Broken Britain – Can it be Mended?

Unheated classrooms, cancelled trains, delayed operations, potholed roads – it’s hard to avoid the impression that the UK isn’t working properly, that our systems are failing, that something has gone badly wrong. Is this because we have failed to invest? Have we outsourced pubic services to companies that have no interest in maintenance? Or do we have to face up to not being able to afford the kind of country we expect to live in? George Monbiot, the writer and Guardian columnist, sets out for Roger and Phil the ways the UK could be mended, and what he thinks needs to happen to end broken Britain.

The Y curve with Phil Dobby and Roger hearing trains cancelled operations delayed cold and collapsing classrooms why has the fabric of the UK reached breaking point is it part of an inability or an unwillingness to fund the maintenance of our society are we living beyond our means are there new

Steps a new government could take to make sure that things work that the system that we pay for actually functions for everyone can Britain be mended why curve so I think it was David Cameron wasn’t it who coined the the phrase broken britam and some people

Would argue that in you then went on to really break it but I mean at the time his point was it was all about crime teenage pregnancies all that sort of stuff it’s a different thing now I mean it’s more to do with the basic things the train transort system education

Hospitals uh getting a GP getting NHS dentist I all the systems that are there supposedly still functioning and actually aren’t no and then you know council’s going bankrupt as well wherever you look you know it’s just like it doesn’t feel likeing quite as well as it should I

Mean when you start to get schools falling apart concrete crumbling uh there’s something badly wrong it’s all to do with maintenance you you have systems whether it’s systems or buildings or whatever it is you maintain them you try and make sure they keep working and that seems It’s it

Seems to me is what hasn’t been going on now whether that’s to do with government short-termism lack of money I mean I don’t know well the government say it’s lack a well you know they’ll say well we can’t spend anymore and that is the question how do you make things stack up

Because we went through a long period of austerity we were told well if the government spends more there’ll be more debt that’ll create more inflation supposedly we’ got the inflation anyway even even with austerity so may as well spend the money uh but you know and all

Of that just raises the question how do you balance it all out how if we’re going to spend more and fix all of these things where does the money come from and and and what do we spend on first that’s the where the priorities there always going to be priorities in these

Things but I suppose you say well okay in the past the government maybe you might suggest that this current government perhaps tended to favor the private sector the more wealthy but even they you know get problems when when things start breaking down they you know they find the roads they drive on have

Potholes the uh the classrooms that they send their kids you much I suppose they send to private schools but even so the basics of Life still seem to not quite function surely at some level they realize that and can direct funds there well you fly your private jet over the

Poth hold answer but I mean yeah I mean it is be touch on it there I mean the real issue is the is the fact that the wealth divide is getting so much greater so I wonder whether Britain is broken for the wealthy I suspect not no but

There are certain basic things you know power supplies I mean the absolute things you don’t replicate even if you are wealthy you don’t build yourself an environment that has no interaction with the rest so you have to use some of these things yourselves so even even the

Wealthy would begin to say hang on a second this stuff just isn’t functioning as it should yeah well I mean Richie did actually have to pay I think he paid it himself to have that extra power put in to the local exchange so they can eat his swimming pool important isn’t it

Yeah so I mean every you know they are suffing but 3 million people last year supposedly used a food bank I mean that’s you know we are civilized society and we get numbers like that poverty is real and getting worse as you said that the the wealth Gap is there so the

Question then is okay supposedly there may or may not be in the next 12 months a change of government yeah what would be top of the L how do you square this how do you deal with incoming Administration you know old Administration we all know it didn’t

Work so now you have to say well what would be the priorities of an incoming Administration how would you actually make it work without also screwing up the economy yeah and you talk about priorities I mean they’re all priorities AR they just say well let’s not worry

About the Health Service te let’s focus on education well let’s not focus on the fact that people starving you’ve got to do all of that all the fact that trains don’t run all time all the Bas all people travel over 100 miles to find an

NHS dentist I mean you know the all of those there’s no prioritizing it’s like everything has to be fixed how do you do that when we we have come down so far but is it just Britain or is it the whole of the world facing this problem I

Think it tends to be much more I think there’s a sense that systems in Britain are not be M this maintenance principle the idea that you not only have to have a system you have to make sure it actually works you know it’s all very

