 Well hello Edinburgh, how dare I welcome you to the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the foremost literature festival certainly in the United Kingdom if not in the world. Do we agree? It's my favourite anyways and that's what counts because I'm the chair. A little bit of power corrupt, does it not? But an even bigger welcome to the main event, to today's star turn, Yanis Varoufakis. Please join me in giving him a fantastic welcome. Now you will know that Yanis requires very very little introduction. That's why he's doing about 17 different events at this festival and interviewing various up-and-coming people including I think my boss in a couple of days. So I'm going to sort of try and behave myself. He might put in a word for me. My daughter puts it in two words, that you have very well the area. Well, that's to be seen. But he is a people's economist, he has confounded my expectations about economists and he has in particular written very recently two wonderful books that I know you'll want to buy and read if you haven't already. The most recent books being Adults in the Room, a beautifully written Greek tragedy about Yanis's experiences of being a minister of that journey from academic and activist to finance minister and the Greek tragedy that ensued beautifully written. It reads like a novel, like a thriller. I really do encourage you to read it. And then for people like me who thought that economics was a discipline that was really deliberately mystified by people who were presenting it as some kind of natural science rather than the politics that I always suspected it was, I do recommend talking to my daughter about the economy. And it's a fantastic conceit because I think your daughter Yanis is 14 but I actually felt it was written for 49-year-olds like me. But that's what we do. That's what we do. We pretend to write books for teenagers so that we can read them. Well it worked for JK Rowling so all the best with that. But I'm sure this audience will want to know just a little bit about your beginnings and your motivations. I know you talk not a huge amount but a little bit in both books about your parents. Perhaps you could speak a little more about your dad than your mum but would you just tell me a little bit about those early influences? Well in a sense my mother and father are a reflection of a polarized Greek society. My mother I remember telling me when I was young that she grew up during a fascist dictatorship. We had a fascist regime that was installed in Greece in 1936 so she was becoming an adult during that time. And I was growing up in a fascist dictatorship that was installed in 1967. So we had this common foundation. But on top of that look I just cut to the chase very quickly as to why my mum and dad represented polarized society. My father ended up in a concentration camp for communists. He wasn't a communist. They put him in there because he refused to denounce communism on the basis that the state does not have the right to ask him to denounce Buddhism, Islam, Communism, anything. And of course they said okay off you go straight into a concentration camp and of course that was a camp for communists so he joined the communist party. So they turned him into a communist. And then he came out four years later a shadow of a man and went back to the School of Chemistry of Athens University which is where my mother as a slightly younger person had just entered and she was the first female student ever to have entered the natural sciences at the University of Athens and imagine the kind of treatment that she received from professors, from fellow students, the discrimination. So she became a proto-feminist as a result of this experience. But because she had a very bad experience with communists in her neighborhood during the Civil War she had become anti-communist and she was approached by a fascist anti-communist student group and recruited and they could see that she needed some kind of support mechanism so they recruited for a couple of months. Her first mission was to keep tabs on a communist who had just come back from a concentration camp and to give in reports that would go to the fascist grouping and the fascist grouping would then pass it on to the police and I'm the result. But I remember when I was much older person. Of course very soon after that the two of them converged politically to the left wing of the Labour Party or the equivalent of the Labour Party. But during moments of tension in the household there were occasions where my mother would call him a bloody commie and she would call her a bloody fascist. Very, very, very briefly. In the nicest possible way. In the nicest possible way. And one of the things we have, we have a number of things in common, comrade, but we have the University of Essex in common and you studied first maths and then became the economist that you are. Actually it's slightly more complicated, I think you will enjoy that. I enrolled to study on a joint economics and mathematics degree, but two weeks into semester one of year one I realised that economics was third rate mathematics. So I thought, well why study third rate mathematics? He said that, I didn't say that. So I dropped economics altogether so I don't have a first degree in economics. I almost escaped economics cleanly and efficiently. And then I did a master's in mathematics. So I thought that I had made a clean getaway. So here's my question, Janice. These