 Hello and welcome to The Fix. I'm Michael Walker. And I'm Eleanor Penny. And we've got a stellar show lined up for you tonight. We have the one that only Laura Pidcock MP in the building. And she is going to be interviewed by our very own Aaron Bassani in the second half of this show. To begin, me and Eleanor have this week's top stories for you. Eleanor, you're going to begin. Yeah, so I'm a bit of a downer this week because today is Transgender Day of Remembrance when we commemorate trans people who have had their lives cruelly shortened by transphobic violence. So we've seen obviously more trans visibility in the media over the past few years, but visibility is not protection, right? Trans people are at some of the most risk in the UK of all the populations, right? One recently, a trans woman claimed asylum in New Zealand because of the relative risk that she ran by just living her life here in the UK. And over in the US, the life expectancy of a trans woman of colour is only 35 years. That's like a full decade shorter than the shortest of countries in the world, which is Sierra Leone at 45 years. So for those in the media who have these past few weeks been building their careers on spinning the most vitriolic, the most violent, the most untrue stereotype about trans people, I want to let it be made very, very clear that those careers are built on bodies. These lies have real and tragic consequences in trans people either being killed or taking their own lives. So it's up to us, obviously, to put the resources and the time into protecting our trans siblings and to putting these, you know, craven idiots on the wrong side of history where they belong. I mean, the moral panic over it's been quite horrific. And I think the only, over the last couple of weeks, the only thing that I've really appreciated is the voice of so many, like, brave, inspirational trans people on Twitter and in the media. I hope we can amplify that. I'm getting such vitriol for it. You've got an equally, sort of, story of injustice. Yeah, so it's not a pretty picture in the build-up to the budget, right? Because the British Medical Journal has recently released a report on the real consequences of austerity and they reckon that means that 152,000 people, over 152,000 people have died since austerity began as a result of austerity policy. Now, this is one of the most respected journals, not just in the UK, but around the world. So that means that one person over every half hour has died as a result of austerity. Now, if we could see that, if we could make those bodies visible, we could call it what it is, right? That's political murder by mass neglect. And, you know, for what? It's certainly not for any kind of economic prosperity, certainly not for any kind of justifiable goal. It's purely in the service of an economic program that has A, proved disastrous, and B, resulted in only a transfer of social wealth from the majority of people right into the pockets of the most wealthy. And you say one thing about these deaths is that they've happened in the dark, right? You don't necessarily see them. It's not necessarily dramatic. It's not that someone didn't get the social care when they needed it. That meant their illness got worse without seeing a doctor and when they go to the hospital. It's worse than it could have been. But now we've had this report. This should be the opportunity for us to all start having a debate about this as a nation, about the damage that austerity has done. We should expect to see this across the news headlines. Now, this should be the front page of every newspaper. Yeah. I mean, you could almost excuse the BBC giving a soft pedal to critiques of austerity a few years ago when we, you know, our work was guesswork when we were talking about the potential effects of austerity had these programs not been rolled out. But look, it's down there. Cold hard facts. One of the most trustworthy sources in the world. And where is it? Absolutely nowhere to be seen. It's absolutely astonishing the contempt that the BBC has shown for the true facts about the true human cost of austerity and therefore for the lives of the people who are most at most risk of austerity. That's the people who demand most medical and social care. That's the over 60s that's disabled people. And no wonder that the UN has recently condemned the treatment of disabled people in this country as a human rights abuse. That is no joke. In terms of the silence from the BBC, friend of the show Tom Mills has been quite vocal about this. And his argument is that the BBC have said we're not giving high prominence because we've had some doubts about how the figures were arrived at. This is the British medical journal. Yeah, so if you're not if you've got some doubts, publish the story and talk about what doubts you may have. Yeah, but you can't ignore something by them. The same. It's the same institution that publishes ego thoughts. The BMJ is when they're talking about austerity when they're critiquing the government suddenly, it's not suddenly that they're really like loyal to the like standards of scientific accuracy. When they showed, you know, not so much skepticism when it came to pushing out government lines of say, you know, when they tried to redefine child poverty to make themselves look a little bit less evil. I mean, like, the lines of power here are becoming more and more transparent as the lines that the BBC and the Tory party are peddling are just way, way away from the reality that most people know, right? We don't need BBC to tell us this anymore, because it's the reality to most people. So you talked about the human costs of austerity. This is obviously the week where the government can change its track. It could rectify all of these problems on Wednesday, if it wanted to. This is my heads up to the budget. I actually think we will see a reversal of austerity. And the reason I think that is because the Javed announced it a month ago, he said, it's actually fine for the government to borrow so long as they