Episode 105 – The Case for Scottish Independence with Kairin Van Sweeden

Macro N Cheese – Episode 105
The Case for Scottish Independence with Kairin VanSweeden
January 30, 2021

 

[00:00:03.060] – Kairin Van Sweeden [intro/music]

If we have to ask for currency from somewhere else, then we’re not going to be independent. That is the situation we are in at the moment because we are reliant on the Bank of England and the Treasury in London deciding how much money we will get during this pandemic. And these are not choices that we make. They are made for us.

[00:00:22.590] – Kairin Van Sweeden [intro/music]

Fundamentally, why would you run a care home for elderly people for profit? That just seems obscene to me. Why would you make a profit out of sickness? That also seems obscene to me as well.

[00:01:26.670] – Geoff Ginter [intro/music]

Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Gumbine.

[00:01:34.530] – Steve Grumbine

All right. And this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Folks, we are back in the saddle, man. My voice, it ain’t perfect, but it’s getting there. And the covid fog has started really lifting. And to be perfectly honest with you, I haven’t had trouble sleeping. Maybe it’s the steroids. I don’t know, but I am very happy to be on the mend and be back in the saddle, really doing some meaningful podcasts.

Today’s show is going to be a particularly interesting one. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Scotland, Scotland is an interesting place.  It has been seeking independence. There’s been an independence movement there. They have been in and out and around the bend with the European Union. There has been issues that came as a direct result of Brexit.

There’s an incredible amount of differences between Scotland and places like Ireland and the UK, though they’re all oftentimes seen in a similar vein. My guest today is Kairin Van Sweeden, and Kairin is the executive director of Modern Money Scotland, and I asked her to come on because I never really talked about Scotland and trying to get a gauge on neoliberalism in a country such as Scotland just seemed like a really great way of breaking some interesting points down.

Now, you’ve heard me talk to Bill Mitchell about Brexit. You’ve heard me talk to Patricia Pino about Brexit. I’ve even spoken with people like Steve Keen and Michael Hudson about Brexit. Today, we’re going to get someone who is literally right there from a more blue collar perspective, who understands the working class better, who has lived the working class experience and has been burned by this scourge of neoliberalism. So without further ado, let me go ahead and introduce my guest, Kairin. Thank you so much for joining me.

[00:03:33.770] – Kairin Van Sweeden

Thank you for asking me.

[00:03:35.240] – Grumbine

Absolutely. I am curious, though. What makes your passions boil about this? Because when you came to me with this concept of our pod, I was like, OK, this is a lot to chew on. I’ve talked about these things in the past, but I wasn’t quite sure what was going on here, because I know that there is some controversy surrounding Scotland.

I know there’s some controversy surrounding the quest for independence. I know there’s even some controversies about having your own currency and what the impacts of an independent Scotland might be. So tell me in your own words, why are you passionate about not only modern money, but also independence for Scotland?

[00:04:19.980] – Van Sweeden

So I guess I didn’t really understand as a child why Scotland wasn’t independent, so it seemed like the logical thing for me. And during the referendum, I would say that I was fighting for it very much from a heart place, not really from a head place. And then after we lost that referendum, I started to think about much more from a head place and I started to research a Scottish currency and how that would work.

And the passion comes from I’m in my early 50s now and as a 1970s child, I saw the neoliberalism starting to creep into my society in Scotland and as a child when I lived in Aberdeen and then progressively more and more as I grew older and different stages of it and different things happening in Scotland that were having a really detrimental effect on people’s lives.

[00:05:12.720] – Grumbine

So, Kairin, obviously neoliberalism is a full suite of evil, and it seems like you guys have a different angle of that in Scotland. At what point in time did you really begin to see the effects of neoliberalism?

[00:05:29.670] – Van Sweeden

Yeah, so I think it’s been a slightly different experience for Scottish people as well. For example, when I was a teenager, I really started to notice that my friends wanted to buy things they couldn’t afford. They wanted to borrow money from credit card companies. That was a new thing that we didn’t have and that started to happen when I was a teenager.

Then I also started to see people starting to beg on the streets of Aberdeen. That was a new thing as well. I learned when I was older the policies that had been put in place. So I could see as a teenager that society was starting to change round about me and there were lots of other differences. For example, in Scotland, we had a poll tax. We were the guinea pigs for the poll tax that was brought into Scotland first before England.

And many people protested on the streets of the big cities in Scotland. But they were ignored and people went to jail. And it was quite a dramatic time. And it also resulted in a lot of people coming off of the electoral roll so that they would not be impoverished with this poll tax that they had to pay. But what was noticeable for me as a young person then was that when people started to protest in London and in England, things started to change pretty rapidly.

So that was a really obvious example of a democratic deficit that we experienced in Scotland. So that was probably the first example of something that I thought, “Yeah, this was neoliberalism in action.” And then thereafter that would be the Piper Alpha disaster, which was just devastating for families in Aberdeen, but across the UK as well. Would you like me to say more about that, Steve?

[00:07:11.020] – Grumbine

All right, yes, Kairin, please. Thank you, that will absolutely be perfect.

[00:07:16.090] – Van Sweeden

OK, so, yeah, my dad worked on the oil rigs. He was a shop steward, so he tried to protect the guys that he worked with and stood up for them. And he, in turn, ended up suffering from that. He was blacklisted. But he worked on the Piper Alpha for a couple of weeks before it went on fire, before it blew up. And he said it was the most dangerous rig that he’d ever worked on. And he worked on a lot of rigs in the North Sea.

And it was devastating for him when it happened. And I remember we were out in a coffee bar afterwards and he started to talk about it and he started to imagine those guys trying to get off that platform and running across or walking across molten metal, was how he envisioned it. And he grew upset in that coffee bar in a public place, and he had to go to the toilet. And that was a really strong moment for me when I thought, this is just awful.

But soon after that, my mom and my dad and some of the people that we knew started up an organization called the Offshore Industrial Liaison Committee, which after a few years became a full-on union to represent the offshore workers because it was such a dangerous work environment and the stories that came from it were horrific. I heard some horrific stories about injuries that happened in the North Sea. So there just wasn’t an oversight.

And I overheard my parents when I was a teenager, heart them talking about how the health and safety executive just didn’t seem to have any teeth as far as they were concerned. And it just didn’t seem to be involved in making the North Sea a safe place for the workers. It was very much a case of the Americans came in, they made a profit, and the Scottish guys and the English guys who worked there, they were treated quite badly.

So it was a devastating thing, the Piper Alpha, it was a huge disaster. A lot of people died. And of course, that also ripples through society because all of those people had grieved for them. But what was devastating about it as well was that it started off as a small fire. But the reason it carried on was because the oil was still being pumped to the platform. And if they had switched off, it would not have been the disaster that it was.

