Jeremy Corbyn

I speak with independent socialist politician Jeremy Corbyn about compassionate politics Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Most women have been there. Something feels off. You don't feel like yourself, yet your doctor says everything looks fine. Spoiler, it's your hormones. Midi is a virtual care platform built for women by women and offers specialized hormone care from trained clinicians. Plus, it's covered by most major insurances. Getting started is easy. You can book your first visit with a clinician right away. It's not you, it's your hormones. Visit joinmidi.com to book your first visit. That's join M I D I dot com. Insurance coverage varies. Check with your plan for coverage.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  500 orders a month was manageable. 5,000 is madness. Embrace intelligent order fulfillment with ShipStation. The only platform combining order management, warehouse workflows, inventory, returns, and analytics in one place. What used to take five separate tools, ShipStation does in one. Automate fulfillment and rate shopping to ship up to 15 times more with up to 90% savings. Go to shipstation.com and use code AUDIO to try ShipStation free for 60 days.

• 1:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  Put me in a velvet headlock, you gelded Emmets. Welcome to the Blind by Podcast. We're experiencing torrential bastard rain here in Ireland. Wet summer rain, wet rain. I've mentioned wet rain before. It's an all encompassing slippery mist. It feels oily. There's currently an anomalous heat wave off the west coast of Ireland over the ocean. The ocean temperature, if you look at current heat maps, and this is because of global warming, there's this massive area of extreme heat just off the west coast of Ireland.

• 1:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  This unnatural superheating of the ocean is causing more water to evaporate than usual. And then when that incredibly moist air hits land, hits Ireland, we're experiencing it as extra wet weather. So it looks like it's going to be wet for a long time now. So if you want to see the impact of global warming in real time in Ireland and on our actual weather, look at the current marine heat wave. It's four degrees above normal. It's the highest, the highest ocean temperature.

• 2:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  That Ireland has ever recorded since records began. So we'll be getting more rain, more storms and very high humidity with bastard rain. This viscous, viscous, steamy, misty fucking rain. So for anyone thinking, Jesus, climate change and global warming, isn't that great for Ireland? We're cold. No, it means rainy or rainy or fucking summers. I have a very special podcast this week. As you know, I'm, I'm getting ready for my tour, my tour of England and Scotland. I'm packing right now, I'm packing right now and I'm looking forward to the magnificent hotel breakfasts that you have over there.

• 3:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  I gotta say, England, Scotland and Wales, best hotel breakfast in the world. Scotland number one for sure. Worst hotel breakfasts, I don't like saying worst, but Australia need to sort their shit out. Very, very strange hotel breakfast in Australia. Boiled chicken sausages, boiled chicken sausages, what like, what more do I need to say? Boiled chicken sausages and roast potatoes and not good roast potatoes, roast potato, dry ones that look like, roast potatoes that look like head butted testicles. Very strange hotel breakfast in Australia.

• 3:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  Unless you stay in a hotel that has a lot of tourists from Asia, in which case you can basically have Chinese food for breakfast if you want. One thing I will say for the Australian breakfast, they fall down on, on the hot food selection. The cold food selection is very good in particular.

• 4:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  There's a type of overnight oats and I found this in every single Australian city, regardless of hotel chain. A very specific strange type of overnight oats that has lime peel in it. I don't think it's overnight oats, I think it's something else that's culturally specific to Australia. And it has, it's like cold porridge with lime peel and I really miss that about Australia. And if anyone in Australia knows what it's called, please let me know. I have a feeling it's a Bertramuesli, Bertramuesli.

• 4:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  It was invented in the, in the late nineteen hundreds and Barter Muesli is, it's the original overnight oats.

• 5:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  I need to do a Barter Muesli podcast because I can plausibly connect Barter Muesli with the rise of Adolf Hitler. I won't get into that now, but I will be doing that podcast in the future. But if anyone in Australia would like to tell me, what the fuck is that thing you have in the hotel breakfasts? It's like cold porridge with lime peel. Let me know please what that's called. But anyway, England, Scotland and Wales, superior breakfast selection at the hotels, best in the world. And that's, I don't dull out compliments to, to England in particular, without, no issue with Scotland and Wales.

• 5:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  I, I don't fucking dull out compliments to England, but you got hotel breakfast right. You really did. That and plugs. Fair play to the fucking English. The three, three pin plug. You got that right. God save the Queen on that one. I'm not just looking forward to the hotel breakfast. I'm also looking forward to coming and doing some live podcasts for ye. I've got some cracking guests who I'm going to be speaking to. I titled this tour towards, towards folklore. I want to learn about folklore, English folklore in particular. But my gigs, they start this Sunday and they're down to the very last tickets.

• 6:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  So I want to give it one last plug. So this Sunday I'm in Bristol, in the Bristol Beacon. Then on Tuesday, I'm in Cornwall. Be chatting to a fella called Dr Martin Shaw, who's a storyteller and folklorist there. I can't wait for that. There's about 10 tickets left for that gig there in Cornwall. Then I'm in Sheffield on Wednesday, in Sheffield City Hall. Then on to wonderful gorgeous Manchester. I adore Manchester.

• 7:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  After that, Edinburgh, Edinburgh with its wonderful sandstone buildings. I'm in Usher Hall in Edinburgh. Glasgow, gonna be chatting with Frankie Boyle in Glasgow. I think Glasgow's sold out. I've known Frankie for years. He's long overdue on this podcast, but finally gonna get to have a chat. Then York, wonderful York. I will be going to the Viking Museum in York, the Yorkic Centre without a fucking doubt. I'm in the Barbican. Then London, London, I'm in the Troxy. I'm in the Troxy in London. London is sold out, but I will release, I haul back certain tickets for guest list.

• 7:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm gonna release a small number of them for people who want them. I have a London guest, I'm not gonna tell you who it is, but there's someone I've been wanting to speak to for a long time. Then Bexhill, down to Bexhill, which is coastal, I believe. You know, I'd never heard of Bexhill and I've chosen to not educate myself about it much. I wanna keep Bexhill as a surprise. I wanna, I want to be confronted by it. I wanna be confronted by Bexhill. So, all I know is that it's coastal, I'm not gonna get into the history of it, I'm gonna leave it be and let, I want Bexhill to happen to me.

• 8:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then finishing the tour in Norwich, glamorous, glamorous Norwich. Let's go. You can get tickets for those gigs at fein.co.uk forward slash blind boy. So anyway, yeah, I have a special treat this week because I'm heading over to see all the lovely crackin' tens. I've got Jeremy Corbyn, I've got Jeremy Corbyn on this week's podcast. Jeremy was a member of the Labour Party for 41 years. He was booted out of the Labour Party incredibly unfairly.

• 9:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  This man, there's an alternative timeline in history where this man could have been the prime minister. I've always admired Jeremy Corbyn. He's principled, he's a socialist. He believes in politics that are compassionate, that are fair, that put human beings before profit, that put the collective wellbeing of the people as number one. Jeremy Corbyn has always spoken for a system where healthcare, education and housing are things that are provided for the public good, that it doesn't matter whether you're rich or whether you're

• 9:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  poor, you can have access to these things. He's a former shop steward, he believes in trade unions, collective bargaining, in workers' rights. He's sound on activism, whether it was anti-apartheid or Palestinian solidarity or Irish unity. He's, he's always been anti-imperial. He's a politician who appears to, to lead with compassion first, compassion and goodness first, rather than running a government to be in the pockets of billionaires, which is what we're seeing all over the world. So Jeremy's an independent politician now.

