 Felly, ni'n gwneud fy ngonfod, wrth i chi'n gweld yllennid yn gwanebu ei gwelfau hwnnw. Mae gennych chi'n gwneud bod ar gweithio er fyddai o'r hwnnw, ac mae gennych ei hwnnw yn hawdd, mae'r hwnnw yn gwneud yn hyn i chi, felly mae'n gwneud ymddangor yn ymdaw'r hyn. Mae'r reitwch hefyd yma y gallwn eu cymdeithasol i hynny, yn ei synhy gwneud mewn i merylio. Mae hynny'r hyn yw heddiw hefyd – mae'r hefyd am maen nhw'n gweithio'n cyfan. a gyda'r iawn cyfrindwyr gyda'r gwaith gwahanol. Rwy'n dweud o'r ysgol, rwy'n dweud o'r trwych gweithio, rwy'n dweud o siarad, sy'n cyfrindwyr cyfeirio, ac y byddawn y cyfrindwyr gweithio yng Nghymru yn gwybodol yn ei ffordd i gydag yma i gael y llwysoedd ffawr i ddechrau yn ysgolion. Oedd yn eich cyfrindwyr yn ddechrau. Ond yn y blynedd yw'r cyfrindwyr yng Nghyrwyr sy'n ei fod yn ei gael eu cyfrindwyr yn 2015, which brought him to the attention of a much wider audience. As you know, he resigned that summer in 2015. The Greek electorate, in a special referendum, had voted by a very large majority against the terms of financial restructuring, which he saw as austerity-laden subservience. But his own government finally accepted the terms dictated by the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission, oedd mae'r bwysig yn y gweithio'r llyfr yn y bwysig. Mae'r bwysig wedi'i cyfnodd ar y cwrtog yng Nghymru yn ymgyrchol y byddai'r ymddangos ac mae'n gwneud bod y cwrthog ar y cyfnodd maen nhw'n ddau'r ymddangos yn y rhan yn gyrddur arnynt. Gwych yn ymddangos a'r angylfaeth yw yma erioedd y ddwy o'r wych y Gryffredd ymgwyllwyr, a'i'r ddweithioio'r hunain yng Nghymru, Prysbwytyrion Scots? Yn rhai hwnnw, mae gael yma ar ôl a'r ddeithas drwy hŷw y ddwy i'r bwysig yma. A gwneud yn gweithio yn rhai hŵr. Yn gyfrifio'r ydym. Yn rhai hŵr y dyfodol, y byddwch chi ar gyfer cwrs a'r ten ynghylch efo'r ffordd ychydigon o'r cyfrifio'r mynd i'r cyfrifio'r mae'r bwysig, rhan o ffair, yn gweithio i'r gweithio i'r ffarrig, ac mae'r gwbl, ond mae'r ffarrig eistedd yw'r gweithio yn gyfrifol ac mae'r ffyrdd i'r Uneddon yw'r Uneddon can格edol ac mae'r ffridd i'r rhan o'r ffarrig i'r Brexit. Mae'n gweithio i'r ffridd i'r gweithio i'r ffyrdd i'r ffyrdd i'r ffridd i'r Gweithredu yn Gweithredu eu ffridd i'r Gweithredu 25 yma, The good people of the Enderborough Book Festival who invited me here, Nick, where are you, you're somewhere here. Had the idea of creating this series of four events under the provocative title, Killing Democracy. And Labeled this particular event today, Reviving Democracy. oedd y cyfnod o'r ddweud. Dwi'n gweithio ddim yn cyfnodol, mae'n dweud. Felly, rydyn ni'n gweithio'n dweud. Rydyn ni'n gweithio ddim yn cyfnodol. Cymru, mae'n ddweud, – byddwch, mae'n greig. Felly, rydyn ni'n gweithio'n ddweud ac mae'n ddweudio'n gweithio'n greig. Mae'n gweithio'n cytraffi, tragiad, ddramau, ddim yn cyfnodol o'r wrthig, ddweud y byddau, ddweud y cyfnodol. Daethwn i'n ddweud am wneud. Felly, yn gweithio'n ddweud â'r cyfnodol ac yn gyfnodol. Mae'r ddweud o ddweud yn ddweudio ddim yn cyfnodol o ddweudio'n ddweud ac yn cyfnodol. Felly, Ac mae'r amser yn fawr. Mynd i'n gwybod y Gymraeg yn ei ddwylo ddwylo'r oedd bwysig ar y flyniad. Mae'n hynny'n gwybod i gyda'r cyfrifiadau i'r wleddau. Ychydig ddim yn y ddweud yn cyrraedd cyffredinol. Mae'n mynd i'n gwybod i'n bwysig bod o'r amser ymlaen mwyaf o'r ddwylo'r dod o'r drwng profiadau cyfrifiadau cyfrifiadau Rwy'n goffio'i cyffredinol a yr rwy'r cyffredinol ymlaen nhw. Felly byddwch chi weithio cwrs, rwy'n gwyfodd gyfyniadau mewn rwy'n gwych. Rwy'n gwyfodd gyda'r cyffredinol ar hynny'n gwyfodd arall. Rwy'n gwybodaeth, mae'n gwaith fydd y dioddrach. Fy llwy ffarnig yn gwaeddiad gydig argy新聞 yng Nghymru, byddai'r dyn nhär jogd, ac mae'n ei ddweud ymlaen i'ch ei ddefnyddio cyllidol gwrthoedd. Yn ei ddweud, mae'n ddysgu', mae'r ddysgu'r dyn nhär jogd o'r dyn nhir jogd, yn yr oed i'r dyn nhir jogd, a ddespai y gwaith i'r cyfriddau cyllidol, ac yw ar-dyn nhir jogd, ychydig y dyfodol yn ei ddyn nharn, byddai'r dyn nharn, y sleif wedyn ydy'r cyd-dweithio yn ymgyrch. Ond ydy'r gwerthoedd. Mae'n ddweud yn ymdweud yw'r gwerthoedd. Mae'n ddweud yw'r gwrth oedd, a'r gwrth o'r last, yn ymgyrch yn y gwaith. Ac yn ymddych chi'n arys, mae'n amser, yna'r arys, yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch. Felly mae'r ddweud yn ymgyrch, ac mae'r ddweud yn yma'r yma'r yma'r yma. Ac mae'n gweithio'r cysyllt yn y Cyfnodau Eisteddfodol yw'r cyfnod y cyfnod hynny. A mae'n ddifrwydd y cysyllt yw'r ddifrwyddau yw'r cyfnod a'r ddifrwyddau ymweld. Yn ymgyrch, oherwydd mae'n gweld yn ymdweud, oherwydd mae'n cyfnod yw'r cyfnod yw Isigoria. Ycyddol Gymraeg I ddim yn gweld anghynt ar y ddechrau a bethfyn yn gweld yn cyfrif . Mae'r cysyllt yw'r gyffredig Ond yng nghymru, ydych chi'n wych na'r digwydd y Brithaeth, Ymddi Gwethaf wedi ddim drwyddi yn bwrdd a'r cyfnod yw'r cyfnod yw ymynd i'r cynnigau'r cyfnod. If you read the federal's papers in the United States, it was all about how to ensure that the demos was consulted in order to feel that they were part of decision-making but at the same time guaranteeing that they would not be part of the decision-making. In Britain in the 19th century you will recall that there was a major tassel between two concepts that today we assume more or less that they are not only compatible but perhaps one and the same concept, liberalism and democracy. To be a liberal in the 19th century meant to be an anti-democrat. John Stuart Mill, a thoroughly good person, also one of feminism's first supporters. Nevertheless it was extremely skeptical about the idea that the majority should rule, that the demos should have the cratos democracy, the state. Indeed it took a series of financial crisis