 Good evening, Edinburgh. Thank you, Nick. Thank you. Edinburgh Book Festival for this wonderful opportunity. This is the fourth event dedicated to the theme of reviving democracy. And what a way to end it with a theme about reviving socialism with Jeremy Corbyn. You see, ladies and gentlemen, the oligarchy would rather imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. But we must be able to dream of a post-capitalist world as a prerequisite to making a democratic, a properly democratic future possible. To humanise politics. Speaking of humanising politics, Jeremy has already made significant contributions to humanising British politics. And I shall mention just two before we start the conversation. Firstly, he proved that it is entirely possible through dignity and a steadfast commitment to sincere politics to sidestep the systematic character assassination attempts of the systemic media. And secondly, he proved that the youth in this country and in every country are not structurally apolitical or apathetic. All they need is to see politicians that are sincere and that they get reinvigorated, they return to the political arena and they reinvigorate politics in the same way that they've done here with momentum, with the Labour Party and indeed with the last general election where the Labour Party against the prognosis of the establishment had its best results since 1945 because of the young people. So Jeremy, my appreciation as a non-UK person representing a people that have been downtrodden and who have been crushed by the same oligarchy which is attempting to put a pressure on you to do a Ramsey McDonald even before you get into government. But they are not going to get their way. I have no doubt about that. Even though the pressures must be extreme, my wife and I have experienced them separately. But how are you bearing up because a lot of people are asking me to ask you that question? Well, I'm absolutely fine, actually. So if anyone from the Daily Mail is here, you can feel free to report that. Listen, yeah, there are pressures, of course, and there are abusive remarks and so on made in lots of places. But I tell you what real pressure is. Real pressure is when you can't feed your children. Real pressure is when you're about to lose your home. Real pressure is when you're working in a hospital, you're understaffed and you've got to make a choice between who's the greatest emergency of a number of very important cases in front of you. And so political representatives have to absorb a lot of pressure but you've got to recognize the real-life pressure that lots of people are under day in, day out in a system that is grotesquely unfair in a society that is deeply divided between the very richest and the very poorest. And surely our message has to be we cannot afford all these levels of inequality in Britain. We've got to do something about it. And that's the message that we've tried to put and I've put in a general lecture. You just reminded me of similar situations in Greece. I was being asked, how can you bear being the finance minister of a bankrupt country? You were just on the phone with John McDonald a minute ago. Well, you know, there is a fundamental. Britain is not Greece and that is a good thing for you and for the Labour Party because you have a chance to win the government and with the fact, given that you still have a central bank and you have a degree of independence and autonomy, a degree. No one is autonomous in globalized, financialized capitalism but you have an opportunity to do things that we can do. But I remember people asking me about how I was bearing up and I remembered two days before the general election which won, we won. A Spanish journalist came to our home to interview me with a Greek interpreter and at the end the Greek interpreter wanted to talk to me in person and he confessed to me that he had lost his home, he had lost his family that he was generally unemployed and homeless and he grabbed me by the hand and he said, look, there's nothing I want for myself because I'm finished. But please, if you win government, can you do something about those who are on the precipice and who have not fallen yet? You just reminded me by saying this. But shall we talk about socialism? Yes. Because it's a very good idea. If Bernie Sanders can turn the good people of Wisconsin into socialists and win the primary election in Wisconsin, I think that we have a duty to return to the scene of our collective left-wing crime that has led socialism to become an impolite world. We need to revive it. It is about presenting things in a human way and with a human value. It's not about economic and political management. It's about what you're trying to achieve and that is something that involves and excites people. It's about unleashing that sense of involvement and creativity that's there in all of us. You mentioned about young people and their non-involvement in politics in Britain. True. In the elections before 2017, the participation of those younger people who had registered to vote was less than 50%, whereas the turnout for the rest of the population was a lot higher than that. What happened in 2017 was a lot of young people registered to vote for the first time and indeed voted for the first time because they saw in the policies we were putting forward some sense of hope for themselves because they had been told ever since austerity indeed before that, because the neocon agenda began in the 70s, it wasn't a recent thing, they'd been told that they should expect to be worse off than their parents and their children should expect to be worse off than them, that they would have less health care, less pensions and they'd have to pay for their education. And what we're saying, that education should be a right, not a privilege, not a commodity, that health should be a right, not a privilege, not a commodity and that everyone in society matters and so that means looking quite strongly at the education system which has become in my view over competitive in the case of the English education system, it's obsessed with league tables and tick box results which puts incredible pressure on