Transcripts For RT Going Underground 20240713

Civil rights Leader Office scargill hold the key to a cuban future for our National Health service all the civil coming up in todays going underground the 1st european Mainstream Media has downplayed alleged corruption in the removal of the leader of western europes largest socialist movement not that it stopped Jeremy Corbett impala meant continuing to ask questions about coronavirus that while his new need is against ahmed threatens court action against anyone publishing a leaked 850 page anti semitism document suggesting his allies conspired to lose a u. K. General election on his pay tribute very briefly to all those Health Workers care workers delivery workers street place and as clean as and so many other groups all over the country that doing such an incredible job together with all of volunteers to deal with this crisis i think its an amazing moment in this countrys history however parliaments job is to hold the government to account and the question one of us is quite simply this the World Health Organization indicated that there was a danger of an epic day. Mc from corona in january they that later to be a pandemic the director general of the World Health Organization said in terms of the way of dealing with it is test test test in order to ascertain the levels of infection across our society we didnt do that no we didnt do that here in britain but then Jeremy Corbyn today arguably represents the polar opposite of his success as a care star for that alone Boris Johnson in a new book by the b. B. C. Is stuart macone explains the korban tradition the author of the nanny state made me a story of britain and how to save it joins me now via skype stuart welcome to going underground all the talk here is a Free Internet we need to have a new respect for shop workers for refuse collectors for n. H. S. People your new book begins with a story about the Public Sector on the post office tower in london with tony benn who i should say that is last ever Television Interview long form t. V. Interview for this programme just did you recount the beginning of this book well and thats good to know the you got a last interview problem a great great now an obviously yeah we were yeah its sort of the siege of the reading the book begins with i was doing a t. V. Interview with Charlie Bannon and we would united top of the what many people still think of as the post office tyrion met in london g. P. O. Chap in bloomsbury and them. The p. R. Guy for British Telecom n o n listen to a kind of chit chat before we began into uni came over and said hey guys just just want change you can call it g. P. O. Chair of the time its the bt tower its the British Telecom terrorism in the g. P. O. Quite some times if you could remember to say that and tony benn fixed him with this when theyre in gaze said. I commissioned this tower i was involved in the in the building of this terrible planning stage it was commissioned by the government it was built and designed by engineers not checked of the state and it was paid for by the british taxpayer those people down there and he pointed out the window and said and it was paid for by those people and Margaret Thatchers stole it from them and it wasnt hers to take and it isnt yours and into a new and you know ill call it what im like really and the guy just slid away defeated and i thought and since then come on these and use have been percolating through my head it eventually has become this book well today in 2020 amidst a pandemic we have a successor it would think to Margaret Thatcher certainly one of his heroines Boris Johnson and hes never been more popular according to the polls during this pandemic i should say to our viewers this book is not negative about this country despite as you suggest there what happened after that you know the 79 tell me about how much this book is infused with a love of britain yes no its not a its not an anti british book at all i prefer to think of myself as billy bragg calls it as a progressive patriot but there is a difference between being a patriot and agreeing we want to tap into this country for the last 40 years maybe even half century which i considered to be essentially and fundamentally unpatriotic i think thats a revolution of 79. 00 and it was a revolution in. 79 with the revolutions in some way they had a massive revolution in iran and we had a massive revolution here in this country that we didnt recognize it as such i think it was a fundamentally anti patriotic anti british revolution because it said that there is no such thing as society in the common bonds of humanity between us are not really as important as profit and he said that individuals often dont paint individuals who do not pay their taxes and who live off shore and news stash their assets off shore it handed the country and its wealth to them rather than the british people so quite the opposite it would be known to british folk in this book connects with a fundamental british patriotism about what made this country great and any one of these images country great was a section of the welfare state in 1945 by the most progressive government computer ever seen so no i do not quite the opposite i consider the people who inhabit the boardrooms of this company and the offshore companies i consider those to be the real unpatriotic town ok well some phil says the refuge the last refuge of the scoundrel ive got to tell you the books title is this phrase the nanny state and that is a that is a term used when it comes to the Public Sector obviously not being used at the moment during the pandemic where we rely so much on the Public Sector who are dying to save us