Well having Ambitions to do x y and Zed which the government puts out there but if it doesn’t actually on the day you know you ring up you actually get someone you make an appointment something happens but are we is that because we’re the something in the

British nature which is just a little bit overly bureaucratic I do know when I move back here from Australia I I thought there’s just a lot that’s not right about this country that I wasn’t aware of with within Australia that things seem to function normally yeah

And is that because we just make stuff too complicated I’m not sure that’s I think it’s to do with using the money that we have I mean there is an argument that we are living beyond our means that we have too much of this stuff which we

Thought we could afford and now we can’t afford we have to cut our coat according to our cloth and we’re still trying to keep everything going things well you know some of the most basic things but if we have a certain number of hospitals but we don’t actually have enough

Medical staff to run them properly no but we certainly got enough sick people though is the determining Factor yeah yeah yeah absolutely uh you know so all of these things have to be done oh well so an impossible question well it’s a question we’re going to ask George mumo

Who The Guardian columnist and writer of environmental subjects but on many other subjects as well and he’s going to give us his take on this and he joins us now uh so George I mean it sounds like I mean just you know as we’ve been saying in our introduction there there’s just

So much that has to be done is Britain so badly broken you know repairing it in any way that is sort of going to be acceptable to the vast majority of the population it’s just going to take years it will take years there’s no doubt about that it it’s not impossible but

There’s this huge backlog um it’s a cumulative underfunding of public services and that really goes back over 40 years we’ve had 40 years with a few breaks of austerity of privatization of The Dumping of costs onto the public um the transferring of profits into the private domain and the result of that is

That many of our public services are in a really shocking but they’re dumping of costs interesting phrase so that’s sort of like the the user pays type approach is that what you’re talking about there yeah I mean it’s it’s it’s a transfer of of of costs from either the public

Sector or its um privatized Outlets to individuals um even when we’re not sort of handing over money to them often it costs us a lot more so for instance there’s been a near collapse of um special educational needs provision in many parts of the country and some

Parents as a result have had to give up their jobs in order to look after their children who are not being provided for and so that’s a massive cost to to the household yes it’s a self-defeating thing in effect yes I mean it’s it’s not saving any money it’s just transferring

Who gets the money and who has to pay that money now I’m interested you talked about 40 years because what you’re then saying is that this began in the fer yeah it’s not just the austerity that we’ve seen over the last decade is it really has it really been going on that

Long because I’m obviously Thatcher era of privatization but I mean many people remember the winter of discontent and the’ 70s when again things didn’t seem to work that well um you is it really possible to draw a line and say no no it was when Thatcher came in that it

Started it it’s not a clear line because some of the underinvestment goes back even further and particularly with water and sewage I mean that’s that’s a real shocking failure which seems to survive all changes of government um you know the last time there was really serious sustained

Investment was in the Victorian era and we are just way behind we have pumping stations which are suitable for um half the size of the population we have today um we have water treatment works which are just Antiquated they’re falling apart um I mean everything is falling

Apart the the the rate at which they’ve been replacing leaking pipelines means that it would take 2,000 years to get the network up to scratch and this is it it is a long-standing failure but that failure was accelerated by neoliberalism which is what Thatcher in particular represented but you give an example

There though with with you know the plumbing is pretty old in this country whether it’s in the house or underground so is I mean that is part of the problem is that the country is just so old there’s just so much Legacy stuff which is expensive to replace yeah I mean it’s

Not an excuse to say we’re an old country because there’s plenty of countries old and new which do invest or have invested um and make a much better job of some of these Public Services than we do but that these are political decisions and very often the the

Political arithmetic is well we’re not going to reap the benefits if we invest now because it’s going to take 10 years for that investment to be felt and whoever’s in power then will be the beneficiary of it and so political short termism is kind of baked in but there’s

Also the ideology and there’s ideologies which say the state shouldn’t be competent the state shouldn’t be spending money the state shouldn’t be providing Public Services except the absolute bare minimum and the more we manage to carve off and the less we provide the greater display of of our

Macho prowess that represents isn’t the ideology actually not not that the state shouldn’t be competent but that the private sector is more competent in doing these things and that if we can buy in experience and fiscal discipline that’s actually a better way to do this and he asked that question with a

