 Given Britain's size, we accept far fewer refugees than the rest of Europe. However, our small-minded government so committed to convincing the public we live in an eternal migrant crisis have today announced measures to make claiming asylum in Britain already a hellish ordeal even tougher. I'll be discussing Pretty Battales, new asylum rules with author and academic Maya Goodfellow. And I'm joined throughout tonight's show by Dalia Gabriel. Hello, hello. I'll be joined by you on a Wednesday today because for the medium term, you and Aaron are swapping Wednesdays and Fridays out. Yeah, I know. It's very disorienting. I feel like I'm going to get ready for the weekend now. My whole week was structured. It's the only regular thing I have. So it was like, my whole week was structured around Tiskey. We've got two more days of this, I'm afraid. Two more days of this week to go. So we will also be discussing on tonight's show whether Boris Johnson was correct to say vaccine development relied on greed, how Croydon Council has allowed tenants to spend lockdown in mild infested homes. Really, really shocking clips to show you. You might have seen them on Twitter. Even if you have come for the commentary, but if you haven't, you need to see this. It's appalling. And we're going to end by discussing what could be the most prophetic commons intervention by a Tory MP this year. You can try and guess what that might be about. What do Tory MPs tend to get their knickers in a twist about and embarrass themselves, soil themselves in public over? You know the score. Do share the show link, tweet on the hashtag Tiskey's hour. Keep your super chats coming and comment under the Twitch stream. Home Secretary Pretty Patel has set out plans today to reform the process by which people can claim asylum in Britain. Patel has announced that for the first time, the means by which someone has claimed asylum will be taken into account when deciding what status they are entitled to. So how they arrived will now matter in terms of how worthy they are, they are deemed of status. Of course, if someone has arrived in Patel's words illegally, that will count against their claim. What's more probably even more shocking is that even if someone has arrived without papers and is granted asylum, that will only be temporary. They will regularly be reassessed for removal from the UK and will have limited family reunion rights and limited access to benefit. So it's going to be harder to claim asylum if you came here by a means by which Pretty Patel calls illegal. We'll discuss in a moment if there is any illegal migration, if that's a thing that actually exists, and that you will have less rights if you are granted asylum by that route. Now Patel justified the changes on Sky News this morning. By developing safe and legal routes, we stop people from being put in the hands of smugglers and people traffickers. Too many people have died trying to come to the United Kingdom. We've got to break this people smuggling model. We've got to put in safe and legal routes. And we've actually got to be able to help genuine asylum seekers, not just flee persecution, but be resettled in the United Kingdom. Currently, our asylum system is overwhelmed. We have a number of areas that we are announcing today where we're looking at. Where is the evidence? Where is the evidence that these changes, will convince people not to take these routes? I mean, if you're fleeing genocide, if you're fleeing rape gangs, if you're fleeing war, your priority is survival. It strikes me that the first thing that people will want to do is get away rather than necessarily pop down to the British embassy. Well, actually, that's exactly why we all create safe and legal routes working with the right kind of partners. And to be frank, we've done this already. If you look at the Syrian resettlement scheme, 25,000 people have been resettled in the United Kingdom through a safe and legal route. And this is effectively what we want to create much more of to help people. Currently, the people that are coming over to the United Kingdom are predominantly individual men, leaving behind women and children that are fleeing persecution that desperately need help. And we need to change our asylum system from an end to end perspective. So there are lots of structures that we need to change within the system itself. So to discuss those changes, I'm joined by academic and author Maya Goodfellow. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Now, in that video, you saw Patel justify the changes by saying that this will disincentivise dangerous channel crossings and also better target those most in need. So she's saying these changes will actually benefit women and children instead of single men. What do you think the effect of these changes will be? What do you make of that justification from Pretty Patel? Yeah, I mean, sort of where to start. I think that, I mean, there with this figure of the male asylum seeker, we see this sort of really racialised threatening figure being used time and time again. And I think that we sort of need to contextualise exactly what Pretty Patel is saying and recognise that this has sort of been built up over years and years and really this language of like genuine refugees, illegal immigrants really started in a big way in the asylum debate with new labour and ever since then, it's been pushed in a major way and the asylum system has got much stricter and it seems from what Pretty Patel is saying, as you said before, if people come into the country so-called illegally, then this is going to impact the way that the asylum claim is processed and the way that they're treated. And one of the most important things that I think to know is that under the refugee convention is stated that how you enter into a country should not in any way impact your claim. And so really this is a, I mean, the UN have already said that this is sort of legally unsound, but this is Pretty Patel positioning herself, I think, in a major way to be tough on migration. And I think the likely outcome of it really is just that more people are going to have to take risky journeys, more people are going to risk their lives and I wouldn't be surprised if more people then die trying to get to the UK. What do you make of the claim about sort of providing means by which people can claim asylum outside of the UK without making that journey? Presumably that would be on some level a good thing. Do you believe the Tories have any desire to actually do it? Have they shown any intention or motivation to do that? And also, I mean, would it be practical, even if they did have the will? Yeah, so one way that people can claim asylum is through these resettlement schemes. And these are often run by the UN agency UNHCR, which deals with asylum and refugee claims and works in refugee camps around the world. And what essentially this means is that there is this sort of transfer from a third country often to a place like the UK. And so, yes, this is a means by which people are able to claim asylum. But firstly, the UN say that globally, 1% of refugees are settled this way. Secondly, if we look at the UK's history on this, you know, British hotel wants to sort of roll out the figures. Actually, there's a lot of stopping and starting. There's quite limited, they actually, this works in quite a limited way. And one way that we can sort of think about this, which isn't necessarily a resettlement scheme in the way that she's talking about is the Dubs amendment, which was about child refugees coming to the UK. The government said 3,000 will take 3,000 child refugees already a really small number, but then halted that scheme and only took in just over 400. And so what we see with these kinds of things is actually governments responding to on creating a toxic politics. But the other thing is, is that it is different resettlement schemes function differently. So with the right to asylum, you can go to a country and claim asylum. But with these resettlement schemes, it just isn't codified in the same way. So it's quite difficult for a lot of people to navigate the system. And obviously, it's quite bureaucratic as well. And so you end up having a lot of people waiting in camps, waiting to have their applications processed, and a lot of countries basically saying, we're not going to take in more people. So I think that this is, I wouldn't be surprised if this is a way that they're trying to sort of slip out of the debate, sort of use the language of a lot of campaigners saying, we care about safe routes, and then actually just using it as a way to make it even