Guy Standing on big finance infiltrating education

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0:30The New Statesman.

0:35Morning, Guy. Olly Dougmore of The New Statesman here. Hope you're well. Really looking forward to our chat later. I think it should be a lot of fun. I think your idea of the precariat has probably never been more relevant. Or another way of looking at it is whether or not actually it still exists and whether the material conditions of such a large swathe of people is whether you can sort of segment the population that way or whether it's sort of just become a general state of being. I'm really looking forward to talking about that. creative thinking the education sector more broadly looking forward to it see you later hi ollie thanks for the message i'm looking forward to our discussion i think one of the issues on which we should concentrate is how the whole of the education system is being infiltrated by big finance particularly from the united states and is actually poisoning the very character of our education system.

1:27But I look forward to our discussion. Cheers. Today, I'm interviewing world-renowned economist Guy Standing. You might not have heard of him, but his ideas have affected your life. He coined the term precarious. His latest book is about market forces, the increasing financialization of our education system and the terrible consequences for us as a result of that. Quick bit of housekeeping before the interview starts. At the beginning of our conversation, there's a little bit of noise interference, both from the builders outside and actually Guy's phone. Don't worry, it does stop. Enjoy the interview.

2:02Guy Standing, author of Human Capital, the book I'm holding in my hands right now. How are you? Very well. I'm enjoying the prospect of talking about a very complex subject, which touches all of us in some way. And it's a major crisis, our education system. And it's part of the reason why I think we're seeing a drift to the far right all over the world, and most of all in the United States, where the education industry has been corrupted to a point which is really frightening, which is why one of the chapters of the book is called The Ultimate Horror, Caligula on the Potomac. And I have this image of Trump being Caligula, and he's appointing his horse in all these senior positions, including the Secretary of Education, who promptly abolishes the Department of Education.

3:06I mean, you can't make it up much of what's going on, but it does have terrifying consequences. And we're going to talk about that, I think. Absolutely, we are. I mean, your work is far reaching from the precariat to the commons, to about the education system. And I'd like to try and absorb as much of that in the space of the hour or so that we have together. But I feel like before we do that, I would just like to get a sense of, as an economist, as someone who spent a lot of time thinking about the organization, the structure of economies, how do you define what a successful economy looks like?

3:41Because particularly in national political discourse, we fixate on a number and it's generally GDP, possibly GDP per capita. Do you think that's a useful instrument? I mean, no. My previous book was called The Politics of Time, and the final chapter is imagining we have a political realignment on the left for the 2030s. And it's an alliance which has an ecological base, and it restores people's control over their time by giving everybody basic security. and enabling the great traditions of the left, of the commons, to be revived. I think the idea of work that is not labor is part of the future vision of a good society.

4:33But the most fundamental problem we have, I believe, is that people in masses, in the precariat that I've written about, on which I get emails every single day from all over the world, The book's been translated into 25 languages, so I get emails from everywhere. And the constant refrain is that we're living in chronic insecurity, faced by debt, faced by inequalities of all types. And unless we have an agenda that's offering ordinary people, particularly people in the precarious, basic security. We're going to see further and further erosion of civilized values, of empathy, of compassion and solidarity, and more and more neo-fascist trends along what we're seeing this country.

5:30And I live in Europe and I see it all over Europe. And we're very close to being on the edge of an existential disaster, another dark night. This madman in the White House is just an emblem of the crisis. So I think we need a new progressive politics, courageous, transformational politics. And that, in a sense, is what I've been trying to do through my books uh the commons basic income uh the blue commons a book i wrote about the oceans and what's happening there and this latest one in a sense is is bringing the thoughts together about what responsibility our education system has for the dystopia that's that's arising around us and I think that when one's written a book which is one thinks the subject is really important one can get carried away and think that you've written an important book and you have to be modest if you've got any sense and you don't know if a book's going it's about to come out you don't know if it's going to have a life I was telling the publishers yesterday so but I do think I do think that it is a fundamental part of the existential threat that we're facing at the moment.

7:01How do you sit, or where does the precariat sit in terms of traditional Marxist terms, proletariat, bourgeoisie? I mean, I assume there's probably been a degree of pushback in relation to the terminology from traditional Marxists themselves. I mean, talk to me a little bit about what it means. Well, when the book, when the precariat first came out, I remember being invited to Marxism today to speak, and they set me up with three people who wanted to attack me, and there were about 500 people in the audience. And I thought, this is a bit of a setup, you know, and these were all classic, traditional Marxists, and I happen to be Marxist, so I know the language, I know the concepts and everything.

