 Good evening, welcome to the fix. My name is Aaron Mestani. I'm joined as is it's not really that frequent anymore. We don't see that much. I don't like you anymore. Ash Sarko the one and only. I see is that we managed to prize Ash away from her numerous speaking engagements. You're always like busy these days. I don't have Tinder fan. I just got to say yes to tell you. So we'll be bringing you the biggest stories over the course of the last seven days this evening. We'll be picking a couple of each and then later on Ash will be talking to Matt Myers about his new book. What's it called? Student revolt voices of the austerity generation out now on Pluto press from all quality book retailers. Can't wait. That's gonna be very good. But first we're gonna talk about a few of like I said the biggest stories of the last week. Ash you're gonna kick us off. So the really big news which just broke a few hours ago. I'm pregnant. Congratulations. No I just ate a ton of noodles. The big news is of course that sentient Glacier Mint David Davis has just announced that when there is a finalized Brexit deal on the table it will have to be enacted by an act of parliament. So that means that MPs can vote on it. That means that they can table amendments and it will have to pass in both houses. Unsurprisingly there is very little consensus on how this news is to be received. You've got Labour figures like Keir Starmer welcoming it as a concession to Labour's ongoing campaign for more parliamentary oversight of the Brexit process. You've got the kind of hardcore remainers like Chika Romana saying well look this is just a kind of facsimile of a vote because if this deal gets voted down by parliament Britain will be exiting the EU on World Trade Organization terms. So it's kind of like saying yeah you can have a vote. There's only really one meaningful outcome because we've got a strap held to the dome of your economy and there's also lots of talk about well will we actually exit on WTO terms or will there just be an extension of Article 50 an extended negotiating period. Will there be a campaign to perhaps withdraw Article 50. All these things are up in the air and I was originally going to talk about the possibility of there being a second referendum today. What campaigning would look like the dangers in trying to frame I think quite a nostalgic or reactive set of political demands and obviously today's statement has shagged it entirely for me. However I think for all the speculation of what's going to happen in 2019 I feel that establishment media coverage has fallen quite short and what it's done is fall into the old trap of perceiving politics as just a series of set pieces of kind of manoeuvring and skull-duggery and one camp trying to take the wind out the sails of another. But don't you think David Davis has played a blinder because it does seem to me that the Tories had their back against the wall on this and because we have the Fixed End Parliament Act if Labour vote this down or if the opposition votes it down they're still in government and obviously things will get terrible pretty damn quickly and they can then put that at the door of the Labour Party, the Lib Dems, the SNP so this seems like a pretty clever move by the Tories. And I'm in agreement though and I think that this comes down to the heart of the matter is that there's actually a real difference between campaigning for more parliamentary oversight and campaigning for effective popular accountability because what we've seen since the June election whether it's been with the Radon pensions funds or whether it's been with the Universal Credit Rollout is that there is very little agreement on what should be voted on and also what an outcome of a government defeat in terms of votes means right no one knows what's going on. So going hand in hand with the kind of you know zombie atrophy and neoliberalism that were all existing under there's also a kind of zombie parliamentarianism and I think that the challenge that Corbyn's Labour Party now has to meet is to get a bit braver because I think one of the great successes of the election campaign was to revive politics itself the idea that what's up for grabs isn't just disaffected consent right but you present a policy platform that you can agree with you can disagree with you can engage with but there's something substantive that's there. The two places where they haven't done that are very closely related it's with Brexit and it's with immigration policy and I think now Corbyn's team has to get a bit braver they can't rely on this kind of schrodinger's Brexit and they kind of have to present a much more robust platform than just laying out a vision of a kind of socialist utopianism so what they need to do is spell out what will it mean if the government collapses in six months 12 months 24 months right at what stage of Brexit negotiations what difference does it make for them to inherit a WTO Brexit as opposed to a kind of high access low control one and I think that that's a really good thing it's not messageable it's messy it's nuanced but trust in the electorate with these issues and this kind of decision making that's what democratic renewal looks like and I think that's what we should all be agitating for. Well from one political dinosaur David Davis to another Tony Blair made one of his now frequent incursions into the popular conversation one of his tri-monthly bi-monthly brain farts he went on a multi-media assault over the last few days I think on Friday he went on a today program in Nick Robinson he did an interview with BuzzFeed to Jim Mortison and then on Sunday he spoke to Sophie Ridge we're going to start with the interview he gave to BuzzFeed very funny and it started with a bit of conversation about centrist staz let me get this quote up he said um I think that's a term invented by people