 Good evening you out there watching. We are the progressive movement the m25 and it's Thursday evening in Europe and that can only mean one thing another live streamed meeting of our coordinating collective the people who as the name suggests coordinate our movement on tonight's agenda So we've got two items, what we call burning issues so detailing what's exploded around Europe and around the world this week and vitally what the m25 can actually do about them. And then we're going to discuss our model for change political model, whether we need to work inside the institutions, or from outside of them. So if you've got any comments, questions, ideas to fling at us since this is live streamed, just put them in the chat and I'll be reading out some of them in between the speakers. Everyone's got five minutes to introduce the topic in two minutes to react. Let's kick off who's starting. Anybody want to speak. I'll take it. Yes, no. We don't want to have these awkward poses, do we? Thanks, my friend. Two points, two issues, two burning issues. I'll start with something that is very high in my list of priorities, just because I just came back from Greek parliament where I had a clash with the Minister of Education and with the Prime Minister regarding this particular issue. The Greek government has just passed the bill as we speak. Maybe they will pass it the next hour after an exhaustive two days debate whereby university campuses, university colleges, university schools will be open game for the police. Up until now, for decades and decades and decades, even during the junta, at least in principle, the police had to have permission from the Senate, from the university authorities to enter the premises of an institution of tertiary education. Universities are supposed to be self-governing and the police can only enter or could only enter up until today at the invitation of the university authorities. In an act that is symbolic and the purpose of which is to kickstart or reinforce a cycle of authoritarians the government is now introducing a permanent presence of police with police stations within the schools and colleges of our universities. In other words, the urbanization, Erdoganization of Greece is continuing apace. But something that I think is of great interest to DEMIRs is that when I was scratching my head and trying to find out where did I get this fantastic idea from. You know, my wildest and most radical imagination could not home in on the source, but a colleague of mine, Sotiris Mitrellexis, pointed out that we should have been warned because WikiLeaks has published the answer. In one of the WikiLeaks documents, there is a transcript of a message from the ambassador of the United States of America, here in Athens, to the State Department, providing the State Department with a complete report on the situation in Greek universities. That was in 2009. And in it, there is chapter inverse, the instruction to the Greek government that they should introduce the police in universities. So, need I say more? WikiLeaks still remains, even older leaks remains a very good source for understanding what is going on today. Secondly, my second burning issue. Remember when the new president, relatively recent president Ursula von der Leyen of the European Commission made the Green Deal, not Green New Deal, but the Green Deal, her signature policy. It was what was going to distinguish the previous commission from this commission. DM25 has been at the forefront of coming up with a Green New Deal for Europe. One way of looking at this is to say, well, you know, we have been pushing the commission in the right direction. They have not adopted our Green New Deal for Europe. They dropped the new, which is a bit worrying because it means that they've dropped something really significant, like the financing of it. But they're moving in the right direction. That is one take. That's one explanation. But there is another explanation, which is the one that I want to put forward as far more valid. They are adopting the form. They are adopting the language. They are adopting some of the policies in order to move in the opposite direction of the one that humanity, Europe, progressive, progressive forces should be following, the opposite. You see, it's one thing to criticize the EU for dragging its feet, for moving too slowly, but in the right direction. It's quite another to say that they are going in the wrong direction. And I'll just give one example and then pass the button on to the next person. Take the case of the carbon tax. The carbon tax. Our policy in the Green New Deal is we impose a large, hefty carbon tax because we must. But the process from the carbon tax are used. All of them, every single penny, every single euro goes to the poorer Europeans. So effectively, it is not the state or the EU that taxes people for using diesel cars or for whatever it is that emits CO2 and other greenhouse gases and takes the money and does things with it. No, you tax everyone. Usually, mostly, the rich have a much greater foothold. And by taking this money and plowing it back into the poorer or the poorest of Europeans, it's a neutral carbon tax which affects a redistribution of wealth or income to the poor. So in a sense, it's not a tax on the poor. It is a tax on carbon that allows you to empower the poor. What is the European Union Commission doing? They're doing the opposite. Carbon tax, which is going to fund the commission because the commission is lacking a tax base because we don't have a federal government. So it's toxic. It is bound to turn the working classes against the green transition. This is something only DM25 can identify. And it is only us who can do that which matters. To come up with the Green New Deal that we have and to point out how the commission and the forces of establishment, whether it's Draghi in Italy or from the lion in Brussels or Merkel in Germany or Macron in France, they are sneaking the form, they are sneaking the right terms, they even need the idea of a carbon tax in order to affect even more inequality and to turn the masses against the green transition. Thank you, Yanis. Over to Patricia. Thank you. Well, Yanis just mentioned the green transition, the Green New Deal. Now, it's today news that in Italy, the new incoming government