you think that the nanny state the word itself covers room in the sense people who had nannies thats thats thats very much i mean its a joke in a way but its i think its a joke with some serious intent and you say the people who complain about a nanny state are the people who have not eat it is an extraordinary thing that we take this on board i mean we we are seen no i mean were in so much what is the function of a state if not to provide for the wellbeing of citizens i mean and for too long we neglected that in time in thought the state should be some kind of other nonexisting its all off. Just facilitating the protection of private property property and them and the smooth transition of money from one bank account to another usually to rich peoples back and i want to reclaim this word that people have never had enough in the lives of taken to using and say no thats not what you know the not and stayed the welfare state up vote call it is kind of love made institutional and we are seeing not that when the crunch comes when we are when we face a read series serious national and International Crises the people who we put our faith in that we will not count on not denizens of the board they have been the 1st people to bleat and to give up but in fact as we see every day its the n. H. S. From work it is delivery drivers it is refuse collectors it is all these people the people have been can neglect these people pretty patel says our own skilled workers well now we seen they are fundamental and i wonder if its too romantic an optimistic to shoot it will see some fundamental realignment and rethinking of our society but i do think we will change i do think youre not going to hear quite the relish pretty patel dismissing people who make less than 25000 pounds on skilled i do not think you will see quite the same relish in the attacks on state institutions and i certainly dont think you will see any day soon conservative politicians applauding themselves in the house of commons for refusing nurses a pay rise that would not be a very good look at all i think in the coming months and years i want to get on to some of the things you show that we have lost as a country since diving at 79 but the story politicians of course disproportionately were educated at private schools are we in britain call them Public Schools you know theyre private why is it so important because certainly Jeremy Corwin the outgoing labor leader didnt want to abolish eton why is it as. As the manifesto said anywhere the election why should we abolish it. It is the fundamental. Schism in British Society i think. It is both emblematic of everything thats wrong with this country so if you just consider purely symbolic act getting rid of those places where people will be useful but i also think you cannot ignore the day to day practical repercussions of that the fact that. In a country where a bite 6 percent of people 6 between 6 and 7 percent of people we think are privately educated they comprise a majority of michael judges the majority of officers in the british army the majority of journalists across the board so even in the liberal papers regard the journalists are privately educated the b. B. C. When John Humphrys left the b. B. C. Today Programme Many people applauded because they thought he was an old rightwing kermits and thats maybe the case but he certainly his leaving left that program less democratic because not every single radio 4 presenter is privately educated the 1st step any government should say if we want to see. You know how to Fairer Society is absolutely overnight abolished it will be skills i cannot it seems to me so selfevident and yet to say to people think you some usually ridiculously communistic thing to say it seems like we british love play this play pleasure declare an interest that i was a i was on humphreys producer at the at the b. B. C. Do you think then that because of all of that we have a tribute thing over the history that you so romantically talk about in the book by people like drawn. The people now doing the press coverage is about coronavirus because their patriotism is very different to that that in this book you know i dont i dont judge i dont want to do you know would you do me no joy but if the person insulting i dont. Sometimes they think they are doing what they think is the best in the circumstances but preservation at all costs of this system as it stands preservation at all costs of an elite on establishment of of of any quality is what they are above it having said that i do think its interesting that he jumps in an instant case in point hes certainly not an idealogue like that you i mean he may well be i mean some people suggest he simply again plays in a self aggrandizement in a bit of fun he certainly is not an idealogue the fact she was and i think thats why weve seen already that. Really soon x. Enterprise in endeavors and suggestions have been warmly welcomed and seem very conservative because theyre not like the conservatives weve been used to for 50 years so its interesting in order to get them public on board hes got to embrace very public spirited principles the kind of principles they dont appear in the senate for the welfare state i do not think the page does mean is my pictures and no i dont think genuinely they really want every british citizen to have everybodys interest they have that of the few and it is their own class and it is their own people that said i do not want i want to jump on about my going to be taught examine my criticism they are faced with unprecedented problems and they are handling them probably as well as they can in some respects maybe economically although we see every day