Straight face by the way yeah well this is the Triumph the Triumph of Hope over experience isn’t it you me but I mean the argument is isn’t it that you know we privatize water those privatized companies should be the ones who are doing all this maintenance and they just

Haven’t been doing it so that must mean the regulator hasn’t been tough enough on them well it hasn’t but there’s also an inbuilt structural problem here that when you privatize a public service like water you are asking the private companies to do two completely different and contradictory things one of them is

To supply the public service and at the best value possible the other is um to pursue their fiduciary duties to their shareholders which is to maximize revenue and the two things are simply not compatible with each other you can’t optimize both very variables and so yes it’s true that there were big problems

With our water and sewage system even before privatization but those problems have become much worse because of those split incentives and we’ve seen 72 billion in fact I’m probably out of date by now but a year ago it was 72 billion pounds had been U directed to to

Shareholders as dividends all that money and much more should have been invested in the network to upgrade Sur and upgrade the water piping system and all the other things that are failing all right so we’re talking about the water system here and that is you know by sort

Of General consent as one of the worst areas of broken Britain but if you take something like schools for example you’ve seen terrible pictures of classrooms uh where kids are wearing huge coats cuz it’s too cold where we know that the concrete that’s there is faulty and all these kind of things now

That isn’t privatized in any meaningful sense it’s maybe localized um with with councils so again what is the issue there because that is place where in the current system public money should be being invested yes so the issue here is austerity you know it’s these it’s these two great fists crunching the public

Sector one of them is privatization and the other is austerity and in this case absolutely austerity is what we’re looking at Labor had something called building schools for the future it was beset with problems it wasn’t perfect um not least because they tried to do as much as possible in right across the

Public sector through something called the private Finance initiative which has turned out to be an absolute catastrophe as some of us predicted at the time but they were actually doing what they said and they were building schools for the future building new putting up new buildings repairing old buildings and

They were spending around 8 billion pounds a year um in 2010 the conservatives scrap that um and there’s been a massive and Rising repair backlog ever since that that was calculated in 2021 as1 billion but this was before we ran into this issue of a rated

Concrete this this sort of AO like stuff um which has got um an expected lifespan of 30 years but in many cases has just been left and left and left and now the ceilings are collapsing and it’s been only a matter of luck that they haven’t collapsed on classrooms full of children

Yet yeah it was amazing isn’t it the first of all 30 years would be seen as being acceptable you know if you if you if you were running a business and something was going to last 30 years you’d have it on a spread sheeet somewhere saying right we got to replace

That in 25 years uh but it seems to seems to get forgotten about well you’re saying that’s a business would do that that kind of goes back to the idea that perhaps private doing it well maybe because they don’t know what they’ve got as well that’s that’s part of the

Problem is that when you inherit a a public asset to the to the companies actually know the state of what they’ve inherited and what they’re supposed to be looking after but I mean the broader question is through all of this I mean it and it gets down to regulations

Generally almost wherever you look if you look at for example uh you know the the situation with fire hazards H you know and using material which is hazardous after the grandell after the grandell as one example it’s just who’s got their eye on the ball through all of

This it’s it’s as though you know we’re not looking close enough at almost any aspect of life and of course the the really biggest failure of all is the Environmental failure where you know we we are stacking out enormous problems for the future and politicians are actively turning away from it pretending

Not to be aware of it trying not to see what the issue is and and so I mean but again it’s not an inevitability it doesn’t have to be like this these are political choices so for instance with grenfell there were loads of political choices made before that

Disaster happened and there were loads of inflection points at which local government or central government could have said um these red lights are flashing we should respond to that we should respond to These Warnings they failed to do so again and again and they were warned individually people within

Grenfell Tower constantly tried to raise the alarm about the fire hazard and they were warned at the national level as well but it just they just did not heed those warnings they didn’t rece the question because the question was who pays for it wasn’t it that was the

Problem I if it was very clear that there was the money available then it would it would happen but you know the government was trying to say it’s local authorities local authorities were trying to say well it’s the residents or the Developers everyone was saying don’t

Care who it is so long as it’s not us because the reason they’re saying is because the funds are there and George that’s the problem isn’t it that you know we are as a society used to a certain level of Service public service and could we is it possible we actually

Can’t afford that our punching power as a as a as a world power isn’t such now that we have the funds to be able to do all these things properly and we have to Awful phrase cut our coat according to our cloth well it’s quite striking what