in the second part of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century and at least one great war, World War, for the two concepts to become one and for us today to be speaking as if there was no contradiction about liberal democracy. So when people talk about China today, critically about the lack of democratic process, and I am one of them as a committee democrat, we are forgetting that the industrial revolution, the second industrial revolution in this country was also predicated upon the idea that the demos should not even be consulted except through representatives that would make sure that the riffraff stayed away from the levers of power. You called me aneratic, no you called me, I called myself aneratic Marxist. You mentioned my reference to myself as aneratic Marxist, but I also referred to myself as a libertarian Marxist in order to confuse my enemies even more. But not just that, because I do believe in it. But let me explain that just for a second. Liberal individualism, which is the political philosophy underpitting the British establishment, the Western European establishment and the American liberal democratic regimes that we've been having now for more than a century. Liberal individualism turns on a strict separation between the individual and the collective. The whole point about seeking legitimacy in the individual has to do with the presupposition that the individual is well defined outside the collective. You are a sovereign agent. You are a sovereign consumer in the marketplace. You are a well defined entity with well defined preferences, desires, beliefs. And your liberty is conceptualized in terms of how well protected you are from the collectivity, from the riffraff, from the state, from the taxman, from the police, from the secret police. Now that is a very useful way of understanding the individual, but I think that it is very narrow. The ancient Athenians who had a very different idea about the good life and the democratic polity, they would never have understood that. So Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, even though they had many differences between them, would never have understood the, if you want, the Scottish Enlightenment tradition of David Hume and Adam Smith that defines the individual as well rounded and well defined independently of the demos, independently of the police of the city, independently of the community. The ancient Athenians thought that the only way you can understand yourself is by catching your own reflection in the eyes of the other, of the person that you are discussing with, that without the other, without the police, without the demos, you are a savage. You would never have any idea of what you want and who you are. So this is an interesting juxtaposition. So the point I want to make is that there is something profoundly wrong, profoundly misleading about a society that cherishes individual autonomy and individual freedom by juxtaposing it against the collective. And if you want, now I'll speak as an economist, just for a very, very, very short space of time, I promise, take the market and the state. We live in a society, don't we? The text for granted that there is something like the state which is defined as the absence of markets and something like the market which is defined as the free flow of demand and supply as Adam Smith would have said independently of the state. And yet, this is not the world we live in. The world we live in is one in which there is a great intertwining between markets and states. There would be no marketplace. There would be no market society in Britain if we didn't have the enclosures. And we would never have had the enclosures if there was no state to ensure that the peasants, the riffraff, were expelled from the lands. The two were always symbiotic, especially today. The European Union was created as a great cartel. The first name for the European Union was the European communities of coal and steel. It was a cartel to make sure there would be no cooperation, no competition between the producers of steel from Belgium, from Germany, from Italy, from France. The whole point of the European Union was to stop market forces from pushing prices down. Now, a parsimonious Scott or an Adam Smith, Le Sefer, free market capitalist or liberal would say this is why you are getting out of the EU because they created it as a great cartel. Yes, but what is going on in this country? What's going on in the United States? Do you think we live in a realm of competitive markets? No, we don't. We live in a world where most prices are fixed and they are fixed by collusion between planning systems. If you ever go into the Google campus in California, what you are going to encounter is a small, very efficient and quite pretty Soviet Union. There are no markets in there. What there is is a strictly hierarchical company that has created a whole space where people actually live, breathe, exercise, do yoga, create products. There is no market. Nobody pays for anything. You go in there, you eat, you drink, and it's a whole community, self-contained community. Goldman Sachs. Is there a market in Goldman Sachs? No. It operates like the Politburo, the Central Committee and the KGB. Anybody who's worked for Goldman Sachs will confirm that. They are proud of it in the same way Vladimir Putin is proud of the FSB and the KGB. But there is no market space there. There is no liberal individualism in ExxonMobil or in General Motors or in Facebook for that matter. We live in a world which has presented itself as liberal democratic, failing to conceptualize the fact that liberalism and democracy have traditionally been false and would like to think of itself as a market