George Galloway - ＂Capitalism Isn’t Working＂
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 13 minutes
Words per minute
137.21692
Harmful content
Misogyny
6
sentences flagged
Toxicity
12
sentences flagged
Hate speech
29
sentences flagged
Summary
In this episode of Trigonometry, Francis Foster and Constantine Kisham are joined by George Galloway, an MP for the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party, to discuss the current state of the left in the UK, and the impact of the cancel culture movement.
Transcript
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Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisham.
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And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
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Our brilliant guest today is a left-wing firebrand, an MP for two different parties,
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one of which he was a leader, and most important Man United fan, George Gallagher. Welcome to
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Trigonometry. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm a big fan of your work, really.
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And you're a broadcaster, which I forgot to add.
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Yeah, you were on my show. It was a very popular segment, actually.
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Well, we're both surprised about that. But thank you for having me. And actually,
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one of the things that we wanted to talk to you about is something you and I very much talked
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about at the time, which was this. And you and I had a lot of agreement, but this maybe was an era
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where we were trying to work out what each other were saying, which is I was talking about cancel
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culture. And you yourself have been attacked physically when speaking on university campus
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by trans activists. And we were sort of trying to find common language about what seems to have
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happened on what I perceive as the left. This seems to have become the sort of intolerance almost
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that's crept in the idea, which is very counter to your values, as I perceive them, which is if you
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don't agree with people, you debate. You express yourself in strong, confident terms.
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And that is how you conduct that conversation. So what is it that's happened in this area of
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debate, conversation, language? Everything seems to be sort of you've got to be very careful.
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You can't offend people. What's your take on that?
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Well, I think we, in feeling towards common language on this, we had a disagreement, which
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we're about to have again now. I don't regard these people as being on the left.
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There's a difference between what I call liberalism, with a small l, and the left, or at least there
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ought to be. And that ranges from the philosophical, through the economic, political, and also on
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social values. So for example, I am socially conservative, in every respect. I don't drink,
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I hate drugs, I believe in marriage, I believe in the country, I'm patriotic, I believe in the armed
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forces, and so on. None of these are liberal traits. And they ought to be a difference between
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the left and the liberals, who don't like the family much, generally, think it's old hat.
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Although most of them live in monogamous relationships, they don't want to theorize that
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as being a good thing. They would, they would attack you if you tried to theorize that.
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They, they seem to believe in the stupefication of the masses where everyone takes a drag and drops out,
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which is the very antithesis of the kind of political activism that I think is needed in the
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country. But you're right, they have become identified as the left. They identify themselves
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as the left, the media identifies them as the left. And ergo, the left is really unpopular amongst the
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mass of the people in the country, who don't look like them, live like them, think like them, talk like
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them. And that's a problem. It means that someone like me has to explicitly say, well, if that's the
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left, I'm not in it, or the more difficult thing to do, to attack the idea that they are the left.
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Now, as you rightly identified right at the beginning, the cancel culture has enveloped,
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not just denying someone like you platforms, but someone like me. Or on the women's front,
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someone like my old friend, Jermaine Greer, she is persona non gratis. She is not allowed
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to appear on any university campus. Although, probably like me, her reaction to that has been,
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well, stick your university campuses. I would no longer, maybe the Oxford Union because the security
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is good, but I wouldn't go to any other university meeting. And I'm invited to them all the time,
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at least every week. But I wouldn't go because once cancelled, twice shy. Or in my case, once
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physically attacked, twice shy. Jacob Rees-Mogg ran into similar difficulties. He's on the right of
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politics, though I agree with him on quite a few things. I'm on the left of politics, and we're both
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effectively not welcome in Britain's universities. Now, that's bad for me because I don't get the
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chance to proselytize for my beliefs amongst young people who will, amongst whom will be people who
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will be journalists and politicians and opinion makers and formers in the future. But it's also bad
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for them. Because it means that the bandwidth of the ideas that they are being exposed to
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is incredibly narrow. And that means we get another generation then that are inculcated with these
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ideas which are coming from liberals, but are, of course, entirely illiberal in any normal definition
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of the world. So I believe in freedom of speech, not just because I think the people hearing it will
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be the better for it, but because if we don't have freedom of speech, even someone like me gets cancelled.
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And that's, I think, where we are in this country. Now, I blame the Americans.
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You may say, where did all this come from? You may think it emerged in the 21st century or even in the
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latter part of the 20th century. But actually, I was there when it emerged. I saw it because I'm older
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than I look. I saw it coming across the sea from the 1968ers. Their ideas throughout the 70s
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began to seep across the ocean and change the nature of left-wing politics in Britain and I presume
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elsewhere. No, I don't have direct evidence of that, but I presume that in other European countries
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this seepage also occurred. And I always joke about it. I knew that the British labor movement would
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go into decline when our weekend schools and summer schools, we ceased to sit in rows and listen to
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leaders and began to sit in circles where Big Tom or Facebook's views were as important as Tony
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Benz. And Tony had no right to speak more than Big Tom from Facebook. I knew that this would lead to no
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good. And it has. And George, we've talked about the left. We've talked about, you say that these
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people aren't on the left, but yet everybody seems to identify them as being part of the left.
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Do you think that the left is therefore in crisis as a result of these people?
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Totally. The left, as defined and largely perceived, though we're trying to change that,
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is in the existential crisis of being regarded by the people it hopes to lead as alien, as foreign,
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as repulsive, actually. So I don't know that you can do it entirely geographically because there are
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many parts of London even, never mind the south that are in that bag. But generally speaking, the farther north
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you go in the country, the more alien these people seem. And it seems to me sine qua non of seeking to
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lead people, seeking to get their votes, obtain their trust, and then lead them in a certain direction.
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It's quite important that they are, that you are not seen by them as someone who hates them,
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who hates their country, hates its history, hates its culture. Because, well, at the very least,
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they're not going to vote for you if they think that's what you think of them. And at worst,
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it produces a recoil, a backlash, in which other populists from the far right can win an audience and
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traction amongst the people that have been repelled by you. So crisis, absolute crisis.
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And do you therefore think that if you look at the Labour Party as it is now, where you've got
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these activists on one side, you've got Keir Starmer on another, don't you look at the Labour
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Party and think this isn't viable long term as a political party? You can't, you simply can't hold
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these two types of people and everybody else within one political organisation.