• 10:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  He's not with the Labour Party and he came on to chat and I wanted a very broad chat about compassionate politics, about social safety nets and about neoliberalism. We speak a lot about neoliberalism and the damage that was done and the alternatives to neoliberalism. We also speak about the history of Chile because Chile is considered kind of ground zero for where neoliberalism happened. I've been doing podcasts about neoliberalism recently and I considered this podcast, this chat with Jeremy Corbyn to be part of that

• 11:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  series. If you want to go back and listen to earlier podcasts that I did about neoliberalism where I tried to understand it and explain it. A good place to start would be a podcast from about two months ago called Why Everything Feels So Chaotic Now. I also did a podcast about about Chile. I call it Chili, you know? That's what feels natural is to call it Chili, but I have actual listeners from Chile, so I want to pronounce it the way they want me to pronounce it. But I have done podcasts on Chile, in particular, the socialist government of Salvador Allende, who, Jesus Christ, the

• 11:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  the podcast in particular is called The Styrofoam Shepherd. I made it in 2022, if you want to listen to that. But Salvador Allende, who was a big inspiration on Jeremy Corbyn, he was a socialist leader of Chile in the seventies. And he like, developed an early form of the internet to try and run Chile as a socialist country via the internet in the seventies. A very forward-thinking person. He was ousted in a coup backed by America and replaced by a dictator called Pinochet, who, he was a fascist war criminal,

• 12:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  murdering, evil bollocks. And Chile is still recovering from the damage that Pinochet did. So that's just some context of the stuff that me and Jeremy Corbyn spoke about. So we've got crack. And here's the chat. Here's the chat. One of the things I really wanted to chat about today, so I've been doing podcasts recently about neoliberalism, trying to define like what it is. It's a way for very rich people to steal public money. That's what it feels like to me. It's like a rich person comes along and puts a toll booth in things that used to be public services.

• 13:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  But what I found really jarring when I was doing, like I'm a millennial and my audience would mostly be millennials and Gen Z younger. And when I was speaking about neoliberalism and looking specifically at the the history of of Britain post-war, when I was looking

• 13:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  Compassionate policies that Britain had post-war, I'm talking the foundation of the NHS, social housing, that stuff that came out of the Beveridge report, it felt like science fiction to me. That's what was freaky. Compassionate politics and a social net and the idea that a government might act for the welfare of the people, it didn't feel real to me when it felt like I was reading a science fiction book. Like the Overton window has shifted that much. And also as well, the fact that the UK was doing this stuff, like a year after it had been bombed to bits by the Germans.

• 14:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  So you've got, you're trying to rebuild your cities and then all of a sudden, the capacity to tax rich people and provide public services exists, it just seems impossible. How does it feel to you when I say to you that it feels like reading science fiction to me?

• 14:37Speaker 03

  Well, the National Health Service and the provision of public services, you and I grew up with and didn't understand anything different. And along came the Thatcherite sharp elbows of the 1970s and 80s, particularly late 1970s and 80s. And suddenly said to people, the cause of all your poverty is the provision of public services. It was utter baloney and nonsense at the time and remains so, that somehow or other, by cutting

• 15:15Speaker 03

  taxes for the wealthiest people, that would enable them to spend more money to invest in an economy and therefore everyone would be better off. And I'm sure you remember this, Margaret Thatcher.

• 15:32Speaker 03

  Selling shares in formerly publicly owned industries very, very cheaply and claimed it was all popular capitalism. It was complete nonsense. There was a huge amount of insider trading going on. The people that bought the shares in gas, electricity, telephones, water and so on were actually by and large the wealthy people or the big corporations. Most of them were valued at well below half any estimation of their market value would have been. And so people became millionaires overnight just by buying a tranche of shares

• 16:16Speaker 03

  in, say, BT and selling them the next day at the market value, which was double what they'd paid them for. And so it was exactly what Yeltsin did in Russia to an even greater degree and made and made hu- huge numbers of billionaires into trillionaires and so on. And so we just have to look at that period of economic thinking by Thatcher and Reagan as actually the grand theft public services from the people. I don't I don't like to use the word neoliberal. So I think most people, most people haven't got a clue what you mean by neoliberal.

• 16:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  Exactly. That's my problem with the word, Jeremy. When people hear it, they shut off.

• 16:56Speaker 03

  It's it's only absolutely. It's only people who sort of study economics or something like that.

• 17:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 17:04Speaker 03

  I prefer to call it the the politics of the sharp elbow. It is encouraging people basically to exploit each other.

• 17:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  But when you say sharp elbow, what does that mean? Just because I'm Irish, we don't have that term.

• 17:18Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, absolutely. What I take it to mean is that.

• 17:25Speaker 03

  When you're, put it this way, when you're, you're in a store and there's a queue of people to buy something, and there's a limited number of things on sale at a very reduced price. Do you form an orderly queue and go and buy something? Or do you let the mob take over? And those with the sharpest elbows edge their way, edge their way to the front and get the bargain. And, and so it goes on. It seemed to me that it was the well-connected that achieved that. And it's the sharp elbows. The late Glenda Jackson could be incredibly funny. And when Thatcher died, there was tributes paid to Thatcher in Parliament, including by Glenda Jackson.

• 18:04Speaker 03

  And she just said, I will forever remember Margaret Thatcher as the licensing of the sharp elbow in our society.

• 18:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  Mm hmm.

• 18:13Speaker 03

  Which I thought was quite a good way, a good way of putting it, actually.

• 18:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's an interesting way to just, language wise there, because you have that queueing thing over there, don't you? That's a part of, of, of British culture. You, you enjoy your queues.

• 18:27Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 18:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  When we're speaking about this, this sharp elbow economics, right? Or these sharp elbow policies. I'd love to ask you about the, you, you went to Chile in nineteen seventy. Cause to, to, to see Salvador Allende. And my understanding of this, what we call neoliberalism or sharp elbow economics. The testing ground for this evil, I think it's evil. The testing ground for this, for me, i- it was Chile, wasn't it?

• 18:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  After, when Allende got ousted and all of a sudden you had Pinochet. And these Milton Friedman and his econ- economists from the University of Chicago said, let's test out these policies on Chile. And then you've got Reagan and Thatcher following. Can you tell us about the trip you did to Chile?

• 19:12Speaker 03

  I, I'll come to that in a second. It started, the populism of this kind of economics. Started with Ronald Reagan and Proposition thirteen in California in the nineteen seventies, which was to reduce tax in order to boost industries. And what it meant was by reducing tax, that the supply of food stamps disappeared. A lot of the California health system was destroyed and collapsed. The public school system, which in the USA means, means what it says a public school system. It has a different meaning in England. And that meant that the private education system flourished for those that could afford to go there.

• 19:55Speaker 03

  The kids in other places just lost out because their schools were underfunded, their teachers were given the sack and so on. And you could see the way the social divide would grow. And this was presented as a form of economic growth. Um, Heath Joseph and others were doing the same in England and promoting this stuff. And I just remember in about nineteen seventy seven or something like that, I go to a, I was a union organizer in the Public Service Union, then called NUPE, National Union of Public Employees. And I remember going to a meeting saying, look, um, sisters and brothers, there's a real danger coming to all of us, and that is that our services are going to be privatized. And I said, this is a really bad thing.

