 Welcome to Tisgy Sauer. Tonight we are talking about the cost of Corbyn, or at least the cost of Corbyn according to Tory HQ. We'll also discuss whether Labour can really deliver a workplace revolution for women, as they announced last week, and whether the pact between Farage and the Tories should be confronted with some sort of progressive alliance. To discuss all this, I'm delighted to be joined by James Meadway, who you all know well. James is an economist and former advisor to Shadow Chancellor. Soon to be Chancellor, hopefully. John McDonnell, welcome back to the show. Good evening. I'm also joined by Vicky Price. This is your first time on Navarra Media. You've had a fairly illustrious career, so you were working as the chief economist at KPMG, the consultancy firm, then ex on Europe, before becoming joint head of the Government Economic Service. Can you explain a little bit what the Government Economic Service is, so the audience can get an idea of your background? Indeed. It consists of something like 1,500 economists. It includes also the Bank of England. It's everyone who works on evidence-based policies. We were the ones when I was there. There's still a big chunk of economists still left in Whitehall, I'm glad to say. Was there a small purge that they managed to get rid of? No, no, no. I mean, people come and go. It's an interesting thing. They are apolitical, of course, but they do put the evidence together, which very often is ignored, of course, by ministers, depending on what it is that they want to push. But it is a very, very significant part of the Government machine, because at least that's the way you can do your costs and benefits of any policy. You present them to your ministers, and if they don't like what you say, they have to give you directions. So the Department itself doesn't go and spend lots and lots of money unnecessarily. But I was also Director General in the Department for Business and running, obviously, the sort of research side and the advisory work that we were doing for that department. So I was working mainly, the period I was there, under Labour, and the last Secretary of State, I had, was Lord Mandelson before the coalition. Oh, really? Yes, so I worked for him for a few years, and that was great. If you've got any dirt to dish live on Tiskey's Tower, that would be very much welcome. Was he brilliant? I'm afraid he was brilliant. Good to work with. He's very good to work with, and the civil servants loved him. Your Wikipedia has you down as a Liberal Democrat? Are you still a party member? No, but I've had quite close associations. Close associations? And I still do. I've been on Vince Cable's Economic Council, and yes, I do provide some advice on the economic side. So that will come up a lot when we talk about electoral alliances. We're going to talk about your new book, Women vs. Capitalism, later in the show. But first, I want both of your takes on what was the big story of the weekend. It was splashed across the front pages of the Tory papers and then leading BBC news throughout the day. This was the dossier put together by Tory HQ, which suggested Labour's plans will cost 1.2 trillion pounds over five years. This was put in a manner which was most hard-hitting on the front page of the Mail on Sunday. They claimed Corbyn's plans would cost every household 43,000 pounds. I'm going to get both of your takes on these sums in a moment, but first of all, we're going to have a look at Sajid Javed, the person who is responsible for these figures, attempting to defend himself on Andrew Ma on Sunday. So we can go to that video now. You mentioned Labour plans. You've got this extraordinary figure of 1.2 trillion pounds all over the papers at the moment, but it's basically bogus numbers and it's dodgy accounting. Not at all. What we've set out today is the true cost of Corbyn's labour. It's an addition. You mentioned Labour plans. You've got this extraordinary figure of 1.2 trillion pounds all over the papers at the moment, but it's basically bogus numbers and it's dodgy accounting. Not at all. what we have set out today is the true cost of Corbyn's Labour. If I may, it is a true cost and I will tell you where it has come from. It is additional spending planned by Labour over the life of the next parliament if they win the election of £1.2 trillion pounds, that is some £650 million extra a day or something like the entire NHS budget for nine years. That is what they are planning. Where we have got these numbers from, let me tell you where the numbers come from. Your viewers, by the way, can look for themselves. They are sceptical. They are very welcome to look and see exactly how we have reached this number. They can go on costofcorbyn.com. Have a look. Let's come through why I put you. This is bogus accounting. First of all, you have taken all Labour conference pledges and assumed that the Labour Party is going to implement them immediately in power, which is crazy. I mean, for instance, you have assumed that they are going to obliterate all private schools and put the cost of that straight in. They are not going to do that. They have made that absolutely clear. That is one example. What we have done is, first, we have taken the manifesto from a couple of years ago, which they still stand by. If they were drawn upon it, we would have not taken that into account. You haven't counted it properly. You haven't costed the 2017 pledges fairly. We have every single costing in this dossier that we have published today is either come from Labour's own figures, most of them actually, over 50% of the costings are from Labour's own figures. The rest of them have either come from independent external sources and in some cases, yes, we have had to work them out ourselves, but we have done that in a reasonable way and we have set out exactly... Apparently, that sounded a bit like a sort of ketamine remix of Sajid Javid to some of our viewers. Apologies for that or have it for free. That was a little bonus for you there. James Meadeway, you were working for John McDonnell for how many years? Four years. How many of those billions are down to you? How many of those hundreds of billions did you scribble down into Labour's last manifesto? None at all. It's made up, as Andrew Marr said, it's nonsense figures. They've plucked them more or less out of thin air. Actually, it's not just more or less, they've plucked them out of thin air. This is a costing based on a manifesto that doesn't yet exist. There isn't due to even be signed off by the Labour Party until Saturday, so it's never been published and printed and given to the public. It just doesn't exist in any sense at all yet. So they managed to produce some costing and something that doesn't exist. If you look at the costings they've used, it's basically like, guess what Labour might say and then throw in a few things that they've ruled out as the private school example indicates. Then find the biggest estimate you can get for it. Then, because it's over five years, multiply that number by five. So at this point, you're stretching way beyond any kind of reasonable, fair assessment. It's just nonsense, right? So you come up with the biggest number you can sort of possibly get to and wave that around a bit. That's what's going on here. Of course, it's the plan B. The plan A is what was intended, was that they'd get the Treasury to try and produce its own, because they do costings for what they think they'll need to spend on the likely government plans was to get the Treasury to release those. Fortunately, the head of the civil service, Mark said, will stepped in last week and blocks that from happening, which is, as Vicki just mentioned, it is quite important that you have an apolitical civil service. It's quite important that you have a civil service that kind of does what minister says, but observes rules, particularly during election time, when you expect, you know, the things should shut down, you don't have the government trying to intervene in favor of one party or another. It was completely inappropriate for the government to try and do this. And very good, they shut it down. So instead, we got this kind of plan B dossier, which is like scrape around and invent a load of numbers and hope that your friendly press reproduce it, which of course they have. So no, it's just forget it. 1.2 trillions of dollars is nonsensical. We'll find out next week what the actual costing, the costing that we did and I did help produce in 2017 the fully costed everything laid out, everything laid out in how it's going to be paid for the plans all carefully sourced and referenced independently. That's what you want from party. The Tories didn't bother to produce that last