 Do you remember Fire Festival? It was a music festival that never happened, which became the subject matter for a Netflix documentary. And it quickly became a byword for failure, false advertising, catastrophe, a complete disaster. Now I remember the documentary at the time it was very funny, although obviously for those involved it was horrific. And I can't help but feel that it's a clearly obvious analogue for Britain right now in the context of COVID-19 being administered by a conservative government with Boris Johnson as Prime Minister. Britain has effectively become Fire Festival. And rather than this guy, we've got Boris Johnson, and rather than Jirol laughing in the background, we've got the right-wing media. And I'm not saying this just to be provocative or to be funny. I'm being deadly serious. The reason why I'm drawing that equivalence is because, as you may have seen over the last 24 hours, there have been reams of pictures going on to social media of people showing the free school meal substitutes that they've been given. Of course, many schools have been closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In Britain, children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds get free school meals as they should. Great policy should be far wider. So if your family has somebody on job-seek allowance on universal credit, these state benefits, you get a free school meal. Five days a week when you go to school. Now clearly because many schools are closing as they should during the COVID-19 pandemic, those kids wouldn't be getting those meals. And obviously they come from poor backgrounds as it is. That's before the pandemic, those families would struggle. So this was something that was brought to the attention of the government by Marcus Rashford. The government said after a great deal of pressure by a 23-year-old footballer on social media who himself had been driven to do this because of his own personal experience of child poverty, they would change course and they did. And so what happened was children who weren't going to school who were learning from home or really should be learning from home would be given a hamper. Now, this hamper would be equivalent to 30 pounds. It was meant to be worth 30 pounds worth of food. And the images you're seeing right now are supposed to be 10 meals. That's supposed to be two school weeks worth of food, i.e. five times two, 10 meals for a child or a young adult. A growing person is meant to be eating this for 10 days. And like I say, this is meant to be 30 pounds worth of food. Now, if you want to see how much 30 pounds worth of food is actually worth, take a look at these images. That's what you can buy for 30 pounds. And that's what people are getting instead. Now, one of the businesses amongst a few that's administering this is Chartwells. Chartwells is owned by Compass Group. It's a huge catering conglomerate made profit of more than a billion pounds in 2019. It's a Fortune 500 company. It's a FTSE 100 company, which is to say it's a huge business on both sides of the Atlantic. This company, Chartwells is owned by Compass. So we're dealing with people with huge resources. You would think huge professionalism know how, know what they're doing, and yet seemingly not. Now, I don't think this is an accident. I don't think it's an accident. An outsourcing company like Chartwells is effectively fleecing the poorest families in this country in the middle of a pandemic and skimming a profit, a pretty healthy one too. That is not 30 pounds worth of food you're seeing there. That's five pounds of food, 10 pounds of food. And by the way, yes, that is tuna in a takeaway milkshake cup. Who thinks a bit of carrot or half a bell pepper is enough to feed a kid for 10 days? Nobody. This is clearly an exercise in just making money for somebody, right? Clearly, I mean, I find it very hard for anybody to contest otherwise, which is by the way why the government has said this is unacceptable, they'll review the situation. And what's gonna happen is that the government and various people who support them in the media will say this is an oversight, it was a mistake, it's a bad person, a bad company. No. This has happened because of the logic of privatization and outsourcing. This has happened because, as we repeatedly see, vital public goods and services being given over to private corporations to make a profit doesn't work. It repeatedly leads to chaotic shambolic situations like this, G4S and the Olympics, Serco and Test and Trace. Anybody who's used public rail in this country, which is overwhelmingly controlled by private rail operators, including nationalised ones too, just not nationally owned by this country, nationally owned by the Dutch or the French government. Anyone who is familiar with the Carillion collapse, this was a building contractor which went under, which had been given loads of money to build public infrastructure. So time and time again, we see that the logic of privatisation and outsourcing, whose fundamental objective is to make money for shareholders isn't working, it's repeatedly failing. That's how it's possible that Britain can spend 22 billion pounds on a Test and Trace system, which doesn't work. While Vietnam, which has had 35 people die, not 80,000, does so much better and yet on a per head basis, it's as third a rich as Bulgaria. It's far poorer than any country in Europe and yet its Test and Trace system is so much more effective than what we have in Britain. One of the wealthiest countries in the world. Why? Principally because that's been outsourced and the exact same thing holds here with Chartwells. And so I think it's really critical to say that this is not, you know, a few bad apples, a mistake. We've seen the pattern so many times we don't need to say that anymore. Cut the bullshit. This is because of an economic model which is repeatedly failing and it's not by accident. It's not that it's always gonna say, oh, you know what, yeah, Aaron, you're right. Let's stop it. There is a nexus of political power and economic interests which ensures that no matter how many hashtags trend or how many footballers