TRIGGERnometry - October 25, 2020


George Galloway - ＂Capitalism Isn’t Working＂


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 13 minutes

Words per Minute

137.21692

Word Count

10,131

Sentence Count

668

Misogynist Sentences

6

Hate Speech Sentences

29


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisham.
00:00:09.400 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
00:00:15.340 Our brilliant guest today is a left-wing firebrand, an MP for two different parties,
00:00:20.380 one of which he was a leader, and most important Man United fan, George Gallagher. Welcome to
00:00:24.280 Trigonometry. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm a big fan of your work, really.
00:00:27.640 And you're a broadcaster, which I forgot to add.
00:00:30.340 Yeah, you were on my show. It was a very popular segment, actually.
00:00:34.580 Was it?
00:00:35.240 Yeah, yeah. Very popular.
00:00:36.240 Well, we're both surprised about that. But thank you for having me. And actually,
00:00:40.360 one of the things that we wanted to talk to you about is something you and I very much talked
00:00:43.920 about at the time, which was this. And you and I had a lot of agreement, but this maybe was an era
00:00:49.420 where we were trying to work out what each other were saying, which is I was talking about cancel
00:00:54.020 culture. And you yourself have been attacked physically when speaking on university campus
00:00:59.400 by trans activists. And we were sort of trying to find common language about what seems to have
00:01:04.660 happened on what I perceive as the left. This seems to have become the sort of intolerance almost
00:01:10.420 that's crept in the idea, which is very counter to your values, as I perceive them, which is if you
00:01:15.580 don't agree with people, you debate. You express yourself in strong, confident terms.
00:01:20.340 And that is how you conduct that conversation. So what is it that's happened in this area of
00:01:26.200 debate, conversation, language? Everything seems to be sort of you've got to be very careful.
00:01:31.760 You can't offend people. What's your take on that?
00:01:34.440 Well, I think we, in feeling towards common language on this, we had a disagreement, which
00:01:43.880 we're about to have again now. I don't regard these people as being on the left.
00:01:48.980 Or, or, or, if that's the left, I'm not on it.
00:01:53.980 Which would make them very happy to hear.
00:01:57.140 There's a difference between what I call liberalism, with a small l, and the left, or at least there
00:02:04.660 ought to be. And that ranges from the philosophical, through the economic, political, and also on
00:02:14.940 social values. So for example, I am socially conservative, in every respect. I don't drink,
00:02:23.740 I hate drugs, I believe in marriage, I believe in the country, I'm patriotic, I believe in the armed
00:02:31.780 forces, and so on. None of these are liberal traits. And they ought to be a difference between
00:02:39.820 the left and the liberals, who don't like the family much, generally, think it's old hat.
00:02:50.220 Although most of them live in monogamous relationships, they don't want to theorize that
00:02:55.720 as being a good thing. They would, they would attack you if you tried to theorize that.
00:03:01.900 They, they seem to believe in the stupefication of the masses where everyone takes a drag and drops out,
00:03:12.540 which is the very antithesis of the kind of political activism that I think is needed in the
00:03:20.320 country. But you're right, they have become identified as the left. They identify themselves
00:03:28.580 as the left, the media identifies them as the left. And ergo, the left is really unpopular amongst the
00:03:36.820 mass of the people in the country, who don't look like them, live like them, think like them, talk like
00:03:43.360 them. And that's a problem. It means that someone like me has to explicitly say, well, if that's the
00:03:50.620 left, I'm not in it, or the more difficult thing to do, to attack the idea that they are the left.
00:04:00.840 Now, as you rightly identified right at the beginning, the cancel culture has enveloped,
00:04:07.780 not just denying someone like you platforms, but someone like me. Or on the women's front,
00:04:16.500 someone like my old friend, Jermaine Greer, she is persona non gratis. She is not allowed
00:04:22.480 to appear on any university campus. Although, probably like me, her reaction to that has been,
00:04:30.820 well, stick your university campuses. I would no longer, maybe the Oxford Union because the security
00:04:37.620 is good, but I wouldn't go to any other university meeting. And I'm invited to them all the time,
00:04:44.120 at least every week. But I wouldn't go because once cancelled, twice shy. Or in my case, once
00:04:53.020 physically attacked, twice shy. Jacob Rees-Mogg ran into similar difficulties. He's on the right of
00:05:05.580 politics, though I agree with him on quite a few things. I'm on the left of politics, and we're both
00:05:12.360 effectively not welcome in Britain's universities. Now, that's bad for me because I don't get the
