 Can Reddit users succeed where Occupy failed and bring down Wall Street? Do they even want to? Tonight, I'll be talking to Gary Stevenson, who is Citibank's most profitable trader in 2011 before becoming an inequality economist, to ask about the phenomenal surge in the value of GameStop, which has cost short-selling hedge funds billions. It's a wild story. It's also pretty complicated, so we're going to try our best to make it as comprehensible for you as possible. It is also, of course, not the only story we've got tonight. I'll also speak to Ben Smoky, who today was acquitted on terror charges for an anti-deportation protest that happened in 2017, and to Darren McLaughlin, the latest Labour candidate to fall foul of Keir Starmer's purge. Of course, it's a Friday, so I'm joined all evening by Dalia Gabriel. Dalia, have you, like me, spent most of your week getting your head around hedge funds, short-selling Reddit forums? It's been driving me round the bend. Yeah, I mean, I've been pushed to the verge of tears almost, trying to figure out what the hell is going on and how the hell our economy has run. It turns out it's run by absolute carnage and chaos and confusion, which is both a strategic opening and a vulnerability, but it's also a big, big, scary, scary thing to reckon with. I'm guessing you haven't invested. You haven't jumped on the bandwagon. No, no. I keep my money like sown into my mattress. I definitely invest at the peak. I mean, I'm the kind of guy who, you know, I work out when something is going on way after the bubble has already, you know, about to pop. Let's start on that main story. Now, it is a complicated one, so I'm going to take you through the businesses, the concepts, the groups of people who have different levels of power within the stock market to try and make it all make sense. It's, of course, the story of message board users clubbing together and giving some hedge fund managers a sore nose. Now, let's run through the elements of the story one by one. This is GameStop. It's an American video game store, which has been struggling, both because of the pandemic, but also because people now download video games instead of going out to buy them. Now, because of those problems, Wall Street investors didn't think the company had much of a future, so hedge funds bet against it. Now, what's a hedge fund? It's basically a company that invests the money of the very wealthy by betting on the stock market. They bet on a company buy. They bet a company. The value will go up by buying its stock. If they think the value will go down, they short sell its stock. Now, I've got to explain to you what a short is. A short means that instead of buying a share, you borrow a share from a broker and sell it immediately. Now, if you've done this, you've borrowed the share instead of buying the share. What you then do is you immediately sell it and you hope that when you have to pay that share back, when it's due, you can buy it back at a lower price than that which you sold it. Then you get to keep the difference. Ultimately, if you've sold a stock short, you want the value to go down, so you can buy back that stock when you have to pay back your stock at a lower price to that which you sold it. If the value of the company goes down, you make a big buck. If the value of the company goes up, you can make some really big losses. Now, we need to bring in Reddit and Wall Street bets. Reddit is an internet forum, if you didn't know that already. Wall Street bets is where users trade advice on which companies to invest in. Now, the people on Reddit are mainly small-time retail investors. There might be some people who work in hedge funds there, but this is generally a crowd of people who are investing small sums of money in the stock market or smallish, smaller than what you normally see in Wall Street trading. Now, on Reddit, there were discussions about GameStop being undervalued. Now, it's a store they loved. Lots of people had shopped in this store before. They thought Wall Street were being overly harsh on it by making all these bets against it. They also noticed that because the hedge funds had these massive bets against the company, they realized that if Reddit users bought up all the shares, it would drive up the price of the shares, and then the hedge funds, when they were due to pay back the shares, they'd have to buy back the shares from the Reddit users for loads and loads of money. That would cost the hedge fund users, or they're not users. The hedge fund managers lots of money, and it could make the Reddit users quite a pocket. This strategy was very, very successful. That's why we're all talking about it this week. On the 24th of January, GameStop was trading at $42 a share. On the 28th of January, it was trading at $470 a share. If we go back to the start of the month, to its peak yesterday, GameStop share prices were up 1,700%. That's from the start of 2021. What was the consequence of this? What's the outcome been? Well, as their strategy suggested, some Reddit users have made a lot of money, and some billionaire short sellers have lost a lot. We're talking billions here. Then some Wall Street traders got angry, quite understandably. And finally, yesterday, Robin Hood, which is the app Reddit users were using to buy and sell shares in GameStop, they suspended trading in the firm. That caused a great deal of anger. Shares in GameStop immediately lost 50% of their values. Lawsuits against Robin Hood were filed. But today, trading has reopened and now shares are back above $300. Remember, they were $40 a share a week ago. Are you confused? Don't worry if you are, because I have Gary Stevenson, former city trader now inequality economist on the show to explain it all. Gary, thank you so much for joining us. Michael, thanks for having me. To start, now, you're talking to someone with not a great deal of knowledge about the stock market. What I know about hedge funds, they normally gamble on the stock market. Sometimes they win money. Sometimes they lose. The same goes for retail investors. Lots of ordinary people bet on the stock market. Sometimes they win. Sometimes they lose. On one level, that's just what's happening here. What's special about what's been going on with GameStop this week? Well, there's a reason it's all over the news. The scale of what's happened this week is phenomenal. Like I said, it's gone 1,700% in about two weeks. That's an increase of 17 times. The speed and the scale is enormous. We don't normally see things like this. It's basically taken down a massive Wall Street hedge fund. I think we need to put this in a little bit of context of what's been happening over the last year. Obviously, the US is in the middle of coronavirus. There's millions of people sitting at home. They can't work. They're not able to get an income. In that period, the stock market has been flying through the roof. Amazon stock price has doubled. That's Jeff Bezos' net wealth. Tesla's up about five times. Bitcoin's doing whatever Bitcoin's doing. Ordinary people are sitting at home trying to work, but work's not working for them. They can't make any money. And they're just seeing the wealthiest people, their money in the stock market, just absolutely making tons. And this is on top of 12 years since 2008 when the stock market has gone up, I think, five or six times. I think what you're seeing is ordinary people starting to realize that we have a stock market that it goes up in good times and it goes up in bad times. Whatever happens, the rich seems to be protected and ordinary workers are not, so they want to get involved. I think, really, this is the culmination of many years of ordinary people getting left behind, of the stock market is getting bailed out, when ordinary people aren't. Obviously, this is the culmination of it, people getting together on Reddit and starting to it's not really, it's not even just GameStop. They're going into other things now. I think these ordinary people, they want their share of the pie backseat, they see it keep going, just the stock markets, and they want to get involved. You brought up, this is ordinary people against Wall Street. That's what we're going to discuss next, the extent to which this is a popular uprising or just a get-rich-quick plan by some people on Reddit. Before we do that, to frame this discussion, I want to go to a couple of clips from CNBC. That's the Financial News channel in the United States. The first clip I'm going to show you is from William Legate. He is founder and CEO of a cryptocurrency platform and a follower of the Wall Street Bets subreddit. He explained how he characterizes the GameStop phenomenon on CNBC. These people are just in general wanting to give Wall Street the finger, quite frankly. They view the system as being rigged against them. I think that this entire movement has really validated that and made it very clear to most Americans that that is the case. If I personally invested my own money and lost half of my portfolio overnight, no one on Wall Street would care at all. If a hedge fund loses half their money overnight, all of a sudden, you can't trade anymore. They stop the free market in order to allow these funds to rebalance their positions. I think that that's extremely wrong and against everything that the market is supposed to be standing for. From your following of them, do the people in this subreddit who are calling to take down the hedge funds realize that there could be some serious unintended consequences that could hurt everyday people? For the most part, I think absolutely. This subreddit is pretty crude, I guess you