society when our societies have markets. But in the end, we live in a series of planning systems that are clashing and cooperating with one another. Systems that are utterly financialized. Did anybody come here to Edinburgh by train? Did you book online? Did somebody book online? You paid 75p for that. That went to train line, which is owned by another five-shell companies. Your 75p travelled approximately 22 times between London and the Isle of Man and Jersey and then Luxembourg before ending up with a company called KKR in the United States where it merged into financial flows of similar tiny little payments and larger payments. In a techno structure that has nothing to do with the marketplace, which no state controls and yet which is aided and abetted by state legislation that your members of parliament vote for without realizing that they are doing it. So what kind of space is there for democracy in this kind of techno structure? A techno structure that has four manufacturing processes happening at once. One is a process that manufactures prices. I remember reading a book by John Kenneth Galbraith, the great American liberal economist, who during the war was given the job by Franklin Roosevelt to fix prices during the war economy. Prices were fixed during the war in Britain in the United States. He said somewhere in his memoirs, he says, it was fascinating to realize how easy it is to fix prices when they are already fixed between the conglomerates. So manufacturing prices, manufacturing desires, we all love to think that we buy that which we love and we love that which we buy. But this is not strictly speaking true, even if it is. Because there is a process of manufacturing our desires, it's called marketing. It's the paraphernalia of processes that instruct us as to what we actually like even before we like it. Thirdly, a process that manufactures money. If you knew how money was created by the banks, you would be up in arms. The fact is that money is conjured up from thin air. It is not true that when you get a mortgage, the banker is using savings of other people to give it to you. What happens is the banker is actually typing into your bank account a certain amount of money and it's a black magic of finance. 97% of pounds and pens in this country were created by private finance. When in 2008 this whole technostructure came out, came down, you know that the bankers around Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States, effectively found themselves owing to one another and to others 50 times the gross national product of the West. So there's a lot of manufacturing going on, prices, desires, money and of course consent. That's how we come to the world of the media and to the world of fashioning a certain set of ideas that the KGB during the Soviet Union, those of who are still alive, like Putin, must be really kicking themselves because those former KGB agents who had tortured people, who had sent people to the gulag, are now looking at the West thinking, my goodness, we didn't have to do any of that. We could manufacture consent in ways that were a lot more anodyne, a lot more humanistic, without any violence. This technostructure came tumbling down in 2008 under the weight of its own hubris. The world we live in today cannot be made sense of in terms that were conventional wisdom before 2008. That has only happened once before, in 1929. After the crash of 1929, the world no longer made sense after 1929 by means of the conventional wisdom of the 1920s. Similar did today that crisis of 2008 is still with us. Greece is an example of a place that was completely crushed through a combination of the nannity of its own ruling class, our own ruling class, and the faulty design of the European Monetary Architecture. But Greece is simply the canary in the mine. It should really not matter in Scotland, it should not matter in the United States, it should not matter anywhere. The only reason why we are discussing it is because we have not fixed capitalism after 2008 because capitalism cannot be fixed, at least not to go back to where it was before 2008. So allow me to finish with a dream. If I am right, and this is something we are going to discuss, that 2008 was our generation's 1927, then today we live in our generation's postmodern 1930s. Just look around you. We have a nationalist, neo-fascist international that is rising up everywhere. It is led by Donald Trump in the United States of America. In Europe he has very able handmaidens in Matteo Salvini, the deputy prime minister in Italy. We have an interior and police minister in Austria, of all places in Austria that comes from a party that was founded as a fascist party. We have Orban in Hungary, we have the Polish illiberal democratic regime, whatever that means. We have France that is celebrating the fact that the fascists only got 36% of the vote in the last presidential election, only 36%. We have Britain that is caught up in a polarizing debate going nowhere about Brexit and preventing us from having a sensible liberal discussion regarding the interests of the peoples of this nation, of this country. So the dream is that we have a new deal like that which Franklin Roosevelt introduced in 1933, but at a global scale. It is a nationalist new deal involving progressive movements in this country, in the United States, in Mexico, with the new president that they have now elected. In continental Europe, this is why our movement, DM25, will be running in the European Parliament elections in order to introduce what we call a new deal for Europe, is our agenda for what to do with the four crises that are tearing our societies apart. Private debt, public debt, poverty and incredibly low levels of