7:46And what I was really happy about at the end is that not only did a lot of people buy my book, but I clearly had the support because the young realize that the old class distinctions were fitted for the 19th century. I'm sure Marx would not have written the same things that he wrote about class today, if he were writing. And it always should be remembered that Capital, Volume 3, ended with a short chapter that was incomplete about classes. And I think what we've got today is what I call a plutarchy, where we've got what I call rentier capitalism, which is meaning that more and more of the income is flowing to the owners of property.

8:40financial property most of all, but intellectual property and physical property, and less and less is going to those who perform labor and work, right? And the old class structure of a bourgeoisie versus a proletariat is a bit stupid, right? Because the proletariat that the social democrats supported, the Marxists supported, were expected to be in full-time labor, stable, full-time labor. Okay, that's not what the precariat is experiencing. The precariat is experiencing unstable labor, short-term labor, volatile labor, volatile earnings, and for the first time in history, two things. One is, this is the first mass class in history, the precariat, whose level of education, formal level of education, is above the level of labor they can expect to get.

9:39That was never the case with the proletariat. Charlie Chaplin's case, you know, and we all know modern times, and this is also the case where they are systematically exploited by debt. Debt is an exploitative mechanism that the precariat has to live with all the time. And the third thing about the precariat is this is the first class class, mass working class, that is in the process of losing rights, losing the rights of citizenship, losing what the French called les droits acquies, okay, the acquired rights that the proletariat and the trade unions and social democratic parties fought to obtain, but now are being taken away, including right to due process, including right to be seeing in the political spectrum a party, a mechanism, a set of institutions that are representing their interests and aspirations.

10:44So I think it makes sense to continue to talk about class. Class hasn't gone away. What I hate about much of the popular analysis is the millennium generation or generation X, Y, whatever bloody number they can come up with. It's pathetic. It's PR stuff. OK, if you're a proper social scientist, you should be thinking about class. How does class work? Relations of production, relations of distribution, relations to the state. That is how you should define class, whether you take a Weberian approach or a Marxian approach, right? So for me, I've seen the evolution of the debate since I first published the first edition of the precariat.

11:33And now I get huge numbers of people writing to me from around the world, understanding the precariat, and not only understanding the precariat, but doing so with pride. When I first wrote about it, it was a matter of shame. Or, you know, I'm a failure. I'm a failure. I'm in the precariat, right? Today, people stand up and say, I'm part of the precariat. And I like that, because if you're going to have a class politics, then you must have a certain dignity and pride in who you belong to. And I think that we are at that stage at the moment where the biggest fear is that it's a class in the making, not yet a class for itself in Marxian terms.

12:20And what that means is that they know what they're against, insecurity, right? Lack of hope. But they don't know what they're for in a united sense. So you've got the less educated part of the precariat. They listen to the Donald Trumps and the Nigel Farages and the people in the cabinet of this government who are promising, you know, or a neo-fascist alternative, which is much worse, of course. Whereas the progressive part, the educated part of the precariat are saying, hey, we're not hearing a politics for us, a politics of paradise, as I call it. So we're at a stage where we're a dangerous moment, A Karl Paulanian transformational moment where we could easily go off to another period of fascism of some sort.

13:15Some people don't like that term, but authoritarianism. All we need in a progressive agenda that hasn't been offered on the cards. And that is a very dangerous moment. And that's partly what the book is about. Yeah, I don't know if you've read a book by Dan Evans called Nation of Shopkeepers, which he talks about sort of this is exactly the same sort of analysis, really, where he talks about sort of downly mobile graduate class and the petty bourgeoisie that sort of within Britain today, you know, whether I don't know, take your pick, hairdressers, tradies, whatever it is. and that there are these two classes.

13:50And I think my reading is that I think, particularly on the new right, the British radical right, I think Farage has a very specific understanding of that class and how to mobilize them electorally. And I'm not so sure about whether you can say the same about the Labour government.

