Episode 342 – From Corbyn to Palestine: An MMT Analysis with Chris Williamson

Steve Grumbine:
00:00:43

All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. You know, I’ve tried really hard to integrate a lot of ideas because modern monetary theory is what got this podcast off the ground.

It’s what continues to fuel the underlying economic blueprint of what we believe and how we believe it.

But we’ve also come to believe that it is absolutely vital to pick a side. And to begin to integrate the working-class struggle into this conversation. Otherwise, we’re just talking to stockbrokers. We’re just talking to a bunch of elites. And I really am not interested in manufacturing new elites.

I would much rather give the working class power to fight the dominion of capital and the dominion of that ruling class. So the combination of working-class struggle and modern monetary theory, the intersection of those two, is really where this podcast endeavors to go.

Now, in the last couple episodes, we have tried really hard to allow experts who are maybe not politically aligned with us necessarily to help us understand ways of getting consensus building and working on getting people to understand one another. My last interview was about deliberative polling and there were some people that took great issue to that.

And I feel badly about that because quite frankly, the Left, if you listen to my interview with Derick Varn, showed that there are like hundreds of leftist tendencies and strains that will not even regard one another.

They will not talk to one another, will not unite with one another because they have had beef for 50 years or a hundred years with each other, some dating back to Stalin and the ice axe to Trotsky’s head. So there’s people that just will not talk to each other.

And unfortunately, the black and white nature of some of these conversations leads people to not be able to abstract the value of seeing tools and techniques used by perhaps our oppressor or perhaps someone that doesn’t see eye to eye with us and leveraging it for bringing the working class together. I feel badly I haven’t been able to make that case for some. But you know what? I’m not pizza. I can’t make everybody happy.

But today I’m hoping that I will make some people happy.

Because part of that ongoing process, my goal has been to bring about people who understand working-class struggle, who are absolutely adamant about tearing down the neoliberal order, that are not against understanding intersectional struggle but placing intersectional struggle behind the concept of working-class struggle, where we all have common ground and we all have a common purpose. And that is what brought me to my guest for today. My guest’s name is Chris Williamson.

He’s a former member of Parliament and shadow minister for the Labour Party, currently deputy leader of the Workers Party of Britain led by George Galloway. And we are going to talk a little bit about all that stuff that we just talked about right there with this podcast. So with that in mind, Chris.

Welcome to the show, sir.

Chris Williamson:
00:03:47

Thanks for inviting me. Very great pleasure to be with you today.

Steve Grumbine:
00:03:50

Yeah, it’s been a minute.

I have never spoken to you before, so this is our first episode together, and this is really fantastic because I’ve spoken to guys that really revere you. Like, we got Steve over there, my buddy Steve Hall, The Death of the Left, Simon [Winlow], his co-author.

I mean, we got a lot of really interesting people that we’ve spoken to over there, and I’m glad to finally be making your acquaintance.

Chris Williamson:
00:04:14

Well, that’s very kind of you to say that. Thank you.

Steve Grumbine:
00:04:17

Absolutely.

With that in mind, though, you know one of the things that brought me to you was I had given a fairly harsh critique of Gary Stevenson, who is an economist who has gotten a lot of air under his wings.

But he gets the economics badly wrong, especially when it comes to understanding the state as a monopoly currency issuer and the state’s ability to provision itself.

He made the offhand comment that, “The UK was not going to be able to finance the welfare state anymore because it was going to go broke because it didn’t have enough taxpayer dollars.”

And it’s this kind of stuff that folks like, even Grace Blakely and others who have great sensibilities, they’d probably be great allies in many ways, but get the economics so badly wrong that you kind of have to walk it back and disabuse them of this. And then I saw your critique. I shared it around. I didn’t want to get specific, but let’s look at Gary.

We don’t have to talk specifically about him, but the kinds of arguments that they push forward.

Chris Williamson:
00:05:19

Well, I’ve got a lot of time for Gary Stevenson. I think he’s helped to shift the debate in Britain in regards to the need for a wealth tax.

Where he gets it wrong, of course, is that he implies that these wealth taxes are necessary in order to fund a good society. And I’ve tried to engage with him.

I don’t think he’s necessarily seen my remarks or if he has, he hasn’t responded to them. To make the point that you were making just before you asked me to come in and respond. But I think the fact that there is a debate now about the need for a wealth tax in Britain is valuable.

Where we need to shift it, of course, is to make the point that, you know, wealth taxes are needed to provision the government to pay for a good society, but they’re necessary to address the grotesque levels of inequality and the power that goes with that. And obviously we’ve seen a massive increase in the UK of number of billionaires and multimillionaires.

And of course, they use that wealth to lever political power. And, you know, I’ve been trying to make this argument about the way in which the monetary system operates.

I often quote Henry Ford, who said that “If people understood how the banking and monetary system operated, there’d be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” And I say our job as socialists is to create that revolution. But we’ve had, what, 40 or 50 years now of this kind of neoliberal propaganda.

The Thatcherite Tina Maxim. [TINA] “There is no alternative.”

And that way of describing how the monetary system works, which it doesn’t work in the way which they described it, but it’s very seductive because people see their taxes being paid and the services being provided, and obviously they think that’s how that it works. I mean, that is, as I say, a very seductive proposition. It kind of sort of makes sense, doesn’t it?

And I think what we’re trying to say is kind of a bit left field and sometimes a little difficult for people to grasp. But I think once people do understand it, when people do grasp it, then I think, you know, they become converts pretty much overnight.

So I think it’s really worthwhile continuing to make the case that, you know, there is no real impediment on a currency issuing government. It has access to all the money it ever could wish to have. And the only restriction really is the availability of real resources in the economy.

And even when you get to a point where you are assuming you haven’t got a completely socialized economy, but where you are competing for resources with the private sector, where you can use a taxation system, then of course to actually tax away the competition from the private sector to ensure that there is the space for the government’s priorities.

And what I would like to see is a situation where we have an interventionist government using the flexibilities available to a currency-issuing government, which it is, in order to create a good society again. I mean, we had a relatively good society in the time that I grew up in the 1960s and ’70s.

In fact, when I was at school in the 1960s, we were being told to get ready for the later generation, because by the time of the 1990s, we were told they would only be working about 15 hours a week.

And there were programs on British TV, things like Tomorrow’s World, it was called, and it was talking about this brave new world with all this new technology and how it’s going to free up the people to grow as individuals, to grow as people, to grow as communities.

And local authorities back then were being told in the UK to build leisure centers and golf courses and tennis courts and invest in adult education and so on, because people have a lot of spare time on their hands and we need to make sure that we got facilities for people to be able to express themselves in this brave new world that we were told was going to be just around the corner. But of course, Thatcher got elected in 1979 and Reagan the following year. And of course, it went in the opposite direction ever since.

Although the first monetarist government really, in this country was the Labour government, actually led by Jim Callaghan, as his name was the Prime Minister, and Dennis Healey was the Chancellor at the time.

And bearing in mind that the Bretton Woods [system] agreement had been jettisoned in 1971, so the pound sterling had been a floating fiat currency for five years by the time in 1976, when Dennis Healey went to the International Monetary Fund on a false premise and borrowed, I think it was something like $3.9 billion. And never, of course, had to draw it down, and subsequently admitted, for the wrong reasons that it was a mistake. He said he was badly advised by his treasury officials.

But in exchange for that loan that was never needed and never used, the International Monetary Fund insisted, as they always do, on a range of austerity measures.

And that led then directly to a confrontation with the organized working class in this country and what was referred to as the Winter of Discontent in 1978-79, it made the Labour government incredibly unpopular and assisted Margaret Thatcher into power in that election year of 1979. And had he taken a different approach then, of course, that would have never happened.

And Labour got elected in 1974 on a commitment to bring about an irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power for working people and their families. And they had embarked on a kind of alternative economic strategy and they were bringing about that vision that they set out in the manifesto.

But that was all jettisoned after Dennis Healey went to the IMF in 1976. And then, you know, as I say, the rest is history.