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And then throw a blue Labour into the mix as well.
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I thought that for a very long time. And electorally, that is proving to be the case. My problem is,
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I'm not with either. I'm not with Starmer, and I'm not with Corbyn. I'm not with the ragged,
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unwashed successor generations to the 1968ers. Neither am I with the centrists. I was thinking
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over, because this is the death anniversary of Jay Guevara. I was thinking over, the centrists
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have no heroes. I pity that. I pity them for that. Who's your hero? Keir Starmer.
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A block of wood. So wooden, the birds are trying to nest in them. Or is it a guy that looks like,
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acts like, lives like, he's just emerged from a student squat. And that is the dichotomy that
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the traditional left now possesses or is in the grip of. And for someone like me, who's not with
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either of these trends, it's a lonely furrow. It's not lonely in that a lot of people agree with me,
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but it's lonely in the sense that in an organised way, most of what is thought of as the left is
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alien to me. That's not where I expected to find out, find myself when I started out in the 1960s.
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Well, one of the things this obviously creates in terms of certainly British politics
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is that we've had a Conservative government for 10 years. I've been very, in terms of voting,
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I've been very politically promiscuous in my life. I've voted everything from Lib Dem to for you when
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I was living in this area to voting for the Conservatives for the first time in my life at
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the last election. And you look at the Conservatives now, you have to say that they're completely
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useless. But you don't see them being credibly challenged at the next election, even now,
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because we don't have a credible opposition. Where does that leave the country?
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Up the creek without a paddle. We have not faced a potentially existential crisis like this
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since the summer of 1940, when Hitler was at the Channel ports, when the Soviet Union hadn't entered the
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war, and where any day the fascist hordes could have landed on the southern coast. We really have not
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faced a crisis like this. Not just the public health crisis, but the economic crisis which accompanies it.
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And we have a government that is, to continue the watery metaphor, lost at sea. And we have an opposition
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which is probably not even a scintilla better than the government that's lost at sea. And that is
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a very difficult place to find yourself. In 1940, Churchill stepped forward. The ineffectual, inept
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throwback to a previous century of the Chamberlain clique was overthrown, and the rest is history.
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But there's no Churchill in this picture. There's no Churchill in the House of Commons. There's not
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even an athlete in the House of Commons. There's nothing that you could say, we could get behind
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this person, these people, this plan. Not at all. On the contrary, I think we're heading,
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again, to continue the watery metaphor into very turbulent times indeed, turbulent waters.
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And you've just mentioned that we don't have a church, we don't even have an athlete. In fact,
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we were talking with Peter Hitchens, and he was saying there was no big beasts of politics left
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anymore. Why do you think that is, George? Why do you think that we don't have, even Thatcher,
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who you would probably ardently, well not probably, disagree with, you can't deny that she was a force of
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nature. And not only was she, there was a hundred or a hundred and fifty such big beasts when I
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entered Parliament, just over 30 years ago, 33 years ago. You could look around, and your mouth
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would open. That's Michael Heseltine going past. That's Tony Benn. That's Dennis Healy, Peter Shore,
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and so on. And that's not ancient history. That's only 1987. So Thatcher, of course, was a big beast,
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a formidable figure. And now there are no Thatchers, no Benz, no Shores. So what's happened? I put it
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down to the death of ideology. The belief in an alternative society died with the Soviet collapse.
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Not that the left in Britain was pro-Soviet, but the existence of the Soviet Union at least implied
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that there was another way that you could run things. That died. The left, the labor movement,
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completely lost confidence, lost hope, turned to the EU, turned to Jacques Delors, from Lenin to Jacques
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Delors is a long way. They sought a kind of corporatist protection from the EU.
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And with the death of Thatcherism, well, Thatcherism not really dead, but with the passing from power
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of Mrs. Thatcher and her replacement by a desiccated calculating machine called John Major,
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but one whose batteries were running out. The whole thing went downhill from there.
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Labor's conclusion was that they needed to find a Taylor's dummy that could talk. And they came up
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with Tony Blair. I was there. I was on John Prescott's leadership team. That's how bad the choice was.
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And Tony Blair romped home and with predictable results. So labor marched across the political
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terrain. And the Tories followed them. The Tories are Blairites, really. So Thatcherism has very much
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been succeeded by Blairism, the labor brand and the Tory brand. What was David Cameron, if not a kind of
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Tony Blair without the laughs? He was ersatz Blair. And I had some hope that Boris Johnson would prove
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different. He hasn't really. I mean, Boris Johnson, despite all the epithets that are hurled at him,
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is actually quite a liberal figure. Yeah. With liberal ideas on, on the economy and society. And he
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certainly lived the high liberal life. He's a party man. Not that kind of party. Right. But, but hasn't proven to be
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competent, which, you know, look, I, maybe if we didn't have a global pandemic and a massive economic
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crisis to deal with, he would have been the sort of cheerleader that sort of saw the country through
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Brexit and minor obstacles in its path. But it's the time, as you say, for Churchill's and Thatcher's,
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and we don't have any at the moment, which I think should worry everybody.
00:18:08.020
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But we do have some real problems ahead, don't we, George? I don't know what your take is on the
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response to the pandemic, actually. Let's talk about that briefly. What do you make of how we're
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Being half an Irishman, I'm entitled to say, as the apocryphal Irishman asked the road and distance
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to Dublin, I wouldn't have started from here. And so we're in a big mess now because we didn't start
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where we ought to have started. I was opining just yesterday. It's proved quite a successful tweet
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that there are more coronavirus cases in the White House than there are in New Zealand, Taiwan,
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and South Korea put together. There's China and South Korea and Vietnam and New Zealand,
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disparate ideological, social, political systems. There's virtually no coronavirus. It's been
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vanquished. And yet we are in a state of panic. The United States still more so,
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although only marginally more so, considering the difference in the size of the countries.