students and on teachers and also results in quite a lot of young people being almost failed by the education system and dropping out of academic study of any sort and so what we're saying is that young people actually matter. Now it's not just in Britain, Britain isn't unique in that sense, the movement surrounding Bernie Sanders and his campaign in the Democratic primaries in the United States I mean who'd have thought that somebody calling themselves a socialist would get within a whisker rather of winning the Democratic nomination for the presidency and it'll be the question we'll all be asking ourselves forever more had it been an election between Sanders and Trump what the result would have been. I know which one I want. Ten years ago the young were lured by this fantasy, this dangerous illusion that modern technology on its own, Google and Facebook would create a better society I find, do you also find the same that today they realize that these technologies however wondrous they may be, they are increasingly monopolized by planning systems like Facebook and Google that concentrate financialized capital and in the end turn them into products. At the same time you have artificial intelligence and for the first time young people understand socialism almost instinctively because they can see that the robots that are going to be producing all those gadgets will have absolutely no need for those gadgets they will not have any interest, any desire in purchasing them or any capacity to purchase them so this concentration of capital which is increasing exponentially means that capitalism is simply going to produce uberized labor markets and just comprehensive misery for the very many Do you find this? To a point, yes, you can't ignore the incredible achievements of the high tech world you can't ignore it. Somebody let me try on one of these face things you put on and it puts you into a virtual reality world and you can travel anywhere you like and so it was that tonight so I thought well I've got a Rio, I've got a South Africa I've got a Mexico, I'll come home again and it was fun and it was incredibly realistic what you were looking at within this thing but it was a complete illusion, a total fantasy world but then the application of this high tech means that we can achieve far more you can do far more, you can do far more in medicine and everything else but and this is the big but which you're quite right to draw attention to the effect has actually been to concentrate power and the agenda in the hands of a small number of very very powerful companies and actually make a small number of people incredibly rich at the expense of the rest technology ought to be something that benefits all of us in the spreading of wealth this technological revolution so far has not and so it is a question about the living standards of people and what you can achieve with that technology but it's also the cultural impact because Marx talked about alienation of the proletarian which effectively meant that the worker felt completely alienated from the products of his or her labor but now you get alienated from the products of your consumption as well because you know when two people get together in social media there's always a corporation somewhere trying to manipulate their behavior in the interests of the corporation so the technology is fantastic I can't live without my smartphone, I'm a techie, I'm a science fiction buff I have to confess to this I want to live in communism and for me the ideal communism is Star Trek because you have machines doing other work and people have philosophical discussions and they explore the universe but I fear that capitalism is leading us towards the matrix Who grows the food? Who grows the food? Who wrote the food? Who grows the food? Nobody, it comes out of replicators Star Trek He hasn't watched Star Trek I'm just asking you the question, you're sitting in this high tech wonderful world we're watching screens, everything's happening Who's growing the tomatoes? No one So what do you eat? They are produced through fantastic technology that can simulate the best organic food ever It won't be impossible to do that I asked you that question, you're quite right I was in a college last week and then you can grow your own food as a hobby you can have an enlightenment That's a good idea That's a really good idea Last week I was in a college where they had something called the Hands Free Hectare They produced a hectare of barley and nobody has been on that field for two years There you are The crop is done completely by machine and drones checking on what's going on and the operator sends the combine harvester up and down stops it when necessary and it stops automatically if a rabbit runs in front of it So it's protecting wildlife I want to touch upon something you said before about the culture of measurement in our schools, in our hospitals You will recall I lived through that in the early 80s under the Thatcher in this country How that happened? Do you remember how that happened? It was when Keith Joseph and the gurus the Hayekian gurus of Margaret Thatcher tried to effectively abdicate from having any responsibility for education, for health and so on by simulating a market mechanism and implanting it into institutions that could never be consistent and compatible with markets like the prisons, the court system, the NHS, universities And I remember how the quality of university education in this country just went down the drain The moment things were valued that could be measured and the intangible things that could not What they did as a socialist looking at this it was absurd It was just a paradigm of absurdity They took the Soviet planning system with indicative prices, the GOS plan and they implanted it into universities They did not implant it in the private sector They implanted it in the public sector So they took the Soviet planning model and put it in our schools and our systems with the result that now we have universities that look sparkling and fantastic and they have all singing or dancing things But the quality of education in this country has gone down the drain And I