invest it. It does sound familiar, because it's exactly what everyone on the left has been saying for the last seven years, but it doesn't make any sense to squeeze money out of the economy and sort of create stagnant wages and low productivity when what you should be doing is borrowing at historically low interest rates, investing that in economy that needs more demand. And then you'll get it back intact in the end. That's what the Javed is saying now. I think we'll see that in the budget. The problem is this has been denied for seven years, not just by the Tories, but also by the compliant media who are happy to go along with it. What will we see this new money that I'm sure they're going to find this time around because they're a bit worried to get spent on? The magic money tree. The magic money tree they'll discover at this time around. It won't be on the people who need it most. It won't be on anyone who you've talked about in that report because when the Tories have realised there's a problem with austerity and it isn't the human damage it costs, it's the damage it costs to their electoral chances. So the Tories looked at those election results in June and they are absolutely shook. They are absolutely shook that the economy they've created has not created enough Tories. And this will mainly relate to housing. So historically, the Tories, one of their most reliable sources of votes is people who own their own homes. This is the reason why Maggie Factory in the 1980s privatised council housing. She thought people who live in council housing are more likely to vote Labour. I mean, they are. Yeah. And so what you want to do is we won't create anyone else who relies on the state. We won't create anyone else who's their well-being is sort of invested in the well-being of the collective. We want everyone to be individualists who own their own homes. Obviously not everyone can be an individualist who own their own homes. So if you make an economy and make housing reliant on private ownership, you're going to get people who are stuck paying overpriced rent to private landlords. You get massive increases in inequality, which is what we saw. But this worked for the Tories so long as there are enough people who had some hope that one day they'd own a house. So you need a new generation where the people at the top of the working class or the bottom of the middle class, they feel like one day they'll get a house and one day they might be a Tory voter. This ladder is broken. So we're not getting barely any new homeowners and we're getting more and more people who I think are making their plan for the future. If I want to move out of my parents' house, we're going to need some council homes because there's no way I'm ever going to afford a home. So this budget is going to be about trying to make that ladder work again and getting a new generation of homeowners. It won't be for the people that need it. We'll see very little in terms of council homes. We might be a gimmick here or there. We'll see very little in terms of private rent as again we might see a gimmick. But this is going to be a budget for one thing and one thing only. Look out for Philip Hammond trying to make new Tories. Yeah? That's couldn't be better. We are going to have a break now. Well, it's not a break. It's actually a documentary and our media has gone highbrow. It's an artistic interlude. It's a very good documentary. It's called The Bitter Fruit of Andalusia. It's by Goche Shuzat. And after that you'll have Laura Pitcock in here with Aaron Bethsdani for an exclusive Navarra Media interview. Van lejos para el agua potable los pueblos a comprar el agua de la botea. Para lucharse, cojen de la banza. Y esta agua está contaminada. Además de las pesticidas del invernadero, cojen agua sucia. ¿Por qué no tienen otra alternativa? Muchos compañeros sufren de enfermedad de piel, pero no se dan cuenta, no lo saben. No es porque son indocumentados que están aquí. Hay unos que tienen la documentación. Pero trabajan sin contrato. Y cuando trabajan, tienen pocos días cotizados. No tienen recursos para meterse un aquilero. Detrás del agricultor también hay una precio. El comprador, si le presiona que necesite tanto, tanto en el agua de tomate para mañana, entonces los trabajadores tienen que tirar hasta 10 horas. Pero no significa que van a tener un pago correcto. El convenio no se respecta. Ni tenemos los 20 minutos de descanso para el bocabillo. Da vergüenza contarlo todo lo día porque aquí no se puede hablar de integración. Español para extranjeros no se hace bien porque no nos conocen. Nos saben que venimos de países machacados por la colonización durante siglos y que luego el 73% no va a la escuela. Entonces, se dan un texto universitario, no entiendes nada. Y a los dos días, pues, dejas tu plaza porque no puedes. La ley de extranjería. El punto de partida de esta negación de los derechos humanos. Tiene que permanecer tres años justificarlo y no trabajar. ¿Quién va a permanecer tres años sin trabajar? Que tiene que comer, vivir, si hay mafias y porque lo permite la ley. Hello, welcome back. I'm joined by the one and only national treasure in the making, Laura Pidcock. How are you doing? Hi, I'm fine. How are you? I'm excellent. I'm excellent. We haven't got long. So I'm going to have to get into the juicy part of the interview that everybody... I mean, you don't know me, but no, that's what I'm like, unfortunately. You are perhaps most well-known, at least to the wider public, for comments you made not long after coming in MP, where you said you weren't really interested in becoming friends with any Tory MPs. Is that true? Have you found any sort of outliers and any of the nice people you get on with? Well, I'm glad you got it right. You said Tory MPs because actually there's been so much kind of diversion that I actually said in the beginning. I said that I wasn't really up for going for drinks with Tory MPs at the end of the day. That is my place of work. Of course, there are many, many, many conservative voters in my