that we the people the scandal we see every day that seems to be complete lack of forward planning and lack of community thinking as well well the riches are that of course the chancellor caver Goldman Sachs and a lot of the people in worth around the cabinet are associated with supporting privatization of the National Health service has been a scandal about a previous exercise why do you think they really able to turn a sixpence so easily and suddenly say they love the n. H. S. That they obviously were so much part of a privatizing it before this pandemic struck well i think one of the reasons for that. Seeming vault fanous has been the one of the engine things about this crisis as weve seen Boris Johnson was hospitalized one of these crises is it has been indiscriminate inhibit attacks i mean its wrong to beat pain has been felt discriminately as always in these cases the brunt of the pain is been felt indiscriminately by the poorest the most vulnerable that is thats whats happened this has in terms of its contagion. Affected everyone we have we were all as likely to suffer as anyone else and i think its been the sheer that ubiquity of it and the fact that middle class people and rich Business People will be affected by has made them realize that they have to step up to the place i think of the coronavirus it only affected some poor people who they couldnt see you know in the cities because you hadnt grown felt you in that context what exactly i mean i write about that in the in the chapter on housing in my book i write a program for and said that as a symbol of many quality you kind of get more point and similarly quote one of the richest few miles on earth you had graham fell but i think its been the fact that. This contagion if you like has affected as the potential to affect everyone i think has meant that this government has had to be seen to be doing some good because and i say if it had been another graham or something even less public than grandpa i think it could well been swept some of the company but this no but this is hitting a lot of people like Richard Branson in the backbones and i think so i think even the conservative party after us and some of their friends might not come to this on scale you know and maybe this is why theyve got this newfound generosity and Community Spirit soon ill stop you there are going to after this short break. Would pharmaceutic. Companies have a miraculous solution. Based drugs the people who are chronic pain patients believe that their prescription is working for them in the remedy. To. Price at the. Grocery dependency and addiction to opiates to long term use that really isnt scientifically justified and ill study actually suggested that the long term effects may not just be the absence of benefit but actually that they may be causing long term. Welcome back im still here with the spirit people are watching maybe im lucky enough to see the site of tens of thousands of cuban doctors pictures of them helping Different Countries around the world during this pandemic despite the fact that i get the Mainstream Media in this country has not been showing those pictures Boris Johnson used to taunt Jeremy Corbyn about cuba and its ally venezuela what what. Do you think you are is so important as regards a country like britain because in the book you talk about relations with the relatives of author scargill one of the architects of arguably one of the biggest flashpoints of International Near liberalism in british history his connection to cuba and health well yes in the book i was very keen to do this i should say that i didnt you do not know enough of banks to be able to say i would not want to seem to be a cheerleader but if you can just immobile on one thing you believe got things right is that Health Care System and i knew virus friend of mine the actress maxine peake. After scandals daughter margaret. Winter has been. Jim x. Mine manager had set up a cuban style Health Practice in bonds and i was intrigued by this and went to go i knew nothing about the cuban Healthcare System except that many people said it was apparent and i was brilliant and they have set up they said this in the middle ninetys tony blairs government came along to try and emulate it because didnt do it properly. Because what they have said that the cuban Health Care System is a system whereby there is a health hold you go in there and you send documents i feel you know i feel a little money use hurting an endo and they need specially southern edge but cross the hall and see him also if you transpires that when you dont really want to happen if youre feeling depressed and is someone you can help you know mentally healthy shes the idea is that its a one stop shop its 24 hours and again im not a medical im not a healthcare professional im not a medical sociologist but it does seem to me the. Cuban system of health care as we are see from the fatima you know dots coming is something we can very definitely learn from because the cuban system stands in stark contrast to our National Health service in a sense which isnt truly universal in fact talk about how the British Medical Association tried to destroy any open National Health service what we want there were other elements of this book why the importance of buses you see this is so crucial i mean libraries british rail the buses as i think of the whole the bush scenario is one that just does is show again emblematic and symptomatic of the wrongheaded thinking of 50 years in this country or 40 is at least. Everywhere in britain in every one i remember him except one place. The buses were privatized back in the days when the conservatives drunk on power looking for what