can say that because I'm not a British politician but I'm somebody who actually studied in British universities and schools and taught here and I just wouldn't send my child But this assert creation of an internal market in Britain, in local government and in health meant that you had this notional value of X department Y department, Z department and so on I remember I was a member of a health authority in the 1980s when this internal market came in It was utterly absurd, the whole thing And I said, why on earth are we buying and selling from each other in the same building when they're all employed by the NHS? And of course I knew the answer to that question perfectly well The whole idea was that the pharmacy will be run by Virgin in the future The ambulance will be run by somebody else and so on and so on It was a first phase Setting up a market in order to privatise And whilst the principle of the national health service is certainly there the degree of privatisation and with it, reduction in working conditions and living standards So you have a national pay bargaining system within the NHS of course It's there, but an awful lot of people are not a party to that because they're working for a contractor going into the service same with the local government and other services as well Which is why our policies are a combination of recreating the principle of a universal public service like the national health service like the education service But it's also about ensuring there's real opportunities for everybody hence the offer we put forward on student fees and the principle that education should be a right, not a privilege and not a commodity to be bought and sold So we will set up a national education service on the lines of the NHS Absolutely because As an economist, you know what is interesting Even the gurus of neoliberal economics recognise that the market fails when it comes to education and to health So this is a very interesting paradox It's like having the Pope who is an atheist and the cardinal is being believers So the gurus of conservative, vulgar neoclassical neoliberal economics would tell you that Jeremy Corbyn is right that you cannot really run a proper health or education service on the basis of a simulation of the market But it's those who are employed whose salaries are directly connected with the bodies, corporate bodies that will benefit from the privatisation that come up with the theoretical neoliberal exegesis of why privatisation is a good thing So you will have to do a battle against them and they are very well paid But it also has the effect of diminishing the working conditions and pay of those within the public sector as well because they're always told you've got to compete against somebody else I was listening to this amazing report from a prison this morning on BBC It was astonishing The prison is an example East Coast Main Line which runs from Edinburgh to London has now collapsed twice in the private sector Carillion which was largely reliant on public sector or partly reliant on public sector contracts collapsed and people discovered actually there wasn't anything there And of course this is a universal story speaking of collapsed infrastructure I think of Genoa the privatised motorway system in Italy belonging to one family that makes 3 billion euros economic rent from it and not servicing the infrastructure with the result, the debts that we had a few days ago Since I spoke about Italy let's move on to an event in June 2016 an event that we tried to prevent we campaigned on the same side what we at DiEM25 referred to in and against in the EU against the EU this was the line that John McDonnell and I were peddling in Donkoste in Leeds where we went and campaigned You were accused of being sophisticated by the media Being sophisticated? Yes They didn't put it in those terms That's a new one Never had that before You had the official remain campaign which was infantilising the British public with the project fear and you had the official leave campaign which was infantilising the British public with those monstrous claims as to what Brexit would mean for the country and the NHS and all that and you had Jeremy Corbyn and some of us who were saying the EU is a cartel of big business it's a pretty awful set of institutions but we're better off staying in and fighting to change it from within in association in collaboration with our comrades progressives across Europe That's a sophisticated argument and you were being accused of not being fully behind the bureaucracy of Brussels of Barnier, of Merkel, of Hollande How do you feel being accused of being sophisticated? It's a low blow It really is, it's a low blow but I cope What we were arguing for was remain and reform There are very strong social arguments for the EU very strong arguments on workers' rights directive on charter fundamental rights on its connection with the European Court of Human Rights, environmental protections consumer protections absolutely very strong arguments for all of that and I would never want to walk away from those There are also criticisms of the EU on its competition policy I want our mail system to be in public ownership There is a competition directive and there's arguments around that There are arguments around the competition element within some EU policies which I think have to be challenged and so what I was saying was one is remain in the EU but we would be a force in the EU for reform of it That was the fourth point I was making in the campaign I hadn't heard that I was being over sophisticated but that's what they meant I'll reflect on that Because you had people like Nick Clegg and Tony Blair and David Cameron who were just adopting the EU mantra as if it was sacred and then you had the Brexiteers who were saying that Satan had created the EU and it was the time and here we were in the middle saying look it's pretty bad That is a sophisticated position to have Britain is not in the EU obviously Thank goodness for that We saw the way in which the European Central Bank treated yourselves and also the austerity that was imposed on Ireland on Portugal and Spain It's not just a