We find we can afford so for instance um in the bank bailout the government issued 124 billion pounds in loans and share purchases um in the pandemic it spent uh 300 or 400 billion pounds depending on which estimate you believe um huge amounts of that money in the pandemic were in incidentally

Squandered um all those corrupt contracts the VIP Lane for PPE test and trace a total catastrophe Nightingale hospitals yeah they’re throwing money around like water but as soon as there’s something you really need as soon as U there’s something particularly which the poorest in society need like the people

In the grenfell tower then oh sorry we can’t hear you there’s no money there’s no such thing as a magic money tree oh boy there is a Magic Money Tree when they want to shake it loads of fruit falls down um and and and I’m not a um

Someone who’s committed to the idea of modern monetary Theory I don’t know if if you you you you’ve followed this we’re very aware yes I’m sure you are yes um but you know the the response to the pandemic is po possibly a partial Vindication of it um you know that what

It shows is that um the government doesn’t have to raise all the money that it spends um that um it can basically magic spending into existence um that’s what governments do um and that that doesn’t all have to be inflationary of course you know it can be inflationary it depends on it has

Obviously it has been as well this time but but that was nothing to do with mmt per se that was the fact that the money that was created was to help us out and it went into people’s bank accounts and there was too much cash yeah sitting in

People’s bank accounts and and we were putting too much demand onu money went in the wrong place basically yes yes that’s right but you’re right it I mean it has partially inv indicated hasn’t it and I mean government spend the government can spend more than it’s

Getting in in tax so long as it’s sort of in line with GDP growth and it can be expanding a little bit beyond that it’s just a question of getting it out of kilter isn’t it that’s that’s the concern and again you know all these are

Choices you know I keep coming back to this and sorry to be be repetitive but you a situation like greni Tower you had these um people who are customarily disregarded by governments um many of them were immigrants or you know recently or they or or their parents had

Come come from abroad many of them were very poor and they just passed over we saw some similar with the post office Scandal um with all all those false false convictions um people like that don’t get listened to but Nigel farage his bank account at CS gets stopped instant

Action all the government’s all over it like a rash we got to do something about this Scandal this is all politics George and the situation the system we have the democratic system we have means that politicians think in five-year terms most of the time uh they need to get get

Reelected it’s only natural that they will tend towards to favor those who they think make it more likely that they will remain empowered to do the things they want to do and that’s not going to change in the next year two years three years four years so how on Earth do we

Tackle this well this is the thing that we need to resist you know when when we see politicians responding to special interests when we see them effectively truncating democracy because they’re not listening to the people as a whole but they’re listening to Lobby groups or listening to particular powerful people

Then that’s what we should be mobilizing against and in fact that is the staff of politics and I’m afraid it’s quite disappointing to see how labor is missing open goal after open goal at the moment where it could be um standing up against what is effectively corruption

Is is is a response to um particular commercial interests rather than to to the people of this nation um and it it’s it’s what should be right at the heart of political choice I mean the the greatest failure in failures in politics come about as a result of the spending

Of money into politics they come about um as a result of campaign financing and all the other Finance which is thrown around in the political sphere ensuring that democracy gets supplanted by plutocracy and that’s what we should be resisting day in day out but well how do

We do that how do we take that on because it is something in the end that can only be done through politics and there’s no incentive for them to change it is there well I mean there might be incentives for other parties to change it there’s not much incentive for the

Tourist to change that of course you know and the trouble is that labor is trying to play the same game they’re trying to raise as much money as possible but you know there’s a golden opportunity here to say we’re going to clean up politics by putting a a maximum

A much um smaller Max maximum level in fact we don’t have a maximum level on on individual donations do we we have a maximum level on the amount that a party can take but not on um how much any one person can contribute to that amount so

You end up with this sort of oligarchic funding where a small number of people can supply the bulk of a party’s funds and then they achieve as a result massive disproportionate influence over politics um and there’s a golden opportunity for labor to say this is corrupt let’s end it and it seems like

Uh it’s not an insurmountable problem there’s two things going on one is that we’ve got this growing inequality within the country so the Jin Co coefficient has gone it’s at 35.7 uh or it was last year in the late ’70s it was 25 so this is the idea of