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And that's because we didn't do what South Korea did at the very beginning, which was to
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absolutely go to war, immediately mobilize their population, their public health system,
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and their economy to fight this thing. And they have done it so successfully that you can get a test
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for the coronavirus at the bus stop, literally on the bus stop. I don't know if you blow into it or
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suck it or what you do, but it's there on the bus stop. I, at 66,
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could not get, for love nor money, a test about four weeks ago when I had a cough and thought,
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I probably better get a test. I could not get one. I couldn't get through on the website. I couldn't
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get through on the emergency number. I couldn't find anybody even that would take my money to give
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me one. That's how far away from South Korea we are on this. New Zealand, of course, a bit of a
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special case because of the sparsity of the population and so on. Although Scotland is comparable
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to New Zealand in many such respects. And Scotland is worse than England. Glasgow is the worst place in
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the country. So we've gone about this entirely the wrong way. And that's partly a consequence
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of the rundown in the public health system over the last 20 or more years. But it's also about
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this failure of leadership. We live in a country, as many other countries, where nobody believes the
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leaders even when they're telling the truth. And nobody gets, there's no mobilization. There's no sense of us
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and always that we are a people, a country, a state with leaders, warts and all. We must follow them.
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There's no sense of that in Britain. So we had a substantial number, a weird left-right crossover
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of deniers that stretched from libertarians who'd rather die than wear a mask to left-wing idiots who
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thought it was all a conspiracy by Bill Gates, the hapless Bill Gates, who became the new Rothschild.
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You just had to say his name and nod and wink. That weird crossover existed. And it was noisy
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on social media. But if we'd had a strong leadership and a strong state, then we would have been able to
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rally everyone behind us. And we would have been able to count on people. See, it would be far better
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if you could count on 65 million people to do the right thing, you wouldn't need fines. You wouldn't
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need, you didn't have to fine people in the Second World War in the East End of London to make sure they
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had blackout in their windows, that they weren't showing light to the bombers coming. Not a mile from
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here. This place was all on fire, completely on fire. So there was no need, because the people believed
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in the country's leadership. They believed in the concept of a country, and us. We have lost that. So
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where we go from here, I've really got no idea. Nothing that they are doing is working. They're throwing
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money around like, like the magic money tree was in every street. I saw figures the other day on
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testing, tracking and tracing. Ireland has spent 733,000 pounds. And we have spent 12 billion,
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billion pounds. And where is it? Where's the tests? Where's the tracking? Where's the tracing?
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Uh, this has been either a gigantic organized scam to make, uh, a few people exceedingly rich,
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or it is the most incompetent shit show ever seen in these islands. Uh, because how you manage to spend
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12 billion pounds on a system that is practically invisible, it's very difficult to compute.
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And yet, it goes back to Constantine's point as well, that you look over at the opposition,
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and they don't seem to have any ideas either. No. In fact, when Keir Starmer is asked what he'd do,
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he'd pretty much do the same as Boris. Carte Blanche. He's given them Carte Blanche. And then worse,
00:25:46.040
as Boris points out, quite effectively actually, what are you complaining about? You supported it last week.
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You gave us your full support on this two weeks ago. I saw him yesterday, or in the house, uh, Wednesday.
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Uh, he said, uh, but, but this complaint you're making is about the very thing you supported not
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two weeks ago. Uh, so for me, Starmer is worse in the sense that, uh, you've got the opportunity as an
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opposition because you don't have responsibility to explore different, uh, uh, different ways in all
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directions, by the way. Uh, I'm ready to listen to an argument that says, now that we are where we are,
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we might as well stop, uh, trying to fight it. We might as well face it, uh, because the situation
00:26:43.640
is so bad. I'm ready to hear that argument. And an opposition is in a position to explore these things.
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But Starmer seems to me like a guy who's strapped himself into a straitjacket, uh, and is, uh,
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merely going through the motions of opposition. And I see he's sliding again in the, in the polls.
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Boris, despite everything, has risen in the latest poll by two points. Um, but I think the feeling in the
00:27:15.960
country is, by God, both of these are jokers. Uh, neither of these, you wouldn't, as we say in
00:27:24.120
Glasgow, you wouldn't send them out for a loaf. You wouldn't ask them to go to the shop for a loaf
00:27:30.360
of bread and have any real confidence that they come back with the right bread, the right change,
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or even the bread. And you said that we don't have this idea of a country, this idea of, you know,
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as a big society. Do you think the roots of that line, Thatcherism, that famous quote from
00:27:46.440
Margaret Thatcher, there's no such thing as society? Well, she crystallized it with that, uh, uh, address
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to, of all places, the Church of Scotland, the most twee Presbyterian assembly anywhere on these islands.
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She effectively attacked, uh, central tenet of Christianity, uh, there. She had balls.
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She, um, she, um, she crystallized it, but I don't think it begins with, uh, with her. I think that
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after the Second World War, Britain felt and was, uh, depleted. And there was the, the long period,
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uh, of, uh, after a short period of, uh, post-war reconstruction, there was the long period of
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what we called Buttskillism, which was Rob Butler and Hugh Gateskill, two sides of the same coin,
00:28:43.880
where nobody really argued much about the central tenets of how society should be organized.
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Even though it was increasingly liberal, uh, through the sixties, nobody really argued. It
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wasn't until Thatcher came along, uh, that, uh, there was any sharp rupture ideologically in Britain.
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But undoubtedly, if you privatize everything, if you, uh, exalt individualism over collectivism,
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if public becomes bad, private becomes good, uh, if that dichotomy sets in, then you're,
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you're going to be in less good shape to face it. So take a look at these places I mentioned that
00:29:30.040
have done well. Uh, South Korea, never mind North Korea, right? South Korea is a capitalist, uh,
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country, an American ally, uh, but it is an extremely cohesive place. It's a place that marches as one,
00:29:46.120
uh, when necessary. It's a place that moves as one. Uh, and of course, China is very much
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the, the, the ultimate expression of that in the world today. And they went, I mean, they fought the
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coronavirus like it was World War III. And now they're living totally normal lives, even in Wuhan.
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Scotland. And we are scared to go out the door. Our businesses are shutting down. Scotland,
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this evening at six o'clock will become a ghost town. And I'm told that Boris is planning the same
00:30:26.920
thing here in England. Um, even alcohol has been banned in Scotland. That's not going to end well,
00:30:35.000
is it? That cannot end well. Um, so we, we are, this is a dog's breakfast and I don't have the
00:30:44.760
resources to know exactly where we are and what we should now do, but I'm ready to listen to offers.
00:30:52.920
I'm ready to listen to any idea from credible people about where we go from now. And it may
00:31:01.240
be that that'll be a very different way from the way I advocated strongly at the beginning.
