 Hello, it's Monday the 17th of October. I'm Michael Walker. I'm James Butler. And you're watching The Fix. We've got a good lineup for you today. We're going to be interviewing Lara McNeil about young Labour. We're also going to talk about the Austrian elections. First off, me and James have both been reading economic reports this weekend. And we've come to the same conclusion, haven't we, James? A specter is haunting Europe. What specter is it? It's the specter of communism. A fully automated luxury communism, no less. And we haven't just been reading the latest blog post from our very own Dr Bostano. This is from the Big Dogs of the Economic Establishment. UCL University, that's my one. And you've been reading economic leftism from an even more surprising source, which is the IMF. Yeah, the International Monetary Fund. I mean, it's worth saying that it's leftism of the most pallid kind. The IMF has been catching on to non-austerity-based thought for some time. The report that's come out is the same report it issues every half a year. It's half yearly fiscal monitor. It's basically dedicated to systematically destroying the idea that taxing the rich is pointless or even destructive to an economy. It's an idea that's been circulating for many years now. And it goes into detail about the policies that can be funded if you were to up the tax rates on the rich. They say that in the front of the report that when inequality gets bad, it can erode social cohesion. It can lead to political polarization and ultimately lower economic growth. So the IMF got woke, I don't know. Well, I don't think you can ever describe the IMF as woke. And you note the third part of the argument there, which is that it's actually economic growth that's set throughout. So that's what they've got in mind. But basically they argue that we need a steeper tax curve for higher earners, so higher marginal rates on the top earners and those have been declining in trend for years and years and years. We should look into different kinds of wealth tax, which we might consider beyond income tax. And that's actually quite important in the UK because we have an enormous amount of land hoarded by the aristocracy and the aristocrats really use a great number of tax loopholes, particularly around inheritance tax. We should look also at taxing capital income, which is really unequally distributed. So these are like profit, interest, capital gains, dividends, stuff like that, which come from having capital in the first place to invest. The moment that's very low, right? It's very, very low. So we should up that. The one bit of income that's not in any way earned. Yeah, absolutely. It just sits there and gives you no money, right? So it also goes into praising the stuff that's been on the left now for a while. But not without criticism, not without pause. It praises it for developing economies. It says in economies where there's a developed and variegated welfare state, maybe it's not going to work so well. It's skeptical about how useful it can be there. And obviously it points out, as we know, that its redistributive impact depends on how it's fine. So it would tie into that question of how you tax people. And the other thing it says is, look, you've really got to spend on health and on education. It points out that the disparities in health outcomes cut across every economy. You look at people, you know, it's particularly true of men. Men who have tertiary education and men who leave education at secondary school have wildly differing life expectancies. And that goes across even nations where you might not think about the case. So there's lots of stuff like that that actually health spending and education spending can really bite into. And obviously this is, you know, positive. The Labour Party which proposes, you know, new 45% and 50% tax bands. I've got three questions for you, James. So this is the IMF. This is the institution that has spent decades forcing governments to take on neoliberal policies, the Washington Consensus, low taxes on the rich because it will destroy growth, cut government spending because it will create inflation. What's caused this turnaround? Have they apologized? And the third question. Are the IMF now to the left of Ed Miliband's 2015 manifesto? Yeah, well, I'm not going to speculate. I mean, it's a very difficult comparison to make on that one. We'll get him on and ask him. Yeah, well, why not? He wants to be a Corbynite now as well. It's very red washing going on here. Look, I mean, there's a long way to go. And there's been a, like, you know, the Washington Consensus has been fragmenting certainly since 2013, maybe even a little earlier. One of the things that one of the guys from the IMF points out is that average top rates of tax across the OECD have declined since 1980 from 62% to 31%. That's an appalling fall. And it's one that we have a long way to go before we were addressed. But in 2013, Olivier Blanchard, who was the chief economist of the IMF at the time, said we've been wrong about Keynesianism. Actually, what we thought Keynesianism did in terms of this technical argument about something called the multiplier, basically the effect that stimulus has on an economy, we've been wrong about that. And then in 2016, this is percolates through the IMF. And in 2016, they come out actually very strongly and say, look, austerity, as it has been applied, just doesn't work. It doesn't do the things that it claims it's done. They defend liberalisation in some way. It's not that they've got really work. It's not that they're not waving the red flag. It's still the IMF. But, you know, they say in dealing with the GFC, the global financial crisis, austerity has