could say. A big part of it, even before this Wall Street Bets movement, was posting people's losses. That's just part of the culture of the subreddit. A lot of these people are not in this necessarily for the money. Certainly some retail traders are, and I feel like some people will end up getting left holding the bag, but for the most part, these people are just wanting to make a statement and they view this as class warfare, quite frankly. Occupy Wall Street 2.0, but on their own turf and with real financial consequences. They're saying this is class warfare, but with real financial consequences. Now, someone from the ruling class who was getting pretty upset about it is a Wall Street trader, Leon Cooperman. Now, he is a hedge fund manager. He's worth $3.2 billion. Here again, he is speaking. This again is on CNBC. The reason the market is doing what it's doing is people are sitting at home getting checks in the government. This fair share is a bullshit concept. It's just a way of attacking wealthy people. I think it's inappropriate. We're all going to work together and pull together. The fair share is being a bullshit concept. That was about tax, I think, but he basically has the analysis. The problem here is that too many people are getting government checks and then the plebs are investing on the stock market and this is messing the whole thing up. Gary, I want to bring you in. I mean, they've brought up class war there. Is this a genuine sort of redistribution of wealth and power from corporate elites to the ordinary man? Is that a legitimate analysis of what's been going on over the past week? I wish there was, Michael. It's so fascinating, isn't it? This is the space we've reached now where it's such an interesting combination of people out there trying to make money in the markets, which is such a sort of individualistic, I want to make money for me idea, but they're coming together on this message board to try and do it together. It's this super combination of I want to make money for me and we need to do it together. I think this is, in a sense, it's kind of inevitable that we were going to reach this space, right? Because people are told that you live in a meritocracy, you have to do what you can, get a job, save up your money, buy a house, but increasingly that doesn't work. Then at the same time, you see people, I come from poor background, I made my money in the sea, basically gambling. I don't know many people who come from ordinary backgrounds who've been able to, for example, buy a house just by working an ordinary job, but people see, oh, this guy's made money on Bitcoin, that guy's made money in the stock markets. I think it's kind of reached this inevitable conclusion where people have realized that even just to achieve your basic goals, it's not working, work isn't working. They've tried to get together and they've tried to rebalance it on an internet messaging board, but to be honest, I don't think this is going to look fantastic for the people who made money on this, but my concern really is people are going to maybe watch this, or it's been all over the news the last couple of days, they're going to see it now, they're going to think, well, this is my chance, they're going to jump in. At some point, this stock is going to fall and I'm a bit, I just want to tell the people that are listening, don't take any mad risks and run into this now because it's not easy money to be made, basically. I wish the revolution could happen from people at home trading the stock markets in their underpants, but I think it's not going to go like that. I'm not sure anyone watches Tiskey South for financial advice, so you probably don't need to worry too much about that, but I do want to focus on that question actually in terms of what is going to happen next for the people who've invested in this company, especially because presumably at this point, GameStop is overvalued, so it's worth a hell of a lot on the stock market at the moment, even though the underlying business isn't particularly valuable, and if you've got a bubble, you normally expect it to burst at some point, so that share price is going to collapse, and if you're still holding shares at that point in time, then you lose a lot. Is that inevitable now? Are we just going to inevitably see lots of Reddit users or people who've piled in because of the publicity around this lose a bunch of money, or is there a different possible route out of this current moment than that? This is such an interesting bubble, because normally when you have a bubble, there's some people out there saying, no, it's not a bubble, it's different, this is real fundamental value. Here is a bubble, here is a massively overvalued stock where literally everyone who's driving the bubble thinks it's overvalued. Everybody knows it's a bad investment, they're still doing it, and I use this message board, WallStreetBets, I've been going on it for a year. If you get some free time, have a look, it's a fascinating place. I was on it this morning, people are going, it's like a religion, people are screaming at each other, don't sell, they think they're starting a revolution, basically. It's driven by this collective madness, and I totally understand this feeling that these guys on WallStreets are making billions, Jeff Bezos is making billions, Elon Musk is making billions, we're sitting at home, we can't even work, I totally understand that sentiment. But to be honest, I cannot see this playing out any other way, then it's eventually collapsing, and there will be people left holding it that will lose money when that happens. I would be very, very, very surprised. To be honest, I think even the people driving it would surely be surprised. It's the most phenomenal bubble where everybody knows it's a bubble. But I think it's important to understand this is not coming out of nowhere, right? Last year in the COVID crisis, the government spent £450 billion, that's £10,000 for every adult in the country. They didn't raise any taxes, they didn't borrow money from external investors, they printed all of that money and they poured it into the system. So what you have here is a government that thinks we can deal with the crisis by printing money and giving it to the rich, because the data shows all that money ended up with the rich. Look, if you try and fix a crisis that has inequality at its core by giving money to the rich, you can't be surprised when suddenly you see massive stock market bubbles. And my big concern is that contagious into UK property, and we see a massive rise in UK property now. And what that will mean for young people in this country if we start seeing this bubble moving to UK property, which I think quite possibly it will. I think we should definitely, let's park the UK property question for a moment because I think we should definitely get you back on, you know, especially particularly on that question, which might have more practical significance for a lot of people watching this, but I want to stick to this phenomenon of GameStop and specifically now move on to the role of Robin Hood. And because Robin Hood is the app where people can trade stocks and shares without any commissions. So this is the kind of app which has allowed ordinary people to trade on the stock market without having, you know, a broker or an agent. And yesterday when this, you know, the prices of GameStop were really surging, they suspended trading. And this was incredibly controversial. People thought this was sort of market manipulation, the big guys coming in to stop the little guy having some influence. And opposition to the suspension came from all sides of the political spectrum. So to prove that to you, the evidence, this is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She tweeted, this is unacceptable. We now need to know more about Robin Hood app's decision to block retail investors from purchasing stock, while hedge funds are freely able to trade the stock as they see fit. As a member of the Financial Services Committee, I'd support a hearing if necessary. You also got someone from the right wing of the Republican Party, Ted Cruz, tweeting in agreement. So he quote tweeted that tweet. I've just read to you saying fully agree. Now Robin Hood themselves, so the firm, the CEO has gone on television saying, this is just because of volatile trading, meaning that they had a bit of a cash flow problem, not them intervening on behalf of any hedge funds who were losing money. Although I can see in the comments, someone has tweeted with a 10 pound Super Chat, that's Kishore Kukundraja. I hope I pronounced your name correctly. They say, Gary, what do you think of Citadel's role in Robin Hood in all of this? And that's a reference to some people are suggesting that there could be connections between Robin Hood and Citadel who are a hedge fund who are losing money on GameStop shares because they'd short sold it. And they think that maybe there was some collusion going on here. I don't know, Gary, what do you make of this decision by the Robin Hood app to suspend trading? I mean, it's such a story, isn't it? Who would have thought finally the thing to unite the factual divide in the US would be the right of people to do wild speculative gambling on the stock market? Finally, finally something that everybody can agree on. Listen, I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in that Robin Hood head office when they decided to suspend trading. And there's lots of people with lots of ideas about what's happening. People are saying that yeah, it's owned by Citadel and Citadel have got powerful political