who regard centrism as the status quo place if you define centrism as splitting the difference between right and left then I'm not a centrist I'm not interested in that I define centrism as the place where you want solutions that are radical but still realistic and non-ideological because they're practical ash what the fuck does that mean well I don't think that Tony Blair's a centrist dad either right why is that because my dad left right but can you can you translate this for me or I mean tell you why didn't you give me your gloss on it right because I think what he's trying to do is claw back that neoliberal moment where ideology can present itself as pragmatism which is the most ideological thing of all right exactly and also look centrism the clues in the name Tony you've got right you've got left and then you have a politics which is purely relational on these two peripheries and it calls itself the centre the clue like I say is in the name and yes the idea that a practical politics cannot be coterminous with an ideologically driven or values driven politics is is ridiculous now sometimes values and what has to be done come into conflict that's the nature of politics but I'm ideologically committed to reducing carbon dioxide emissions and if we don't do that guess what half the city is in the fucking world will be underwater in 50 years time so it also turns out that it's practical as well so it's a false binary which I think like you say he's just going through the greatest hits of the last couple of decades and he's not been at the top politics of 10 years he's still talking unadulterated shit then there was the um the today program interview which he gave with Nick Robinson he talked about two things there which I'll briefly touch on the first was that he said that labor should be 15 to 20 points ahead of Tories and I mean okay they were polling mid 20s in April latest part of 43 of the Tories on 40 and everyone laughed at Diana but when she said that they were going to make up that shortfall everyone laughed at her you can't keep on moving the fucking goalposts they would win a significant majority if there was a general election today and here are the facts 1997 2015 every single general election labor lose seats when they won a general election for last time in 2005 they won with 9.5 million votes in June they got 12.5 million votes 2015 general election they lost 50 seats in Scotland it's very clear that Corbyn's labor have turned a corner whatever your beliefs there's a historic change right something's been interrupted and the thing that was interrupted was a flawed understanding of technocratic machine politics conjoined with near liberal policies and the reason why Ed Miliband didn't do the same thing and by the way the Tories in 2015 were just as messy just as fucking crap and useless but that wasn't exposed because Ed Miliband didn't do what Jeremy Corbyn did which was break with that form of technocratic politics and offer a different kind of policy platform but finally Tony Blair chatting shit about polling and about centrism is all kind of funny but then there was the stuff he said about Saudi Arabia so we're just now going to cut to a particular part of that interview on the today's program and Nick Robinson we talked about how Saudi Arabia is now a beacon for human rights and freedom in the Middle East well I think the way I look at the Middle East and I spend an enormous amount of time there is I don't think this really is about a proxy war and I don't think it's although there's elements of this I don't think it's really about Shia versus Sunni or Iran versus Saudi it's essentially a battle for the the heart and soul of the region in which on one side you have people who really want religiously tolerant societies and rule-based economies and those that don't and the new leadership in Saudi Arabia and particularly the crown prince and the program that he's putting forward is a program that is about modernizing the country its society its economy and they see the threat of Iran as a threat that's pushing extremism across the region and destabilizing countries whether it's Yemen or it's Lebanon or it's Iraq or it's Syria well I I mean this is complete nonsense it's kind of entertaining to hear him choke on the Orientalism yeah do you know I mean it's like he's he's trying to speak from underwater it's like Samuel Huntington's trying to escape from his neck yeah I mean look let me get something clear here Carlson's table I'm half Iranian I am not I am not standing for Iran I'm not saying Iran is this sick and like you know it's a major regional power with its own interests it's in Syria it's doing things that nation states do right which is advanced the national interest which is also the interest of the ruling class I'm under no illusions but the truth is in Iran more women graduate than men there are women in parliaments women can vote they've been able to vote for decades Saudi Arabia women could vote for the very first time in 2015 women ran by the way nobody's this is not the executive or for a president this is for counselors you really have no power right it's a it's a it's a despotism it's an absolute monarchy right women could stand for for for public office but because women are legally prohibited from speaking to men who were not their relatives in Saudi Arabia right women who are running for office could only address all women crowds or if they were addressing all men crowds they had to be behind a screen or a man would read their speech for them this is the country which Tony Blair is saying you know is on a path to democracy and a rules-based economy he basically means neoliberalism and human rights and when you compare it to Iran in a number of ways Iran is not a despotism it's a polyarchy you know both formally and informally it has a constitution the two countries