• 20:39Speaker 03

  We've got to oppose it. And then I said a bit more, and then I said, okay, any questions? First hand goes up, what's privatization? What does it mean? How can you sell something off that's publicly run? That was a perfectly sensible question.

• 20:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  That, that doesn't make sense anymore, unfortunately.

• 20:58Speaker 03

  No, unfortunately not. But that showed the sort of, uh, the mental position that, um, people were in, in the union.

• 21:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  This is ours. This is ours. We all.

• 21:09Speaker 03

  Absolutely. As far as she was concerned, it was a woman who asked it, as far as she was concerned, it was our service, it was publicly run, and she was proud to be a public employee, delivering that service for her community. And she did it very well. Now, just on to Chile for a second. I first went to Chile in nineteen sixty nine. I'd been to a lot of other countries in Latin America, traveling around on my own. All of them had military dictatorships at that time. Um, Brazil, Paraguay, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, and so on. They were all incredibly brutal. Chile felt slightly different because, one, whilst it has had skirmishes with military

• 21:53Speaker 03

  dictatorships and far-right governments in the past, particularly the very early nineteen fifties, it was a kind of European-style elected system of government there. And this was, um, nineteen sixty nine. And I noticed, yes, there was, um,

• 22:13Speaker 03

  Fairly large degree of fairly comfortably off middle classes, but also desperate levels of poverty in every single one of the towns I went to, very poor housing conditions and real poverty in those places. And this was the time of the formation of popular unity, led by Salvador Allende and Pablo Neruda, the great poet, who was also the alternative candidate to be president alongside Allende. And the the conglomeration of the Socialist Party and Communist Party chose Allende and Neruda campaigned for Allende. They, I was there in sixty nine when popular unity had been formed, and I went on the May Day March

• 22:57Speaker 03

  in Santiago that day, absolutely massive and absolutely full of hope that at last all the parties of the left had come together. And they were offering a program of public ownership of the mining industry and other services that were privately owned, particularly telephones and other services like that which were American owned, as was the mining industry. And above all, it was about putting money into education, to health and to housing. And the inspiration was, we will give education and every an opportunity to every child in our society, and we'll do it through culture as well. The Allende won the election with,

• 23:40Speaker 03

  I think, thirty six percent of the vote, and was then endorsed as president by the Congress, which he did not control, his party or the conglomeration of parties did not control. So he had a problem from day one, but he was the president and did a great deal by presidential decree and some by legislation. But he sat, he got every artist, musician, poet, painter and so on together, put them, asked them to go on a train all around the country, because there were a lot of railways in Chile in those days, narrow gauge railways that went incredibly slowly but were fun to go on, and went to every town and set up theatres in the square, wherever it was, and describe what the Popular Unity government

• 24:23Speaker 03

  was trying to do in education, everything else. So there was a public buy-in by the poorest people, and that showed in their loyalty to Allende.

• 24:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  But the fact that he used art, he used art to communicate.

• 24:37Speaker 03

  He absolutely used art to do it. That was the key. And so he went, they went around the country promoting all these ideas, which was fantastic. The same time, the USA, Nixon, Kissinger and all the others were then busy saying, how are we going to get rid of this guy, this pestilence? And they claimed he's a threat to the USA. Well, Chile wasn't, isn't and never could be a threat to anybody. It's a very long, thin country, a long, long way away from anywhere else. And so they then strongly opposed the public ownership of mining, strongly opposed the increased taxation for the richest and mobilized the upper middle classes to oppose Aenday. Then

• 25:22Speaker 03

  through economic strangulation, like denying Chile lines of credit, et cetera, et cetera, meant that increasingly, the companies in Chile that provided food and so on couldn't buy it, couldn't get it. So they created shortages of everything. Aenday responded by a state buying operation, state provision of basic services and price control in order to make sure everybody was fed, but the shortages got worse and worse. Now, there's the thing, you'd have thought a government that is presiding over what was seen as economic chaos and shortages would be very unpopular, not a bit of it. The 1972 elections and the early 73

• 26:05Speaker 03

  elections in Chile resulted in an increase from 34% to over 50% vote for the Popular Unity Coalition. They could, the people could see what was going on. They could see that their government and their president was on their side and a very powerful, very rich group of people internationally were determined to destroy it. So they supported their president. And again, Music came into it and there's something that the May Day march of seventy three, a few months before the coup, it'll make you, it'll give you goosebumps listening to it. Victor Hara singing there, the People United will never be defeated at Pueblo Unido, Mas Sera Vincido.

• 26:50Speaker 03

  Um, the coup came in September seventy three and then, my God, then the people of Chile really realised what Andy had been warning them about.

• 27:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  Mm hmm.

• 27:01Speaker 03

  They killed seven thousand people, locked up thousands and thousands more, drove tens of thousands into exile and um then slashed public services, privatised all health and education, or university education and um created the most unbelievable gap between the richest and the poorest and then promoted the new class of export led industry. So you had people in Chile desperately hungry and a big increase in fruit production all for export, wine production all for export.

• 27:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 27:37Speaker 03

  And the fisheries were all sold off to Japanese companies to steal all the fish from the shores of Chile. And so you had this experiment then in free market, low tax, low services economics and who, who benefits? Those that can buy into that and those that have got the money. Who loses the poorest? And anyone that opposes the system then got um tear gas, water cannon and imprisonment as a result of it. It was the most brutal vicious period. This was Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics experimenting. The same stuff was done to a different degree by Reagan in the USA and by Thatcher and the Tories in Britain.

• 28:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  And now what you're describing there is this unthinkable thing that happened at the time is now our lived reality in most of what we'd call the global north.

• 28:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's become the norm that somehow or other, uh, public services are a bad word and that privatisation is supposed to deliver something good. But I, I think the thing's at its day, more than at its day. We look at the water industry in Britain, sold off thirty years ago by the Tory government very cheaply and the water companies that bought into it, well, the water companies that were formed and bought into it. It wasn't popular capitalism at all. It was hedge funds, big investors and so on. They knew what they were buying and they knew what they were getting. And by doing that, they inherited vast amounts of resources the water companies had. They were huge landowners.

• 29:15Speaker 03

  They were public bodies. They bought land for reservoirs of the future, for new pipes of the future. All that sort of thing. It was kind of sensible planning, actually. And all that was sold off as quickly as possible. So there was a huge income level bonus to the companies because they'd suddenly realised all these assets. Failed to invest in the system, which for a while didn't make a lot of difference. I mean, you can but then over time, of course, if you don't invest replacing pipework, et cetera, then at some point they're going to burst and at some point the water supply will be damaged. They were also responsible for sewage and sewage treatment.