connections and they don't want Wall Street to get hurt. Listen, I can't tell you whether that's what happened. I'm sure that Robin Hood themselves would say we're trying to protect investors or we have legitimate financial reasons why we can't do it. Listen, I guarantee you there'll be people in Wall Street that are not happy about suddenly a huge amount of financial market power being held by random guys trading on Reddit. But I wouldn't be able to tell you with any certainty whether there was actually a shady meeting behind closed doors between Wall Street bankers and politicians and the guys who own Robin Hood. I would love to know more and hopefully Alexandra Kajakot has will get her request for more information because the people on Reddit are furious about it and I can totally understand. I mean, they've got a massive position and suddenly they can't trade. If it was me, I'd be furious too. But I wish I could tell you the exact reasons that there were some shady dealings behind closed doors, but I'm afraid I don't know the truth. I want to talk now a bit more about whether this phenomenon which is sort of like individual retail traders, individual individuals, individual individuals, individual people in their bedrooms trading on the stock market but talking to each other about it could transform capitalism in some way. Now there are lots of people saying, discussing quite rightly that this sort of adds an element of unpredictability into the stock market because it's not just GameStop who have gone up in value. It's lots of other brands which were seen as not having much of a future by Wall Street and they're often brands which people have some emotional connection to. So GameStop was a shop people shopped out in their in their childhood a bit like you know you could figure blockbusters here. I know we have game. It wasn't particularly meaningful to me. Also, I think Nokia is doing quite well. Blackberry is doing quite well. There's a cinema chain in the United States that's doing quite well because people are piling in money and one analysis is that this is sort of basically you know it's kind of like financial shitposting in a way. Other people though are arguing that this distributed manner of investing could itself be a more efficient form of capitalism than that which is managed on Wall Street. And to introduce this point, I want to show you a video which is of the CEO of Social Capital explaining again to CNBC why he thinks that Wall Street's bet is not just an FU to the Wall Street establishment. It is also that but that it's also the site of better investments than what hedge funds are capable of. And I would encourage anybody who is dismissive of this thing to go into Wall Street bets and actually just read the forums. And I think that you're going to see three kinds of posts. The first kind of content are a lot of people doing some incredible fundamental diligence on companies trying to think about long term value. And in my opinion, many of them are doing as good and frankly a better job than a lot of hedge fund analysts that I work with. That's number one. The second are a lot of people who believe that coming out of 2008 what happened was Wall Street took an enormous amount of risk and they left retail as the bag holder. And a lot of these kids were in grade school and high school when that happened. They lost their homes. Their parents lost their jobs. And they've always wondered like why did those folks get bailed out for taking enormous amounts of risk? And nobody helped and showed up to help my family. And then the third thing is a realization that instead of having idea dinners or quiet whispered conversations amongst hedge funds in the Hamptons, these kids have the courage to do it transparently in a forum. And I'm not saying all of it is perfect by any means, but I think it takes an enormous amount of faith in the system to be that transparent to talk about things and then for each individual to make their own mind up and to do things, whether it's to buy into. So what I found quite interesting there was this phrase the faith in the system, because most people are talking about this as a deeply anti-establishment movement, potentially anti-capitalist. What that commentator there was suggesting was that potentially this could reinvigorate capitalism if you've got all of these people trading stocks in their bedrooms who can make collectively more efficient and more transparent decisions than hedge fund managers having quiet dinners with each other, then potentially this could be a boost to overall economic growth potentially. I mean, you're almost looking at a kind of democratic capitalism of the sort of individualistic factor kind in a way. I mean, what do you make of that, Gary? This idea that actually these could be more efficient investors than the Wall Street broker. So it's not just a disruptive force, it could also be a highly efficient force. I mean, I've spoken a lot this year about what we've seen in the last 10 years, because governments and central banks have been trying to deal with crises, like I say, by printing huge amounts of money. We've come to this position where, as I say, if the economy does well, stock markets go up. If the economy does badly, the central bank prints a load of money and stock markets still go up. And we've really had this divergence here where whatever happens, stock markets do well and ordinary people do badly. And you know, I've put out videos on my Instagram and on my Facebook, Gary's Economics, explaining how people can deal with this. Because when house prices and stock prices go through the roof, but wages don't, it really, really hurts, especially young people, because they can't save up money, they can't get a house. And for this reason, I totally understand why people have surged towards online trading platforms as a easier way to access stock markets, because they want to get a share of the returns that have largely been going to the richest people, because most stocks are owned by the richest people. For that reason, especially in this last year, we've seen a massive, massive uptick in the number of people using online trading accounts like IG index in this country, Trading212, this kind of thing. And I think it's really important to talk about this, because on the one hand, it's important that ordinary people are able to participate in these markets and take some of the returns that super rich people are getting. But the truth is, if you're super rich and you've got £1 million, £2 million, £10 million, you can make loads of money on the stock markets. If you're an ordinary person sitting home with £10,000, £20,000, it's going to be very difficult for you to do that. And often, these people, they go onto these trading platforms, they don't really have a full idea of what they're doing. Sometimes these trading platforms can allow you to make very risky bets and people don't realise just how much risk they're taking and people can lose all of the money they put in potentially. And I think 75% of people who use this IG index trading website lose money. So, I don't want to give the impression this is some mad democratising force, because look, I'm a market professional and I've made quite a bit of money and I make money when I'm trading my stock markets. But if some guy who doesn't know what he's doing puts his life savings in there, he's probably going to be in that 75%. So, I think the end result is, I don't think we're going to transform capitalism and radically redistribute wealth just by everybody becoming a stock market trader, because in the end, the best stock market traders are going to end up working for the wealthiest people. And, you know, if you're just, you know, an electrician or a hairdresser sitting at home on the internet, you're probably not going to quadruple your money. In fact, you are likely to be in that 75%. So, you know, it's very typical that the way the world is right now, you know, all of this wolf of Wall Street, the idolisation of money and trading, people think, well, we can reform capitalism by all becoming traders. But I think in reality, the most likely situation is the professionals will make money, the people with the most experience make money, and the ordinary people will be left with the losses. That's a downbeat note to end our coverage of this story. Jane Hayward with A Fiverr says, great story, great coverage, great guest. I couldn't agree more. You've been a great guest, Gary Stevenson. Thank you so much for joining us this evening. We'll definitely get you back soon. If there's a housing crisis next, if the housing bubble pops, which actually maybe wouldn't be a crisis, but we'll save that conversation. Yes, yes, we will. Until next time. Thanks so much, Michael. Have a good day. Nice one. Peter DeSousa also says with £5 Super Chat, I think what all of this shows is we the people really have the power in our hands. It's our time now. That's the sort of provocation actually. I'm going to bring in Dalia on that point. Dalia, do you feel any clearer on what's happened over the past week? Have you changed your idea about whether or not financial speculation might be a useful form of activism? That was a really great interview. I'm so glad that we managed to get Gary on. It really does help clarify some of these things for me. I think listening to him, I think it showed two things to me. These things are possibly in contradiction with one another. On the one hand, this whole incident showed to an extent the vulnerabilities of our casino-style economic system. Collective action directed strategically at these weak