constituency, and I want to win every one of them. I want to be credible to every single one of those people. But the idea that those people who vote conservative are as culpable as the people in government who are conservative or Tory MPs, who are making some crushing decisions about my community, that I then just go, all right, then I've literally expended so much energy being so frustrated in that chamber, hearing Tory MPs saying some of the most scandalous things about my community, but you fancy going for a pint? I just think it's like the weirdest concept ever. I think I'm being the professional one. No, no, it sounds dangerously close to professionalism, which, I mean, you couldn't say that about many members of parliament, could you? Is that the attitude that they're just not treating it as a job? I don't know, right? I'm not going to tell lies about that place. Most MPs, right, do work exceptionally hard, but I think this has been this dangerous narrative. A lot of the stuff you don't see as well, so, like, you spend hours, I've got a select committee tomorrow, you spend hours preparing for that so that you're on point, you know what you're talking about. People don't see that. That's not on the telly. But we have been primed for more than a generation to see, like, consensus politics as, like, the way forward. And I think that's why my comments were kind of, there was shock about them, that I would say, actually, no, there are clear ideological divisions between me and the conservatives, and that I'm away from home five days a week, four days a week, and I've got friends at home. I'm not going to try and make these relations with people who I do think are creating very damaging, very damaging atmosphere in my community. Having said that, I have done a lot of cross-party working because that's a very different thing. I've got an early-day motion about upskirting and making sure there's legislation to protect women from having that done to them. Hopefully the Tories will sign that. That is very different from, like, cosy drinks on the terrace after work. Why did the media respond in the way that they did to your comments? Because it was outrageous. I mean, even Theresa May had to kind of, had to mention it. Why did they go on that kind of response? I think it's a bit pathetic. I think it's false outrage, or at least it's not outrage at what I really said, but some of the underlying presumptions within what I said, and I don't want to be too high for looting about this. But do you think that's it? What you said actually attacks the very core of Westminster politics. If you have somebody, and there are many, you know, on my side that do this regularly, calling out basically a bit of a cosy network that there has been in the past, we can come together, we can work on this. I'm sorry if somebody thinks that the private sector should be involved in the National Health Service, or if somebody thinks it's appropriate to roll out universal credit in my constituency on the 13th of December. Some people won't get the first payments over the 28th of January. How can I work with that kind of person other than a plea and say, you're the people in power, stop this? But there are ideas, the ideology underpins that action, doesn't it? And so I also think there is something else as well, right? Because yes, you get a lot of negative comments. People say, I'm a Tory voter in your constituency, I don't feel like I'm represented now, and I spend a lot of time talking to those people, explaining myself, and I think that's quite right, because I'm a servant of all the people, not just the Labour voters. But what about those people, right, that haven't got a penny in their bank, that have got to go to the food bank, but might get rejected because they've already been twice or three times, who know that this system is coming, so things are already hard, and these are people who might have been made redundant because they've been out of work or whatever. And then they see me closing up to people that have inflicted that upon themselves. Who represents them? Will they trust me? Because I tell you what happened, right, in that last general election, people didn't say they're all the same. And I'm happy if people disagree with Jeremy Corbyn or think that, you know, we're really ideologically driven or whatever, as long as they're not saying they're all the same, because then people know there's people representing them. You said primed. So the presumption previous to the last general election, was that to be successful, you had to reach out, there had to be consensus. It was about the centre ground. You and I, people that agree with our politics before the election, said actually that's not the terrain anymore, and I think more and more people are now getting there. How do you think the public thinks about these things? Does it look at the comments you made and think, oh, I don't like that, I want them to get along? Or do they want a clear choice? What do you think is not necessarily even the right thing to do, but the path to winning? What's the best way to proceed? I think people need to know that you are representing those communities. So I think the whole narrative around centre ground and almost post ideology is an ideology in itself. It's a very... If somebody in your party, if they say I'm a centrist, what does that mean to you when you hear them say it? Well, I would say the general election that's just being taught as that's not what the nation wants or needs right now. So you can have that, and of course the Labour Party is a broad church, but that's not what the people want right now, so you have to respect that. Nearly 13 million people voted for socialism, and I tell you what I think change is incremental, so you have to kind of test what people will think about things. And for 13 million people to say actually we've got faith in that, I think we'll give confidence to millions more people to say actually I think I'll vote for that kind of change as well. You recently said that