been a disaster. There's been a disaster in this country in which it's been implemented, including the UK. So that's what they have to say. It's been going. The consensus has been going for a long time now. And it finally looks like it's really started to crack. This is an important strategic question for the Labour Party, of course. And beyond that, for the left, which is that actually our opponents are going to feel actually very free to move beyond austerity. And so we have to think about how the right is going to try to buy off. It also means we can be bold. We can be bold. So it's fair to say the IMF are not quite woke, but they're just catching up what was already the consensus on among most economists who weren't sort of trapped in that bubble of financiers. Pushing the economic debate forward this week, or released last week, is a report from UCL which is proposing universal basic services. This is pitched slightly in opposition to universal basic income, or as an alternative to universal basic income. And the idea is that to improve our society so that everyone can participate fully in the economy, what we should be proposing is to expand the principles that undergird the NHS and housing to all the areas, or most of the areas, that are essential to participate in life, to lead a good life. So that includes housing, communication, the internet, food, and shut- oh, I've already said housing. Housing, the internet. Food. Transport. That's the fourth one. We're actually going to get them all up now. Let's get all those details up now. So we'll get what they proposed for housing first. So for housing, they are proposing doubling the existing social housing stock by funding the building of 1.5 million new social houses. The new units would be offered on a needs basis at zero rent with utilities provided at zero charge. This will cost six billion a year, rising to 13 billion within seven years. That's a very ambitious proposal. The call for council homes is getting, ah, the call for council homes is getting more and more popular, more and more hegemonic, but no one's quite talked about making them free yet. I mean, free rent. That would not just improve the quality of people's lives, but it would turbocharge the economy. Imagine you're not spending £600 a week on rent. What are you going to do with that money? Some of it you're going to save. A lot of it you're going to spend in the local economy. That's going to be massive. The next one is food. We're going to go to food. Food, another obvious essential in life. We're going to provide one third of meals for the 2.2 million households experiencing food insecurity, and this is going to cost £4 billion per year. I'm not sure if I did say how much it's going to cost last time. We're going to get on to costs in a second. This is something we, again, we don't really talk about free food. It makes a lot of sense in a period where we've got millions of families relying on food banks. Why doesn't the state just provide that? And a massive problem with child nutrition as well, right? There's a real, real concern about children who go home from school and in the school holidays have massive, massive food poverty and it has a real developmental effect. And so this is one of the great social evils that we should be thinking of just as we did after the war. Next one, transport. So we're going to extend freedom passes for bus services to all. And if bus use increases by 260%, this will cost £5 billion a year. Bargain, IMO. So this is the freedom passes that currently you get if you're over 60. That means you can get on any bus for free. My parents both have it. They absolutely love it. I saw my dad on the night bus the other day. He was on the bus for free. I was paying however much it cost on an oyster, £1.50. How unjust is that? Not any longer under this proposal. And finally, potentially most ambitious is information. So they're going to provide everyone with a basic phone, TV license and internet which is going to cost £20 billion a year. That's quite a lot. I love this proposal. I think it's exactly the kind of ambitious, radical social democracy we should be talking about. It's taking the essentials of life out of commodity circulation. This would presumably be democratically controlled and it really gives us freedom to live a decent life experiment. I was looking on Twitter about people commenting on American healthcare and one point they were making is imagine if we have free healthcare. Imagine how much more freedom you have to challenge your boss when your health insurance isn't connected to your work. Imagine if we have housing and food provided. Imagine how much we can demand in the workplace. Imagine how ambitious we can be. In that sense it's a classic bridging demand but it allows that it actually has positive outcomes that go beyond it. Like you, I think it's a really ambitious and important report. I think it does something very important which is think about the way in which societies cohere. One of my favourite lines comes from a sociologist called Titmus, R.H. Titmus, who makes the point and it's a very obvious point in some ways that actually unless you have a system in which the rich or even the well-off are committed to something like society, so they're not incentivised to avoid tax because it will always be cheaper for them to find a way to privately provide for themselves rather than paying to society. So that sense is really, really important and it can really be done by these kind of universal things. The two things that I think are really striking is the transport thing, because like you my parents both have freedom passes and they love it, and the digital thing which I think is