time. Let's see if they managed to get something out this time round. Although I did see them they're not planning to produce a manifesto until two weeks before polling day, according to the independent. Yeah, yeah, it's a completely bizarre thing to do, because it means everyone talks about labor policies for one or the two weeks. So it's fine by me. Well, I think their idea, I mean, this is slightly digressing, but I mean, I assume their idea is they only want to talk about getting Brexit done and fear mongering about the Labour Party. So they think that to release the manifesto would just be a distraction. But Vicki, I want to go to you first on these sums. So you were head of the government economic service. You can speak with a lot of authority on these issues. Do you agree with James? Are these numbers nonsense? Well, look, everyone who's looked at those figures, whether it's journalists or anyone else have said that they are a huge exaggeration of what probably is going to happen. But in reality, you can't spend that money very easily. And you don't have enough people to do it anyway right now, because the economy supposedly got close to capacity. So it will take quite a lot of time to get to a point where you can even start spending, you know, hundreds of billions if you're lucky. And any of the restructuring that's being discussed, whether we're talking about national renationalising the railways or anything like that, also gives you, and I think Labour is quite right when they say that. It gives you an asset as well that you've got. So you've got to look at both sides and not just count it as an expense. But in reality, whoever comes back as heading the government in a few weeks time is going to have to spend a lot of money in the economy, because we are growing quite slowly. We just had the figures for the third quarter GDP coming out, which are not fantastic. They're not bad, but they're just more or less made up for the fall that we had the previous quarter. So we're not really growing fantastically fast. And we're already seeing that unemployment is sort of stabilising. So it couldn't easily start moving up. And they will need to spend quite a lot of money to ensure that the shock of Brexit, whether we like it or not, it's not going to finish as a result of just maybe putting a withdrawal deal through. It's going to be one that's going to continue for quite some time because the conditions that we are going to have in the future in terms of trading with the EU are not going to be clear for a good few years. It might take a very long time. And during that period, nobody will want to really seriously invest or take any serious risks in the economy. So I'm afraid the government, whichever one it is, Tories or Tories have already indicated, of course, that they intend to spend quite a lot extra. They're going to have to spend more and they're going to have to borrow more. Yes, of course, there will be differences in terms of whether you raise taxes, one party raises taxes, the other one perhaps won't. But we've already seen that the Conservatives too are backtracking on what was suggested earlier in terms of cutting taxes for people and raising the threshold, which is what they intend to do. So there's quite a lot still to come out. And I think it is quite interesting we're not going to hear a lot of that for a while, because obviously people who maybe are starting thinking of how to vote won't have all the information around. It was in Boris Johnson's leadership campaign to raise the threshold of top income tax from 50K to 80K. But I don't think it's been mentioned since he became leader. I think Dominic Cummings thinks it would be stupid and electoral suicide. Well, I mean, let's see if the establishment in the party get their way. Yeah, but indeed, what the calculation suggests is that it's going to benefit the better off more. So the question is if you're really thinking about redistributing these, it's not a bad idea. Of course, all of us would like to pay, at least I haven't, would like to pay less tax if necessary. But the redistributive element of it goes the other way. So I want to talk about how this is going to play electorally. So even though, I mean, if you could hear Sadid Javid underneath the sort of side-trance music, you could see that Andrew Marl was giving him actually quite a grilling, to be fair to him. But to the tourist advantage, and I suppose what they knew would happen, is that 1.2 trillion pounds, even if it is flimsy, even if when they're on interviews it gets somewhat torn apart, was leading the news all of Sunday, is still, you know, one of the main talking points on the radio and on the TV news today. We're talking about it. I didn't worry about playing into the Conservative party's grid because I'm not sure how many swing voters watch this show. But there is a danger that even if they're coming out with nonsense figures, it is the cost of Corbin, which becomes the dominant narrative, which at least, well, which could potentially shape the whole election. How worried are you about that, James? Not especially, and this is the other bit. I think I've been wondering around with this kind of sunny optimism and kind of a regular beam of sunshine for the last few weeks about almost all of this. Look, it's something Harold McMillan said. It was Tory Prime Minister in the 1950s. He didn't want people to talk about how much Labour was going to spend because there was a risk that people might hear this and think they rather like the sound of lots of money being spent. And after what, nine years of austerity, of the worst spending cuts for a very, very long period of time in this country, there is clearly, you can see the opinion polls. I mean, frankly, you can just see it wandering around talking to people. You can see there's a real thirst for actually more spending to happen. And the point where she starts saying Labour is going to spend a lot of money, what people hear there is Labour is going to spend a lot of money. What they don't necessarily hear so much is 1.2 trillion. The point which the Sunday Times has to put an explainer on its front page saying what a trillion is, is the point at which you're not necessarily communicating quite what you want, right? It's not immediately clear to people what this number is. And there's the interesting thing about numbers is that the way people hear them, if you're not a massive sort of political nerd, if you're not, frankly, an economist or something similar, you don't grab all the numbers and cling on to them and that's the number. And then this has to stack up with that and all the rest of people don't think of it like that. They think of it particularly around stories. They're not necessarily politically engaged all the time. They will be during election campaigns. They'll sit down and think about what's happening to the country and how they're going to vote and make a serious decision. But I think in terms of stories and what makes sense in the arguments. And to just go, here's a number without a story attached to it. It doesn't really work. I mean, that's why if I were a Labour strategist, the bit I'd be more worried about would be the Daily Mail or the Mail on Sunday front page where they said Corbyn is going to cost every household £43,000. I mean, not many, I don't know if many households work obviously a lot do, but the majority of households don't have £43,000 to lose, which is an interesting point. But Vicki, I don't know how you think the Labour Party should respond to it. I mean, James, you almost seem to be suggesting that they should just say, fuck it, yeah, we will spend £1.2 million. You've got to deal with their nonsense. You'll be serious about this, right? It's not serious to have the chance of the Exchequer waving around actually made up figures. Things that aren't real in any sense. You've got to challenge them on that. But let's also have the position on this. Look, if they're daft enough to start thinking they want to talk about Labour spending plans, they want to try and talk about what we're going to do fine. They're talking about what we're going to do. So let's not assume doom and gloom in this one. Well, I mean, the reality is that you do need to spend, as I said earlier, in particular areas. There has been increasing in quality that has taken place without any doubt. If you look also regions by comparison to London and the Southeast, what you've seen is that there's been a widening in wealth. And that's very worrying in terms of how do you get over that real problem, which has developed over a period of time. We've fed, of course, a fall in productivity because a lot of investment hasn't taken place in parts of the UK where