00:05:19.900 chance to proselytize for my beliefs amongst young people who will, amongst whom will be people who
00:05:28.000 will be journalists and politicians and opinion makers and formers in the future. But it's also bad
00:05:37.120 for them. Because it means that the bandwidth of the ideas that they are being exposed to
00:05:44.460 is incredibly narrow. And that means we get another generation then that are inculcated with these
00:05:53.520 ideas which are coming from liberals, but are, of course, entirely illiberal in any normal definition
00:06:01.840 of the world. So I believe in freedom of speech, not just because I think the people hearing it will
00:06:10.340 be the better for it, but because if we don't have freedom of speech, even someone like me gets cancelled.
00:06:16.940 And that's, I think, where we are in this country. Now, I blame the Americans.
00:06:22.840 You may say, where did all this come from? You may think it emerged in the 21st century or even in the
00:06:33.380 latter part of the 20th century. But actually, I was there when it emerged. I saw it because I'm older
00:06:40.260 than I look. I saw it coming across the sea from the 1968ers. Their ideas throughout the 70s
00:06:50.940 began to seep across the ocean and change the nature of left-wing politics in Britain and I presume
00:07:00.360 elsewhere. No, I don't have direct evidence of that, but I presume that in other European countries
00:07:07.460 this seepage also occurred. And I always joke about it. I knew that the British labor movement would
00:07:15.240 go into decline when our weekend schools and summer schools, we ceased to sit in rows and listen to
00:07:25.140 leaders and began to sit in circles where Big Tom or Facebook's views were as important as Tony
00:07:35.640 Benz. And Tony had no right to speak more than Big Tom from Facebook. I knew that this would lead to no
00:07:44.100 good. And it has. And George, we've talked about the left. We've talked about, you say that these
00:07:50.960 people aren't on the left, but yet everybody seems to identify them as being part of the left.
00:07:56.300 Do you think that the left is therefore in crisis as a result of these people?
00:07:59.920 Totally. The left, as defined and largely perceived, though we're trying to change that,
00:08:08.800 is in the existential crisis of being regarded by the people it hopes to lead as alien, as foreign,
00:08:20.800 as repulsive, actually. So I don't know that you can do it entirely geographically because there are
00:08:29.440 many parts of London even, never mind the south that are in that bag. But generally speaking, the farther north
00:08:40.520 you go in the country, the more alien these people seem. And it seems to me sine qua non of seeking to
00:08:49.940 lead people, seeking to get their votes, obtain their trust, and then lead them in a certain direction.
00:09:00.320 It's quite important that they are, that you are not seen by them as someone who hates them,
00:09:06.900 who hates their country, hates its history, hates its culture. Because, well, at the very least,
00:09:14.840 they're not going to vote for you if they think that's what you think of them. And at worst,
00:09:20.780 it produces a recoil, a backlash, in which other populists from the far right can win an audience and
00:09:34.700 traction amongst the people that have been repelled by you. So crisis, absolute crisis.
00:09:42.820 And do you therefore think that if you look at the Labour Party as it is now, where you've got
00:09:49.000 these activists on one side, you've got Keir Starmer on another, don't you look at the Labour
00:09:53.880 Party and think this isn't viable long term as a political party? You can't, you simply can't hold
00:09:59.980 these two types of people and everybody else within one political organisation.
00:10:03.820 And then throw a blue Labour into the mix as well.
00:10:05.440 I thought that for a very long time. And electorally, that is proving to be the case. My problem is,
00:10:16.160 I'm not with either. I'm not with Starmer, and I'm not with Corbyn. I'm not with the ragged,
00:10:25.580 unwashed successor generations to the 1968ers. Neither am I with the centrists. I was thinking
00:10:35.360 over, because this is the death anniversary of Jay Guevara. I was thinking over, the centrists
00:10:41.580 have no heroes. I pity that. I pity them for that. Who's your hero? Keir Starmer.
00:10:48.260 A block of wood. So wooden, the birds are trying to nest in them. Or is it a guy that looks like,
00:10:57.340 acts like, lives like, he's just emerged from a student squat. And that is the dichotomy that
00:11:05.040 the traditional left now possesses or is in the grip of. And for someone like me, who's not with
00:11:14.240 either of these trends, it's a lonely furrow. It's not lonely in that a lot of people agree with me,
00:11:23.520 but it's lonely in the sense that in an organised way, most of what is thought of as the left is
00:11:31.640 alien to me. That's not where I expected to find out, find myself when I started out in the 1960s.
00:11:40.520 Well, one of the things this obviously creates in terms of certainly British politics
00:11:44.420 is that we've had a Conservative government for 10 years. I've been very, in terms of voting,