14:09You finished your answer there by talking about fascism. And so I'd like to probe that a little bit, really, because I, so far, I was quite reluctant to invoke that term when talking about Farage, when talking about reform, until we got this announcement about sort of the intention to sort of pursue a policy of mass deportation, you know, possibly even revoking the right to stay for people who don't have settled status in Britain, people who we've previously said, no, it's okay, you can be here 5, 10, 15 years, whatever, say, no, no, you're out, and we're going to deport you. And the more I thought about that idea, and actually its implementation, well, you know, the British police force has already stretched to such an extent that a lot of sort of, it's not the right term, sort of menial crime goes unsolved, uninvestigated.

14:54So the police probably can't implement this sort of thing. The border force perhaps would want to do it, but probably doesn't have the necessary people to do it. The airline companies essentially refuse to run the deportation flights even under private charts. So you're probably going to have to use the RAF in order to run the deportation flights. And at that point, I'm thinking, well, this is quite a militarized response to immigration, to a different ethnic makeup of the country. and I started to soften to the idea of invoking that terminology I just I just wondered if you talk a little bit about what the word means to you and how applicable you think it is to the current states in in British politics yeah I think I mean in a sense we're seeing in Britain a a copying of what's happening in the United States so far in a much milder milder way what trump has has done of course is he's created and one shouldn't use these words too lightly he's created in ice an effective potential gestapo equivalent to the 1930s in Germany who are outside control of civil society.

16:12And they are taking action, you know, listen to when they shot that poor woman. René Goode, yeah. Yeah, René Goode. Of course, Vance immediately jumped up and said, he has total immunity, you know. He can do what he likes, in other words. And it's a sort of extra, extra... Judicial, yeah. Judicial process. And the fear must be that if the far right in this country were to enter government, that something equivalent would take place here. I use the term that the far right is following a policy, which is a term that's not been widely circulated, but I'm trying to increase its circulation, if you like.

17:00aporophobia. Aporophobia rather than an xenophobia. And aporophobia means fear and hatred of those without resources. Because if you think about it, both Trump and Farage and Orban and Marine Le Pen, for example, they love rich foreigners. They love the plutocrats, wherever they come from, from Saudi or Israel or wherever. So it's not anti-foreigner per se. It's anti those who don't have resources and who may want resources. The people who have every reason to be resentful and have grievances because they're insecure, they're disadvantaged, etc. etc. And the genius, inverted commas, of Trump is that he's a Caesar.

18:01And a Caesar is identified as a genius identifying enemies, that he can mobilize enough of the plebs, enough of the populace, against those enemies. So it might be women, it might be Muslims, it might be, you know, any number of groups you can identify, the dirties, the deplorables, whatever euphemism they use. And that's what we're seeing. That's what we're seeing. And my concern, all of our concerns should be that you see social democrat governments who haven't got a solution moving to try to preempt them, moving to the right, and therefore being dragged not just with appeasement, but with going in the same direction, which is only helping to legitimize the next group taking it a bit further.

18:58And that's not a solution. And that's where we are today. But I think it gets back to the subject of our discussion, which is the role of education. Because the education system is failing to be a bulwark against this drift. It's failing to give us our values. And if you go back to the ancient history, if you go back to the ancient Athenians, and that's where I start in the book, Plato understood that you could only have democracy if you had minimal inequality and maximum public education, because otherwise the potential tyrants could mislead the people who don't have education. And the idea of education was liberation, teaching people empathy, to be able to put oneself in the shoes of the other.

20:01May not be agree with them, you know, but to understand them and to empathize to the point where, okay, it's not my lifestyle, but it's fine, you know. And we're losing that capacity because of what's happened to the education industry through history. And all the great educationalists going from the ancient Athenians, through Rousseau, through Hegel, through Marx, if you like, through Cardinal Newman, John Stuart Mill, and into the 20th century with Tawny and Lasky and G.D.H. coal. All these people would be horrified if they saw what the Labour government and New Labour and the Conservatives have done to education in this country.

20:52And I'll give you one example, because it's an example that seems to have gone under the radar last year, but symbolises is an incredible development. Last July, a Bolivian billionaire, on the right, political right, in alliance with a Wall Street company that he helped found and an ex-employee of his runs, bought the fastest-growing British university. They bought a university with five campuses and over 40 ,000 students. What does that tell you? I was talking to some MPs, Labour MPs. I said, did you know about this? What guy are you talking about? They didn't know. here you had a university, Arden University it's called, okay, over 40 ,000 students, five campuses, taken over by a right-wing Bolivian billionaire, and you don't know about it?