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Well, I mean, one of the arguments we've heard on our show from doctors like Dr. Carol Sikora,
00:32:32.520
for example, is actually that the average age of death for someone with COVID in this country is 82.
00:32:38.520
Average life expectancy is 82 and a half. So the people who are dying are mostly people who
1.00
00:32:43.160
were either very ill or very old. And what you do is you protect those people and let everybody else
00:32:50.680
get on with their lives, and then you don't ruin the economy. I mean, that's one of the
00:32:54.360
options that maybe Keir Starmer should explore as someone who's in opposition has more leeway.
00:32:59.800
Yes. Of course, those numbers, I don't know how long ago you spoke to them,
00:33:06.040
are coming down. The big spike now is amongst young people.
00:33:13.720
Yeah, I'm just coming to that. We don't yet know where those cases will go.
00:33:17.960
If they pass with a couple of weeks of misery for the thousands of students who appear to be
00:33:24.440
infected. By the way, bringing students back to university was a major league disaster.
00:33:30.920
And whoever's responsible for that really should be up against the wall and shot.
0.86
00:33:36.840
It's the old pro-Soviet instincts coming out there.
0.89
00:33:39.320
Because, hey, we can communicate with each other quite well without being in the same room.
00:33:44.520
Yeah, this has led to, I mean, in the University of Northumbria, they did a mass test. 775 people
00:33:54.360
tested positive. In the University of Glasgow, again, many hundreds leading to a situation where
00:34:01.800
students have gone to university and are now locked in what is effectively a cell and not allowed to go
00:34:09.000
out. And no point now because even the alcohol is banned at six o'clock for everybody, never mind you,
00:34:15.720
and so on. So the numbers of cases has dramatically spiked amongst young people. And we don't yet know
00:34:26.120
at the time of recording quite how serious they will be. Neither do we know what level of immunity
00:34:33.720
and for how long having caught it will provide you. I'm waiting for my Sputnik V, Sputnik V vaccine,
00:34:45.800
which I've requested from the Kremlin. But they seem to be a bit slow in getting it to me. Maybe they...
00:34:51.880
There's a bit in your cup of tea that I made earlier there, George.
00:34:54.120
Maybe they're worried it might not work and they'll lose a major asset. But the vaccine process here
00:35:05.720
seems extremely slow. Cuba has a vaccine, China has one, Russia has one. We'll not buy them for
00:35:14.280
ideological reasons. So there is still a case for quarantining certain sections of the most
00:35:24.920
vulnerable people. But it's not foolproof that, Constantine, because you can lock up your granny,
1.00
00:35:32.600
but you can't lock her up forever. And one grandchild is going to get through.
00:35:38.840
And nobody wants to lose their granny, even if they are 82.
00:35:44.760
So I'm not with the, if you like, with the libertarians on that. But I'm ready for fresh
00:35:57.880
Yeah, it does appear that we're hitting crisis point. We're not hitting, we've hit crisis point
00:36:02.680
with the pandemic. The thing that I really wanted to talk to you about, George, is socialism.
00:36:07.680
Because it seems that it's, we're seeing a bit of a resurgence in people who identify as
00:36:14.080
socialism. We've seen it in America with politicians like AOC. What does socialism mean to you for
00:36:20.800
a start? And then we'll go on and discuss it further.
00:36:23.040
Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because I started out by explaining what I think is a
00:36:28.400
dichotomy between liberalism and socialism. And I'm not a liberal, but I am a socialist.
00:36:33.680
I think it's partly because capitalism isn't working, to paraphrase Mrs. Thatcher. If you were
00:36:44.640
to do a poster today like hers, when she said socialism wasn't working, it would be a much longer
00:36:50.320
queue. There's far more people now unemployed under the capitalist system than there possibly has ever
00:37:01.040
been. The American unemployment rate is now as high as it was in the 1930s in the Great Depression.
00:37:07.440
There's a wave of evictions on top of that because banks are foreclosing on landlords. Landlords can't
00:37:13.760
get the rent out of the people and result misery. If the United States economy doesn't pick up,
00:37:22.000
I don't believe it will. Then we will very shortly in this winter have greater levels of unemployment in
00:37:29.440
the US than we did in the Great Depression. Our bounce back seems to have stalled. Our growth rate
00:37:38.080
for August was 2.1%, despite the most gigantic handout from the state that there has ever been in,
00:37:48.000
eat out to help out, which may have spread the virus and may have stalled the recovery,
00:37:55.600
helped to stall the recovery. So it's quite likely that by this winter, our levels of unemployment will be
00:38:03.840
over 10%. If you think, well, you're too young to know, but when UB40, clue being in the name,
00:38:13.280
we're talking about the one in 10, and they were talking about the one in 10 unemployed.
00:38:18.880
People thought it was something else, but that's what it was, and they're friends of mine. So it's quite
00:38:24.960
likely that this winter, we'll be right back in the depths of depression. And therefore,
00:38:35.840
the famous Thatcher queue is now much bigger. So capitalism isn't working.
00:38:43.280
And therefore, people are looking for an alternative. And the only feasible alternative,
00:38:49.600
for me, in developed societies with huge populations, which, like ours, 65 million is a big population,
00:39:01.200
and a piece of land this size, is to organize ourselves in a wholly different way, with the state
00:39:09.120
playing a decisive role in the organization of society and the economy, by which I don't mean
00:39:17.440
the nationalization of everything, or even necessarily anything. I mean, the state
00:39:25.600
with a decisive, directing role in what happens. So I'm not in favor. As I always put it, anyone that's
00:39:35.520
ever seen a Bulgarian Communist Party official's suit knows that they're not good at tailoring.
00:39:43.520
Anyone who's ever been in an Eastern European Soviet-era restaurant knows that they're not good at
0.94
00:39:50.480
restaurants. There are some things that are too specialist, too small, need to be too flexible
00:39:57.120
to be organized by the state. Art, culture, and so on, among them. But there are some things that are
00:40:06.000
too important to be left to a private sector that is manifestly failing. So I believe, I've only been
00:40:14.640
in China a couple of times. I don't know it well. But I would say that the Chinese model of synthesizing
00:40:25.760
private enterprise, free enterprise, capitalism, with a strong central role for the state,
00:40:32.400
it's not a surprise to me that the Chinese economy is the most successful economy in the world,
00:40:37.840
that it will very shortly be the biggest. It's been the most transformative in the numbers of people
00:40:44.720
that it has lifted out of poverty. In fact, it's lifted the greatest number of people out of poverty of
00:40:51.920
any system, any country ever in history. And it is now, I did a piece yesterday about the demands of
00:41:00.880
the international financial community for China to be more easy on its debtors.