books are so beautifully written. They are not written by a maths or economics wonk. They are rich with literary references and cultural references, everything from star tricks and the matrix to methistophilies and Shakespeare. Where did all that come from? Where does our culture come from? It doesn't come from school. It doesn't come from university. If you rely on your school and your university for your culture you end up like Boris Johnson. Wow. I can see that we're into... So if you don't read on your own because you enjoy it. We're into letter box diplomacy this afternoon I think. Right. He's flawed me with the Boris Johnson remark. I didn't think I'd have to deal with Boris Johnson in Edinburgh. I have to say of all places. But more seriously this book, Adults in the Room, is your story, your very personal story about that experience, that extraordinary experience that you had in 2015 of going as this already world-class economist, already a seasoned activist, but literally going into the jaws of the deep establishment and becoming a finance minister. Was it at all therapeutic to write? I think it was probably painful to write, but... Usually therapeutic experiences are painful. Therapy has to be painful in order to work. I wrote it because my partner in everything that I see here she can testify to this. When I resigned I just had this great urge to make sure that I put things on paper before I forgot what happened as a record. It was extremely painful. I had to relive that six month period without the hope or the adrenaline. So the first time when you experience something that is extremely tumultuous, something that is very stressful, at least you are being carried by the adrenaline and the sense of optimism and hopefulness that something good may come out of it. When you relive it without them, it's very painful. But in the end, of course, it was cathartic. So Janis wrote of the moment when he was presented with this opportunity stroke dilemma of taking on this very, very impossible, but certainly hugely important job of being the finance minister of a bankrupt country that was seeking to renegotiate, seeking to take on the troika, the great financial institutions of the continent and the globe really. He wrote, the moment of truth had arrived in front of me there lay an offer I could refuse. The risks of accepting were clear and mountainous. Whilst I liked Alexis, the Greek Prime Minister, that is, and was willing to believe in him, the events of 2012 and more recently, his casual disregard of our stoneship agreement to involve me in the shaping of Syria's Thetalonica programme had given me more than sufficient cause for scepticism. And as Dan, I said, that's Janis' wife, after my subsequent return to Austin, I was exploitable because I was expendable. If you bring back a decent deal, they will claim the credit. If not, you will get the blame. But at the same time, when you are facing the reality of a nation in dead bondage and two generations that are being unnecessarily and brutishly wasted, because that's what we have in Greece. We have a process of desertification. We are losing 15,000 young people every month because it's a bankrupt country, which is kept bankrupt for political reasons that have nothing to do with Greece. At that point, you think, okay, even if there is one chance in a million that by accepting that position, you can make a difference. Do you really have an option? You have to take it. I mean, you have an option, but not morally. You have to accept the crashing calculus of probabilities just in case one tiny possibility materializes, and you help your fellow citizens escape from effectively a debtor's prison, a kind of Victorian workhouse. This is what Greece has become since 2010. And it was worth it, even though I failed. That debtor's prison metaphor is incredibly powerful for the bondage that you described. There are many villains in your book, if I may say so. There are lots of flawed people and frail people, but there are many villains, I would say, people that are hugely disappointing, people that were just double dealing, people who said one thing to you in private and then said something else in an official meeting at the highest level. But that's politics, isn't it? I mean, that's the vast majority of politicians are like that. And we know that. I mean, I don't know about you, but when I entered that scene, I knew this was going to happen. I didn't expect it of the people that lured me into doing it, with whom we had supposedly a bond of brotherhood and sisterhood. But look, when I was writing this book, I tried not to have any villains in it, except perhaps one, whom I'm not going to mention. That's my punishment of him. I tried to portray everyone, to give every character in that book their best chance to defend what they were doing by presenting their own thinking, the stories they were telling themselves were doing what they were doing. In a sense, I tried to write these characters as faithfully to reality as I could and in a way that did not demonise them, in a way that effectively had playwrights, characters who are flawed, who are neither very bad nor very good, doing what they think is best, given their circumstances and their constraints, but whose actions, when combined with one another, produce a tragic. Well, it's interesting that you talk about playwrights, because I've said to our friends here that it reads like a novel, but