22:08I don't know about it, no. Exactly. Now, this is a situation where, I could give 20 examples, where you're having foreign finance. Maybe he's a lovely man to his dogs, this Bolivian. I mean, I don't mind, but he's never had... I've checked up his history. He has no experience in education whatsoever. He's never invested in... He made his money on the stock exchange in Wall Street, right? Well, good luck to him, if that's how you know. Okay, that's not my point. My point is we're allowing foreign capital to buy up our education system. Now, can you imagine Jenny Lee or somebody like that from Tribune?

22:54I was talking to the Tribune people the other day. Jenny Lee, who founded the Open University in 1969, can you imagine how she'd react? Or can you imagine, you know, any of the great people on the left reacting? you're turning your education system over to foreign finance? Answerable to a certain president? Come on! So, in a sense, this isn't a matter for keeping calm, gentlemen. It's a matter for us to get onto the barricades. And I'm not exaggerating, because it goes all the way down to preschool. We have our schools on send being taken over by foreign private equity. They go for short-term profits.

23:44They can close the facilities whenever they wish. And why would you do this to yourself as a society? Well, this is the point, right? Should should education be a commodity? No. Should it not be a public good or even just something held in common? Exactly. Do you understand it to be a part of the commons? Yeah, that's why the title of the book, The Education Commons, because education has always been a part of the commons. It's what you share and learn and elaborate. And it's not just scientific knowledge, It's vernacular knowledge, knowledge that's gained through community involvement. And I give examples of how the importance of having democratic control and the commons will always have stewards who are responsible for preserving the commons and gatekeepers, organizations, bodies that hold the stewards to account.

24:50We've lost both. we're rushing to privatize. Rachel Reeves loves JP Morgan. She consults Jamie Dimon before she introduces her budget. Well, you know, this is undignified beyond anything else. But think what happens when you have your education system at every level. I show it in the book. Every level being taken over by foreign private equity. Now, private equity has a model, okay, short-term profit maximization. Buy, flip, strip, or the other way around, okay? Asset stripping by any other name. They make their profits, they pile their firms with debt, and then declare bankruptcy or sell it to another private equity company.

25:38And so your schooling is turned into a commodity. This is a commodity, right? Now you go through from preschool to send schools to a so-called academies, which are not academies, all the way up through universities, through apprenticeship. Ask me about apprenticeship, I get a little angry, okay? Tell me about apprenticeship. Well. And get angry. Get angry. A certain Ewan Blair, the eldest son of a certain Tony Blair, took a very nice wheeze by establishing a company called Metaverse, whereby he took advantage of the apprenticeship levy. The apprenticeship levy means that firms have to pay a certain amount to have apprenticeship, or they have to pay tax.

26:33So Ewan Blair becomes a broker, apprenticeship broker. He doesn't do any training himself. He doesn't do any education himself. but he puts firms gets cheap labor they get called apprenticeships they go on two days a month or whatever it is week maybe for part-time training and then they go back and they're paid lower wages than everybody else because they're apprenticeship apprentices and then for some peculiar reason best known to politicians. He gets$1.7 billion raised in venture capital. His firm for six years makes vast losses every single year, hasn't made any profits. And then he's allowed by the government to issue BSc degrees, apprenticeship degrees.

27:32and now what they are heaven only knows okay and then to cap the story he is given the mbe for services to education now one wonders what they are and one wonders why he got it you've done more services to education i'm sorry i'm you can't do less i was gonna say guy i'm not I'm sure, but yeah, if that's the logic. I mean, in a sense, you need Monty Python to do justice to stories like that. But I've got others in the book. And it is a statement that says our education system is in disarray. And that's a key theme of the book, a serious theme.

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29:29You write in the book, as the amount of schooling has grown, there has been a long decline in creative, imaginative and innovative thinking. Tell me more about that. Elaborate on that idea for me. Well, the extraordinary thing is that particularly since the reforms that Thatcher introduced and through the Schooling Act of 1988, basically the curriculum of schools was narrowed dramatically. She wanted all arts and humanities to be excluded from the school curriculum. Keith Joseph was similarly, but he persuaded her to be a little bit a compromise on that. And what's gradually happened, as I show, is that the curriculum in schools has become narrower and narrower.

30:23fewer and fewer students pupils teenagers and into onto university are taking arts or humanities history philosophy you know that's almost they're almost threatened species and what we're seeing is a real decline, and I give some statistics, in a number of related themes. One is deep reading. Deep reading is in deep decay, if you like. Another is creative imagination. There is a diminishing, there are lots of things. And third that goes with it is a loss of play in schools. And I give the example of the most expensive academy, they're called academy, they're not real academies, but they're called academies, most expensive, costing£46 million in Peterborough.