investment in the things that humanity needs and the planet needs. So my dream would be that we have a progressive international opposing simultaneously the inane establishment that is reminding me increasingly of the Weimar Republic as it was crumbling in the late 1920s and the nationalist neo-fascist international. I thought we should end with a dream. I'd like to start maybe, Annas, with your putting a bit more flesh in that dream of what you want for DM 2025. I noticed in your book you said adding to the original French dreams of liberty, equality and fraternity, you've said that the new Europe should consist of somewhere where no European nation can be free as long as another's democracy is violated, no European nation can live in dignity so long as another is denied it and no European can hope for prosperity if another is pushed into permanent insolvency and depression. Nobody could quibble with that but how is it going to come about? The way we are trying to make it come about, leading by example, we are not, DM 25 is not going to change the world on its own. We are a young movement of about 120,000 people across Europe but what we are trying to do is we are trying to demonstrate not that another Europe is possible but that another Europe is already here. And how do we do this? Let me give you an example. When last year Matteo Renzi, then Italian Prime Minister, called for a referendum for constitutional reform in inverted commons, we decided to do something that had never happened before in Europe. We decided that our position would be in Italy at the pan-European level. So we started a boisterous debate amongst members of DM 25 here in Edinburgh as well, in Greece, in Italy, in Germany. Of course our Italian friends and comrades and colleagues were the first ones that led the debate but the Germans, the French, the Polish, the Danish participated in this debate and then we had a pan-European vote across members of DM 25 on what our position on Italy is. So that is how the transnationality ball started rolling. So now we have a new party in Greece, Mera 25, which is part of the DM network. Our manifesto, with which we are going to run in the general election that is coming up in the next few months, we don't know exactly when, is going to be voted for by all our members including our members in Scotland. Now this is how we demonstrate that it is possible to have local action, patriotic parties, but at the same time operate on the basis of selecting policies and positions in Greece that resonate with what's happening in Scotland, with what's happening in Italy. Because look, let's face it, the full crisis that I mentioned, public debt, private debt, poverty and low level of investment in the things we need, there is a little bit like the problems of climate change. Climate change requires of each one of us that we change our ways, but it's not enough for you and me to change our ways. It's not enough for Scotland to change its ways. So you need local action and global action, internationalism. So these four crises need this. So this is what we mean. You see, the tragedy of the crisis of 2008 was that by the time it reached Europe, which was a year, a year and a half later, and it first erupted in Greece, then went to Ireland, then went to Portugal, then went to Spain, Italy, and then it migrated all over the place. The tragedy was that the establishment that had actually caused through its inanity and authoritarianism of crisis in cahoots with the financial sector, in order to justify the bailouts for themselves and for their mates, started turning one proud nation against the other. The Germans were told that the cause of the problem were the Greeks. The Greeks reacted in a knee jerk reaction by hating the Germans. It's not easy to do this, but it can be done. If you know what I mean, after having a Nazi occupation in the 1940s, I was despairing watching these ancients supposedly hatreds being revived in order to cover up the real causes of the crisis, to cover up the fact that the crisis happened because we had an unholy alliance between the grasshopers of the north. And the grasshopers of the south against the ants of the north and the ants of the south. So what we're really desperate trying to do anything we should continue to do it across Europe and indeed across the world is create an alliance of ants of those who actually do the work and who are constantly the victims of the unholy alliance of the grasshopers. That's a kind of profound irony at the heart of all this, though, because you're mounting this challenge, this democratic challenge if I could use that unfortunate adjective. You're mounting this challenge at a time when Europe, and certainly from a British perspective, is completely obsessed about Brexit and the fallout from Brexit. And ironically, as I say, Britain has actually caused the other 27 nations to coalesce. I don't think that Britain caused the other 27 nations to coalesce. What Brexit did was to cause the ruling classes of the other 27 nations to coalesce. That's not confused the ruling class of a country with its people. If you look at the people of Italy, if you look at the people of Greece, if you look at the people of Germany, they are still Europeanists that like the idea of a united Europe. But if you ask them, do you trust the European Union institutions? You get an 85% now. So Brexit has not changed that. The European Union is at an advanced stage of disintegration. It is disintegrating everywhere. And you have this remarkable site. The more the disintegration proceeds like the rot that goes deeper and deeper, the more united the regime looks. Remember the Soviet Union in the 1980s? The Politburo looked rock