 joined to being recorded. I hope that's okay with everyone. I'm just gonna wait for a couple of minutes and then we're going to promote our moderator, Paul Siegel and our other panelists Alfredo Saad-Filo and Guy standing to panelists, but we'll have to wait for a little bit to, for that to happen. I just, let's see if we can find. Yeah, guys, here's let's promote to a panelist. Perfect. Hello everyone. Hello Alfred. Apologies. We're relieved. I've been waiting for some time. Apologies. In classic, yeah, it's too soon to fail at the last hurdle. I will just get Paul on, we are just waiting for. Hello Guy. Hello Guy, sorry about that delay. I'm here, hi there. We're all on, we've all made it. Yep, I was just, I was just waiting for the link to start. I know, for some reason it's going to be less, but it's all good, it's all good. So, as we introduced earlier on, this is the first panel, a series of five, for the Conflict Security and Development Conference. Really, the conference is all about kind of engaging with critical issues in conflict security and development and this year we're doing it from the lens, through the lens of inequality. So, this panel is all about COVID. It's called COVID, Engloban Inequality, Assessing the Dynamics of Disparity. And really the crux of it is understanding that COVID isn't just a health crisis, it's also the exasperation of multiple inequalities, both within country and around the world. So, this panel will be an opportunity to explore those different inequalities, to understand why particular groups experience COVID in a more acute way than others, understand why the spread and the response of the disease has been largely inadequate for particular population groups and why income inequality has been crucial in explaining this. It will also look at kind of the, the priorities between countries around the world. So, it'll take a very much a global approach as well as kind of within country. And finally, it will also look at kind of looking forward what will be the long-term impact of COVID, but I think more importantly, the exasperation of existing inequality. So, without further ado, I'll introduce the panelists and we'll get on to the panel and what you've all been waiting for. Given that this is such a kind of multidisciplinary topic and inequality in itself is very multidimensional, we have an array of panelists to cater for that. So, we have Zubaida Haak, who's the kind of former interim director of the Ranimi Trust, itself a race equality think tank. And now she's been sitting as the, one of the independent advisors on stage. So, an invaluable perspective. We also have Maurinisha Suleiman, who is currently leading the COVID Impact Inquiry for the Health Foundation and has been working on how health inequality has kind of manifested in the UK health system in terms of mortality and deprivation. We also have Alfredo Sardfilo, who is the head of Department of International Development here at KCL. He was also a professor at SOAS and has risen extensively on neoliberalism and kind of the exclusionary role of capitalism and more recently how COVID has been exasperating that. And finally, Guy Standing is our last panelist. He is professor at SOAS and published amongst many other books, the book called The Precaria, which talks about how particular population groups are vulnerable to precarity, to poverty and that has dangerous ramifications for democracy. And then finally, without forgetting Paul Stiegel, who is also a senior lecturer here at King's. He's also a member of the LSE Inequalities Trust and works a lot on the global income distribution curve with a specific focus on the top 1%. So an invaluable moderator will offer crucial expertise. The way this panel will go is each panelist will talk for eight to 10 minutes with, I think Mary Anisha has some slides and then we'll open it up to Q&A. So I would really encourage you all to submit your questions, engage in conversation, comment on what you agree with, what you disagree with. And if you'd like to join the panel and ask your question out loud, please do say so. And I will promote you to a panelist for a few minutes. I think we're going to begin with Mary Anisha because she has a few slides and we'll crack on with the panel. Again, apologies about that delay at the beginning, typical. Okay, Mary Anisha, thank you very much. Thank you so much, Esme. And good evening, everyone. It is a wonderful privilege to be joining you and to be with such an auspicious panel. I am just going to double check that you can see my slides. Can you see my slides? Yeah, brilliant. Okay, so what I'll do is spend a few minutes telling you about some of the work that I've been doing at the Health Foundation. Esme do cut me off at a solid 10 minutes. I can talk about this work endlessly as my colleagues, friends, and family will tell you. As we all know, the pandemic has had, has captured all of our conscious and unconscious selves. And what the Health Foundation did towards the summer of last year was launch the COVID impact inquiry that we officially began in October of last year to very much look at the evidence reflecting the impact of the pandemic on health and health inequalities. And the way we've been looking at the evidence is in terms of three timestamps. What was the pre-pandemic picture and organization of society? How were people's health, social, and economic assets distributed? What happened when the pandemic hit? Whose assets were further eroded? What new inequalities have emerged because of the pandemic? And this is not just in terms of the direct impact of the virus itself, but also responses to the virus. Governments across the world have had to take unprecedented measures to restrict the spread of the virus, save lives, and prevent spread. But what that has subsequently done is that it has impacted people's financial situations in terms of jobs, family incomes, and that has further eroded people's opportunities for good health and has exacerbated vulnerabilities. And I'll illustrate some of these points with the data that we have collected. I'm not sure my slides are going to move. Oh, there we go. So in terms of the pre-pandemic organization of society, many of you will be familiar with some of the fantastic work that Sir Michael Marmot has done in exploring health equity in the UK and the Marmot 10 Years On Report that was published by the Health Foundation prior to lockdown last year, showed this stalling in life expectancy across England and Wales. And why this is important is that it displays a reduction in opportunities for good health. And I'll come on to why that's of consequence during the pandemic. But what we see is that these opportunities for good health reflected in life expectancy and healthy life expectancy follows a very stark social gradient. We see almost a 20 year difference in life expectancy, a female healthy life expectancy from the most deprived to least deprived parts of the country. And this is crucially important when we think about how mortality, hospitalizations, intensive care admissions within the pandemic track this social gradient. And it means that some of what has happened during the pandemic could have been foreseen. And it means that as we think about the management of ensuing variants and the different phases of the pandemic, we really need to think about the groups that have been disproportionately affected. In terms of some of the social and economic factors, we see that there was a trend in terms of poverty in the UK. And although employment rates have been improving, the quality of jobs has been poor. And what we also see is that a significant proportion of people have been on low incomes but also a significant number of families have had very low levels of savings. And this has impacted people's resilience, their ability to absorb the subsequent financial shock of the pandemic. So that gives you a flavor of the pre-pandemic organization of society. What's been the impact of the pandemic on this? The first is something that we all very visibly recognize this difference in mortality that was observed in the first wave of the pandemic with the UK faring