31:25And the headmaster was asked when they were opening this school, where are the playgrounds? We don't have any playgrounds in this school. no playgrounds the children don't need to play they've got to concentrate in class we don't want waste time and play now any psychologist child psychologist or educational contact play is a vital part of learning it's where you have your creativity your empathy it's the that is the zone of learning, learning to be a human being, learning how to relate to other people. And along with what I call the AI paradox, which we'll come to perhaps later, we're seeing a diminishing amount of artistic, ethical, philosophical, historical.

32:28Ask children, and ask students about our history, you'll be horrified. They're not teaching it. I mean, I think they are vital parts of a good education system. And yet our Prime Minister says we've got to make the schooling system more oriented to jobs. No, no, no, no, no. I would say the opposite. it. You've got to rescue. Of course, I'm not being unrealistic. Of course, you need to learn skills so that you can get a career, blah, blah, blah. But you've got to get a balance. And I don't hear that balance or see the evidence of that balance over the last 30 years. On the contrary, the sort of instrumentalism of human capital, this horrible term that I hate, which is driving people into a neoliberal mentality and orientation is diminishing our critical thinking.

33:35Now, wherever I go, and I've given talks, I did a calculation, I couldn't believe the number of presentations at universities I've given, but I've spoken at 155 universities in 49 countries and everywhere people the academics the teachers the students are saying roughly the same thing right they are they are angry i was talking to a couple last night they were asking my book i said yeah yes true you know but i i have a section there on examinitis examinitis right Right? It's a pandemic. It's a pandemic. I mean, I give some statistics. I mean, people from age three in some countries, all the way up, are taking an incredible number of exams.

34:32And there's no evidence that this does people good. Okay? The best system in Finland, they don't have any exams until they leave school. And then it's voluntary almost. and and and they they do much better so it's no evidence that uh that examinitis is a desirable thing yeah i think i think it's not it's not to do do down or to reduce in any way vocational training or or indeed not to you know do down you know um higher education but i i've come across this most specifically in uh in jonathan height's work around social media smartphones and consequences for for teenagers at the moment but i mean there's just reams and reams of evidence that a play-based childhood, particularly one that involves copious amounts of time in the outdoors.

35:25And indeed, you mentioned Finland, some Nordic countries, you don't really start education in the way that we understand it until you're seven years old. The early years, infant years, are based around social relationships, interactive creative play. And I just, I wonder, what is the incentive or what is the cause of looking at that and going, no, actually, we should financialize the education, we should marketize the education. It just seems the evidence base is there. And you turn your head and go, no, I'm just going to ignore it. I'm going to focus a system that either allows for rentier capitalism, allows for an extractive market.

36:06Is it simply that it's driven by the internal logic of capitalism, that there's a profit to be derived there? And if it's to the detriment of our future generations, then so be it. Well, I think that the first point that I'm going to be emphasizing again and again and again, I think, is we need much greater awareness of the crisis, of the depth of the threat to real education. The second is that I think we need to regain democratic commons control over every level of learning. You've just mentioned Scandinavia. One of the tragedies, and I've worked in Scandinavia and even written a book on Sweden, the Swedish system has gone bad.

37:00It's really bad. They introduced privatized schooling and highly standardized. And the CEO of the biggest privatized schooling chain in Sweden said, we don't care if we're compared to McDonald's, but we believe in standardization. And the system is really creepy. And they've pushed up, they've lowered the age of going to school now to six. Whereas in Finland, they're still holding the line a bit. um but but uh the the trend sorry the trend in sweden has been worrying at the same time as inequality has increased dramatically in sweden you know when i worked there in the in the 80s uh the the old ethos was there but it's gone talks about the ai paradox the ai paradox is this that the idea in silicon valley and i have been invited to talk in silicon valley at singularity university and mountain view is that uh the singularity thesis is that as artificial intelligence rises it will rise to equal human intelligence the ai paradox that i've put forward in the book is that as AI rises, HI, human intelligence, goes down.