state they committed a crime against the Irish people The head of the Central Bank of Europe put a gun on the Irish Prime Minister's head and demanded that overnight the losses of private investors mostly from Germany should be transferred onto the books of the Irish state and the Irish Prime Minister succumbed Now that's robbery Just daylight robbery, that's what they did You will allow me to make one part of this I actually was I challenged the whole Maastricht idea which established the European Central Bank because it was the Central Bank based on price stability not on living standards not on rights and sharing it was entirely on price stability It was a purely ideological construction which nevertheless besides being ideologically quite putrid it was technically and financially ridiculously stupid We created a central bank to be the Central Bank of 19 governments without the Central Bank Go figure But having said that now we are on the road to Brexit Article 50 process We have a government that is completely in disarray It's a dog's Brexit process from where I'm standing which is Athens What are you going to do? Let's say that there is a May Collapses and you move into 10 Downing Streets before March We would obviously We would obviously take over the negotiations We would obviously look for a substantial transition period and our fundamental position would be access to European market and we would have we would accept the regulatory alignment, we would indeed go further than it and I'd go further than the European Union on a lot of trade deals but we would not be saying look, hang on a minute if you don't give us what we want we're going to go off and do a private deal with Donald Trump which will be about deregulation, it'll be about the diminishing of working conditions which is happening in the United States courtesy of Trump and his administration and we will not be going into that sort of protectionist trade war that he's going into in the present time so we'd be seriously negotiating with them and we recognize that there's always going to have to be a very close relationship with Europe after all, half our trade is with Europe and so you can't walk away from it May I convey to you what our position as the Democracy in Europe movement is on this transition period because there's not a single word of what you said that I disagree with but to tie down a little bit more our proposal would be that you go for as close an alignment as possible for a five-year period, renewable that would mean something like Norway Plus which would effectively respect the leave verdict of the British voters create a period during which nothing much changes except common agricultural policy and fisheries and it gives the House of Commons breathing space during which to debate what kind of longer-term arrangements you want or the people of Britain want between the European Union and the United Kingdom without the ticking clock without the gun on your heads as parliamentarians as a country But in the main town we've got the urgency of it that unless they make some serious moves and serious agreement then there are a whole lot of jobs all over the UK mainly in manufacturing industry that are going to be seriously at risk Norway Plus preserves them because nothing changes You have customs union single market for a five-year period I take a point on that but unless they do something then there's an urgent situation where the supply chain disappears When you say they, you mean whom? Tory government Tory government will never do anything they will not have a parliamentary majority and my fear is that you are going to end up with no delay Brexit that's our fear I suspect and you better make sure that you storm the Downing Street as quickly as possible to prevent that My preference would be that since they clearly are not capable negotiating this they're resigning we have a general election so that we can have that choice before the people of this country I am wholly opposed to the idea of a second referendum for a very simple reason you need a binary choice you can't have a binary choice anymore now you have four options on the table one is a deal like there is a maze second option is a hard Brexit Boris Johnson style a third one is end the Brexit process altogether fourth one is a Norway kind of agreement for that you need a general election but also judge what you do what you can have on people's lives what can we do about the levels of poverty in Britain what would you do about the levels of inequality what do we do about the way the housing crisis and so much else in this country do you have a government that is serious about doing that or do you not that has to be the judge of what a government does and I think that the great success of your manifesto in the last general election was that you managed to shift the focus of the debate on what matters for people and to effectively escape at least for a while for a few weeks during the election campaign this polarisation between Brexiteers and Remainers and I would like to again speaking from the perspective of our movement which is a pan-European movement it's so crucial to unite progressives that are in favour of Remain and I believe this toxicity has to end and we can do this so what do progressive people in Germany in France USA, Greece, Spain wherever they're actually saying much the same thing you cannot go on diminishing the role of the public service of the state without paying a price in poverty, inequality and out paying a price with people's lives being wasted and so surely it has to be the question of what the community as a whole does in provision of housing security health security, education security and invests in in our future invests in infrastructure you need technology you need and the development of new manufacturing processes we can't run the whole world just on service economy but in order to bring together the progressives from Germany from Italy, from Greece, from Britain we need to create a political infrastructure a movement that actually does that not simply inviting each other to have little chats and going to each other's conferences