00:41:07.840
That's how far they've come, that the World Bank is asking China to forgive debts and reschedule debts
00:41:19.040
for the poor countries that they have lent money to. That's how rich and powerful and successful
00:41:25.600
China now is. So I would, if I was designing the economy, that is roughly the kind of economy that I
00:41:32.960
would favor. It wouldn't be communism. I'm not a communist. It wouldn't be the Soviet Union,
00:41:42.160
which was a failure. It would be something new. And I think the Chinese synthesis is,
0.99
00:41:50.560
I can borrow a phrase from Tony Blair, is the third way.
00:41:54.800
It's interesting. I mean, you talk about the statistics of unemployment, the economy failing.
00:41:59.200
Obviously, prior to coronavirus, the economy in the United States was ostensibly doing well,
00:42:06.000
here the same. But nonetheless, I think the rise of that sort of thinking actually predates the
00:42:12.640
coronavirus, the unemployment that we're seeing and are going to see. And when we talk about capitalism
00:42:19.520
not working, I would say, certainly people of our generation and below, it's not so much about the
00:42:24.800
unemployment that results from COVID that caused that, but perhaps the situation with housing in
00:42:30.080
this country, which for young people is absolutely atrocious. And also the feeling that perhaps for
00:42:36.480
the first time in living memory, your children will do worse than you are doing, than you did,
00:42:44.000
that their living standards will be lower, that their access to good jobs, despite half of them
00:42:49.760
now attempting to go to university and racking up massive deaths. Despite all of that, their life
00:42:55.360
outcomes are going to be worse. So I would argue that, and I'm not a fan of socialism by that,
00:43:00.640
but I would argue the reason that people are drawn to it is that we've had these systemic problems
00:43:06.400
that predate the current crisis in a very big way. Would you agree with that?
00:43:10.320
Yeah. And I don't agree that the US and British economies were doing well before the virus. As
00:43:16.960
a matter of fact, the recession began before the virus, a month or two before the virus,
00:43:25.600
but it had been coming. Effectively, we slump every seven, eight years. And therefore,
00:43:33.120
this slump would have happened anyway, was overdue and had begun before the virus. But the virus has
00:43:41.440
proved that our vitals are not capable of withstanding shocks, like slump, like recession, like viruses.
00:43:52.560
All of which, by the way, were entirely predictable and predicted that this government, the conservative
00:44:00.400
government did, how would you call it, an exercise, some three years ago, I forget what it was called
00:44:08.880
now, which was predicated on a coronavirus and quickly had to cover up the exercise because the model
00:44:22.320
basically collapsed under the weight. So if you live in a society that regularly slumps,
00:44:29.600
that cannot withstand any existential jolt, then that society is not fit for purpose, needs to be
00:44:39.680
changed. The reason why we have a housing crisis is because of capitalism.
00:44:46.320
Again, sorry to play the age card, but I was there. I opposed Mrs. Thatcher's drive
00:44:53.440
to sell off council houses because I knew it would lead to what it has led. And I was one. I was the
1.00
00:45:02.320
Labour Party leader in Dundee. We were one of only two or three, two places in the country that refused
00:45:09.760
to sell council houses. The government sent in the bailiffs and a high court judge who was later
00:45:17.280
found to be up to unfortunate things in a public lavatory somewhere.
00:45:26.480
We hated them, not for that reason, but because he'd been sent in by Mrs. Thatcher to sell our houses.
00:45:35.120
What we need in Britain is a mass construction, which would be an economic multiplier for a start,
00:45:42.560
of good quality, affordable council housing. Council housing is the best form of housing
1.00
00:45:49.120
because you elect your landlord. Your landlord cannot afford to ignore you in a way that a private
00:45:55.840
landlord can. Your landlord has to listen because you've got a vote and you can vote them out,
00:46:03.600
or you can vote their boss out in the local authority. A mass drive of millions of council houses,
0.96
00:46:12.800
would transform the situation in Britain. I'm not saying, because I grew up in one,
00:46:19.920
that the council house estate of the 1960s is the ACME. It isn't. I always favored Titoism over
0.97
00:46:31.040
Stalinism. And Yugoslavia had many more innovative ways of practicing socialism. And I liked that.
00:46:43.520
So capitalism isn't working for young people. 50% of our people are going to university.
00:46:53.200
But a very small number of them end up doing anything commensurate with the investment that's
00:46:59.040
been made in their education. When I was the MP for this very street, the London Olympics stadium was
00:47:08.720
being built. I stormed in to the minister, the late Tessa Jowell, demanding to know why none of my
00:47:17.440
constituents could get jobs on the site, why everybody that was building it was from Poland or Bulgaria.
00:47:25.520
And she halted me in my tracks by saying that there are no tradesmen unemployed in your constituency.
00:47:36.000
There are just not many tradesmen in your constituency. And that's why we're having to employ them from
00:47:42.240
Poland. This is madness. We've got thousands of unemployed journalism graduates, but we can't build our own
1.00
00:47:51.040
Olympic stadium because we don't have enough joiners, glaziers, electricians, plumbers.
00:47:59.040
That's not a functioning society, a properly functioning society. So on all levels, unemployment,
00:48:06.400
increasing poverty, food insecurity, the housing crisis, capitalism isn't working. So to go back
00:48:16.000
to your question, why would socialism not be something that people were now looking at?
00:48:22.080
Of course, socialism had many failures. I don't need to tell you that.
00:48:27.840
Okay. Socialism has many failures, but so does capitalism. And therefore we need to find a better
00:48:37.360
way. And I think that people are increasingly searching for that better way. They just won't
00:48:44.320
find it in Keir Starmer or Jeremy Corbyn, for that matter.
00:48:48.560
And what do you think about the growing inequality between rich and poor? Because it seems that the
00:48:53.280
gap is now bigger than ever. Constantine and I were in Trafalgar Square about a month ago,
00:48:59.040
and we were shocked to see hundreds of people lining up on Trafalgar Square for a food bank.