seems to create a ministry for the ecological transition. That is something completely new. I don't know, it's a good thing, it's a bad thing, but for sure it's something completely new. And it's already very controversial. Now, what DM25 always said is that no social justice is possible without the environmental one. So they are strictly connected. What I hope and I like to think about is that with this, always if it's going to be created, but anyway, if there is this chance, this new chance in Italy, we can relaunch with force all the policies that can be made. As DM25, we first talked about five years ago when nobody talked about these specific things. It's very, the idea to have a ministry for the ecological transition can maybe keep last someone, but let me convert and ask, for example, to my DM25 comrades what they think about that. Thank you, Patricia, who would like to comment on that. Floor is open. Anybody? Ivana. Well, I will try just to make a couple of examples of possible threats or traps that we can fall into celebrating some moves of our governments or celebrating victories of Democrats such as Biden's victory and so on. So I have an example from Serbia and a very positive advertisement, almost article from, I think BBC it was, about Serbian government being very efficient with vaccinations and featuring a good example of international collaboration that Serbia has vaccines from Russia and from China, and a small amount from EU, which is something that is not even near the truth. And we can on one side say, yes, we do have one amount of Chinese and Russian vaccines and so on, but it's nothing to celebrate about Serbian government. That's an official example. And the other one is some kind of government from the shadow that we have right now with various public figures that emerged during the decades that are trying to counter the official government. It's the two sides of the same coin and nothing to welcome and nothing to celebrate. And if we are going to move forward with DMs ideas, we should all, of course, push forward our agenda and our program, but we shouldn't let it be hijacked by these informal structures or formal, such as Ministry for Green Transition in Italy. Thanks, Ivana. Luis. Yeah, I completely agree with that. That's nothing to rejoice about the optics from establishment, you know, these things. However, I do think that we as EM need to take advantage of every single opportunity that we have to hacking to every discussion, every table, every forum that there is out there and push, as Ivana said, our agenda and denounce the charades, the hypocrisy and the use of public funds to create optics and be very, very explicit as to what we have to put on the table. I think that it's an opportunity. We need to use these forums, these discussions, these ministries, whatever open calls there are that the establishment tries to make it as democratic and open for everybody to jump in to precisely do that. So that's it for me. Thank you, Luis. Who would like to go next? Rosemary. The thing is, the appearance form that the government can put on can be extremely deceptive. We last at the end of last year had an excited announcement Boris Johnson of a 10 point pledge towards the battle against climate change. One of the key headlines was that they're going to get households involved 600,000 household hose in converting to heat pump heating. And they set up a scheme. This amazing scheme turns out to be managed by US administrator who can't administrate. So it's beginning to sound horribly like a lot of the things that happen with COVID-19 in the UK. All the renewable businesses, a lot of small businesses that piled in in order to help these households make the transition. And all the agencies that recruited new green sustainable jobs for renewable experts who could help install these heat pumps are getting bankrupt. And they're going to go to the central centre because out of the 600,000 over months and months and months, they've only managed, I think, 17,000 households so far. There's no apology. The government comes back and says, Oh, well, there are other various grant schemes that you can apply for. And nobody says boo, but you have to ask the question. One way that Yanis is talking about is in this dark way. This is one way of putting people off from the one aspect of the template point pledge, which actually concerns commitment of British people in households to trying to make this climate change thing work. This is to show them that, you know, it's a dead end with people giving up left, right and centre and businesses losing money and going out of business. I don't actually think so. I think in this case, it's just the old neoliberal ideology, which says it's the responsibility of individuals to do everything. It's on their shoulders. And of course, this is completely meaningless because meanwhile, the government is having to take huge strategic decisions between hydrogen production and the renewable alternatives. And we hear absolutely nothing about that. Then there's the celebration of the COP 21 in Glasgow. Johnson is going big on how there's going to be another world beating UK exercise. But he admitted to let the Cumbrian authorities know we've just been organizing something around a new cold pit, which has been extremely embarrassing for everybody. And now they've come under a lot of pressure in that local authority because they hadn't heard of the implications of the template pledge. So this is a very, very complex field that one enters into. And it's very difficult to draw out the strands that are really useful for advancing people's cause and the ones that are really deceptive. Thanks very much Juliana. Yes, I wanted to add that. If I look here in Germany, for example, if you see at the parties and who's financing them and you see that so much money goes from industries which are, you know, in opposition to green transition, they finance this political landscape and I think this is also a very big part of the problem that it's not only political will that is missing but there is also a lots of corruption from the automobile industry in Germany, for example. And they did not only mess up in Germany, they messed up also in the US with all these scandals around the cars and the wrong numbers. And the cars weren't