manufacturing has been so significant in the past or or other types of industrial activity. And we haven't spent in terms of infrastructure enough in regions outside London. If you look at spending per capita, it has been basically tilted towards London. And we have heard that there is possibly a decision on HS2. There's still a question mark in my mind as to where exactly some of those benefits will go. So a lot more explaining of what type of benefit you get because money is spent in certain places in a certain way is really what people probably would be wanting to understand. But I think there is definitely the sense that we would neglect loads of parts of the UK at the period of austerity that we've had. And really the last three years have been, I would say, characterised by political paralysis. Nothing very much has happened except talking about Brexit. And it's interesting we're now talking about this 43,000 pounds, whatever it is. You must remember that the project fear that people talk about before the referendum had a figure of four and a half thousand pounds average that a household would lose as a result of Brexit. And that was her year. That was sent out by the government and they said every household will be four and a half K poorer every year. Well, more or less, because basically it isn't that you lose that money every year. It's just that you've got this loss and then you are at four and a half thousand less. So you're not losing it every year. Yeah, yeah, foregone income foregone, isn't it? It's sort of taken from you. I mean, the interesting thing is that we have already had income for God of about three percent of GDP, which is equivalent to about 60 billion. So you can divide that already. But plus we fed the fall in the pound, which has made people poorer anyway. If you are buying things from abroad or traveling, then you're poorer already. And then, of course, we've had the move towards jobs which are nothing like as productive as before. So thank God for the minimum wage going up, which has kept incomes up to a point. But and then you add the squeeze and everything else has happened in terms of welfare spending and also the squeeze in services. So we have been already a poor and we have been borrowing as a result more. I mean, our debt has gone up three times since the financial crisis. Could we potentially have some sort of counter website backed by, you know, well trusted economists, potentially ex joint heads of the government economic service who are, you know, talking about the cost of the conservatives and you say that they've cost us two trillion pounds in income for gone over the last nine years. I'll help you with the figures. Me and James will do it after the show. They're quite a lot of people who've done a lot of work on what the impact of austerity has been. And it's quite interesting too when you see how people have voted. There's some work done, which has been published by Warwick University. I think it was done by someone in Oxford. But it was produced quite recently where there was a direct correlation in their in their findings between austerity and the vote for UKIP in the European elections before the referendum, and then the vote to leave. And if that hadn't happened, then there would have been a nine percent swing in favor of staying. So austerity has been significant in shaping politics really. And we can't get away from that. So I think we're going to move on to your book in a moment. I think, first of all, I just want to say a gift to the Labour Party, because all these numbers bloody confusing. I think they don't mean that much to voters. But Sajid Javed has chickened out of a debate with John McDonnell. And so every time now when the Labour Party are confronted with these figures on TV, they can say, look, we've always said they're bogus and we're happy to debate the Chancellor one on one on stage on national TV and show these numbers for the sham they are. And he's chickened out of it. And I think people understand chickening out more than they do 1.27 trillion, five and a half billion. You know what I mean it's like that's, you know there's personality and values there. Let's talk about your book Women versus Capitalism. Thank you. I'm going to, yeah, that did go on the screen there. I could have held that up, you know, a bit, a bit smoother, I think. It's called Women versus Capitalism, but it's not some of our audience might be disappointed. No, it's not an anti-capitalist tract. You're not saying that women have to overthrow the chains of capitalism and and have some sort of socialist revolution. Well, no, but the interesting thing is it does do some comparisons there in the West, if you like and the socialist regimes that exist, in fact communist regimes in the past, where perhaps mainly because families weren't that valued and perhaps regimes didn't really like to have any serious individual enterprise taking place. Women and men were all expected to go and work in the same way and and expectations were shaped very differently. Plus, there was quite a lot of help with health costs and childcare of the sort that actually women in the West would really benefit from if we had it properly done here, too. So what the book is really saying is that there is an issue in terms of the way in which women are used in the labor force, the fact that there is a problem with even having women in the labor force. So participation is stopped by all sorts of obstacles that are put in their way, whether it's motherhood, of course, that's one of them, whether it is bias that already exists, whether it is other constraints that there might be such as, you know, the types of jobs you can do all across the world. So I'm not just talking here about the UK. So in many places, they still don't have any legal rights. They can't work without approval from their husbands. I mean, the funny thing is if you look at what we had in Europe until 1965, for example, Switzerland, which is quite a developed place, of course, and very rich. A woman still had to have the permission of her husband to open a bank account and work. So what do you find? They're not the boat to the 80s. They just protested this last summer for equal pay, which they don't have. And the manifestation of all these things that exist. So women don't have enough information to decide even what types of careers they should go for. It's not told them at school they don't have enough flexibility when they have children at work. So what ends up being the case is that the use of women is not the optimal the optimal position that you could have it. And therefore, you have underutilization of resources. We don't achieve a productivity growth that we should have or a prosperity. Households are poorer and women are the ones that are downwardly mobile. And they're the ones that are most likely to fall into poverty. And there are loads of single mothers, of course, out there that suffer. And then, of course, their children suffer too. And because they need to look after kids that don't have the flexibility and they don't have the money to pay for childcare costs, what you find is that 42% of women in the UK work part-time. And if you work part-time, you're almost sort of stuck with working at levels that are below your skill level. So that is a loss to the community. And you earn a lot less. If we look at the wage cap, it's supposed to be only just 9% a bit below. If you look at the hourly rate for anyone who works part-time and you compare that with the hourly rate of a full-time man, the difference is 35%. And that, if you look at that through your lifetime, you end up with women with lower pensions in the end, seriously likely to fall into poverty and definitely not having earned or having been in senior positions. And that way, not really encouraging quite a lot of the younger generation to do the types of things that they should and should be capable of doing. So I think there needs to be a serious rethink. We are losing out in terms of the economy as a result of the policy that are there. And we're not the only ones. It happens across the globe, even in places that are considerably more sophisticated in that area, like the North European countries, such as the Nordic ones in particular, such as Finland, Norway and so on. And so the argument's not so much. We need to overthrow capitalism, but it's that free markets alone won't bring about women's liberation. And so you need a lot of government intervention, right? You need a bigger state. Absolutely, every big state. Yes, but every... We've got nothing against big states. It doesn't necessarily have to be big in terms of the amount of money it spends, although it would be rather nice if we had more or less