• 29:59Speaker 03

  By not investing in sewage treatment plants and not investing in what's necessary, which is parallel piping for sewage foul water compared to drainage water, they then ended up, when there's a storm on, pouring sewage into the river. And so over the last few years, the annual leakage of pipes in the UK would fill Loch Ness

• 30:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 30:23Speaker 03

  in one year of wasted drinking quality water because they can't be bothered to invest in the proper pipe system. And in one water company alone last year, there were three hundred thousand sewage discharges into rivers and the sea. Three hundred thousand in one year. Um, no wonder the many of our rivers are grotesquely polluted. And the levels of pollution in the sea, of course, comes back to bite you because you kill the fish. And so it is, um, this is what privatisation has brought us. Greed, enormous profits, most of which have been exported to tax havens around the world and an inadequate system where the pipes keep collapsing because they haven't been replaced and maintained

• 31:07Speaker 03

  by any kind of planned investment that should have been necessary. So I absolutely demand the uh public ownership of water. But I tell you this, I don't want public services run by A board that has been appointed by the government because they happen to know the people involved. I don't want that at all. I want some sort of democracy involved in it. I want the local authorities, the workers in the, in the industry, the unions uh who've got members in the industry, local small businesses and so on, all to be involved in the running of our water system. So it will have regard for supply, the environment and investment. And uh all of that is absolutely possible.

• 31:50Speaker 03

  Let's unleash people, ordinary people's enormous imagination and ability to do something good, to provide services for the people. And water would be a fantastic way of starting.

• 32:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  We're going to take a small little break here in the chat uh with Jeremy, just so I can, we can have the ocarina pause. There are adverts inserted into this podcast, algorithmically generated adverts. So everyone here is a different advert. I don't want to shock you with a big loud advert. So what I do, I'm thinking of new listeners here. What I do is I, I play a little ocarina as a warning for when the advert comes in. So I've got a little ceramic otter that somebody made for me and I blow into his, into his anus, into his ceramic anus, and it makes a noise. So I'm going to blow the otter's cer- the otter ocarina's ceramic anus, and you're going to hear an advert for something.

• 33:04Speaker 00

  Seventy-five percent of women who seek menopause care don't receive it. The lying awake at three AM, wondering what's happening to your body, ends now. Midi is virtual care built for women in perimenopause and menopause with clinicians who specialize in women's health. Plus, it's covered by most major insurances. Getting started is easy. You can book your first visit with a clinician right away. Midlife needs Midi. Visit joinmidi.com to book your first visit today. That's join M I D I dot com. Insurance coverage varies. Check with your plan for coverage.

• 33:34Speaker 04

  Hey guys, it is Pablo Torre from Pablo Torre Finds Out. And as a journalist, I like to think I have the answers. But every holiday season, Gifting makes me think otherwise. Getting it right feels impossible and can get quite stressful. But thankfully, Sephora takes a lot of the pressure off. Whether you're shopping for a beauty expert, a skincare lover, or someone who is just hard to shop for, Sephora's got it all. The big assist comes from Sephora's expert beauty advisors, who remove the guesswork with personalized recommendations so you can find something thoughtful and useful for the people on your list. Beauty is a gift anyone can give. So this holiday season, shop gifts at Sephora and give something beautiful.

• 34:16Speaker 05

  Hi, this is Mark Bittman from the podcast Food with Mark Bittman. I've been writing about food and restaurants for almost 50 years, my whole career, really. And what I know is that the good restaurants all have something in common. They're busy, genuinely, chaotically busy. And somehow, in the last few years, the best of them have begun to make it look easy. And do you know why? Because they're running on Toast's technology. Toast is built for restaurant owners who understand that Toast's tools keep the line moving and keep their customers happy with fewer mistakes and hiccups in ordering and paying. For owners, that turns busy into business. To learn more, head to toasttab.com.

• 35:01Speaker 05

  That's T-O-A-S-T-T-A-B, toasttab.com. Toast: Built for Busy.

• 35:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  Very perverse, because it's like...

• 35:19Speaker 00

  Hot flashes, rage crying, forgetting words mid-senten. Yeah, we know. Menopause is a lot. Midi Health gets it. That's why Midi offers virtual healthcare specially tailored to women's needs. Built for women, by women. Every symptom, every stage, every question. Visit joinmidi.com to get started today. That's join M-I-D-I dot com. Individual results and coverage varies. Check with your plan for coverage.

• 35:50Speaker 05

  Hi, this is Mark Bittman from the podcast Food with Mark Bittman. Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of the higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a berry chantilly cake. Ready to cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings? And sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.

• 36:25Speaker 06

  Hi, this is Dr. Shoshana from TED Health, and today's episode is sponsored by Kashi. Say hi to new Kashi Gut Health Granola. A straightforward, delicious way to fuel your gut. Made with prebiotics, fiber, and cultures. My favorite flavor, blueberry almond, has perfectly crispy clusters, delicious almonds, and bursts of whole blueberries. It's an easy fit for a daily routine, whether that's for breakfast or a snack. In a world of overwhelm, it's a straightforward, delicious choice. Try new Kashi Gut Health Granola.

• 37:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's a little hotter, like the blow into his hope. And the noise is like he's really enjoying it.

• 37:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. This podcast is my full-time job. This is how I earn a living. It's how I rent out my office where I record the podcast. It's how I pay all my bills. This podcast is listener-funded and independent, fully independent. No one tells me what to talk about. I'm not interested in listenership. I don't want fucking clickbait. Even there, like bringing on Jeremy Corbyn, I want a conversation. I want to chat. I'm not looking for viral moments that I can turn into a clip

• 37:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  or to catch my guests off guard with unfair questions so that moment goes viral. I'm not interested in any of that shit. I don't want to do that shit. I don't like seeing it when... Other podcasts are mostly corporate media does that type of thing. I just wanna make a podcast that I would listen to if I wasn't me. That's it. And this is possible because of the support of listeners, because it's a listener funded podcast. And I can tell advertisers to fuck off and they can't come to me and say, we, we need more listeners this week. We need to hit this target.

• 38:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  No, I'm funded by listeners to do my thing, to fail, to be curious, to explore, to be passionate. So if you do wanna become a patron, please do. Patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That's it. But if you can't afford it, if you can't afford that, don't worry about it. Listen for free. You listen for free because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free. So everybody gets the exact same podcast I get to earn a living. Upcoming gigs. Look, we've got England and Scotland next week. We know about that.

• 39:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then I think my next gig after that, September, I'm up in Derry. Wonderful, wonderful Derry in the Millennium Theatre. And then after that, I'm in Vicker Street up in Dublin. Those lovely Vicker Street shows on the fucking 23rd of September. Now, back to my chat with Jeremy Corbyn, where we speak about compassionate politics. And we also speak about kneecap Palestine and a united Ireland. So if you look at the messaging of the right and not just in Britain, in Ireland too, and also in America. They're very good at this simplistic messaging of weren't things great back then? You're, do you remember your childhood? Wasn't it wonderful?

• 39:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  Or without saying, you had unions, you had public ownership of land. You had a government system where the policy was about the good of the people. That's not mentioned. It's just remember blue passports. Weren't they lovely?

• 40:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's uh it's all this sort of imagery, but it fails to take account of what people's lives were like. Nineteen fifty's Britain, yes, it was hard, it was hard work and so on for an awful lot of people. Working hours were longer than they are now and and all that. But there was an absolutely universal free health service. We got free milk in school and free orange juice for all of us as kids because the state had decided that we were needed this to improve our health. Living standards were growing, were improving quite

• 40:50Speaker 03

  fast. And particularly the health of working class, working class kids and the life expectancy of the poorest people increased a great deal during that period. And so it wasn't all bad and there was full employment. What Thatcherite economics did was increased unemployment, increased the gap between the rich and the poor, and appealed to people that somehow or other they could get rich at the expense of others. Hence, the sale of council housing because if you buy your council house at a huge discount, on the face of it, you get your house very cheap, you no longer have to pay rent and you've probably got quite

• 41:32Speaker 03

  a small mortgage because you bought it at an enormous discount. But then the next question is, what happens to the house after that? And what happens to those people that need a house? Uh more than half, much more than half of all the council houses being sold ends up in the private rented sector. So we have these examples, I'll give you one. Um, I was talking to a family last week who live um in a private rented flat on an estate in my constituency. The rent for the council flats on on that estate are about hundred to a hundred and fifty a week, depending on the size of the flat. That's sort of area.