solid. The party was more united than ever. And then it collapsed. Because the more you keep an unsustainable political economy together by force on the basis of unsustainable policies on the basis of fear. The fear that they tried to inspire in the Greek people in 2015 this summer. The more you succeed in doing it, but all you are doing is you are postponing the crumbling. And when the crumbling comes, it is very fast, very furious and very uncontrollable just like 2008 was in the financial markets. It's a very specific kind of crumbling you're looking for, isn't it? Because you make a powerful case in terms of Brexit of staying in Europe and fighting Europe from within. But you're obviously talking about two different kinds of Europe. You want one bit of Europe to crumble and be no longer relevant, i.e. the ruling classes as you characterise them, but you want a kind of pan-European movement to rise up in its place. I'm allowing me to put it a little bit more simply in the sense that as Greek patriots I always criticised my government when it was wrong because that's what patriots must do. And my government was usually wrong. Not the government I served in every government. And I'm sure you've had this experience in this country. But you're criticising your government because you're a patriot. You do not want to bring down your country. You do not want to disintegrate your country. So my argument was always about the European Union. It was put together as an oligarchy. There is no doubt about that. But how was the British state put together? As a what? A democracy? It was one of the most vile oligarchies in the history of the world. Just like our one in Greece and the French one and the Russian one. But what do we do? We storm the castle. Not in order to demolish it, but in order to put it into the service of the many, not the few, as Jeremy would have said. Yes, I was just going to say that doesn't sound entirely original. However, before I open it up to the audience here, I listened to you last yesterday with Shami Chakrabarti. And I've heard you in various bits of your writing talking about the media. And how can I put this in not exactly flattering terms? And I want to just throw in a quote about your own Greek media, though I know that you're equally hostile to media wherever. Not equally. They're not all equally bad. They're bad, but not equally bad. We're agreed that you think they're all bad. Except the BBC, of course, which is here today. Only joking. Which bit is the joke? I think they know. Okay, let me just throw in this quote before we go to the audience about the Greek media. And this is a kind of low-key statement of Yannisys. The triangle of sin was complete. The insolvent media were kept in a zombified condition by the zombie banks, which were maintained in their undead condition by a bankrupt government. I mean, you've spent so much time on the fence in these books. I'm not being paid sufficiently to keep my mouth shut. And it's working, yeah. You have to realise that Greece is a special case. It's a case where the ruling class went bankrupt. The overboring that had kept them afloat up until 2008 just collapsed in exactly the same way that the financial sectors and the grasshoppers in the city of London, in Wall Street, in Frankfurt, in Paris, and so collapsed. It was that in this country you had the Bank of England printing money as if there was no tomorrow to reflow them, similar in the United States, similar in Germany, Angela Merkel, for goodness' sake. One morning she received a phone call. She nearly had a heart attack. Somebody said to her from the chancellery or the Ministry of Finance, I'm not sure where it was, we need to give our bankers 600 billion euros today. She said, what? I'm making zillions. Why do they want 600 billion from the taxpayer? No, no, no, Chancellor, they're all bankrupt. It happened overnight. She had no idea why it happened, but of course she signed on the dotted line. So the difference was that in Greece we didn't have a central bank and we did not have the surpluses that the German state had been accumulating as a result of a mercantilism which for years has been amassing trade surpluses with the United States, with Britain and so on and so on. So our oligarchy, but of course the international financiers and the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank and the European Commission came to the rescue. They didn't come to rescue the Greek oligarchs, they didn't care about the Greek oligarchs. They came to rescue Deutsche Bank, Société Générale, the French and the German banks because the Greek state and the Greek oligarchy together had borrowed huge amounts of money from the German and the French banks at a time when every... Remember the charming notion of riskless risk? Remember somebody called Gordon Brown once said we have overcome the dynamic of boom and bust? Or Bern Bernanke, the chairman of the Fed, who said we live in a great moderation. That was all before 2008, my goodness. The most immoderate period in human history was... and the most unparsimonious period in human history was presented as moderate. Anyway, so they all came down. And in the process of saving Deutsche Bank, Société Générale and so on, they saved the Greek bankers as well. And of course they shifted all those losses onto the weakest shoulders of the weakest taxpayers, initially the Greeks, the Slovaks, the Italians, then eventually the Germans. So in the process what you had, it's what I just described in the quotation that you so kindly read out from, you had the oligarchs, the developers that had been making a fortune out of contracts they got from the state that was borrowing the money from Deutsche Bank. The