00:49:04.880
And these were traditionally people that you wouldn't think would have to queue up to get food handed to
00:49:09.840
them. Well, yesterday I was shooting a film. I wasn't in it, but directing it in Hyde Park,
00:49:16.720
the site of the great exhibition. It was about Charles Dickens. I can't tell you much more than that.
00:49:22.960
But the gap between rich and poor in Britain today is wider than it was when Charles Dickens was
00:49:29.920
writing Oliver Twist. And that's 140 years ago. So if in 140 years you've gone backwards in terms of
00:49:43.200
equality, then you're not doing it right. And what you just described, and that's in the heart of
00:49:50.960
London, in the heart of the empire, I could take you places in the north of England and in some parts
00:49:58.960
of Scotland where life expectancy itself is going backwards. Yeah. Where people will not just live
0.64
00:50:06.000
lives less good than their parents, but they'll live less long than their parents. That's a crisis.
00:50:12.880
crisis. And it's one that nobody is yet addressing, but which the discerning can see is a fundamental
00:50:21.920
crisis. So, and we haven't yet, as Ronald Reagan would say, we ain't seen nothing yet.
00:50:28.800
If that's Trafalgar Square in the autumn of 2020, way to February 2021, there could be serious problems.
00:50:38.480
It could be a disruption to social peace in this country because of mass unemployment and poverty.
00:50:47.200
It's a very important point, the inequality, because we have a lot of guests on the show from
00:50:51.440
all over the political spectrum, people on the right, people on the left. I sort of think of
00:50:56.320
myself somewhere in the center, but it doesn't matter where you are on the spectrum. The objective
00:51:00.400
fact is, and the evidence shows us very clearly, the more inequality there is in a Western democracy,
00:51:05.520
the worse that is for everybody, including the rich people. Of course. Even for billionaires,
00:51:09.360
it's worse. Of course. How many gates can you put on your community? Exactly.
00:51:14.240
And how effective can they be? Right. If you live in a crime-ridden society
00:51:17.600
where people don't have any food, like you say, it doesn't matter how many gates or doors or whatever,
00:51:22.880
you're not going to have a good life. Quite. And that's something that we're just,
00:51:26.720
we're going to have to address and finding some way of doing that is going to be essential. But George,
00:51:32.560
we wanted to talk to you about one other thing. Can I just ask one question before we do,
00:51:37.920
which is, how much blame does globalization have to take for this? A very great deal. Globalization
00:51:45.440
is a deeply flawed idea. And it's at the heart of this crisis. We can't get PPE. Why? Because it comes
00:51:56.000
10,000 miles from China. Why? Why can't we make masks, rubber gloves? This was the workshop of the world.
0.97
00:52:04.400
Uh, at the time of the great exhibition, uh, and Dickens, uh, that I was filming yesterday. Uh,
00:52:14.640
this was the workshop of the world. We sailed the seven seas in ships of steel, uh, laden with our
00:52:22.080
manufacturers. And now we can't make rubber gloves. We got to buy them from 10,000 miles away. Uh,
00:52:29.280
this is a cataclysmic failure. Uh, and the British capitalist class has to, uh, take a share of the
00:52:40.240
responsibility for that. But the decline of national control and direction, uh, is not just an economic
00:52:51.360
problem. It's a sociopolitical one. It's the reason why we voted for Brexit because we correctly
0.66
00:52:59.200
identified that we were no longer in control of anything meaningful, uh, in our lives, not just we
00:53:05.520
weren't, but our government wasn't, our state wasn't. And that meant that not just the supply lines were too
00:53:13.600
long, but the political command lines, uh, were too long and we couldn't affect them. Uh, and so
00:53:21.840
globalization is hated by people. They don't put it that way. Most people, most people probably never
00:53:29.680
utter the word globalization, but they know it's like the camel, difficult to define, easy to recognize.
00:53:36.240
Uh, the, the, the, the people know that far too much of what we buy and consume and eat, uh, is coming
00:53:45.920
from somewhere else. And the things that we used to do ourselves are now done by someone else. Uh, and
00:53:54.240
for the profit of a few, I mean, U S capital didn't relocate to China cause they love, uh, chop suey. Uh,
0.99
00:54:04.000
they relocated to China because, uh, they could make more money, uh, manufacturing in China, leading to
00:54:11.360
the closure of the rust belt. And we've got our own rust belt here in Britain, roughly
00:54:20.320
co-terminus with the, with the red wall, which is why Brexit happens, why I knew it would happen,
00:54:28.160
why I advocated that it should happen, uh, and why I was entirely unsurprised when it happened,
00:54:34.880
unlike the liberal elite, uh, of people who benefit from globalization here. If you live beside me,
00:54:43.120
I'm in the process of moving to Scotland, which is less true there. But in my part of London,
00:54:48.800
why would you not be in favor of the EU? Why would you not be in favor of globalization?
00:54:54.000
You're luxuriating, not just benefiting from it. You're luxuriating in it. But of course,
00:55:01.280
the farther away from that bubble, you go, the less attractive the consequences of globalization
00:55:07.120
are. You don't have money for a, for a Macchiato. And so it doesn't matter that an attractive barista
0.93
00:55:16.080
from Slovenia is serving it to you, uh, uh, and historically low price. Because you don't even
0.78
00:55:22.960
know what Macchiato is. You don't go to, you don't have a barista. You don't have an au pair. You don't
00:55:29.600
have the money to pay for a Polish electrician, uh, to build your basement or your, your extension,
0.65
00:55:37.040
and so on. And that's the deal to continue the Dickens point. That's the tale of two cities
00:55:43.520
that we are living in within one country. Globalization is to blame.
00:55:48.800
It's an issue we've talked a lot about on the show and Brexit is something we've explored.
00:55:53.120
Um, even though we both voted remain because we're good people.
00:55:57.040
That always used to be the thing we used to do for a joke. But we've had many pro-Brexit guests
00:56:05.120
on to explore that very point. And it's, it's undeniable. George, it's been a great interview,
00:56:09.520
but there's one other thing that we, before we get to our final question itself, that we really
00:56:13.680
wanted to talk to you about that we don't really see discussed anymore. And I actually think it is
00:56:17.360
a very important point, which is Julian Assange. Oh yeah.