• 42:14Speaker 03

  So that's around maximum six hundred pounds a month. This woman has three children in a one bedroom flat privately rented and

• 42:26Speaker 03

  She gets housing benefit up to the local housing allowance, but the rent is two thousand two hundred a month. And her local housing allowance is about six hundred pounds a month less than that. So she has to use her universal credit benefits to top up the rent. The person who was in a position to buy that council flat at a massive discount about ten, fifteen years ago, is living off the income from one flat. And this woman is trying to find over two thousand pounds a month from a combination of housing benefit and her own benefits, just to pay the rent to keep a roof over the heads of her kids. That is disgusting.

• 43:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, yeah, it's completely wrong.

• 43:12Speaker 03

  And that flat ought to be publicly owned and she should get a place provided by the public. Well, obviously, in this individual case, I'll do everything I can to support her and she seems to me to deserve deserve one, obviously. But the problem is that unless we build far more places for affordable rent, rather than promoting the idea that everything to do with housing is a property ladder and a market, then we're going to carry on with these kind of problems. It's not that different in Ireland as it is here, is it?

• 43:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  What we have is a scheme called HAP, which is, so the councils don't build houses anymore. What you have is a person can pay, they can rent, a person who needs affordable housing can rent the affordable housing and it's affordable. But a landlord is in the middle and that landlord gets rent at market value from the government. So the person is paying maybe a hundred, two hundred quid, but that landlord is still getting fifteen hundred quid, but that money is coming from tax.

• 44:18Speaker 03

  So the state is subsidizing private landlords.

• 44:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  But then that's pushing up pushing up the housing crisis and it's just.

• 44:26Speaker 03

  And the public money is then going to subsidize private landlords.

• 44:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  And that's why I say it's, when I describe, I say about neoliberalism, it's a way for the wealthy people to steal public money. That's what it is, because that's what's happened.

• 44:40Speaker 03

  The housing system here is slightly different, not that different, in the sense that. People who are eligible for universal credit or any kind of benefit access housing benefit. The housing benefit is capped at what's called a local housing allowance, which is meant to be the market rate for that area. So in reality, billions of pounds of public money is paid directly to private landlords because of a notional market value on the rent income. And I think the great mistake of the Starmer government, or one of the great mistakes of Starmer government, there's plenty of others, uh, was in the Renters Charter to, yes, give grade security of tenure. That's a good thing, of course it is, but fail to bring in any regulation of the level of rent.

• 45:26Speaker 03

  And that is what we have to do. Nineteen fifty's Britain might have been a different place, but private sector rents were very low. And the government was funding the development of, uh, some years, three or four hundred thousand Newcastle flats every year across the country. So the housing needs of people were being met by public building. And indeed, by the end of the, um, nineteen sixties, something like ninety percent of all new housing being developed was actually council housing.

• 46:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  And is that just political will, Jeremy? And what I mean by that is, is when I, like, when I started speaking about the, the, the Beveridge Report, right? And you're talking post-war Britain. Britain is in bits, it's just been blown up. And that's when they find all this public money to actually, for the greater good, for multiple services. So like, people say, oh, you can't do that now, it's too expensive. It'd be too expensive to build council houses. It's too expensive to have a Green New Deal. You couldn't, but then you go, hold on a second, you managed to do this when the place was blown up.

• 46:35Speaker 03

  Absolutely. They did it through political will and absolute determination to do it.

• 46:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  And taxing rich people ninety percent.

• 46:41Speaker 03

  Well, taxing the very richest people at ninety percent, but also by, um, when they brought an industry into public ownership, as I proposed with water, Parliament would set the share price at which you would buy the industry. So we would say to the water companies, you're now, all trading in water company shares is now suspended as of this moment. And we're going to take you into public ownership. We will calculate the share price you deserve on the basis of, yes, the value of the company

• 47:19Speaker 03

  and all of its services, but we will also take into account the pollution you've caused, the excessive profits you've made, the lack of investment you've ploughed into dividends and bonuses to senior executives, and we will take that off the share price we're going to pay you. So we will set the share price and the share price will be paid in government bonds, which will be at a fixed interest rate. What you do with the government bonds when you've got them is up to you, but that's how it will be paid and that will be the the payment to you. So if, for example, a pension fund owns shares in a water company, it would then get in return a large tranche of government bonds with a fixed return on

• 48:04Speaker 03

  them. So it wouldn't, it might be less or it might be more than they would get year on year in a water company, but they would know exactly what that income was. So it's not stealing from people, it's taking a rational estimation of what they've done while they had responsibility for delivering our water industry. And those that failed to deliver proper quality water will be punished accordingly. And that's how it should be done because we've got to be serious. If we want good public services, yes, you have to pay for them, but you have to make sure they're delivered in a fair way. Water is one of many examples.

• 48:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  And what you've described there, if I was to see that in the newspapers, that would that would be called anti-business policies, as opposed to policies that are about the public good, that would be framed as anti-business. And that's what I've seen throughout my life.

• 48:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  Basic, like even the word socialism, Jeremy, most people hear socialism and they it's like you might as well be in the KKK, like people, you know what I mean?

• 49:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, you'll love this, though. I went to, when I was leading the opposition, invited to speak to the CBI, Confederation of British Industries, annual conference. And so I went along. I was kind of helped that before me Boris Johnson had spoken and somewhere along the line, he'd either lost his speech or never written one and gave them a speech about Peppa the Pig. Which apparently confused them. It certainly confused me because up until that moment, I'd never heard of Peppa the Pig. I don't have very small children, so I don't watch Peppa the Pig. He had apparently seen it and liked the programme. Great.

• 49:51Speaker 03

  So he talked about this, and they were left slightly confused. So I probably got an easier ride because at least I was making what I believe to be a rational contribution to their debate. So I said to them, look, I said, I don't think many of you here are actually supporters of what I'm putting forward. But let me explain to you what we're trying to do here. There's grotesque levels of poverty and inequality in our society. Far too many young people are leaving the education system without any proper training or opportunity to get the sort of job that their skills should be giving them. And that if we started investing in people rather than profitability

• 50:34Speaker 03

  of industries and people taking money out, so we're putting money in rather than that, then we'd have a much happier society. Now, I don't expect all of you to start cheering me for raising a tax, but we're going to put corporation tax up to the level it was of twenty six percent. And we're going to use that money in the following way, and then went through the major programmes we're doing. And then I just said to them, I said, if we don't mind, I'll just ask you all one question. You're obviously people that are doing fairly well, you're managers and CEOs of your companies, you're not poor, you're quite well off. But are you comfortable when you've had a nice weekend going into your office, your nice shiny

• 51:17Speaker 03

  plate glass windowed office on a Monday morning and finding people sleeping in the hallway because they've got nowhere to live? Are you actually comfortable in a society that allows several thousand people to sleep rough every night and several million children to be brought up in poverty? Don't you realise that by investing in housing, investing in health, investing in education, we do, we create a much happier society? Society, but you also create a much better run economy because the skills of those very poor children that are not going to become engineers, doctors, lawyers or teachers or anything else because of their underachievement and poverty

• 52:01Speaker 03

  are actually going to benefit all of us. Think of it as your contribution to a happier and more sustainable society. I don't pretend I got a standing ovation. I certainly didn't, but at least um.