We’ve been living with getting on for 50 years now, only 45 years of neoliberalism, which has been an absolute disaster for working-class people.

You know, globalized economy has been absolutely catastrophic for working-class people in the UK and certainly in the United States and of course across Europe where we’ve seen, you know, jobs offshore to low wage economies. And we’ve now got something like 15 million people in the UK, the sixth biggest economy in the world, living in poverty.

Maybe it’s an absolute scandal. It doesn’t have to be that way.

And I think if we can raise people’s expectations, raise people’s consciousness, raise people’s awareness about how the economy works and austerity is an absolute political choice that we don’t need billionaires.

And indeed, when Jeremy Corbyn was the leader of the Labour Party, some of the billionaires, like a chap called Lord Alan Sugar, I don’t know whether you’ve heard of him or not, he’s quite a big name in the UK. He threatened to leave the UK if Corbyn ever got elected to Parliament.

I put out a statement saying “That’s great news and I’d be happily driving to the airport because we don’t need butcher’s billionaires to deliver a good society.” But even Jeremy, even Jeremy Corbyn was actually captured by this kind of neoliberal thinking. And his Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell similarly.

I mean, John had met with Bill Mitchell. I tried to persuade him to meet with Stephanie Kelton who had agreed to come over to Parliament.

She was on a speaking tour at the invitation of Mariana Mazzucato. She agreed to take some time out to come speak to John, but he wouldn’t talk to her, unfortunately. He said he didn’t have the time.

He had to be in the Parliament chamber. I mean he was making an excuse really, you know, and

Steve Grumbine:
00:12:06

Sure.

Chris Williamson:
00:12:07

And unfortunately we missed a real opportunity there because when Jeremy Corbyn was standing for the leadership in 2015, he was very much putting forward a kind of an MMT sort of perspective, really. He didn’t call it that. He’s sort of using those insights anyway.

I mean, there are aspects of MMT that I don’t necessarily agree with myself, but fundamental kind of issue in relation to using it as a lens to understand how the monetary system operates. That was something he had embraced. And he was being advised at that time by an excellent economist in the UK called Richard Murphy.

He founded the Tax Justice Campaign and was talking about “people’s quantitative easing” and was making the case that, “Look, the government can invest directly in the economy and build a good society,” et cetera. This actually got labeled “Corbynomics” by Labour’s Shadow Chancellor. Labour was out of power, obviously at the time.

A chap called Chris Leslie, he labeled it “Corbynomics,” which was actually quite a nifty strap line and we kind of embraced it. The tragedy is that Jeremy then, when he won the leadership, never actually sought to promote Corbynomics.

Steve Grumbine:
00:13:03

That’s such a shame. That is such a shame. One of the things that you brought up, and I want to hearken in on this, you’re from the UK. I am from the United States.

And when we talk about these concepts of monetary sovereignty, MMT, monetary operations, et cetera, we are constantly inundated with the pushback from many well-intentioned people that the only reason why the United States could ever do these things is because it’s got the “petrodollar.” And it’s because of this, it’s because of that, in reality is not a true statement at all.

And it may give the US privilege because that’s part of empire here. But you know, the UK has the same arrangement in its own right.

Japan has the same arrangement in its own right. Australia has the same arrangement in its own. Russia, China, they all have the same arrangement within their own right.

The difference is, and you can look at China, who purposely uses the power of each of these tools to great precision. They don’t play the game of losing. They do the best they can to meet the needs of the people.

Our governments are captured. Our governments are captured by capital. They are serving the needs of capital. And in the end we are left holding the bag.

The big, big problem, aside from what I consider to be a fundamental lack of democracy and lack of agency within, is the myth, the monetary myths that are pervasive in all these “official” and establishment friendly-groups, and even the ones that are up and coming that take the monetary story completely wrong. And so therefore you end up playing in a neoliberal world again and again. It’s different names doing it with different sensibilities.

And I think the key pushback that I hear from most people when you try and explain these monetary truths to them is they mistakenly take the political sphere and act as these are immutable truths that can’t be budged. It can’t be changed. When in reality it’s like a hammer in the hands of a carpenter.

You can build a beautiful cathedral, but a hammer in the hands of Ted Bundy will get you a dead girl. So it’s the same tool used differently. So you think about the lens of MMT and you, or just in general, these heterodox framings.

People mistakenly take the way that the neoliberals use these things, the way capital bastardizes these things, and assume they are immutable truths. But what would happen if a socialist government, a working person’s party-led government, had these tools and understood how to use them?

How different would the outcomes be?

Chris Williamson:
00:15:51

Well, it would be 180° difference, wouldn’t it? Of course, the capitalist powers would use all the influence that they’ve bought to try to derail the socialist government.

But I think, for example, John McDonnell, who was the Shadow Chancellor, they were tying their one hand behind their back going into that election. Indeed, how they would became very close actually in 2017.

But he incorporated what he referred to as a fiscal credibility rule, and the plan was to reduce the deficit year on year and that the fiscal credibility rule, he said, could be suspended in an emergency if the circumstances required it. However, he then actually delegated that power to the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee. He didn’t have the power to do it.

I mean, I was making the point.

But we could be then in the perverse situation where a Corbyn-led Labour government that was supposed to be breaking the mold of British politics and implementing a genuine socialist alternative could be in the ludicrous situation of actually having to implement austerity.

Because the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee might not agree that we’ve reached the circumstance where it’s appropriate for it to be suspended.

So as I’ve said, it’s 40, 50 years of this kind of propaganda and the people who ought to know better seem to be kind of willfully blind to the opportunities that are sitting in front of them.

I mean, one of the best things, or perhaps one of the only good things really, that Gordon Brown, when he was the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK, was to keep us out of the euro.

I mean, had Britain gone into the Eurozone, then effectively would have been relegated to the status of a local council because we wouldn’t be in control of our own currency then. And obviously we saw what the EU and the European Central bank and IMF did to Greece, I mean, absolutely crucified the country.

But they were in the euro and it made it more difficult for them to respond. Although I think they did still have some aces up their sleeve. They just refused to use them even though the Greek people voted.

I mean, this was the socialist government. Syriza had come in and, you know, everybody really had great high hopes for them. And again, they’ve still got a lot of time for Yanis [Varoufakis].

For a fact, I think Yanis did approach that with a good deal of integrity. And when they went to that referendum, won it by, I think it was 65% in favor of rejecting austerity.

That was being insisted upon by the so-called troika. He went to see Tsipras, who was the Prime Minister. When he went into his office, he got his head in his hands. He was actually crestfallen.

The Greek people had voted that way because he wanted the excuse to say, “Look, we’ve got no choice but to implement this now. The Greek people have voted for it.” They went ahead.

I mean, they bowed down to the pressure that had been put upon them, but they weren’t in a powerless position as Yanis Varoufakis was making the point at the time. Nevertheless, they did. But as I say, being kept out of the Eurozone was, as I say, the best thing that Gordon Brown ever did.

But we’ve never ever though then used the abilities that the currency-issuing sovereign currency actually offers.

Other than during the pandemic when there was lockdown in this country, it wasn’t so much in the United States, but here, I mean, people continue paid for by the government, get 90%, I think, of their wages where they weren’t able to go to work. There was all sorts of subsidies handed out to businesses to actually get through the situation that they found themselves in.

This was a conservative government, of course, it was in power. The Chancellor went on to become the Prime Minister.

Rishi Sunak was saying “There will be of course, a reckoning, you know, we’ll have to sort of at some point, you know, pay for this.” And indeed a lot of the government bonds, I mean, they go through this kind of like circus. It’s a nonsense really.

It’s like the government owns the Bank of England in the UK and they sell bonds or the government sells bonds and then they’re purchased by the Bank of England.

And much of the resources that were raised during that time or paid out during that time of the pandemic was as a result of the bonds purchased by the bank.

It’s like taking 10 pounds or $10 out of your left pocket and lending it to your right pocket and saying, “Well my right pocket owes my left pocket £10.” “It’s your same pair of trousers, mate. What are you on about?” Ridiculous.