significantly worse compared to similar and neighboring countries. And what we've seen is that subsequent waves have illustrated differences in policies internationally, but that some research shows that one of the key determinants of mortality in the first wave was about when countries locked down. In fact, the date of lockdown in some studies accounts for 40% of the subsequent mortality in wave one. And this shows sort of the importance but also the underlying variation that was observed. Why is healthy life expectancy important? This chart shows that countries that have had greatest improvements in healthy life expectancy in the last decade experienced lower excess mortality during the pandemic. And what this means is that when countries are afforded opportunities for good health, it means that there is greater resilience against shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic. We know that the prevalence of diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity, not only makes your immune system more vulnerable to the virus but that subsequently your outcomes are also much worse. And it means that countries really do need to spend on improving population health and also sustaining population health. This also shows the impacts of income inequality and excess mortality, the Gini coefficient showing that countries that have higher levels of inequality have seen higher rates of mortality. It means that unequal societies are less resilient societies to an external variable like the COVID-19 virus. When we think about the disproportionate impacts of the virus, we see how it tracks that deprivation social gradient. And that although we see that non-COVID mortality was higher in more deprived areas, we see that COVID mortality has a steeper gradient. And that means that there are significant factors such as people's jobs, their housing, their access to support and services that have been crucial in determining both exposure and subsequently outcomes to the virus. And this is a graphic illustrating some of the outcomes from the first wave that people from ethnic minority communities, disabled people have fared significantly worse. We know that this has tracked through into the wave two of the pandemic. And one of the really stark statistics that has stayed with me throughout the pandemic is one in six deaths from the pandemic has been amongst those with disabilities. What has been the impact of responses to the virus? We know that people have faced more financial precarity in the UK. This is illustrated in the need for universal credit. And this is particularly true for those on lower incomes. And this is illustrated in the blue circle, but also that there are new vulnerabilities emerging, that those even from the least deprived areas are also accessing universal credit. And it means that people who previously weren't vulnerable have been made vulnerable because of the pandemic. The other key issue is what's happening to family finances and we see that lower income households have to carry a greater burden, spending their savings and also facing greater amounts of debt compared to those from more wealthier households. And finally, this is really crucially important. This link between people's economic circumstances and subsequently their health outcomes. And what we see is that those who've experienced persistently lower pay during the pandemic are more likely to report poorer wellbeing. And this tracks through across all metrics of mental health. And this is incredibly concerning when we think about the instituting burden of mental health, not just in the UK, but globally. Although there has been a bounce back once restrictions have been lifted, there is a significant portion of the population that are experiencing erosions in their mental health that will be crucially important for the longer term. Esme, I'll stop here. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Mary-Lewis, that's fascinating. I mean, just fundamentally that unequal society's last resilient is just true across the world. I think actually the fact that people who weren't previously vulnerable, that are now vulnerable, leads us nicely into Professor Guy Standing's work who has researched a lot around this. Thank you. Well, thank you. Thank you very much. And I'm going to give a different perspective. I suspect that Alfredo will be talking about some of the things I'm going to briefly discuss. I think everything we're experiencing during the COVID pandemic and we're going to be experiencing over the next few years is ultimately related to the economic model that has been built up in the last 50 years. And it began with neoliberalism of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, which fundamentally the most important aspect for what subsequently happened was the deregulation of finance. And since then, finance has become an octopus that has completely dominated the global economy. And with the big tech companies and big pharma, have created a new model of capitalism, which in the book I've just published called The Corruption of Capitalism, are characterized as rentier capitalism. And the first point I want to make is that we are no longer living in a neoliberal era. The neoliberal policies finished in the late 1990s, because they created a structure which has turned the global economy into the most unfree market economy that's ever existed. And that is a strong point I want to begin with. And the development of rentier capitalism extended from the incredible power of finance which has gone from being a servant of economic activity to being totally dominant. In the United Kingdom, for example, the market value of financial assets, of financial institutions, has risen to over 1,000% of GDP, of national income. The United States, it's over 500% in many other countries. It's also over 500%. And finance, in fact, has been taking more and more of the total income. But rentier capitalism has meant that more and more of total income has gone to the owners of property, financial property, physical property, and fundamentally, so-called intellectual property. And the big change was epitomized by the passage in the World Trade Organization in 1994 of trips, trade-related aspects of intellectual property. And what this essentially did, and it was guided by the U.S. corporations and U.S. administration backed by Britain and a number of other rich countries, it globalized the U.S. intellectual property rights regime. What this means is that it actually contrary to all these statements of neoliberalism, it created monopolization. So that any corporation that could patent something, a procedure or a product would have automatic monopoly profits, because nobody else is allowed to produce it for 20 years. And in the case of pharmaceuticals, it could be through various procedures, it can be extended to 40 years. And we've gone to a point where in 1994, there were fewer than one million patents in the world filed with the World Intellectual Property Organization. And then by the early part of this century, it had risen to over three million each year. And there are over 15 million patents in force at the moment. And what this does is it channels huge rental income to the major corporations because they have become patent hoovers. They go around and they put huge numbers of patents together, string them together and can earn billions. Not too little attention has been given to this aspect of the global capitalist system. And of course we've seen it in the case of the COVID vaccines with this demand for waivers and so on. But I don't believe that they will allow that because that would be a desirable thin end of a wedge, because the whole system relies on capturing the rental incomes. In addition, countries have moved to a new form of mechanicalism where they back their big national champion corporations with huge subsidies, huge tax cuts, huge lobbying capacity and use the international financial institutions to further their encroachment in developing countries. So we've had a huge shift from development aid which was grants mainly, but then increasingly with conditions to loans which have tied to allowing access