free child care, which I think is really important. But it is the regulations. Every step that has been made in terms of progress for women in terms of achieving a quality, if you want to call it that, or suddenly improving the power of balance that exists at present has been the result of government intervention in terms of legislating for it. It doesn't mean that companies have implemented it properly, and you have to watch that a lot more carefully than was the case until now. And for example, you can see that with the pay reviews as well, that they were voluntary when big firms were supposed to just tell you what they were paying and the differences that existed between men and women. Of course, they have produced them finally. When it was voluntary, they didn't. When it became compulsory, they did. But there is absolutely no comeback in terms of penalizing them if they don't improve their pay rates. In fact, what they normally do, of course, if things look bad, is they cut the rates of the men that they don't necessarily give a huge amount of increase to the women. But let's see how that sorts itself out in the future. So that's the real, real issue that we have actually very few women at the top of organizations and therefore the gap is enormous. That exists in those firms. And for the moment, they haven't had to explain why that is the case. And I'm going to sort of read out what Labour's announcements were last week and see what your assessment of that is. But first of all, sort of from the book, what are your key arguments about what we need to change to get rid of the pay gap to make sure that our economy does work in a way that benefits women. But first of all, you need to make a flexibility at work absolutely compulsory. Second, you need to... What does that mean? It means that when you ask for... Two days a week, they have to give it you. Well, not necessarily two days a week that you don't work, but two days a week you may want to work at home or you want to have different hours. Actually, if you have more flexibility and you shorten the working week too, you get more productivity. There's a lot of findings that support that view. But the other one is to penalize firms that don't change things that they should do. So I mean, after all, the government deals with the vast majority of firms that exist. It either procures from them or regulates their prices or regulates whether they are competitive enough and puts a sort of obligations on them. So it buys pharmaceuticals from firms, medicines, and so on. So energy firms have the prices controlled. So it procures huge amounts of output, if you like, from, say, construction firms that build your infrastructure that you need, you can have all sorts of rules that say, unless you improve the way you run your firm in this area over a period of time, then we're not going to contract with you. And what I do really believe is that the emphasis should not be on boards and whether we can have more women on boards because it makes absolutely no difference in my view on the culture of an organization. But we should aim at having quotas for senior positions so that forces firms to keep their talent and have pipelines that allow you in the end to have the women they can choose from. So it's not positive discrimination, but it's one that says, let's keep the women working and keep them working so that they advance because the reason why the pay gap is there is because women lose out by being part-time or not being there or upstanding themselves for a bit to have kids. They lose in terms of training, skills, and therefore, when they compete with a man, they don't really offer the competition that they should take. Let's get up some of these labor policies. So labor announced they'll, in their words, deliver a workplace revolution for women. This includes, I think we can get these up on the screen now, creating a new workers protection agency working in partnership with HMRC, that's the... Taxpeople. Taxpeople with powers to find organizations that fail to report their gender pay gaps, publish action plans to reduce gender pay gaps or satisfy measures to close the pay gap, increase statutory maternity pay from nine to 12 months, allowing all working mothers or parents to spend a full year with their newborn babies before going back to work, give all workers the right to choose working hours that suit them from day one of the job, require large employers to introduce a menopause workplace policy to break the stigma associated with the menopause, tackle sexual harassment in the workplace, including by amending the Equalities Act so that employers are liable for harassment committed by third parties, such as customers or clients and enshrine the role of Equalities Reps in law so they have time and support to protect workers from discrimination. How do you rate these? I think they're going in the right direction, without any doubt, but I would also add that, of course, the Lib Dems are also saying that there should be free childcare from the age of nine months, which I think would also be a very good idea. So we're probably just going to spend a little bit more on this, so of course, how will you pay for this? Like with everything else that we've just been discussing, it's going to be costly, but the important thing about this is that you can get the payment back over a period of time, so we have to think long term, and one of the points that I'm making in the book is that everything's very short term, so changing all these things for a firm, unless you force it, they're not going to do it because it costs them, and of course, if you invest to get this sustainable sort of developments in the future because it keeps you going for much longer because you have a better workforce, et cetera, et cetera, that, of course, is subtracted from your profits, and we have this culture where you have to report your results every quarter, and that's a serious issue because you focus on profits, and if that's what you do, including, of course, governments, which are very short term in their attitude and outlook, then you're not going to get the investment that you need to change that culture, and that's why you have to have this enforcement there. Small firms, unfortunately, will say, we can't afford any of this. In fact, if anything, they're going back to give me their flexibility because the consumer doesn't want to pay anything extra. Unfortunately, we got the point where the consumers become very clever in terms of seriously looking at prices and expecting not to pay much, and certainly not more for anything else than they do at present if they can avoid it, and businesses have been unable to raise prices, and if you increase their costs, and they're already screaming a little bit because of the minimum wage, you're going to find the small firms, perhaps don't survive, so you have to just watch it, how it's done, and whether you indeed need to give something to them. I mean, firms are complaining, for example, on the side of business rates. You can perhaps do something there, and therefore allow firms a little bit of leeway that way, and but force them to really be much more open in terms of how they deal with women in particular, because what you find is that right now, you still have firms asking, potential employees, whether they are either going to look after kids, and do they intend to have any? And quite often, they don't hire them because of that. Some people in our audience are calling you a neoliberal. That's a terrible thing to call. How do you respond to that slur? Well, it's fine. I can just add to the many things that have been called. I think that's because you don't want to abolish capitalism, but we'll go into that. I can't do it single-handedly. We'll go into that more deeply in the comments. I just want to say that childcare is an area where we've been outbidded by the Lib Dems, isn't it, James? It's a bit uncomfortable for us. The manifesto's out next week, so see what that says, I think, at this point in time. The issue raised here is the big, well, there are several huge issues. One of them is kind of restructuring of the firm and what firms should be doing, what the whole economy should be doing. I mean, it's quite striking at the minute that if you kind of look ahead into where we might be in five or six or seven or eight years' time, there's a lot of the issues around, in particular, the undervaluation, which I think you touched on in the book, of work often performed by women, so care work in particular, which we don't value anything like enough, and it gets underpaid and it gets shoved to one side. We don't treat it as we should do, and care work itself is underpaid and often in