So, again, it was really money over lives. And that was really an awful story. But it had a massive effect on the people of Scotland. A lot of people were touched by it. So those are the two big things. I guess, for me as a young person that affected me and I saw how neoliberalism was affecting my country.

[00:09:46.260] – Grumbine

Clearly, London is a very different place than Scotland, and you can see the inequality baked in, in the U.K. as well as you’re seeing in Scotland. What would you say is the number one driver behind that inequality in both London, U.K. and Scotland?

[00:10:10.170] – Van Sweeden

Yeah, so the democratic system, I would say, is probably very much responsible for it because it’s the “first past the post” system. But there’ll be lots of reasons that contribute to it as well. So London is the capital city of the U.K., as you know. And I lived there for eight years. And it was very clear to me when I left there that there was all this huge infrastructure spending when I was there. And you could see the wealth.

It was something I hadn’t come across in Scotland. It was foreign to me how wealthy people were in London. And as I grew older and I became involved in the independence movement, I started to find out more about the statistics behind that. And as it turns out, London is something like five times more wealthy than the rest of the country. And I believe the statistics say that Berlin in Germany and Paris in France are twice as wealthy as their respective countries.

But, you know, you may be aware of this, that London is a huge money laundering place as well. So a lot of money passes through there as well. So there are a whole host of reasons. And also the democratic process means that there are more representatives around that area. And so it’s a negative loop where you have more representation so more people want to live there because conditions are better. So more and more people live there. So, you now have a situation where London has nine million people living in it.

And it’s not just Scotland that suffers from the over-centralization. It’s also northern England. It’s also Wales, which has also its own independence movement. It’s also places like Cornwall on the southwest coast as well. So there are lots of places outside of London and in the Southeast that are affected by this massive democratic inequality within the UK and how it’s come about and how it keeps feeding itself and making itself worse as well. And that’s really culminating now in a growing independence movement in Scotland and a growing independence movement in Wales as well.

[00:12:02.250] – Grumbine

So if you were looking at London and let’s be fair, most of my experience with the U.K. frequently points directly at Londoners, and Londoners are as different as New York City Manhattan folks are to the rest of the U.S. Tell me about the difference between the lifestyle of the Londoner and the lifestyle of folks in the suburbs and in Scotland and in Ireland. What is that chasm like? What is the class difference? What is the perspective difference? It seems like a totally different country.

[00:12:40.150] – Van Sweeden

Yeah, I think a lot of capital cities have the same situation. I know that there are probably a lot of people feel the same way in France about Paris as well. You know, when I lived there, it was really noticeable to me that a lot of people around about me had never been to Scotland. And their experience of other places, apart from London, were usually getting on a plane and maybe flying over to Europe, or flying somewhere, but not usually getting on a train and maybe exploring the rest of the United Kingdom.

So they had very little understanding of what other places looked like. So much so when I was a child, I mean, the children that I lived beside in Chester, I lived in Chester when I was a child as well, they actually asked me if I would be living in a cave in Scotland when I was a child. So there really is a lot of misunderstanding about what Scotland’s like in the south as well.

The wealth was really a shock to me. It was really shocking how wealthy people were in London. I hadn’t come across that kind of level of wealth in Scotland. But of course, London in itself is an unequal place. And I knew plenty of people that lived in poorer areas in London as well. But the difference in the type of wealth that you’ve got in London, it’s really crazy. It’s very alien for someone coming from Scotland.

It was both exciting as well because you would see famous people all the time. And I worked in restaurants and met a lot of famous people when I worked in restaurants as well. So as a young person, you know, I was in my early 20s and it was quite exciting as well. But you also realize that it’s very, very different. It’s not like the rest of the country.

And it’s also not like Manchester or Newcastle, these cities in the north as well. They’re quite different, too. So it just is very different. And I think capital cities vary, but I think London varies hugely. And the statistics from Eurostat back that up. It is five times more wealthy than the rest of the country. And that’s not the same situation in Germany and France. So it’s very different.

[00:14:36.520] – Grumbine

So when you’re fighting for the causes you’re fighting for, when you’re working through issues that pertain to the working class and we’re all the working class except for this very small percentage of people. When you’re thinking as the working class and you’re looking at the way laws are being drawn up and you’re listening to the way the narrative is being stated, it seems like Londoners have an outsized voice in determining not only what happens in the UK, but in earnest, past the border over to Scotland and Ireland, etc. They seem to have a tremendously large voice that allows them to dictate what happens. Is that a fair assessment? I see you guys fighting, but I see them having an outsized voice. Is that correct or am I missing something?

[00:15:30.550] – Van Sweeden

Yes, that is correct. But I guess I don’t want to personalize it as the people of London, because, as I say, a lot of them are not really aware that this is going on. A lot of people are not political geeks. They don’t really think about it. And if you’re not affected by it, you’re not going to give it much thought. So, yeah, it’s not the people per se. I mean, it’s politicians and their political class that are perpetuating this problem.

I would say that, for example, we have 22 years of conservative government and then the Labour Party came in and we were all hoping for a lot of change,  but of course a lot of things didn’t change. They stayed pretty similar. There were big changes, for example devolution – or devolved parliament – in Scotland, but that was also pushing from the EU.

The EU were pushing for more what they would term regions being leveled up. And that was one of the things that they wanted there was more self-government within the regions, although Scotland’s not a region within the UK, we are a sovereign nation. We’ve been a nation for hundreds and hundreds of years. So it’s very different.

[00:16:36.990] – Grumbine

The idea here that in the United States, I don’t want to spend time here because everybody hears about the U.S. so often, I want to focus on Scotland, but I do want to make the point that in the United States, we have this bourgeoisie, this elite liberal class in the United States that thinks they’re smarter than everyone, that thinks that they have all the right answers for everyone that mocks anyone that is rural.

We’ve got people that are very elitist, academics, even that talk in big words to shame people to make people feel about an inch tall. We’ve got people all over the place that serve whatever kind of societal tools they can use to ensure that they have a leg up on everyone. It’s a sick society, quite honestly. And this whole “I’m better than you. I’m better than you by an inch. I am better than you by a dollar.”

There’s always some measurement of a gap between each other. And the neoliberals in the United States, largely led by limousine bourgeoisie liberals in the Democratic Party, they sound like they have the right sensibilities and they’re pouring all their efforts into finance capital. They’re in the Wall Street pockets, bolstering people who already have money, pushing investment capital. They are not looking at the regular people.

Can’t even pass covid relief bill to give people actual survival checks right now. So this neoliberalism and the elite upper crust, it doesn’t feel the pain of the working class  – and they tend to be the rule makers  – are leaving so many to die, leaving so many to be suffering and miserable. And so I use that to transition back to your comments of Scotland.