to their big national champions or some other incursion into their economies. So we have a situation where rentier capitalism has been spreading and the pandemic, the COVID pandemic was a shock, a crisis waiting to happen. If one compares the Spanish flu a hundred years ago with this pandemic, many more people probably died in that Spanish flu, but the economic crisis was not as great and the fundamental reason is that the global economy in 2019 was incredibly fragile, incredibly fragile, where in which huge national debts, particularly in developing countries, public debts were also matched with huge corporate debts because companies had loaded themselves with debt and had been distributing their profits instead of investing for growth. If you want growth, I don't necessarily do, but instead of doing that, giving to their shareholders or themselves and loading their companies with debt. So huge global crisis of corporate debt. So we now will have a rumbling in the post pandemic period of a lot of bankruptcies. But in addition, you have huge private debt. Household debt around the world is at unprecedented levels. And this links to the thesis that I've been advancing in my books and articles, which is a new global class structure has been taking shape in the context of rentier capitalism. The plutocrats, we all know about them. The plutocrats are earning mostly rental incomes from property from wealth. That's why they did so fantastically well last year. In addition, the elite underneath them have been gaining rent. So have the salaried people. People with salaried employment, with pensions and everything have done very well out of this pandemic. So it's wrong, I think, to say that only the top 1% or 0.1% have been actually gaining. The rentiers go quite long, far down in the system. It's the precariat, the growing mass class of people who are being exploited by rental mechanisms through debt, finance loves debt. Finance wants people to be in debt. That's how they make their money. And people in the precariat are now going to be tumbling into homelessness, tumbling into suicidal situations, tumbling into incredible insecurity. It's a surge that's going to be happening. And so what we've had is a triple K in the terms of the distribution of income. Before the pandemic struck, the rentiers were gaining. The people relying on labor were falling further and further behind. During the pandemic, there's another K. The people at the top and the salariat have done extremely well. The people in the precariat, which is growing and mushrooming have been doing extremely badly. And then this will take place even more so when the stimulus packages are wound down if that is what happens. Now, this talk, as I understood it, was about conflict as well as development. And what we've seen with rentier capitalism is that China was rather left out of what was happening before 2001 because China was not a member of the World Trade Organization. But when it joined, it started to become a rentier economy itself. And by 2011, it was filing more patents than the United States, which was the second most in the world. And by 2015, it was filing more patents than the US, Japan, the European Union, and South Korea combined. So we have the situation where China has become a new dominant rentier economy. And if you go to places in Africa, and I work a lot in Africa these days, you see the Chinese system there and making rentier profits and doing deals with governments so that they can have access to resources and become mercantilist in their own way. And we are going to see a period of incredible tension and conflict in the next decade because now the Chinese are moving into Antarctica, the Arctic is also being colonized by the various major powers and the scope for conflict is growing and growing. And the points I want to mention by means of concluding is that we need to realize that we will only build resilience, particularly in developing countries. If we'd learned one fundamental lesson from the last year, the resilience of all of us depends on the resilience of the weakest and most vulnerable among us. And that is one reason why I've been advocating a basic income, both as a development tool and as an essential vital part of the recovery in countries like Britain and the US and elsewhere because then we would give a base for people to have basic security. Without basic security, we cannot be resilient. We cannot be robust and have an immunity and all the stresses and the morbidity that's just been mentioned will become much greater if people don't have basic security. And the universal credit is a fraud. We know that huge numbers of people are punished and sanctioned and don't get it. It's been the varieties of means tested benefits have been allowed to fall. We need a new income distribution system in dismantling rent here capitalism. And that I think is the context in which anybody who's a student doing development studies or anybody doing social policy should confront this particular crisis because it is a transformational crisis that may well lead to a new dark period of neo-fascist populism. He got a wave with Trump. He nearly succeeded. He's still got 74 million votes even though he's an ogre. And we may well see that drift unless we provide the precariat with basic security. And that is the biggest single challenge ahead for all of us. Thank you very much. Guy, thank you so much. That was brilliant and fascinating. I'll now move on to Zabeda who will, I know Alfredo will compliment Guy nicely and we'll break up a bit of academic with a bit of policy from Zabeda who will talk a lot about her experience with race and inequality and minorities. Thank you. Sorry, I've got to unmute. Hello everybody. Thank you for having me here. I'm delighted to be here and I'm honored to be with such amazing academics and people from Kings College and the Health Foundation and so on. It's really fantastic. And I think in that sense it's great that I was invited because hopefully I can bring a completely different perspective to this but complimentary. So I thought rather than giving it sort of a more academic talk that I would try and tie together what Meroenisha's been saying and what Guy's been saying about how this pandemic has been everything but the great leveler. And of course that's what we heard at the beginning that this was the great leveler because the virus doesn't discriminate. But of course what we've seen not just in the UK but throughout the world is the virus may not discriminate but we're not in the same boat. We're facing the same storm but we're not in the same boat and that became really clear. So I thought I'd start off with really I'm going to talk to you about my work and I suppose just sort of bring to light what we've heard from Guy and Meroenisha about how this pandemic has been impacting on different groups in very disproportionate ways. Now as May mentioned a year ago I was the interim director of the Ranami Trust which is a race equality think tank. So actually it was more than a year ago back in March last year. I found myself in a situation where of course the pandemic we'd just been hit by the pandemic it was like watching the slow car crash as the government tried to get itself together of course it took me a while. But I quickly realized from a Ranami perspective that this pandemic was going to hit back in the minority groups very hard and that's exactly because as Meroenisha mentioned that we were always aware of the pre-existing inequalities among black and ethnic minority groups in this country and those pre-existing inequalities were both in terms of class but also in terms of race. So for instance we knew that on average black and ethnic minority groups were two times more likely to be in poverty were much more likely to be in overcrowded housing depending on which ethnic group you looked at Bangladesh and Pakistanis are about one in four are much more likely to be in overcrowded housing but around 15% of black African groups are likely to be in overcrowded housing. We also knew that different ethnic groups were more likely to be in multi-generational housing and that there were higher