more difficult for people to get here. Another practical issue I heard today, which I hadn't realized I hadn't thought about, is the fact that whilst this resettlement scheme, even though it was very stingy, I think we allowed 25,000 Syrians into the country versus the million people that Germany let in. And we're sort of saying, oh, we've done such a good job with this resettlement scheme. But that was in a refugee camp. And there are many actual situations where someone is fleeing a government, where if they go into the, can I claim asylum please building, and then our British government, which they're quite likely to do, deny them asylum, that itself could find them arrested. For example, if you're in an authoritarian state, where to claim asylum elsewhere is itself a suspicious thing to do. So it just feels like they haven't fought through this at all. I want to know, sorry, go on. Well, I mean, I think part of the problem is they have thought through it. They know that it's going to make the system worse. And like, time and again, what we've seen all of this is like, is it seems like an obvious point to make. But I think it's an important one is like, there is no humanity in this. The people who are trying to claim asylum are consistently dismissed as so called illegal immigrants that consistently like are consistently told that they're lying, that they're cheats. And even, you know, even if people were pretending or sort of using or sort of embellishing on certain parts of their story, I often think why aren't we questioning why that would be the case? I don't think anyone risks their life to try and get to a country like the UK just for fun or just to try and fleece the system. I think we really have to recognise that this is to do with people trying to find safety and also trying to be in a place where maybe they have family, friends, they speak the language and so this whole myth about the settling in a safe country, that and that being France is often used because of the channel crossings, totally ignores that these are people. These are people who are trying to claim asylum. And I think that that is the government is is quite intentionally stripping the humanity out of the debate in order to keep this really anti-asylum, anti-immigration politics at the forefront. And you've mentioned that the reforms to say that we'll only grant you asylum or we'll only consider your claim positively if you didn't arrive by so called illegal routes. That could be in contravention of the UN Refugee Convention. There are also other elements of this which seem to me sort of legally dubious, being unremovable, barraforming the appeals process, presumably giving people less of a day in court, you're intervening in due process there. And also something called introducing boomerang deportations whereby people crossing the channel can be returned within 24 hours. Now, the whole thing to me just reads as completely extreme. But what are the legal means to stop this? What are the challenges the government could face? Because I mean, in this country, we do have the sovereignty of parliament. If it's against the law, the government can just change the law. But if they do break these international laws, I can imagine the government just saying, yeah, fine, we broke them. We didn't want to follow them anyway. Are people in the sort of migrants rights community confident that if something does break international law that Pretty Patel is proposing, that means it can be defeated? Yeah, I think there's two things here. One is that actually a lot of what they're talking about isn't necessarily new. And so as I said right at the start, you have new labor saying really, really similar things. There's often this, there was even, I think there's a white paper called there are faster firma, which is about asylum. And so this idea of trying to speed things up is something that often comes up into one of the things that the government will encounter. One of the problems I think there isn't this sort of their own making, if you like, happily for us in a way is that already as it stands, the asylum system is just a total mess. And people so many people are waiting on their asylum applications to be processed. And this was the case even before the pandemic hit. And so I think they'll find that actually the kinds of bureaucracy they're talking about is very, very difficult. They really have to put a lot of money into this, which it's not clear whether they're going to be willing to do that. And so we have heard this time again. But yes, I think the fact that in terms of challenges again with under new labor, we saw a lot of legal challenges about around some of the asylum legislation they tried to introduce some of that was successful, some of it wasn't. And I think that what we've already seen today is we've seen UNHCR as I said, we've seen the British Red Cross, I think we've seen numerous migrant rights organizations come out and say that these plans, they don't even make any sense. And so I think we can expect that there will be all kinds of resistance. But I would also say, what is it going to look like in its entirety isn't totally clear, even with the resettlement stuff. It's the policy paper that they put out, I mean, there's going to be a consultation on that. It's not they haven't fully fleshed out a lot of these, a lot of these claims. And so although they certainly can make the system much, much worse for people who are trying to navigate it. And that is one of the most concerning and immediate things that we should be thinking about. I think there's they also do sort of face a challenge around some of the harshness that they want to introduce is not totally clear how they're going to do all of this. And so part of this is also about them really ramping up the rhetoric and really sort of whipping up their base and whipping up hate around this issue at a time, you know, when they are sort of also trying to avoid scrutiny around things like the handling of the pandemic. I want to bring in Dalia now on sort of the political story going on here, because one of the I suppose depressing things here is it looks like Pretty Patel could be about to start a fight potentially with international bodies, potentially with lawyers over the human rights of people claiming asylum. Now, who knows whether she'll win it or not? I think she's definitely going to be very happy to have it. And when you've got a Tory government who are just desperate to start a fight about asylum and refugees and migration, how do you think the progressives should respond to that? It's difficult terrain, of course. It's incredibly difficult. And I think that in many ways, there has been an abdication of this struggle for a very long time. Maya pointed out that, you know, these kinds of policies, these kinds of the closing down of safe and legal passages to migrate to movements, that these kind of things have been going on for a very long time, you know, with new labor, the figure of the bogus asylum seeker was a very central character to the kind of political clout and the political, the politicking, essentially, of new labor and the media under new labor as well. And I think all during those struggles, when the foundations for this was being laid, many in the Labour Party, many across the left, abdicated responsibility for fighting about this because it felt, A, that these people aren't voters, so we don't need to win them over. Or a sense, you know, because of very misguided ideas of white working class and progressive patriotism and things like that, and seeing that basically fighting for the rights of asylum seekers and for irregular migrants of all kinds was kind of not a price worth paying for the potential cost that it might have amongst a working class that is envisioned to be primarily driven by bigotry, which is incorrect. I think that you are completely right. I think the spectacle of fighting with international human rights courts is incredibly, is incredibly up the street of pretty for talents, almost orchestrated. If you think about Brexit, such a central part of the Brexit campaign was this idea that, you know, Britain wants to take strong action against bogus asylum seekers or likely terrorists, etc. And the problem was human rights, you know, the international human rights bodies, and, you know, in the case of Brexit, the European courts were kind of the big bogeyman of that fight. So I think that in many ways, this is going to bolster Preeti Patel's own constituency. And I don't think that, you know, Preeti Patel is someone who it hasn't crossed her mind that she might want