to privatized next i mean. Whatever you think about privatization i think you know there are certain things i say in the book i do not want the state to make my clothes i dont want to state to make my point music i dont want the state to make my career thats fine im happy to leave that to small Business People and entrepreneurs but i do not want. I do not want the private World Private sphere to be controlling my prisons my water supply all my transport and i think everyone going to be some of those conservative privatizations i think maybe some consume and use them sounds would agree not that some of them were insane and would run for pure ideological grounds what coming coming flog off next buses no one in britain wants to privatized this it was just a little up perfectly well what you got immediately afterwards was a cowboy system whereby health and safety went out the window if you go into mansion im down to oxford road the most overcrowded. Transport corridor probably anywhere in the world you get now get places that have no job because it doesnt make any profit sense it didnt make any fiscal sense to do you know i just its emblematic of the insanity of privatisation and of course whats the one place in britain that didnt do its london where the buses are still controlled by the council and where they are still cheap what do you what more proof can you need in the name of the people who made the decision the people who made the decision to privatized transposes and said oh no he because we like it the way we know that this way works so you put saps can have the stupid system were going to foist on you but well well have it this way thanks well during the pandemic disproportionate numbers obviously a bus arrives in trance whatsoever actually dying on the was a bright light without b. P. A. Were not sure what what is going to happen with that another element maybe of trying to understand the pandemic and the response to it because as i say birth johnson is popular as a Prime Minister you have literally you stop short of blaming. Ignorance within society on the closure of libraries after the bailout of the banks in 2008 you almost say to keep people ignorant you even mentioned dolly parton whos been on this show talking about her literacy project what was behind do you think it was actually that conspiratorial the 1st thing to go in this country after the bailout of the big banks with libraries in this country. Well 2 things im on it if you dont Economists Program on it to be sharing a virtual space weve got because of me shes a charmer in fake human brain. I mean would i be so conspiratorial to suggest that they would deliberately closing down avenues of knowledge probably not in so many words that doesnt sound rather tinfoil hat wearing but i do think the prioritization is interesting though. To me the mark of a Civilized Society is that it would close the library last. Thing the fact that they were so quickly dispense with is part of that same way of thinking though when david camp David Cameron described attacks on the b. B. C. As delicious what we do not any time soon i dont think are any of his. Successes but i do think that it was it speaks of a certain cast of mind to say well the 1st thing to go we dont need a books for those traps account for them you know because you can go buy a book cant you. Because traditionally libraries the Public Library system has been such a vital knowledge of network for working class people in this country and i do think if it wasnt it well i dont think i bond villains they 12 the mustaches and struck cats instead and now we will get to the libraries and consign them to ignorance forever but it do you think they mean what you were working class people got knowledge on not for free and i do think they were handy in easy things to close down because i think on a very tribal level libraries like public transport like all kinds of Public Utilities are anathema to a certain right wing cast of mind because one of your great expertise is is a music tell me about how one of britains greatest exports of music and still Percentage Points on g. D. P. Is state music and how we should reinstitute the dough for 16 year olds well its in it again at some of the points i make in my book a kind of its a personal polemic its intended to be maple neck shes intended to be provocative meant 10 and its not. White paper. Now but i didnt reach something to be sent from the fire that i speak in the book some of my friends musicians my job is a car current Richard Hawley who spend long periods of time on the dot com superman to benefit honing the craft and as richard says in the book and as jeremy del of the art he said there was a degree to which the relatively benign unemployment system of e. S. P. N. Was a kind of alternative arts cocounsel you know and these were alternative schools because these are places where you could i mean certainly dont was not the right wing press a lot of people live in the lap of looking on the dole you want but you did have enough money coming in to you know sustain you while you write some songs going about together and. You know from the disappearance to the stone roses from johnny vision to function and on woods on till we had recalibrations gone in recent years were. Privately educated people take control of pop music but after for many many this state sets of projects just produced these musicians and they often honed their craft on the dole and as Richard Hawley points out in the book is however much money i took in the dough on the dough i have paid now 10. 