But yeah, I mean this, this sort of charade goes and now we’ve got the Labour Party so called, they’re even as bad, if not worse than the previous Tory administration.

But you’ve got the, a new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves sign off these bonds or the Bank of England, she has the power to tell them to stop signing off the bonds that they bought through a reluctant market. And so they’re having to increase the interest rate, you know, the yield that’s available on those bonds. Well, don’t sell the bloody things.

They don’t need to sell them. I mean what they’re doing. Exactly, it’s just ridiculous.

I mean, as I say, I mean, you know, quoting what Bill Mitchell said, “The bond market is basically corporate welfare.” That’s what we need to be emphasizing. We don’t need to sell bonds, we don’t need to provide welfare for the super-rich.

Who are the people that buy these government bonds? They’re super-rich oligarchs and corporations. It’s just absolute nonsense. You mentioned Japan.

Japan has been in this situation on a number of occasions, I believe, where the bond yields have gone negative. So actually people are buying these bonds and actually getting less back than what they paid for.

Steve Grumbine:
00:20:49

Japan’s buying their own bonds like crazy because it’s fake. It’s just nonsense. It’s just the most ridiculous thing. I couldn’t agree more. Let me pivot slightly here.

You are obviously part of the Workers Party of Britain and you’ve got Jeremy Corbyn right now starting his own kind of party and it’s got a lot of energy behind it. You see a lot of talk about it, et cetera. Obviously, there’s a lot of skepticism as well. Capture, infiltration. The fact that they still don’t have the right economics, possibly.

We don’t know, we’ll see. My guess is that probably won’t get the right economics in there. Give me your assessment of this new Jeremy Corbyn project.

Chris Williamson:
00:21:35

I think it’s really exciting. It illustrates, I think, that there’s a massive appetite in the UK for an alternative. The Labour government has been absolutely catastrophic.

Talk about setting yourself up to alienate as many people who voted for you as possible. And bear in mind that the Labour government got elected on a very small share of the vote.

In fact, no government in history has ever been elected with 32% and got a majority with a 32% of the vote of the people that voted in the election. And Sir Keir Starmer sitting on a super majority. He’s getting on for 2-, it might even be over 200 majority in the House of Commons on a vote which was about 2 or 3 million fewer than Jeremy Corbyn achieved in 2017. And around about the same.

Not much more than we achieved the Labour Party achieved in the disastrous election of 2019, which we were told by the right-wing Labour Party aficionados that that was the worst result in the Labour Party’s history since 1935. But because of the vagaries of the first past post-electoral system, it’s enabled the Labour Party to secure this massive majority.

And that’s because the Tory vote was split. I mean, people were pissed off with the Tory Party, there’s no doubt about that. And most people stopped at home, actually.

I mean, the biggest cohort were those that didn’t bother to vote. So it was the second lowest turnout in history and the lowest proportion of the vote for a winning government actually in history.

So only I think it’s less than one in five people have voted for Sir Keir Starmer. So yeah, there was no real great appetite for them.

And as I say, the Conservative vote was split because of the Reform Party led by Nigel Farage, that actually took a lot of votes from the Conservatives. Actually a lot of working-class people voted for them as well, although I think there is potential for many of those people.

Some of them are bigots, some of them are racists and bigots, and they do play on that reform a lot. And some people on the left make the mistake of just dismissing people who voted reform.

And before that there was a party called the United Kingdom Independence Party, or UKIP for short. They were also demonized and dismissed as a bunch of right-wing bigots.

But what Jeremy said when he was standing for the leadership in 2015, when he was asked about the UKIP vote, he said, “Well, people voted UKIP out of desperation.” And I know that’s absolutely true because I lost my seat.

I mean, I got elected first in 2010 and then lost it in 2015 by a very narrow margin, just 41 votes, and then won it back in 2017. And we targeted UKIP voters, who are now predominantly the Reform voters.

We targeted them explicitly and many of them came back and had been previous Labour voters and came back to support the Labour Party.

And there was an interesting poll undertaken just this week, in fact, of Reform voters and what they thought about Jeremy Corbyn compared to Sir Keir Starmer. And he won on every single metric, Jeremy Corbyn did, by an absolute huge margin.

Whether he could be trusted more, whether they thought he would be better on the economy, better in terms of public services, the whole list of things. And, you know, Starmer is the most unpopular Prime Minister and even more unpopular than Thatcher was at the lowest level that she was had.

Steve Grumbine:
00:24:37

Wow.

Chris Williamson:
00:24:38

So it is very exciting. It will remain to be seen, though, what their electoral chances will be.

I think that they’re in with a good chance, but I think more and more important is their economic proposition and whether they are, and which I’m hoping they will do, collaborating work with groups like the Workers Party, because we’ve got a clear position on some key issues.

It might be seen as slightly more socially conservative than, you know, all the people that are maybe supporting the new Jeremy Corbyn initiative, but many of the people that are members of the Workers Party have also signed up to find out more about this new initiative. And it’s 600,000 people at the last count had signed up in double quick time. So there’s definitely an appetite there.

And the opinion polls for a party hasn’t actually properly been formed yet, showing it’s getting in the order of between 15 and 20% of the vote, and in certain constituencies, a substantial share of the vote. And in fact, in the Prime Minister’s own constituency, he would lose to this new initiative whenever it gets off the ground.

I’ve been in touch with another economist, Steve Keen, you may know him, Steve Keen, but another good heterodox economist, and he told me that he was hoping to speak with some of the people around Jeremy and hopefully they will embrace a different approach to what they did when Jeremy became the leader of the Labour Party. Essentially, we need to dust off the old Corbynomics idea, really. I think if they do that, then that would be great.

I mean, I’ve had my own sort of discussions, battles even within the Workers Party, when we’ve not got a settled position in relation to this yet. I’m hoping we will get there. I mean, I’m very clear about the opportunities.

Not only does it enable us to explain and argue how we would deliver a good society, because one of the things that the right wing often say and the media will “Oh, it’s all very well, it’s all pie in the sky. How are you going to afford it?” But as Tony Benn always used to say, “If you’re going to afford the money to kill people, we can afford the money to help people.”

And I think having a clear-eyed view about how the monetary system works enables you to explain precisely how you would do it.

And actually also, I mean, that’s the other advantage of being able to expose the lies that are being peddled by the mainstream political parties and the media to hoodwink people into believing that we can’t have good quality public services, that we can’t have decent pensions, that we have to charge working-class students ridiculous amounts of money. I think it’s about £11,000 a year to go to universities. It’s crazy.

When I was growing up, I didn’t go to university, as it happens, I went into the building trade, left school at 15. But many of my contemporaries did. Not only do they not have to pay tuition fees, you got a grant to go to university.

And during the vacation period, in the summer holidays, they were able to claim unemployment benefit. I mean, it was a totally different situation. And housing was plentiful. Working class people were able to buy their own home.

I mean, I was an apprentice bricklayer and at 19 years of age I was earning enough money. Me and my girlfriend, who went on to become my wife, we saved up and we were able to buy a brand new three-bedroom, semi-detached house backing onto a waterfront in a desirable village about eight miles south of where I was born. And working-class people were able to do that. And some didn’t buy. Some got what was called a council house made [by] local authorities.

They still have actually a housing stock, but much of it has been sold off under what was called the right to buy when Margaret Thatcher came into power. But you could get a council house if you wanted one. And a lot of my contemporaries didn’t necessarily buy straight away.

They went into a council house and the rents were very low. They were able to save for a few years and they went and bought their own house and then that house was released for someone else.

So, you know, in need of a home as it were. But now, I mean, the council housing, public housing, has been massively reduced because of what was called “the right to buy.”

Much of it has been bought up by private landlords. They’re now charging former council houses three, four, five times the amount of rent that is being charged in an equivalent council house today.

And many people who are starting out in life, young couples, even professional couples, and particularly in places like London, they can’t afford to buy and it’s very difficult for them to afford to rent. And so they’re paying ridiculous sums of money for their housing costs. And this is an absolute crazy situation. And doesn’t have to be this way.