The Gen coefficient is if you take two people two random people uh the chance of their income being exactly the same so the larger it is then the the greater the Eng income so it’s gone from 25 to 36 in the last 50 years so we’ve got a

Lot of people getting very wealthy and then the people who are struggling the people the 3 million people who are on food banks last year so that that that is the one issue and that’s been going since actually before Thatcher you know that that time Bett before Thatcher so

Uh so that’s one issue so the and then the other issue is well okay if you tax people more at the top end so you start to reduce that inequality then you do have more money available for some of these Public Services it’s seems obvious and then you problem the problem with

That is the wealthy people will say but we don’t want to be taxed and yet at Davos last week they were all there saying taxes more somewhere somewhere somewhere so but that’s the problem is I mean you know if you like the the the the experiments that have been made even

The truss experience um suggests that the financial markets are very very able to change the world in in a brief moment and if they don’t like what they hear they can do that and that has real world economic effects on our ability to do

All the things that we want to do it no no know I don’t think it is I think it has a real world effect on those people uh who hold those th those assets uh I don’t think it has too much influence on the I me what’s your point on George I

Think you’re talking about the markets which is very different to what we’re talking about which is how governments and Society fund the yeah but government but they can only fund it if they have the money to do it which is when the markets at least are willing to lend

Money to we rely we rely too much on the I mean George what do do you think is nonsense or do you think I’m on I mean George was talking about modern monetary theor very little to do with Mone so he didn’t completely back it George I think

There’s loads of opportunities to raise taxes in ways which are just not going to touch 99% of people so for instance raising the top rate of capital gains tax to meet the top rate of income tax um there’s quite a few billions in that a Robin Hood tax on financial

Transactions you could do pretty well out of that land value taxation you know taxing taxing the most most valuable property um there’s just to tax on tax on wealth generally actually yeah yeah I mean there’s lots of opportunities here and what’ll happen is that the rich

People will say I I’ll leave the country but upon the great majority of people will say good rid to you here’s a one-way ticket sld off you know if you’re not going to but then those people if their people aren’t there they’re not going to be paying tax I

Mean I mean the fact is they don’t you know they always threatened to but unless we got a full-on Venezuela situation they they they don’t you know they they’ve got homes here they got kids at school um they’ll Rumble and Grumble about it but then they very

Seldom act in it and those who do are generally the most antisocial and unpleasant of the lot and no one would miss them yeah and they’ll bring house prices down you know if they I mean because that that is the other element of all of this isn’t it as to where

Money goes I mean the average house price to earnings ratio is now over seven compared to three in 1996 in London it’s up over 11 so I mean that’s that’s another issue first of all how do our kids afford to buy houses but also those of us who are paying a mortgage

We’ve got so little money left over of course we don’t want to pay more tax because we’ve paid it to the bank for our mortgage and funly enough Banks seem to be doing quite well out of all of this but don’t worry the government’s got a solution and the criminal justice

Bill which is passing through Parliament now if you are found rough sleeping you can be fined £2,500 which of course you’d have in your back pocket or imprisoned so they will provide accommodation for homeless people but only in a prison cell yeah well I mean

You don’t need the 10 then do you move the tents off but but I mean the point of all this the conclusion we’re sort of saying is we need more money and that money needs to be spent in a longterm way that’s the fundamental and how do we incentivize that because even the

Governments we’re talking about perhaps potentially a labor government later this year or early next with the money that we’re talking about the tax potential they are still going to want to stay in power and okay they may not have to countown necessarily to the interest groups we were talking about

But they’re going to want to stay in power so they will be still working on that fiveyear cycle and winning the arguments on that alone I think a lot of it’s about narrative you know that labor is absolutely transfixed by this Tory tax and spend narrative you know we

Can’t be seen to be taxing and spending and you think why can’t you be seen to be taxing and spending what what militates against that why can’t you make the case that we need to mend this country and mend this country would be a pretty good slogan I think for the labor

Party right now um and that that’s going to require long-term spending and that what a responsible government that cares about its people does is long-term spending and that getting past that short-term cycle becomes uh your your selling point it it becomes the thing which people would vote for if you only

Made it your selling point but instead instead we have all we we’re going to stick to Tory spending plans because otherwise we’d be seen as irresponsible no it’s exactly the opposite you just they’re just buying Into The Narrative of their opponents and it’s very disappointing to see is it all just