also really, really ambitious. One of the things the report says it's quite relaxed about provision. It says it can come from the private sector, it can come from sort of public expenditure, or it can come from voluntary organisations but these need to be democratically controlled. I think provision is an important question, actually that can have a real impact on cost, it can have a real impact on actually what kind of services these are and what kind of houses these are. If you're building 1.5 million new houses for zero rent, I mean that's got to be done by this day, I can't really see how anyone else is going to provide that unless we have a terrible sort of rebirth of PFI but I don't think anyone's particularly in the mood to do that. What about, so the Left has been talking over the last seven years, many about defending current services from austerity and universal basic income. Do you prefer this to UBI? Yeah, I absolutely do. I think it does something really important which uncouples this stuff from a monetary relation. And so basically, you're not being given money which can go then into the hand of rentiers so it can go into the hands of your landlord or it can go into the hands of a monopolist. And these are people who will raise the prices according to universal basic income. So I've always been very skeptical about in our current economy, in our current political economic setup introducing basically a chunk of cash that can then go into the hands of people who run the world. This is much, much better and actually provides the sense that it's something you can move beyond as well. The question for me though is about infrastructure. So it's really, really important for us to get a sense that you don't just have free buses but you have buses that run more than once a day. You don't just have the ability to access transport but you have transport more equally distributed. Massive spend on transport in London and that is understandable but the spend across the rest of the UK is really, really poor. Our examples for what happens when you make something universal and free are quite good. NHS provision is pretty good. It's not like because it's free it got worse. I prefer it to UBI. I think my critique of UBI can be expressed in the same way as the right wing one which is that money is going to get wasted but for me it's not going to get wasted because of booze and gambling. It's going to get wasted because that goes straight into the pocket of an ordinary person and then at the beginning of the month it goes straight into the pocket of a landlord and that's just the state subsidizing people who are milking us all. So let's move to UBI but first of all let's expropriate the rentiers, build a social housing so we can actually spend the UBI on booze and not gambling but booze and books and cinema and rents already sorted. Cinema I feel like I'm sort of learning French or something. You need a nice black sweater. How are they going to pay for it? We'll do this very quickly but in total everything they suggest is going to come to £42 billion per year. It sounds like a lot. It's only 2.3% of GDP which for what you're getting that seems like bang for your buck. We've already discussed about how this itself would promote growth more money in people's pockets. It means more money circulating, more jobs, more taxes. They're going to fund it, well they've suggested funding it by lowering the personal tax allowance which means you pay tax from a lower threshold than you currently do. They're saying about four and a half K. That covers the whole of it. You might argue that we should pay for it by just taxing the rich. I think their argument is this makes it politically easier, easier to collect if you've got a broader tax base and also by their sums this still works out incredibly progressive. So it's going to increase the incomes, the weekly incomes of people at the bottom by £80 a week is what they're saying. I don't think you should give up on the idea of taking quite a substantial chunk of this from those who have profited for years over the fact that there isn't sufficient social housing provision. We can figure out where to tax it from but at the same time how much time do we want to think about taxing landlords and how much time do we want to think about taking away the institutional power they have. That's sort of really the priority, isn't it? Is it fully automated luxury communism? No, but it might be a step on the way there. It's a start, right? We're going to move on to the Austrian elections in the land of... I'm not sure what we were watching there. In the land of the Donald Duck. In the land of... That Scrooge McDuck. Oh, Scrooge. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, my popular culture. So in the world of economic reports the left is doing quite well. The left is hegemonic. In the world of actually existing elections in Europe there is another specter haunting us. There is indeed. And unfortunately it's the specter of the right and the far right. And what I'm obviously talking about here is the election in Austria over the weekend which brought out this Patrick Bateman looking guy who is now Jesus Christ. The images came a little bit before the punchline. So this is Sebastian Kurz who looks like Patrick Bateman. That's why you were just showing that video. He really looks like Patrick Bateman. He is the leader of the Austrian People's Party and he will very shortly be the Austrian Chancellor. The People's Party is the traditional conservative Christian Democratic Party very fusty very kind of old school conservative. He's brightened up a bit. He's changed their logo to Turquoise brought in some non-political people which