We can have a credible and sensible housing market which is actually accessible to everybody. You know, it’s accessible to working-class people. We could actually find ourselves a situation.

But a friend of mine used to work in further education and he had links with the old Soviet Union and he would go and meet his contemporaries in the old Soviet Union, and he said they earned considerably less than he did. He said, but they had much more disposable income.

Their housing costs were next to nothing, and they were regularly eating out and going to the ballet. And they were all this kind of culture which was open to them.

They had the resources to be able to do that, which is kind of something you can only dream about even back then. This is going back into the time when things were better in the UK, but things have really gone from bad to worse now.

And that’s where I think people are looking for this alternative and are hoping, I think, that this Jeremy Corbyn initiative will deliver that alternative. But it has to get the economic issue right in order to achieve that, in my opinion.

And I think if he does that, then we could see significant changes brought about in the UK.

Steve Grumbine:
00:29:44

One of the things that I struggle with, I’ve been doing this podcast now for almost seven years, and I’ve been doing, I guess, MMT activism now for over 15 years. And in that space, I’ve never, ever seen a working-class politics that matches up.

I mean, I see people with a great slab of policies, but they’re hodgepodge. They’re not consistent. They’re not like interwoven. They’re not a coherent strategy. They’re Band-Aids on heart attacks a lot of times.

Because at the end of the day, even with understanding the monetary system without fundamental changes to the capital order, without fundamental power dynamics shifting, these things are suggestions. Or maybe they’re not even that. Maybe they’re something very temporary, that the next political cycle will be just jerked away.

And for me, I guess I don’t have any real hope at this point. It doesn’t mean that I don’t have hope.

I just don’t see a clear group of people that are not content with bourgeois society and running with the big dogs and flying first class and living la vida loco.

And the other side being people that get this stuff, that are fundamentally focused directly for the working class with this monetary understanding, you know what I mean?

Like you’ve got this weird split where there’s not a real coherent critique of capital, a real critique of the state capture by capital, and a real critique of the neoliberal order, married up with an understanding of the monetary system. What does working-class politics look like to you in that space?

And let me just say before you go into this, we have folks within our organization who are trans. We have people that are homosexual. We have women, old, young, and we believe in an intersectional politics.

Now, I’m not here to say that we should prioritize microaggressions and identity politics, but I believe that the working-class struggle is working class people, whether they’re gay, trans, whatever.

So how does a working-class politics that focuses on class analysis, focus on working class struggle, remain open to the broader working class and not diminish the real-life oppression and struggle they face? How do you incorporate all of that? It’s very tricky, isn’t it?

Chris Williamson:
00:32:05

Well, I mean, I think it is focusing on the kind of bread-and-butter issues and that comes back down to “the economy, stupid.”

The famous Clinton campaign slogan, which is where the Left, in my opinion, has gone wrong for the last 50 years or more, where the emphasis has been on identity politics. And they’ve tried to give the illusion that they’re being radical still whilst relegating class and economic inequality quality to oblivion. Really.

I mean, you know, it’s not something they’ve really necessarily focused on. I mean, certainly, you know, Blair, okay, they talked about reducing child poverty and so on. We should be eliminating poverty.

Never mind about child poverty, we should be eliminating. Don’t just reduce it. We should be eliminating poverty. In the sixth biggest economy in the world,
there is absolutely no justification for anybody to be living in poverty, for anybody to be struggling.

Steve Grumbine:
00:32:50

Amen.

Chris Williamson:
00:32:51

Everybody should have a right to a decent house, a decent income and a decent standard of living. The ability to be able to retire at a reasonable age and enjoy that retirement. These things are not sort of pine dreams.

These things are all doable and possible. But I think that’s where the danger is.

If the left is seen as obsessing on those issues, that then drowns out the good discussion that we need to be having.

The arguments that we need to be having about the creation of a good society where we can eradicate these grotesque levels of economic inequality and poverty, etc.  And we do get sidetracked.

But I think that what we’ve said in the Workers Party, I mean, you know, we’re hoping that we can reach some sort of an electoral agreement with a new initiative. But, you know, we need to focus on five, maybe up to 10 issues.

For example, with, say we’re going to bring all the public utilities in the UK back into public ownership, that we will basically free up education again and make it, you know, a public good, as it were, get rid of tuition fees, that we would commit to a proper housing system where people can get access to decent housing, that would regulate the housing sector, the private rented sector, to stop people having to pay such exorbitant rents that we would kick the avaricious privateers out of the public sector altogether. The public sector delivering, like the National Health Service should be all about delivering public service, not private profit.

And I’m saying that because I know that the vast majority of the British public support that, right across the political spectrum, from right to left, there is an overwhelming majority in favor of that sort of approach.

And I think if we can get some sort of electoral agreement and a strategy whereby that is the focus, that is the main emphasis, we can part the identity politics stuff up and focus on these issues. Fred Hampton was right when he talked about the importance of working across the piece in terms of black and white working together.

It made the point, you don’t stop or address discrimination, racism with black racism. You have to have a more kind of considered approach. You know, you do it with solidarity.

You don’t address the problems caused by capitalism, by Black capitalism, you address that with socialism. This is the kind of thing I think we need to be emphasizing. It’s that kind of economic question, I think, which has got to come to the fore.

And as I say, those are the issues that we know from polling and discussions that have taken place in the UK that the people are overwhelmingly in favor of them. And these are the policies of Jeremy Corbyn.

In fact, there’s quite an amusing little clip on YouTube where there’s a chap who was a former Conservative MP, became a broadcast, a bit of a comedian as well, actually, Gyles Brandreth his name was, and he went around the capital of the Home Counties, it’s basically the kind of very strong conservative area of the country around London, looking for what he called secret socialists.

And he was stopping people on the street and asking them whether they supported some of the issues that I’ve just gone through about regulating the private rental sector, kicking the privateers out of the National Health Service, scrapping tuition fees, bringing the railways back into public ownership, bringing the water industry back to public ownership, and gas and electricity and so on and so forth. Everybody was agreeing. And then he was saying to them, “Do you realize that you are a secret socialist, sir?” or “You’re a secret socialist, madam?

And they would like, step back in horror a little bit, say, “Well, what do you mean by that?” “Well, these are the policies,” he said “Of Jeremy Corbyn.” And he had a clipboard in his hand.

He turned it around and there’s a big picture of Jeremy Corbyn on it. And some of these people recoiled in horror. They were, “Oh, well, I don’t know,” you know, because they’d done a number on Jeremy.

The media really kind of demonized him.

Steve Grumbine:
00:36:17

The anti-Semite.

Chris Williamson:
00:36:18

Yes. A little less bullshit. Yeah, absolutely.

Intermission:
00:36:22

You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast by Real Progressives. We are a 501c3 nonprofit organization. All donations are tax deductible. Please consider becoming a monthly donor on Patreon, Substack, or our website, realprogressives.org. Now back to the podcast.

Chris Williamson:
00:36:45

Jeremy actually facilitated that, I’ve got to say, because he kept apologizing and allowing his best company, in fact, I fell victim to that myself because I called it out for what it was. It was a scam. And I defended people who’ve been falsely accused.

And for that I was then accused, myself. And I was eventually suspended from the Labour Party when Jeremy Corbyn was the leader.

I was then reinstated after an inquiry, but then I was resuspended two days later because there was a big furor that was kicked up by the Zionist lobby and the right wing, who were predominantly Zionists anyway, of the Labour Party. And so the General Secretary resuspended me. I then took the Labour Party to the High Court in Wool.

There it was a second suspension was ruled unlawful and the Labour Party had tried to. Again, this is under Jeremy’s watch. This should never have been allowed to happen.

And the General Secretary was supposedly an ally, but they’d gone to court on three separate occasions to try and delay the hearing.

I was calling for an expedited hearing because I was concerned that it was going to be an election and if I was suspended, I wouldn’t be able to stand as a Labour candidate. And at that point in time, there was what was referred to as a fixed-term Parliament.