so clean as they promoted them and so on and so on. And I think it's really also important to point out where these connections are so people don't get full of all these greenwashing policies and and institutions that got built that get built up. And there is a, I think this this big link, which shows that it's all just for the show and not genuine. Thanks, Giannis. I'll begin with an answer to Patricia. The message to DMR says, never miss an opportunity to enter an institution. I get invited left to right and center by the worst outfits in the universe by bankers by, you know, the oligarchy personified in the form. I mean, the other day I only spoke at the event sponsored by Davos for goodness sake. But the question is, how do we present that? Do we present this as, oh, yes, we've been invited. It's great, isn't it? The world is moving in the right direction. They want us, DMRs to be part of it. No, no, because they are co-opting us. They want to be their handmaidens. No, what we need to do is we need to go in there and give them, share with them a piece of their mind. Tell them why they are the problem and that they cannot greenwash their awful brown black policies. We have no right to celebrate the fact that they still are ideas because they take the ideas to deny them their substance. Like, you know, Macron stole from DM25 and I know that, directly from DM25, the idea of a constitutional assembly for Europe. And he turned it into this travesty of the future of Europe conference, which is simply a lifestyle event, the purpose of which is to do nothing except to legitimize. So we have to remain radical in our analysis, like I explained before regarding, you know, carbon taxes. Yes, we must not be happy because somebody said, OK, carbon tax, your idea. Let's take it. No, because you have to look at the way they're going to use it. When they talk about, you know, greening the portfolio of the European Central Bank, that is another way of justifying quantitative easing, the purpose of which is effectively to make Volkswagen more powerful. Yeah, we have to understand that they are in the business of greenwashing everything. And we cannot be allowed to be duped by that. You know, Rosemary before said that mentioned Boris Johnson. Boris Johnson and Rosemary did something even more extreme. He stole from a friend Jeremy Cobing the expression green industrial revolution. But if you look at the substance of what he's offering, it's rubbish. There's nothing there. There's very tiny specks of green. There is no industry and there is definitely no revolution. So for us to say, oh, yes, they're going in the right direction. This is to lobotomize ourselves. Let's not do it. Okay. Well, that's a nice segue to the second item on our agenda, which really kind of speaks to the radicality of the DM 25. Because we've been we've been out there for five years. What is our model for political change? Do we need to be inside the institutions to reform them? Do we need to be lobbying and asking nicely? Or should we be looking at changing them from the outside? And if we do that, should we be doing that like merit 25, like a political startup? Or are we into building coalitions? So your views on this would be appreciated, everybody. Eric is the first to speak. It wasn't on this topic, but I'm sure I can reshape what I wanted to say to adapt to what you just said. I completed an agreement with what Yanis just said. And OK, to speak to what Mechan just said. Look, what is quite worrying. And I think that's something that when DM set off in 2016 is set off to try and amend is that for many years, political movements, especially progressive political movements and political movements of the left had been reduced to political beggars. They had fallen for this neoliberal trap which divides democracy into the governed and the governors, you know, the people in power and the people not in power, which is which is the root opposite of a democracy, you know, in a democracy, the people are in power and differentiating the people from those in power is to admit essentially that you don't live in a democracy, which might be true, but it's not something that should be taken as a standard. So this political approach whereby the left is reduced to fighting within a world that it doesn't agree with in the context that is everything it opposes, and always trying to simply lobby those in power to try and change the minds of those in power and try to educate them into taking making better decisions is is is a full zero. It's nonsense. It's utter nonsense because politicians that act against the interests of people, they don't do so because they don't know any better. They do so because they didn't set off to serve people in the first place. They are, you know, governed and under the influence of certain political interests that got them to power in the first place, whether it is the party that they're a member of or whether it is private interests that help them sponsor their campaign or whatever else have you. But it's not an accident and to always try and influence those in power as if there's something separate to us is essentially to undermine the concept of democracy in itself to give up on the idea of democracy and it's awful. And you see this tendency you see it everywhere, you know, you sometimes see it even within DM and I think it is a culture that we need to oppose because it's against everything that DM set off to to fix. It's it's not democracy in Europe, you know, so I really think that DM 25 when it sets off to do something and is to look at a the context what is the context who are the people that we're talking to and not to suffer any illusions about whether or not their minds are going to be changed, you know, whether we can persuade them in order to have political weight in a conversation and negotiation, you need to have political capital, you need to go on to the negotiating table with people behind you with political power behind you. And then you have a chance of influence, you're not going to influence people who are in the positions they're at to serve certain political interests, you're not going to persuade them just because you have a better idea than they do. That is not the basis of which politics is done. Thank you, Eric. Sorry to cut you off. We've