may sound familiar from Monsieur Macron and also sort of very personally branded it which is also a common right wing tactic. With his young dashing good looks and his young young millennial now in power hates migrants. Here's one secret trick. Millennial xenophobes. Part of this is the failure of right wing social democracy and the Social Democrats have been in a grand coalition in Austria and they have been basically given their imprint to technocratic right wing rule and has tainted them in an electoral it's his political background that worries me. I am very worried about Sebastian Kurz. While he was a minister he promoted very very strong xenophobic policies he said to send all refugees back harden all European borders even further than they already are. He has supported a full ban on the Burka calling it not a religious symbol but a symbol for a counter society and he's made much of his rather inflated role in bringing the migrant route in the West Balkans so that the entry point quite dangerous entry point in fact taken into Europe. God he really is a Patrick Bayman little motherfucker isn't he? The context is basically there was a populist right wing party that was doing Poland's dust for freedom party. Freedom party and he's taken on quite a lot of their tracks. It's again quite common stories about the institutional party police officers. Now no one in Austria can find a police officer or a judge who has worn a headscarf but you know so this guy is going to have an impact. There's been a very dirty campaign in which social democrats have really covered themselves in Mark. They probably funded this site this website smearing him in an anti-Semitic way at the same time he's been really profiting on just out and out racism so yeah this is bad it's going to it's likely that on a European level we'll see him join Orban in Hungary the law and justice party in Poland. These are kind of quite extreme xenophobic right wing parties demand much much harsher treatment of migrants than already is the case in Europe and you know this party itself has profited on a kind of very very right wing so it won't be afraid to attack Brussels as it needs to. It's likely it will join the what's sometimes group as coalition of kind of central European countries Poland, Czech Republic Slovakia, Hungary who have been a very very strong regressive voice Do you have an explanation for that bunching of authoritarian populism? Yeah well look I think in Central Europe I think the long term story here is one of massive injustice within the EU in which these are all countries that were brought very quickly into the EU quite rightly many of them look suspiciously at Germany as profiting off the way in which they accession the EU so Germany's kind of use of guest workers and things like that they were also promised quite a large amount of kind of structural funding from the EU not all of which has arrived some of it has but not all of it has so there's a sense that they're very much a kind of second tier within the EU sort of Franco-German members club it's important to note I guess that this party, the far right party the freedom party is the party of York Haider who some viewers may remember in 2000 he was brought into governing coalition and there were diplomatic sanctions against Austria across Europe that isn't going to happen now because this is the new face of Europe The new normal thing is that the social democratic party dropped their anti-semitic campaigns and take on something that looks a bit like Corbinism but I don't think we know enough about Austrian politics to say whether or not that's going to happen we're now going to have a break when I come back I'm going to be interviewing Lara McNeil about yesterday's or the weekend's young Labour conference see you in two minutes self hey Paul things have really changed but for all the darkness every cause has an effect for all the talk of change the present moment is really one of crisis a crisis of democratic representation of identity a climate crisis of a failing economic model which isn't working for most people but it's beholden to advertisers or the political ambitions of oligarchs which is why in 2013 we founded Navara Media online corporate media we are funded by our subscribers there's no tax avoiders, there's no oil money and there's no lords what we're creating is media for you which quite simply you make possible looking to raise £40,000 that will allow us to not only keep on paying our contributors but give them a little bit more as well as keep our studio and take a look at the fantastic Navara events nationwide to help us get there go to support.navaramedia.com and give a one-off donation or even better sign up for a subscription we've already achieved so much but the truth is we've barely started welcome back we've been planning to update that advert for a while you've been watching it for a few months it's very important for us one because we need your kind donations to continue this operation and two because it gives us two minutes to shuffle the chairs that's what was going on then I'm delighted to be joined by Lara McNeil welcome to the show Lara, you are vice chair of Labour students and on the London Young Labour Committee of course you're here because Young Labour, the UK-wide one, had their conference this weekend and it's made the news because it had some rather bold policies get passed so we had capital controls we had leaving NATO we had nationalising the banks it's a pivot for Young Labour, isn't it? Yeah, I think it's exciting I think a lot of it was in the... young people always seemed to be maybe more left-wing in the Labour Party or in general and I think after called being in power