points of this very speculative immaterial finance capitalism can cause a moment of chaos in which wealth can be redistributed momentarily or over the course of the day or whatever. On the other hand, it showed that because these things are not just neutral tools, these things are so connected to broader forms of power like monopolized corporate capitalism or the state that it can be very hard for those things to be sustained. It warns against this idea to use a very, very exhausted trope. The master's tools cannot dismantle the master's house. This is where the market interference, which was in the case of the Robin Hood app, or in the case of protest, that could be the use of the police or the use of state force, can curtail that momentary disruption. Because I'm thinking about the use of apps as well in this saga and the fact that because platform capitalism concentrates the power to gatekeep access to data, to information, and to the actual things that make this shit work, the actual infrastructure, it concentrates that power into tiny select companies. It makes it very difficult to scale up and sustain that action. That's why even though struggles around cyberspace and hacking and data are obviously really important, they're still intimately connected to the forms of power that we've always had to deal with. So it's not just this free floating space of neutral technology that you just need the smarts to be able to hack. It actually has to be connected to a broader analysis of power if it's going to materialize in anything. So much food. I want to down some coffee, get into wall street bets and maybe get on the next wave. I feel like I want to make some money easily anyway. We've got 2,000 people watching. Please share the show stream so we can get more people watching this live. We're going to go straight on to our next story and I'm a big one. 15 anti-depotation activists who were prosecuted under anti-terror legislation have today had their convictions overturned. The StansDead 15 blocked a charter deportation flight taking off in March 2017 by breaking into the airfield and locking themselves to an aeroplane. Now they were charged with and found guilty of endangering the safety of an aerodrome. It was the first time the legislation had been used to prosecute peaceful protesters since the 1990 Aviation and Maritime Security Act was introduced in response to the Lockerbie bombing. However, today an appeal judge found, and I quote, the closure of the runway was undoubtedly disruptive and expensive, but there was no evidence that it resulted in likely endangerment to the safety of the aerodrome or of persons there. So the judge has said this should never have been prosecuted as an act of terrorism because even though it was against the law, it wasn't against that law. I'm now delighted to be joined by one of the StansDead protesters, Ben Smoke. Ben, congratulations on the result today. You must be very pleased. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, I am ecstatic, very, very relieved, very happy to be sat here wearing my ex-terrorist jumper with pride. Yeah, it's been a very, very long and arduous and harrowing four years that I don't think anybody in their right mind would have seen coming. I think the use, as you were kind of explaining, the use of terror legislation is unprecedented in the use of this one particularly, particularly against peaceful protesters. I mean, the idea, I was talking to somebody earlier, the idea that we were endangering safety and we were sat there and surrounded by police who were all being very, as they want to be, very chatty and laughing and happy and they didn't look like people that were fearing for their own safety. I was locked on singing Beyonce and Abba, which I guess is probably the only act of terrorism that happened on that evening. And so I think, yeah, kind of feeling incredibly, incredibly happy and incredibly vindicated this evening. And so what happens now? Because I mean, normally in this situation, because actions like this have happened before, I've taken part in actions like this before, we got tried for aggravated trespass. And I think we pleaded guilty because we've clearly done aggravated trespass. Aggravated trespass means you've trespassed somewhere to stop someone carrying out their legal duties. If you stand in front of a plane, you're clearly stopping someone carrying out their legal duties. But the charge, the highest level of punishment for that is quite low. Clearly, they have charged you, Ben, or they did charge you with terrorism as a sort of try to intimidate people out of taking actions like this. Again, they didn't see this aggravated trespass charge as enough of a deterrent for people taking part in inactivism. This is a legal question that I don't know the answer to. I hope you do. Which is that now you've been cleared of this stupid terrorism charge. Have you just committed no crime at all? Or have you committed a lesser crime of something like aggravated trespass? So as it stands, right this second, I have no criminal record whatsoever, which I'm not surprised about as anyone else. But I think, yeah, so to kind of like lay it out is that obviously in terms of aggravated trespass, that was what we were originally charged with. And that's what we were originally set to go to trial for. And then the action happened in March 2017. We received an email sometime around June 2017 from our lawyers saying that the CPS were planning on upping it to this terror charge. And at the time, I was like, that's clearly ludicrous. This is never going to happen. And then three weeks later, it happened. And then obviously we all kind of know how that story ended. But with the aggravated trespass charge, it never got taken away. So it's still there on the docket, which means that it's still live to a certain extent. And that's kind of one of the things that obviously we want. It means that we are at risk, as far as I'm aware, and I'm very much not a lawyer, but as far as I'm aware, we are at risk of the prosecution, prosecution deciding to plow forward because they have been very, very embarrassed by today. Fundamentally, that would be wrong, obviously, on so many levels, not least the fact that they have spent hundreds of thousands of pounds attempting to punish us for a crime that, as the court of appeal has said, we simply didn't do. But legally, we are still kind of, jeopardy is not the word, but I think I've been very much sort of spending today thinking about being the end of the day, end of the road. And unfortunately, with these things, it very much isn't. But that's not to say that today is an incredible moment and a huge relief and something that I personally take a huge amount of pride in and a huge amount of pride in all of the people that have kind of like been along and helped us along the way. So yeah, I don't know whether that I'm also trying to be very, very careful legally with everything. So I'm not sure that completely answered the question, but I hope it did. Sorry, I shouldn't have asked you a question directly about your case given that neither of us have professional legal backgrounds. Ben Smoke, thank you so much for giving us an update about your case today. And again, congratulations. I know it's been a real fucking, you know, difficult time having the CPS trying to charge you for terrorism and prosecute you for terrorism. But it's great that after, you know, a four year struggle, you have cleared your name. I mean, you've already cleared your name in the public eye, but in the eyes of the law, you have cleared your name. Thanks so much for having me on. Have a lovely rest of your day. And you've had. That was good interview. Great to hear. Dali, I want to bring you in on this. I know that sort of anti-depotation activism is the kind of thing you take a very close eye on. Do you think that this result today will be sort of obviously, obviously, it's a huge relief to the people who are involved. Do you think it is also going to be a relief to people who take part in direct action more broadly and particularly in sort of anti-depotation actions? Is this something which is going to be a real boost to the wider movement? Yeah, I mean, the significance of the standard 15 winning this case cannot be overstated. And you know, what it would have meant for our civil liberties in the way that you outline if that appeal had not been successful. You know, this expansion of the remit of anti-terror legislation is something that has been happening for a very long time. And had this, had the standard 15 lost this appeal, that would have represented a very, very significant victory for, you know, to use a kind of like super theory term, like the castle or state, it would have represented a really big victory in that. And that is something that affects all of us. And what we've seen here in sort of following, you know, whether it's through our friends, people like Ben, and sort of following this on Navarra is we've sort of seen in real time that the human cost of defending ourselves from these encroaching attacks on civil liberties under the guise of the war on terror. You know, this is, this is for a lot of us, this has just been like a headline. But you know, for those who have gone through it, you know, that's come at a huge personal cost, like I can't imagine what that's been like to go through for several years. And this is another thing that the kind of courts do to sort of demoralize you as they drag you through the courts like years and years, so you don't really know, you know, where you're going to be in the next couple of years. And I