00:11:50.580 I've been very politically promiscuous in my life. I've voted everything from Lib Dem to for you when
00:11:55.060 I was living in this area to voting for the Conservatives for the first time in my life at
00:11:59.940 the last election. And you look at the Conservatives now, you have to say that they're completely
00:12:04.980 useless. But you don't see them being credibly challenged at the next election, even now,
00:12:10.820 because we don't have a credible opposition. Where does that leave the country?
00:12:14.760 Up the creek without a paddle. We have not faced a potentially existential crisis like this
00:12:24.480 since the summer of 1940, when Hitler was at the Channel ports, when the Soviet Union hadn't entered the
00:12:33.200 war, and where any day the fascist hordes could have landed on the southern coast. We really have not
00:12:43.120 faced a crisis like this. Not just the public health crisis, but the economic crisis which accompanies it.
00:12:50.760 And we have a government that is, to continue the watery metaphor, lost at sea. And we have an opposition
00:12:58.920 which is probably not even a scintilla better than the government that's lost at sea. And that is
00:13:07.540 a very difficult place to find yourself. In 1940, Churchill stepped forward. The ineffectual, inept
00:13:17.500 throwback to a previous century of the Chamberlain clique was overthrown, and the rest is history.
00:13:26.380 But there's no Churchill in this picture. There's no Churchill in the House of Commons. There's not
00:13:33.100 even an athlete in the House of Commons. There's nothing that you could say, we could get behind
00:13:40.140 this person, these people, this plan. Not at all. On the contrary, I think we're heading,
00:13:48.440 again, to continue the watery metaphor into very turbulent times indeed, turbulent waters.
00:13:56.280 And you've just mentioned that we don't have a church, we don't even have an athlete. In fact,
00:14:00.700 we were talking with Peter Hitchens, and he was saying there was no big beasts of politics left
00:14:05.180 anymore. Why do you think that is, George? Why do you think that we don't have, even Thatcher,
00:14:10.660 who you would probably ardently, well not probably, disagree with, you can't deny that she was a force of
00:14:16.660 nature. And not only was she, there was a hundred or a hundred and fifty such big beasts when I
00:14:24.560 entered Parliament, just over 30 years ago, 33 years ago. You could look around, and your mouth
00:14:33.180 would open. That's Michael Heseltine going past. That's Tony Benn. That's Dennis Healy, Peter Shore,
00:14:39.200 and so on. And that's not ancient history. That's only 1987. So Thatcher, of course, was a big beast,
00:14:50.160 a formidable figure. And now there are no Thatchers, no Benz, no Shores. So what's happened? I put it
00:14:59.340 down to the death of ideology. The belief in an alternative society died with the Soviet collapse.
00:15:11.440 Not that the left in Britain was pro-Soviet, but the existence of the Soviet Union at least implied
00:15:20.140 that there was another way that you could run things. That died. The left, the labor movement,
00:15:29.860 completely lost confidence, lost hope, turned to the EU, turned to Jacques Delors, from Lenin to Jacques
00:15:39.340 Delors is a long way. They sought a kind of corporatist protection from the EU.
00:15:50.120 And with the death of Thatcherism, well, Thatcherism not really dead, but with the passing from power
00:15:59.720 of Mrs. Thatcher and her replacement by a desiccated calculating machine called John Major,
00:16:07.520 but one whose batteries were running out. The whole thing went downhill from there.
00:16:13.460 Labor's conclusion was that they needed to find a Taylor's dummy that could talk. And they came up
00:16:24.740 with Tony Blair. I was there. I was on John Prescott's leadership team. That's how bad the choice was.
00:16:32.380 And Tony Blair romped home and with predictable results. So labor marched across the political
00:16:43.800 terrain. And the Tories followed them. The Tories are Blairites, really. So Thatcherism has very much
00:16:54.660 been succeeded by Blairism, the labor brand and the Tory brand. What was David Cameron, if not a kind of
00:17:04.260 Tony Blair without the laughs? He was ersatz Blair. And I had some hope that Boris Johnson would prove
00:17:18.660 different. He hasn't really. I mean, Boris Johnson, despite all the epithets that are hurled at him,
00:17:28.660 is actually quite a liberal figure. Yeah. With liberal ideas on, on the economy and society. And he
00:17:36.360 certainly lived the high liberal life. He's a party man. Not that kind of party. Right. But, but hasn't proven to be
00:17:46.780 competent, which, you know, look, I, maybe if we didn't have a global pandemic and a massive economic
00:17:52.260 crisis to deal with, he would have been the sort of cheerleader that sort of saw the country through
00:17:57.420 Brexit and minor obstacles in its path. But it's the time, as you say, for Churchill's and Thatcher's,
00:18:04.080 and we don't have any at the moment, which I think should worry everybody.