38:31And there is a worrying possibility that this paradox is being played out. Because there are lots of associations, you mentioned Haidt's book and screen and stuff. As far as his thesis, which I discuss in the book, the decline of mental intelligence and the rest of it and the stresses that he's talking about, the anxious, began before the iPhone, right? It began before, but that was accentuated. It was this intensification of schooling and the whole orientation that preceded the first. But the paradox is that all the time we're seeing AI increase, it's reducing the scope for critical thinking.

39:28It's increasing standardization. I discuss the biggest system, Khan Migo it's called, of electronic tutoring, okay? And people are turning more and more higher. we're all responsible for doing it. So what if I, you know, even when you get to a cooking recipe, you turn to AI, you can get anything. And it's creepy that your emails, where I get many emails and then AI has drafted a response at the bottom. I mean, it's really creepy, really creepy. But think about it. It's making more of us lazy, more of us thinking, well, if AI says that, it must be right. Now, the diminishing of critical thinking is not just linked to one phenomenon.

40:25It's linked to a process and a fact that we're not learning from a young age and through our lives the ability to be critical and the ability to exercise what I've called in the book, parxia, it's an ancient Greek, the ability to speak what we really think because we are fearful of the consequences. And we're having the advancing of a panopticon state where the surveillance is incredibly powerful and not only powerful today, but what you or I say today could be used against us in 20 years' time. That's why you should erase this interview immediately, please. But the simple issue is that all of this AI, which some people, in my view, quite correctly call an alien intelligence rather than artificial, because it is alien to us, is reducing our critical capacities and reducing our sense of being able to exercise Pachysia, you know.

41:48And this is a part of the challenge and why I say in the final chapter we need, as a matter of urgency, to set up a National Commission for Education, which looks at the fundamentals and says, we need a fresh start. Okay. And thinking about AI, and we shouldn't only think of AI, but it is a very fundamental part of what's taking place. And thinking of the Musks and the Larry Ellisons and the Tony Blair as their agent taking over more and more of access to our data and data on you and me that can be used. I don't know, right? We don't know. And this is the sort of society which is going to inhibit critical thinking.

42:44And the example of a number of examples that I give in the book of where self-censorship is the first thing that happens i um i heard a jimmy carr joke recently where he said you know student a student uses ai to write an essay the the lecturer uses ai to market and in the end ai gets the job yes you get to the point where you eliminate your critical faculty it's quite dangerous we've spoken about height we've referenced height a couple of times here and i slightly tangential but i just ask your perspective because i think it's relevant i mean what are your thoughts on um you know proposed ideas around either a social media ban or a smartphone ban for uh adolescents young teenagers i mean how do you think about something like that i think it's a a no-brainer i think that given the current uh public education or what passes for it and given the vulnerabilities that we're all experiencing the insecurities i think there's got we have got to have much stronger safeguards especially as the uh influencers of the world the dominant influencers are some very unsavory people who can use misinformation and disinformation and all these sexual imagery i think i think it's a no-brainer that they've got to be stronger safeguards but ultimately ultimately we need to build safeguards in ourselves and in our children and in our friends and in ourselves, and to be able to withstand this stuff.

44:22Regulations are needed, but regulations by themselves will not achieve a liberation from dominance by the electronics. I've, just to return to the AI point, I've read interviews you've given where you've spoken about emergency basic income. I, you know, response to a natural disaster, famine, war, look what's happening in Gaza now, look what's happening in Ukraine, whereby in terms of aid efforts, relief efforts, that we may be better to sort of just provide the population with cash, basic income, right? Rather than other attempts at aid, which have the possibility of, well, don't stimulate the local economy.

45:04There's a possibility for, a greater possibility for corruption. um how do you sit the sort of conversation around ai the way we've been talking about decrease to human intelligence and then your ideas around basic income how do they connect to each other okay they're very strongly and i discuss the connections in the in the final chapter i mean i believe we need basic income as a matter of justice and a matter of freedom but for justice. But I think one of the strongest arguments about moving in a direction of a basic income, and we've now got hundreds of experiments and pilots to back this up, is that it leads to people having greater sense of control of their time and a greater sense of being able to spend more time learning, putting that learning into effect, and withstanding the pressures that come from insecurity.

46:02And the evidence is very strong in my view. If we don't have an agenda that gives people basic security, they will be susceptible to this populist stuff and be suicidal or stressed out or suffer from addictions of some sort. If you or I were chronically insecure and you don't know how you're going to meet your food bill and whatever it is, you're going to drift that way. I mean, let's not pretend otherwise. And I hate the judgmental sort of approach to welfare and things. I think it's disgraceful, disgusting, unnecessary. I think we've got to rescue this sense of time and security. And that's why I believe in it.