guess, you know, that's why we call it, we call it struggle. And so I think we all owe people like Ben and, you know, the whole legal team and all of the people that were involved in winning that appeal, we all owe them a huge amount for that fight because this victory is very important to all of us. Jared Goldie agrees with O5. She says, should never have been charged some justice done overturning the convictions, great respect for all the 15 and anyone fighting border violence could not agree more. Thank you so much for the super chat. I can see we've also got a 50 pound super chat from Joe Tapper. We're going to go to your message at the end of the show. Don't worry, that's going to be read out. For now, if you're enjoying the show, please to make or help Navarra media grow, go to navarramedia.com forward slash support. You make this show possible. You're the reason we can go live three nights a week and potentially in the future more. Right. The January lockdown seems to be working with COVID cases going down and hospital admissions leveling off. However, the epidemic could be declining faster, and the government recently released this advert to try to encourage people to keep following the rules. Look them in the eyes and tell them you're doing all you can to stop the spread of COVID-19. Stay home, protect the NHS, save lives. Now, I mean, that's obviously a powerful advert. Of course, as we always say, we do advocate that people follow the rules. It's very important to follow lockdown rules. But the whole campaign does leave a bit of a bad taste in the mouth, and that's because yet again, it's government messaging which blames individuals for the government's failure. The slogan, look them in the eyes and tell them you're doing all you can to stop the spread of COVID-19. Now, this is Navarra from the government, and Boris Johnson is the person in the country who has the most responsibility for not doing all he can to stop people dying from COVID-19. If he had gone into a lockdown two weeks earlier when the scientists had advised, then we would have peaked at 30,000 cases a day instead of 60,000 cases a day. Potentially, we could have had half the number of deaths in this wave. I mean, quite likely we could have had less than half the number of deaths in this wave if he'd taken earlier advice from Sage, for example, the circuit breaker, for example, a test and trace system that worked. So to then make this also individualized about the viewer who's watching this advert, who's supposed to feel guilty for the deaths that will continue. They're going to continue above 1,000 a day for potentially quite a while. They're still on an average of over 1,000 a day, and that's probably not the fault of the person watching that advert, but that's kind of what they're trying to get you to believe. Anyway, again, none of this is to say ignore the advert. I do want to bring up a variant of this, a variant of this particular advert, not more transmissible, but in this instance, more on the nose. So with estate agents, construction workers, and call centre operatives being asked into work by their bosses, that's clearly one of the big failings of this government in terms of the lockdown not being as strict as it could have been. As I say, cases are going down, but they could be going down faster. And it's in that context where bosses are asking their workers to go into work, that this variant of that advert is particularly gross, let's say. So it says, look him in the eyes and tell him you really can't work from home. Now, what does this ignore? Obviously, if you can work from home, work from home. If you're someone who's going into, well, you can't go into a central London Starbucks, but if you're self-employed and going into some office that you don't need, some shared office that you don't need to be in, it's a bit of an unusual scenario anyway, don't do that. But if someone is going into work when they could work at home, what's more likely to be the case is that their boss asked them to go. That's normally why people go into work. It's because their boss asked them to go. That's how the economy works, but the government hasn't been very strict on bosses. The government have been very lax on bosses, in fact. They sort of say, we advise you to encourage your workers from home, but there's no demand, there's no requirement. And as we know, there are many industries which aren't essential, which are continuing at this point in time. Now, Shelly Asquip, who works on health and safety for the trade union congress, she summed up, she's also been on the show a few times, summed up the problem with this ad when she tweeted, this is out of order. Unions are hearing from thousands of frightened workers every week who are being forced to office jobs they know can be done from home, but face the sack if they refuse, blame the bosses. Now, darling, I want to bring you in on this because I mean, we've talked a lot about how the government sort of blame individuals to distract from the actions of themselves and their sort of lax attitude to bosses. But I haven't seen it being quite so explicit before that they're blaming workers for the spread of coronavirus. I mean, were you surprised by that advert? I mean, it's kind of just the most brutal expression of how this entire crisis response has been run. And I completely agree with Shelly. Firstly, that poster campaign should not be directed to everyday people who have had unclear messaging, who have many of whom have followed irresponsible lockdown policy, for example, people who went to shopping centres and went to restaurants in that sort of early part of December when that was open in London. And also, as you mentioned, people who are forced into going into work, that a campaign like that should be directed towards MPs and specifically Boris Johnson. It should be saying, you know, look him in the eyes and tell him that we should take coronavirus on the chin. It should be look him in the eyes and tell him that it was okay to open restaurants and shops while we still have thousands of infections a day. And we were entering winter season for the NHS just so companies could make their Christmas bottom line. How about look him in the eye and tell him that we don't have enough money to furlough people and that we shouldn't furlough them because it would disincentivise people from working, which is a direct quote from Ian Duncan Smith. Because those are actually the people and those are actually the policies that are accountable for the crisis. Because those are the people, because, you know, not workers who are going into work because their boss has the power to make them go into work. And, you know, I know so many people, multiple people, who are not only going into work, having to go into work when they don't need to work, but even for those who do have to go into work, are working in unsafe conditions and whose managers are making incredibly irresponsible decisions in order to make a bottom line. And there's absolutely nothing those workers can do to report or flag that irresponsible behaviour from an employer. There's no mechanism to correct that. And Shelley bringing up the context of, you know, how unions have been treated in this is really, really important. Because unions like, you know, the National Education Union, like the Fire Brigades Union, you know, these are the institutions that have actually done the work and taken leadership to keep workers and, you know, their broader communities safe and whose struggle has likely saved thousands of lives. Like the any use fight to stop kids going back to school likely saved thousands of lives. And they had to do that in the face of demonization, of stigmatization from the press and politicians. So, you know, that is like, and the fact that that that part of that story gets lost and the fact that the unions, they're not just fighting for, you know, this abstract idea of, you know, the workers, but they're fighting for the safety of the broader community as well. And, you know, I think that you mentioned that, you know, this is about sort of shifting blame from the government. And I think that that's true. But I also do think that there is an element here of embedding this broader principle that when you have times of crisis like this one, the response to that has to be through policing and punishment. So, you know, we've heard a lot from Prety Patel about how, you know, this myth that it's, you know, reckless individuals breaking the lockdown is the reason why we have this, we're in this position that is being used as a precursor to essentially increase policing powers, increase the ability of police to sort of find people on the spot. And so the idea is that we respond to this through punishment and through policing, rather than through an ethic of care and an ethic of support, which is kind of much more what the unions were fighting for. And yet they got so demonized. So I think that there is the question of, you know, the sort of immediate strategy of like, we've really fucked up here and we want to just create a narrative that can kind of confuse people and get people to blame each other rather than us. But I also think it's in the ideological fabric of we respond to these things by punishing individuals and by through this carceral system, rather than by having the principle of care and support to enable people to do what they need to do in order to keep themselves and their communities safe. If you want to tune into a new show that doesn't blame workers, it doesn't blame ordinary people for the coronavirus crisis we are currently in, then please