00 times over in my taxes and so in some ways just physically you make sense as well as creatively the north south divide of course in the music of the accepting the clash or the other jam with that era maybe what about the north south divide where they came to media you talk about is another regular an opera bill do you talk about granada t. V. You talk about different types of media the used to exist before london because the dictator as it were media was of the country although arguably has changed a little since the b. B. C. Moved images that well i think in the mood for me to succeed b. B. C. Sending i mean it is no its not its not cured everything but i think it has shifted the center of gravity slightly north which is no bad thing because you mentioned a great you know. Which was the work of sonny Sidney Bernstein who was a capitalist but he was as i say in the book the book is not an anti capitalist or a by any stretch the imagination but it eats against a certain way of thinking and a certain way of thinking show by governments of left and right that it helps to have a force yes i do think things have changed sign for the better but you still dont get many people with my accent on the radio for news you still dont get it you dont get it and thats why i think that class cuts through all the other differences in British Society that weve got a lot of in recent years and while we take Great Strides i think to increase our diversity representation in all manner in all manner of spheres about sexuality about ethnicity by gender class is the great unspoken to be less think cuts through and i think to simply have. Different privately educated presenters of different ethnicities is really progress but i think things are Getting Better but in some ways things are very much tense and there are just going to ask finally about income loads of people in this country and in European Countries suffering greatly financially from the coronavirus pandemic over here we have 640000000000 pounds were given in quantitative easing to the city of london and then really complicated benefit strange 80 percent furloughs where their Family Businesses i dont know there could even be a bit of fraud who knows it all of this you in the book however say things could be much more easy is here in this country with some kind of baseline income to stop people starving to death and should say there is a cause there are well nourished people in this country i thought just last week i mean i thought just in the interim maybe 2 weeks ago when the when the sudden shock of what was happening to us i think finally came home and began to get into the government briefings in. I thought we trembling on the verge of the magic of universal basic income i still think its somewhere in the back of our thinking because clearly this is an idea whose time has come trump is and the next day while i mean you could argue that we are having a kind of universal basic right not a maybe maybe well think rethink about it afterwards but it would seem to be an idea again that hes not particularly politically no particular party savvy just to be commonsensical. But again some people on the right think that the very idea of giving people money for nothing is a seat will somehow sap our moral fiber etc to all that garbage that they always talk but. No it would seem to me to be very eminently sensible i dont and i doubt hes times come and theres been tried all over the world Nixon Richard nixon thought about implementing it but no communist Richard Nixon of course he thought of a committee and it seems to me to be eminently common sense to start saying now has a certain amount of money that you can have that will to a certain extent have all the benefits folded into it and it gives people the right to talk about freedom of choice the right to talk about individual liberty as if the sacrosanct thing well what could be more individual heres your money do with it what you will bill and when its gone its gone you can do what you want with it right now but it is a safety net to stop people starving will encourage entrepreneurial isnt thats something youre interested in i think its eminently sent i have yet to see any properly sensible critique of it so i think its an idea whose time is coming soon were going to thank you and thats of the show will be back on wednesday the other verse 3 of the u. S. Switching sides in support of Margaret Thatcher you know war for the most readers for connivance where british soldier is believed 1st confirm the writ of virus goes over the south atlantic archipelago until then give it up as a media wash your hands of the forget join the army go into the south that instagram and facebook. No longer the world checks an interest in keeping its citizens locked up the soul of a. New virus will go by this rules and restrictions will remain i think its a panic scare idea governments of the world very much interested in lifting this restriction is bought they are evidently and presumably scared of doing business touch away as to provoke not the wave of infection. We should worry at all to calming the level of poverty that will be faced might millions and millions especially citizens and the people falling off the. U. S. Economy was booming growing numbers of people were made homeless. You can work 40 hours d in a week and still not have enough to get housing everybody believes america still is the land of opportunity the reality of it is that were not financially equality and the lack of Affordable Housing for a living minimum wage gave many people new choice though theres been a problem with the city brunos turn richard cole who stay away oh miss colton consider that there is no answer because yes that requires resources the most vulnerable are abandoned on the streets to become the