to try and run for Prime Minister at some point. And this leaves us in a really strange position because in many ways, international human rights legislation and particularly, you know, legislation on the issues of migration for those of us in the migrants rights space, you know, we have a lot of criticisms, there's a lot, there's a lot that's left to be desired, you know, it's a very kind of liberal, particular kind of way of understanding migrants rights and the particular issues that face people who migrate. But we are finding ourselves having to, you know, defend because it feels like the last bastion against a complete sort of a complete, as Maya pointed out, the only sort of outcome of this where you have a situation whereby the safe and legal passages to migration are being restricted and restricted and restricted. And people who are claiming asylum are being placed under increased surveillance. It's essentially, despite what Preeti Patel says, is putting people into the hands of not only people smugglers, which is kind of this figure that is used very much treated as the cause rather than the symptom of our migration system. But actually, it puts them at the mercy of a very violent state and of exploitative employers. When we talk about, you know, the fact that we have workforces in this country that are being paid less than minimum wage that are in abhorrent conditions, whether it's by British companies in Britain or it's offshoring factories, etc. A lot of the reason why those working standards are able to be pushed so low is because people are classified as illegal by the migration system, an increasing number of people are being classified in that way by our migration system, which then leaves them at the mercy of employers who can then exploit them in ways that lead to, as we saw in Leicester recently, the presence of a sweatshop, you know, in the middle of one of our sort of big cities. So whilst obviously a lot of what my good fellow just said was really, really pertinent, I think you are right, we really need to wise up about how we can catch up on the lost time of the fact that we didn't fight when the groundwork was being laid. We didn't fight adequately. We saw asylum seekers, we saw migrants as people who could be thrown under the bus in the name of broader progressive or left-wing strategy. And now unfortunately, we're reaping the negatives of that not just because of the inhumane policy that this is creating, but also because these systems of surveillance of tracking eventually get used on all of us. I want a final question for Maya, which I suppose relates to the studies you've done of the politics of migration over the past few decades in your book, Hostile and Environment. I know that book was sort of themed about the demonization of migrants and how they have been very successfully demonized by both new labor and conservative governments. From those studies, do you have any insights about successful ways to resist that? I mean, do we have examples of where there have been public campaigns which have shifted public opinion in the kind of direction, which would mean that if Priti Patel were now to just say, screw the UN Convention on refugees, I'm breaking it all, screw the rights of refugees. Do you think there is a language the left can speak in which would make that politically costly to her, which would increase solidarity that people in this country have to migrants and refugees? Yeah, I mean, I suppose it's less about where public opinion has been, because unfortunately, what you've seen is, although this has changed, it's shifted in certain ways. Actually, what you find time and again is you have both parties, being government, out of government, reproducing a lot of these really negative narratives. But what you do find is people resisting particular pieces of legislation, particular forms of treatment, you find really strong movements against attention centers, against things like the new labor government trying to introduce vouchers for people seeking asylum. And so there are really important forms of resistance that connect up the racism of the border regime with the way that migrants are being treated and looking at sort of the similarities between the way certain British citizens of color and non-citizens are being treated. But I think it's less about what has always come before, but exactly as Daria said actually is really learning about how we look past some of the framings that we've seen recently and in the past. And what I mean by that is it's very difficult, but at a time now when the government are going really hard on asylum, we really should not be reproducing narratives that suggest there's a good asylum seeker or a good refugee and then a bad migrant or bad economic migrant, as the language often goes. And the reason why one of the central rally inquiries has to be people cannot be illegal and your status should not define the rights that you can access all the way that we'll fight in the struggle together for better rights for everyone is because these are the these are sort of totemic in how the asylum and immigration debate has functioned, this figure of the illegal immigrant, this figure of the problematic economic migrant, I think the left has to fight for everyone. And so it can't just be selectively saying some people are worth it and some people are not. And just one example before I go of what I mean by that and how that functions is during the first lockdown, there was a big recognition that a lot of key workers were actually people who had not been who were not born in the UK, not just doctors and nurses, but NHS porters, supermarket workers, delivery drivers. And there was a pushback against the NHS surcharge, which means the migrants have to pay twice over the NHS once through national insurance and then again through the surcharge. And this pushback really focused on health workers, health and care workers. And so the government ended up bowing public pressure and campaigners and suspended that. I mean, there have been some issues around that, but they did say we won't make people pay this anymore who work in the health and care system. But everyone else still has to pay twice over for the just to use the NHS or just to be in this country. And so when we're thinking about people's rights, that's why it has to be for everyone. It has to be for people who are documented, for people who are not people in all different professions, but for people with none. Because otherwise we end up just reproducing the very classed racialized immigration system and narratives that the right fly off of and that we should all be sort of trying to resist all the time. And so the fight is not only about asylum is about immigration more broadly and really pushing for rights for all. Brilliant. Maya, thank you so much for joining us this evening and for your insights. Always very welcome on Tiskey Sour. Thanks. Let's go to a couple of comments. Shailendra Singh with five pounds, Tories aiming at Americanizing the UK more unequal, socially, racially polarized, nasty to migrants, aggressively policed and a harsh legal system. And with a right wing TV channels like GB News. I do think that bringing in the worst elements of American society is one of the things that this Tories party seems to be prioritizing. Raji Adi with 4.99 no wonder anti immigration sentiment is so popular. It's so much easier to appeal to people's fears and prejudices than their logic. A depressing thought, but it's quite a persuasive one. And Lou Moon with a fiver sending my first super chat to celebrate being offered a job at my union branch credit to Tiskey Sour for my interview smashing socialist rhetoric. For my interview smashing. Oh, I see you used that socialist rhetoric in your interview. So glad to have helped. Congratulations on your new job. Next story. Boris Johnson has reportedly told the 1922 committee of backbench Tory MPs that the success of our vaccine development and rollout is down to greed at the meeting on Tuesday night. Johnson said the following, the reason we have the vaccine success is because of capitalism because of greed, my friends. Now he did go on to say, actually, I regret it and repeatedly asked MPs to forget I said that. I think probably the fact you said it means he means it and it's an argument we're going to continue to see. One of the reasons this has provoked controversy, which I think is a bit silly is because people are reading this as related to the row that the UK is currently having with the EU over especially AstraZeneca vaccines. Now, I don't think Boris Johnson was saying that