same oligarchs owned the media and used them in order to exercise political power to manufacture consent in Greece for the oligarchy regime. Once they got bankrupt, the media were profoundly insolvent. Not a single television channel, not a single radio station, not a single newspaper is in the black. They're all deeply in the red if it's not purple. And they were kept going through advertising placed in those media lucrative advertising, ridiculous sums of money being paid to them to keep them afloat, by the bankers who were bankrupt, who were saved by the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, the European Central Bank, with loans that they were of course unloading onto the shoulders of the weakest taxpayers. Did you expect those media to be kind to politicians like myself who advocated the end of this triangle of sin? It would be just, you know... ...biting the hand that fed them. Worse than that. It would require a degree of heroism amongst these people that I think would be inhuman to expect. Okay, now I want to let the audience in but I just should say that these books are, I mean, I was quite panicky about meeting this man because as most of you will know, economics is not my core skill. But this book is actually an absolutely cracking read but all of his books are littered with wonderful quotes and I'm particularly liked the one that you threw in from Catherine the Great which said you're talking about Greece and you said if you can't be a good example then you just have to be a horrible warning. That we are. So let's have the lights up in the way. There are four microphones so everybody should get a chance. There's one up there, well done, yes, there. And let's get right to somebody else there. Thank you. Right, please. Where are you? Stand up. Stand up so I can see you. I'll stand up too. So you were talking about ants and grasshoppers and in our current political system what happens is the establishment run the political parties for the most part. There are exceptions, thank you Jeremy. But there are, that's an issue because the parties just keep becoming more and more neoliberal and buying into the whole process because they've achieved power and they want to maintain that power. So would it not be an idea to go back to what you were talking about about the idea of ancient Athens and having 50% of your government to be ordinary citizens so that each constituency elected a party, a political party member and an ordinary member of the public and then your government will always have, your parliament will always have 50% ordinary people and a smaller percentage of each party? You just reminded me that in ancient Athens there was a mighty clash, philosophical, political, moral clash between the aristocrats and the democrats. What is fascinating is to recall that the aristocrats were in favour of elections and the democrats were dead cert against elections because the democrats used to think, and I think quite correctly, that it is always the richer who have the rhetorical skills, the money, the time and the opportunity to invest in political power and political preservation and therefore they will be the ones who will get elected in the end even though back then they didn't have Facebook and advertising on television and so on. So the question is okay, so what the democrats suggest instead of elections and the answer is lotteries. Every single position in government in ancient Athens was determined by lot, including the judges, except two positions, the general who had to know something about fighting a war and the banker, the central banker who was always a slave. You know why? Because citizens could not be flogged. I think we should bring this back. Could we get another mic too? I'm the gentleman, that gentleman and then there's a gentleman behind as well. Thank you. I was surprised to read a couple of years ago that in spite of America printing, I think of that state, two and a half, three trillion dollars or creating money, quantitatively. About 15 to 16. Whatever the number was then, American public debt had doubled and I wondered how that was and then if you look at the public debt in Japan, China, Australia, wherever you look, it's been increasing and where is the money coming from? Okay, well let's first get one thing straight. We do not have a crisis of public debt. The crisis of 2008 was presented as a crisis of government that wanted to hide the fact that it was a crisis of private debt of the private financial institutions that were then salvaged by plundering through austerity taxpayers while at the same time printing men. Let me ask the technical part of your question. Where, you know, how can you have all these quadrillions of debt? The answer is there is a lot of private wealth around. If I were to give you today 300 billion quid, let's say, you know, I became over generous all of a sudden. I gave you 300 billion. What would you do with it? You'd have a serious problem. Firstly, you can't take it home in a bag. It's too large. It just can't be done. You don't have a large enough house. What do you do with it? You have to invest it. Now, in what? During a crisis, even if you build new factories to produce new gadgets or whatever, you are not going to have enough, there won't be enough customers ready and willing and with the money to purchase gadgets that you will be producing. So you freeze, you think, I'm not going to invest because there won't be aggregate demand for the gadgets that I will be producing. You do not invest. There isn't enough aggregate demand because people like you have not invested and then you say to yourself, ah, you see I was right. But you are still stuck with the problem. What do you do with