People are dying and you made that point in your writing. Can you talk about how that lack of empathy or lack of understanding really is bringing on the austerity measures of neoliberalism that are, in effect, causing so much pain?

[00:18:36.110] – Van Sweeden

Well, going back – I started off before talking about the Labour Party. I mean, for me as a lefty, it was a joyful moment. I was living in London when the Labour Party got in, but there started to be some things happening with the Labour Party. I thought this is not really the Labour Party anymore. And they had to call themselves New Labour, for example.

I heard one of the “high hitchins,” as they call them, in Scotland, Peter Mandelson say that he felt completely comfortable with filthy rich people, that that wasn’t a problem for him. And that was really shocking for a lot of us then as well. And the Labour Party, unfortunately, they were involved with the Iraq war as well. And people protested. They didn’t want that.

And they were also clearly getting very much in bed with the financial class, and you could see that more and more. And that sort of culminated in the last Labour prime minister talking at Mansion House, which is where the city financiers gather and sort of patting them on the back verbally for doing a great job and then literally, 2008, the financial crash just happened just after that. So as someone from the left you were thinking, well, how on earth has this happened?

How has he not noticed that these problems were happening? But going back to what you would call in America blue collar workers as well, I think that’s something that people realize now. Those are the people that are actually getting stuff done. So it’s really important that, for example, you have “bin men,” as they call them, in Scotland. So your refuse workers, I think they call them in America, literally if that does not happen, your streets will overrun with rubbish and there will be rats on the street.

So these things are really, really important. If those key workers are not there, there’s a lot of basic things just don’t happen. And I think covid-19 is perhaps going to make people more aware of how much they rely on people working in the supermarkets and how much they rely on people who do these necessary things that are funded by the council and that they’re really, really important things.

And how much in a situation like this, you rely on the civil service and the government to be there to help you out when something as dramatic as a pandemic happens. I think with neoliberalism from Thatcher’s time, there was this kind of thinking that government has to be reduced, it has to be small. But you can see with a pandemic or with a war, these are situations where really you have to have your country organized and you have to have those organizers in your country.

And, for example, with the National Health Service as well, that’s been really rundown of late as well, especially in England. They’re really working toward trying to privatize as much as possible. People are resisting that as well. But it’s been reduced. And in a situation that you have now, really you realize that your health service has to run it so it’s got some slack in it. So, for example, when something like this happens that your health care workers are not working six or seven days a week.

It would be much better if they were normally working four days a week and then when something like this happens, they’re going to work five or six days a week and they’re not going to be so stressed off their faces. So it’s really important. I think people are starting to realize the importance of key workers now. And so hopefully things will change after covid. I think it’s been such a huge shock and a huge reset for so many people as well.

[00:22:04.110] – Grumbine

Having fallen prey to covid, I’m not going to lie, I don’t want to be melodramatic, but I took three weeks before I went to the hospital. I felt it. It was scary, but it didn’t become bad until the last two weeks of it. And when I got the double pneumonia and my oxygen was way down and I could barely breathe and I’m scared, it just hit me like a ton of bricks. We could be locked down like this for a long time because new strains are coming out.

Even with these vaccinations, new strains, new ways of this virus getting at you are still morphing. And this is going to have a dramatic effect from schooling, people doing cyber school. Well, poor people can’t do cyber school. They’ve got to go to work even if they aren’t doing desk work or whatever. They’ve got to physically go to work. And then their kids. They’ve got to either send them to school or they’ve got to work something out.

And in a country like the US, it’s one thing, it’s a huge country, but in a small country, you guys have different constraints on you. I’m interested. What has covid-19 done to Scotland? What has Scotland been like under the covid shutdown?

[00:23:19.360] – Van Sweeden

Well, there was an interesting comment from a Scottish guy who actually works in the British media, works in London, and he had gone home to visit his parents when he’d been able to because obviously there were restrictions, and he really noticed a difference in the amount of people wearing masks in Scotland in comparison to London.

It did seem to be that Londoners, they are packed together. That’s how living in London is. So those people don’t really have a choice. A lot of them have to go to work. Scotland obviously is more sparsely populated in several parts of it. But where I lived before in Edinburgh, it’s fairly busy there as well. But everyone sort of took the idea with the mask on pretty quickly. So probably there was a little bit of a slightly different response there. I think that’s probably the main difference from what I gather.

[00:24:08.750] – Grumbine

Being an activist for independence for Scotland, what is the movement for independence in Scotland all about? Why don’t you give us a little history about that and let’s roll into what the current situation is.

[00:24:24.240] – Van Sweeden

Yeah, well, the union was really imposed in 1707 upon the Scottish people by, as Robbie Burns called them, “a parcel of rogues,” and it wasn’t what the majority of people wanted, but there wasn’t really real democracy at that time. So it was really forced upon them. And there’s been an independence movement for a long time, but it’s grown and grown. And we had a referendum in 2014.

Unfortunately, although the movement grew in itself and it went from something like 33 percent to 45 percent, we didn’t get over the line and 55 percent voted no. But many of them very soon afterwards realized that they made a mistake and they changed their minds about it. And then in 2016, we had the Brexit vote and suddenly people could really see the democratic deficit because 62 percent of people Scotland voted to stay in the EU and, unfortunately, because we are a small part of the UK, we just have to come out of the EU.

So that was really devastating for a lot of people. And I think it demonstrated for other people in the EU, for example, my friends in the Netherlands, they didn’t really understand the Scottish independence movement either. But when they saw the Brexit vote, they realized that, “Oh, these people were voting differently.” And in Scotland, we have voted differently for a long time because we’ve never voted a conservative majority since 1955.

So that’s a long time since we’ve gone for conservatism. And I would say probably also as well, that’s because before in Scotland conservatism, with a small C conservatism, rather than the full, fat neoliberalism that Thatcher brought in. And so there is a slightly different landscape here.

[00:26:05.660] – Grumbine

So with that in mind, what does a currency sovereign mean to Scotland, not just independence from other countries, but you’re also talking about currency sovereignty as well. What does that mean for Scotland?

[00:26:21.260] – Van Sweeden

Yeah, well, that would mean independence. If we have to ask for currency from somewhere else, then we’re not going to be independent, that is the situation we are in at the moment because we are reliant on the Bank of England and the Treasury in London deciding how much money we will get during this pandemic. And these are not choices that we make. They are made for us.

So you can see smaller countries roundabout us are making quite different choices. And these are countries that run currencies that are quite obscure. For example, the krona in the Scandinavian countries, these are not traded across the world in the same way the dollar and the pound is, but they are making different choices about what they’re going to do with their currency and how they’re going to look after the people during this pandemic.