got two minutes interventions. Simona. I wasn't not saying anything. You raised your hand, your virtual hand. Okay, fine. No, I just applauded because I totally and I said that was Eric. It was two virtual hands applauding. Forgive me. I thought it was I want to speak one virtual hand. Okay. Anyone else like to chime in. Anyone. Johannes. I actually, I didn't, I haven't prepared anything but I'm building on what Eric said, I think. If you look at examples of political change that has happened. For example, I saw a very nice documentary about the movement in Barcelona that brought out a call out into power. The party is unfortunately not here tonight, but something I remember very dearly and what is often. Yeah, mistaken or done gone wrong in the past is once movements like, you know, once the Social Democratic Party in Germany was definitely a driver for change but when you get into the position of power. You need that pressure from the people from the street. Otherwise, if you don't have that pressure and don't have that force behind your, your party that that that got into power or your movement. Then it all falls apart and you will be, you know, against the media against the big, the big companies, the big money. And if you don't have the people power the street power behind you you will not achieve something. So, in that documentary, there was a close associate of other call out saying that he was actually saying, Okay, now we won the election. Now our work begins and you need to stay on the streets and you need to help us to really change something. If you now think that we won, then nothing will change. Thanks. Yannis, there are those critics of DM 25 who during the last five years have correctly said that come on folks. What do you think you're going to do? You think you're going to enter the institutions in Brussels and convince them that you're right. They don't care whether you're right or not. They are following the imperatives of a cartel. And, you know, they will do whatever it is that they do and the weak must suffer what they must. They're right in that. But where they're on is that we were never naive enough to think that it was the power of our policies and of persuasion that's going to make a difference. But let's face it, the EU is not a federation. Yeah, even if we had a federal party, you know, a transnational party, we wouldn't be able to contest an election where we would be able to install a federal government in Europe that is going to carry out our Green New Deal, because there is no such structure, federal structure. Even if we win power in one country, right, we will send one minister in the ministry in the council. So, coming just concluding, Mehran, theory of change, our theory of change is that we can only transform, we cannot reform the EU through blah, blah. But we can transform the EU through conflict, through being prepared to enter the European Union Council, the Eurogroup, whatever, even from one country or two countries if we can. And in there, veto the hell out of them. In there, you know, cause paralysis so that there is a clash and the EU either transforms itself into something which it is not or it perishes. It will be democratized or it will disintegrate. So my message to those who have been following DM for a very long time within DM is comrades, this is not going to be easy. It hasn't been easy and it needs us to be ready for a major conflict. And those who are outside criticizing us for being naive, no, men, mates, we are not naive. We believe that on the one hand it is not progressive to say, let the whole thing collapse. But on the other hand, right, we are not entering those institutions in order to be good boys and girls. We are entering those institutions to say no. Thank you, Yanis Beral. I fear that you're muted, Beral. I really agree with Yanis last words because I was also thinking about it. But what I observe here in Turkey at least, but maybe also it's the same in Europe, politicians are able to do what they can and what they want to do because they are supported by the bureaucrats. So there is a huge population of bureaucrats. For example, in Ankara there are 3 million bureaucrats, I know. So they make it very possible for the politicians to do what they do because they work behind the politicians. And PR companies, they are presenting to the politicians projects. And these companies are copying what, for example, NGOs or DM is doing. They are copying and presenting these ideas, these projects to the politicians. So I think we should make, I don't know, a move towards this direction. And they shiffer their position within the political media of the countries. Thank you, Beral. And before we wrap up, we've got a question from the chat from Angie Kay. She says, I think in response to what you just said there, Yanis, that if we would veto and block the policies of the politicians, what would be their counter strategy is the question? What other weapons do we have in our arsenal? Who would like to take this? Yanis. Well, you see, the one good thing that the European Union architecture gives you is veto power. You can paralyze the thing. Let me give you a simple example so that it's tangible. Last summer, a progressive government could have sent to everybody else in the EU council. Here are three or four conditions for me to vote in favor of the EU budget. Or Bandit, the fascist did it and got away with murder. He got everything he wanted. And what did he want? Free rein to be corrupt in Hungary. And he got it. Now, how about progressives using it to use a carbon tax and then redistribute it to the poor? And say, unless we do that, I'm not signing. There will be no EU budget. The whole thing will collapse. Now, that is a weapon. But you've got to be prepared to use it. Thank you, Yanis and Rosemary. Oh, I just wanted to add that, thank goodness, we didn't spend all our time in the institutions. And there are people to persuade, but there are fellow democratic citizens as we try and defend democracy. I think that's a huge job for all of us. And it's the one that really keeps me hopeful about the future. Thank you for that hopeful note. And I think on that we will end this part of our discussion and move to the boring internal part. Thank you all of you out there watching, listening to this.