00:56:20.080
For, for anyone who doesn't know anything about it whatsoever, you're a man with very clear
00:56:25.200
thinking who understands that that particular situation very well. So just explain to someone
00:56:29.600
who doesn't know anything at all, what is that all about? And why is he in the position that he's in
00:56:34.960
now? Well, full disclosure, Julian Assange is a personal friend of mine. Uh, and when I could no
00:56:41.760
longer go into the embassy to see him, I stood outside and sang Frank Sinatra songs to him through
00:56:47.280
the window. I'm actually not a bad singer. Julian likes Frank Sinatra. Uh, Julian Assange is,
00:56:55.200
is a world historic figure, uh, whatever happens in this court case. He has developed an entirely new
00:57:05.440
model of journalism, uh, one which facilitates the exposure of material and information that the
00:57:16.800
powerful don't want to see disclosed. And that is the very definition of journalism. If nobody
00:57:25.360
doesn't want you to say what you're saying and doing, then what you're saying and doing probably
00:57:30.800
isn't worth, uh, uh, a row of beans, because if it's not hurting someone, somewhere amongst the
00:57:39.200
powerful of what you are revealing, then it's probably not worth revealing. And so Julian in,
00:57:46.640
during the time that I have been his friend has revealed some of the most sensational material,
00:57:54.720
uh, ever only some of which he's on trial for, uh, he's essentially on trial now for revealing war
00:58:02.720
crimes committed by the United States and others in the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan,
00:58:10.800
which when I started out opposing, it was a deeply unpopular stance. Mine, I could show you my scars.
00:58:18.240
Uh, but you can now, uh, now not find a sentient being in the land and who any longer thinks
00:58:24.880
that invading and occupying Iraq was a good idea. Uh, but Julian during that period,
00:58:33.040
when things were different revealed big crimes, systemic crimes, uh, in the war logs, which showed
00:58:46.240
mass killing of civilians, uh, of journalists, uh, a totally cavalier, uh, attitude to wiping people
00:58:56.960
out, whether they were men, women, or children, whether they were Reuters reporters, uh, whether they
00:59:03.840
were prisoners being forced to commit indecent acts upon each other in the Abu Ghraib prison, uh, and be
00:59:12.160
photographed for the entertainment of the torturers afterwards, uh, videotaped and so on. Julian broke
00:59:19.600
all these stories. He also broke a lot of stories. This is why I'm a bit surprised that Donald Trump
00:59:25.440
is pursuing him with the gusto that he is. I still live by the way, in hope that Donald Trump will
00:59:33.360
pardon him. He also revealed, although he's not on trial for this, the absolute venality of the Clinton
00:59:41.520
crime gang and the so-called Democratic Party in the United States of America. And sure, that benefited
0.76
00:59:49.040
Trump, but it benefited all of us to know that Hillary Clinton was a crook and that the Clinton
1.00
00:59:57.040
crime family were up to the neck in all kinds of vice, venality, and corruption. We all needed to know
0.97
01:00:05.120
that, not least because they were secular saints in Western society. Julian revealed, uh, many stories
01:00:15.360
which cast these people in a new light, for which he now faces 175 years in a supermax prison in the United
01:00:25.840
States. So this story is important and yet entirely ignored by the very liberal class of journalists and
01:00:36.160
broadcasters that feasted on the dripping roast of his revelations. And so if you were going to ask me,
01:00:44.240
who do I hate most in the whole world? I'd tell you the Guardian. The Guardian newspaper personifies
01:00:53.040
everything that I hate in society. And one of the reasons is the Guardian feasted on Julian's stories,
01:01:01.520
ran them over and over again on the front page of their newspaper, and have remained utterly silent
01:01:09.760
while he's persecuted, prosecuted, and banished forever into the bowels of a supermax prison. Even though
01:01:19.840
that very process may one day be used against them. And could be, I mean, if Julian has committed an
01:01:29.440
offense in publishing these stories, so have they in publishing these stories. Their editor could now be
01:01:37.120
on trial. Maybe one day will be. And if we get to a situation where our country, it's America today.
01:01:46.080
It could be Saudi Arabia tomorrow. Saudi Arabia could, for example. I was a good friend of Adnan Khashoggi,
01:01:54.880
who was murdered by the Saudi dictatorship and literally cut into pieces and flushed into a drain.
01:02:03.120
But when he was living here in London, and in fact he was living in Washington when that happened to him,
01:02:11.440
the Saudis could have sought his extradition to Saudi Arabia. Now you might say it's fanciful that
01:02:17.760
any British court would send someone to Saudi Arabia. But it's not that fanciful. If you could send
01:02:23.280
someone to 175 years in a supermax in America, if the Saudis had said we won't cut his head off,
0.97
01:02:30.640
we'll only put him in prison for 175 years, they could have extradited. Adnan Khashoggi might
01:02:37.840
have been better than the end that he had. But it could happen to anybody. It could happen to you.
01:02:42.960
It could happen to you. It could happen to you. You're seditious out here. Seditious to somebody.
01:02:50.960
You know, that would make a lot of people very happy. It could well lead to some foreign power
01:03:00.000
extraditing you and destroying you. Now, when this unequal extradition treaty was concluded in secret
01:03:10.640
in summer when the house was not sitting by David Blunkett, Tony Blair's home secretary,
01:03:19.840
you may say I am a soothsayer. I personally raised with David Blunkett a notional, because I didn't
01:03:28.960
know Julian at that time, a notional case whereby a journalist whistleblower could be extradited
01:03:40.320
without just cause being needed to be shown, could be extradited to the United States under this
01:03:47.440
extradition treaty. David Blunkett gave me a personal assurance that it was on the face of the bill that
01:03:55.120
no one could be extradited for a political crime in his secret extradition treaty that was signed before
01:04:04.960
we even knew it existed. How's that for parliamentary democracy? I was an MP at the time. For here, actually.
01:04:14.000
This very street. And he said to me, he showed me
01:04:17.760
that declaration on the face of the treaty that this could not happen. My fear could never come to
01:04:28.640
pass. But it has come to pass. And the get out is, well, he's not being extradited for a political
01:04:39.680
crime. He's being extradited for, effectively, espionage, even though he's not a citizen of the
01:04:46.400
United States and never set foot there, never committed any crime there. And so the promises,
01:04:54.560
sick transit Gloria, David Blunkett, where is he now? What were his promises worth?