So I think for a lot of people in Scotland, though, they’re starting to see that and for me as an independence supporter, I didn’t really understand the importance of currency until a couple of years ago. And a lot of people in the independence movement are still in that place I was a couple of years ago. They don’t really think about it. It’s not really on their radar.

But, of course, after researching it, because I was trying to be a better campaigner, I realized this is completely key. We can’t be independent unless we have our own currency. We have to have our own currency. So that’s kind of where we are with Modern Money Scotland. We’re trying to convince people we need to have our own currency. And one of the people in our board, Tim, he’s busy with that as well.

He’s actually trying to envisage an actual Reserve Bank for Scotland as well and getting experts on board with him as well. And the other thing, we’re trying to do it at Modern Money Scotland is trying to debunk the idea of austerity and debunk the idea of unemployment. So we could see after lockdown, the mainstream media were starting to talk about post-covid austerity. And I thought, oh, yeah, I can see they will try to convince people that this is necessary, but we know that’s not necessary.

And it was knowing that, I had that knowledge that I said to the other activists round about me, “We need to form some sort of body to try and put pressure on political representatives, but also to inform people don’t have to accept this austerity now.” And furthermore, you don’t have to accept the unemployment narrative either, because these are both political choices. So to that end, we’re also busy writing a paper on a job guarantee just now. So we’re still working on it, but hopefully, it will be ready soon.

[00:28:51.150] – Grumbine

One of the things that you brought up and I guess this kind of ties into several pieces of this is as you’re seeking currency sovereignty, one of the big pushes that happens within neoliberalism – and this has been well-documented from great scholars like Philip Mirowski of Notre Dame and others – that neoliberalism basically creates this triangulation where they give you a completely unacceptable answer, and then they give you a slightly less unacceptable answer.

And then you’ve got no choice. It’s like they eliminate the choices. They give you really bad choices, and then they institute something that sounds like, oh, God, thank God they made a compromise or whatever. But in reality, it’s just as awful as can be. And it’s very conservative, very right wing, very non-for-the-people, very finance sector friendly. Can you talk about the triangulation within the neoliberal framework and what typically happens?

[00:29:54.900] – Van Sweeden

So a couple of things, the triangulation, I’ll go back to that, but you were talking about something there about neoliberalism. I read something today and it was about the care home situation we’ve got in the U.K.  Again, that was neoliberalized. They started to privatize care homes. And that’s been really pretty disastrous – the private care homes.

I have friends who have worked in them and there’s a lot of shenanigans going on in those care homes because, you know, fundamentally, why would you run a care home for elderly people for profit? That just seems obscene to me. Why would you make a profit out of sickness? That also seems obscene to me as well. And under neoliberalism, it seems the thing with the care homes is they’re trying to make a consumer choice is often portrayed as a human right.

And I see that online with people from America as well. They are sold this idea that it’s a fundamental human right, that you’ve got consumer choice, but there’s no such thing as consumer choice a lot of the time. And with care homes, for example, elderly people, sometimes they can’t even make that choice because they’re at the stage where they have dementia. They’re not capable of making choices anymore.

And their choices again, well, that depends on how much money you have, but also maybe the location you’re in as well. So if you’re in a rural part of Scotland, there will be only one care home you can choose from if you want to stay somewhere close to your family and your friends. So that’s very much nonsense as far as I’m concerned. It’s really nonsense. Going back to the triangulation aspect, well you’ll know that under Clinton and Blair, that was when these left wing parties started to triangulate so much that they started to look like right wing parties.

And that is probably why the Labour Party have just sunk like a stone in Scotland, because the Labour Party in Scotland are very, very strong and people voted for them for years and years. Literally, you could put a monkey up with a red t-shirt, and he would get voted for. They were very strong in Scotland. And then people grew disillusioned with them with the Iraq war and with the overt neoliberalism of the Blair government, the Blair/Brown government.

And they don’t vote Labour anymore. They are the third party now in the Scottish Parliament. So, yeah, they have triangulated so much. They are no more recognizable as a Labour Party any more. And in fact, ironically, in the British Parliament, the Labour leader actually is a Knight of the Realm. And the Labour Party were supposed to be all about stopping the House of Lords. So for someone who’s taken on the honor to be at the head of the Labour Party feels very wrong to me and the very ultimate triangulation

[00:32:42.360] – Grumbine

Indeed.

[00:32:46.230] – Intermission

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[00:33:43.870] – Grumbine

You brought Bill Clinton up. We watched Bill Clinton fly to Arkansas and watch a man who was mentally impaired be executed to prove to the right wing that he was stronger on crime than they were. And this is what our Democratic Party in the United States is all about. These people shame you and act like you’re a fool when you try and point out the truth, but they are so brainwashed and propagandized in this country that any kind of common sense, any kind of pointing out the truth brings out some sort of a perverse, almost romanticization of these people.

And they’ve got all these romantic visions. But when you try and put something like Franklin Delano Roosevelt in front of them, you try and bring up a New Deal, or you try to bring up taking care of the people, “Oh, my God, that’s socialism.” And this is the perversion that the Democratic Party in the United States has become. The Republicans, you know, are not going to support you. There’s no point in even looking at them. It’s like they have nothing to do with you.

They have no interest in what you’re for. The Democrats, they’re supposed to be for labor. They are supposed to be for unions. They’re supposed to be for the working class. And nothing could be further from the truth. And the United States’ number one export is neoliberalism. And we are spreading our wings all over this world. And I guarantee you, we’ve dropped our evil seed into Scotland as well. In your story about the oil, clearly, the US has poisoned the well there as well. What do you think is the antidote to neoliberalism? Is there any way to defeat it or is it just something that has to be mitigated?

[00:35:22.740] – Van Sweeden

Yeah, I think it will be defeated. I think the corvid pandemic will bring change. I’m hopeful of that. I’m optimistic about that as well. I mean, you’re talking about the Democrats and their need to be seen as more hawkish. And again, that’s a triangulation on their part. I guess the triangulation. I mean, they were hawkish, the Labour Party. Obviously, they went into the Iraq war. But the other thing is to look fiscally sensible.

And when you understand that governments spend first and tax second, those platitudes from the Labour Party, they’re laughable. They’re ridiculous. And you realize that they either don’t know what they’re talking about. And if they do know what they’re talking about, then there’s no excuse for that at all. And there was an example I wrote to you about as well, that I realized when I was at university just after I graduated, a lot of the people right about me they wanted to go on and do a second degree, a lot of them, because it was a life sciences degree.

They wanted to go and do medicine and quite a number of them couldn’t get a place to do medicine. And I remember thinking, these are really bright kids. You know, they’re in their early 20s, they have won the first degree. They’re sociable people, and they don’t have enough places for them. This is madness. In a country like Cuba, they’re exporting doctors.