not the best conditions at all. Is that if you look at the kind of jobs that end up getting automated, for example, over the next few years, they're often the ones that we think of as more skilled, they're often the ones where you have, as it happens, more men doing them, they're often the ones where we think that, therefore, you end up having to pay more money for them. So there's a kind of long-term shift that you might start to see happening in which things that we used to think of as very skilled and often this would be sort of basically male work, I mean, the classic sort of skilled manual work we want part of it. That's the sort of work that's disappearing. That's the sort of work that you end up not having so much of. And the work that you can't automate, the work that you don't want to automate, which is care work in particular as a striking one, is the stuff that you do actually have to start valuing much more highly. That in practice, the economy we have, which is capitalism and it's a neoliberal version of capitalism, it's structured around a particular way of viewing work and a way of viewing gender roles at work, which aren't necessarily going to apply so well into the future. And I think one of the challenges looking ahead, if you take the next sort of five, 10 years or so, is dealing with a shift in how we think of work and the kinds of work that we think is value that actually you can get a computer to quite easily, to an increasingly large extent. And the kind of work we've undervalued in the past is the stuff that computers can't do so easily. I mean, not just care work. I mean, things like cleaning, which women do to a vast extent, more than men, it's something you can't automate so easily at all. So suddenly your entire valuation of where work is is put under quite a dramatic pressure simply because of this big technological shift. And I think all the parties, certainly all of our politics, are going to have to deal with something like that in the future. But I think there's a difference to how we value it in relation to what is being paid for that work, which very often comes from the government itself because, and then we're talking about a big, sort of monopsonistic body like the NHS. And what individuals perhaps put as value of that type of work. So I don't think we're satisfying the importance that by not paying very much, the importance that people individually give to, let's say a care worker coming to your home because of the way in which the decisions are made on what do you pay this one. Plus, of course, they're not unionized mostly and so on. And I think you're absolutely right, things are changing. But what's happening is that women in particular are, yes, men had been when industry changed, if you like, and some of the things that they were doing are now done by other countries. But women suffer most, if you look across the world, when you have a slowdown in the economy, first of all, and also when technology is introduced. And when you look, for example, at a retail where lots of women have moved to, and if you, the public sector, which cut the labor force very significantly, tends to have much more equal policies. And the people who work for it tend also to be generally more educated because of the type of work that you're expected to do. And if you cut that, then first of all, sort of women lose out because they had more flexibility there and also much more equal wages and better pensions and all that sort of stuff. And they move into, let's say, retail. Well, what we've seen recently is that, of course, retail, which has been under some sort of trouble for a while, is losing people because it's automating. So just in the last quarter, 85,000 jobs went in retail, 85,000 jobs. So over 100,000 jobs go every year, or 150,000, I think, last year. That is enormous. And a lot of that is done by women. And the question is, what happens next if you just allow that to happen without some support? And many of them, of course, need re-educating, retraining, and different areas that they can move to, which include, of course, these care sectors which at present pay so little. So you're absolutely right. I think there has to be a complete rethink. And I say quite a lot in the book. Plus, I've almost come to the conclusion, and I say that in the book too, that maybe we should be paying a wage or a minimum income or an income to everybody. That allows them, perhaps, to also do all the other things that people do which is unpaid. And women tend to do much more of unpaid work than the men. We're getting some pushback against the neoliberal comment in the comments. So Akassapia says, Bicky is definitely capital L liberal, but she does not sound neoliberal to me. She's talking about regulating, not deregulating, and she's been critical of the invisible hand. Oh, that's very good. Thanks very much. In a moment, we're gonna talk about electoral alliances. First of all, you're watching Navarro Media. You are listening to or watching Tiskey Sour. As you know, this show is only possible. This channel is only possible because of your kind donations. So please go to support.navarromedia.com and donate the equivalent of one hour's wage a month. And if you're already donating the equivalent of one hour's wage a month, thank you very much. You make this show possible. As ever, like this video on YouTube, share it on Twitter, share it on Facebook, keep your comments coming. We're gonna talk about alliances now. I think there's been some breaking news in the last hour or so, which I'll talk about in a moment when we talk about progressive alliances. But first of all, I wanna introduce the segment with the news, the big news in the general election from yesterday that Nigel Farage announced that the Brexit party would be standing down in all seats currently held by the conservatives. Are we gonna go to a quick clip of Nigel Farage making that announcement and justifying it yesterday? So we can go to that now. So way up, Boris's promises, and is he gonna stick to them? Against, against the threat, particularly in the south and the southwest, that we let in a lot of remainder liberal Democrat MPs. So the reason I was quiet is I waited until last night to decide and I'll tell you now exactly what we are going to do. The Brexit party will not contest the 317 seats, the conservatives won at the last election, but what we will do is concentrate our total effort into all of the seats that are held by the Labour Party who have completely broken their manifesto pledge in 2017 to respect the result of the referendum and we will also take on the rest of the remainder parties. We will stand up and we will fight them all. Does this, I suppose, a couple of questions. One, does this put Boris Johnson straight into Downing Street? Is this, I mean, it's clearly some sort of gift to him, but how effective is this gonna be? And two, why has this happened and why now? James. Does it put Boris Johnson straight into Downing Street? No, not at all. For two reasons really. One is that it's just created this, you shouldn't take any votes for granted, you do have to have a quite serious argument, quite serious discussion with people, but if you, it's created a very simple equation, which is that the Brexit Party are in fact the Conservative Party and for a whole load of people who would never vote Conservatives but might vote Brexit Party, that is a quite damning argument because it's very hard for a Brexit to get out of this now. Like really difficult, they've obviously done a deal. Like it may not be a formal, here it is, writing down a bit of paper, but it's a deal, in fact it's probably the worst sort of deal because it's, what did you call it, a unilateral alliance, I think was the largest phrase yesterday. In other words, it's a deal where you turn up, offer something to somebody else and they give you nothing really in return and that's like the most craven, pathetic deal going. So you're not just Tories, you're kind of craven, pathetic Tories. Now, for a whole load of people out there who perhaps voted Labour in the past, might be thinking of voting Brexit this time, that is going to be absolutely toxic for them. On the other side, there's a lot of people who vote Conservative who really don't like the Brexit Party very much and I would imagine we'll be looking at this sort of goings on as something that really would not incline them to be voting for the Conservative Party. So the net gain in this one, if there is anyone, seems to be overwhelmed by the obvious arguments that have now been set up, the easy political arguments that have now been set up for anyone opposing the Conservatives and all this sort of hoopla that was around the right about