the... You asked if the rollout of the Universal Credit was a matter of gross incompetence or calculated cruelty. What does it look like to you? Do you think that the Tories are being cruel in the calculated fashion for the Universal Credit? It's both, without a doubt it's both. And I tell you why, in that chamber the other day for the debate on Universal Credit, the Minister was like pulling... Who was responding? It was like pulling his face to one of my colleagues, who said Universal Credit is about to be rolled out on my constituency but then talked about some people who were already on Universal Credit. The Minister didn't even know that there was a first phase called live service where uncomplicated claimants would go on Universal Credit first. So I was having to tell him from across the chamber this is the Minister responding. You're saying well how would you know if Universal Credit is a disaster if it's being rolled out today? I was having to say it's the live service. So I'm a backbencher, this is the Minister responding. So that is shambolic as far as I'm concerned. You should know that policy inside out and all of the consequences and unintended consequences. The reason I think it's callous is because if you have all of the advice and support agencies telling you it's inappropriate to roll it out in its current form, yet you still do it. So this isn't about ideology in the Labour Party. These are professionals working with people on the ground saying you can't roll this out safely in its current form and you do that anyway because you're a weak government and it might be like another shame, shambles, because you're scared of the fallout from that, then that's callous, it's cruel. So you said that you were in Parliament as a professional and suddenly engaged in public service and you take seriously all constituents regardless of who they vote for because of that ethical public service. But it can't be right then to say that the Party of Government is cruel and incompetent and doesn't even know the policies that it's advocating. I mean, that doesn't sound like public service to me. So is this Tory government? Is it driven by public service? I think ideology underpins a lot of why many people are there. So I genuinely do think there are many conservative members who are working hard, by the way, in that they're lasing about or whatever. But they have really skewed ideas of poverty. So I think that lots of them think that people being poor is their own fault. I genuinely think that some conservative members think that if I had had their life, I would have chose better or differently. And don't understand the crushing, like the oppressive nature of poverty, what it does to your self-esteem, what having little to no money in the bank account does for your freedoms, for example. So it would be hard to conceive why universal credit would be a crushing system if you have not got that consciousness. So honestly, when you're talking about hunger statistics or poverty statistics or inequality levels, they're literally screwing their face up as in what are you talking about because they're not seeing it. So public servants, but public servants that see very different communities than many of the Labour MPs represent. You were not a parliamentarian this time last year. You were looking up to Christmas. We didn't know there was a general election until I think what 16th of April. How much has changed in the last year? And what were you doing 12 months ago? Because you're an outstanding politician. But I mean, nobody really knew much about you until you were selected. Well, I was still running on and stuff like that. But just like to my friends and to my constituency Labour Party, I feel like I've aged about 100 years in five months. But that's fine. I think it's just quite a demanding lifestyle. I have to caveat it at that point saying it's not the hardest job in the world. There are much harder jobs out there that are paid a lot less. So I'm definitely not complaining. But I just had more of a private life. That's all you're accessible all the time as a member of parliament and that takes a bit of getting used to. So I'd probably be looking forward to a Friday night drink, helping sort out the Christmas work party. I was at a charity this time last year looking at racist ideas and attitudes, how they're cultivated in society and what purpose racism has in society and having beautiful conversations with young people, trying to unpick those racist ideas and attitudes. So much more kind of immediate gratification out of that job. I remember this time last year into December, January, a lot of people that were backing Jeremy Corbyn or were definitely going to be voting Labour, for them it felt like a real low point. I was one of the very few people that I knew that said, look, we can get a hung parliament. I never said anything otherwise. What if you think that the real possibilities of success under Jeremy Corbyn in the next general election looked like before the general election? Were you a true believer, even before you became an MP? Were you an optimist? Yeah, because you just... I remember, I'm not going to lie and say I didn't have my low point. I never ever doubted that socialism can be attractive to working class communities if you are not highfalutin' about it and if you talk to people's needs, if you talk about what people actually are experiencing at the minute, I had my low point. I mean, we all did, right? Yeah, of course, because there's only so many times you can have the door shut on your face and you lead as an IRA sympathiser or you're not economically credible, but nobody's questioning the millions in offshore trusts or bailing out of the banks or nobody's questioning that status quo. There was a definite turning point during the general election, which was the manifesto, but I definitely thought and still do think that what the Labour Party now and its current guys is offering is really different, isn't it? Like, we were brought up in the Blair years and