rates of poverty and of course that a large proportion of black and ethnic minority groups were in low paid precarious work. Guy, a professor standing talked about a lot about the low paid precarious work and Meroenisha talked about that in terms of universal credit and so on. And all of that was important because we knew immediately that when the pandemic hit that it would not be evenly spread. As I mentioned, people would not be in the same boat. So straight away, as working at Rana Mead we quickly pulled ourselves together and thought like the first thing we need to do is make sure that the government are going to take this into consideration, make sure that the public understands what's going on. So we started writing blog pieces, started talking to the media and so on and really trying to make them understand why it is that we thought black and ethnic minority groups would be disproportionately. And of course it was about amplifying not only the pre-existing inequalities but also explaining why those groups would be hit hard. Now, just to speed forward a couple of months later I thought the best way to make the public understand how black and ethnic minority groups were hit and to split the ethnic minority groups up how they were hit by the pandemic. As Esme said, not just in health term but also in social and economic terms is I did that by commissioning a national survey. So last summer, as the interim director of Rana Mead Trust I commissioned a national survey with an ethnic minority boost to look at how the pandemic was hitting different groups and lo and behold, what we found was what all the academic research was showing but what government was blind to. And that was the fact that the reason black and ethnic minority groups black and Asian particularly were being hit hard was because they were much more likely to be in low paid front-facing jobs. They were much more likely to be the health than social care workers if you recall rather tragically, right at the beginning of the pandemic we found that more than half around 60 out of 100 NHS workers who died were from black and ethnic minority groups. So they're much more likely to be on the front line but actually they're much more likely to be among the low paid ones as well. The healthcare assistants, the social care workers the delivery drivers, the cleaners but all of that was front-facing and on the frontline and that meant that they were much more likely to be exposed but they were also much more likely to bring it home and that meant that they were likely to spread it because of the conditions that on average black and Asian groups lived in which was overcrowded housing, living in urban areas, living in multi-generational homes all of which meant that social distancing was not possible and of course public transport they're much more likely to travel on public transport. Now the reason I'm telling you all of this is because it amplifies or it's explained why black and ethnic minority groups not just in this country but also in the US with black groups but also across the world have been much more exposed to this virus have been much more likely to be severely ill from this virus partly because as Meroenisha mentioned because of pre-existing health inequalities and comorbidities so we're much more likely to be severely ill but we're also much more likely to die from this virus. Now I'm going to stop there in terms of my run and meet work but now I'm going to talk to you about how in my work on Independence Sage and you could look us up www.independenceage.org I work with 12 other scientists. The reason I was bought on board was because a lot we realized a lot of our work would be around would be on inequality. We realized that much of Sage's work was looking at the health aspects of this pandemic but not really at the social and economic aspects of this pandemic. And that had already become clear to me because just jumping back to my run and meet work we didn't work alone. We quickly started to work with poverty organizations and with poverty organizations, migration organizations and with the women's sector. We all had to collaborate together because we realized that it wasn't just in terms of black and ethnic minority characteristics that people would be disproportionately hit by this pandemic. Not necessarily in terms of health wise in terms of mortality but in terms of the social and economic and psychological aspects or manifestations of the pandemic. So I worked very closely with the forces society with women's budget group and we commissioned research together and found that women were not only much more likely to lose jobs when we're not only more likely to be furloughed but they were much more likely to have to take on a disproportionate amount of the childcare and it wasn't the fun bits of childcare. It was the harder bits. Esme, am I running out of time? Am I okay? But a couple of, two minutes left. Two minutes left, sorry. So, and similarly working with the third sector of poverty organizations, the reason we were collaborating is because as Merinisha mentioned and as Guy mentioned, we found straight away that those in low paid work were less likely to be furloughed and much more likely to lose their jobs which meant that they then had to rely on other income and not everybody realized that they could rely on that they could apply for universal credit, all of which were coming out in all of our surveys and we use that information to bring to the public to bring to the government but we particularly utilize that information in relation to government policy because one of the things we haven't talked a lot about is how government policy, how they reacted to this pandemic has also exacerbated the inequalities in this country and I'm sure in other countries as well and that includes the vaccination rollout as well because what we realized is in all of the policies the government were not carrying out impact assessments, equality impact assessments to see how their policies were impacting on different groups and that's really, really crucial. And I can explain more about that perhaps in questions but that was very important. Now in terms of the independent sagework that we did, a lot of our work was about that. A lot of our work was around saying to the government there is no point in testing and you know that government were trying to roll out mass testing as they are now with lateral flow tests. There is no point in testing unless you financially support self-isolation because what we found was that people were not coming forward for testing because they couldn't afford to self-isolate. Similarly, when we were talking about policies we realized the government wasn't taking into consideration women's circumstances weren't doing very much around domestic violence and domestic abuse which increased and so on. Now I'll stop there because, sorry, I hadn't meant to sort of go into that long story but I guess what I was trying to bring to light was really how all of these issues were really brought to the fore. Actually one last thing I'm going to mention a vaccine rollout because that's the other thing of course that we covered on independent stage because we realized with vaccine rollout it wasn't straightforward and there was a lot of vaccine inequality and people in deprived areas and among black and Asian groups so all the groups that were much more exposed to this virus were much more at risk from this virus were also less likely to take up vaccination so we've done a lot of work around that and for all of these things we wrote lots of reports but more than that we've taken it to the media we've taken it to the government and we've tried to sort of influence policy in that way. Thank you very much, Esme. That was amazing, thank you so much. And I think you're so right you have to ask why these impact assessments weren't conducted and what the underlying motivations of that are. And now finally we'll move on to Alfredo before Paul Siegel will take over the Q&A moderation. Alfredo, the floor is yours. Thank you very much, this is an absolutely brilliant panel. I will speak about a book that I have just finished