are incomparable but what concerns me the most is that the average Brit will be listening to this and they'll be saying well Tony Blair is intervening because he's a former prime minister you know and fine you know he's a prime minister has a role to play you know their views are important Tony Blair was a lobbyist for the Saudis between 2010 2011 he was a lobbyist for a nationally owned oil company he gave them access to politicians Chinese politicians this is on the books Tony Blair associates got i think in excess of 350 000 pounds so he's a lobbyist for these guys he's been a lobbyist in the past for a number of other regimes we find quite problematic he was the prime minister when Hong Kong was given back to China between 2007 he was in the country five times 2007 2008 he then gives a speech in Hong Kong sorry in China he gets 200 000 for that speech and since then he's not criticized the regime once so here's the thing people talk about Brexit they talk about Trump they talk about bots on Twitter we have a former prime minister who is a lobbyist for China and Saudi Arabia who is then trying to set the terms of debate for British foreign policy and where British lives may be lost or where taxpayer money may be spent in regard to foreign policy decisions so we don't need to worry about Twitter we don't need to worry about Cambridge Analytica fixing Brexit when we have absolute clowns fundamentally charlatans like Tony Blair at the center at the forefront of our national conversation he shouldn't be in the labor party and fuck me he shouldn't be on the television he shouldn't be on the mortal coil me i don't know why i'm stopping there but i do want to talk about one more thing if i can yeah because one of the things that i've been really concerned by is that there seems to be a real rebirth and renewal of the platforming of trans exclusionary radical feminists and i feel that while we have been quite effectively demolishing their arguments about how trans women aren't women and how trans women present a danger to cisgender women everywhere and i think that there's been a lot of really great and useful work done to demolishing it there's not been that much time spent on thinking about how and why this kind of revived platforming of these figures like Jermaine Greer or Julie Bindle is happening because this was bigger over the weekend right and this was really big over the weekend because you had Janice Turner's heinous article saying children sacrificed to appease the trans lobby which is just classic scare mongering front page of the sun as well no yeah front page of the sun today which was the skirt and the drag queen go swish swish swish terrible scanning doesn't even go that well with the wheels and the bus but i digress and i think that we can see a lot of parallels between this kind of confected moral panic about you know trans people corrupting our children and taking over our schools we can see a lot of parallels with the kind of section 28 hysteria of the 1980s where we can see a lot of parallels with a kind of homophobic authoritarian populism which came to power i think with thatcher and i think because we can see those parallels weirdly this should give us a little bit of hope because that was a really effective political strategy when it was able to present itself as a counter hegemony so the thatcherite narrative went that i'm going to come and make schools teach common sense curriculum values again like you know the three rs and no more hippie teachers promoting homosexuality and people were able to look at and go yeah that sounds about right whereas actually that kind of orthodoxy is no longer a counter hegemony it's just hegemony and what's more that is completely at odds with the general movement of pop culture now i'm not saying that life is not made often intensely unbearable for in particular trans youth and trans people of color in this country almost half of all trans youth in this country have attempted suicide 84 percent have self-harmed and those are deeply alarming statistics however the kardashians are trans inclusive now can you west of trans inclusive now pop culture is going in one direction and it is in a more inclusive and pathetic and accepting one and that's not the mood of our popular press so that should lead us on to our second question which is how can these figures like julie binda like uh what's her name but chill right like germane greea how can they find friends in the right wing tabloid press because let's be real these were the feminists who were getting smeared as lesbians separatists as bad mothers and all the rest of it in these very rags not that long ago and i was giving it some thoughts and i was thinking about the fact that trans exclusionary radical feminists aren't radical at all because what they've done is they've looked at the foundational feminist premise which is that gender is a set of social norms constructed to dominate women as a class and that women's emancipation is based on the deconstruction and the dismantling of these norms and gone well we can't take that too far we will at some point rely on a biological ascensionism and what they've done is essentially respond to the death of modernity and the kind of utopian potentials of you know modernist meta narratives and kind of accept the conditions of post-modernity that real change isn't really possible and it's not desirable which is the exact position of these right wing tabloid rags they don't want change they don't want political participation the reason why you're able to see this kind of dovetailing of ideologically divergent political interests is because they both want the same thing which is stasis so when people say that identity politics are splitting the left and it's going to interrupt a program of social and economic transformation i kind of present this counterpoint