do subscribe to Navarra Media and Tiskey's How We Go Live Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7pm. And we hold the powerful to account, not the public. Right, the advert we've just shown you was, I mean, it was gross from our perspective. Unfortunately, it hasn't caused a massive backlash in the wider population. The one we're about to show you has. So this was another ad put out to encourage us all to stay at home. And we can get it up. As you can see, we have four household scene on the left. You can see you've got a family sitting on the couch, on then you've got a parent holding a baby, then a parent homeschooling their children, and then a parent cleaning the house. Now, if you are particularly eagle-eyed, what you'll notice is that all the chores are being done by women. A woman is homeschooling, a woman is caring for the baby, and a woman is cleaning the house. The only man to appear is lounging on a sofa. So this has caused quite rightly, quite a lot of outrage, because it seemed as deeply sexist. The government in this case have responded to that backlash by pulling the ad. So they have pulled it, they've said, oh, it doesn't actually represent what we think about women. Let's go to some of the backlash, because it didn't just come from campaigners, although that was, you know, there was a lot of backlash from campaigners, a lot of backlash on social media, but it also came from Tory backbenchers. So this is Caroline Noakes, who chairs the Women's and Equality Select Committee. She tweeted the image saying, someone signed this off. Now, Dana, I want to bring you in, because this advert is clearly offensive, but also, you know, are we potentially missing a trick by talking about the advert as being offensive when actually the representation it makes of households during lockdown isn't necessarily that inaccurate. So the force that society found women were twice as likely to have taken unpaid time off as a result of the pandemic than men. And the IFS, that's the Institute for Fiscal Studies, found that in the spring lockdown, women were only able to do one hour of uninterrupted paid work for every three hours done by men. So it's an offensive advert, but also is the reality even worse? Yeah, I mean, the reality it's representing is what's offensive rather than the poster itself. And, you know, women in general, even outside of the pandemic, have had to take on much larger amounts of unpaid care work as a result of austerity and, you know, the defunding of the care service and the devaluing of care as, you know, a kind of work. So it's really actually kind of annoying to see Tory MPs who are absolutely fine with all of the economic policies that have burdened, you know, especially working-class women with huge amounts of unpaid care work on top of the wage labor that a lot of working-class women do, getting up in arms about the reality that they help to create being represented in a poster. And, you know, but in the case of the pandemic specifically, so that's kind of a broader comment about austerity and its impact on women. But, you know, in the case of the pandemic, we have this situation, you know, and especially because outside care services, you know, even if we did have a well-funded care service, it would be restricted in how much we could have relied on that in this particular moment. But we can still see highly gendered concepts of work, which is basically why are women having to take unpaid time off in order to fulfill their increased care responsibilities as a result of the pandemic. That is a, that is not an accident that women have had to do that and, you know, have therefore had to accept a cut in their wages and have, because they've had to take unpaid time off and also has left them less time to, you know, take care of themselves and sort of make sure that they are rested, etc., in order to take on all of this work. So that's not an accident. And that is again part and parcel of the government's, you know, complete disregard for the realities of how this pandemic is going to have knock-on effects, especially for marginalized people like working class women. And, you know, this is, this is work and it's work upon which our economy and our society relies. Now, obviously, the, the, to an extent, the gendering of this work as sort of feminized is related to how that work is represented. So in that sense, I guess representations like the one in this campaign kind of matter, but, but if what you really care about is making the lives of women, you know, sort of structurally easier, then you'd be much better off supporting the actual material policies that would do that rather than getting angry on Twitter about a poster, which is very easy to do, but ultimately is kind of meaningless. I mean, it is important to point out, you know, some of the easy things the government could have done, which would have limited the, you know, the unequal outcomes of lockdown, because you often hear the lockdown skeptics, the likes of Julie Hartley-Brew, who say, oh, I'm against lockdowns because they have an unequal effect on the poor, but then you don't hear them backing any of the actual policies that would mean that lockdowns didn't have an unequal effect on, on, on poor people, because obviously, obviously no one thinks lockdowns are a good thing, but you need to stop this incredibly deadly virus. And what the government could have done, for example, is given people the right to claim furlough. So if you had, for example, you know, if your kids have come off school, you say, look, I want to devote a bit more time to homeschooling than I would be able to do if I continue doing my work. So can you furlough me? And it turns out that TUC did a study into this. 70% of women who asked for furlough were declined it. So you have people who are, you know, in the government's words, trying to do the right thing, which is trying to keep the education of your kids tiding along. I mean, this TUC study was specifically about women. So I don't know what the numbers are when it comes to men, but you're saying, look, I want to make sure my child's education continues as best as possible throughout this period. So I want to be furloughed during this period. The boss says no, often the boss had said no, because they said it would make us look bad, or because then other people might get an idea that they could get furloughed. So you can see how completely the wrong attitude has been sort of spread from the top down from the government down to say, you know, if possible, keep on working. And if that means you have to work twice as much because you're doing your job and looking after your kids, so be it. It didn't need to be like that. We're going to go on to our final story. Before we do, make sure you like the video. It helps us in the algorithms. It means that more people see this show. This is our final story. This May, local elections across the UK as well as elections to the Scottish Parliament will be Keir Starmer's first real electoral test as Labour leader. And if the Guardian are to be believed, officials inside the party are concerned that Starmer has failed to win over enough Tories to stop the elections being a bit of a damp squib. Now, in fact, officials are briefing they would consider a standstill a good result, as only 4% of Tories tell pollsters they've switched from the Tories to the Labour Party. Now, this is too small a swing, given the huge majorities of Tories built up in 2019, presumably because Labour backed a second referendum. They, in general, backed Labour in 2017. Corbyn was leader in 2019 when we were the second referendum party. They're gone. And if we want to win the kind of council seats that we won in 2016, so that was when the last elections were because these elections are ones which have been delayed from last year because of the pandemic, then you're going to have to win back people who were Brexit voters. It doesn't seem like Keir Starmer is doing that yet. What I want to focus on now, though, is not so much voting behaviour, but funding in the Labour Party because there was a very interesting nugget in that piece I just showed you about the party finances. So they wrote, strategists have also told shadow ministers that the party's finances are in a perilous state, a situation that could worsen due to numerous court actions against the party. Now, we've talked a lot on the show about court actions against the party. What we're going to focus on now is the revenue side, how much money the party are getting in, not the cost it's having to pay. And because of stupid court battles it's got itself into, for example, by suspending people with no due process. Now, why is it interesting that the Labour Party might be struggling financially? And I say it is because it shows that a big part of Keir Starmer's strategy for Labour isn't yet adding up. Now, you might remember us covering this report from the times in October. It outlined how Keir Starmer was wooing rich donors to try to replace the unions that had backed Corbyn. So from the piece, they wrote, Labour has established a free tier fundraising strategy to convince wealthy supporters to make regular contributions. Donors are invited to join the party's Rose network for £100 a month. With £200 a month, they can join the more exclusive Ambassador's Circle. Well, membership of the Chair's Circle costs £416 a month. Now, we talked at the time about how stupid all of these titles are for the different sort of magic circles. Ambassador's Circle reminds me of Ferrero Rocher, that one. You can join to make yourself sound very fancy because you're