around this topic and what the book does is to look at the pandemic from a political economy perspective in the context of the system of accumulation today or the current phase of capitalism which is of course neoliberalism. And one way to look at the pandemic is by pointing out that COVID-19 has highlighted some very important limitations of neoliberalism and they are likely to lead to a drift into fascism but also with strong movements of resistance emerging at the same time. The outcome of that is of course open. So I want to argue that the pandemic belongs in a context of the economic crisis of neoliberalism and the political crisis of neoliberal democracies. And this is why to cut a long story short why in my view countries that followed more strongly neoliberal policies since the great financial crisis that started in 2007 policies like fiscal austerity and the dismantling of the state. Those countries also tended to have more authoritarian neoliberal leaders later and they tended to do worse in the pandemic as well. And the analysis will then start from the point that we live in the age of neoliberalism and the most important feature of neoliberalism is financialization, meaning the subordination of social and economic reproduction to the accumulation of what Marx called interest bearing capital. That's finance. And the core of financialization is the transfer of control of the allocation of resources from Keynes and States, from developmental states to a globally integrated financial system. And this is what allows finance to control the most important sources of capital and the most important levers of economic policy in most countries today. This is what neoliberalism is about. The next consequence or implication of all feature of neoliberalism is the transnationalization of production and finance. That's what is commonly called globalization. And this is about the international integration of the circuits of accumulation at the level of individual firms correlated with that, the liberalization of trade, domestic finance and international capital flows to allow this model to work. And then next is the state. Neoliberalism, despite the discourse is not about the withdrawal of the state, not about the rollback of the state. The role of the neoliberal state is to impose and to legitimize neoliberalism. It's to transfer to finance control over the sources of capital. It is to impose a new legal framework to put together the new industrial structure, the new financial structure is to privatize public assets. It is to repress the opposition. And in the last four decades, neoliberalism has transformed economies and societies and public policies and it created unprecedentedly favorable conditions for accumulation. The West won the Cold War. I've seen the liberalization of trade and finance and capital movements. We have seen unparalleled support to accumulation by competing states. We saw cuts in taxes and transfers in welfare provision. As my colleagues have pointed out, we have seen the decline of the traditional sources of resistance in the nationalist movements, nationalist governments, trade unions, peasant movements left wing political parties. We've seen the ideological hegemony of neoliberalism. And with this came a tremendous recovery of profit rates since the lows of the 1970s. But, and this is shocking, instead of thriving GDP growth and investment, at least in the core countries have been slowing down between 2007 and 2020, the West suffered the deepest and the longest economic crisis and the weakest and the most regressive economic recovery on record. This is what I call the economic paradox of neoliberalism. You create extraordinarily favorable conditions for accumulation and you have a complete inability to capitalize on them. Following from this, we have the political paradox of neoliberalism. The consolidation of neoliberal democracies in the 1980s and 1990s undermined the institutions of representation and the capacity of states to resolve social conflicts. And in circumstances, as we saw of continuing economic crises and permanent fiscal austerity, this fed a crisis of democracy. This leads to the third paradox that will underpin my analysis of the pandemic, which is a paradox of authoritarianism. We have the economic crisis in neoliberalism. We have a political crisis in democracy. This led to authoritarianism and the personalization of politics and the emergence of what I call spectacular authoritarian right-wing political leaders. And this process became evident with the election of Narendra Modi in 2014, and the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. And it was similar in many other countries to the problem is that the neoliberal policies that these authoritarian leaders pursue, they damage and they undermine their own base of support and they open space for new forms of fascism. So we have this rolling economic and political crises taking place when the pandemic hits in early 2020. And what we saw was that the most uncompromising neoliberal countries could not mount a coherent response to the pandemic, even though there were successful examples to follow, examples of China, of Kerala state, of New Zealand, Senegal, Singapore, Taiwan, and so on. And what the authoritarian neoliberal government tended to do instead was to veer towards policies of what became known as herd immunity, whatever the cost in terms of lives lost. And what they ended up doing was having the highest death rates, they have the highest cost in terms of economic damage as well. And they ended up perpetuating the pandemic and making it impossible effectively to eliminate the coronavirus. That was a dramatic policy failure of those neoliberal administration and the administrations. And the implication is that the crisis of public health and the crisis of the economy that we have today were caused by political choices. They were not caused by a virus. They were caused by political choices. They were caused by the dismantling of state capacities. They were caused by failures of implementation. They were caused by a shocking misunderstanding of the nature of the pandemic. So my general conclusion is that today neoliberalism sustains itself primarily through coercion. And this is not just about overt repression, but we see plenty of that. It's also about austerity policies in the economic domain backed up by punishing measures against the poor, against the underprivileged, against the neglected. And it is also based on the escalation of all forms of repression against dissent, for example, through electronic monitoring. Now, in those circumstances, we have a stagnation of neoliberalism. We have a degeneration of democracy. We have to confront that through the broadest possible political alliances. It is only possible, I suggest, it's only possible to build alternatives to neoliberalism if we integrate economic and political demands into a positive program for the expansion of political democracy and the expansion of economic democracy. So in that sense, the pandemic is an indictment of neoliberalism, but it is also a rehearsal for a much bigger challenge that we have, which is the challenge of climate change and the environmental disaster that is unfolding around us. The pandemic also shows to me that the impasses on the economy, politics, and in health, they cannot be addressed through a renewal of neoliberalism. They cannot be addressed through commitments to a mythical free market or through a reversal to fiscal austerity. Even the attempt to do any of this will undermine democracy. So the pandemic can open spaces for progressive form of political activity. If we have mobilizations organized around concerns with equality, with connectivity, with economic and political democracy, and this is what I think we should focus right now. Thanks very much. Thank you so much, Alfredo. I think I have lots of questions personally, but I'd better pass over to Paul, who will lead the Q&A and if there's time, I'll jump in. But Paul, over to you. Thank you very much. Thank you. That was fantastic. Extremely interesting set of discussions on the impact of COVID, the relationship between COVID and