So the election, unless you could achieve a 2/3 majority in the House of Commons, would not have been held until 2022. But I was concerned that, you know,
if that proposition was put, then, you know, they might actually be able to go anyway. They went three times to try to get it delayed and on the third occasion, each time got thrown out.

On the third occasion, the judge set a date for the hearing, I think about a week hence. And within about 36 hours I received a letter from the party.

And I thought initially when I saw it from the party when it opened it, that it made seems sense they weren’t going to pursue the matter any further. They were going to lift that second suspension, but it wasn’t to do that at all.

He said that we know that you are in the High Court in a week’s time over this suspension, but there are new allegations that have been made against you and therefore, irrespective of the outcome of that, you will remain suspended. They were determined to get me out.

I mean, and the Zionist lobby is a pernicious lobby and they were determined to destroy Jeremy Corbyn, even though Jeremy did his level best to bend over backwards to accommodate them. And really what he should have done is to stand up and fight them and call them out as they reveal themselves to be.

But we always knew that they were this kind of genocidal ideology.

I think had he done that, he would have been in a much stronger position and all probability could have gone on to win the election and become the Prime Minister.

Steve Grumbine:
00:39:04

Speaking of genocidal tendencies and Zionism, I am increasingly concerned about-we all should be concerned, let’s just be fair-across the world, the power of
the Zionist lobby, if you will, has radically impacted the political landscape in the United States, definitely radically touched NATO, all the NATO countries, the European countries in particular, I mean, a lot of these countries are just straight up repeating the lies, the unsubstantiated lies about the “Hamas raping” and all the “Beheaded Jewish, oh, the poor Jewish babies that the Hamas. Do you condemn Hamas?” And all this insanity.

It is like a disease how badly that mindset has permeated the media, the mainstream media, the political discourse, you name it.

And now in the United States, and I want to throw this over to you for your side here a little bit, but more in particular how it impacts working-class politics.

I see in the US now suddenly the Democrats in our political lie of a theatrical production we call “US electoralism,” they are suddenly now two years basically into this genocide, are suddenly acting like they’re going to try to stop now. They didn’t. They, of course failed. They always fail, by the way.

There’s the performative act of, “Oh, yeah, we’re now against it,” two years later, after Gaza has been basically turned into a concrete rubble jungle and the people are emaciated and starving and homeless and dying and literally being killed every time they try and get food. Now all of a sudden, they want to get a pat on the back for saying, “Yeah, maybe we shouldn’t provide offensive weapons.”

It’s like, where have you been for two years, you terrible, evil people? Right? And they want a pat on the back. How in the world did this Zionist plague, if you will, impact all these governments in the way that it has?

I mean, it is amazing how in lockstep, in spite of all the evidence and oppressed people that don’t have tanks rolling through, don’t have nuclear weapons, that don’t have any kind of sophisticated military apparatus, don’t have even the ability to feed themselves, their hospitals are gone, their schools are gone, their homes are gone. How in the world is it that we’re still talking about, “But do you condemn Hamas?” I mean, it’s ridiculous. This is universal. It is like a plague.

How did this happen?

Chris Williamson:
00:41:37

It’s truly offensive, isn’t it?

Steve Grumbine:
00:41:39

Deeply.

Chris Williamson:
00:41:40

It’s just not the last two years, of course.

Steve Grumbine:
00:41:42

Oh hell no.

Chris Williamson:
00:41:43

They’ve been supporting the Zionist entity for 77 years, in reality.

I mean, it is new in the sense the scale of the genocide, but the massacres, the abuse of the Palestinian and oppression of the Palestinian people has been going on really, you know, as I say, for 77 years. And indeed before that, I mean, Israel was a country born out of terrorism.

The terrorist, Zionist extremists had waged a terrorist campaign for 30 odd years. And in the end, it was a Labour government. It was that transformational Labour government on the domestic front.

And their foreign policy had left a lot to be desired from 1945-51.

But they surrendered really to the terrorists in actually agreeing to give a land which they didn’t really own to a group of people who had no legitimate claim to it at the expense of the people who live there. I mean, it’s absolute disgrace.

Now Britain does have a particular responsibility, I mean, going back even before that, you know, to the so-called Balfour Declaration. It was part of the, you know, the British Mandate after the First World War when they carved up the Ottoman Empire.

And Britain given the responsibility of looking after Palestine. They’ve got a very sophisticated process of infiltrating all pillars of the different countries in the West, from the political sphere, through the media and the entertainment industry and so on. And they’ve kind of really cornered a market.

I mean, this is one of the things that we try to expose on the program that I present each week, Palestine Declassified. We sort of expose the Zionist entities, Israel’s attempts to fight the solidarity with the illegally occupied people of Palestine. They use every dirty trick in the book to do that.

I mean even the Epstein scandal, I think it looks like Israel’s hands are all over that in order to obtain kompromat on politicians and so on. And of course it’s a disgrace, it’s an outrage.

And when you start to call it out, you get accused of anti-Semitism, although that is wearing thinner and thinner. I mean Shulamit Aloni. She wasn’t a former Israeli Minister,

Steve Grumbine:
00:43:30

Oh yes.

Chris Williamson:
00:43:31

20 odd years ago said, “It’s a trick, we always use it.” Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism. I mean it’s just nonsense.

And one of Jeremy’s mistakes when he was Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour Party, he accepted a decision of the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee to embrace, fully embrace the working definition of antisemitism. On the illustrative examples, and I think it’s 11, is it? Or something like that in the IHRA working definition. 11 examples, I think about six or seven of them relate to criticism of Israel. I mean it’s just a kind of Zionist charter and Jeremy should have kicked it into touch completely.

I mean if I’d have been him when he lost that vote at the National Executive Committee, I would have said, “I know I’ve lost today, but I think they’re wrong. And I’m going to take this to the floor of the Labour Party conference later this month.”

I think had he done that, he would have probably carried the day, but unfortunately, he didn’t. And it was then used as a stick to take out even more people. But anti-Semitism, it doesn’t really exist in Britain at all actually.

I mean very, very rare instances they try and claim support for Palestine as anti-Semitic. I mean this is what they do. But truth be told, but they’re very, very rare.

I mean, and inside the Labour Party it really is, I mean, statistically non-existent.

I’m going back to where the party was around 600,000 and there was an investigation launched into how many complaints of antisemitism have been and what percentage of the party membership that worked out to. And I think it was something like 0.04%. And of the complaints that had been made, I think several hundred, 200 had come from one individual.

Steve Grumbine:
00:45:00

Wow.

Chris Williamson:
00:45:01

And most of them were just not even legitimate. They weren’t even anti-Semitic.

And some of the complaints that were being made related to people who weren’t even in the Labour Party, you know, they were complaining about, “Oh, this is an example of anti-Semitism of the Labour Party,” by people who weren’t members of the Labour Party. I mean, the whole thing was a nonsense. And as I say, unfortunately, Jeremy gave it legs by continually apologizing.

And as I said to him at the time, “Every apology you make and every concession you give is just feeding the beast and making it stronger. And ultimately they’re going to come for you and destroy this project.”

And they did. I mean, that’s what really killed the Corbyn project.

It was the anti-Semitism thing. I mean, what finished it off. What delivered the coup-de-grace, of course, was the commitment to a second referendum on Brexit.

People in the working-class communities up and down the country had voted overwhelmingly in favor of leaving the European Union. And so this was inevitably going to play very badly.

And so consequently Labour ended up losing lots of seats in that election, although a lot of people again said, because the turnout wasn’t as low as the last election, but it wasn’t as high as it ought to have been.

And so a lot of people stopped away and other people who would normally have voted for the Labour Party voted Conservative because Boris Johnson was saying that, “He was going to get Brexit done,” and he was actually portraying himself as the anti-establishment leader. And it’s absolute absurdity. He’s a pillar of the establishment, but people bought that.

And of course he was aided and abetted by the media and aided and abetted by the Labour Party and the Labour leadership who had agreed to have a second referendum on Brexit. But Jeremy, that was against Jeremy’s instincts again. And I think Jeremy’s political capital had been absolutely decimated by the anti-Semitism scam.