the reason we have more vaccines than Europe is because we're more greedy. Number 10 has also denied that's what they are saying. What I think he was trying to say though is more fundamental than just as well wrong really. So that comment about big pharma, he sort of expanded on that here. So this is according to MPs who were present. He said the following, it was giant corporations that wanted to give good returns to shareholders. It was driven by big pharma and I don't just mean the chief whip. Now, that terrible joke at the end is a reference to chief whip Mark Spencer, who was a pharma before becoming an MP. But putting nap jokes to one side, how true is the claim being made here? Do we have the greed of shareholders in the likes of AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Moderna to thank for the speedy development of vaccines? To answer that question, I'm joined by science journalist Steven Buranie. Welcome back to the show, Steven. I'm taking my keys from you. Yeah. Tell me, tell me, we don't have time to talk about haircuts. Is shareholder capitalism, why COVID vaccines were developed and approved within 12 months? It's a good question. And I think coming from Boris Johnson's statement, on the one hand, I mean, it's completely ridiculous. I think you've got even Trump saying before he left office that this was like a great national project that was backed by the government in the United States. Operation Warp Speed spent $18 billion backing research for vaccines. A huge amount of public research went into this. The Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, the so-called British vaccine, was basically entirely created by Oxford University before AstraZeneca started to distribute it. So that's all funding that's coming publicly. So from that perspective, it's completely ridiculous to say that capitalism delivered this. But on the other hand, I would actually push back a little bit on what you said, which is to say that in a way capitalism did deliver the situation that we have right now, where the delivery of the vaccines, the securing of the vaccines is actually totally marketized. And so when you see a situation where you've got a country like the UK who spent big, spent early and secured five doses of vaccines, almost 400 million for the country. And then other countries have none. I mean, that's the market of action. That's capitalism in action. But I mean, I suppose it's not the... Well, do you think Britain was more greedy than the Europeans that means we ended up getting more vaccines? I mean, then the Europeans, a lot of it is speed. I mean, you've got to give some credit to that. But just in terms of the amount of vaccine that we have, and the fact that other countries have none, I mean, that's the fact that there's nobody in charge of this. It's totally marketized. Let's talk about how capitalism might be limiting the distribution of these vaccines. I suppose you've sort of said how it could be meaning that they're divided in unfair ways, or that the distribution of them says not equitable. I want to talk about how other capitalism could limit the production of vaccines. And this is especially with respect to patents. So whether or not the intellectual property rights of big corporations is stopping us produce enough vaccines. I want to bring up a graphic, and this is from Bloomberg. This is dividing the countries of the world according to their position on whether or not patents for COVID-19 vaccines should be waived during the pandemic. So in yellow, you can see countries that support those patents being waived. So that's most of Africa, India, China, parts of South America. But the countries who oppose waiving those patents are mainly in Europe and North America, also Brazil and Australia and Japan there. Now, I want to know from you, Stephen, do you think that it is this opposition to waiving patents that is meaning that on a global level, at least the rollout of these vaccines is much lower than we'd like it to be? Yeah, I think the answer is yes, but you've got to look at it at sort of two different levels. So given the world we have now, the situation we have now, pharma is required to deliver these vaccines. So there was a time prior to the 1990s that many states manufactured their end vaccines. A lot of states in Europe, Canada did at the United States Army, had a vaccine manufacturing facility. Basically, all of that was sold off through privatization through the 80s and 90s. So, you know, pharma is required to make these things. So with the world we have now, if you were to bring down patent protections, basically what you would get is the ability to, on the one hand, you could sort of share information. I mean, something I think that doesn't really come through well is if people often say, you know, we have like 200 coronavirus vaccines in production or in sort of research. And that's held up as if it's like a really good thing. You know, it's like industrious. There's like a lot of people working on it, but they're all making these vaccines like totally walled off from each other. So, you know, if one has some sort of, you know, patent process development that could make anything faster, especially in production, they're not sharing it at all. And I mean, this goes counter to how things were done for basically most of the pharmaceutical industries history. Like during the Second World War, the American government basically forced companies to share the knowledge of how to make antibiotics with each other. I mean, Pfizer had a specific way of producing penicillin that the US government forced it to give to other producers. So just like at that level, if you opened up patents for COVID-19 vaccines and everybody shared their knowledge, I think you would probably get a lot of efficiencies, you know, rung out of the system that way. The other thing you could do, and this was also common in the past, so prior to the WTO agreements on intellectual property, lots of countries, again, Canada used to do this, Italy, Spain used to do this, you could force pharmaceutical companies to license their vaccines to you or license any of their drugs to you. And so in this case, you know, a country would say, we need more of this specific drug, we have a company here that'll make it give us the recipe and we'll give you some money for it. And there was basically nothing pharmaceutical companies could do about it. And this was super widespread. I mean, Canada used to do this for heartbreak medication, like it was not controversial, it was not a big deal. But basically the ability to do that has been totally circumscribed since the sort of IP regimes of the 1990s. And so those are sort of the two things you could do if you were able to open up patent protections. And this is what like Third World or developing nations, global South nations are really interested in doing. So India, South Africa, China, really, really good at making basic vaccines, not incredibly good at developing them, but super good at the factory side. And so, you know, if you totally open up patents, there's lots of companies that have said, look, if you give us the chance, we could do this. And I mean, that's that sort of the level working with right now, it's not going to, you know, ratchet up production by double immediately. But you would see people, you know, bringing this forward in like four to six months and bringing some more efficiencies out of the system. At the other level, you know, if you were to basically go back to sort of a pre 1990s regime, you would have countries able to make their own drugs. You would have basically sort of less protections on IP so that you could make them around the world. And it would just be an ecosystem in which pharma didn't have this like vice grip on the ability to make these drugs. I like that idea of like the bit like a compulsory purchase order, right? So in a crisis that the Canadian government can just say, we're going to give you some money for it, but we're determining the price and you've got to give us the patent. I like that attitude. Totally uncontroversial. I mean, Pfizer very famously wrote an op ed in the New York Times that called this part of this, this thing stealing from the mind. And that was the sort of start of the lobbying effort that eventually brought it down. I want to know who you blame for the position we're in right now. Something that's, you know, been very present on social media. I think there was one article about it is this idea that, you know, the academics at Oxford University, what they wanted to do was develop an open source vaccine, which anyone