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00:19:24.160 So glad we finally achieved our dreams.
00:19:27.740 But we do have some real problems ahead, don't we, George? I don't know what your take is on the
00:19:34.740 response to the pandemic, actually. Let's talk about that briefly. What do you make of how we're
00:19:39.000 dealing with it now?
00:19:40.020 Being half an Irishman, I'm entitled to say, as the apocryphal Irishman asked the road and distance
00:19:47.620 to Dublin, I wouldn't have started from here. And so we're in a big mess now because we didn't start
00:19:56.960 where we ought to have started. I was opining just yesterday. It's proved quite a successful tweet
00:20:06.400 that there are more coronavirus cases in the White House than there are in New Zealand, Taiwan,
00:20:14.660 and South Korea put together. There's China and South Korea and Vietnam and New Zealand,
00:20:25.920 disparate ideological, social, political systems. There's virtually no coronavirus. It's been
00:20:32.400 vanquished. And yet we are in a state of panic. The United States still more so,
00:20:38.660 although only marginally more so, considering the difference in the size of the countries.
00:20:44.080 And that's because we didn't do what South Korea did at the very beginning, which was to
00:20:51.280 absolutely go to war, immediately mobilize their population, their public health system,
00:21:00.240 and their economy to fight this thing. And they have done it so successfully that you can get a test
00:21:09.280 for the coronavirus at the bus stop, literally on the bus stop. I don't know if you blow into it or
00:21:16.540 suck it or what you do, but it's there on the bus stop. I, at 66,
00:21:22.020 could not get, for love nor money, a test about four weeks ago when I had a cough and thought,
00:21:34.440 I probably better get a test. I could not get one. I couldn't get through on the website. I couldn't
00:21:39.120 get through on the emergency number. I couldn't find anybody even that would take my money to give
00:21:45.460 me one. That's how far away from South Korea we are on this. New Zealand, of course, a bit of a
00:21:52.980 special case because of the sparsity of the population and so on. Although Scotland is comparable
00:21:57.940 to New Zealand in many such respects. And Scotland is worse than England. Glasgow is the worst place in
00:22:06.580 the country. So we've gone about this entirely the wrong way. And that's partly a consequence
00:22:13.480 of the rundown in the public health system over the last 20 or more years. But it's also about
00:22:24.080 this failure of leadership. We live in a country, as many other countries, where nobody believes the
00:22:34.520 leaders even when they're telling the truth. And nobody gets, there's no mobilization. There's no sense of us
00:22:43.480 and always that we are a people, a country, a state with leaders, warts and all. We must follow them.
00:22:51.140 There's no sense of that in Britain. So we had a substantial number, a weird left-right crossover
00:23:01.200 of deniers that stretched from libertarians who'd rather die than wear a mask to left-wing idiots who
00:23:13.800 thought it was all a conspiracy by Bill Gates, the hapless Bill Gates, who became the new Rothschild.
00:23:22.820 You just had to say his name and nod and wink. That weird crossover existed. And it was noisy
00:23:32.040 on social media. But if we'd had a strong leadership and a strong state, then we would have been able to
00:23:40.740 rally everyone behind us. And we would have been able to count on people. See, it would be far better
00:23:46.080 if you could count on 65 million people to do the right thing, you wouldn't need fines. You wouldn't
00:23:52.740 need, you didn't have to fine people in the Second World War in the East End of London to make sure they
00:23:58.720 had blackout in their windows, that they weren't showing light to the bombers coming. Not a mile from
00:24:08.560 here. This place was all on fire, completely on fire. So there was no need, because the people believed
00:24:18.160 in the country's leadership. They believed in the concept of a country, and us. We have lost that. So
00:24:26.480 where we go from here, I've really got no idea. Nothing that they are doing is working. They're throwing
00:24:35.480 money around like, like the magic money tree was in every street. I saw figures the other day on
00:24:46.360 testing, tracking and tracing. Ireland has spent 733,000 pounds. And we have spent 12 billion,
00:24:56.680 billion pounds. And where is it? Where's the tests? Where's the tracking? Where's the tracing?
00:25:01.800 Uh, this has been either a gigantic organized scam to make, uh, a few people exceedingly rich,
00:25:12.520 or it is the most incompetent shit show ever seen in these islands. Uh, because how you manage to spend
00:25:21.400 12 billion pounds on a system that is practically invisible, it's very difficult to compute.
00:25:27.800 And yet, it goes back to Constantine's point as well, that you look over at the opposition,
00:25:33.400 and they don't seem to have any ideas either. No. In fact, when Keir Starmer is asked what he'd do,
00:25:39.480 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.