in the Labour Party for the last two years maybe we're starting to see some of that actually translate into policy, into motions and I'm really impressed that Young Labour are leading the way on some serious issues so it's like when we actually get into power we've got some policy which we've recommended to the National Policy Forum that's the process Oh so that's how this works this goes to the National Policy Forum proposed by Young Labour I think a lot of people maybe think that so we have conferences where we can pass policy this is specifically MPF recommendations from Young Labour essentially trying to represent what Young Labour wants so that the Labour Party listen to us in the manifesto and we're leading the way on some of these more radical things but they're going to be very important when we actually get into power Let's go through those three big ones and so leaving NATO what's the argument? So I honestly didn't know too much about it and I walked in that conference room not going to lie that's international affairs has never been my strong point in politics however there were some really strong arguments from I think everyone who spoke on that debate about four rounds of speeches were all first time delegates which was really exciting because they were really sort of intellectual speeches about essentially how NATO has been an excuse or been associated with American imperialism and there were arguments against and I think I felt that they did kind of reminisce a little bit back to the another Europe as possible with the scope on the campaign about being inside NATO being able to remain in reform exactly so I think the points made for were very sort of strong and gave very examples there's actually kind of an emotional debate talking about some of the things that the West have done and how we need to think seriously about that and not play into sort of rhetoric around how sort of excusing America for its actions so it was a good debate on both sides but I'm happy with it we'll move to capital controls and nationalising the banks roll them into one capital controls I saw I read the motions it was mentioning a lot about Syriza so this is people really learning from left wing attempts at government around Europe and learning from them what were the arguments for capital controls and for nationalising the banks again I think it was like learning from us I think a lot of what the Tories throw at us is oh look at these socialist countries or these socialist experiments that haven't worked I think we can't afford to be a social experiment that doesn't work it's about looking through and how we're actually going to implement our manifesto when we get into power nationalising the banks had some very strong arguments behind it after the financial crash and I think yeah it's just strong left wing economic policy which is ultimately what we're going to have to do when we get into an inevitably international capital doesn't like it so the more controversial than what was passed was perhaps what wasn't passed so there were two controversies misunderstood or otherwise that can be for you to explain one that young Labour voted against a motion which was for a two state solution in Israel and Palestine and the other which was that they voted against defending freedom of movement can we start with the two state solution what went on there the controversial one because I think it probably got misconstrued a little bit especially the media we don't have any policy on Israel Palestine as young Labour the Labour Party's policy is a two state solution and that is essentially by definition what young Labour sort of go with and I think a two state solution a better motion would have probably passed what was wrong with the motion so essentially the TUC in general so obviously at this conference I don't think they felt like they could vote for it because groups it was mentioning in the motion aren't supportive of BDS policy some unions don't take as bigger stance on that but the TUC essentially have a version of they want to disinvest from companies boycott companies that profit out of this illegal settlements in Israel and I think they didn't feel like they thought it was sort of saying this is what we should do when Palestinian trade unions Palestinian people are calling for this so it was sort of ignoring those wishes and instead of mentioning groups that trade unions are already working with on this it mentioned some more fringe groups which so they didn't feel like the motion was that it didn't address it properly and because it was a little bit we already have a two state solution policy in the Labour Party having a motion that was sort of similar but a little bit more confused that it would confuse the policy so yeah as I say we don't actually have a policy on it as young Labour so I think it was unfair to say that young Labour disagreed two state solution because I honestly don't think that would be true like I certainly wouldn't go against that looking at that motion it did seem like a slightly bizarre motion that referenced specific groups which is a bit uncommon for that kind of thing the motion which I read which did seem more like it was a position which was genuinely opposed by young Labour was defending freedom of movement that was rejected outright can you explain what went on there? Yeah so the free movement motion it didn't really mention I know you had this discussion on the fix a few episodes back and I think that was really good because you actually talked about how you would deal with the current system like not to look at it like everything's fine because honestly trade unions don't think that workers don't think that everything's fine