there are times when it is actually written like a play, because you do go into verbatim script, almost, of your words and the other words. How is that possible? Were you doing a little surveillance of your own? Of course I was. You were secretly recording conversations? Absolutely. You know, it didn't happen by design. Let me share this in the book, but I'll share the experience. I go into the first meeting of Ministers of Finance. That was my inaugural Eurogroup meeting, as it's called. The meeting had me, at the centre, being attacked constantly and mercilessly by the German Finance Minister, by his cheerleaders, who were the Finance Ministers of former communist countries, by the Spanish Finance Minister and the Portuguese Finance Minister who had imposed upon their countries crashing austerity, and therefore, if I managed to get away without doing the same, then they would have trouble explaining to their own people as to why they didn't do a Varoufakis as they put it. Ten and a half hours, I was just receiving the slings and arrows of about 30 people in there. At the end of that meeting, which was a soul destroying meeting, I came out, dazed, confused, with a threat that the banks of our nation would be closed within five days. These are seriously stressful moments. I had given press conference exuding confidence and optimism because this is what the Finance Minister must do when inside me I was dying. And then immediately after the press conference, I called my secretary and said, get me a transcript of the tenth and a half hours because the next day I would have to go to my parliament in Athens to report to the house what had happened during those ten and a half hours because that was a meeting in secret. I would have to inform the cabinet, the prime minister and I have to confess that after ten and a half hours, of course I remember what had happened but not verbatim, you know. When you are under so much psychological and physical stress, there are things you forgot who exactly said what and the order in which it was said. So I asked for a transcript and minutes of the meeting. She called me ten minutes later saying, Minister, I was told that there are no minutes. No records at all. Meanwhile, this happened two or three or four times, so I would also have TETETET meetings with the Commission, with the International Monetary Fund, with the European Central Bank. And I respected the rules of confidentiality. They didn't. They were leaking to the press, horribly distorted versions of what had been said by me, by them and I realized that there is no way I can defend myself because, you know, the press corps works in completely unmysterious ways. So what happens is your interlocutor has one or two favoured reporters, usually working for the financial times in the Wall Street Journal. They feed them the distorted versions of the truth. That gets printed in the FD in the Wall Street Journal. Then immediately all the other newspapers copy it because, you know, journalists are very lazy people. And then it's wall-to-wall coverage globally, and a version of the truth that has nothing to do with the truth is registered as the truth. And I have absolutely no way of defending myself, so after a while I started recording every meeting. And I told them that. And then they limited massively the distortions. They even apologized and print for things they had said. And the only reason why there were no libel cases about this book is because they knew that I can back up every dialogue which is in there. Well, there seems to be a lesson for us all. Go, you know, go and quit. But what are the lessons for us in the United Kingdom at this particular moment, on the basis of your very, very brutal experience of 2015? Well, I'll just choose two lessons. One concerns Brexit. I've been saying this since the referendum, and this was my advice to both parties, but primarily to the government because it was the government's remit to begin the negotiations. Do not start negotiations with the apparatus that Brussels will send you. Mr Bernier has no mandate to negotiate. Mr Bernier is being sent over to London not to negotiate. He is a bureaucrat. He has a checklist of the things that he will demand of you. And he himself said so. Remember the first time he gave a press conference, he said there will be a two-phase negotiation. Phase one, Britain gives us everything we want. Phase two, we will discuss what you may want. This is a declaration of hostilities. Imagine me coming to you saying, okay, first you're going to give me everything I want, and then once you've given me everything I want, then we can discuss what you want, but no commitment that I'm going to give it to you. So the strategy of the Tory government of sending Mr Davis initially, then I don't know whom. Now it's Mrs May doing it herself. To negotiate with Bernier would always going to lead to an 11th hour ultimatum from Brussels, take it or leave it, of a very bad deal. Because unfortunately, and I'm saying this as a pro-European, somebody who campaigned against Brexit in favour of Remain. Unfortunately, the moment the people of Britain voted to leave, the European Union bureaucracy had one incentive, to humiliate Britain. They do not want a mutually advantageous agreement. It is a nightmare for them to strike a mutually advantageous agreement with Britain. Because for them what matters is to signal to the rest of the riffraff in Europe, to the