And so he didn’t really have, I don’t think, sufficient sway anymore to be able to hold the line which the Labour Party had in the 2017 election was that we accept the outcome of a referendum and we will get on and deliberate.

Although they then prevaricated on it, which was unfortunate.

But he was held hostage by, to some extent by the parliamentary Labour Party members of Parliament, Labour MPs who were overwhelmingly hostile to him, overwhelmingly pro-Zionist as well, overwhelmingly hostile to me as well, as it turns out. But I was leading a campaign to democratize the Labour Party, to make all MPs subject to an endorsement process in between each election.

I feel like a primary, I think, in the United States. Don’t all of your elected representatives have to do that anyways? It’s pretty common.

Steve Grumbine:
00:47:18

No. It’s unfortunate. But over here, these political parties are considered private corporations and they’re held by their own bylaws.

And if they choose to have a primary or they decide not to have a primary.

Chris Williamson:
00:47:30

Okay, yeah. It’s not common, is it, though, for a primary to take place in that sense, in between elections.

So when you’re elected, then in order to stand again, you may have to get endorsed. Anyway, that was what I was arguing for

Steve Grumbine:
47:41

Sure.

Chris Williamson:
47:42

in the UK and for the Labour Party anyway, to make them accountable to the members, actually.

I mean, you know, we would become the biggest political party.

Steve Grumbine:
00:47:49

Makes all the sense in the world.

Chris Williamson:
00:47:50

And we’re saying, “Look, these people are representing the Labour Party. There’s nothing to be fearful about democracy.” And actually being more accountable, as it were, to your members, that’s a good thing. It’ll make you a better representative.

Because often, I mean, a lot of these MPs are away with the fairies. They’re completely seduced by the Westminster bubble. They love all that. I mean, I never did, I’ve got to say.

And so they become divorced from reality on the ground. Whereas ordinary rank and file members will keep you rooted, as I’m saying at the time, they could be your eyes and ears.

This is something to embrace. It will make you a better representative.

It will make us more relevant to the people that we’re seeking to represent in Parliament, the electorate, as it were. But Jeremy, you know, he kind of blinked. There was a lot of pressure against it.

There was all sorts of demands from the right wing of the party calling on Jeremy to take action against me. This is disgraceful, what I was doing. It was bringing the party to disrepute all this democracy.

And he, in the end, when he only came to the conference in 2018, the self-same conference actually, where I saying he should have taken the IHRA working definitions to.

So earlier that same month, he had accepted the IHRA working definition of anti-Semitism, which was the signing of his sort of death warrant, and then by not implementing or voting for the democracy reforms to make MPs accountable, which he had asked the General Secretary of one of the biggest trade unions in the country that was affiliated to the Labour Party, to vote against him. And the way the votes work at the Labour Party conference at that point in time, they’re probably going to change it now, but I don’t know.

But anyway, then they were divided. 50% went to the constituency Labour parties, in other words, the ordinary rank and file members of the Labour party.

And 50% went to the trade unions and socialist societies and the affiliated socialist societies.

And the vote split almost 50/50, I think it was something like about 95, 96% of the constituency delegates, the ordinary rank of our members were in favor of and wanted and voted for these open selections, as we called them. And it was a slightly bigger figure for the trade unions.

And that’s because there’s only one trade union that was a small union, the fire brigade union, that voted for these democracy reforms that members wanted.

And the Unite the Union, which was to say the biggest union at the time, they used their vote, their block vote, which would have equated to around about 20% of the total votes against. Now, if they’d have voted in favor, would have gone through with a big majority. And it was actually their own policy.

The Unite the Union had voted in 2016 in favor of implementing open selections in the Labour Party, so their delegation at conference voted against their own union policy.

And that was according to Len McCloskey, who was the General Secretary at the time of the Unite the Union, because he’d been asked to do so by Jeremy Corbyn. So this was catastrophic. I mean, talk about signing your own death warrant. And then I was Jeremy’s loudest champion in Parliament.

And then a few months after that, I was suspended on the phony allegations about anti-Semitism. I’d spend my life fighting racism in the 1970s when I was a young bricklayer, apprentice bricklayer, casual racism was quite a thing.

And I got beaten up, nearly beaten up on more than a few occasions for challenging racism on the building side that I worked on. And I was involved in the anti-fascist movement there, what’s called the Anti-Nazi League, confronting fascists on the street.

Because there was a right-wing faction in Britain at that time called the National Front, which was gaining substantial ground actually, and was winning a lot of council by-elections in the country. And then the Anti-Nazi League was founded as a sort of bulwark against it. So I was involved in all that.

But then I’d got labeled as a bigot, as a racist, as an anti-Semite, and ended up getting suspended from the party, eventually resigned from the party just ahead of the 2019 election. I was dropped then as an official candidate because I was still suspended even though I’d won that High Court hearing.

But they then introduced a new suspension based on absolutely absurd accusations. I mean, there was nothing.

One of the accusations against me was that I called on the right-wing Labor MPs who were complaining about the fact that I was going to attend the 2019 conference. I wouldn’t.

I wasn’t going to be allowed into the main conference itself, but I was going to be speaking at lots of the fringe meetings and these were packed meetings that I did and they were saying “I had no place, I shouldn’t be there, blah, blah, blah.” And this went into the media.

So the media came to me for a comment and I said, “These people need to pipe down and get behind the leader, focus their criticisms against Boris Johnson, these right-wing Tories and work for a Labour victory.” That was used against me. What they were saying was it was some sort of anti-Semitic trope.

When I used the reference to piping down as if it was a reference to the pipes in the gas chambers. You can’t make this up. Absolutely ludicrous that they were able to concoct this very thin sort of crime sheet against me.

That it had the desired effect. It stopped me from being able to stand as a candidate. I mean, who knows?

I mean, had I been elected, you know, I might have been standing in front of Labour leadership, you never know.

But it would be very different to Sir Keir Starmer got to say that. All the Labour candidates in that subsequent leadership election after Jeremy stepped down, Jeremy shouldn’t have stepped down as quickly as he did. I think it would be better stay in for a year and let the dust settle. But he resigned almost. Well, he announced his resignation straight away.

So a selection process started for a new leader and that is where Sir Keir Starmer emerged as the successful candidate. Although he claimed that he was going to continue the legacy of Jeremy Corbyn, we knew this was a complete bloody lie.

But every single one of them, including Rebecca Long Bailey, who was a sort of alleged Corbyn candidate, as it were, they all bought into the Zionist nonsense, they all bent the knee to the Zionist lobby. I would not have done that. Of course. I think now a lot of people have had their eyes opened.

Many of the people on the sort of optics left, if I can put it like that, a lot of the people that obsess about identity politics, they were joining in the feeding frenzy against me. They were joining in with the right-wing attacks on me, sort of amplifying these allegations about antisemitism.

It’s ironic now because many of these characters are now articulating their criticisms in a way very similar to what I was saying back in the day. But they’ve never really acknowledged.

Steve Grumbine:
00:53:47

You’re just ahead of the curve.

Chris Williamson:
00:53:48

Yeah. Owen Jones. You may or may not have heard of Owen Jones, a commentator in the UK, quite a prominent one, alleged lefty.

He wrote a book after the election in 2019 called This Land and he devoted about six or seven pages to me and headed it up. This section was “I was the king of the cranks.”

That was a term that they used against people like me, you know, we were cranks, cranks and antisemites, you know. Yeah, it’s a tragedy, mate. I mean, it’s not just me. There were so many good people.

Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London before, was leader of the Greater London Council.

Somebody who frankly had done more in public office, in my opinion, had done more than anybody in public office to advance the cause of anti-racism going back into the early 1980s. In fact, he earned the sobriquet as a loony lefty in part because of his stance on fighting racism. And he was drummed out of the Labour Party.

He was accused of being this anti-Semite, being a Nazi apologist, would you believe. It’s a tragedy really, because Ken was such a big figure in the party.

I don’t know if you’ve heard of Ken Livingstone, but he was such a big figure, an inspirational figure in the party and he should be venerated as an elder statesman of the Labour movement. But he was absolutely ostracized after this happened and I was about the only person, you know, keeping in touch with him.