46:53As it happens, I'm working with the Palestinians at the moment, on an emergency basic income, supposedly for Gaza, but nothing is feasible in that genocidal situation, but also in the occupied West Bank. And an emergency basic income, at least, it's not a panacea, but it has to be part of the apparatus. You have to give people the possibility of getting control, a little bit of control in their lives. And I think the same with a basic income in Britain. I strongly believe in it. I was involved in the Welsh basic income pilot. I've been involved in other schemes. And everywhere, we have seen the biggest improvement is on mental health.

47:46And you need mental health to be there. learning. You need mental health to be a responsible citizen. And you shouldn't disparage that. I mean, you know, this government is offering security to finance. Stability, security, guarantee. But they're not offering ordinary people in the precariat anything approaching security. Okay? And as long as that happens, their voting share will collapse. they're dead men walking unless we have a progressive agenda which says that everybody in our society has the right to basic security not you don't have to do x y and z you have a right as a human being and and i think that is so fundamental that that i get annoyed when i hear sophisticated argument and suppose it won't reduce the labor suppose it will make people lazy Well, let's stop abolishing inheritance, shall we?

48:49Because they're getting a lot of basic income for doing nothing. Let's put it that way. So, I mean, in a sense, the rhetoric of opponents of giving people basic security is hypocritical to the nth degree. And if we don't wake up and give people basic security so they can have some dignity, have some prospects, then we'll deserve to be moving in the direction we talked about earlier. Yeah, I was on the radio with the Shadow Home Secretary a while ago, and I got his eyes bulging out of his head when I said it might be meritocratic for an inheritance tax of 100 % on wealth over, let's say, five or 10 million quid, and he absolutely lost it.

49:36That he did. That's the Conservative Party. But I would say, let's not be party political, because I could name you some members of this government who would say probably the same which is exactly where i was going to to move to guy because um the watchwords in in within the government and particularly as it relates to welfare at the moment is is about contribution it's about the contributory principle a contributory society and i just wonder well i'll sort of i'll just tee it up for you for you to talk about how you think about that and and the conflict it has with the version of a sort of altruistic, empathetic welfare system that you've just described?

50:16Well, in the book, Politics of Time, I've got an appendix where I say, what is the most valuable form of work in the British economy and British society? The most valuable, easily, okay? And of course, the answer is unpaid care, okay? Unpaid care, mainly done by women, is far more valuable, yet it is regarded as non-work. It is regarded in GNP measures as zero. Zero. Okay? So if I spend more time looking after my elderly mother, GNP goes down. Poor old Rachel Reeves pulls her hair out, so does Starmer, etc. Which is ridiculous. Come on, we should mock it. we really should mock it it's about time we if a martian came down they think you're mad okay so the work that is done by more people that has more value is given zero and of course if you do such work you're said you're you're called lazy because you're not contributing to gdp and you don't get access to proper benefits universal credit or whatever it might be okay and you get disparaged as a skiver or whatever you know now we need to get out of that mentality i don't know whether you are contributing more to society than i am probably you are but but it doesn't we we cannot say that i mean michelangelo spent a lot of time not doing anything he would have been called lazy and he would have been he would have been sanction.

51:59I mean, this is how silly we have got into a state of a sort of dualistic, utilitarian thinking, which leads in very bad directions, because it leads directions, okay, how do we make the work shy? Get on with it, you know? So various ministers can get up and jump and down, and you should ask them, I bet you got a lot of pocket money when you were a boy, you know i bet you got inheritance you know and he went to public school or whatever it might be right so i mean we have to get back from that many people have i mean i just passed some people lying in the street right in the tube station and those people have probably had a series of accidents a series of things that have happened in their lives i don't know i don't know but i'm not going to rush to judgment, and nor should anybody else, okay?

52:59Now, of course, one should help those people. One should help everybody, help you and me as well. But the essence of our judgmental society has to be challenged. And that, I think, is what education is about. Education is teaching people that we've all had a different experience. We've all had mishaps or whatever, but I don't know. I don't know what yours are or what mine are, and therefore you don't build a system that is judgmental on a statistical average. That's what algorithms are doing today. More and more, we're seeing categorization, which leads to discrimination, and we're seeing the consequences of that.

