 I mean, did I ever tell you the story? I mean, I think you know the story, actually, but I'm not sure if you do. I bumped into Jeremy Corbyn during the coup, and I was working in a pub at the time, and I just finished my shift. So it was like, I don't know, maybe midnight, something like that, and we were on the tube. And he's just sitting there with his wife and like, you know, plastic carry bag of documents or something, and there's me absolutely stinking to the high heavens of beer. And I was just like, oh my God, it's Jeremy Corbyn. And he remembered me from UCL occupation, and we started chatting. And I had to say to him, I was like, mate, like, I've got to ask, like, how are you doing? Because your party wants to kill you. And I'm not saying that in a hyperbolic sense. These people want to see you in an early grave. And he, and there was no lie in his eyes. He was like, this is fine. This is what we expected. No, this is what I've been wanting to do my whole parliamentary career. Why would I let this bother me? And I couldn't tell if that was really clever or really dumb. And I still don't know, to be honest. But what do you make of this whole thing? When you look at these seven MPs who've gone off to form their own splinter, is there a little bit of you that respects their integrity for going? Their integrity? I mean, as you point out, it seems more like a stunt. There's no political mandate. There's no ideas. And if you think about go back to Corbyn, I mean, this is the group of MPs who've been on the outside. The party has not been reflecting anything what they've been for decades. They've complained about it, but they haven't left. They haven't taken out and said, well, let's just split the party. And you've got some MPs who, yes, now they're on the outside and they want to piss in the tent, basically, which is just ludicrous. There's no principle in this at all. If you support the Labour movement and want to get rid of the Tories, you have to support the Labour party. This is nonsense, no. And so do you think that they want to get rid of the Tories? No, I think that's the real problem. Look at their voting records, look at what they stand for. I mean, it seems like they basically want to be the DUP. Confidence and supply for the Tory government. There's a difference between institutional racism. And I think that institutional racism is where you look at processes that have been designed to have particular racialized outcomes. And they are also the sum total of conscious or unconscious biases held by the people that make up those institutions. And you need both those things, I think, for something to be institutionally racist. So there's that. And then these institutions have failed adequately to deal with racism. And I think that we're in that latter space here. And so then you've got to think, well, how do you improve? But I mean, there seems to have been quite a lot of work done here, right? It's been in the news for a long time. There's been reports. There's been high-profile expulsion from the party. You know which party is institutionally racist? The Tory party. And there ain't nothing. No one's mentioned it. No one's said anything about it. And this is... Because people go, yeah, that's why we vote for them. That's part of their marking. And I think this really is overplayed, like... And that's not to say there's no anti-semitism. Of course there's anti-semitism. But the idea that this should be the thing that overturns the Labour movement... Honestly, I don't know what more do you want? It seems there's been a big focus on this. So this is a very off-the-record thing that I heard. And so I'm not going to be naming the name. But a Labour MP of Tinge was asked Why don't you leave the Labour party over anti-semitism? You've got an anti-racist conscience. And he was just like, I'm a black man! Where am I going to go? Where am I going to go? Also I've had to deal with institutionally racist policy-making for all these years. And I think that this is where the fractiousness comes in. Where we're thinking about how do you integrate this into a wider anti-racist movement? Is that there are lots of people, in particular, thinking about Muslims and black people who are on the sharp end of the state apparatus, going, hang on, a second, we've been here all this time, and it's been happening, and we did get a news story. And I don't think that's the reason not to do things. And I think that's a very toxic thing, where you let sort of lowest common denominator politics seep into it. But at the same time, that's where the sense of perspective comes in, where you go, if we weren't able to eradicate anti-Semitism from society in 2000 years, you're not going to do it overnight from a membership of half a million people. You're simply not going to. A hugely interesting kind of theological background to this stuff, and the way in which the kind of evangelical right relates to Donald Trump. Because it's immediately a kind of political theological question, it's like, how do you get behind this guy who is, you know, who talks about grabbing women by the pussy, who has definitely had extramarital affairs, who is by all standards of Christian judgment utterly abhorrent. And in some ways, it's just because the evangelical fundamentalists are quite capable of practicing that kind of compartmentalization, cognitive dissonance. But also, there's a really great essay by Adam Kotzko, who's an American left theorist, thinker, who