but you see the bankers are internationalists they are completely united they have bankers internationale the fascists are increasingly united Steve Bannon is in Europe organizing the neo-fascist international between Salvini, Orban the Polish government the Kurds government in Austria I'm sure he's operating here he even had a meeting with Boris Johnson I don't know why he did that but anyway he did we need a progressive international by which to counter them and we need to create we need to go beyond the Brexit debate because even if Brexit happens even if hard Brexit happens there is nothing stopping us if we are coordinated to have for instance you're going and I'm very pleased to see that I was very pleased to read this in your manifesto you're going to create a new public investment bank a national investment bank where there's nothing stopping your new national investment bank and the European investment bank collaborating issuing bonds together in order to create a fund for large-scale investments in green transition technologies that would create good quality jobs and the Bank of England on the one hand the Central Bank on the other also collaborating in order to be standing by in the financial markets to purchase those bonds to make sure that the interest rates and the cost of borrowing for the green transition new deal for Europe indeed for North America as well the whole point behind the national investment bank is that we lever in other investment as well in order to improve infrastructure and deal with the massive inequalities across the UK between English regions between Scotland and the rest Northern Ireland and so on and unless we do that then what do we continue doing having badly paid people working on zero-hours contracts and you have the sort of sport direct as the model of employment or do you have something very much better and very different and I don't pretend any of this is going to be easy to do but I want our government, the Labour government to be measured against the reduction of poverty measured against reductions in homelessness measured in reductions in the number of people dropping out of school university and so on and about improving people's lives improving the quality of our environment and the quality of our lives at the moment we have this claim that there's high levels of employment in Britain the reality is there's been frozen wages for 10 years and the quality of employment for many people is falling to a group of people in Glasgow who are working in the hospitality sector on zero-hours contracts and they have this absolute fear of the phone ringing they're demanded to come in that day and they're ill they're child sick all the sort of stuff that happens to all of us every day means they can't go in they then get written out completely and they've lost even the chance of working on a zero-hours contract that is inhuman and all life is dominated by waiting for the phone ringing is it going to ring that's just wrong and so that kind of employment practice has got to end and we are absolutely determined to do it which is why we would go further than a lot of European rules on employment rights from day one full rights at work that'd be a good start absolutely and at the same time as the zero-hours contract in this country you have about 850 billion pounds sitting idly in the city of London beating up asset prices and house prices in the south of England and not doing anything productive your national investment bank would be able especially if it's coordinated with similar public investment banks in Europe to soak up that liquidity by issuing bonds and putting it directly into the creation of good quality jobs in the green transition sector and good quality housing was the moment the housing investment actually some of which goes into building luxury apartments in London and the south east that are sold off plan are used as a cash machine for those that have bought them and sometimes they're bought and sold before they're even built bought and sold several times before they're built and in time the housing waiting lists are at record level all over the rest of the country for council housing or housing association properties and so there has to be a change the regional imbalance in England as well as between the nations and there has to be investment in secure housing insecure housing has a very bad effect on children particularly very bad effect on people's lives and also it's very expensive to live in insecurity that can't be right could I invite you before we open it up and we will open it up very soon before we do this could I invite you to be a bit more ambitious in what respect you have a great burden on you to be the leader not just of a progressive democratic socialist movement in the United Kingdom but also beyond the limits of the United Kingdom people out there and you know that in Europe, in America, in Latin America are looking at you for inspiration and leadership beyond the shores of these islands would it not be important and quite marvellous actually to create that progressive international with Bernie Sanders with the new President-elect in Mexico with us in Europe in order to put forward a hopeful message to the people of Britain to the people of Europe and so on people of India in South Africa that we need an international new deal because all the problems that you described regarding Britain of poverty low investment in the good quality jobs the private debt situation in the United Kingdom I was looking at data in this country you have a massive private debt crisis you don't have a public debt crisis you have a private debt crisis when more than half of the families in this country especially working class families need credit cards in order to put food on the table you have a serious private debt issue all these are problems that we have in Greece they have in Mexico, we have in Italy and it's a bit like climate change you need to act upon them in this country but it's not enough to lift these boats to empower the working class in Britain to have investment in good quality jobs it would help to do the same thing in Europe and the United