Money though uh and you know long-term investment and I just wonder whether in this country I spent a quarter of a century outside the country I came back and I thought my first impression was you know Brits we have a a great way of making things more complicated than they

Seem need to be and I just wonder whether you know we need to almost go through regulations and simplify things and say what can and can’t be done I’ll give you an example so we know councils are going bankrupt and we know a chunk of them are going bankrupt because that you know

There’s I think how many now have issued a voluntarily issued a section 114 notice got slau cuden thork working I think well yes so the interesting thing about working that was going going to be my point some of these are going bankrupt because they just don’t have enough money to provide the services

Woking is going bankrupt because it used taxpayers money or rate payers money to invest in infrastructure because they had this grand plan that woking was going to be this fantastic new city that was you know going to be a a growth hub for the region and it all went badly

Wrong money that was just spent just was was wasted and now they’re paying for that so simply saying to councils hang on a sec just back in your box just provide the services and we’ll make sure you’ve got enough money and that’s just one example sure you go through all

Sorts of other walks of life and other other Industries like train companies you could probably simplify you know what their operating requirement is without necessarily rationalizing them some of these things will need to be renationalized as well I’m sure but we got we’ve got to get the you know

Simplify things so it’s very clear what the objectives are and where responsibility and where responsibility is and then yeah and then then you can put money behind it at that point you might find you need a lot less I mean I’m a bit wary about this um call for simplifying regulations because of

Course it’s what certain very predatory businesses have been calling for for a long time which B and simplification very often means deregulating them I think we need to be very clear about what exactly we’re calling for in circumstances like this you there are there have been some very foolish

Council spending decisions and you know there’s no inoculation against stupidity there’s there’s lots of silly things are done um regardless of the environment in which they take place but I don’t think anyone would be against uh sorry anyone on my side of the political divide would be against the idea that Council should

Be investing more in public services and should be trying to improve their their towns and cities um if if not in a sort of very self-aggrandizing and foolish way as we’ve been talking about but um you know and of course councils are absolutely strapped for cash not least

Because of this highly regressive and extremely Limited council tax um banding system which hasn’t been updated since 1991 where the richest people pay only a little bit more than the very poorest people a little bit better than the pole tax but not much not much indeed it’s

It’s not quite a flat tax but it’s a very gently sloping so David Cameron when he because he really ter the phrase broken Britain didn’t he when he was uh pitching for power back in government now uh yes he’s back uh but you know he’s backing A lot quieter though isn’t

He but he talked about uh I mean a very different broken Britain he talked about selfishness uh behaving as if your choices had no consequences children without fathers kind perish the thought schools without discipline reward without uh effort crime without punishment rights without responsibilities that was his broken

Britain so I feel like the dialogue has moved on a little bit from from that and the sort of broken Britain that we’re talking about I think you’re right maybe it’s a vote winner if the labor party were just to embrace itain but they fixing BR do you think they will embrace

It George you think you think that the KY time whatever it says perhaps at this point in order to get to power do you think they actually get what you’re saying the problem is if they don’t say it before they’re in power then they won’t have a mandate to do it once

They’re in power yeah and and the media can very easily turn on them and say well no one voted for this because you didn’t put it to the people and in fact it would be something of a deception of the people to to campaign on one Manifesto when having a completely

Different one in mind so um I I don’t think he’ll that Sama will show any more courage in office than he’s so far shown out of office and that amounts to very rather depressing isn’t it yeah it is rather depressing but and so what happens then we just get more

Privatization it feels like that’s going to be the answer well if these things are if these things are broken if we can’t manage to fund our schools we’ll just have to privatize more of it if the National Health Service can’t function uh as it currently is we’ll just have to

Privatize more of it you know it’s it’s just it seems to be the you know the answer over the last couple of decades yeah no and and and that was more or less what Blair and brown did with the whole private Finance initiative was was you know instead of just stumping up the

Money in the usual way from government coffers um they tried to bridge the gap by bringing in private companies effectively to manage and run public services and what the effect of that was was to make um the the U balance spending look better at the time but to

Load the future with massive liabilities which have been absolutely crippling to um hospitals and many other parts of the public sector as they’re having to pay off these huge debts to to to the private sector and I think that’s you know starm is not going to do another private Finance initiative but he’s