could develop. And then they had a conversation with Bill Gates, who said, no guys, you've got to go with big pharma. So they went with big pharma. Now, I don't know if that conversation happened. But what's your understanding of why, you know, academics at Oxford University or any other university decided to go with big pharma? Is it because that was actually the only game in town? Or was it because they sort of, you know, got a whiff of the profit motive and decided that that's the best way to go? I mean, as far as I understand, it was, it was actually, I mean, it's pretty well refined Bloomberg reported that, you know, not not a noted socialist publication that, you know, it was, it was a conversation with Bill Gates. I mean, it's really hard to say I don't, I don't know any of them personally. And initially they had wanted, like the Oxford group had wanted to, you know, give it an open source, basically. And, you know, I believe that that's what they wanted. I think that they were convinced to do so because the entirety of the system is geared towards that. Pharma is the only game in town. And it's just sort of not done that you release something and just let anybody try to make it. I mean, there's for this specific vaccine they're making as well, there's, it's not like a traditional vaccine that Big Pharma usually makes. It was sort of a new technology sort of similar to the mRNA ones that Pfizer and Moderna made. And so, you know, they may have had concerns about even the ability of other places to scale that up. I mean, that said, you know, I think it's an understandable decision. Big Pharma is really good at making vaccines. I mean, they really are, they're the only, they're the only game in town for the most part. And so it's easy to understand, you know, why, given this decision, when you have this, this one product that you would go with, you know, somebody that's really good at making it. I just think it also shows sort of a limited outlook, you know, in the really long view, because, you know, if this is not the chance, if this is not the chance to break out of this sort of regime that well prior to COVID, you know, has been, has been criticized for limiting lifesaving medications, life saving drugs, life saving vaccines to the global south for overcharging people in the developed world. You know, if this isn't the chance to try to break out of it, you know, when it is. So I mean, hopefully that, well, I was about to say the next time around a pandemic comes along, but we're going to need vaccines and we're going to need drugs as soon as this pandemic is over. If only Oxford University and all the other universities could develop a partner with public sector organisations which can create a vaccine so they don't have to sell all of their intellectual labour to AstraZeneca and Big Pharma, because they're the only people with, you know, with the machinery or the know-how or whatever. I mean, that's why I say it is really two levels. It's what you can do right now, but then it's about thinking about how you could create or even refer to a better system that we used to have that makes it so that you can produce it without relying on Big Pharma in the future. Stephen Burrani, thank you so much for joining us this evening. Thanks for having me. Let's go to a comment from Kit Scolan with £5. I realise this is a tone shift because the country is so bleak, but would you wish happy birthday to my partner Angus for tomorrow? He's fab and got me into Navara Media. Happy birthday, Angus for tomorrow. Well done for getting your partner into Navara Media. That is exactly what we like to see. If you haven't already, do hit subscribe. We go live every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7pm. ITV have reported on the conditions in a tower block in Croydon and it is absolutely shocking. As in, I watched this with my mouth wide open appalling. If you haven't seen it, you're going to be shocked too. Let's take a look. No one should have to live in conditions like this, but in this wet, cold, mould infested flat, live franzoy and her two young sons. The bath she wants used to bathe her children catches dirty water from the ceiling above. The leaks began four months ago, soaking the floors, destroying their possessions and turning their home into a health hazard. I've had to plug out my fridge since like for about three months now because water has been leaking down the back of it into the electric plug and it shutted off all the electrics. The damp began two years ago, but despite complaining to her landlord, Croydon Council, for the past four months, nothing has been done. I mean, there's only so much I can get angry and get upset and pull my hair out. I just feel like I'm going to kill myself if I continue like that. So I just try not to make it stress me out too much. You've got two children to pick at. Yes, I do. What do they say to you about this? Mommy, the house is flooding and are we going to move? Are they going to fix our house? And they're like, are we going to be homeless? And stuff like that. What do you say to them? I told them the truth. I said, I don't know if anyone's going to fix it and maybe we will be homeless because everybody I turn to, no one helps. I mean, that is just so disgusting and appalling watching that. This is 2021 in a very wealthy country and you have people living in flats which are flooding for months. You know, it looked like an abandoned building in like a horror movie like Chernobyl or something. You go back there 20 years later and this is what the buildings look like. This is what Croydon Council are expecting someone to live in. Now, that was the flat of Franzo and her two sons. They were age seven and five. In the longer video you'll see that they all live in one bedroom because it's the only room in the flat which isn't flooded. They don't just live there. That's also where they cook. They've got a microwave and a kettle in there because they've had to turn off everything in the kitchen. I mean, you saw the kitchen, you can't cook in there. It's disgraceful and it wasn't the only flat in the tower block that looked like that. The ITV crew also visited the home of Leroy McNally who lives in the same building. The mould is everywhere. I've had to move the furniture around so that the water doesn't land on the bed. This is all mould. This is all mould. It looks like there's been a fire. It's terrible. Leroy has had damp problems here for many years but in November the leaking began all over his flat, sparing not a single room. How long have you had these four buckets here for? Since about Christmas. Every six hours I empty them and put them back out again. So what do you do at night? I've got to bed about 12, wake up about six, empty the buckets. Like Franzo downstairs, Leroy feels ignored by Croydon Council. I have to keep on ringing the council over and over again to say, what are you doing about this leak in my flat? Eventually they said to me, there's no leak in your flat. They said there's no leak in this flat? They said there's no leak in this flat. Why do you think they're not listening to you? I've got a feeling because when I used to ring up before, I used to say Leroy, my name's Leroy McNally. And I've got a feeling that that puts them on your foot because straight away they say Leroy, it's a black person. We don't want to deal with this person, blah blah. I've got a feeling it's something like that. Eventually I started saying my name is Mr McNally. I wouldn't say Leroy. And I've got a better response. So you've got a better response when you didn't use your Christian name? When I didn't use my Christian name. Just that wall at the beginning, that wall that was just covered in black mold. If I spent five minutes in there, I'd be worried that my lungs were getting damaged. And again, Croydon Council are expecting someone to sleep in there for months. Now, for some background, the tenants have been complaining to Croydon Council, who are their landlord, about those leaks since 2019. So ITV saw evidence of Franzoy. That was the woman in the first clip you saw complaining to the council in October 2019. It was from December last year, so about four months ago, that the leaks got really bad. So it essentially looks like a permanent flood. And since then, since the leaks got awful, Franzoy has called the council 20 times. She showed ITV call records of that, nothing was done. Now, again, other people in that block also had problems, but didn't want to appear in the report. This is so tragic. One man told ITV, the dripping got so bad in his flat that he had to sleep in a tent in