States this is why we need to coordinate and this is why we need people like Jeremy Corbyn to show leadership beyond the shores of this country but we don't frame it around the individual frame it about what we as people I don't have the Labour Party here with me I have you thank you it is important and you're right that we build that sense of international connection because you're quite right others are very internationally connected in a better way than many of us are I have spent a lot of time talking to a lot of people across Europe over the past three years we are in touch with Bernie Sanders and his campaign and I'm delighted to say the new president of Mexico has invited me to his inauguration and he has this massive opportunity having won historically a big majority in the presidential election to actually challenge the levels of inequality in his country which are probably the most unequal society in the world I mean I know it's a tough competition but I should imagine there's somewhere well up there at the top and so you simply say oh Chris is doing pretty well in that competition one of the few things we're good at in Wales though so there is the whole movement of people saying well actually I don't want to be worse off than my parents generation I don't want my children to be worse off and I don't want the insecurity of knowing that somewhere other if I get ill I've got to find the money to pay for a hospital treatment talk to anybody in the United States of what it's like to get ill unless they've got some incredibly fortuitous private insurance system of the bill they're going to get and the burden on their families the bankruptcies that follow the poverty that follows the foreclosures and all that that follow as a result of people got to understand just what an achievement setting up our national health service was and the principles surrounding our welfare state they're all under attack this is why the moment Chris went bankrupt the troika of creditors the first thing they attacked was the our national health service which was never as good as yours but they looked at it as a target that had to be brought down symbolically with menace and with ferocity isn't there a constant philosophical debate between the individual and the collective we want people to be individual we want people to be imaginative and excited for themselves and what they can achieve but sometimes that goes so far you forget that you actually do need your community, your society the collective around you it's the collective that achieves things it's the collective that delivers well you were talking to a Greek well you started all this democracy business yeah it's actually not just the democracy business it was a very flawed democracy the definition of the autonomous individual which is so profoundly different between the ancient Athenians and the British establishment the British establishment has this view of the autonomous individual as the lord in the manor house with very well fortified fences so the individual is well defined and it's well defined in juxtaposition to everybody else to the other, to the community the rest are seen as a threat to individual liberty in this country whereas in ancient Athens all the philosophers the aristocrats, the democrats the left wing, the right wing they agreed on one thing that the only way of realising your potential as an autonomous individual is through dialogue with somebody by catching your reflection in the eyes of the other so you're nothing although there was a bit of a problem with Greek democracy they relied on other people namely slaves to do a lot of work and women were not considered citizens and also migrants didn't have the right to vote migrants and slaves didn't have the rights and women had no rights at all the slaves were not human they were not considered even to be human they were considered to be things, objects the women were human but had no rights and the medics, the migrants were simply the riffraff the way that you keep looks at people like but they did all the work slaves and the migrants but what is also interesting however is that nevertheless despite all these demerits of Athenian democracy it was the first time and probably the last where the majority who were the poor controlled the government that's true and there were also differences in democratic centres around Greece wasn't it it wasn't all of a single type there was only one democracy really well there was Athens but there was also other towns and other cities that did things a bit differently like Sparta which was a despotism beyond belief but those mothers were not all despotic let's open it up but you know what the interesting thing is the Spartans who were almost fascistic nevertheless they were feminist women had the right to a number of activities that they never did in Athens I've never heard anything so nice about the Spartans before well done okay so let's take some questions let's have the lady up there and the gentleman down here in the glasses let's begin with these two questions hello so I'm a young person and I feel like I've been interested in politics since I was 17 but a lot of time some not all some older people tend to look down on young people for their political views because it's not always fully formed or fully involved informed I mean and because we're at the book festival I'm wondering if there's any recommended reading you would give young people to inform their politics no one really wants to educate us anymore the gentleman here thanks a lot we seem to have the most inept and incompetent government in Westminster probably in our lifetimes my question is why is Labour not streets ahead in the polls because you bloody well should okay thank you for the questions young people are intrinsically interested in their own lives and their own future and I think that access to social media notwithstanding all the unkind things we've just said about Google and Facebook do give people an incredible opportunity to relate to each other to discuss things with each other and actually to explore ideas and things in a way that they never would have done before and I