There’s absolutely no reason why there shouldn’t have been more places for those young people to study to be medics. And with covid-19, those people would be qualified now as medics. One of them, a friend of mine, he did qualify as a medic and he is ready to work in the National Health Service. So that’s just so incredibly stupid. It’s mad. So I think more and more people will come to realize this and how this has affected them from the point of view of also the medical community.

It’s also been reduced over the time of covid-19. In the U.K., we’ve lost 650 medics. And a rough calculation, if you say they’ve done a four-year degree, that’s like 2,500 years of knowledge just lost, you know, because we had a situation where we could have prepared much better for this pandemic. Again, by the time that it was gamed in 2017, we had had austerity since 2010 and the conservative government had decided not to do the preparatory spending for the pandemic, despite the fact that the scientific community had known that this was coming and they must have advised the government.

Well, that would be why they had gamed it. There’s just so much incredible stupidity and so many people have died through incredible stupidity and/or venality. And we have to do something about it, Steve. So we’ve just got to keep keeping on. And I listened to an interesting podcast from the Tax Justice Network yesterday, and they were talking to someone who was really talking about how mass movements start to change things.

And it takes a long time. And it’s all about people connecting with each other who also care about these issues as well. So I think it’s really important for us as activists to just keep connecting with lots of other activists who care about these issues and it will grow and grow. And we just have to keep working at it. It will come, and change is coming. There’s a change to the taxation system in America today. I just flagged it up to you on Twitter.

So and then also as well, the treaty on non proliferation of nuclear weapons. And that’s been a movement for a long, long time. But that’s happened now. So change does come and we just have to keep fighting for it and keep talking to people and keep letting them know we care about this, too. Do you care about this? OK, let’s do something. So I think that’s the way to go as an activist who really cares about the damage that neoliberalism and the orthodox thinking has done to societies all over the world.

If you’ve read “The Shock Doctrine” by Naomi Klein, you can read about what’s happened in India, what’s happened in South Korea through this kind of neoliberal thinking that came from the IMF as well. Lots of people have died. And it’s really time that we just stop this and got people to understand this is not necessary. This doesn’t have to happen. And you can fight this. And I can tell you how.

[00:39:35.610] – Grumbine

Poverty is a political choice. Every time you see a homeless person, that is a political choice. Every time you see a family struggling, that is a political choice. Every time someone dies because of not having a home or lack of food, that is a political choice. Every single thing that we need or want, it’s never a lack of dollars. It’s always a lack of political will.

And so to me, the mindset of the neoliberal is possibly the most destructive thing on the planet. There is nothing that comes close. You see the far right-wing and they’re buffoons and they’re horrible and fascism is evil. But at the same time, I look at what they propose as the alternative, which is fascism. And in its own right, neoiberalism is a form of fascism. A Monthly Review article from a couple of years back clearly lays out that neoliberalism is fascism.

But yet, because it’s got better bedside manners, maybe the people themselves appear to be nice, or maybe they even spread it out amongst the racists to try and give off of veneer of inclusivity and intersectionality. It’s not real. It’s a fake. It’s a fraud. They use identity politics to prevent themselves from being critiqued, and they use these things as a weapon to fatten the wallets of the wealthy, to keep funneling GDP from every nation, including Scotland, up to the wealthy.

And to allow the people to feel like there is no such thing as public money. There is only taxpayer dollars. And that mindset seems to be the single thing that Modern Money and MMT come together to destroy. And the flipside is, is that it seems to be the anchor for not only the Labour Party in the UK with all these neolib type economists over there, but you’ve got that in the US as well.

What do you think it will take for people to recognize that while taxes are required, that states can create currency to spend on anything that the people need and that the issue isn’t really a matter of finance, it’s really an issue of political will? What do you think we as activists need to do to make that stick?

[00:41:52.430] – Van Sweeden

Well, I think that you’re going about it the right way, Steve, with your podcast.  I like podcasts. I think podcasts are great way of going forward as well. For me, I am in a political party. I can contact a lot of people through that political party as well. I can go and talk to them about my thoughts about how things change. Some of them will take that on.

The SNP, the party that I’m a member of is a broad church and it goes from people who I would say are quite obviously neoliberals to people who are very left wing, very socialist. So that gives you a platform. If you’re in a political party, you can go around all the different branches if they want you to come and talk about it. Come back to something you said earlier. I was going to say the accidental neoliberalism as well is a problem.

And I’ve really noticed this after the last election here in the UK, there was an interview with a woman who was a contender to be the new leader for the Labour Party in England, a woman called Lisa Nandy. And she was talking about how she was campaigning in the North of England. And I don’t know if you’re aware that in this last election there was a huge change in the North of England – that many people in the North of England who would normally vote left of center, they voted right-wing this time.

So Lisa Nandy was talking about meeting a little old lady on the streets of northern England somewhere. Don’t remember which town it was. And this little old lady had said, “Well, I’m really quite keen on your manifesto, but we can’t afford it. We’ll just be in too much debt. And I can’t put that debt onto my grandchildren. So I’m going to vote Tory this time.”

So that’s your accidental neoliberalism. You know that women voted a way she’d never voted her whole life because she so strongly believed that the country was in debt. And we understand that government debt is not debt in the same way that you and I experience it, or that business experiences it. It’s not the same at all. The monopoly issuer of the currency, so it’s not going to be in debt in its own currency. So it’s getting people to understand that as well is quite important.

And our mainstream media is constantly talking about where are we going to get the money, where are we going to get the money? And I really want to hear journalists in this country start to say to politicians, “How are you going to put the resources in place to make this happen rather than where are you going to get the money?” Because it should really be obvious by now after covid-19 that creating the money isn’t a problem. It’s really about real resources.

And from the UK, that should have been very obvious to people in the fact that, you know, the government is trying to create more money or it’s what it calls borrowing, which we know is bonds, which is not really borrowing.  It still can’t buy those masks if they’re not available in pounds in the UK. So that was a really, really important example for how money and resources are not the same thing. And really the resources that are important and money will not always be able to get you those resources when you need them as well.

So it brings up questions of resilience within countries. And do we have to rethink our resilience as countries and what do we need to have here – or close to here – rather than things that are really far away in very extensive supply chains.

[00:45:10.940] – Grumbine

When it comes to real resources and natural resources in particular, what does it look like in Scotland? Because I know, for example, in the United States, we had a guy named Cliven Bundy a few years ago who was attacking our BLM, which is basically the folks that troll the borderlands and the prairie. What he had done was he had put stones at the head of a river and diverted the river away from everybody downstream so he could have it for his farming needs.