01:05:02.160
They were not worth the paper that they were written on. And so if you believe in freedom of speech,
01:05:10.160
if you believe in journalism, if you believe in the right of the public to know
01:05:16.480
what is being done in their name on their dollar, you need to be concerned about what's happening to
01:05:21.680
Julian Assange. And lastly, you call me old fashioned. I believed, still to some extent believe,
01:05:30.000
that the last uncorrupted institution in Great Britain was the judiciary. I know the social cast
01:05:38.160
from which they come. I know they're not elected and cannot be removed. But when I look at how all our
01:05:44.720
institutions have failed, one after the other, the civil service, the media, even the police,
01:05:54.080
they've all failed us, one after the other. I thought the one that was left was the judiciary.
01:05:59.360
I always used to say, and my father before me, actually, long before these institutions
01:06:05.440
failed, I'd rather take my chances in front of a British judge than in front of a British politician,
01:06:12.160
or a British journalist, or any of a British police officer and so on. And therefore, the abuse of
01:06:20.800
law process on view openly, if you care enough to look at it, in this case has been so gargantuan. I'll
01:06:31.840
give you just one example because time is running. If I told you that you could be extradited, even
01:06:39.600
though it is established fact that all of your meetings with your lawyers were filmed by the
01:06:49.760
prosecuting authority in the United States or their agents, so they know all of what your defense is,
01:06:58.640
I speak as one who was secretly filmed in the embassy. Having a P, talk, everything I said was filmed.
01:07:08.640
I can live with that. But Julian's lawyers were secretly filmed, talking to him, preparing him,
01:07:17.120
him, and he preparing them for his defense in a court case that might one day have to take place in
01:07:24.960
London. You would say such a case would have to be thrown out. Even if it was a traffic offense,
01:07:32.720
it would have to be thrown out. If the police were filming you and your discussions with your lawyers.
01:07:38.640
But that happened. Nobody disputes that it happened. All the evidence has been
01:07:46.240
laid in front of this court in London at the Old Bailey, the old lady of British justice.
01:07:53.920
But it will not make a blind bit of difference. The fact that such an abuse of process, and I could
01:08:00.320
give you 500 other abuses of process that have happened, has not made any impact on this case,
01:08:08.880
means that we have to fear for the justice system in our own country itself. And we, not you, me,
01:08:19.680
someone wholly British, were led to believe and did believe that British justice was really
01:08:26.880
something. That it was justice. That that statue on top of the Old Bailey of the lady with the scales
01:08:36.880
really was something. Turns out it wasn't. Turns out, it seems, unless in the appeal process this is
01:08:45.760
overturned, that Julian is going to be sent to 175 years in prison for the crime of telling the truth.
01:08:53.760
That's a terrible story. And one of the things that I always think about is, we really should be
01:09:00.640
incentivizing people to whistleblow, to reveal these things. That should be something that's
01:09:05.440
encouraged. You should be celebrated, paid money, whatever it is. It's a vital part of any democratic
01:09:11.120
process. And yet here we are allowing this man to be extradited to another country to face
01:09:18.880
I'm glad we got a chance to talk to you about that. Me too, me too.
01:09:22.640
It's an issue that you don't see covered and frankly, very few people know about really.
01:09:28.400
But George, with that in mind, we've got one more question for you.
01:09:30.880
Which is, what's the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be?
01:09:35.440
That's a curveball. How Manchester United managed to spend one billion pounds and produce what we
01:09:43.280
produced against Tottenham Hotspur last weekend. That's something that's occupying quite a few of
01:09:48.960
my brain cells. One billion to assemble a squad of misfits, misfiring disasters is something.
01:10:01.280
Football is a national religion in Britain. We're quite good at it. We invented it.
01:10:11.120
Manchester United has been my team since 1965. I've never been more miserable about that.
01:10:17.040
I feel guilty that my children are decked out in Manchester United here. And my six-year-old son,
01:10:25.680
who's a protégé, I remember his name, Torrin Galloway, he'll still be around when he's a top player.
01:10:33.440
He turned to me and said, how could Manchester United lose 6-1 to Tottenham Hotspur or to anybody?
01:10:41.040
So that is something that we should be talking about, but it may be off your beaten track.
01:10:46.960
No, that's fine. But I will say this as a West Ham fan, I think it's something that should be celebrated.
01:10:55.040
Torrin Galloway will be playing up front for Everton when we win the league.
01:10:58.640
Well, I'd be honoured if he was. There was an iconic player called Jimmy Gabriel,
01:11:05.840
who came from Dundee, my town, to Everton and became, in the 1960s, an iconic Everton player.
01:11:15.440
So I was brought up always to look for the Everton score. I've got a soft spot for the Everton,
01:11:22.000
but I never thought they'd ever assemble a team like they appear to have assembled now.
01:11:27.360
They are dark horses for the league this year. Remember you heard it.
01:11:31.280
And you at home watching, you cannot see Anton's face, but I've never seen him this happy.
01:11:40.080
It's been a real pleasure. I hope the viewers think so.
01:11:43.040
I mean, to speak for so long and not be bored for a second is, I think, an achievement. So thanks.
01:11:50.720
Thank you. And if people want to hear you speak for a lot longer, they can tune in, of course,
01:11:55.360
to the Mother World talk shows, which is normally on Sundays.
01:11:58.400
Still on Sundays. It's free to air every Sunday. And you can watch on Twitter, on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube,
01:12:08.880
multiple platforms, even something called Twitch.
01:12:15.040
And a million people a week are now watching it. Well, in fact, a million people are watching it on the night.
01:12:21.360
Close to a million and a half over the course of a week.
01:12:26.480
But we've started a midweek Mother of All talk shows, which only costs $1.70.
01:12:33.840
And that's George Galloway bare knuckle. So if you know what I'm like on a Sunday night,
01:12:38.640
imagine what I'm like bare knuckle. So I hope people can do it. It's on Patreon and on Facebook.
01:12:43.920
Make sure you go and find that. And of course, follow George on Twitter as well. Thank you so
01:12:48.480
much for watching. We'll see you very soon. Absolutely, guys, for a live stream, which goes
01:12:53.840
out on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at 7pm UK time, and our episodes, which go out
01:12:59.680
on Wednesday and Sunday, again at 7pm UK time. Take care and see you soon.