The country 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 epidemic from corona in january they that later declared it 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 guest star that alone Boris Johnson in a new book by the b. B. C. s 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. Skype steered 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 or 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 program just to recount the beginning of this book well and thats good to know the you got a last interview problem a great great now i dont usually yeah we were yeah its sort of the siege of the book reading the book begins with i was doing a t. V. Interview with Charlie Bannon and we would unit top of the what many people still think of as the post office tyrion and london g. P. O. Channel in bloomsbury and them. The p. R. Guy for British Telecom n o n listen to our kind of chit chat before we began internee 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 now 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 its a need and you know ill call it when im like really on the guard has slid away defeated and i thought and since then coming these ideas of 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 or in 97 i tell you about how much this book is infused with a love of britain yes no its not a its not an ounce of british book at all i prefer to think of myself as billy bragg called it as a progressive patriot when 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. 79 was the revolution 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 yogic individuals who do not pay the taxes and who live off shore and who stash their assets offshore it handed the country and its wealth to them rather than the british people so quite the opposite to be announced pretty broken 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 countrys ever seen so no i do not get 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 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 i do say to people who complain about in many states other 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 neglect that in time in the state should be some kind of the 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 lets not what we know the not and stayed the welfare state or call it is kind of love made institutional and we are seeing not that when the crunch has come when we are when we face a read series serious national and International Crises the people who we put our faith in the people we look out 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 and optimistic to shoot it well 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 arriving 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 in the way of the election why should we abolish eton. It is the fundamental. Schism in British Society i think. It is both emblematic about in the trunk of this country so if you just concede is a 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 black 6 percent of people 6 between 6 and 7 percent of people we think are privately educated they comprise the majority of heikal judges the majority of offices in the british army the majority of journalists across the board so even in the liberal papers the guardian younger the journalist 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 kermit jhon thats maybe the case but he certainly his leaving left that program less democratic because not every single radio 4 use presenter is privately educated the 1st step any government should say if we want to see. You know how to fire a society is absolutely overnight abolish the Police Killed i cannot it seems to me so selfevident and yet to say to people think you some and hugely ridiculous to come into the thing to say it seems like we british love play this play pleasure declare an interest that i was a i was wrong humphrys producer at the at the b. His c. Do you think then that because of all of that we have a thing of the history that you so romantically talk about in the book by people like john. The people now doing the press coverage is about coronavirus because their patriotism is very different to that in this book yeah i dont i dont judge i dont want you to you know demean or join in 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 all costs of an elite of an establishment all of the of of inequality is what they are a but i happen 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 hes simply a game plays in this self aggrandizement and 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 likely conservatives weve been used to for 50 years or so but its interesting in order to get them public on board hes got to embrace very public spirited principles the kind of principles that underpin the center for the welfare state i do not think the page does mean is my pictures and no i dont think genuinely they really want everybody citizens 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 can do we see every day that seems to be complete lack of forward planning and lack of community thinking as well well the riches are back 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 were 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 or 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 Boris Johnson was hospitalized one of these crises is it has been indiscriminate intimate attacks i mean its wrong to beat pain is being felt discriminately as always in these cases the brunt of the pain has been felt by the poorest the most vulnerable that is thats what all the time but 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 it 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 had to grant you in that context what exactly i mean i write about them in the in the chapter on housing in a 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 white graham felt 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 bell or something even less public than grandpa i think it could well in swept under the carpet 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 to us that some of their friends might not come to this on the scale you know i maybe this is why theyve got this newfound generosity and Community Spirit ill stop you there youre going to after this short break. Clubs Global Energy markets are in disarray over production low demand and lots of storage has witnessed some prices go into negative territory this is not just because of the pandemic this is the result of just policies the Energy Market may never recover. As the u. S. Economy was booming growing numbers of people were made homeless. You can work 40 hours d a week and still not have enough to get housing everybody believes america still is the leader of the reality of. Financial inequality and the lack of Affordable Housing living minimum wage many people no choice. Thats been a problem with the city has turned a return call the stay way. The food if there is no answer because you have to be forced resource the most vulnerable or abandoned on the streets to become invisible comes. Welcome back im still here with the still it people are watching me have been 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 arguably 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 why why did you think you were is so important as regards a country like britain because in the book you talk about relations with the relatives of office 