do the right thing and call this out, things aren't going to change. Well, how do I know that? Well, an example here is the former chair of Chartwells. He was the chair until December last year. So I think it's pretty fair to say that the basis of the business has been shaped by him. He's called Paul Walsh. He's a former Tory donor. In 2015, he signed a letter in the Daily Telegraph telling people to vote for the Tories, not Ed Miliband. He was joined by people like Sir Philip Green and Luke Johnson and Sir Stuart Rose, more on him in a second. Sir Philip Green, that man has now become a byword for parasitism, bad practice and finality. And yet people like him, only six years ago, were viewed as legitimate voices in public life. He knows what he's doing. Well, thank God we no longer think about Sir Philip Green. We shouldn't think about Paul Walsh either. We shouldn't think about the kinds of people at the top of the Compass Group or Chartwells. Luke Johnson involved in Patisserie Valerie. Some very strange things happened with its accounting. And then you've got, of course, Sir Stuart Rose who said in 2015 in this letter, vote for the Tories. And yet a year later, this is how thick the man is, was fronting the Remain campaign. So in 2015, the Tories fundamental promised the electorate, which you have to be fair to them, they came good on. It meant that David Cameron had to resign, was will have a referendum on membership of the European Union. And Sir Stuart Rose said, yeah, vote for those guys. Because the idea of paying a slightly higher rate of tax was panicking him so much. And yet a year later, he's leading the campaign to stay in the European Union. No wonder it lost. No wonder it lost. You've got people that are stupid at the top of it. Are you kidding me? So Paul Walsh is just emblematic here of a much broader issue. A man whose salary is astronomical in the millions per year, who donates money to the Conservative Party, who tells people at the press to vote for the Tories, who oversees a business which skims money from something which is meant to be helping the poorest families in the middle of a pandemic. How much more disgusting do you get? I mean, let's use the word evil. Let's use the word. Because it's one thing for it to happen. But it's not gonna change. If Paul Walsh came out tomorrow and said, you know what, this is really terrible. This has shown me actually, this is a really immoral business. Our priorities are completely wrong. We're sorry. I might reconsider my opinion. Is he doing that? Of course he's not. It'll happen again. There'll be another outsourcing giant next year. And the year after. And the year after. And Marcus Rashford's proposal, and I thought this is a very good piece of policy by the way, Marcus, was to say, well, why don't we just get all these independent businesses, which have very struggled in the context of the pandemic, which they have, we all know them. You know, sandwich shops, cafes, restaurants, cake shops, whatever. Why don't we get those guys to provide the food, these free school meals for these kids who are having to study it from home. Great idea. This is a kind of ad hoc version of what's called the Preston model. How we should be recentering local economies around independent businesses, preferably worker-owned, paying a living wage, renewable models and so on and so forth. That's a whole different video. But the point is it's very different to the model we presently have, Carillion and Serco and G4S and the Compass Group, where basically everything's about shareholder value. People come far, far, far, far, rather bottom, let's be real, okay? Which means income inequality, it means regional inequality, because all that money is always going to London, all the shareholders in London. And of course it means terrible outcomes in terms of public services, right? And Marcus Rashford rightly says, well, why don't we not do that? And why don't we do this thing where we help independence and also help the local community at the same time? And by the way, he says as a caveat to that, maybe I don't know what I'm doing, maybe I'm naive. You're not naive, Marcus. And by the way, the Times, the Telegraph, the Mail, the Sun and sadly too many Guardian journalists too, every Tory MP, all their policy gurus, and again sadly too many on the Labour side as well, will say, well, that's a nice idea, but sadly we can't do it. We could do it. It's just all of those people do very well out of the status quo and they don't want things to change. They don't mind if there are multimillionaires off the back of this, while people can't even feed their own children in the middle of a pandemic while they're having to look after maybe one, two, three kids at home. Already the situation was bad before COVID-19, now it's disastrous. They don't mind. They don't mind. They have the second home. They have the flat or the house in London. They have the two, three holidays a year. They have the big pension. They have the nice weekends. They have the nice clothes. They don't give a fuck. They don't care. And the politicians who give this cover, repeatedly, or the journalists who give this cover, before you know it, they might be working in public relations for one of these companies so they're not gonna criticise it. But like I say, what's imperative to get here is that this is not an aberration. This is not a mistake. What you're seeing with these images of these free school meal hampers is the reality of Britain without sourcing with privatisation. And it's why an absolutely astronomical speed, actually I never really thought it would be this quick, in the context of COVID-19, we're seeing a country which is moving backwards at a remarkable rate. Britain is meant to be a wealthy country, well-organised country. You'd think it'd be one of the better countries in terms of getting through COVID-19, but it's not. Because so much of how we organise society is along these lines. And it's not an accident that the rich are getting richer while so many other people suffer. It's not an accident. That's the point. That's the design. This is not a glitch. This is the system.