So the question becomes, this river, that’s real resources, that’s water. Water is life. How would resources go? Would water be nationalized? Would it be considered a right? What does that look like in terms of real resources beyond just the monetary spectrum?

[00:46:01.950] – Van Sweeden

OK, so I really considered this after listening to Fadhel a couple of years ago. Water is nationalized in Scotland, Steve. It does belong to the people in Scotland. And we have an embarrassment of water. And so people don’t like that. But we’ve got lots and lots of water. We’ve got something like 90 percent of the UK’s fresh water in Scotland. Resources.

Well, obviously, we had oil, we had lots and lots of oil. That was really just bunked up the side of a wall. The oil money has been wasted and our neighbors across the water in Norway, they set up a fund. So they have a pension fund, and they have got a lot of money now from the oil resources that they had. You know, really, oil is controversial – obviously with global warming. But Scotland luckily has an embarrassment of renewable energy.

So we have incredible tidal energy, incredible wind energy. Much more than the people of Scotland need. So that’s definitely a resource that we have. And then the other really important resource that Fadhel pointed out is to have an educated population. So, 46 percent are educated up to college or university level. But of course, everyone goes to school. Everyone has a primary, secondary school education. So we have an educated population that are ready to do work.

So these are the means of [inaudible] that you need to have to function as a country. Then if you want to buy TVs from other countries that make them, that’s something else entirely. But we have the big things that we need. That’s very important. And for example, we have 60 percent of the UK’s ocean water and eight percent of the population.

We have a huge farming sector as well. Our universities punch massively over their weight. The university that I went to, Dundee, has a massive reputation across the world as a life sciences hub. It’s had lots of little businesses have come off of that, life sciences businesses. The Glasgow University, Edinburgh University, St. Andrews University, very famous as well because Prince William went there.

But yeah, it does really well. Aberdeen is pretty well respected as well. And we’ve got really great universities, and we attract a lot of students from all over the world to our universities. We have a big satellite industry in Glasgow, the biggest in Europe. We are getting a space station built in the north in Sutherland. So, yeah, we’ve got lots and lots of resources, more than we need really for the size of our population.

What we really need are more people and probably young people who are going to make babies would be the best to have. Really, we need more people. Yeah. So losing people who live here from the EU was disastrous for us. We’ve lost a lot of people who just didn’t feel safe and welcome here any more because of the Brexit. So that’s really sad because Scotland needs more people.

[00:49:07.470] – Grumbine

It’s interesting because, you know, food sovereignty is one of the keys. That’s what brought down Zimbabwe. And you have energy sovereignty, which is a very key thing, which is one of the things that has hurt places like Venezuela because of the oil trade. And then you’ve got genuinely the fact that you guys are able to produce not only real goods and services, but you have real resources in abundance from renewable energy to water.

So you guys are ripe for an independence movement. You’ve got all the key things that will allow you to be a player in the global arena. And I think that that’s a tremendously comfortable position, considering what many other countries who lack huge amounts of sovereignty on the spectrum because of a lack of productive capacity, a lack of current modern standards, they’re not attracting people to their area either.

It is interesting to me that you would tell me that you lack one of the key resources, which is labor, the real people. I wonder, is it an aging population? Is there something that is counter to immigration? Do they reject immigrants?

[00:50:20.340] – Van Sweeden

We don’t reject immigrants. We didn’t vote for Brexit. So, yeah, that’s the big problem. You see, of course, that we need people, and Brexit took away all of those people that had come over from Poland and… my husband’s Dutch. That’s why I have a Dutch surname. We had a lot of people over here working in the National Health Service as well. So we’ve lost a lot of people from the EU because of Brexit.

And that’s been really bad for Scotland because, yes, we have an aging population, and we need younger people. I didn’t mention that we have food sovereignty. We do have food sovereignty.  The other thing I was thinking when we were talking about that, as well as Iceland’s view of Scotland and there’s such a small, small country and they cannot understand why Scotland is not independent, because they look at Scotland and they go, oh, you’ve got an embarrassment of resources.

Why aren’t you independent? Why didn’t you vote for independence in 2014? But there’s so many people in Scotland that think we can’t make it on our own. And that’s really unfortunate. And I think that’s probably down to what’s called the “Scottish cringe.” There is an expression for it, and it’s that feeling that we’re not smart enough or not big enough. We’re not rich enough.

But we clearly have the resources to go for it on our own as an independent country. And this is not some sort of we don’t like the English thing. It’s nothing to do with that. It’s about making decisions about how your country is run. And it hasn’t been run well from Westminster. And with the limited resources we’ve had through devolution, it’s been run better, but it could still be better again. So an example of that would be that we don’t have Internet coverage that’s really good through the whole of Scotland.

And when you look at somewhere like the Faroe Islands, which has a 5G network all over, then you think there’s something wrong here. And I think I say this in the paper as well. When I lived in the Netherlands, that was really clear for me that when I moved there, they were still using the guilder. They switched over to the euro while I was living there. But the guilder is no worldwide reserve currency.

But I could see that in the Netherlands, they had fantastic infrastructure, fantastic services. If you become unemployed in the Netherlands, you get something like 80 or 70 percent of your last pay for about three months, and then it’s reduced. So if you had a well-paid job before you don’t go from that, say, for example, 70,000 pounds, you go down suddenly to 90 pounds a week or it would be guilders that I’m talking about in the Netherlands.

So there’s not that kind of shock that happens to you, you know. And also in the Netherlands, when I lived there as well, people were paid to go on holidays. That’s the same as the UK. But not only that, they were also given money to enjoy their holidays as well. So there were a lot of things and the infrastructure for me was really noticeable. They have fantastic infrastructure. So the roads were fantastic, the lighting was fantastic. Sports centers, amazing.  Everything was just really well organized.

The architecture – the state of the buildings. Everything was just really well organized, whereas things here are crumbling through the lack of funding. And that’s a political choice. We know that’s a political choice and it enrages me that that’s the situation here when it’s never needed to be the situation and either through the false narrative of we’ve got to pay down the deficit or just people in the positions of power, just not really caring what it’s like in the rest of the country and just don’t like what it looks like in London.

[00:53:59.160] – Grumbine

The thing that jumped out at me while you were talking, I think to myself, it’s so important how we see each other, how we see ourselves. It impacts waking up in the morning. It impacts going to bed at night, impacts how we treat our children. And for many, the idea of national identity is a very vital part of who they are, and the idea of Brexit was a lot about nationalism. It was also a lot about something that I think is not talked about enough.

And that is that when a government embraces austerity, there’s always going to be a bad guy. There’s always going to be the guy who’s taking your food off your plate in the stories they tell. And to me, that is the story of Brexit, a government that didn’t take action to make sure that the people were taken care of that allowed nationalism to be the right answer.