putting you in the same age bracket, isn't it? Yeah, I'm actually a bit older. We were brought up in the Blair years and like, what that does to your consciousness, it gives you very low class confidence, doesn't it? It gives you this idea, you know, this idea of social mobility and cheap credit and all that kind of stuff. It gives you a false sense of what you can achieve in society within this system. I think that's burst now. It's burst now for our generation and there's got to be a way out. But a difference between someone like yourself and something like me is that you came from a historically, you know, a bastion of Labour movement and of the Labour Party. And I was from the south and I remember that experience, because I went to a grammar school and I remember my mum having a panic attack about Tony Blair winning. And you're like, Labour is going to shut down all the grammar schools. Typical southerner. But for me, coming from that background, there wasn't that living embodied tradition of socialism. So I understood the ideas, I understood some of the history. But for me, the real turning point was the financial crisis of 2007-2008. And then like you say, I thought, right, bloody hell, the grabs now. The mask can come off. Gordon Brown can adopt some really social democratic policies and we can stop pretending this thing helps people live better lives. That didn't happen. What was the fundamental turning point for your politics? Have you always been somebody that believed in socialism and its potential attractive qualities to the mass of the general public? I don't know, because I do remember the night that Tony Blair took us into office. And I remember my mum and dad crying, like with a lesion. They didn't vote for Tony Blair, but they were just so relieved that there might be a system that listened at least. So it was quite moving, like the relief away from factorism, away from John Major. Because what it did to our community was profound and the community that I represent now has got scars that are still deep from that era. And then the Labour Party came along and it managed things. And I'm not saying there weren't loads of unbelievable things that happened because of the Labour government. But there were also a lot of damaging things as well, weren't there? So it was about managing a system rather than transforming the system so that poverty isn't enduring. You can kind of take somebody out of poverty for a little bit, but to make sure that workers and unemployed workers actually have control over the pain conditions, you have to allow more trade union freedoms and rights. And that didn't happen, and that was a disappointment. And I think our international foreign policy was very problematic for my family. I have massive respect for people that come to socialism on their own, because I didn't. I've been socialised through a socialist lens, if you like. I've been taught since I was young. I remember my mum, I once looked at this woman and I was like, oh my goodness, what is she wearing? Because it was freezing and she had a skirt on, she had to stop the car and she was like, how dare you? She was like, that might be all she's got. So just a little experience. I know she was like, how dare you? You do not comment number one on another fit woman's body. Number two, that might be all she's got. So there was questioning all along. I know there are people that have been brought up in very kind of well-to-do families that have come to socialism on their own. They've questioned the system themselves. Especially when our education system doesn't give us our work in class history. It doesn't tell us what our class achieved through their demands. It kind of teaches us that the establishment gave us everything that we've got. That's just so not true, is it? And it's certainly not true now. So I have big respect for all the anti-austerity movements that have created any kind of change within this quite oppressive system. Because the trade union and those movements have shaped my politics as well and had a massive impact. Final question. Obviously Jeremy Corbyn is going to get to 10 Downing Street. We're going to have a Labour government. What are the big lessons that can be learnt from the previous Labour government, new labour? What are its big failures and how can they not be repeated? I think, and I see it in this government, that you can't have this or William Double speak. You can't be saying things are getting better when things are getting worse. You can't sow false illusions, like you have to be honest with people. And I think the biggest thing that I would love, because obviously I'm not in control of the Labour Party, I'm like a worker within it, if you know what I mean, is to be really honest with people, that to truly transform a system takes more than a year. It takes more than a term that you've got to give us time to change the moral compass of this nation. And that is from the grassroots up and from the bottom down, and that's not one or the other, that it will take all of the movement together alongside a socialist government to create that change. But patience, because what I never want to do is lie to my constituents and say, things are going to get much better and it's going to happen in five minutes. It's going to take us time. Our investment programme takes time. Attracting industry, creating infrastructure. They're all quick wins, like a pay rise, you know? That will alleviate people and that will give people a bit more freedom and take off the pressure. Of course there are quick wins, but to truly change the moral compass and the fabric of this nation, it will take a while. I don't want anyone to promise things that aren't going to come to fruition. On that note, we'll leave it there. Multiple term Labour government. How many terms? Three, four? Forever. I won't say it. You've been wonderful. Thank you so much. This is The Fix. We'll be back next Monday. My name is Andrew Stoney. Laura, thank you again. We'll see you sometime, same place next week. Bye.