think social media is an amazingly strong form of communication and it is very much communication by young people with each other and newspaper readership is declining very rapidly and it's much more older people that buy and read newspapers and I think that's an important factor in all this but it's also young people growing up in a sense of insecurity as well the levels of mental health stress the housing stress the education stress the job stress is massive amongst a lot of young people they don't have the sense of security that other generations did I personally didn't go to university that was my choice but had I wanted to and chosen to and gained entry somewhere it would have been free for me I would have got a grant no fees it would have been there and there was that sense of security which young people don't have at the moment and so a lot of what we were saying was about really trying to create a stronger sense of security for young people and also unleashing that imagination and young people are interested in politics politics wasn't interested in young people for a very long time that surely has to be the key to it on your point about the incompetence of the government well yes they are incompetent but they're also wrong wrong in what they're doing wrong in the direction they're doing we as a party obviously have a different approach a completely different approach and the manifesto we put forward was a transformational agenda for this country and we have done well but not well enough we didn't quite win the general election but we had a big increase in the Labour vote from previous elections, the highest Labour vote for a very long time and indeed the future for socialist, social democratic and left parties across Europe is the message is very obvious where they go along with austerity, go along with a continual approach of deflating or diminishing the role of the state then they lose support and lose support in a very big way I'm not complacent about this we've got to do much better we've got to do as much campaigning as we possibly can and we also have to have a policy development process which we're developing which does involve a very large number of people putting their views forward on all the issues that we put forward but I tell you this when the general election was called last year we were written off by just about everybody we mounted a campaign for the many not the few went out there and took that message out there and once the broadcasting rules kicked in the public as a whole were able on broadcast media to hear at least what we were saying in the general principle that election campaign and the result was what it was I don't think this government can last that long we will push them all the way we can and we're absolutely ready for election whenever we can get one and we're determined to do it and we're absolutely determined to win it as well so that we do transform this society so we're going to have this gentleman here because he's really outstretched his own to an extent that is medically problematic and we want a lady yes up there but before you start speaking until the microphone comes to you the beauty of being a foreigner is that I can speak the truth without any repercussions Jeremy Corvin just before the general election suffered a second coup d'etat within his own party and to have brought home the Labour Party with a 40% vote is a majestic performance it's a performance that needs to be applauded as a major triumph okay thank you my question is is that next month on the 11th of September marks the 45th anniversary of the coup d'etat in Chile what do you as a trained economist and what do you as a democratic socialist learn from that coup d'etat and how does it inform the way that you both work today and the lead as an incoming Prime Minister faced with competing demands for expenditure and for investment how would you assess the expenditure and investment needs of the social care sector okay on the first question about Chile I feel very personally about Chile and very personally involved in Chile I first went there in 1969 and I took part in the May Day March in Santiago that year which was the first coming together a popular unity around Salvador Allende who was the candidate for president and a year later he was elected president on about 34 35% the vote something like that first passed the post three way election campaign and his government took office from day one undermined by the United States and was isolated and a crisis of shortages and many other things was created and the military were incredibly strong always have been they're very strong within Chilean society and eventually the coup happened although it was eminently predictable organised by Kissinger and the CIA it was brutal 7000 people disappeared and the brutality of it is kind of legendary I'll give you just one example great musician Victor Hara who could sing for the people as he did fantastic tunes fantastic musician he was one of those caroled into the national stadium and to stop him playing his guitar and singing they smashed his hands with a hammer so he couldn't play his guitar but he continued singing that was the bravery of the people the coup happened because of a powerful military because of the sponsorship of what they were doing by the US at the time and it also happened because the rest of the world didn't realise quite how perilous the journey was that Allende and the socialists were undertaking in Chile they built houses they used poverty they brought mining and other industries into public ownership and the living standards of the poorest people improved a great deal it was seen as a threat to the wealthy in Chile and to the big corporations who were frightened of a process of public ownership of their minds copper mines particularly and so the lessons are that you can't do it on your own the lessons are there has to be solidarity with people when they're going through the kind of transformation that Chile went through I got involved in wanting Pinochet prosecuted and indeed I went back to Chile during 1990 when the Pinochet regime finally finished and it was an achievement