Spaniards, the Greeks, the Italians, that if you dare challenge us, you will be crushed. This is what they did with us. And this is why I've been advocating a completely different approach and always style agreement. To people who said that there's a tension in your politics and a tension in your story between Varifakis, the proud European and internationalist, and Varifakis who is railing against these corrupt elite, closed, secretive, undemocratic institutions. That's the predicament of every progression. Remember the trade unions movement in the 19th century? The Labour Party? What was it set up to do? It was set up to challenge an establishment that was pursuing policies and implementing laws, the purpose of which were to constrain democracy, the purpose of which was to magnify inequality and to preserve the privileges of the privileged class. When you are starting a progressive movement against a regime which is holding people back, holding the majority back, holding the many back, you are challenging the institutions of the state, but that does not mean that you are challenging the state. To be genuinely patriotic British or Scottish or English, whatever, or Greek for that matter, as a patriot you've got to criticise your government when your government is wrong, and that is not to go against your country. Similarly as a proud Europeanist, it is my duty to criticise Brussels because Brussels is destroying and disintegrating the European Union through this combination of authoritarianism and inanity. And denialism? Inanity. Stupidity. You do write at length about idiocy. I can't remember in which one of the books, but you go back to the Greek roots. These are wonderful books. As I say, many villains, even more human, frail, tragic characters, but one hero. There's one hero I noticed in adults. And that's Danai who is with us. My bitter half. And those of you who have read this book will know why. But those of you who have yet to read the book must know that whilst Yannis and many other people display moral courage, there is absolute physical courage displayed by Danai in one particular incident. This may amuty. Just now I was talking to Yannis and Danai outside and I was congratulating her and admiring her because at one stage in the story, she physically comes between Yannis and a group of violent thugs in anathans restaurant. And they have broken bottles and they are attacking Yannis and his party in this restaurant. And she puts herself. She embraces him and puts herself between the violent attackers and her husband. I'm sort of expressing admiration as anybody would outside this venue. And I said, I'm these fascists and you took them on. And the two of them said they weren't fascists, they were anarchists. This is the problem with coming to the Edinburgh Book Festival and talking to intellectuals. You get the, you know, you confuse anarchists and fascists. So that was my schoolgirl era. But nonetheless, you both had to endure not just character assassination, but sometimes, you know, very serious intimidation as well. Yes. Yes, but you know, as Masha Ayokina said in the previous event, if you keep fearing such acts of violence, then you never do anything. And then you become prisoner of your fear. And as Franklin Roosevelt said quite correctly in 1933, the only thing we must fear is fear itself. And in the end, we must ridicule the fear. And we must push constantly against it without ever overcoming it. Otherwise, we are prisoners. We are unfree people. We are unfree people. We are indeed another lesson for us. If I could just, before I open up to friends in this little gathering of ours to make their questions and their comments and my favourite, by the way, which is comments very thinly veiled as questions. You know how to do that, don't you? You just have a little rant, not too long, just a little rant and then say, don't you think? Like question time in Parliament. Like question time in Parliament. Or if you're really good at it, you just elevate your voice a little bit at the end of the sentence like you're French or Australian or something like that. So while you're formulating your contributions, I would just say, for one little bit of mischief, you can tell I loved your books, but the one thing I was missing was perhaps a little bit more feminism, particularly in the book that you wrote for your daughter, which is a wonderful explanation of your economic thinking. But maybe there could have been a little bit more of the commoditisation of women themselves and the lack of recognition of women's work perhaps. So we might look forward to a further volume perhaps from Professor Varanakis on feminism. I confess entirely. The adults in my memoir of 2015, there are two things that I felt were seriously missing from it. One was the people. They're not in that book. It's a book about what was happening to me, what I was experiencing behind closed doors, in our home, on the phone. That's the result of, and there aren't enough women. But you know why that is? Because during those six months I was encased in a patriarchal male-dominated establishment and I just wanted to write down my memoirs of that experience. But the result is that from others in the room, the masses out there are almost absent. Except that when they do come in, they are wonderful. Yes, but not enough. The cleaners in the ministry, that's a wonderful moment when you go to the ministry and the cleaners who've been locked out and not paid for however long are there. They were dismissed. It's amazing. The country goes bankrupt because of the oligarchy, effectively feasting on billions and billions and billions of loans. The state is bankrupt. The banks are bankrupt. The bankers are bailed out, of course, like everywhere. And the ministry, which is administering the most harsh austerity in the history of the world. Seriously. We had a 15% reduction. 