Going to try to find ways of um solving these crises without actually spending more money and frankly there isn’t a way you’ve just got to spend more money so not being a conspiracy theor we’re not conspiracy theorists on this podcast well unless we find that actually it’s

Very good for ratings in which case we might do a bit of a pivot on that but um but I mean we’re not conspiracy theorists as it currently stands and yet a conspiracy theorist would say isn’t it interesting isn’t it if you if you let all of these systems collapse then it

Makes it easier to to privatize and you know so is that really actually part of the agenda it it is yeah long it’s not neglect it’s actually a long-term strategy yeah well you can you can see what it’s doing in dentistry this is exactly what the

Approach has been in dentistry is is to put these impossible conditions on NHS dentists including these units of dental care which U where you never quite meet the costs of the of of what the dentist is spending um you effectively load the dentist with all sorts of conditions

Which just make you know you have have to be a very altruistic person now to supply NHS dental care because you lose money and the people the only people still supplying it are subsidizing it out of their private practice um and but but you know there’s been no government

Announcement saying we’re shutting down all NHS dental care that they’re doing it stealthily but the effect is just the same the same and ke st’s answer state sponsored toothbrushing that’s that’s I mean as we draw this to a inclusion George I suppose the point you’re making

Is that if K sta tomorrow said you know your your your slogan um men Britain uh that there would be a public support from that that he would not be imperiling his chances of getting into power it is a vote winner if that were really the case wouldn’t he do it I mean

The left’s case has always been well if we put the Jeremy Corbin case if we put all this out there in the end people will support but you’ve said yourself on this podcast many times before not that you’re being repetitive of course uh that he’s just too scared you know he’s

Just doesn’t he doesn’t want to lose the election let’s look at what he’s scared of I think he’s more scared of the billionaire media than than he is of the people and that is is a huge part of the problem here that we’re we we’ve got this incredibly dominant powerful group

Of offshore billionaires who are telling us what to think and telling us how to act and somehow they’ve been allowed to become a more important political force than the electorate has yeah and a BBC that’s scared to move yeah yeah too right but the Next Generation doesn’t

Read newspapers so maybe there could be relief in that except I suppose they get influenced in other ways well by billionaires over well and it’s not as if billionaires don’t ear social media also true also true George thank you very much indeed for that um I can’t say

It’s been an optimistic um uh session but it’s been really interesting and uh yeah we shall see it’s good to talk hopefully get you on again soon GE sure love you to talk thanks so much guys cheers than bye all very interesting stuff so next week uh what are we going

To talk about well we’re going to talk about miscarriages of Justice something else that’s not working it clearly isn’t I mean the the system to try and look at cases that could represent Injustice and we know with what happened with the post office workers of course that injustices

Can persist for a long time and the system doesn’t even when they know that these inar Justice they seem to take incredibly long time to go through to such a point that so many people have and haven’t seen Justice yeah and well beyond the post office there are lots of

Individual cases and we’ve had several in the past few years where people clearly have been put in prison for many years and come and the system hasn’t worked they when eventually their cases have been brought back to court they have been exonerated no um but there’s

Is this a case or is this a systemic problem I think it’s systemic I think there’s a lot of a lot of this going on and and the problem is yes you know obviously most people in prison probably say that they’re innocent that is true but there are some some horrendous cases

Of people who clearly are not guilty of what they’ve been put in prison for and they lose 15 20 years of their lives I mean even up until recently there was a horrible thing where the home office would charge people for board and lodging for the amount of time they’d

Actually been imprisoned incredible isn’t it I mean it shows the attitude that’s out there and the system which is the the criminal cases review commission it absolutely creaks and we’re going to talk to someone who knows this really well Glenn Maddox who is uh a very prominent solicitor campaigning on a lot

Of these cases and get a sense of why it doesn’t work and how we are guilty really of of Injustice to a fairly large number of people who shouldn’t be in prison but are just because we haven’t got the resources or time or expertise to put into actually sorting their cases

Out well and you have spend a bit of time inside haven’t you not actually ins visiting people rather than actually so I’d be interested in finding out more about that as well next week yeah okay that’s next week on the Y cev join us for that have a great week bye the why

Curve