• 52:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  Did you get a sense that they're never tired of it that way?

• 52:16Speaker 03

  Some of them, yeah. Some of them said to me when we had the coffee break afterwards, oh, thanks for that. It made me think a bit.

• 52:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow.

• 52:23Speaker 03

  So, but they weren't, they weren't hostile. Indeed, some of the managers, as opposed to the owners of the companies, were actually quite sympathetic.

• 52:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um, just harken back there to Salvador Ande and his use of art to communicate ideas and to communicate political ideas. Something I'd love to ask you about is kneecap because like my view of kneecap is so protest right now is becoming increasingly frightening and kind of dangerous. Uh, young people who want to protest, particularly with Palestinian solidarity, they're scared of facial recognition cameras. They're scared of am I going to lose my job in five years? Is there AI that's going to remember my face? It's become frightening. And what I think kneecap are doing with art is they're creating a new space where protest occurs.

• 53:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  But it's a gig. So we have a liminal space where you're attending a gig, you're having crack, you're going to a festival, but you're protesting too in this new safe space. And as an Irish person, I'm, I'm just really pissed off with them being charged with terrorist offences, especially you can go around Belfast and you can see flags for the UVF hanging and no one's getting done for. But terrorist flags, you know, it feels really political and I just want to get your opinion on kneecap.

• 53:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, they apologized for the remarks they'd made and the way in which they presented them, and they made that clear. And the other case is an ongoing court case, so therefore cannot, I cannot comment on it. But what they are doing is presenting very good music, inspiring an awful lot of young people. And making people think about things. You're quite right about the undermining and attack on our rights to protest. And I've been involved in supporting all of the Palestine demonstrations that we've had over the last, what is it now, more than eighteen months?

• 54:25Speaker 03

  And every single one of them has been weeks and weeks of argument with the police about the route, about the demonstration and so on. Because of the powers that were given first in the nineteen eighty six Public Order Act, which goes back a long way. But also successive piece of legislation since then, and endless attempts to curtail demonstrations. And also portray the Palestine demonstration being on as somehow other a threat to society.

• 54:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 54:55Speaker 03

  Those Palestine marches are a march of love and unity. Huge numbers of people joined the Jewish Bloc of people who support Palestine on the march. Lots of people support Islam are on the march. A lot of people who don't have any religious belief whatsoever are on the march as well.

• 55:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  People who don't like seeing toddlers getting blown up.

• 55:17Speaker 03

  Exactly. They're united, united together on the basis that they're appalled at what's happening. I was just, as I do most mornings, watching Al Jazeera when I got up this morning. More pictures of destruction of homes, bombing of the West Bank by Israeli jets. And of course, the continued horror of Gaza, if I may say so. I also horrified the figure that there's one point five million children starving to death in Afghanistan at the moment, a country. That we occupied for twenty years, along with the USA, spent billions of pounds on it, withdrew and left behind an abuse of human rights and unbelievable levels of poverty. But just back to Palestine for a second.

• 56:02Speaker 03

  The supply of weapons to Israel, particularly the components of the F thirty five jet by British companies, means that that jet can fly, means that that jet can bomb, that jet can kill people and that jet can deny the Palestinian people their right to live in peace and justice. Israel clearly intends to uh try and expel the entirety of the population from Gaza. I'm they're not going to succeed in doing that, but they nevertheless are still trying. And they're also going to intensify their occupation of the West Bank. And I was in a debate over the weekend at When the Light Gets In Festival at Hay on Wye, which is sort of parallel to the Hay Book Festival. I mean, they're not rivals, they complement each other.

• 56:46Speaker 03

  And I was doing a debate alongside Yanis Varoufakis with Malcolm Rifkin, former Foreign Secretary. And he was sort of explaining, you know, what had happened and so on and so on. And my whole pitch was that the only contribution or the best contribution Britain can make now is two things. One is stop all arms supplies to Israel.

• 57:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 57:11Speaker 03

  Secondly, make sure and provide all the food and medical aid that is necessary immediately to the Palestinian people. Don't try and run Palestine for the future. That's a matter for the Palestinian people. And if you believe in international law, as most governments claim to do, then the ICJ is given a very strong view that the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank is illegal and they should withdraw.

• 57:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  Jeremy, in your opinion, right, because I this is one that has me scratching my head is why does the global north kowtow to Israel so much? Why does established international orders like the ICJ, as you mentioned? What's going on here? Is it about the Suez Canal? Is it? Why is Israel so important to America? Not just America, Europe? What's going on here?

• 58:05Speaker 03

  Um, it's hard to put your finger on one thing. One is that the position of Israel in the region was for a long time the one reliable ally the US had in the region. So they see Israel as a very, very important military ally.

• 58:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  Back when, when we're talking mandatory Palestine, right? And it was British controlled.

• 58:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  One quote that always stands out for me is there was a fellow called Ronald Storrs and Ronald Storrs was the, the governor of mandatory Palestine. And in nineteen nineteen, the quote was, "We're trying to create a little loyal Jewish ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism." And when I heard that, I went, okay, it's like a little, even when it was the Brits, it's like a little aircraft carrier in the middle of the Middle East. It's a military base and it still is doing that for the West.

• 59:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, indeed. And the use of military to both ensure there was expulsion of Palestinians, but also suppression of the Palestinian uprising of nineteen thirty six was actually part and parcel of it. Israel was then recognised eventually by the UN in nineteen forty eight. And its borders were set at that point. That was strongly opposed by all the neighbouring countries. Fast forward to the formation of the PLO, the negotiations and so on, reached a point where

• 59:49Speaker 03

  the PLO in effect recognised Israel's existence within the nineteen forty eight borders.

• 59:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 59:56Speaker 03

  What they didn't recognise was the nineteen sixty seven and other attempts that Israel has made to expand, including going right down to the Suez Canal and so on. And we then had succession of negotiations, of Camp David, et cetera. But the crucial one was Oslo, which was.

• 1:00:18Speaker 03

  An agreement written in Oslo, but that agreement also allowed Israel to control parts of Palestine, control the security and immigration and emigration within Palestine and in effect put Palestine under Israeli occupation. The key issue now is to bring about an end to this conflict means that we stop giving Israel the wherewithal to occupy Gaza and the West Bank and we also give the Palestinian people the right to decide their own future. Israel has never declared what its borders actually are. Internationally,

• 1:00:59Speaker 03

  what's recognised is the 367 border, which was the, as I said, the one that was set at the first time when Israel was recognised by the United Nations. It seems to me the whole issue has to be forcing an end to the settlement policy and withdrawal from Gaza and the West Bank. I was at the ICJ when they did the hearing on the application of South Africa on the genocide ruling. Absolutely fascinating and well done, South Africa. And I just thought from sitting there in the gallery, watching what was going on.

• 1:01:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  Did that give you hope? Did that, when you heard that, did you think, wow, now something's going to be done? You can't ignore the ICJ.