inequality, nationally and globally. And it seems to me one of the big puzzles that's kind of been touched upon, but I don't feel like we have an answer to, and I'd really like to hear what the panelists have said about this, so if we could perhaps start the discussion on this topic. I'm very curious about the political impact of COVID and the effect it's had on the governments around the world that have been attempting to address it. I mean, one might think that a major health crisis like this that clearly needs a huge amount of investment in public health would lead to an unequivocal rise in support for public services. And you'd expect that to help a certain type of government and not help other types of governments. In particular, we've heard a lot about neoliberalism and we might expect it would imply a turn against neoliberalism. But in this country, and we've heard quite a lot about the relationship between COVID and inequality in this country, this country seems to have led to support for a conservative government that has been pretty clearly in favour of austerity and a decline in spending on public services. And just recently, there was an extremely, they were proposing a below inflation pay rise for health workers. If you think of another country, Argentina, which is a country I happen to know quite well, so I've been watching what's been going on there, they have a relatively left-wing government in power, Pairingist governments, they call it. And there, the right-wing opposition very strongly took the, if you like, the Trump stance and Donald Trump view, which was that any constraint on people's movement and freedom and actions was a violation of their rights. And they seem to have made a certain amount of, had a certain amount of political success from doing that. At least it's, I mean, they haven't won any elections yet, but that's the line they've been taking. And so I'd be very interested if the panellists might give some comments on where we see this going forwards. I mean, it's already been mentioned, so we've had two presentations on the UK, where we know quite well what the government's done and also this slightly paradoxical reaction to it. We've also heard two speakers talking about the international situation and we've had references to the possibility of the rise of fascism. So I'd be very interested to hear what the panellists have to say and perhaps then we can open up to a wider discussion on kind of where this can go politically, what the political impact of this is going to be because presumably the political side is going to be what determines what happened, how this develops, how the question of both, health policy and neoliberalism develop in the future. But if anyone would like to remark on that issue, that'd be great to me, perhaps I can open up to wider questions. Yes, may I'd be happy to kick off. That'd be great. Paul, a fantastic question. And I can begin the conversation just in terms of some of the work that we've done at the Health Foundation trying to capture public opinion on some of these issues around the public's view on the pandemic, the impact of the pandemic on inequalities and the appetite for government action on these. And from the work that we've done, I can say that there is a greater recognition of the differential impacts of the pandemic, but also the role of the wider determinants of health, this greater recognition that jobs, housing, incomes are crucial for good health and that there is an appetite for action on these aspects. And so what it means for the UK in particular is it's an unprecedented time for there being a recognition for government action on recovery. But the point to add is when we're talking about political change and political action, maybe one of the things that the pandemic has also highlighted is what we mean in terms of the level of political action we're referring to. And the role of local government, but also the role of devolved governments in the UK has also become more recognized. And there is a huge push towards more of that localized action and localized coordination that the pandemic may well be a point of change on. I was interested to talk about the UK, maybe Zubeda if you have any thoughts on this country's reaction. A lot of thoughts, I'm not sure if it's all publicly wise to share. I mean, I think Mera Nisha's right that or perhaps she's being quite kind, there's certainly a disparity between where the public is and what the public have learned from this pandemic versus what I would argue what the government have learned from this pandemic in terms of going forward with the post-COVID recovery. I mean, I would argue that they're not even there yet. You know, so much of this government's reaction to the pandemic has been ill thought out, has been scrambling, has been a reflection of incompetence, has really been a lot of, as we've heard many a time, did they're in delay, that I'm not necessarily entirely convinced that there is a big ideology that's underlying it all unless you consider the natural herd immunity infection ideology. I think that that was there at the beginning. We are an independent sage and many of my, you know, many others and many other scientists out there still believe it hasn't entirely left this government and that is the most manifest through how they are approaching schools. There are not really any mitigations in schools whatsoever, what few there were, such as face masks, they've taken away. You know, if you consider those to be ideologies, they're there, but I mean, with this government, it's just so difficult because if you think about how they've handled test and trace, and I know that's a really specific example, but it's fundamental to this pandemic because test and trace was supposed to be the key way that we had control of this pandemic where we, you know, found identified people with the virus, we traced their contacts, we isolated them, we cut, we broke the chains of transmission. It's supposed to be fundamental. Now that would have been best if it was locally led because local professionals, local public health directors, GPs and so on, primary carers, they all know their local communities. They know how to find people. They know how to, they have trust by local people and so on, but instead the government did something which we wouldn't have expected, which is be centralized. They had centralized services. So I think to be honest, Paul, I'm much more skeptical about the ideologies. I understand, you know, there's certainly ideologies in terms of the government gave less money to public services, more to private companies. You know, there was much more accumulation of private wealth, much more profit by private individuals and private companies, but I don't think that there's been a clear path. I'm not sure the government's that competent. Guy, you do have your hand up. Please go ahead. Oh, you're unmuted. I am unmuted now. I think it's important, and I don't want to turn this into an argument, but I think it's important to see the economy and the economic structure today as fundamentally different from what Thatcher and Reagan were proposing and what was meant by neoliberalism back in the 1980s and 1990s. The man who gave the title to the set of policies of neoliberalism as the Washington consensus, John Williamson, happened to die earlier this year. And we're a very far cry from the Washington consensus. And I think that what we haven't discussed so far is the systemic corruption that has become part of the hallmark of the modern rentier state. I think what you can interpret what Boris Johnson and his crew have been doing very much in class terms, very much as an ideological project. It's a different project from what Thatcher was pushing. It's very interesting that if you look at Sunak, he got his apprenticeship working for Goldman Sachs. He did four years working for Goldman Sachs. And then he worked for a man who last year in Britain received, I don't like the word earned, over one million pounds a day, every day of the year. He received over one million pounds. Now here you have a totally different situation from anything remotely close to a free market