And he was no longer invited on to talk shows and things like that. He was a regular feature talking head because of his background and he’s always got some useful things to say.

Tragically now he’s got dementia and he’s not in a good way. It seems a very sad end really to somebody who has contributed so much to the movement.

I guess you must have heard of this chap called Mark Wadsworth. He’s a black rights campaigner. That was his stock in trade.

He was a very prominent black rights campaigner and you know, in the 80s and so, 70s 80s, a journalist and such, really good guy.

There’s a very famous case in Britain where as a young Black kid who got stabbed to death by a group of racists and they all got away with it, actually, you know, I mean, there were a bunch of racists in the Metropolitan Police Force and they were able to get away with it.

And there was a long going campaign to get justice for the Stephen Lawrence family and Nelson Mandela was visiting the country and Mark Wadsworth introduced Nelson Mandela to the Stephen Lawrence family and catapulted it to an international cause celebre. And eventually, you know, there was a part of the prosecution and they did get some justice.

There was a documentary made about the Stephen Lawrence case after the justice had been served. And it was a three-part documentary because there’s a lot of issues to kind of unpack, as it were.

But the first documentary was devoted to an interview with Mark Wadsworth, or about half of it was devoted to a discussion with Mark Wadsworth that was broadcast on the very day that the Labour Party expelled him for being a racist. I mean, can you believe it? It’s just unbelievable.

And this was Mark, me, Ken Livingstone, many, many others, you know, many Jewish comrades suffered a similar fate because of our opposition to the Zionist entity, because of their support for the Palestinian people, because of their support for Jeremy Corbyn and for a socialist alternative. And that was unconscionable. We know even the Israeli Prime Minister was criticizing Jeremy Corbyn.

I mean, I know notwithstanding Donald Trump, normally this is completely undiplomatic for a foreign head of state to be leveling criticisms on the political situation in another country in that sense, but particularly a so-called ally. But this was what we were up against and unfortunately we lost.

Steve Grumbine:
00:56:59

Yeah.

Chris Williamson:
00:57:00

But hopefully we can regroup now.

And as we’ve already said, this new initiative that Jeremy Corbyn has launched, I wished he’d done it sooner before last year’s election, but, you know, better late than never, could stand as in good stead and could see a complete reconfiguration of the political scene in Britain. And that will be a thoroughly good thing if we can make it happen.

Steve Grumbine:
00:57:17

Indeed. I wanted to bring up one final thing, if you have time.

Chris Williamson:
00:57:20

Yeah.

Steve Grumbine:
00:57:21

And that is as we look at the Nazification of Germany, you know, as Hitler rose to power, people were unemployed. The economic conditions were absolutely a travesty. Working class conditions were absolutely abysmal.

And what do you see when the working class doesn’t have meaningful work, when it can’t afford to take care of its family, when people that are used to providing for their families are no longer able to provide for their families, not in a way that they feel proud of, the work itself is not fulfilling, unemployment through the roof, et cetera? This is when we see the rise of right wing fascism. This is one of the core elements that you see. And then what follows with that is scapegoating.

You see a lot of the problems that stem from lack of economic opportunity and lack of good jobs and lack of good working conditions, et cetera.

Do you feel that the rise of identity politics has masked the lack of understanding of that job security and of that economic safety that families once had?

Do you feel that it has allowed that to go undealt with in the service of an identitarian politics that has not served the identities it’s intending to serve either as a result. You know, within the MMT community, and I know you said you have your differences here, I’m a huge advocate for the job guarantee as a meaningful way of offsetting the ebbs and flows of the business cycle. And I say this as a socialist, somebody who would love to claim the means of production and eliminate the capitalist state, as it were.

Knowing that requires a whole lot more than what I think most people are prepared to do at this moment.

I believe that the lack of meaningful work, the lack of the ability to be proud of your income, proud of your work, proud of your ability to tend to your own family has had such disastrous effects not only on society, but it leads to a lot of the scapegoating that creates the very problems that identity politics claims to try to solve.

Chris Williamson:
00:59:30

Without question, in my opinion, identity politics has a lot to answer for.

And you know, the kind of middle class predominantly who kind of obsess about this and who dominate inside the Left as it were in this country anyway, betrayed the working class. And it does lead to this resentment and there is that danger that people could be seduced, were desperate by the othering. The right wing always do.

We saw this in Nazi Germany and we’re seeing it today, you know, with this so-called Reform Party. They obsess about illegal immigration and asylum seekers and so on.

What we’ve been saying in the Workers party is that we understand there’s a concern about mass immigration.

And I mean that’s not great from the perspective of the countries from which people are leaving, because often the brightest and best are leaving those countries. And that obviously has a negative impact then on their economies.

But it also has an impact here in terms of the ability of the capitalist class then to exploit this new labor market, as it were, this new group of workers that come into the country and they pay them lower wages and it kind of has an effect of driving down wages, particularly when trade unions have been initiated and the level of trade union penetration now is nowhere near what it used to be. And indeed many of the industries in which trade unions did dominate, of course have gone, they’ve been offshored to low wage economies.

You know, we’ve got to find a way of not necessarily bringing those back but ensure that new high-tech industries, etcetera, can create new good quality jobs for people.

And you mentioned the job guarantee scheme and that’s one area where I’m not sure necessarily the job guarantee scheme is where we should go because I don’t know about over in the United States, certainly in the UK there was a sort of a temporary employment scheme for young people back in the day, sort of just after I left school, so I didn’t need to go through this. There was much fuller employment when I first left school.

But as the 70s went on then, you know, unemployment became significantly higher and they brought in this thing called the youth training scheme and there’s a lot of stigma attached to it. This kind of, it wasn’t a proper job and a real job.

And I think there’s a danger that potentially there could be a stigma associated with a job guarantee. Although, you know, I’m not necessarily against it in principle.

What I would prefer to see is a big expansion of the public sector to create proper long-term jobs, as it were, for people to overcome any potential stigma that might be associated with a sort of temporary job guarantee initiatives.

And there’s so much that needs to be done in the public sphere in terms of the infrastructure in Britain, much of what we have got is falling into dilapidation and certainly, you know, it’s fading at the edges anyway, let’s put it like that at best. And so we could have a lot of people doing that type of work.

We have a social care crisis in this country that could be addressed with proper investment. Care works, provide a free care system at the point of need at the minute, people having to pay for their care.

And so, you know, particularly for working class people who are maybe seduced into buying their council house, having a capital asset perhaps for the first time in their life.

But when they’re at the end of their life, if they’re in need of care, they’re having to sell that in order to be able to pay for their care at least after they die. It’s then sold so the kids don’t benefit from it as it were.

So I think there are things that could be done in that regard in terms of, of, you know, investing, as I say, in our infrastructure, in our public services. More teachers, I mean obviously you can’t do these things overnight, you need to train them up.

But with a goal towards reducing the pupil teacher ratio in schools, building more schools, of course, providing more doctors and nurses, higher education, there’s a whole range of different things that could be done, I think, in the public sector as permanent proper jobs, as it were. And I think if we could actually give people that dignity of work and dignity of being able to earn a decent salary as well.

Because a lot of the poverty in Britain is in work poverty, people having to be topped up with Social Security benefits, welfare payments to top up their meager wages. I mean, this is ridiculous. And what we’re doing, of course, is we’re subsidizing bad employers.

If an employer can’t afford to pay a worker a decent wage, they probably shouldn’t really be in business, in my opinion.

Steve Grumbine:
01:03:23

You know, I absolutely agree. One of the things I want to say though, just as a point of reference, right, Warren Mosler refers to the job guarantee as a transition job.

No matter what, there’s a floor there, you can’t bounce below the floor. So marry what you just said, because he also says, and rightfully so, “Hey, if you want these jobs out there, fund them. There’s no reason you can’t do it. Ain’t your ‘hard-earned tax dollars’ paying for it. So don’t sweat it, folks.