denoting a large amount to the Labour Party every month. Now, we spoke about how this was concerning because it was a signal that Keir Starmer, instead of being responsive to trade unions, the organised voice of the working class and to members, ordinary grassroots people who want to change the country, he was shifting the Labour Party in a direction where it would be answerable to the wealthy and the powerful. And that's obviously a problem because it limits what Labour would be able to do in government. For example, new Labour was quite dependent on big financial interests. Not only did that lead to sort of controversies involving sleaze. So for example, tobacco advertising on F1 vehicles, that was because of a donation scandal, not the kind of thing you want to be involved in, but also it was probably related to their unwillingness to raise tax on the top 1%, which was why by the end of that 13 years in power we still had quite low tax rates. So it matters on that level. What this is showing is that it also matters on the basic financial level. Even on its own terms, Keir Starmer's strategy isn't really working. So he's pissed off the trade unions, he's pissed off the members, and lo and behold, the funders, the big money people, aren't coming in and putting their money into the party. So he's struggling. The bet at this point doesn't seem to have paid off. For some more details on maybe a bit much to call it a funding crisis, but let's call it a squeeze. And we can go to a telegraph piece at the end of last year. This is a report when Labour released its declared donations. So they write, the 6.3 million publicly declared since April the 4th, 3.95 million has come from short money. So that's the annual payment given to opposition parties. That's from the government. While 2.1 million has come from unions, including Unison GMB and the Communication Workers Union. And while Labour has launched a charm offensive to win back wealthy donors, just £199,000 has been donated by private individuals during that party. In comparison, under Mr Corbyn, the Central Labour Party received 5.1 million from trade unions during the first 244 days in charge, while individuals donated £627,000. Apparently, I said that party instead of that period, my mistake. Now, so it seems that Starmer has lost the backings of some big unions, mainly Unite, he's pissed off Len McCluskey, and undermined some of the membership income because you've got members leaving and because they're pissed off, especially at Corbyn being suspended, but also at some of the policy announcements coming out. And you might ask, why did he do it in this order? If you have a strategy for, let's get big money in, and that will reduce our reliance on members and on trade unions. Why wouldn't you wait for that money to start flooding in before you piss off the members and before you piss off the unions? And it's a good question. The reason I think he hasn't done that is because you can't do both at the same time. So you can't get big money to invest in the party if they still think that Kierstarmer is being responsive to the organised working class and to party members because big money interests know that their interests are in conflict, they're mutually exclusive to the interests of the working class and to ordinary grassroots activists and members. So you can look at it. This is potentially the bet messing up for Kierstarmer. It's also potentially him playing a long game. Maybe he thinks he has to prove that he's willing to cut loose members, he's willing to cut loose trade unions so he can show that he won't necessarily be responsive to their concerns before he can get the big financial money to roll in. So you could see his very public attacks on the left as laying the ground for maybe big backers who still it seems have cold feet. That's something we'll have to wait to see. Darla, I want to bring you in on this because me and Aaron have talked about this before and I've tended to be of the view that Labour wouldn't have problems with funding under Kierstarmer because if I was a big wealthy backer, I would as a priority, even if I didn't think Kierstarmer was going to enter power, I'd be quite keen to keep the organised left out of control of one of the main two parties in the UK. And so by giving Kierstarmer money, you can let him have independence from members and trade unions and you can ultimately push the party's direction in a right to the right. Aaron said that was unlikely. Why would they bother investing in the Labour Party? And it seems to me that actually the evidence seems to bear more in common with what Aaron was suggesting. Do you expect big money to flow into the Labour Party or do you think that Kierstarmer's bet hasn't paid off? Well, I mean, it's all about that kind of the connection between funding source and political agenda that you bring up is pretty key here. And if you think about it, the reason that wealthy individuals and business people think about donations to parties like investments, so they think, okay, I will invest a donation in this party because I've made a call that doing so will give me a larger return on that investment than what I put in. So in order to be able to make that investment on that basis, they sort of needed, and this explains why Kierstarmer did what he did, they needed that reassurance that their interests, which are, as you mentioned, more often than not in conflict with those of the working class. So those would be like the membership or the trade unions. So they need to know that they're going to be prioritized over that. So the material and kind of performance of cutting off unions from the Labour Party, both through sort of failing to take leadership in big union struggles over the past few months, and in sort of pissing off Len McCluskey, that wasn't a bug, it was actually a feature of Kierstarmer's leadership. And in a sense, that's what I've always said, sort of the primary aim of Kierstarmer's leadership, sort of is, and maybe these donors are kind of waiting to see if he's able to pull it off. And that is, it's not so much to kind of win elections because the most important election is still quite a way off. But it's to kind of restructure the party in a way that not only undoes what Corbynism did to the party, but makes it essentially impossible for it to ever happen again or tries to make it impossible for that to happen again. So, you know, that includes kind of going away as far as possible from being a large membership organization. And that's through pissing the membership off so much that a lot of them just leave, or it's through kind of actually just reducing the power of the membership constitutionally. So that instead of winning through people power, the model of winning kind of relies on these big donors. The problem with that model is that, you know, the big donors and the mainstream media, they're always going to favor the Tories, right? Because they are actually, you know, why get the copy when you can get the original. So as long as the Tories are like a viable electoral force and able to win elections, then they are going to always be the favored horse in this race. You know, part of the reason that they backed Blair, that the don't, you know, big, you know, sort of capital and the media backed Blair was because the Tories became literally unelectable. And in that vacuum, Blairism was going to kind of re, you know, reanimate and sort of like resuscitate the kind of the status quo. So in this whole thing, when they're playing this, when the Labour Party is playing this game in this way, what they don't, what they fail to realize is that they're always going to be essentially like a backup side chick in this scenario. And that might be why Star Wars Gambit isn't paying off right now. I mean, there are especially a sort of backup side chick, given that unlike in the new Labour years, it seems quite unlikely that Labour would be able to win a majority. So their route to power is probably going to be in coalition with the SMP, which is something that I don't think Labour members have much of a problem with. But big business probably does because that brings with it quite a lot of potential in stability. As I said, we've got a big story in a moment about how Keir Starmer is trying to cement his control of the party, exclude people from the left. Before we do that, if you want to watch a channel that holds the new Labour leadership to account, always very fairly, always based on facts, then make sure you subscribe to Navarra Media. We go live every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7pm. Now, how far is Keir Starmer going to disengage and disenfranchise the Labour grassroots? And we'll give you some details in a moment first, though. I want to remind you how Starmer talked about the issue when he was standing to be Labour leader. Now, this is from the video, you probably remember it, that launched his leadership campaign last January. So that was a very short clip. Starmer, but it was a big feature of his leadership campaign, he's saying he wants to unify the party, bring together the talents from members across our movement. And it featured this shot. We want to bring it up. So on the right is Darren McLaughlin, who is on Momentums, now on Momentums National Coordinating Group, standing with Keir Starmer, he's saying where we draw on the talents. Now, this is relevant, because Darren was the Secretary of Bristol West CLP. He was also selected to be a candidate for Bristol City Council in May's elections. However, he is now neither of those things, as he's been suspended from the