system, which for all her many, many, many faults, that's what Thatcher was pursuing. And we have a strut a rigged capitalism with revolving doors. And I list of the very many people who go from politics into Goldman Sachs and back into JP Morgan and then back into politics and heading the central banks or whatever and then back into politics. And it's a global phenomenon. And this financial elite is pulling the triggers for property ownership and property incomes. So what you've seen is the functional share of income going to capital and going particularly to forms of rent has been going up in every part of the world, including China, possibly more so in China than in any other country. And of the proportion going to people who rely on labor has been going down and down and down. And the growth of the precariat is creating conflictual tensions. And I thought that Alfredo's points on this were very pertinent because what we've got with a growing class of the precariat is some parts of it without too much education are supporting the Trumps and the Boris Johnson's and the Salvini's in Italy where I am at the moment. And they are supporting a neo-fascist populism. But the other part of the precariat, what I call the progressive part, the uneducated part, they're not going to be fooled into voting for a neo-fascist populism. But there's a lot of energy out there. I receive emails every single day from all over the world, people saying, I'm part of the precariat and we are going to start taking action. And I think you have to articulate a system whereby huge subsidies are being given by the state to finance and corporate capital. We're having a dispossession of our commons all over the world, particularly in developing countries and increasingly in the oceans of the world, we're having a dispossession in favor of private equity capital, venture capital and the big financial institutions like BlackRock and Goldman Sachs. So I think it's more important to see the tensions that this is producing because at the top of the pile of tensions will be between the declining United States and the rising China. And China is becoming a very avuncular rentier economy. Huge rent, it's not a neoliberal economy, it's a rent seeking economy and it's doing extremely well around the world. The New Silk Road is merely a metaphor for what is happening. And of course the United States is a shrinking rentier economy and lashing out and will be increasingly violent and increasingly likely to vote for another Trump unless something fundamental changes in our distribution system and we get a new progressive agenda. We are at a very vital point and I fully agree with Alfredo. We are at a transformational crisis point and this pandemic has merely accelerated what? And you're going to see the huge number of zombie firms in Britain that have just been propped up by this stupid furlough scheme which is extremely regressive. And once this is unwound, you will see bankruptcies, the law and a whole lot of people will be tipped out into the lumpen precariat if you like. And I think that this is a point where it's much more important to focus on structures and systems of accumulation and disaccumulation but not put everything into the basket of neoliberalism. Alfredo, would you like to follow up? Destructive again at the level of society. It is destructive at the level of society and it is profoundly counterproductive when you have a social phenomenon like a pandemic that requires coordinated responses and requires people to behave in specific ways that have internal coherence to contain the spread of the virus. Now, neoliberalism dismantled collectivity. Dismantled collectivity in practice. It dismantled workplaces. It dismantled production systems that existed with some coherence within nations. It internationalized them and restricted or reduced the ways in which people connected in their workplaces, in their communities, in their clubs according to their political preferences, et cetera. Now, neoliberalism dismantled the mechanisms of political representation and economic representation of the collectives. Dismantled the large political parties, dismantled trade unions, dismantled all sorts of organizations that existed in the past at grassroots level. This disables political action to a very large extent by the least powerful people in society. And what we have seen happening, maybe it didn't have to be this way, but this is what happened, is the projection of agency into political leaders that seem to be coming from outside of the political system. Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro or even Boris Johnson, some kind of eccentric personality that is his own person, you project agency onto those leaders and since as a collective or as an individual, you have no power, you expect them to resolve problems for you. But this is profoundly self-destructive because these political leaders are not outsiders. They are deeply committed to a very perverse form, an authoritarian form, a reactionary form of neoliberalism and the implementation of their policies worsens the situation for their own voters. So my suggestion that I try to articulate before is that authoritarian neoliberalism is unsustainable, is intrinsically unstable and it tends to drift into increasing levels of authoritarianism and it tends to fertilize the terrain for the emergence of the forms of fascism. These authoritarian leaders cannot resolve problems and the pandemic is just one symptom but there are other instances as well that they cannot resolve problems. What they do is instead of resolving problems, they create conflict. They live politically by creating descent, by creating enemies, by promoting enemies, by confronting them and this is instead of addressing the problems, the actual problems of the people who voted for them. So I'm pessimistic in that sense that neoliberalism can lead to the emergence of solutions from within itself and the pandemic is one drastic, dramatic, terrible example but there are others too. But I am hopeful that the magnitude of the shock will lead to mobilization and in this sense, the United States offers a positive example of mobilizations that have been able to shift of economic policy at the federal level and hopefully we'll continue to do this and hopefully that example will serve to inform political action in other countries too. We need more of that, much more than that but we are now in a much better situation than we were when Trump was still in power. So hopefully something will move in this country as well and in other parts of the world. Thank you very much, Alfredo. And it's a rather troubling thought that it seems, I mean, who can know the counterfactual but it seems plausible that Trump might actually have won again if it hadn't been for the COVID pandemic because he handled it so spectacularly badly. So we should be thankful for small mercies I suppose. So moving to some questions from the audience I can just click on the Q&A up here. So Emma Sandvik-Ling asks, well, do you know inequalities have increased during the pandemic? Will we go back to normal after the pandemic? Will inequalities continue to increase? And what can we do to mitigate the inequalities brought on by the pandemic? So what can we, are we gonna return to some kind of normality? To some extent we've been talking about this in terms of politics and sort of the big questions but what can we do to mitigate the inequalities going forwards if we can find governments willing to implement the policies? Guy, please go ahead. Yeah, very good question. I've argued in a book that we've got this triple K development. I don't think it will, the gains are only at the very top. Quite a lot of people in the Solariat have done very well out of the pandemic and we're doing very well beforehand. They get a lot of rentier incomes. The prokaryat are exploited by rentier incomes and the reality in Britain is this, that income inequality has been growing steadily over the last 50 years, despite some people claiming otherwise. The chief economist on the Financial Times, Giles, he denies it but many sources of data show that income inequality has