15% of GDP was lobbed off state expenditure. So you have a situation where somebody was receiving, like, say, 1200 quid a month pension. Now has to live on 250. We're talking about such brutality. And the ministry that was administering these misanthropic, antisocial measures while paying advisers for the government ministers and alternate ministers and junior ministers, princely sums, to advise them to do what, to cut. I mean, why do you need expertise to cut? You just take a cleaver and you cut. You don't need to pay an adviser 250,000 pounds a year to advise you on how to cut a pension, right? And the same ministry fired 300 part-time cleaning women, cleaners, who were receiving 300 euros a month. And some of them had been working for 20, 25 years. They were 60 years of age. They would never get another job. And the first thing I did when I moved into the ministry was to rehire them. And the might of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, Wall Street, the German government came crashing down upon me because I dared to rehire those 300 women. These are the ones that Shami is talking about. And you compare them to Greenham Common women, don't you? Oh, because I was at Greenham Common during the early 80s. I was there a lot of the time. And I got exactly the same sensation, the way that those women, two groups of women were organizing their public protest. You've got to remember the cleaning ladies of the Ministry of Finance had come outside the ministry for two years. So that's the comparison of Greenham Common. The way they were beaten up at night by thugs, working for the deep state. The way that they were beaten up by riot squads. The way that they were being denigrated by the equivalent of the times. Or, you know, the Guardian even. There are no journalists here. I said the equivalent of the guy. So the comparison was there. But if I may, just a second lesson from the book that I think we should take out for Britain. It's the one that I spoke of the day after your boss was elected, leader of the Labour Party. The manner in which the election of a decent politician, a dignified politician, who nevertheless goes against the grain of the establishment's policies. Triggers of a fantastically planned character assassination attempt, which then leads to pressures within your party so that a very Greek coup, in our case, a very British coup, in your case, will be in the offing in case he becomes Prime Minister. So that either he's forced to turn himself into a new Ramsay MacDonald, or to be pushed out. This is, I think, the lesson that the Labour Party and the people of Britain can get out of this. Because this is precisely the process. I don't know what you mean. This has never experienced anything like this myself. Perhaps we could have some, a little light, and we could open this discussion up to... Oh, aren't you pretty? And so young. So who would... We've got four roving mikes and some very athletic colleagues who are going to whizz around. Why don't I do some groups of three with that, Suzy Janys, groups of three? So why don't we start on this side and then we'll go to the middle so can we have a group of three over here? Can we start in the front row here, please? And then we'll have two more in this group. Hello. I agree with your comment about the press. People like us can only work off information. How would you suggest we get that information? Great. And a second. Thank you. And then we'll go further back for the third. I believe that you did support the Remain campaign, but I was curious to know what mechanism you think could be used to democratise the European Union structure. Thank you very much, and then over there, yes. We've mainly been talking about economics, but often bad economics leads to demagoguery and then military adventurism. Do you have any concerns with what's going on in the country next door to you with Mr Erdigan? Are you concerned that he will go back to the sort of adventurism which we saw when there was a previous military leadership in both of your countries? Wonderful. Three, fantastic. And when you do get the mic, do you hold it really? I think you need to hold it really, really close to be heard. So the press, what do we do? We still need the information. How would you democratising Europe and Turkey? Jeremy Corbyn has demonstrated quite magnificently. And I think we did it in Greece too before 2015, that it is perfectly possible to ignore the toxic media, to ignore the character assassination attempts, to use social media and also a steadfast determination to stick to an honest account of the choices that the people are facing. In the end, this will persevere as far as your task is concerned as a citizen, as a voter. I think you have an obligation. We all have an obligation to go beyond the sun, the times, the telegraph, the guardian to seek information from first principles ourselves. We now have the tools to do it. To be an active citizen means actively to search for the truth behind the propaganda. The