• 1:01:38Speaker 03

  Gave me a lot of hope, but also just thinking that South Africa, for all the horrors of the apartheid system from 1948 to 1990, and all the sacrifices made by people in South Africa and Soweto and all the townships, as well as the global solidarity movement. And I was thinking those wonderful young people in Don's Stores and other places that did so much. Brought about the end of apartheid. I don't want South Africa is far from perfect. South Africa would say that straight away itself. It has become a political force on the world stage for peace and for justice and for humanity. So all those that ever fought against the anti-apartheid, fought with the anti-apartheid movement against

• 1:02:23Speaker 03

  the apartheid system, well done, because you helped bring about something good in the world.

• 1:02:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  And also, you've been a supporter of United Ireland for quite some time. Can you speak about that a bit?

• 1:02:35Speaker 03

  Yes, I mean, I represent a constituency that.

• 1:02:40Speaker 03

  As a very large Irish community and a long tradition of contact with Ireland. Indeed, the archway and around there was the very much the centre of the Irish community. And we've got a lovely mural we've put up in Navigator Square. And we called it Navigator Square after a public discussion and debate. We'd changed the traffic system to stop traffic going through the middle of it. Sending the traffic around the outside, so to speak. So we created a lovely plaza area. And the question then came, what to call it? I strongly supported the campaign, which was done by public vote on what to call the square. I advocated for Navigator Square on the basis was it's in honour of the navies.

• 1:03:25Speaker 03

  The Irish workers that came over to England and Wales and Scotland. And they built the railways, they built the canals. And that's where the term navy comes from, navigators who built the canal. So we've got Navigator Square, the centre of our Irish community. And I was brought up on the school history of Ireland, which was sort of skated over the whole question of partition. And apparently the great famine of the mid 19th century was caused by poor farming methods. And people not rotating crops of potatoes with something else, which brought about blight, which caused the famine. What a load of nonsense.

• 1:04:11Speaker 03

  The famine was brought about deliberately by the landowning system. And all through the great famine in Ireland, great hunger in that book by Cecil Wood and Smith, for example, Ireland was exporting food to England during all that period.

• 1:04:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  And also, like a little, we call it genocide in Ireland. There was, your man Travellion, Travellion, who was the, he was the person who was appointed for, to give charity to Ireland.

• 1:04:40Speaker 03

  Yes, he was, yeah.

• 1:04:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  He had that old school liberalism where he was just like, no, this is a punishment sent by God. And it's been sent by God because the Irish are. Poor and filthy and wicked, so we can't intervene. They're they're supposed to die, you know what I mean? And it was very convenient that it was convenient for colonization to have half the population disappear. And and for for us, we're seeing it in Gaza now. So it's reminding us in Ireland.

• 1:05:06Speaker 03

  People who don't want to read books about the history, I would, if they've got time and are in the area, I would just say, go to the museum in Skibberine.

• 1:05:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:14Speaker 03

  Just go spend an hour going around that beautifully presented museum in Skibberine and see what the poverty was and those people were starved to death by the British occupation. And so I, as one who's read quite a lot of Irish history and I've obviously been in Ireland.

• 1:05:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:32Speaker 03

  Many, many, many, many, many times. I look forward to the day when Ireland is won. I don't know when it's going to come. Um, and um, obviously, the respect for all the history and traditions of all communities. You've got to bring people together to bring about unity and bring about a united future.

• 1:05:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's it.

• 1:05:53Speaker 03

  Mandela taught us that in South Africa.

• 1:05:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  And that's the Irish flag as well. I mean, the Irish flag, green, white and orange. It's the green for the nationalists, the orange for the Protestants and the white is the potential for peace and compromise in the middle, you know?

• 1:06:05Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 1:06:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um, were you influenced by any Irish politicians or thinkers? Like, I know Mick Lynch was big into James Connolly and that.

• 1:06:12Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Mick Mick and I discussed James Connolly at at lots of meetings and um, I've always loved my conversations with Michael D Higgins, your.

• 1:06:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, he's great, yeah.

• 1:06:24Speaker 03

  Your wonderful president and um, he, whenever I see Dublin, we always exchange poetry books. And I was there for the Tressle Festival last year and I gave him a copy of our book Poetry for the Many, which is a collection of poems by different people. And it's designed to sort of get people interested in poetry. There's one poem by me in it. And he was very generous and received the book from us and he's presented me with a beautiful edition of the collected works of Seamus Heaney.

• 1:06:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um, and also.

• 1:07:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  One, I want to know, are you considering forming a new left party or left coalition? And also, the second question is, how much of what you would like to see changing is harking back, we'll say, to that welfare state era? But how much of that doesn't work anymore because the world has changed so much? Do you know what I'm trying to say?

• 1:07:21Speaker 03

  Yep, I am, I do understand what you're trying to say. Well, in my own situation, as you know, I was removed from Labour Party membership.

• 1:07:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:32Speaker 03

  The Labour Party, when they expelled me from membership, when I announced I was going to run as an independent, after they denied the people of Islington North, Labour Party members, any choice in their candidate for the future, I said, well, I think the people should decide, not you. And so I announced I'd run as an independent. They sent me a letter 28 minutes later, expelling me after 55 years' membership with the Labour Party, a one-line email, charming.

• 1:07:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:00Speaker 03

  Really, they're all heart, these people. Anyway, so we ran the campaign and we ran it on the basis of the I would be in Parliament, to campaign for global peace, campaign for environment and sustainability, and campaign for a equalities agenda in Britain, economic and social equality. Independents ran all over the country, independents are coming together under collective umbrellas, we're all going to be there on June, June the 2nd, the, June the 7th, sorry, the anti-austerity march through London, which is going to be a huge event because we're

• 1:08:42Speaker 03

  into a new round of austerity with cuts in health and education spending going on at the moment. Now, that's the future. I don't think politics works on harking back to something all the time. Because we talked at the beginning of our podcast about public ownership and.

• 1:09:03Speaker 03

  Obviously, I support the principle of public ownership. But I've never forgotten when the Tories started privatization of electricity and gas. I went out in the streets with leaflets, like lots of other people did, protesting against privatization. I gave them to people, some of whom hadn't got a clue that it was publicly owned anyway.

• 1:09:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:25Speaker 03

  They, as far as they were concerned, they said, oh, the gas company, oh, yeah. Well, what's happening to them? But I said, well, they're being sold. They said, oh, well, who owns it now?

• 1:09:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  You do.

• 1:09:35Speaker 03

  I said, well, actually, you do. Really? Do I? Oh, I didn't know that. Thanks. And so that public ownership, whilst it was very effective in delivering um cheap electricity and and so on. It was a very effective and well well-run industry. Um nevertheless, it didn't actually capture the public imagination about what public ownership could achieve. And so the primary points we're making are about levels of poverty, such as the two-child benefit cap, such as the attempt to cut personal independence payments, save five billion on it, and increased defence spending by thirteen billion a year.

• 1:10:14Speaker 03

  So our coming together will be for spending less on defence, for promoting peace around the world. I don't agree with what Russia's done in Ukraine, but the war has to stop. Therefore, surely our role and determination should be to bring about a ceasefire and bring about a peace conference, which can mean that Russia and Ukraine can live together alongside each other. Neither is going to go away, but are we just going to continue witnessing hundreds of thousands of people dying in this appalling war? And so I think that we also have to challenge the arms industry, which is why I co-authored a book called MAG, The Monstrous Anger of the Guns,

• 1:10:59Speaker 03

  which is about the arms trade and its influence globally in all countries, including Russia for that matter. And so what we're bringing together as a party is a social justice agenda, a social justice agenda, a peace agenda, and above all, environmental sustainability agenda, because.