his living room. Darlia, were you as shocked as me watching that? I mean, of course, it's absolutely disgusting. The scenes themselves are incredibly shocking. I don't think that you need to be an inspector or whatever to know that these are very dangerous and unsafe living conditions. It's important, I think, to connect this to the broader story of gentrification. I grew up in Croydon and I've seen, just over the past five years or so, I've seen that as these living kinds of living conditions, perhaps not to this extremity, but certainly unlivable living conditions, have become more and more ubiquitous for working-class communities that have been living there for a very long time. The actual area itself, like the price of real estate, the quality, the transport connections, the amenities, these have all skyrocketed in terms of their price and their quality. And obviously, access to that quality is very much mediated, depending on your class. So, while we see this active degradation in some areas, we're seeing other parts of the area become much glossier and people making a huge amount of money off the fact that real estate is gaining a lot of value in this area. And I think as middle-class professionals and lots of us who live in South London, who live in these kinds of areas, increasingly as middle-class professionals move to these areas, there's this sense amongst landlords and real estate tycoons that working-class people, largely black and brown people, are taking up space in prime real estate that they're not good enough for. They aren't rich enough, they aren't white enough, they're taking up what is now prime real estate for free and how dare they? It doesn't matter that these are homes that many of whom have actually looked after and refurbished and cultivated with themselves. So, we see this kind of active cultivation of disorder, of hazardous living as a way of trying to displace people, firstly, so they vacate these spaces because it becomes unlivable, they have to leave, it's becoming unsafe for them to live there, or to create the pretext for housing to be knocked down and replaced by luxury flats. So, you point at it and you say, look at what a state these buildings are, we need to knock them down and rebuild and we'll put a couple of so-called affordable housing which are often not that affordable at all. So, I think the story in Croydon is not specific to Croydon, it's the story of gentrification which is happening across our city and that's been going on for decades. And I think also we've been having a lot of conversations actually over the past few weeks but since the summer really about this idea of state violence and you know, rightly a lot of that has looked at sort of direct physical violence that has been experienced by people at the hands of the police. But this is also a form of state violence. You know, state violence is not always a boot on the neck, it actually most often comes in the form of systemic wage theft of active cultivation of conditions and exposure to harm, to death, and the nature of that exposure often means that it can be kind of reframed as being the fault of the individual or the fault of the community that they somehow brought this on themselves. And you know, a lot of instances of state violence, it disproportionately impacts black and brown and working class people, people who have been designated as disposable, as unwanted, as people who don't matter. Ruth Wilson-Gilmore actually uses this in her description of what racism is, what she calls the state sanctioned and or legal production and exploitation of group differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death. And that's what we're seeing here. That to me is a much more convincing understanding of how racism operates today, not only as sort of speech acts or acts that involve individual intent or behaviour, but when we look at footage like this, and we think about what we know to be true in our communities and our neighbourhoods, and we see the systemic neglect and expulsion of particular communities in ways that lay foundations for the broader neglect and active denial of care and broader patterns of exploitation that are then suffered by everyone, whether it's housing or healthcare, education or employment, or you know, the treatment of people and the criminal justice or the immigration system. So for me, this is really about looking at how gentrification operates, the techniques of gentrification of which you know, systemic neglect is a very key part of that. And also putting this into the context of these broader questions of state violence and racial state violence that we have been having over the past several weeks. I mean, I think that concept of systemic neglect you bring up is really important as well, because I mean, if you're looking at a situation where you've got working class, predominantly black and brown people living in a tower block who are begging their landlords, in this case, it was Croydon Council, the case I'm thinking of, Grenfell, it was an arms length tenants organization. They're begging them to make their homes safe, because they know they're incredibly dangerous and their landlords do nothing. You can't help but think, yeah, this is just systematic contempt on behalf of landlords and councils and arms lengths, tenants organizations for whoever are living in their properties. And yes, this does remind me of Grenfell 2017. We learned then after that tragic fire that took 72 lives, we learned after that that the tenants had been complaining to their council for years, years and years, or to their tenants organization for years and years about the dangerous conditions that were in in that building. And they were completely ignored. And no one took paid any attention until the tragedy happened. They'd actually sort of foreseen that in previous blog posts in the in the tenants association, they sort of mentioned that we think this will only be recognized when a real tragedy happened. And it did. But no one took their voices seriously because they're people who are marginalized in society. And I mean, again, one can, if one wants to be cynical about this, take a similar line to what what Dahlia was, I say cynical, it's also incredibly convincing that this contempt is partly motivated by the fact that councils, landlords would prefer these poorer people, these more marginalized people to not be in their boroughs at all. They think, well, if you're going to complain, why not move to a different less expensive borough, and we can move in the middle class professionals that we are trying to attract. I mean, it seems fairly obvious. That's what's going on here. And I want to talk about race as well. Dahlia, you brought it up very rightly. I mean, it was obvious because of what Leroy McNally said, he got better treatment. And when he didn't use his first name, and the ITV report, which was very good, all credit to ITV for this investigation, they brought up some broader statistics on racial disparity. So they say, according to the government's latest English Housing Survey, 33% of mixed white and black African households live in a non-decent home compared to 18% of white households. A non-decent home is one with no modern facilities, no effective insulation or heating, or in a state of disrepair. 13% of mixed white and black Caribbean households are more likely to have damp problems compared to just 3% of white households. So the racial disparity there incredibly clear. The obvious question, I mean, I was asking as I watched that initial report, whose fault is this? I think everyone who watches that can admit that's an absolute disgrace. Who should we blame? Now, on one level, we can go all the way back to the 1980s, we can talk about facture, destroying the idea of council housing as something that a cross-section of society relies on, making sure that council housing is something which is only used by, or the intention is that it's only used by marginalized people who don't have much of a political voice, which means that as you deteriorate the conditions on council estates, politicians can quite happily ignore the people. If it was a middle-class white person who had that much mold on their bedroom wall, I think the council would probably do something. So it's because you have limited council housing to the people with the least political voice that you are able to sort of generate conditions like that, allow conditions like that to continue. In the immediate term, you've got to point the finger at Croydon Council, so they have direct responsibility for this. They are the landlords, they have the