the billions? So you buy government debt. Let me tell you something that I think is quite indicative of what I say in my other book, the book that I've written about talking to my daughter about the economy. I think it's very interesting to take the case of Singapore. The state of Singapore, it demands deficits. The government of Singapore has never had a deficit in its history. Do you know that its debt is 120% its GDP? How is it possible? I'll tell you how it's possible. They are smart people. League 1U and then his followers understood that the only way capitalism can work is if you create public debt because public debt is the banks, the private banks, what oil is to an engine. So what they did was every year they borrow money and they use it to buy assets to invest on behalf of the state of Singapore. So even though the government never overspends their taxes, pay for pensions for whatever government expenditure there is, the government constantly borrows from private individuals the best so as to produce the bonds the public debt that is the oil that keeps the machinery of capitalism going. So let's not allow those who cause the crisis private financiers on the basis of private debt to bamboozle us into a discussion about public debt which then is the excuse for austerity which is the worst thing you can do during a period of stagnation and crisis. Now we've got a lady there and then there's a Sikh gentleman just in the middle there if we could get the other mic to him and then somebody over here, thank you. Hello Yanis, I think it's more than the financial system that's corrupt, do you not believe the whole system of energy is corrupt? Of energy? Share my energy, yeah, I mean money at the end of the day is just made up. Energy, oil, fossil fuels that is the ability to do work and I just worry, I read some figures about the shale oil mining industry all the companies doing shale oil and gas mining in the States they're all up to their ears and debt I just feel there is more than financial debt out there in the world and I think it has to be part of the change that we come to because you can't just promise people things that the energy system can't possibly deliver so I just wanted to bring energy into that. You should because the oil curse is a very real phenomenon with the exception of Norway every country that discovered oil suffered for it including the United Kingdom Thatcher financed the attack on the working class and the communities in this country using North Sea oil until it was depleted. Wherever taking a country like Nigeria you have immense wealth you have immense poverty and you have immense authoritarianism as a result of the oil curse Now the oil curse always goes hand in hand with what I call the finance curse and what is the finance curse the other side of the oil curse in the sense that what is it that gives a Saudi Arabian prince shake or whatever immense power the fact that he happens to own the well, the piece of land with oil underneath In David Ricardo's terms the English early 19th century political economist who defined the concept of rent this is a major impediment even to capitalist growth You see Ricardo and Adam Smith the Scotsman had this disagreement I mean Smith was dead by then he was a human with a dead Smith Smith was an optimist he believed that free market capitalism would be like an escalator that takes all of us up constantly some of us are on a higher step than others but if you let the market do performance miracle we'll all keep going up and maybe the steps which are coming together with reduced inequality he was an optimist David Ricardo who was a great supporter of Adam Smith's way of thinking supported a difficulty in Smith's model of capitalism and the difficulty was the private ownership of scarce land and scarce resources because his point was and it was an up point that as the escalator of Adam Smith is going up and there is growth and there are more jobs and there is more income more and more of it is going to be concentrating on those who own by accident of history or through authoritarianism the scarce land resources whether this soil for agricultural purposes or shale gas in Texas or some oil rig somewhere in the middle of nowhere and he felt that as the percentage of the total wealth is constantly appropriated increasingly by the few that would be bad for capitalists so he was not a communist he was not a socialist he was worried about capitalists as opposed to the landowners the ones who own the oil wells and so on now if you add to that the black magic of finance which conjures up from thin air gigantic mountain ranges of paper money and then combine this with the accumulating value of those who own the scarce resources you end up with a confluence of forces that can only lead to something like 2008 and not to mention the fact that we're destroying the planet in the process good to try and get two more in there's a lady somewhere up here with the mic and then there's a gentleman in the middle there with the mic so we'll just start off here if we may my question's really a bit basic can you stand up I want to see you and could you hold the mic up against it's really much more simple than everybody else's why is it now that the majority in any kind of election and referendum is no longer respected you know you had the Scottish independence referendum and the independence movement had more money than the other movement and they did 10% difference and they're still complaining moaning, whining, wanting now the referendum the European election the European referendum was won by whichever camp Brexit and the people who lost that are still countering up and down Whitehall complaining, whining, minging, moaning