• 1:11:19Speaker 03

  I'm more than disappointed that so many of the former committed people across Europe on environment and sustainability are now going away from the sustainability agenda and say, oh, that's all old hat. We can just go back to global warming and pollution. But he can't actually, because at the end of the day, that has a massive effect on all of us. So sustainability is not a threat to people's living standards, way of life or jobs. It's actually a massive opportunity for good quality jobs in environmentally sustainable services.

• 1:11:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm going to ask you one last question, Jeremy, and it's

• 1:11:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  why it seems to me that the right and capitalists, that their messaging is consistently more effective than the messaging of the left?

• 1:12:10Speaker 03

  They are better at reading what works in messaging and they're good at the simple message.

• 1:12:21Speaker 03

  The 1979 Conservative campaign where Thatcher won the election was absolutely, I'm sorry to say brilliant, in that it had this picture of a long queue of people outside what were then called labour exchanges. And there was

• 1:12:42Speaker 03

  a level of unemployment then that was unacceptable and been brought about by the IMF, the International Monetary Fund cuts imposed on the British Labour Government in 1977. And the legend just said, labour isn't working. It was absolutely simple and brilliant. And the right use the very intelligent thought processes of people in the advertising industry, think up these things. We need to be Equally clear on what we're proposing. And so we, the left too often unites about

• 1:13:23Speaker 03

  what it disagrees with. So we say we're against this, against that, against the other. Yeah, there's lots of things I'm against. There's lots of things you're against. And, you know, we, we can all unite in what we're against. I would rather we went and saying we're for, we're for a society where every child matters, every child. We don't leave kids behind in school. We don't leave kids behind on the street. We don't leave, leave kids behind in terrible housing. And so we approach it from the basis that everyone matters in society. And we use all the tools we can to bring people together, which is why I was very keen on and very proud of what we included in my two manifestos, which was

• 1:14:05Speaker 03

  a bit of a clumsy title, but the pupil arts premium, which meant the money would go into every school for every child to get the chance to learn music in school. And then I think we use all of that sort of stuff for popular campaigning. So when you go out campaigning for something, you bring people together. So the debate then is if we say we're going to bring water into public ownership, we're for public ownership of water. Now, come together in citizens assemblies and tell us how you want to run it. That is empowering people and using the imagination, intelligence and creativity that's there amongst everybody. So if you're looking for wisdom,

• 1:14:47Speaker 03

  go to universities for sure, but also go and talk to homeless people on the street because they'll tell you a few things as well. There's a lot of wisdom out there which we're ignoring.

• 1:14:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  I, I love what you said there, but don't define about what you're against. And instead, define about what can be done. And one of my favorite documents is the The original NHS message that was appeared in the papers, because again, when I look at it, it looks like science fiction and it's just so simple. Here's your new national health service. Anyone can use it, men, women and children, no age limits, no fees to pay. And it's just straight up.

• 1:15:23Speaker 03

  Somebody gave me a copy of the leaflet that was produced and delivered to every house in the country in 1947, saying, this is what the National Health Service will give you from next year.

• 1:15:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:35Speaker 03

  Amazing. But there's some great short documents around. I've got, one of my proudest possessions is a pamphlet I was given, an original of James Connelly's Socialism.

• 1:15:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah. Yeah. And again, he was a beautiful communicator.

• 1:15:52Speaker 03

  Brilliant. And for a man who had basically no real formal education, he was.

• 1:16:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  He grew up in Cowgate, man, underneath a bridge.

• 1:16:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:04Speaker 03

  Lived in, grew up in desperate poverty. Basically, he was self-educated and became the amazing orator and thinker he was. Just imagine, 1916, James Connelly not executed. James Connelly released from prison four or five years later. And James Connelly's contribution to not just Ireland, but to working class communities all over the world, be a different place.

• 1:16:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  And also the, the quote that we still use today in Ireland, I'm going to paraphrase it, but Connelly said, if you take the British flag down from Dublin Castle tomorrow, unless you get rid of the landlord, Britain still controls you through capitalists.

• 1:16:49Speaker 03

  He, absolutely. He, he didn't stand with nationalism.

• 1:16:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's it.

• 1:16:56Speaker 03

  As emblematic and symbolic of something. He stood with Irish nationalism as for a republic that would be run by the working class of Ireland for the benefit of the working class of Ireland. That was Connelly's message.

• 1:17:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  And it's a brilliant one, because it's, this is about class, doesn't matter about Protestant, Catholic, doesn't even matter about English people. This is a class issue.

• 1:17:18Speaker 03

  This is where Mick Lynch and I come together.

• 1:17:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah. Yeah. And, and it's, it's a wonderful one. And I'm going to leave you there, so Jeremy, thank you so much for that chat. That was absolutely fantastic.

• 1:17:28Speaker 03

  Sorry if I went on a bit too long, but there we are.

• 1:17:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  I know, you're grand. I actually hung up the call at that point. And I didn't say a proper goodbye to Jeremy Corbyn. Any new listeners, I'm on the artistic spectrum. I have difficulty saying goodbye. So I spoke to Jeremy for an hour there, had a wonderful conversation and ended that conversation by saying, I know you're grand, and then pressing the hang up call button. So apologies to Jeremy and to my listeners if that sounded rude. I wasn't being rude. And I struggle with the specific parameters of propriety when it comes to saying goodbye and saying hello. I'm all right with the bit in the middle.

• 1:18:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  All right, I'll catch you next week, ye glorious gunts. I'm off to do a lot of gigs for the Kraken Tens. And the next time you hear from me, I'm probably gonna be recording a podcast in a hotel, in a hotel, hopefully not underneath a duvet. In the meantime, wink at a swan, genuflect to a dog. Witness the majesty of a summer snail. Fucking snail, man. Snails at a boat. Five o'clock in the evening, night and overcast, pissing rain, summer rain. Snails coming straight out.

• 1:18:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  Big proud heads, stalky eyes, no threat of bars with the greasy rain. Bear witness to the majesty of a snail. God save the snail. Dog bless, I'll catch you next week.

• 1:19:40Speaker 06

  Hi, this is Dr. Shoshana from TED Health, and today's episode is sponsored by Kashi. Say hi to new Kashi Gut Health Granola, a straightforward, delicious way to fuel your gut, made with prebiotics, fiber, and cultures. My favorite flavor, blueberry almond, has perfectly crispy clusters, delicious almonds, and bursts of whole blueberries. It's an easy fit for a daily routine, whether that's for breakfast or a snack. In a world of overwhelm, it's a straightforward, delicious choice. Try new Kashi Gut Health Granola.

• 1:20:11Speaker 07

  Finally, TV on your terms. With Sling, you can stream the shows and sports you love on your schedule, all at a great price. Just pick a plan, add the channels you want, and skip the ones you don't. Want to pause your subscription? Well, Sling lets you do that, and you can keep watching over 600 free channels. I mean, the only thing better than flexible TV is free TV, right? Sling lets you do that. Base pack required. Visit sling.com to learn more.