right now I think we needed to talk more about the motion didn't mention anything about closed shops anything about how we're going to deal with sort of undermining collective bargaining that happens how we're actually going to address the problem so basically we're saying capitalism is a problem not immigrants but it didn't have any steps on how to actually solve the problem and we passed some really good policy as well at this conference we're selecting Muggent Rights and things like that and people speaking against the motion were not saying they don't want high immigration they want high levels of immigration they just don't want to discriminate against people who aren't from the EU and unions in general were speaking about how it's used by capitalists essentially to undermine collective bargaining to cover up sort of the skill shortages in this country by employing lots of nurses and things from the EU we're not we're covering up some of the problems that we have in educating British workers so there were strong arguments for and against and I think it's really difficult not to get caught up in you want to be careful you do not want to like migrate about or anything like that and because you want high levels of immigration I think it was really difficult we had a good debate on trying to separate those the criticism would be that it buys into some common misconceptions about immigration that migration from the EU significantly reduces wages which it doesn't it doesn't seem to be a huge barrier to union organisation that would be much more to do with the trade union act or other laws which limit the ability to function as a trade union so the question would be why not just focus on those and take a bold stand about freedom of movement in terms of whether or not there was enough in the policy so this was from Northwest Unite members in their Twitter so it says there's no freedom with free movement does that statement sum up how you feel about it? I'm not united so I can't say obviously what they're thinking specifically on that in that tweet I think possibly what they're trying to get at is we are in a capitalist system and a lot of migrants come here to work here for a better life but they're not free and they are exploited by their employers still and often it uses a threat against workers already in this country to say you can employ these workers on less money and things like that so I think it's probably talking about the system in general is not working and going back to the motion it was saying defend and extend free movement so it was defending the current system which is used by capitalists I'm not sure I'd say that would sum up my view on it but I know a lot of strong feelings by unions that are organising migrant workers so it's not about British workers versus migrant workers the people coming up to speak on it were saying how this affects migrant workers as well and their rights and people spent so much time organising these workers as well and yes we did pass pro-migrant policy along with that and so that would be my view on it Final question we'll move away from the policies one of the most important constitutional roles young labour has within the Labour Party in a position on the NEC I think that comes up for election next year I know there's been some controversies about how democracy functions within young labour whether there's some fiddling from above I know there was a conference where labour students were given that was this conference so it was surprising how the results turned out because a third of those are delegates so you were expecting that to be watered down yeah but in your overall assessment of how organised how it's going as an institution does it have a bright future or are there still challenges to making this an organisation where members really have a voice so yeah it's got like 95,000 members now it's a huge organisation it's tripled in membership and we're having this democracy view in the Labour Party and we hope that will cover young labour but yeah we have one rep on the NEC we have the National Youth Officer but they're not elected so we have elected members of staff which often leads to conflict between the political waves of the elected committee staff and things like that and I think this conference was decided the location and the timing and the delegate make up was all decided by the NEC which has two young members on it one of which is the youth rep, one of which is the CLP rep rear so everything is dictated over the current committee who are elected by the young members and I think the democracy view is going to be good if it covers us but it's a shame that had to come from above that had to come from Jeremy, that had to come from democratisation of the party rather than what we want as young members and have been calling for a long long long time and it's a shame that the Labour Party but in general like you are sort of patronised as a movement I mean are they worried that we are going to be too radical what are they worried about and it's like you should trust young workers you might have stoked that fear a little bit this weekend well I'm not sure but I think there's a lot of frustration and they should trust the youth movement to be autonomous like they only just got their own bank account for young people like it's moving slowly but I hope it will be in the right direction it's unfortunate it has to come from sort of a democracy view from above though isn't it really alright we're going to have to end it there Lauren and Neil thank you so much for joining us I'm sure we'll have you back on to talk about the future of young Labour or the whole Labour Party this was The Fix see you in a week