Trump is mind you, Trump is a little bit different Trump is elected in America and the minority won't accept the result of a democratic election why? well I'm going to go against the grain of the audience and sympathize with you just for a bit to begin with because as Ruth said and as many of you know it was on the night of the 5th of July 2015 when the very brave and courageous people of Greece gave us a 62% rejection of the troicas ultimatum of the creative ultimatum and that very night my Prime Minister said we need to surrender and we need to betray the 62% so I as a democrat, as a committed democrat I think it's imperative for each one of us to the extent that we are committed democrats to respect the verdict of the referendum and of elections respecting the verdict does not mean agreeing with it it does not mean that I'm going to give up my attempt to change your mind and to bring you on to my side but you have to be respected what the European Union did to the Irish people after the referendum on the Lisbon treaty which is to say you gave us the wrong verdict keep voting until you get it right it's not something I would like to see in this country I supported remain I campaigned vociferously against Brexit but I reject the notion that there must be a second referendum because the people who voted to leave are lesser intellectuals than the rest of us who supported to remain so far we are on the same page I will even say that the spectacle of democrats, especially Hillary Clinton supporters in the United States demonizing and vilifying those who voted for Trump and blaming it on Vladimir Putin or Facebook is a sign that the democratic party in the United States has completely lost its way they have not understood that the people who voted for Trump firstly every large section of them had voted for Obama in 2008 so you can't say that they were racist unless they changed the spots between 2008 and 2016 but I don't believe that if you really want to understand well how I understand Trump's election for the first time in the last 90 years a majority of American families cannot afford to buy the cheapest car on the market in America without a car you don't exist you can't find a job, you can't go to the supermarket you can't do anything except for those who live in Manhattan and for the first time in 90 years the majority of families cannot afford the cheapest car which is a Nissan I believe trading at around 14,000 American dollars and when I say they can afford it I don't say that they don't have the money they don't even have the credit worthiness to get a bank loan to buy one that's why Trump won this is why the fascists win because they go to the population and they say to them we will give you back your dignity they don't say I'm going to be a horrible person I'm going to create a concentration camp they do it in the end but what they promise people is that they will restore their pride their dignity their country and we progressives who want to fight them never turn against those who vote for the right must never say to them ah your vote doesn't count we must respect every single citizen including those who vote for vile candidates and vile causes and we have to win them over this is something that we have to recover as a principle amongst progressives just to say because I also have a dream and that's that you can ask a single sentence question and you can answer it in 30 seconds Janys you spoke very low about Europe and America yet there's a big world out there which encompasses Asia and Africa and Latin America and not very recent in the past that democracy was used as an excuse to implement the capitalistic agenda of the conglomerates or in some economies it was very heavily emphasised on the soviet model so what do you think in your perfect world the perfect balance interplay between democracy and capitalism in 30 seconds democracy has always been used in the last decades as a bulwark by which to demolish on a colonial agenda weaker people peoples and weaker nations think of Iraq on the basis of a campaign to bring democracy to Iraq we just destroyed a whole part of the globe with the west but that is not a reason to lose sight of the great potential for liberating and for pushing in a progressive direction humanity in Asia, in Africa, in Latin America on the basis of a democratising process Thank you I will ask you to thank Janice Propri in a second but I just want to say a couple of things about the books adults in the room is a memoir which tells the whole story in gothic detail of all the negotiations that he had to go through with the troika as they became known and the weak stuff for what they must does exactly what it says in the tin and explains how it's always the disenfranchise to wind up picking up the tab for the people who made them broke in the first place there's a third book talking to my daughter which sub title isn't capitalism for dummies but that's how I found it it was a really useful primer for me now that's the good news the bad news is that because Janice has already sold so many books this week there's a limited number of them to be signed in the signing tent but there are bookmarks to be signed in the signing tent we don't believe in the market so we're not selling them we do believe in the market and we are selling them and there are bookmarks to be signed and the good news is that there's another whatever they come in another van load of Janice's books arriving tomorrow so if you wanted to pop back and get the books you can do that but you can also have a chat to him tonight and get bookmarks signed meanwhile I'm sure you've been as riveted as I have been please join me in thanking Janice for her talk