only way we can restore democracy and we can keep it alive is to be active. Both as politicians and as activists to treat the media with the contempt that they deserve because after all we live in something like Soviet times, there is one line that is coming from the establishment media, but in the end, most people don't believe it anymore. But what we must believe, just like dissidents in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s found ways of becoming informed about what was going on in their country, we need to do the same thing in the West and we must stop relying on the comfortable illusion that we live in a mediatic democracy, we don't. On the question of what we do to democratise Europe. Look, the democratisation of Europe is not going to take place through negotiating with Barneur through discussions within the European Union Summit. It will have to involve a pan-European democratic movement that effectively storms the castles of the institutions of Europe in exactly the same way that we have to do it in our own nations, in our own states, in our own countries. We need to take over the institutions of our democracies and to make them work for the demos. That will not be an easy task, but compare and contrast two possibilities, two scenarios. One is Britain gets out of the European Union and goes its own way hoping to reconstitute democracy within the borders of the United Kingdom. That's one scenario. How well do you think this is going to work? I don't think it's going to work very well. Because most of the problems you are facing in this country are like climate change. You need local action, but you need internationalism as well. Whether it is a question of pushing up investment in good quality jobs in the green economy. Whether it is a question of alleviating poverty. You cannot alleviate poverty in Britain when the rest of Europe is sinking into greater inequality and more poverty in Spain, in Greece, in Italy. You cannot create a green transition in this country when we have more and more investment in diesel technology in Germany and in France. We need to work together on this. The second scenario is this. Actually, I had the audacity of proposing it to George Osborne once. We were in Ecofin. Ecofin is the gathering of the ministers of finance of the European Union. Europe will be Ecofin, not just the euro area. I said to him, George, you actually had a good relationship on a personal basis. Nobody is perfect. I said to him, we were in agreement in criticising certain policies that were coming out of France and Germany. I said, look, why did we bind together and veto the hell out of them? Every time they come up with a policy which you think is un-democratic or not in the interests of Britain, Greece and so on, why don't we just veto them together in other countries as well? We open other finance. Of course, he looked at me as if I was an instrument of Satan. Because the only time George Osborne ever spoke in Ecofin was to defend the city of London. Never spoke a word, even in edgeways about anything else. But imagine a situation where you have a progressive government in Britain, one or two progressive governments in Europe and we veto the hell out of them. Now that is a far more effective way of transforming the European Union. Ideally, what I would like to see is a grassroots movement. This is what we've done with DiM25, the Democracy in Europe movement, across Europe that is pushing for what we call constitutional assemblies everywhere in Europe to decide, to discuss amongst ourselves what kind of governance we want across Europe to deal with the four crises that are pulling our societies apart. The crisis of private debt, which is destroying this country, yet again. The crisis of public debt, which is always the excuse behind austerity. The crisis of very low investment in things that matter, especially the green transition and poverty. And decide how we're going to act upon those four scourges that are commonly faced by Europeans. And finally, Erdogan and Turkey. Look, Turkey has been growing very well for a decade now under Erdogan. Erdogan initially was a reformer. He managed to take out of the political and economic equation, the military. And that was an achievement. But then, I mean, Xiaomi initially said that some power corrupts. Well, as you know, a great deal of power corrupts a great deal. Erdogan at some point became so enmeshed with the oligarchy of Turkey and so authoritarian and so crazed with his own authority. But nevertheless, the economy was supporting his new regime. Why? Post 2008, as you know, central banks like the Fed states, like the Bank of England here, like the Bank of Japan in Japan produced tsunamis of cash to refloat the financial sector. The European Central Bank still does. The Bank of Japan still does. But the British Central Bank and the American ones have stopped doing it. All the liquidity, the cash that was generated in the last eight years or so, seeped out of the financial system of the west of Japan of England and so on, and found its way into so-called emerging markets. They needed to those who had that money who had given that cash needed to invest it somewhere to get some returns within zero interest rates everywhere. That was not easy. So countries like Turkey received, I'll give you a number, net are 250 billion pounds every year net. These were the inflows that supported stupendous gross that you've had in