which is no these things are deeply connected trans rights are human rights they are our rights they are political rights and us as cis people need to ride or die for our trans siblings and i think we need to get a lot better at rejecting the framing of mainstream debate and push it on to politically useful territory excellent well we're going to go to a break now i think we're going to show our fundraiser video we wouldn't need to change no we're not we're not showing our fundraiser video we're showing a video of john mcdonnell at the ucl occupation in 2010 my favorite guy and after that you'll be speaking to the one and only matt mayers about his new book great looking forward to it see you in a second first of all just i'm really solidary i've been solidary to jeremy korman mp as well he's in the palestinian region at the moment i just want to congratulate you on what you've done i think it's brilliant and it's happening all over the country and the messages that are coming in from the university and colleges right there across the country is absolute solidarity and i think whatever you're seeing on the tv or whatever what's happening along white hall what's the real world the real world what's happening is large numbers of students are actually saying we're bad enough and we're not willing to take it anymore and it is about it is about the basic freedom of education we thought of the generations people like me were fought for the right of free education and these bastards are going to take it off us and what this is all about is making sure that they don't and i think you're having the effect you're having the effect whatever they say whatever klegg says and it's very difficult not to use physical force on klegg i know but i'm trying to understand myself in the chamber and whatever is said you are having that effect i've been down in the street today down along white hall some of you may have been there but 11 o'clock 12 o'clock large numbers of young people turned up with all the ages school students as well as college students at university students so it was a a joyous absolutely joyous atmosphere when they assemble them climbed up on the lines of to malice square and there was enormous numbers and they spontaneously then marched down white hall and what then happened is the police set up a barrier at the bottom i've filmed some of it there was a barrier set up by a police right way across the road and they did initially did a police search search knocking young people over and pressing them up against safety barriers and i think i filmed some of it because i was worried actually it was almost almost hillbill like you thought someone was going to get injured by a trampoline and then they kettled it they kettled people in and then left a police van in the middle and left it alone it was almost an act of provocation of what was going on and people literally in kettled in had no idea what to do and all sorts of things were breaking out people were asking to leave and they refused to leave some of some of my friends and colleagues are in their trap in there as well they've been there for four or five hours not allowed to leave but when we raised it with the police they said well we're about to supply them with water people just want to protest peacefully and of course some bombers did break down and it's unfortunate but actually some of the violence also came from the police themselves and a large number of people have been hurt too i think that's a disgrace all around you know the whole point of the protest is about the peaceful demonstration of our views of opposition and the the whole message is it got and it's in our long history in this country if governments won't listen and if politicians lie there is no other way but to resort to the streets there's no other way in which we can register our voice if parliament's not listening and that's what people have done i just want to say well done you've restored my position i've got to get back to the the place that um William Morris wanted to turn into a house as you know and use him nowhere it was a storage for um to try this anyway i'll get back there but we we've grown we've grown out of the aversion down to the jeremy and i on the on the agenda of parliament they're not allowed to debate early day motions out of them though but we put it down anyway just as an expression of solidarity congratulated people have been demonstrated not to find universities and colleges right across the country because it is in line with the tradition for peaceful protest in this country when governments refuse to listen people have to take power into their hands themselves and that's what you're demonstrating and what you're doing it isn't just among students you've given courage and determination to trade unionists who are now fighting for their jobs for others that are campaigning for justice in their own fields i think you've sparked off a new generation across the protest in this country but also a new belief that people can assert their rights when politicians ignore solidarity thank you very much for what you're doing so that was john mcdonnell all the way back in 2010 addressing the ucl occupation and i know that that's a kind of shaky and unfocused mobile phone video but being a completely sentimental cornball i thought we'd kick off with that because really if it wasn't for that wave of university occupations between 2010 and 2011 i don't think navara media would exist i would never have met aran busani or james butler i would probably be richer happier in a more secure form of employment so you wrote a book um thank you so much for joining us it's a real pleasure to have you here um so this book student revolts voices of the austerity generation i can't recommend it highly enough and i'm not just like gassing you because you're in front of me like a little