hears himself from that kind of theological background. And he talks about the way in which the American evangelical right thinks of Trump as a Cyrus. So Cyrus in the Old Testament is a king who is used by God unknowingly, you know, for the greater salvation of his people. So essentially, they're able to reconcile it in terms of this kind of providential plan, this kind of acting of God through his... It's a really deeply disturbing thought when you get into it. Cardi's socialist leanings are not just the result of trying to distance herself from Nicki Minaj. In fact, it was the other way around. So Cardi beat was when there was the Democrat primary for governor. She endorsed the one that used to be Miranda in Sex and the City. Cynthia Nixon. Cynthia Nixon. I went to her party. I don't know why I forgot her name, but I was just like, Miranda, she endorsed Cynthia Nixon. And then Nicki Minaj turns around and she's like, you know what, I'm going to endorse Cuomo, everyone in New York, Cynthia Nixon. So that was a strange quirk of ratbeats. But Cardi actually, I think is a really valuable political voice. She is authentic. She is to the point. She is saying to her fans, like, I understand this. You can too. There's no jargon. I like her. And the right knows that it does very well in culture wars. So when you've got a discussion point about Winston Churchill's legacy, spoiler alert, the man was a white supremacist racist. In his own words, in his own time, it would be insulting to his history. It would be insulting to him. He's turning his grave. I'm a racist. But they do, they do really well on that ground. And you know, and here's the thing is that at the moment to me, politics seems like it's a big fight between who wins on what vision. Is it a vision of a shared past or a shared future? And I'm scared as someone who really values anti-racist politics. That if I articulate it as strongly as I want to, I'm playing right into the culture wars narrative that the right wants from me. That's true, right? And I think like, I think what did we really underestimate how important that racism is to politics? I mean, I think what, since that year, the last 40 years, there's been 13 years of labor rule. And what is it that has kept the Tories in power for so long is they play racism really well. It's anti-immigration, right? And actually, Corbynism would be really popular if we just said this is national socialism. You say, look, it's just for white people, close the borders, which is why Corbyn's done exactly what he should do with Brexit. Corbyn cannot come out and say, yeah, all the immigrants come in. Because that does play 100% into you. To get the labor majority, you have to win between, I always drive from Birmingham to Manchester and it's literally after you get out of the city, between city to city, it's just lots of poor white areas that voted Tory, right? Those are the people you need to convince. And the way that the Tories have kept them on side, when it makes no economic sense at all, is because they play to this idea that we look after you, it's not about the migrants, et cetera, et cetera. And they played that book too perfection and the left has not been able to deal with it. I could have made a law and order point if they wanted to. And this is what Jacob Rees-Mogg essentially did. Although I think what he was doing on question time was, and this is why he's such a canny operator, is that he goes really hard, really hard, really hard and says something unexpected and you go, oh, he's unexpectedly reasonable. And he knows that hymn book and he sings from it. But he made essentially a law and order point, which is this is what the law says, you bring her back, she faces trial here. And in some ways that is a very traditionally conservative argument. Yeah, and I think, can you continue to have a government that deport criminals to other places? I don't even know what his discussion, she should be on a charter flight long time and should be in his role right now for the UK to deal with. This is legally, this is outrageous. Use of arbitrary power, although it exists on part of the British state, don't get me wrong, has not been dramatic or scandalous in the same way that it has been elsewhere. There's not been any kind of sharp break in government. These rights, rights to citizenship, rights to legal process, rights to challenge, the arbitrary actions of the state, these are not rights that exist just for people you like. The fact that they're guaranteed for you means they're guaranteed for other people. I particularly want to press you on, which is can you do anti-racism and economic left populism at the same time or do you have to make a choice? Can you? I mean, you can. I guess it depends, I suppose it kind of depends what the goal is. I think this is, if you look at the Labour Party buying which Corbyn's in, I don't know if he's pro-Brexit or anti-Brexit, but because of that immigration rhetoric, you just have to be. And Labour Party has to be anti-immigration to get in power. That's just the reality of the Labour Party. Now, the question is, do you push electoral politics? When we're talking about socialism, to my radicalism, maybe the political sphere, maybe the Labour Party can't possibly provide this. I mean, this is basically my argument, is that within the formal structures of the political of course you can't. Within the main course you can't, no. Do something else. Why are we relying on the Labour