how this is Boris Johnson just marching into Downing Street, I'm afraid, is completely misplaced. Well, I mean the people who should be most worried about this or the particular way that Farage has made this alliance by standing down in Conservative held seats is more the Lib Dems than the Labour Party, isn't it? Because this is, I mean, if he were to stand down in Labour or in Tory target seats, which are currently Labour held, that would be worrying for the Labour Party. But at the moment, what this is going to do is unite the Leave Vote in those particularly south-west seats that the Liberal Democrats would have been targeting. So, I mean, are you hearing worried noises from the Liberal Democrats over this move? Right, I have to make it very clear, I'm not a political scientist and I'm not involved in politics of the Lib Dems. But what I am is a remainder. So, obviously I have an interest, not necessarily, I mean, I'm Greek-born, so I can live anywhere, therefore, although I'm British too. But nevertheless, I have a, well, an attachment to Europe. But I'm saying it more from an economic perspective. So, because you'd find that 99.9% of the economists, I think there may be eight economists, maybe the 10 who are against remaining and are pro-Brexit for some reason, some of them quite good friends of mine, I still can't understand what's got into them, but anyway, and if you're listening to this, hi. Some of them have been on. Have been on, I'm sure they've been on. So, my interest is whether the tactical voting or whatever it is, works as a result of this or not, or whether people abandon it or it becomes even more of a need of people to vote that way. It worked quite well, of course, in the European elections, but this is very different because of first pass post. And I have no idea, therefore, what the result would be, but obviously, looking at this, it would be nice if somehow or other we got an outcome that allowed us to stay in the EU for a little bit longer, perhaps, we think. But I have no idea whether the latest thing actually, the latest announcement from Farage makes that less or more likely. And there is somebody on my left who's terribly enthusiastic about the prospects generally, not about this particularly, but optimistic, shall I say, about what's going to happen and who managed to be seen. Let's talk about the more, I know that Labour aren't, or don't like to think of themselves as the Remain party, but the Romania end of any potential alliance and the news that came this evening was, first of all, that Tim Walker, who was the candidate in Canterbury, who I didn't know who he was because he's had me blocked even though I've never interacted with the guy, but apparently he's the editor of the new European. He, this evening, decided to stand down in Rosie Duffield's seat. That was the seat, well, Canterbury, that Labour won in 2017, I think it'd been a Tory seat for a very, very long time. She's a Remainer, quite well liked. And he decided to unilaterally stand down and say, I don't want to let a Tory in in this seat, but what's the development since then, so you probably haven't seen this yet, Vicki, 750 Christian Guru Murphy tweets, the Liberal Democrats tell Channel 4 News they are going to stand another candidate in Canterbury after the withdrawal of Tim Walker. So Tim Walker stood down, that looked like an overture towards some sort of pact in at least a couple of seats, and the Lib Dems aren't having any of it. Should there be some sort of Remainery, Progressive, Non-Tory Alliance, and how would it work? Whose court is the ball currently in, as it were? I'll go with you first. Me pulling, pulling. We were just talking about this before the show, whether the Lib Dems would stand someone else, because it looks quite aggressive if you do, and they do want to look quite aggressive, and mostly they want to look quite aggressive towards Labour. That's very, very clear, I think with their current leadership more so, than any leadership they've had in the past, I can recall. Really, really very, very distinctly anti-Labour, and in particular anti-Jeremy Corbyn. Now, my slightly cynical view in this is that you line yourself up to get into the position where either you say to Labour, should there be a hung parliament, we'll do a deal with you if you get rid of Jeremy Corbyn, or you do something similar to the Conservatives, which is you get rid of Boris Johnson, and you're good either way. You also have a calculation that you want Conservative votes, and you do not want to look like you're doing any favours to the Labour Party at that point in time, which is sort of fine by me, because I think the real dividing line in this election, and I think we have to be quite clear about it. Now the Brexit party have clarified the division quite sharply. There is on one side a very reactionary, radical right block, which the Conservatives, with Boris Johnson, their head are part of, that intends to use Brexit as a battering ram against whatever's left of the welfare state, and in particular the NHS in this country. And that is quite, you know, almost quite openly what they intend to do with it, with the Brexit party tagging along. And then the other side, you've got people who want to defend that. Now I think the leading edge of that defence, and not just defence, saying we can do much better than this, is what the Labour Party is saying. I think people who are voting Lib Dem can make their own minds up about what they're going to do. I'd suggest that they need to vote for a party that actually stands for a positive vision of doing something different that isn't about the austerity that is going to, if they're concerned about remaining in the EU, that is going to offer a people's vote, a second referendum, with a credible leave option against Remain. And that, I think, needs to be a choice they face seriously. But if you're going to clarify the argument, if we're going to have an argument which is going to be, okay, there are two different directions this country can go in, which is, broadly speaking, Boris Johnson, let's get a trade deal with Trump as fast as possible, smash up the NHS, still call it the NHS, but, you know, rip to shreds on that side, or a very different vision of the future. These are your choices, and I think it's good if the election plays out like that. So you wouldn't want a Lib Dem Alliance, even if one was available as it were? Well, I have to be quite blunt. I mean, look, I remember, this is one sort of defining political moments for myself, and certainly probably for yourself and a few other people, was what happened in 2010 when the Lib Dems, after getting a big vote with lots of students or young people voting for them, and turning around and saying, sorry, we can't actually abolish tuition fees. You know, we remember the protests. We remember what happened. We remember what happened with years of austerity. It was a terrible, terrible thing to do. So no, I don't think an alliance that says, let's have the Lib Dems, we're all on this side, because Brexit is a defining issue. I shouldn't say any number of other defining issues. It's climate change. There's a state of the NHS, there's a state of public services in general. There's having a vision of what the future might be that gets beyond sort of penny pinching and shuffling around and hoping we can keep the show on the road. We need something big and dramatic to happen in this country. It should look like getting a Labour government in with a plan to change how this economy operates in a fairly fundamental way. I don't think the Lib Dems, I don't think having a formal alliance with the Lib Dems is really any part of that. It's quite interesting what Nigel Farage did, because what's often said on the non-Tauri side or the Romani-ish side is that the reason there's not a pact is because Labour have refused to stand down anywhere. And this has said, with the Lib Dems, there's actually just more hostility between the two parties in terms of their vision of what the country should look like. But with the Greens, it's often said that why should the Greens stand down if Labour aren't standing down anywhere? But I think what Nigel Farage... I think I'm not saying that's not a good argument, but it's just interesting the analogy of what Farage has done, which is recognise that if the Tauris were to stand down anywhere for the Brexit party, that would do so much damage to their brand that it would make them winning an overall majority quite difficult. So they've said, look, our biggest priority is Brexit. And to get Brexit done, we have to unilaterally stand down, even if that doesn't seem on the surface fair, because that's the only way we can get a levy