Turkey. Today, with the pumps not functioning anymore in the United States and in Britain, this liquidity is now being taken out of the system. So emerging markets are facing a dearth of liquidity. So the only way the Turkish economy could continue to grow in this way and for Erdogan to build his new Britain regime on the basis of that growth would be to have another 250 billion pounds every year flowing into Turkey but that's no longer happening. And now Erdogan is caught up in his own hubris because as an Islamist he's arguing that interest rates are a bad thing. Nobody likes high interest rates but he has this almost religious commitment not almost religious commitment to not allowing the central bank of Turkey to increase interest rates in order to arrest the outflow of money and at the same time he does not want to slap capital controls impediments to the export of money from Turkey because his friendly oligarchs want to take their money out of Turkey. But you can't have it both ways. You can't say no to capital controls and to high interest rates what happens if the money leaves and you have the implosion that you have. In combination with the very imbalanced precarius political situation you have a Turkey that now is on the brink of a major crisis political, economic, financial and social I sincerely hope as a Greek that this does not translate as it usually happens in authoritarian regimes into imperialism into creating some kind of skirmish some kind of short lived but acute war with their neighbouring countries like Greece in order to distract domestic public opinion and to solidify the regime authoritarian regimes are very good at that. Aren't you Mr Sunshine? We live in a very dark world but we have to create our own rays of sunshine and we will do this by adopting Antonio Gramsio's line that we must have a very pessimistic mind and a very hopeful heart. I think we have time for a few more points if people are succinct this time it will be two women and a man because affirmative action is employed by this chair so find me a woman go on on this side of the house lovely thank you so I agree where are you? so while I agree that the Wall Street Journal and the FT and the other major media aren't the only sources in America social media isn't necessarily to be believed either and we have a president who has his own version of facts and truth that seem to change by the hour and so while I understand your perspective on media maybe over here on this side of the pond maybe not so much in the United States I'd love to hear your take on the media as it relates to American politics another person on this side of the yep hello thank you you said some 10 minutes ago that we should not negotiate with the upper Ajax they have an agenda and even when that agenda is hidden there's no way forward with them my question is very simple is there anyone with whom we can negotiate when we're trying to deal with the notion of Brexit in this country at the moment thank you sir and then do I have another woman on this side of the house maybe a little further back running shoes no pressure don't slip health and safety hello hi there what do you think your chances are of becoming the next greek prime minister of him being prime minister sorry I can hear you would you just repeat that please madam what do you think your chances are of becoming the next greek prime minister greek prime minister I'm not interested in that position so I'll start with the last one if you asked me in 2013 2014 what are the chances that you will become finance minister of greece I would laugh in your face look it really doesn't matter it really doesn't matter what matters is that we have changed at the political level that allows the many to regain control of their lives is feeling which office is neither here nor there but let me go to I'll take them in the reverse order don't be so coy you're going to say a little more about that you're thinking about going back into politics I am supposedly the leader of a party called Mera25 Mera means day in greek but it also means the front of europeanist radical disobedience so we are running in the elections so I'm going to be competing but I'm not interested in predictions but you haven't been put off by this experience once I threw my hat in the political ring in the party political ring I'm not getting out we created our own political movement we are going to run across Europe in 11 countries as DM25 in may 2019 in the pan-european parliament elections and probably on the same day there's going to be a national election and I'm going to be contesting it now how we're going to do it's up to the greek demos now your question about who do you negotiate with the answer is no one and let me be succinct on this the european union cannot negotiate with London a proper Brexit deal because there's no one to negotiate remember what Henry Kissinger once said he said the problem I have with Europe is I don't have a telephone number to call I don't know who to speak to you speak to Macron, to Barnier, to Merkel it is impossible so that's why my recommendation has always been after the Brexit referendum two respect leavers who won for better or for worse we supported the remain campaign as democrats we have to accept that leave won you have to respect leave and the recommendation I come up with consistently enough for almost two years is a Norway style agreement you come out of the EU you stay in the