Party? And I think actually, the truth is that the left, the far left of the Labour Party should have broken off, they're the ones you should have broken off, because understanding that their politics, this can't work. Because there is a real problem in this country, the majority of the people are white. Obviously, whiteness is important. It kind of does frame a lot of these debates. And I have to say, if you want to get elected, then anti-racism is a bad idea. What I find really interesting, and you saw this with the school strike for climate protest last Friday, is that it started playing out as a culture wars issue. And you had the sort of turning point, UK, we're not far right really, mom, oh no, wait, hang on, someone's just been defending Hitler's domestic policy. Weird, weird, so weird. National socialism. Doing the thing of sort of denouncing it as a cultural phenomenon. You've got all the people who you would expect, Dan Hodges, Toby Young, all of that lot, sort of going after some school children for political hypocrisy. And I thought that that was sort of one moment where culture wars was working for us. Because you could just go, what is identitarian about not wanting the planet to die? I was doing some broadcast media and they were saying, no one cares about economics, it's all identity now, what about Black Lives Matter? And I was just like, hang on, hang on, hang on. What's identitarian about seeing Black people killed by the police, no trial, no arrest, no nothing? In this country, we don't even have capital punishment. What's the identitarian aspect of this? And I feel that when you ask the question of, well, why is this culture, that's your way of saying the thing that you want to say. Oh yeah, and I think that's, you can't win on the ground the culture wars are started unpervised by the right because they can't win the economic argument. Like you need to get poor white people to come along with you and the economics of this are pretty clear, that neoliberalism is terrible, it doesn't really work for you, right? So how do you bring the white, poor white people along? You bring them along with this cultural stuff, this anti-immigration rhetoric. It's the culture wars, it's not something that can ever work for you. The big difference in America and Britain is that Britain had its slaves in the Caribbean rather than on the island and this somehow is supposed to separate it. But actually the relationship between slavery is very similar actually and the relationship with the descendants of slaves is basically identical in both places. Even the migration thing we overplay because America is massive and the great migration from the South to the North is very similar in structure to the migration of the Caribbean to here. Although it doesn't get nationalized because we're not different nations, and if you look at how people are treated, they're identical, which is why someone like Malcolm just speaks, he's like, yeah, it's kind of the same. And then some of the African-American stuff, African-American studies is too insular. But then you have black feminism, for example, which has probably been the most influential, particularly for this generation, ideas of intersectionality, Kimberley Crenshaw. And also culturally, I mean, a lot of our culture comes from America anyway. So if you understand the hip-hop references and what that does and Cardi B, et cetera, it's a whole language that comes with it. So I think a lot of it is applicable, I think, and I think it has been applied. Chris Leslie, probably the most ideologically coherent out of them, this guy who, you know, he judged that the Labour Party had failed to appeal to which magazine readers in the 20s. Who reads which magazine? How is this a key? Don't ask me. Don't ask me. I didn't even know they still made which magazine. Who's all you shit like everyone else? Like everyone else is in there being like, you know, best like blackhead remover 2019. Like the rest of us, I don't wait for a magazine to tell me how to clear my pores. But he also, you know, thought that the Labour Party had been too hard on landlords in 2015 in general. Really? Which is, you know, a remarkable, remarkable reading. So yeah, I mean, this is the guy, and he also has said, you know, about Labour's economic policy in the last manifesto, but it would scare away big business and, you know, it would be, you know, it's unrealistic under the rule. So, you know, the thing that unites them, I think, on the economic front is capitalist realism, right? These are people who miss the old days of being able to say, there is no alternative, so you can choose, you know, brutal neoliberalism, but with, you know, a happy diversity face. What colour is your sanctions letter going to come in? Well, you can choose it with a kind of brutal Tory face. And then there are the people who, you know, there's this American Cold War liberal, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who, you know, who talks about the Vital Centre. These are the politicians of the dead centre. These are the people who, you know, really want things to reset to the way they were prior to 2008, really. That's, they are, you know, politicians of nostalgia. That, I think, is what unites them. I think, you know, is that, you know, that perspective economically. It can be more different than the way in which the leadership of the Labour Party now envisions its role. So it's not really a surprise on that front that they've gone.