00:25:54.200 You gave us your full support on this two weeks ago. I saw him yesterday, or in the house, uh, Wednesday.
00:25:59.800 Uh, he said, uh, but, but this complaint you're making is about the very thing you supported not
00:26:07.400 two weeks ago. Uh, so for me, Starmer is worse in the sense that, uh, you've got the opportunity as an
00:26:19.000 opposition because you don't have responsibility to explore different, uh, uh, different ways in all
00:26:26.520 directions, by the way. Uh, I'm ready to listen to an argument that says, now that we are where we are,
00:26:34.440 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.
00:26:51.000 But Starmer seems to me like a guy who's strapped himself into a straitjacket, uh, and is, uh,
00:26:59.400 merely going through the motions of opposition. And I see he's sliding again in the, in the polls.
00:27:07.880 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,
00:27:36.120 or even the bread. And you said that we don't have this idea of a country, this idea of, you know,
00:27:42.280 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
00:27:55.000 to, of all places, the Church of Scotland, the most twee Presbyterian assembly anywhere on these islands.
00:28:03.480 She effectively attacked, uh, central tenet of Christianity, uh, there. She had balls.
00:28:12.280 She, um, she, um, she crystallized it, but I don't think it begins with, uh, with her. I think that
00:28:19.880 after the Second World War, Britain felt and was, uh, depleted. And there was the, the long period,
00:28:27.640 uh, of, uh, after a short period of, uh, post-war reconstruction, there was the long period of
00:28:36.280 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.
00:28:52.440 Even though it was increasingly liberal, uh, through the sixties, nobody really argued. It
00:28:58.600 wasn't until Thatcher came along, uh, that, uh, there was any sharp rupture ideologically in Britain.
00:29:07.160 But undoubtedly, if you privatize everything, if you, uh, exalt individualism over collectivism,
00:29:17.640 if public becomes bad, private becomes good, uh, if that dichotomy sets in, then you're,
00:29:24.680 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,
00:29:36.760 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
00:29:52.840 the, the, the ultimate expression of that in the world today. And they went, I mean, they fought the
00:29:59.720 coronavirus like it was World War III. And now they're living totally normal lives, even in Wuhan.
00:30:07.960 Scotland. And we are scared to go out the door. Our businesses are shutting down. Scotland,
00:30:17.960 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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00:32:23.000 get cancelled.
00:32:27.400 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
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.
00:33:12.120 But that's cases and that's not deaths, right?
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.
00:33:36.840 It's the old pro-Soviet instincts coming out there.
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,
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.
00:35:43.240 Of course.
00:35:44.760 So I'm not with the, if you like, with the libertarians on that. But I'm ready for fresh
00:35:53.480 ideas. But there are few and far between.
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
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,
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
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
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,
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
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
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.
00:48:25.680 Or him, his mother's from Venezuela.
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
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.
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
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,
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
00:55:16.080 from Slovenia is serving it to you, uh, uh, and historically low price. Because you don't even
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,
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
00:59:49.040 Trump, but it benefited all of us to know that Hillary Clinton was a crook and that the Clinton
00:59:57.040 crime family were up to the neck in all kinds of vice, venality, and corruption. We all needed to know
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,
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
01:09:16.800 injustice. Not justice, but injustice.
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.
01:10:45.680 Did you want a more serious?
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.
01:10:52.880 David Moyes, that's all I'm going to say.
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.
01:11:38.560 George, thank you so much for coming on.
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.
01:12:12.400 For gaming, yeah.
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.
01:13:13.920 We'll see you soon.
01:13:43.920 We'll see you soon.
01:13:45.920 We'll see you soon.