Don’t get all bunched up because you think you’re paying for somebody to have a job. The reality is the state can provision itself, can produce all these jobs, great jobs, the best jobs, pay them whatever you want them to make.”

There’s nothing preventing you from doing that. And so when you do see how much services have been eroded in the name of neoliberal profit scraping

Chris Williamson:
01:04:09

Yeah.

Steve Grumbine:
01:04:10

that there’s literally no reason the state cannot provide really, really high-end, good quality jobs with benefits, et cetera.

And once you fill that up and once you ensure those jobs are there, the need for a “job guarantee” would be minimal at best because the private sector has no impetus to have full employment. So it’s up to the public sector to provide a job for all, since it’s produced a tax that everyone has to pay.

And the only way they can pay that tax is if they have income. If they don’t have income, they can’t pay the tax. And this is another form of demonization that goes on.

So I think you’re absolutely right in terms of fund, fund, fund.

I believe wholeheartedly in absolutely filling up those public sector jobs, create good quality jobs that fill the public need and then have that security at the bottom if need be, to prevent people from falling through the cracks. You know, again, I would like to get rid of the entire capitalist state as it were and allow workers their proper place.

But that, again, requires an entirely different level of commitment from people at this point than I think most are educated enough to understand or willing to fight for at this point, unfortunately.

Chris Williamson:
01:05:26

We can get a long way down that road, though, I think. That is very doable, in my opinion.

And it just requires political will, frankly, from the leaders who kind of get into power to put these sorts of systems into operation. You know, we do that, then the sky’s the limit, really, is my opinion, and…

But passionate about is raising people’s consciousness about how the system works. And I think once people realize that they wouldn’t tolerate the injustice of poverty and inequality that is endemic in the UK.

Steve Grumbine:
01:05:54

And the US, by the way.

Chris Williamson:
01:05:56

Well, the US I guess it’s even worse, but it’s just some of the stuff I’ve seen. It’s kind of there’s hardly a bridge. Isn’t there anywhere in the world there’s not homeless people.

And obviously in the United States is the richest country in the world, there’s even less justification than there is in the United Kingdom for that to be the case. But, yeah, I mean, I’m more optimistic. I don’t know, you were saying lack of hope or something.

I’m not saying you didn’t have any hope, but you didn’t.

Steve Grumbine:
01:06:14

In electoral politics, I have very little hope. Yes.

Chris Williamson:
01:06:17

Well, I mean, obviously the light of experience suggests that you are right, but maybe I’m naive, but I think there is the potential there.

I mean,

Steve Grumbine:
01:06:24

I want to believe.

Chris Williamson:
01:06:25

We have an electoral system. Let’s use it to deliver the good things that people need.

And where I think the Labour government of 1945-51 went wrong, is that the fascination they brought about didn’t actually put in a system that was impossible to break, as it were. And a lot of the gains that we made back then have been lost now.

And so we’re kind of more or less starting again, really, from where we were back in 1945. But it was able to be done then, I think we could easily do it now and do a better job of it as well, actually.

But what we also need to be doing is we need to be raising people’s consciousness all the time. And this is where the trade unions, I think, have fallen down.

Steve Grumbine:
01:07:04

Indeed.

Chris Williamson:
01:07:05

They should be, you know, engaged in political education and giving people the tools, as it were, to understand, you know, how the system works, et cetera, to recognize, you know, what we’ve got and how we can improve on it and maintain it. Because otherwise, you end up losing it you know.

Steve Grumbine:
01:07:17

That’s it! I was about to say, and this will be my final point before I let us close out.

I’m not just talking about maintaining political gains, but I’m talking about maintaining infrastructure, maintaining the services, maintaining the public housing, maintaining the roadways, the bridges, the electrical grid, the Internet, whatever it is, right?

If you just think about the cost of maintenance as instead of a cost, if you will, but more of an investment into people’s lives and so forth, the amount of jobs just to properly maintain everything is so unbelievably abundant. We just literally pinch pennies on the maintenance side.

We build all these wonderful things many, many moons ago and then we just allow them to deteriorate.

And if we invested in that, the amount of jobs and the amount of satisfaction people would have in seeing the fruit of their labor right there before them, the aesthetic of progress would be so intoxicating, I believe. I think that would be a real change. Someone could believe it.

Chris Williamson:
01:08:20

I think so. We were sort of halfway there, you know, in some ways in the 1960s and ’70s.

I just think back then, the local authorities, the local councils they employed, just as one example, an army of grounds maintenance workers, of gardeners and so on. And so all of our roundabouts and dual carriageways and so on, they were abundant in the summer with flowers.

And it took lots of people to kind of maintain this.

The local authority in the city where I live, they had a massive nursery where they grew lots of plants and so on for the purposes of beautifying the city as it were. And that’s just one example. There’s so many other things in just making sure that the roads, the pavements and are properly maintained and so on.

Again, back in the days, all of the pavements in the city were made up of paving slabs, beautiful paving slabs, and they were maintained like that. But as time has gone by, you don’t have paving slabs anymore.

Otherwise, other than it may be in the city center, they’ve been replaced with tarmac. And if you look at the use, this thing called. It’s like a slurry, it’s like a kind of watered-down tarmac that they spray over it.

I mean, it looks bloody awful. But when you were laying slabs, proper paving slabs as it were, it took skilled workers, a lot of workers to keep on top of that.

Because when they became cracked or whatever, they’d have to go and maintain them and mend them and things like that.

We were on the way to doing that sort of and thing but where we fell down is we didn’t think and the labor movement didn’t properly politically educate their members to understand what they’d gotten and that it was in danger or could be in danger of being lost as it has been lost now. So you have to make the revolution, then you’ve got to maintain it, haven’t you? You know, that’s the thing.

And you’ve got to.

Steve Grumbine:
01:09:54

You got to counter revolution.

Chris Williamson:
01:09:55

Yeah.

Steve Grumbine:
01:09:56

All right, listen, Chris, you’ve been an amazing guest and I appreciate you spending a long time with me today. This has been amazing and I hope I can have you back on in the future. Tell everybody where we can find more of your stuff, how we can follow you.

Chris Williamson:
01:10:10

Yeah, well, I’m on social media. If you look for me on Twitter @darbychrissw, I regularly post on there. I also present a program called Palestine Declassified.

You can catch that on Rumble. We also post on social media. You won’t be able to reach us on YouTube, however, because we’ve been banned from YouTube, would you believe?

But there we are.

That’s the story, and I might tell you, if you do have me back on, about how after leaving Parliament, I’ve been banned from the parliamentary estate because I’ve been deemed a threat to national security. But that’s as another story, so I won’t go into that. But anyway, I mean, it’s a nonsense, but anyway, it’s because I support the Palestinian cause.

But anyway, never mind.

Steve Grumbine:
01:10:47

I am going to have you back on to talk exactly of that. I appreciate you bringing that up very much. Let me just tell everybody we are Real Progressives. This podcast is Macro N Cheese.

My name is Steve Grumbine. I am the host. My guest, Chris Williamson has been amazing and I want to thank you for joining me today. This organization is a 501[c]3 in America.

For those of you listening, it is a nonprofit, meaning that we can receive donations and you can get a tax write off at the end of the year. So it’s a win-win for all of us. If you have anything that you can give, we survive on your donations.

I know there’s a lot of big platforms that people just rush to fund and we’d love it if you considered throwing some of that our way because we believe the work that we’re doing is pretty good and pretty necessary as well. Follow us on our YouTube channel. You can follow us all over where podcasts are found. Go to our website, realprogressives.org go to the dropdown menu.

And hit donate. Also go to our Patreon, which is patreon.com/real progressives.

And of course you can find us on Substack, which is realprogressives.substack.com so without further ado, on behalf of my guest Chris Williamson, on behalf of the podcast Macro N Cheese, we are out of here.

End Credits:
01:12:15

Production, transcripts, graphics, sound engineering, extras, and show notes for Macro N Cheese are done by our volunteer team at Real Progressives, serving in solidarity with the working class since 2015. To become a donor please go to patreon.com/realprogressives, realprogressives.substack.com, or realprogressives.org.