shit i would probably say but one of the things that felt like a real joy to read was these memories which had kind of gotten a bit fuzzy around the edges for me were just sort of called back with so much clarity and emotional texture and richness and these voices of people who i love dearly or maybe there's some friendships which maybe slipped off they were suddenly called back with um this wonderful clarity and you could just kind of hear these voices ringing um in your ear so i guess my first question is just how did this book come together and what was that process like of gathering all this testimony well it's normal history um so i wanted to create a history of the movement told to the voices of the people who made it um so i did about 60 interviews over a two year period and it was quite a quite an emotional uh really creative process uh in which um telling the historical story is no longer you know the historians not in the archives you're talking to real people with real their memories and the movement because it was defeated left for many i think um right the experience of defeat was very difficult to deal with and so coming five years after seven years after these interviews um i think allowed people to come to terms with the movement and hopefully by constructing this historical story future generations can learn from the experience of the movement and i don't think the 2010 generation had a space in which they could argue um out what's happened in 2010 there was no space there was no space to um create a balance sheet of sorts um and hopefully this historical story this of the 20th century movement this book is their collective um property i mean i'm not asking you to give away the best bits for free but what did happen in 2010 why did the student movement fail to secure a victory if you had to give the kind of you know elevator version of the summary why they lost well i would say well government in transigence and his wonderful george osbourne quote from the book when she says that we expected this we expected resistance against the first rounds of austerity and if we don't defeat the students then the whole of our austerity regime is going to be called into question they saw this as a fundamental battle that they had to win the government um wasn't prepared to let the let the students um get their way the liberal democrats many of whom like vince caper would never um reconcile with the fees policy anyway chose the side of the government and it was faced with a student movement divided between official and unofficial movements um between an n us that was focused on parliamentary action and winning over one or two liberal democrat and peas versus the movement in the streets which was in no mood to make any deals with any politicians but felt betrayed totally by the political system also a student body that was actively demobilized we hadn't had movements for decades especially not as radical as the one that millbank set off mixed i think with tactical mistakes and no space political space anyway to argue out possible tactical changes mixed also with huge police repression um the police actively crushing uh the movement in the streets and the and the students being brought through the courts um and i think we'll all remember alfie meadows who was nearly killed by police baton so i think it's a mix of all these all these reasons i mean one of the things that i think you discussed quite well in the book is that there is a assumed antagonism towards hierarchy and hierarchical forms of organization and there's a great deal of disagreement in terms of the voices that you um interview in terms of should there have been more of an embrace of leadership it's kind of funny that one of the results of 2010 2011 is actually a revival of institutional forms of political organization i.e the labor party it's made a big comeback so one is do you think that this kind of return to institutional politics represents a failure of non-hierarchical organizing and two do you think that corbin would be possible without that kind of mass mobilization first in 2010 2011 well i do think in 2010 there was this proliferation of non-hierarchical organizing some of us are still repping hard for it by the way but i think it was this generalized really generalizable experience and it made sense to people at the time because you had a political class all political parties seemed totally out of touch with what students were students in 2010 had put their faith in the liberal democrats who had framed themselves as a party alternative to new labor they didn't vote for the iraq war they had promised free education students felt totally betrayed by the breaking of their promise that really undergirds the moral economy of the student protests they also have the labor party who had commissioned the brown review had brought intuition fees twice who invaded the rock and you have a conservative party that students generally don't don't support when the liberal democrats portrayed the student the bottom fell out of politics and they were in no mood to make any accord with these politicians who had sold their future down the drain i think as the movements progressed and the social movements it wasn't just the chonest and movement that was interested in non-hierical organizing you had occupy you had uk and cut you had a number of different social movements in the in the streets none of them seemed to break through i don't think it's any surprise that people felt in 2015 that they had put all of this effort over the past five years to very little result the editorial government that was coming in with a larger majority than the coalition and i think people were desperate for change and that i think laid the basis for this shift in many people this return to the institution and many of the 2010 generation have now found themselves