single market and the customs union for a period of five years renewable in order to give your House of Commons the opportunity without a ticking clock and a gun on its head to debate amongst the representatives of the British people what you want the future arrangements between the EU and the UK to be and also you detoxify the situation because Angela Merkel is going to be immediately she will be be calmed because she will think that's a problem for the next Chancellor of Germany or the one after that and look I am in this country I was described as a Benite I was always a Tony Ben supporter as a young person he was right to fight against the entry of the UK into that European common market I think but 43 years have passed your economy your society your polity has become intertwined with the EU to such an extent that it is impossible to disentangle without causing much damage within two years so the beauty of the Norway solution and I will actually go beyond Norway I would call it Norway plus but we don't have much time to discuss the technicalities of it the beauty of it is that you don't have to negotiate you just file an application for a Norway style agreement and none of them can say no to you politically it would be poison for Merkel Macron to say no to a British request for a single market customs union for five years so Barnier would be fired the article 50 process would end because nothing would change effectively except the agricultural common policy and fisheries that would return to Britain like Norway has its own and then the British nation the English nation, the Scottish nation, the Welsh nation will have the opportunity to in the fullness of time and without pressures and without a gun on the head of the government to decide what you want the future arrangements to be and then you can have negotiations that are tailor made to that collective decision and finally social media United States and the European Union Donald Trump fake news I don't think there is a great difference between the European Union and the United States Do you remember the term manufacturing consent it was not invented by Noam Chomsky in order to describe the situation in Europe it was invented to describe the manner in which the New York Times in particular this pillar of the liberal establishment in the United States distorted the facts of the Vietnam War distorted the facts about the military industrial complex distorted the facts about the security apparatus and the CIA and the coup d'etats in Chile and in Greece in other places so there is nothing new here fake news was not invented by Donald Trump fake news has been always manufactured by our established media what Donald Trump did very cleverly was to attack the liberal establishment using the new apparatus of social media in a manner that has been practiced before in the mid-war period by the Nazis and the fascists because let me remind you that some of the most apt criticisms of financial capitalists of the 1920s especially of the Weimar Republic came not just from the left but from people like Joseph Goebbels if you read the speeches of Goebbels in the 1920s the first part is actually very interesting and very apt and very accurate at some point once he has exposed the way in which the liberal establishment is taking the masses the majority of people to the cleaners the way that they are constantly looking after the bankers and the financial interests of the oligarchy and so on then we have to kill the Jews but you have to remember the fascists and the Nazis did not win power because they promised Europeans the Gulag or the concentration camp or a war they promised that they will bring dignity back to the common folk Mussolini promised and delivered the first social welfare state pensions like Salvini is doing now the fascist Salvini is doing today in Italy Donald Trump is attacking the deep state in the same way that Hitler was attacking the Weimar Republic the difference between us and Donald Trump is he is attacking the deep state in order to capture it and to use it for him and his mates he is the man who said that he is going to what did he say about the about Wall Street and the swamp that he would drain the swamp first thing he does he takes people from Goldman Sachs and appoints them so social media are putrid they are just a conduit of filth but nevertheless there are also instruments that we can use and the labour party under Corbyn has used it very well we cannot turn over these technological innovations to the fascists to the tramps of the world or indeed to the financial times we have to use them and combine them with serious politics on the ground serious debate democratic politics where let me remind you that what really marks our democratic politics is people who do not believe that they have all the answers getting together to crowd source collectively answers we need to move together in the United States in the continent of Europe in the United Kingdom in countries like Mexico in India even China a progressive international by which to oppose on the one hand the deep establishment and on the other the nationalist fascist international that Donald Trump is leading there we have it ladies and gentlemen shake your chains to earth like to you which in sleep had fallen on you you are many they are few if you enjoyed this event my name was Shammi Chakrabati whether you did or you didn't please congratulate once more Janis Farrifach