been steadily growing. And one of the phenomenon in Britain is that the extent of hiding incomes in tax havens is higher than any other country with known data. Something like 20% of wealth in the country is actually channeled into tax havens and therefore not recorded in our national statistics. But the biggest story for people thinking about these things is this. While income inequality has grown and the Gini coefficient has grown, wealth inequality is much greater than income inequality. And the value of wealth in Britain, private wealth, has grown from 300% of GDP back in the 1980s to over 700% today. So the main story of the growth of inequality is the growth of wealth relative to income because the Gini coefficient, the standard measure of inequality of wealth is much, much greater than the Gini of income. And if you increase the wealth relative to income and the wealth inequality is already much greater systematically, then of course, you're getting far greater wealth inequality. And it's risen to the extent where over 60% of the wealth, private wealth, private riches in Britain are inherited, not earned. It's a complete lie that somehow wealth is earned by hard work and entrepreneurial abilities. That's a bullshit statement. What we're really seeing is a growth of inherited wealth. And this is rentier capitalism writ large. It has nothing to do with the nature of the market. It is a system of private property rights, triumphing over any market principles. So you get huge monopolies, but you also get huge wealth. And of course, the wealth feeds into the political domination through funding the conservative party, through incredible transparency deals that we've seen in the past year, where they're given government billions have been given without any sort of tendering or anything like that. And we're seeing a systematic plunder of the economy for the rentiers. And this has nothing to do with the market. It has purely to do with corruption and the existence of a corrupted state where the Boris Johnson's of the world representatives of finance, and they're well rewarded by finance, both directly and indirectly. And I've documented that. Thank you. Mero-Nisha, perhaps a sort of more directly UK policy-based perspective on this. How do you think we can go forwards and can we address these? I think he's going to call this... Noel, it's a... I mean, someone who's more of a directly related to work on government policy. I think he was a big picture guy, you know? First of all, thank you, Paul. And maybe what I'll do is try and compliment what guy has already started us in terms of the conversation. And I mean, just thinking about Emma's question, I'm reading it. And when Emma refers to going back to normal, I sincerely hope not, you know, in what I presented earlier, we know that inequalities were prevalent in our society. And yes, the pandemic has accentuated those, but we shouldn't go back to where we were. Rather, we should be using this as an opportunity to reflect and bring together efforts, not just from national governments, but also local governments, public health bodies, all of those who have a role to play business, local economies in trying to improve all of the factors that I'd mentioned earlier. We need to tackle the precarity that Guy and others have talked about. We need contracts, employment contracts that provide people with stability, good quality jobs. We need good quality housing. The housing stock in the UK suffers from damp vulnerability to overcrowding because of unaffordability. These are variables, you know, low-hanging fruit that can be addressed. In the work that we're doing for the COVID Impact Inquiry, the report that will be publishing early July, we are making some high-level recommendations on some of these factors, including education. The other critical issue that I'd mentioned earlier is the role of mental health and improving mental health because that feeds into people's abilities to do jobs, gain an education, really open up further these opportunities for health and well-being. So definitely there are actions there and there are actions that are being evidenced by work not just of the Health Foundation but organisations like the Institute of Fiscal Studies, some of the work that Runnymed and others have also done. So, yeah, a few pointers and suggestions there, Paul. Alfredo, any thoughts? I think neoliberalism breeds inequality. If you leave the system to run, it will tend to create more and more inequalities and across all aspects of life, not just income or wealth inequality but also healthy inequalities and other types of inequality. And this was highlighted here today. A critical thing to stop these inequalities growing is tax reform. And this has come onto the political agenda very, very strongly recently and that's an absolutely crucial lever for change. But we need much more than this and what has sustained this proposal for tax reform, particularly in the United States at the moment, in my view, is the realisation that another round of fiscal austerity, repeating what happened after the 2007 crisis and a new round of fiscal austerity was the initial response, the tendency from several governments, including clearly the British government but also I think other governments too. But it was the realisation that the attempt to do this would lead to or could lead to a political explosion. And I think the BLM revolt in the United States, the biggest political revolt in that country in several decades, that showed the limits of what neoliberal governments could do and it showed limits that the Biden administration decided not to try and cross. So they have reversed course and they're now moving towards realisation that tax reform is essential. You cannot squeeze the poor and you cannot squeeze public services anymore. All the low-hanging fruit has already been taken. The state has been dismantled to a very large extent. So now is the time to tax the rich and to achieve at least the containment of the inequalities that neoliberalism tends to generate. But we need more than this, we need job stability. We need economic security for the majority of people. We need welfare guarantees for the majority of people in order to build a minimally cohesive society. Now this I think can be, we can point to those outcomes around the decommodification of social life and the definitialisation of social reproduction. I think political activity along those axes would be very popular. It would point to felt needs by many, many millions of people and it could point to a way to confront neoliberalism and financialisation, a way that is popular and constructive. We can't do politics just by rejecting or denying what exists, we need to have a positive platform. And I think those types of projects and programmes potentially could offer a way forward of transcending neoliberalism. I am excited I'm going to have to jump in at this point because we've hit half seven, which was our hard deadline but I just want to really reiterate my thanks to all of you panellists for attending this evening. I think the things that stood out for me really were what connects all of your fascinating presentations was the imbalance of power, you know? For Meirini Shor and Zubaira, it was experiencing inequalities along minority and racial lines and explaining that is due to the kind of rife, power imbalances in the system that we live in, which is neoliberalism and capitalism. I think that the thing that worries me is when, as Guy pointed out, income from labour is systemically fractional of the income from wealth, where does that leave democracy and is democracy fit to solve these issues and will it come from within? You'd like to hope. This conversation's gone for a very long time so I think we'll have to leave it there but again, thank you so much. Tomorrow morning's panel will be on gender with some fascinating, again, equally fascinating speakers. So please do check out our website. You can use the same Zoom link. We will sort out the terrible technical issues we had this morning so I'd like to apologise for that once more and I hope you all have a lovely evening. Thank you very much.