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 do not know enough of banks to be able to say i would not want to seem to be a cheerleader but if youve been just an overall on one thing. Youve got things wrong is that Healthcare System i knew vajra friend of mine the actions maxine peake. After scandals. Margaret. With her husband jim ex mine manager. Id set up a cuban style Health Practice in bonds and i was intrigued by this and went to go and 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 submission in the middle ninetys tony blairs government came along to try and emulate it but of course 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 set up an edge pump cross the hall and see him also if you transpires that when you dont really want to happen if youre feeling depressed and its only can 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 seen from the fact of many doctors 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 were 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 i think the the whole the boston area 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 way 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 privatisation 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 curries thats fine im happy to leave that to small businesspeople an entrepreneur 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 everyones going to be some of those conservative privatizations i think maybe some conservatives themselves would agree not that some of them were insane and would run for pure actually logical ground what coming coming flog off next buses no one in britain wanted to privatized this it was system that worked perfectly well and 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 wholesale privatisation and of course whats the one place in britain they 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 both 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 mention 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 buy only part of the program on it to be sharing a virtual space weve got because of me shes a terrific human being. I dont want to 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 there prioritization is interesting though. To me the mark of a Civilized Society is that it would close the library last. If in fact 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 illustrious successes but i do think that. It speaks of a certain cast of mind to say well the 1st thing that goes we dont need a books for those traps account for them you know because you can go buy a book cant you know 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 my bond villains they 12 the mustaches and struck cats instead and now we will get into 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 and 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 of course one of the great expertise is is a music tell me about how one of britains greatest exports of music still Percentage Points on g. D. P. Is state music and how we should reinstitute the dough for 16 year olds well its 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 do think there is something to be said for the fine that i speak in the books some of my friends musicians like javas carr current Richard Hartley who spend long periods of time on the dock im superman to benefit honing their craft and as richard says in the book and is generally down in the art he said there was a degree to which the relatively benign unemployment system of yes the air was a kind of alternative kind soul you know and these were alternative art schools because these are places where you could i mean certainly dont was not the right wing press blogs the people live in the lap of looks and the doc you want but you did have enough money coming in to you know sustain you while you write some songs and get in a band together and as. You know from the disappearance to the stone roses from johnny vision to function and on woods until we had recalibrations gone in recent years were. Privately educated people take control of pop music but after many many this state sets and produced 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 opera builder you talk about grenada 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 well the arguably has changed a little since the b. B. C. Moved to manchester. Well i think that in the mood for me to succeed b. B. C. Semi 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 mention the great granada which was the work of sunny sydney 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 he its against a certain way of thinking and a certain way of thinking shared by governments of left and right that it helps to have 40 years and i do think things have changed simon 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 percentages of different ethnicities is really progress but i think things are Getting Better but in some ways things are very much stands 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 court today raising to the city of london and then really complicated benefits and strange 80 percent furloughs where the new Family Businesses i dont know they could even be a bit of a 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 i should say there is a cause there are cool as well nourished people in this country i thought just last week i mean i thought just in the end 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 new government briefings in. I thought oh we trembling on the verge of the idea 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. In the objects that well 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 is not particularly politically not to 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 it 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 sense but i doubt hes times come and these being tried all over the world Nixon Richard nixon thought about implementing it 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 miss 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 it for the show will be back on wednesday the out of us 3 of the us switching sides to support Margaret Thatcher you know war for the readers for good islands where a british soldier his belief doesnt confirm the rivers goes over the south atlantic archipelago until the give it does rise of the media wash your hands of the forget to join the underground into the south that instagram and facebook. Youre sitting somewhere i. Feel. Yes lets see i guess. I was on the floor somethings in my basket you know trying praying. Theres time whereas the guy worms i was having children fever i didnt have any sense of snakes the smell has been the most you could put the world with you. Recently she you know sunday dinners or just used to. That one time when he was on the mountain for research. And i hope i didnt. Push myself how close are they for me in the 58 i got to. Go. Right. African countries take a distinct approach to fight the spread of coronavirus warning its population about the dangers through graffiti and songs. Such. As. Also this hour r t joins moscow disinfection squad as they battle not just coping 19 public fears they may not be who they claim. Also u. S. Mainstream media usually so eager to cover Sexual Assault allegations go strangely quiet on new claims against president ial candidate joe biden. And hundreds of amazon workers plan a mass sickout for a few