legal responsibility for the people who are living in their properties. Now, they told ITV in response to this report, we were very concerned to learn of these issues at these properties, and the photographs we have seen show conditions that are clearly not acceptable. We are sorry that these residents have not had the level of care for their homes that they rightly expect, and we will be looking into what has happened as a matter of urgency. Now, Croydon Council is a labour council. I mean, probably many people who are watching this show or a few people watching this show might have gone out campaigning for that labour council, so you're going to be, you know, it's shocking to see that they have allowed this to happen. Now, you could say in their defence, okay, maybe this isn't the fault of neglect or systemic neglect or contempt from the council, it's because we have seen huge budget cuts from central government, and we have seen huge cuts from central government. Council budgets have been cut by two-thirds since 2010. That obviously does mean that repairs are going to be done less often. It means that the council are going to have less people to answer the phone. It means that people are going to be more rushed to a working for the council because they're expected to do more things in the same amount of time. But, I mean, what makes me lose any sympathy for Croydon that one might have sort of retained after watching that clip is this bit of reporting from ITV. So this is from the article that I've just quoted before. So ITV, they write Croydon Council declared bankruptcy in November 2020. The council denied the continued disrepair at Regina Road was linked to their current financial situation. So the council are saying, yes, we've presided over this horrific situation where people are expected to live in what looked like death traps, essentially, live in absolutely hellish conditions. And, oh, by the way, it has nothing to do with our financial situation. Well, if it's got nothing to do with your financial situation, then what has it got to do? The only option that remains after you've ruled out the financial situation is either that you are criminally incompetent or you hate poor people. You hate black people. I mean, those are the options, right? And I don't see why, you know, if even if it was because of funding, you should not allow that to happen. But if Croydon had stood up and said, yes, this is, we're so ashamed this has happened, but also this has happened because of the draconian cuts we've seen from the conservative government. These are the results of this. Yes, this particular situation is so extreme. We don't understand how we managed to let this happen. But to be honest, because we are stretched, because we don't have enough money for repairs, we are seeing us being forced to offer a service that we don't think is is one that our citizens deserve and therefore you should fund our councils properly. But no, this Labor Council stands up and says, yes, sorry, we've messed up and no, it's got nothing to do with money. Like how stupid can you be? It's also this is very important, actually. So in terms of did they have the capacity to sort this out? Now, you saw in that video they had been the people you saw in those clips had been asking the council for weeks and months to do something about this. Since being contacted by ITV, the council provided alternative temporary accommodation. So it's interesting how they'll act when a TV company gets in contact, but not when actual tenants call them up to disgrace. Let's go to our final story, which is a more light hearted one, because it's just a typical Tory soiling themselves in public. Before we do that, do make sure you like the video. It helps us in the algorithm, which means more people see the show. Between now and 2024, we can expect to see many Tory MPs soil themselves in public as they try to show their undying commitment to the British flag. Few, though, will likely top this pathetic intervention by the MP for Northwest Norfolk, James Wilde, during a session of the Commons Public Accounts Committee. He made this odd challenge to BBC Director-General Tim Davy. I just wanted to touch on, there was a bit of discussion about flags last week, and I think in your own report last year, 268 pages, do you know how many union flags featured in any of the graphics in those glossy pages? Of all the briefings that I got for this meeting, that was not one of them, I'm afraid. I think Mr Wilde will be able to take it again. I had no idea. We're zero. Do you find that surprising? No, I think that's a strange metric. I have to say, one of the things I looked at when I came into the building this morning was a Union Jack flying proudly on Broadcasting House, which it does on many, many, many days of the year. I have travelled around the world championing the UK. I sit on the private sector council for the great campaign. I don't think there's any problem with the BBC in terms of championing the UK and Britain abroad. We're incredibly proud of it. And if you do wander up Regent Street today, then have a look at the Union Jack flying proudly on top of the BBC. Always good to see the Union Jack flying. I was thinking of a report of 268 pages about the BBC and the British Broadcasting Corporation. My constituents would expect to see probably more than one flag appearing. I just don't see it as a metric. Okay, well, you may not, but license fee payers may do. And the great campaign you mentioned, I think the Union Jack, which is pretty prominently in that. In the report you published last week, the BBC across the UK. Again, how many images were there of the Union Jack in that? Well, I could hazard a guess based on where the question is going, but I haven't looked. Yeah, again, it was none. So maybe in the annual report for this year, perhaps you could include some imagery around the Union flag. That was the House of Commons, right? These are people who are elected to be the political authority in this country. We're in the middle of a pandemic, and that two minute questioning, he really thought he had him there as well. He was like, ah, I've got him. I've got him here. He's not going to be able to wiggle out of this one. A whole 280 page report without a single Union Jack on it. Also, it was the Commons Public Accounts Committee. So the job of these MPs is to scrutinize people on how public money is spent. Very important job. There's actually quite a lot of things they could have thought about over the past year, potentially the £37 billion which has been earmarked for test and trace, much of it going into the pockets of corporate lobbyists, right? But no, he's spent his time flicking through 280 pages of the BBC's annual report and found that there aren't any Union Jacks. Dahlia, I mean, what did you make of that video? I mean, at this point, I feel like I need to just get a full Union Jack tattoo just to be safe. I feel like it's also highly telling that the very people who have crowed the absolute loudest about cancel culture and snowflakes and free speech came to be so invested in these concepts of the very people who are now on fucking police patrol about the size and number of flags in random places that no one has even asked about. And don't bring your constituents in there. I guarantee your constituents are not as annoying as you are. So don't even try blaming this on them. But this tells us a lot of what we already knew, right? Which is that firstly, that a lot of that kind of free speech snowflakey stuff was as it has been mobilized by the riot over the past several years is actually has been not much more than a Trojan horse to basically try and restrict and stigmatize particular kinds of speech and not just speech, but actually in some cases just the mere existence of certain individuals whilst trying to kind of discipline various institutions and people into towing a particular line and into co-signing increasingly sort of reactionary pieces of legislation that are done in the name of patriotism and whatever. And these kinds of the duality of this kind of like literally sort of shoving flags down our throat with this these kind of models of legislation that we touched on in the beginning of the show which really talk about models of belonging and ideas of what it means to belong and belonging which is essential for accessing basic needs. Not only is it narrowing and narrowing and narrowing but it's making life really inhospitable for those who fall outside of it. And in many ways I think a lot of this this sort of increased paranoia and sort of you know policing about flags