majority in Parliament. Do you think there's any argument that the Lib Dems and the Greens should unilaterally stand down in Labour-held Romani seats, recognising that they aren't one of the two major parties in the understanding that that's the best role they can play towards getting a Parliament which is opposed to a hard Boris Johnson-style Brexit? Well, I would imagine they would have thought about this. And we may see all sorts of things happen, maybe even by tomorrow, but who knows. But just to go back to what James was saying, but what type of vision there may be for the country. I mean, in reality, we have to be aware that there's no way you're going to have a trade deal with the US. Certainly not in the short term, and you're probably not going to have a trade deal of the sort that people are worried about, given that we have to have a proper trade deal with the EU first. I mean, we do sell 45% of our goods and services to them. The result is that whatever, more or less, the Europeans tell us, whoever is in power, really, we're going to have to probably accept. Although, of course, the Labour is talking about a referendum and so on. So we have very few cards. So we have to be very closely aligned to Europe, which means that it's going to be very, very difficult to have a trade deal with the US that has all those negative impacts. I mean, just today we had people from the agricultural sector make it very, very clear they were terribly worried about the implications of having any of the stuff that is rumoured we might have to give up and give in to the US if we're going to have a deal with them. So I think it is most unlikely that we're going to end up that way. So let's not move it to a project fear the other way. So it's not going to happen in a hurry, and it's not going to happen the way that people are worried about. But of course, one can have different visions in terms of how we might end up. Now, the question politically is, how do you get to something which is more benign than perhaps what people fear, in particular with Brexit, the Lib Dems after all want to stay? So I would imagine that they have done some calculations that tell them that whatever approach they're having right now is the right one. So you think they're driven by, because I imagine lots of our audience are suspicious that this decision, and you could say the same about the Labour Party, it's open to interpretation. But the argument would be that what Joe Swinson is doing is not necessarily prioritising remaining in the EU, but rather prioritising party interest and her particular vote share in that general election, even if it costs the election for non-Torre, non-Brexit party forces. I don't know, but all the interactions I've ever had with the Liberals and of course the view that people got in the conferences, because I do lots of fringe events for all the parties, I have to say strictly apolitical on this, the remain part of their campaign seem to be absolutely the one that they've been emphasising, and that's what their supporters also believe. So it should be the main, or is the main area of focus. So I don't know whether that answers at all your question, but that would be still my view. We've got 10 minutes left, so let's start getting some of your audience questions. Start typing those now, put a big fat emoji on it, it means I see them more often, it can be a rocket emoji, that's what they tend to be, but you can put on whatever one you feel like. Let's actually, let's return to that while they're coming in, let's return to that neo-liberalist, oh, I can't get what I'm talking about. It's just on the trade deal, because I do disagree with you on this a bit, at least, you're right that signing a big trade deal with the US would take some time, but if you look at the withdrawal agreement, the revised withdrawal agreement that Boris Johnson has and the changes to the political declaration, it's fairly clearly distancing Britain, if it goes through, much more than Theresa May still did. This talk about basically still being somewhat aligned and via the backstop still very significantly aligned with the single market, with the EU, is sort of ditched. And that does leave, then create the space in which you can wander off and do your own thing. Now this is presented as like, oh, isn't this great? From the sort of ERG, let's sign a big fat trade deal with the US end of things. Now, they will have some disappointments, because you can't just go off and sign a thing. Trump has floated and some of his trade envoys have floated. We can do sort of mini deals on the way. The legality of that is harder to work out, but there is the option of trying to sign sector by sector deals and this sort of thing. But I think the line of direction that's laid out in the withdrawal agreement and in particular in the political declaration, the outline political declaration is quite clear from this government in terms of where it wants to get to. It's a much sharper break with the EU than even the Theresa May deal had, which was also quite a sharp break. And once you make that sharp break with the EU and you start to put some distance there, at some point, yes, it'll be a trade deal, but it looks to me like you're prioritising doing something else instead. And however long it takes to get there, you want to get there. You're quite right in terms of how it looks. And indeed, all the estimates of the economists is that this deal, if it goes through as is, so the political declaration actually really meaning what it says, then indeed, the deal is worse for the economy than would otherwise have been the case and certainly worse than Theresa May's one. And I agree with that. However, the question is whether the political declaration is there just to ensure that he got the support to be able to get this thing through, by which thing we've just been now the withdrawal agreement and nothing more, which is basically the divorce agreement. In reality, the political declaration can just be amended completely. And you're going to be working on that for years to come. So yes, you're quite right that the way it looks now, we're divorcing ourselves too, from regulatory alignment and so on. But there's no way that can happen if you want to continue to deal with the EU for quite some time to come. And I really seriously think there is absolutely no way in which you're going to end up not extending the transition period. The transition period may go on forever. And during that period, you're still going to be negotiating, which means you can't do anything with any other country. And the sector of deals that we may be even be thinking about right now with the US, sectors will have moved. I mean, look how hard the US is right now towards the EU. Not only have we had tariffs on aluminum and steel, we've also now having fines and tariffs on all sorts of other products. Agricultural wants to plus cheese, Parmesan cheese from Italy because of the dispute with Airbus and Boeing, which has come in favor of Boeing and against Airbus. So Beijing will be subsidizing that sector illegally or whatever and the threats on imposing taxes, tariffs, on higher tariffs, on cars that we export to the US. So the risks are still there against the EU rather than if you like, suggesting in any way that there is any intention by President Trump to soften his stance in his trade deals. Why he should do anything different with the UK? It just beats me, frankly. Well, the offer with the UK would be, I mean, the obvious parts of that are the offers are open up the healthcare market, open up a very big European, otherwise protected market for healthcare and that would be a fairly significant offer. I mean, that's where the risk of the NHS comes from. I know, of course, I understand that perfectly, but if you look at any free trade agreement that takes place, I mean, services are generally not included and it seems to me sort of, I know there have been apparently some meetings between the big pharmaceutical companies and nice here. I mean, the officials or the bodies that are involved in pricing decisions and that has been a worry that's been reported and maybe that shows you something, maybe a foot in this area. But in reality, having such a deal is going to be so controversial for the country that I don't think that anyone would be able to have anything accepted of that sort, even if we have a government with big majority emerging, which may or may not happen, of course, in December. I mean, in a way, it obviously goes down to, well, not obviously, but I mean, it probably goes down to however much this is politicised, right? So we can't say if the Conservatives win, they will sell the NHS, but we can say that if there