This is the real story, because government allows it to be that way. As you were saying, you’re working on a job guarantee. We in the MMT community understand that a federal job guarantee eradicates many of the concerns of the people as they watch jobs go because everybody has access to work. It’s not like you’re left on the sidelines wondering how you’re going to feed your family.

And so Brexit, there was no job guarantee. There was none of those things that we are talking about. And naturally, they see people coming in and taking their lunch. When a government doesn’t act, the people then in turn seek a scapegoat and the scapegoat in this case was people coming and taking their jobs. This is what they say in America, talking about the Mexicans are taking our jobs, blah, blah, blah.

And without the government interceding, without the government doing its job, taking care of the people, then what will end up happening is pitting one poor against the other poor instead of a unified working class, and you end up with these divisions.

What do you think in your particular case, because I know nationalism is really powerful in Europe. All these things that make up a national identity, how key do you think that was in the Brexit situation? And also what are the impacts to Scotland because of your own form of nationalism in your own way of seeing yourselves as proud Scots? How does that impact you?

[00:56:30.710] – Van Sweeden

Yeah, I was going to say earlier on about the cultural depression was probably one of the reasons that people voted no in 2014. I mean, we have had a culture repressed. Certainly when I was at school in the 1970s, we weren’t taught Scottish history. And you were certainly taught that you had to speak proper English. You weren’t allowed to use Scots, and going back hundreds of years, the Gaelic one which was repressed as well.

But since devolution, things have changed and that cultural identity has grown stronger again and actually see with a lot of young people within Scotland as well, they’re really embracing that as well. And you’re actually starting to see Scots literature come out from new writers, new young writers as well. So the cultural shift has changed and a lot of young Scots and older Scots are taking more pride in their language and their culture and becoming more familiar with it.

With Brexit, Fintan O’Toole talks about this as a kind of English nationalism as well. I think you’re right. And it was a classic divide and conquer from the ruling classes, which in our country have been handed down to us by the private school system. It’s called the public school system, but that’s a historical anomaly. But it’s where people who are educated, they pay a lot of money to go to these schools.

So the concept of immigrants coming and taking our jobs, yeah, we know that’s a classic divide and conquer from the ruling classes and has been for a long, long time. So Brexit was that to a great extent. But again, the geography and the way that politics has worked in England has contributed to that as well, because poor governance has meant that far too many of the really important institutions were implemented into London.

That meant that London got very busy. Lots of people live and work there. And you have this huge population within London and all around about it as well who are trying to live off those various institutions and then all the businesses that wrap themselves around that as well. Whereas if the UK government had been more sensible, let’s say, and thought about really doing a similar thing to what Germany has where they have lots of different institutions all over the country, so that wealth is spread much more between different cities.

And again, I notice in Germany, the cities, they don’t have these big cities. Cities are different sizes. So it’s spreading different big institutions like, say, a central bank. You would maybe have that in one city. You wouldn’t have the parliament and the central bank in the same city, those kind of things. And you wouldn’t have the ministry of whatever. You know, all the ministries are all down in London. And then also you had the BBC as well, was down in London and took a long time for that to change in some of these things coming to different parts of the country as well.

So, so much was centered in London. That’s really poor and unintelligent governance that has allowed that to happen. And then that’s culminated in people feeling like, well, the immigrants are all coming over here. And it’s like, well, yeah, you built all the infrastructure here. So what do you expect?

[00:59:31.370] – Grumbine

Amen, sister.

[00:59:32.900] – Van Sweeden

Of course, all the immigrants want to come here, you know? So, yeah, of course the English were going to feel like that. And that’s really just down to really illogical poor governance on the part of their leaders as well. And you could really see that on a macro scale, problems with the EU, we see them. We can see that neoliberalism is built into the EU.

You cannot have more than a three percent deficit just across the board for all countries, you know, and that’s complete nonsense. Of course, that can’t possibly apply to all different countries. And different countries have different requirements as well. Greece is never going to be anything like Germany, so you can’t expect it to be an industrial powerhouse in the way that Germany is. But, you know, all the Germans want to go there on holiday.

So it’s almost the reverse between Scotland and England, where they’ve got this big population in the north and they’re doing all these things and then they want to go to the holiday in the south. And you’ve got the big population in the south, except, well, only the very elite people come up here for their holidays as well. And then coming back to the job guarantee and what happened on Capitol Hill recently as well. You know, when I was talking about this with Cameron, who I’m working on the job guarantee paper with.

For me, it’s really important that we get this information out, because when I saw what happened on Capitol Hill, interestingly, the mainstream media here and I went on a radio show to talk about this and sort of debunk this, they started to talk about, well, isn’t social media bad, and it’s the reason that this has happened. It’s like, no, 40 years of neoliberalism is the reason that this has happened.

All these people are unhappy and discontent because they’ve been forgotten and they should have jobs. The country should be employing them to make sure that things get done. I know that in the USA, your infrastructure is also crumbling as well. And this is happening here. It’s happening in Germany as well with this neoliberal narrative.

What? You’re supposed to let bridges just fall into such disrepair that you’re taking your life in your hands to cross that bridge? Yeah, there’s just there’s so much wrong with that thinking. Of course, there’s so much wrong with that thinking. And that it culminated in what happened on Capitol Hill was no surprise to me as a working-class woman, I have to say, because I feel incredibly angry at the poor governance that has resulted in a lot of the things that have happened in Scotland and in the rest of the UK as well.

And I’m not the only person that’s unhappy about it in Scotland. The independence movement is not happy about it. Wales’s independence movement is now growing at a pace since the pandemic as well.  More and more people can see that this type of governance just doesn’t make any sense. And I think it has become, especially clear with covid, when you can see that the money is being created now that it’s really, really required. And people are asking themselves why have we had ten years of austerity?

[01:02:30.030] – Grumbine

So who is controlling the currency used in Scotland today?

[01:02:35.780] – Van Sweeden

That’s the British parliament who control it. So as you know, money is created through the acts of parliament when they decide what we’re going to spend this on this, and then they go to the central bank and the money is placed into the bank account that they decide to put it into. And that’s how money is created. We know that there is this myth here that we say, “We’re in debt. We’re in debt.” And of course, we knew that that’s not the issue. And I understand it. Government bonds are not debt. They are basic income for wealthy people.

[01:03:05.660] – Grumbine

Yep.  [laughs]

[01:03:05.660] – Van Sweeden

So, it’s getting people to understand that the government’s never going to be in debt in its own currency. It’s always going to be able to pay off in its own currency. And the restriction is inflation. But, of course, at the moment, the UK government, because they have an 80 seat majority, they are very blatantly giving money to their friends. It’s just incredibly blatant right now, Steve.