53:46If you have this characteristic, this characteristic, this characteristic, you're more likely to be doing a criminal act and therefore we'll go and raid your home minority report yeah i think it's one of the um the greatest deaths of our modern time to my mind other than perhaps that of the commons is that of idle time because when when you think about the sort of paradigm shifting moments of divine inspiration where's where's isaac newton when when he develops his his his laws of physics where he's sat beneath an apple tree and something hits him on the head where's where's archimedes when he shouts Eureka, he's sat in the bath.

54:21We don't get that anymore. And I think we're much poorer for it. We're coming to the end of our time together, Guy. Sort of, again, slightly off the subject matter of the book, but as a man who's worked for the UN, I need to talk to you about the sort of parallel bodies that the American administration appears to be trying to set up whilst it withdraws from various international agencies, a lot of them based around the UN and establishing this board of peace that on the face of it appears to include Vladimir Putin, Tony Blair, and some other figures. And I would just invite your comments about a world that appears to be moving from the multilateral, the supranational, one based on international law to one that appears to be much more governed by private interest and hard power.

55:14I think this is the big issue of the moment because what I'm calling a plutarchy has arisen in the world. A plutarchy is defined as ruled by the super wealthy in the interests of the super wealthy. And of course, all of the people around Musk, Peter Thiel, and Larry Ellison, they don't believe in democracy they i mean i spent three days for my pains uh sitting next to peter teal talking to him and uh here is the man who was the primary funder of trump in 2016 i also spent had a breakfast discussion with lindsey graham and these types are really really the people running the show. And they are quite open that they don't believe in democracy.

56:15And the main reason they don't believe in democracy is that if you have genuine democracy, those who don't have resources will vote for redistribution, which would affect them. Can't have that. We must have rule by the elite who are going to have a technological efficiency. And it really worries me that the Plutarche is using people like Tony Blair to infiltrate our governance process and using these people to destroy a complex, imperfect system of multilateralism. I thought Gordon Brown's article yesterday was a good one, destroying it without any pretense that they're doing it for altruistic reasons.

57:11They're not. OK, so Trump's just withdrawn from 66 international organizations. I mean, no, just spiteful nonsense. OK, but we in Britain should be extremely worried that Larry Ellison, Larry Ellison, a close friend of Trump, the second wealthiest man in the world, has given Tony Blair£257 million for his Tony Blair Institute. And basically, they are lobbyists for this technological apparatus of Palantir and Oracle to influence the British government. So when Starmer goes to the United States, he gets taken around the headquarters of Palantir, the biggest arms people now. So we're seeing a dismantling of an imperfect multilateralism with a deliberate creation of a vacuum in which the plutocrats can come in.

58:15And this board of peace is something that Bertolt Brecht needed to address. I mean, it's beyond Monty Python, it's Bertolt Brecht, because it's an odious creation. They've got to pay a billion dollars each, you know? I don't know where Tony Blair, but he'll get it. Ellison will help him, no doubt. And the people they're putting on it almost symbolize in an incredible way what's happening. I mean, it's beyond parody. It's beyond parody. Except, of course, that if you have anything to do with what's happened in Gaza, you know that this is beyond tragedy. This is genocide, visible genocide in the 21st century.

59:10And anybody who pretends otherwise is either a fool or deliberately on the side of that, right? That's why I'm furious with Lammy for never doing it. Lammy was a discussant for one of my books, and I've been so disappointed in the fact that he did nothing to stop the arms going to what's been going on. But I think, to go back to your question, we are at a terrible point, and where I agreed with Gordon Brown was that, okay, if we have the emperor going away, you know, then the rest of us should fill the gap and create some alternative democratic value-driven set of institutions. I've been in Brazil recently, where Lula is a voice of sanity.

1:00:04And we have other voices of sanity in the so-called South. We have also ogres like Modi and So therefore, but the point is we need a recalibration of globalism. And that was, of course, the left were always meant to be internationalists, right? So we must avoid going back into retreating into enclaves and become more nationalistic because everybody else is going national. We've got to be brave at this point. So I have many, many friends in senior positions in UN bodies, and they're all so incredibly depressed at the moment. Guy Standing, thank you so much for giving us your time. Thank you for speaking to me.

1:00:57I'm very grateful. Great. You've been listening to The Exchange from The New Statesman with me, Oli Dugmore. If you've enjoyed this episode, please do leave us a review. This episode was produced by Catherine Hughes. The Exchange will be back next Wednesday. Thank you.

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