wasn't big public outcry, then probably Boris Johnson would not really mind signing a trade deal with the United States, which meant that our drug prices could go up slightly. And it increasingly looks like it's the interest in the European side, the EU side, have moved from, can we keep Britain into, can we get Britain out? And if we get Britain out, we want some distance. I mean, if you look at Emmanuel Macron, it looks to me that, certainly from France, the decision is that, well, if you're leaving, you should just leave and we need some distance now, thank you very much. You continue to protect the European market and Britain does its own thing and you're quite happy with that. There's a longer term issue there of can France realign Europe so that France is top dog rather than Germany, that kind of thing. It made it very clear that they don't want competition, that they don't want us to deregulate, but the only way in which you can distance yourself from it is by having different regulations and that, of course, will hurt the Europeans and they don't want that. And I think therefore it's very, very unlikely this will happen. And Macron, of course, in some ways is quite happy if we go because he'll be the top dog alongside Germany, whereas right now we are equal size and quite important. In fact, we've been the more sort of liberal side which has influenced quite a lot of what happens in the EU and he's, of course, the more intervention inside or has been, at least France has been, more an intervention inside and, of course, the state there is indeed quite large and he'd like to keep it that way probably, although, of course, he's reforming as well. But I think the thing there are the politics there too, but I think for the Europeans, us staying and wanting to stay is gonna be, would be such a big win because it just shows that we can't do without the EU. So we've got to look at the two separately. Yes, ambitions of individual leaders, but also what it actually means for the EU. And if you look at the barometer, which the Euro barometer that comes out very, every quarter, what you see now is that the Europeans are sort of at record levels instead of satisfaction with the EU and Brexit has allowed that to happen. And they even are at record levels with the satisfaction with the Euro, which is the thing, of course, that was used in the campaign in terms of, you know, look how badly the Eurozone has done, look how poorly Europe is doing as a reason for leaving, which, you know, for lots of us economists made no sense. Let's do some questions relatively quickfire because it's almost 10 past nine. I like this one, Dono Evil. Dono Evil, great name. Oh, no, actually, that's not the question I wanted to ask, even though it's a good question, but there was one that I think goes a bit deeper. Jay asked this one. Ask Vicky if they would agree that patriarchy is the primordial condition of capitalism. This is a very Navarra media question, I like it. I would absolutely move out of patriarchy. There are some regions of the world where it's the women, of course, who rule, but they're very few and counted on the finger or one finger of one hand. But I think the question is, you know, is patriarchy essential to capitalism? Can you escape patriarchy within capitalism? Well, you have to escape it because the moment you have this patriarchy and you basically favor the people who are like you and you keep women out, you have much worse outcomes in the economy and you don't actually value at all the long-term consequences of having more women, the positive ones of having more women working in the labor force at the right level. So you tend to become much more blind, if you like, to some of the externalities that are out there. So capitalism does not price externalities properly, it doesn't price the impact of their actions. So if patriarchy is moving in that direction or basically forces you or makes you not understand fully what the implication is of your actions and because it's not pricey, then capitalism also doesn't work because you've encouraged the system to behave in that way. So the two can be very closely linked because that's how they operate, short-term, not looking at the longer-term impact and that's the problem with capitalism right now. So yes. You don't think it's an essential connection? It's an essential connection. Yes, yes, I thought that's what I said. That it doesn't have to be, but the way that it's worked. Well, if it doesn't have to be, doesn't that mean it's not essential? Isn't that my understanding of, because if it has to be that way, it's intrinsic to capitalism that there'll always be patriarchy, whereas if one can make a non-patriarchal capitalism. No, it can be as sufficient, but sorry, it can be an essential but not sufficient condition for capitalism. So it is there and it's not the only thing that basically determines it, but it can be a very important part of it. So that's how I define it. Let's go to a completely different question. I'm gonna direct this at you because I think I know what your answer would be. So this is to James, should labor drop candidates from obviously liberal Democrat conservative marginals for the sake of making Swinson look like the unreasonable one? Take the FBP Evo in other areas of the country. No, if you say you're going to be a national party, there's two parts of this. One is if you say you're going to be a national party, then you have to look like you're going to represent everybody in the whole country. You have to be able to say, we are a national party because we stand everywhere and everybody who sports is can vote for us anywhere that they live, that's one. Two is I just don't buy this electoral pact thing. In different countries, different electoral systems, there's more of this that can happen. In our electoral system, it's built up and it's very peculiar baroque way over a good few hundred years, then it's quite brutal and it's quite sort of winner-takes-all kind of filter. Well, Patrick potentially, but it's not particularly consensual when it comes to elections and people tend to view PACS as a way of pulling the wool over voters' eyes or doing something behind their back or trying to manipulate things that shouldn't be manipulated. I don't tend to view PACS as at least at the national level as something that people go, oh yes, that's a good idea. I fully respect and understand why my party's doing this. Look at what's happened with the two parties that have just done PAC. Look what's just happened to the Brexit party where the candidates are up in arms because they thought they were going to stand and stand for the Brexit party, things that they think they stand for. They're not anymore and they've just been told they can't. Same with the Green Party. The Green Party and the Remain Alliance, they've got candidates dropping down and saying, I don't want to be a part of this. So no, I don't think it's a good idea. If you're a national party and you say we want a different kind of government in this country, for the whole country, you stand everywhere and you give everybody who supports you a chance to vote for you. Replica asks, what's Vicki's thoughts on the Democratic candidates in the running in the States? Are you a Bernie bro? Or a Bernie sis or Bernie whatever? Well, I mean, I have to say, I've been looking at Elizabeth Warren's plans, which I think are brilliant. And of course she has pinched quite a lot of them from Bernie Sanders anyway. So they agree on a number of things. So the healthcare one, it costs an awful lot of money, but pretty good news. She's also the one who really believes in universal free childcare. That's been costed, very expensive. But when you look at the long-term impact of people that work contributing a lot more in terms of taxes and also the impact on the children, you can more or less get it back over a period of time. But of course the policies are also involving taxing people more and perhaps a wealth tax and so on in order to balance the books. So yes, I think they are. In my mind, in the right direction. Thank you so much for joining me this evening. I think we're gonna end it there. Vicki Price, thank you for joining us on Tiskey's Hour this evening. Thank you. James Meadway, always a pleasure. And thank you for watching. We will be back. I promised you we'd do a second show last week. And the reason I didn't is because I got ill. You might be able to hear it somewhat in my voice, but there will definitely be a second show this week either tomorrow, Thursday or Friday. So keep an eye on our Twitter, keep an eye on our Facebook and make sure you have notifications turned on so that you see whenever we go live. See you soon, goodnight.