of the people of Chile they finally did get rid of that military dictatorship and I spoke at a rally at Villa Grimaldi which had been the torture centre of the Chilean fascist regime with Michel Bachelet who later became the president and so there was a process of coming together there was a process of prosecution of those people that committed those appalling crimes but the point is we should have a basis and this is where I concluded this point basis in our foreign policy which is about human rights which is about respect for democracy which is about environmental sustainability and so that we form our relationships with other countries and the basis of how they respect their own people and how they respect international norms of human rights and law as a whole and I learned a great deal from the whole Chilean experience and I think we all need to learn a lot from it as well because governments that are trying to adopt a social justice pass will always be attacked by those that want to preserve their wealth be it in tax havens or within their own society on the second question we asked about social care the social care system across the UK is poor the people that are stuck in hospital because social care is not available for them when they should be discharged from hospital and go into a care supportive environment they end up either staying in hospital which doesn't do them any good and isn't any good for the hospital either or they cannot get the social care they need so somebody in the family has to give up work and care for often an older high dependency relative and it's nearly always women who end up losing their jobs and their careers because of the failure of the social care system I'm absolutely determined that we have a social care system worthy of the name that does ensure that all those who need social care get that social care and you don't impoverish the family in the process of doing that it is expensive but it's very important to actually do that because I'm sure some of you would have done is read the National Health Service Act of 1946 and even now it's an inspiring document to read in the preamble in the first paragraph it talks about doctors, it talks about hospitals but it also talks about social care and mental health it sees it as a comprehensive and Nye Bevan who founded the NHS was also the Minister of Housing and he said good housing leads to good health you cannot have good health in a polluted environment insecure poor quality housing low pay and poverty good health is a combination of clean air, clean water sufficient food to eat but also a sense of mental well-being as well as obviously the medical needs you support, you need to support people who are going through an illness or a condition that needs medical health but health is not a specific it is a generality as well I will take one more question from the lady here in the middle wait for the microphone while the microphone is coming to you let me say that in 1967 we had our own fascist coup d'etat and many democrats from Greece were given refuge in Chile by a lander and then in 1973 or 1974 by the time democracy was restored in Greece we returned the favour to many of them sorry that is important but that does not hide the fact firstly that in the end we failed to prevent the two coups and secondly the international oligarchy is now staging coups not by means of the tanks but by means of the banks as it happened in Greece in July of 2000 there were indeed Spanish people that died in Chile and then Franco died shortly after the coup in Chile and then they found themselves back in Spain having spent 40 years in exile in Chile only to find a Franco equivalent to take over in Chile okay you both said very fine words that few people would argue with how can you explain the increasing fear that labour is not getting any nearer 10 Downing Street well listen labour has got more members than we've ever had before we're more active than we've ever been before we have great hostility from the mainstream media than we probably ever had before I think we are in a strong position to keep people united around the agenda we put forward on social justice transformation challenging and ending inequality in Britain and giving people hope bringing people together in hope of what can be achieved what the right offer in our society is racism they offer division they offer something that is not very pleasant in society and will not actually solve any of the problems that people face I think people have to have the confidence that we can deal with poverty we can deal with unemployment we can invest for the future we can have a sustainable life for all of us we can work together with others around the world our unity our unity of purpose of peoples all over the world, the United States Europe, the rest of the world is something that I think is getting stronger don't be undermined by those that want to divide us unite together around the kind of world we could create we had a sniff of that in the last general election when David won the general election I did everything personally I could to make sure we won that general election but I'll tell you what, next time we're going to do it even bigger and even better and what's more we're going to win it well we're drawing to a close I want to thank the Edinburgh Book Festival people for giving us the space to create a dialogue to have the best antidote possible toxic debates that take place in the airwaves, in the newspapers in this highly polarized society in this highly polarized Europe in this highly polarized world we need to stick together across European borders across international borders across even political party divisions because we have a unique opportunity not to repeat the mistakes of our grandparents when after a major financial crisis that generation's 2008 that took place in 1929 a nationalist international rose up taking advantage of the establishment's inanity and authoritarianism in order to drag the world into an abyss we have an opportunity to stop this and we are only going to do it through solidarity and rational debating thank you Jeremy for being here thank you all