it's coming from a place of insecurity. In the book recently published by myself and six other incredible scholars Empires Endgame we talk about the political the particular political and cultural effects of imperial decline on internal British politics on how the loss of a particular international role played by Britain in the world and not to say that you know imperialism doesn't exist anymore but you know the the particular form that imperialism takes and how it exercises its power has changed but the sense of decline of feeling that you know the neck the world is no longer under the boot of the British state as it was at one point leads to these kinds of you know nationalistic like convulsions which lead to these obsessive attachments to things like a flag because there's not much else to attach to and I think it's also being accelerated by the fact that the union in the union jack is very much in decline it's it's at the most fragile that it's been for a very long time you know the s&p is the largest party in Scotland it's not going to change anytime soon support for Irish reunification and Scottish independence are both you know above 50% especially amongst younger people in younger generations so it's a problem that's only going to get worse for the British state and even 40% of people in Wales support Welsh independence so you know with these kind of numbers and the fact that it's happening at that younger generational level I think that you know that is kind of what's that that insecurity is partly what's driving this very desperate scramble to put on a front of strength and unity and this is the kind of frivolous side of it but the more terrifying side of it is the the kind of huge displays of state power being wielded in order to show the strength and the kind of the efficacy of the state and this is these these big displays of power are done you know as we mentioned in the beginning of the show against asylum seekers they're done against you know people of colour they're done against working class people so there's kind of like a frivolous funny side that there's also a kind of darker underside to that kind of national insecurity which I think is why we're seeing this kind of pageantry being becoming more and more a cause of scrutiny in the public sphere I mean I think we've got an example of one of each of those one being a bit cynical and one being silly although I mean maybe some of you will find them both both cynical the cynical one is that this peer pressure from backbench Tory MPs and certain pundits on the television seems to be having an effect and beyond the Tory benches so news this this week the BBC has reported that the hosts of BBC breakfast Charlie State and Nagam and Chetty they have been spoken to and reminded of their responsibilities after complaints about comments made about Tory ministers doing all their interviews in front of ever-growing Union Jack flags and I say that's sinister because I mean people people on the left disagree there's people disagree with me about this but I I don't find it that offensive when politicians have Union Jacks next to them I think it's kind of to be be expected if you want to be the leader of a country you're probably going to have to show that you have some affection towards it but what I find is incredibly sinister is this pressure for everyone to do the same so if you are to make a joke about the Union Jack if you personally don't feel comfortable standing in front of a Union Jack then suddenly that casts you out for suspicion I mean I find that incredibly sinister and I come from this as I say my position is we should just be more relaxed about flags whether someone has one whether someone doesn't want I think everyone could do with just being a bit more relaxed about flags but we're getting to quite a sinister place where you have to apologize or be reminded of one's responsibilities if you make a joke about a flag the news which I think is more silly although potentially it could be more consequential we have the announcement of a new government policy today I'll bring up a tweet from itv's Paul Brand who's reporting on it says the UK government has asked for the Union Jack to be flown on all UK government buildings every day of the year from now on currently Union flags are only required to be flown on all UK government buildings on designated days the guidance will ask for the flag to be flown all year round unless another flag is being flown such as another national flag of the UK and Paul Brand says this is a clear attempt to assert the Union um culture secretary Oliver Dowden has also today described the flag as a proud reminder of our history and the ties that bind us now that's actually quite telling that quote because you say this is this is a reminder of the ties that bind us and clearly as as Dahlia mentioned there from this this push from the government is partly because they're a bit worried about the strength of the Union you've got a majority of people in polls um being shown to be in favour of Scottish independence actually the movement for wealth depend welsh independence is growing quite a lot of strength and the movement for irish unity um is also on the up in large part thanks to brexit so there's real concerns in in westminster that the union could break down that would really um undermine a big part of sort of the conservatives raisin detra their reason for being they're called the conservative and unionist party if all these um constituent parts of the uk decide to go it alone Boris Johnson doesn't really want to be the prime minister who presides over there what does i want that to be that the main thing um next to his name in the history books and what's a bit pathetic is that their biggest plan to stop that happening seems to be to fly the british flag in more places now i'm not sure if anyone in scotland is going to think oh i was for independence but now because i've walked past a union jack every time i go past a town hall every day that now means that actually no no maybe i do feel proud of my country and maybe i will vote remain in the uk if that all is if that's all they've got the union is not lasting long i mean the other thing to say about this i've said it already in this section 147 000 people have died during this pandemic the government have said they don't have time for an inquiry into why that happened oh so we don't have time for that kind of thing in the middle of a pandemic we'll do that in a couple of years time why didn't they make this pointless announcement in a couple of years time if we don't have time for an inquiry but we do have time to make changes to the rules about which flags fly from which building you've got to ask questions about the priorities of this government um and the answer is is quite obvious they don't give a damn about anyone that lives here they just you know want to prove that they are more patriotic than the people sitting on the opposite benches um darlia how much more of this do you think we're going to have to take from now until 2024 i mean i think it is like you said i mean it's a pathetic front that is being put up against these kind of internal contradictions um and i actually think that you know you mentioned oh will this kind of like is this the best that they've got how you know i don't think anyone's going to change their mind about i actually think it might even have the opposite effect and that people will feel so patronized um by it that they're actually more likely to get frustrated and you know resentful uh of how little it seems that you know westminster thinks of them i think that's a really important point i mean if i i mean obviously i think it's quite unlikely that we're going to break up from the u k i suppose that's london or i suppose we might end up breaking up from the u k just because everyone else is left but one very minor reason to do it would be because you're sick of walking past all these huge flags every time you go past the town hall um right we're going to wrap up there thank you everyone for your super chats tonight and your comments we always do appreciate them darlia thank you so much for joining me this evening a wonderful wednesday surprise thank you for having me um if you have enjoyed the show and you're not already a supporter please do go to naviremedia.com forward slash support and donate the equivalent of one hour's wage a month if you already do that thank you so much um you make all of this possible um we'll be back on friday at 7 p.m do make sure you hit that subscribe button for now you've been watching tiskey sour on naviremedia good night