party. Darren joins me now. Keir Starmer said he'd be drawing on all the talents across the movement. He certainly hasn't been particularly welcoming to yours. Can you explain briefly your situation, the situation that you found yourself in? Yeah, thanks, Michael. I'll try to explain it as significantly as I can, because it's a bit complicated. But essentially, I would say that there's been a bit of a kind of factional battle taking place between the left and the right of the party, and that it's particularly affected Bristol. So I was elected as the Secretary of Bristol West CLP in July 2019, which was at the time the second largest CLP in the UK. I was also selected as a Council candidate for the Bishops in the National Downward. And shortly after that, I applied and was successful. I got into the Bernie Goethe Leadership Program, which is the leadership program that the Labour Party developed for its lame members to take on leadership positions within the party. But what's happened quite recently, I suppose, is that there's become a kind of great deal of conflict, I suppose, between the bureaucracy of the Labour Party in the south-west and the membership in the south-west area, which began with the selection process for the West of England Combined Authority Mayor, the Weka Mayor. So CLPs and affiliates nominated their preferred candidate, and then created a long list. And then the regional office together with a shadow cabinet member and people from the NEC whittled down that list to two members. And they chose two members, two candidates who were perceived to be kind of more on the right of the party, now the actual candidate is Dan Norris, who used to be an MP in the Blair years. And a lot of members felt disenfranchised by this decision because their preferred candidates received several more nominations. So moving on from that, on the day of the EHRC report came out and Jeremy Corbyn was suspended, Bristol West CLP decided to put on a meeting to discuss a motion that was passed by one of our branches in support of Jeremy Corbyn. So that meeting took place on the 9th of November and immediately after that, the chair of Bristol West CLP and my co-secretary, that Hannah Little and Paul Tasman, were suspended from the party within a couple of days. And I received their letters of suspension as the secretary, and I could see that there was evidence attached to their suspensions which said, did you say this in an email, did you say this on social media, etc. We didn't understand why I wasn't suspended, but then I eventually was suspended on the 20th of November. But there was no specific allegations or evidence elicited against me. So I wrote back to them, to the governance of the legal unit to say, can you tell me what the evidence is against me and what the allegations are? And I didn't receive any response. Within a few days, we were supposed to be having the Bristol West AGM in which we were going to be electing a new EC. And I and my chair and my co-secretary were trying to step down at that point from our roles. But they then sent an email to all of our members saying they were canceling the AGM and that they would be running the AGM themselves with the assistance of the governance and legal unit in February. And they made a number of kind of unsupported allegations and insinuations, suggesting that there had been some improper conduct in our EC. But they've never attempted to address any of these issues with any member of our EC. They haven't communicated with us. They haven't emailed us. They haven't called us. We've tried to speak to them. We've tried to email them, and we've received zero response for any of our questions that they've just made these unsupported allegations without backing them up. So then in December, I was told by the chair of the Bristol LCF that regional office had asked the LCF to select new candidates in my ward and in the ward of another candidate who was also suspended. And the LCF refused to do that because they said that they were in there to implement the democratic will of the members and they didn't see why they should intervene. And that surely these disciplinary cases should be resolved well in time for the May local election. And now last night, they've sent an email saying that they are selecting for these, they were reselecting for these ward seats without having ever contacted me or my other candidate, Anna Laugh Green, who's also kind of under suspension. So yeah, that's the situation now. When you explained it to me earlier, that's the bit that I found particularly sort of shocking about all of this that you haven't received any communication. So I suppose, you know, in your situation, they'd say, look, you were democratically selected as a candidate to be a council candidate for Bristol City Council, but you were then suspended and obviously suspended people can't stand to be a Labour candidate. But they haven't told you why you're suspended. They haven't given you any evidence as to why you're suspended. And also, you've been asking, you know, can we hurry up this process because I've been selected to be candidate. And they've basically blanked you, right? So they've blanked you. And then without informing you that you'll be standing down as a candidate, they've emailed the rest of the local party and said, you've got to select someone in your place without having spoken to you. So it's all very, you know, it doesn't seem like there's any interest in due process here. There's there's doesn't seem to be any means for you to defend yourself, does that? No, I mean, I finally received a letter from the government and the from the Disciplinary Unit on the 20th of January, two months after I was suspended. And I asked for whatever the allegations or evidence were. And I responded to that letter and answered all of their questions regarding administrative suspension on Tuesday. And then on Thursday, this email went out saying that they want to select new candidates. So presumably the wheels are now in motion, which means that my disciplinary case should be coming to an end in the near future. They NEC told the secretaries within the Labour Party that they expected the administrative suspensions resulting from hearing or passing motions related to Corbyn to be dealt with by the New Year. That was the advice that we were given as secretaries, and it just hasn't happened. And they've not they've not offered any communication as to why that is. And if they had been dealt with by then, you would have had time to stand as a candidate, but because they're sitting on these cases, that means that without these cases being resolved, they can, you know, push them into the long grass, say, look, well, you're not on a Council candidate anyway. And if they decide that they're going to let people back in for hearing motions about Jeremy Corbyn, which seems quite possible. And then they can say, fine, you can come back into the party, but it's too late for you to have any position of influence, right? That seems to be the end game on their on their part. Yeah, I mean, that's the way it seems. I mean, I think it's, I mean, it doesn't seem like a coincidence that so many elected CLP officers and people who hold elected roles and so many Council candidates have been suspended at this moment in time, when I think we can all agree that there is a factional kind of battle taking place within the Labour Party at the moment. Darren McLaughlin, thank you so much for joining us this evening to fill you in on your story. Do keep us posted, especially if, you know, anything becomes a bit more official than this weird silent game they seem to be playing with silence. Maybe I'll be opaque, let's call it. In any case, yeah, thank you so much for joining us this evening. Thank you, Michael. Just going to just say, can I ask everyone to join momentum and to pay attention to our housing eviction resistance campaign and our campaign to have David Evans position an elected role following the Labour Party conference in September? Great. Good for getting that in there. I'm sure we'll talk about those in more detail at some point. Thank you, Darren. And thank you for joining me, Darlia, for the show. I hope you have another exciting week in store locked in your house. I look forward to next Friday. Hopefully, the Redditors will have done something interesting by then as well. I wonder what they do next. Oh, God, I can't read any more about fucking stock markets and hedges. Darlia was a great guest, though. We can get him to back on to explain anything that's confusing. I've got a couple of questions, actually. From the live chat on YouTube, Harriet PS, who I know is very lovely. Also, I'm a mentor of NCG. Ask key question. Where are Darlia's glasses from? They're lush. Oh, they're from Boots. I think they're actually just Boots' own brand. Wow. I don't know. I normally don't wear my glasses when I'm on TV. And Joe, weird. They look great. They look fabulous. Mine look average. No one's asked about them. What can I do? What can I say? Joe Tapper with £50 says, please can I have a birthday shout out for my wonderful husband, Robert? He introduced me to Tiskey and is that Aaron to my Michael? Thank you so much to the Navara team for keeping us company during lockdown. Happy birthday, Robert. You sound like a lovely couple. And thank you so much for that donation. Darlia, thank you so much. I'll see you in a week's time. Thank you all for watching Tiskey Sour for your super chats tonight. We'll be back on Monday at 7pm. Have a great weekend, even if a low key one. You've been watching Tiskey Sour on Navara Media. Good night.