[01:03:31.100] – Grumbine

Crony capitalism.

[01:03:32.690] – Van Sweeden

Really blatant. And it’s reported on every day by openDemocracy and The Good Law Project. They’re all reporting on it because it is just ugly and blatant. And, you know, the worst thing about it is they’re giving money to people like Deloitte, these big accountancy firms to do Test and Trace and this is something they have no experience of.

And you have the local councils, they are well-placed to do this type of work – and their surrounding organizations – and they’re not getting the money. The moneys are going to private players who are friends of the people who are in government. The corruption, it’s blatant now. And because they have an 80 seat majority, they’re going to get away with it for the next three years until they’re voted out, hopefully, and after that.

But a lot of damage will be done in that time. And of course, a lot of those people, they don’t need that money. So it will probably end up in offshore bank accounts, sitting in an offshore bank account doing nothing, just making them feel better about themselves.

[01:04:32.030] – Grumbine

Before we go further, I want to take a step back, because clearly the UK and the pound are a sovereign currency. You guys are, in essence, a state like we have in the United States, like Texas or New York, or California within the UK.

[01:04:48.470] – Van Sweeden

Correct.

[01:04:48.950] – Grumbine

 And in other words, you all can’t create currency, but you are a currency user from the UK.

[01:04:54.800] – Van Sweeden

Scotland’s a currency user.

[01:04:56.180] – Grumbine

Yes. That said, you brought up something very important and that is in the EU within the euro-adopting countries. And you look at Greece and you look at Germany and there are two very different countries. One is a net exporter, one is a net importer. One bases its trade on industrial production. The other one relies on vacationing, holidays. They do not have strong industry.

So when they left the drachma, in Greece, they not only gave up their monetary sovereignty, but they also didn’t understand economics because as a non-exporting nation, the only two choices they have to bring money in, because they can no longer count on exports, is either A – sovereign debt, and they gave up their ability to create sovereign debt or B – private debt, which as a currency user is the only thing that they have left.

And so with that in mind, you look at the stock-flow consistent modeling, and you just a moment ago talked about how the wealthy take that money and offshore it. That’s a demand leakage. So between the demand leakages and the fact that there is no ability to create currency in Greece, a lot of these European countries that are net importers are really left to hang out to dry. Is that currently how it is with Scotland as well?

[01:06:28.530] – Van Sweeden

Yeah, actually, there was another independent supporter was putting a viewpoint about this, and they were talking about how Greece had run up this huge deficit and Scotland wouldn’t be like Greece. And I said to him Scotland is like Greece because we are a currency user. We’re not a currency creator. And I asked him, “Do you know what a big deficit is and when will the deficit be too big?”

And I said, “should perhaps look at the deficit that Japan is running and was running before covid before you say that kind of thing.” He wanted me to share on the Yes Edinburgh North & Leith Facebook page and I wouldn’t share it because I felt solidarity with the Greek people. I just thought, no, I’m not going to allow someone to say that they were running too big a deficit. What is too big a deficit?

It’s about the context, as Bill [Mitchell] says, as well. So the Netherlands and Greece, that’s been interesting for me as well over the past [inaudible] because, obviously, I still have friends in the Netherlands as well. And there is this narrative in the Netherlands, and that’s interesting for me as a Scottish activist as well, where they think – and a friend of mine’s actually said this to me – “Well, but you’re the savers, Kairin and it’s their problem.”

There’s this kind of perception in the north of the European area that Greece are these profligate ne’er do wells who just sit on their backsides, do something. And I’m thinking to myself, well, I have heard the same thing out of the mouth of the ex-editor of The Sun newspaper who recently was online saying, “Yeah, that would be good if Scotland got their independence because I’m sick of paying for them out of my taxes.”

So, yeah, there is a perception in some English minds that that is what is going on, that because they are the bigger country, they’re making a bigger tax take, and they’re a bigger tax, too, is sustaining our lifestyles. And we’re all just sitting up here in chaise lounges waiting for the checks to come in from England. [laughs]

[01:08:24.000] – Grumbine

Sickos. [laughs]

[01:08:24.000] – Van Sweeden

You know, like that’s actually happening. And it shows you a lot of people probably don’t get up here as well. So it’s interesting that dynamic, seeing it from my friends in the Netherlands, their perception of Greece, and then also that perception, again, being the same for some English people, obviously, not all English people think this way, but some English people actually think that that’s what’s going on, that their tax is paying for us.

So, yeah, it’s terrible what happened to Greece. And Europeans will have to decide if there’s going to be solidarity there, or what are they going to do? I know that Dirk Ehnts is working on this with Pavlina Tcherneva as well. So hopefully they can push some change there. And I think the European Central Bank are taking a bit of a different attitude now as far as deficits are concerned with this, again, covid-19 has turned their world upside down and their perceptions, their previous perceptions, upside down.

So perhaps change will come and perhaps my friends will start to understand that. Also, what I pointed out to my friend as well is that the Netherlands, like the UK, like the USA, especially Delaware, are huge, huge tax havens, and the Netherlands is stashing the money of wealthy Greek people and Italian people in their offshore bank accounts just outside of Amsterdam.

So they are not helping the situation by allowing people who’ve got lots of money from the southern countries to just stash their money elsewhere and not actually spend it in their own countries.

[01:09:53.420] – Grumbine

Wow. All right, so with that, Kairin, thank you so much for taking the time to be with me today. This is really enlightening for me. How can people track you down that want to follow your work?

[01:10:06.560] – Van Sweeden

OK, so Modern Money Scotland has a website, ModernMoney.Scot. We have our own domain. We have social media. We’ve got social media on Twitter. We’ve got a couple of accounts on Facebook, one which is kind of our official Facebook page. And then we’ve also got one, which is more of a discussion page, more of a community. So, yeah, there’s one that’s just kind of married up to the Twitter page and then one that’s more of a discussion page as well.

So, yeah, you can find us on all those platforms. And as I said earlier on, I’m hoping to start my own podcast soon as well. So we’re looking at that. I’m looking at the technical aspects of that. And we’ll try and get that one to go fairly soon, too, and interview some of the fantastic people that I’ve got to know over the past in the economics community.

[01:10:53.160] – Grumbine

That’s fantastic, if you need any help setting up the podcast, let us know. We are a fellow traveler and a friend and willing to help in any way we can, OK?

[01:11:02.510] – Van Sweeden

That’ll be great.

[01:11:03.660] – Grumbine

So with that, thank you again, Kairin. This is Steve Grumbine and Kairin Van Sweeden with Macro N Cheese. We’re out of here.

[01:11:17.270] – Ending credits [music]

Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts, and promotional artwork by Mindy Donham.  Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.