in the corbin project i don't think there's i think there is this narrative arc between the 2010 student movement and the present but i think in the movement defeat that it created the conditions in which people have started to think well maybe jerry corbin jerry corbin can break through where we couldn't i mean i don't know about nothing to show for it because i had six months of chest infections mister and that is something to show for you know occupying various cold floors in winter um i mean i i guess this isn't necessarily a question you can answer decisively but maybe it's something that you can sort of tease out an answer from is that in the book you talk about this kind of upsurge and insurrectionist energy and i do want to show a video in just a second um but that actually coded within that was a kind of appeal to power which is almost look how angry we are look how um you know look at what you've riled up something has to change and people weren't prepared for disappointment right not just defeat but actually uh that demonstration of real politic and just how unaccountable their institutions are do you think that we have emerged from that tougher smart and more resilient or inshallah this won't happen but should the corbin project fail are we headed towards another similarly irreparable kind of political disappointment only perhaps a lot more catastrophic in terms of the mood that might engender well i think there's there is that possibility but i would say that the structural economic uh drivers that created the conditions for the movement like 2010 are still there still present um this generational cleavage which is riffing open british politics 2010 was simply the first it was the market was a political touchstone um that signified this new political subjectivity which um was expressed in 2010 when young people took to the streets and in 2017 when they took to the ballot box um it's the experience of young people today um living under austerity living with futures which are looking like they're going to be far worse than their parents with paying almost half their rent on uh half their income on rent um with the job market and with precarious work um huge student debts with six percent interest rates this is creating the conditions um for uh social movements in the streets but also movements of the ballot box and i think we need to continue the student movements um going forward we can't let up the social movements in the streets if corbin's going to succeed i think there's got to be this relationship between the two i mean just before we wrap up i do want to show this great clip which you discussed in the book can we show it we're from the slums of london yeah how do they how do they expect us to pay nine thousand for uni fees you get me and e-mail e-mail the only thing keeping us in college was stopping us from doing drug build on the streets anymore nothing because there's not just one 2010 2011 generation there was kind of one surge of interaction of standards in the streets that was the students but then the kind of coda to this and it's kind of in conversation in the book is the riots of 2011 do you think that that energy has been coordinated and appealed to in the same way by corbin's project as it has kind of courted the remnants of that student movement or is that still something that's kind of pulsing and waiting to blow well i think that the 2010 2011 that's very much a political conjuncture um the 2010 student movement and the 2011 riots i think the spirit of many um of those involved i mean the spirit of both were very much um uh implicated in each other this rebellion total against the system itself no political no politicians represented the students no politicians represented anyone in the streets in 2011 but i do think the current conjuncture is slightly different obviously there are multiple 2010s there were the 2010s of the russell group university students who are occupying there's a russell as the 2010 of those people you saw in the in the video um also within the 2010 generation there's multiple 2010s uh going forward there's those of radical social media people who've made careers in radical media there's those 2010 people who've gone into the radical independence campaign into the corbin campaign it's the green party into uk and cut um they've taken their experiences forward um i do think that the 2010 2011 period is i just get the sense that that was a very very specific conjuncture coming out of 20 2008 financial crisis with a total rebellion against the system and i i do think the conditions are still there for some some explosion like that to emerge again but i think we are in a new conjunction now i think the horizon has has shifted on questions like free education on questions like gentrification on rent controls on building new houses on defending the welfare state i think corbin has shifted the political debate and i think those movements in 2010 2011 i think paved the way for for that to occur so that's i think why we need to return to the experience of 2010 2011 because i think it really did lay the lay the basis for the changes we're currently seeing i mean i will really encourage people cop this book i'm not just saying that because the mate wrote it it's actually really sick and so because we love a good competition at navara i got my first suggestion for a competition question rejected which was guest matt star sign so if you tweet at navara media with um oh what was the question who admitted to spineless dithering over supporting the protest in 2010 if you tweet with your answer one of you will win a copy of this excellent book um i don't have one with me so matt won't sign it but um i'll just like right fuck you or something in it so we'll post it to you uh thank you so much for joining us it's a pleasure all right same time same place next week bye