in recent years particularly but this idea that you know capitalism always needs to grow always needs to extract resources it basically takes stuff from the earth and uses people and then concentrates wealth in the hands of just a few people and that generally doesn't work for most people most of us suffer as a result of that how does degrowth fit into that picture?

So this is a term invented or at least popularized over the last few decades, but I think really it's sort of exploded in use in the last couple of years.

And exactly as you say, it's taking on the idea that typically capitalism or economists, people who try and talk about capitalism will say, okay, growth is the central thing.

If you wanted a justification for why capitalism is all right, really, you'd probably start by saying, look at the last 250 years of industrial capitalism from, let's say, the Industrial Revolution onwards, starting really in the north of England and bits of Belgium, bits of Wales, and then expanding gradually over the entire world, as you've seen in the last sort of few decades, really, where the sort of completion of this process, the creation of a massive global market, the the extraordinary industrialization of china and east asia and this sort of thing right so you've got all this incredible transformation of human societies which has produced huge riches for everyone including most people right that would be your justification for for capitalism you go To be honest with you, most people living in this country right now are better off than most people living in this country 300 years ago.

You go, look, you've all got iPhones.

We're talking on this very flashy bit of computer equipment here.

We can all access the internet.

How do you go about that? Is it like banning private jets? Or like, you know, as soon as you get to £999,999,999, that's it? You get 100% tax? What is that? Like, how do we do that?

Either you believe in devolution or you don't.

Well, no, you're absolutely right.

Devolution is the talk at the moment, particularly with Andy Byrne, although, of course, he tends to refer more to the larger cities in the country than places like Piddington.

Out in Oxfordshire, this is a bit of a stunt, right? The first one is they're not actually going to leave the UK.

It's a way of getting attention to the thing.

There is something of a tradition of this, by the way.

I realise there's something of an East Anglia bias in the panel, a sea land bias.

James Meadway, this is kind of up your strasser, isn't

Are there any other structural reasons why our yields are so much higher than everybody else's?

You've kind of put your finger on one part of it.

I mean, look, the first bit is the way that the bond markets work is the US Treasuries are basically setting a floor.

It's called, supposed to be, the risk-free asset.

So everything else is going to be a bit more expensive than that.

That's how people trading these things are thinking about the world.

US Treasuries go up pretty much automatically.

Is it actually the case that there could be a sovereign debt problem for loads of countries in the global north? Or is this just an adjustment to a new normal where maybe growth will be lower, interest payments on debt will be lower, but broadly they should have to get used to a world in which governments are more fiscally constrained?

And what about the impacts on infrastructure, you know, beyond the sort of anecdotal reports about power outages and damage to the rail network, including those two recent train derailments in the UK, and also effects on nuclear power plants in Europe? What sort of concretely do we know about the actual scale of those infrastructural impacts at this point?

Well, at this point, it's mixed up in that 3% losses in output.

So this is a statistical generalisation from the evidence that we have, or at least there's a line put together for Europe.

So it gives you a kind of average impact of lots and lots of different things going on.

There's the fact that people don't work because it's too hot.

The fact that people can't work so hard, like physically or mentally, because it's too hot.

And then there's the fact that there's some infrastructure impacts which will be creeping in there, that things break down.

Could you talk a bit about those recommendations, how you think they ought to be to be funded and the extent to which they're based on policies that have already been implemented elsewhere in the world?

You know, the circumstances are not what they would have been or what we thought they might be, uh, 10, 15, 20 years ago, and just assume that we all sort of happily imagined that the, the line would go up forever and ever, and we'd all get richer forever and ever, right? If that's not really what's going to happen, what do we do to make the best out of it, and how can we make this still, uh, uh, the chance for people to live rich, fulfilling lives in circumstances that are different to what we might like? I mean, that's actually the problem we face.

So yes, you do want to try and present this as it is actually a good thing if you have to work less.

It is a good thing if we plant more trees.

It is a good thing to have spaces that are available to people that are cool and pleasant to sit in.

You know, this is...

These are things that can work and be positive.

Yeah.

That's what we have to think about.

So, do we finally know now what Andy Burnham stands for and what an Andy Burnham government would do? Well, earlier today, I spoke to Economist, host of the Macrodose podcast and friend of the show, James Meadway.

We know some of it.

He ducked out of deliberately the fairly major question about who his Chancellor of the Exchequer will be.

I mean, when the choices between broadly speaking, Ed Miliband, West Streeting, Shabana Mahmood.

I mean, this is quite a spread of opinion inside the Labour Party, to say the least.

So, you know, it matters a fair bit who ends up getting that job.

A lot of the other stuff have been trailed really over the last week or so.

Basically, it empowers people who want to build and grow and disempowers NIMBYs because you have... sort of these local authorities who want investment to come in and therefore they're focused on it that's what you have in sort of china or i think the usa as well but then you have a tension with inequality because then if you've given essential services to these local authorities and the businesses really want to go to greater manchester but they don't want to go to the west midlands then sort of that challenges the universal basis of our welfare system so is that an irresolvable tension and we just have to make a decision

Um, of course, to actually meet the target he, he set there, he'd presumably only need to build more than have been built per year-

year-Um, since 1970, 'cause he's saying since the post-war period, not since the war.

Um, in the 1980s, the average was 40,000 a year, though it's declined throughout the decades, so ended up a lot lower than that.

Um, under new labor, this is just a phenomenal statistic, only 562 council homes were built per year.

So there were a few, um, housing associations that were, were building houses at the same time, but again, not in anywhere near to the degree, um, that social homes were built in the post-war period.

Um, in this speech, Burnham also said he would reform business rates to benefit pubs and high street shops.

Um, he said he would make high streets the symbol of Britain's new renaissance.

So, so is, is that a, an irresolvable tension and we just have to make a decision?

Still, that's only four percent off grocery costs, so I don't really see how this is in any way particularly a silver bullet or a meaningful plan when it comes to lowering grocery costs.

The point to get across here is that don't get mixed up between a thin margin and a huge mass of profits.

That huge mass of profit is generated from a very, very large number of transactions on average of which they have a fairly small margin, and it is market power.

It is the fact that we have a few very large supermarkets that sell most of the food we buy that they're able to command these profits.

So the question is how might you use that surplus that they're generating to help support at least some people when they're doing their daily shop? And the suggestion here would be, well, you could use it to cross-subsidize to reduce the prices of essential goods.

You can take some of that profit, and instead of saying, "Oh, there's the shareholders, the CEO, or senior managers, or whoever else," you can say it can come back to consumers of certain kinds of goods.

So you don't say just on average reduce margins across the board so that, you know, if you go and buy some Tesco's own brand super luxury thing, you know, right at the top end on which they make a very tasty profit, uh, you're not saying, "Okay, bring that down to zero," or whatever.

Um, I wanna get your thoughts on Andy Burnham standing in the Makerfield by-election, and what's your approach to it? What's your understanding of what the Green Party's approach to that by-election is?

[laughing]

... about what their concerns are and what people, what people actually bring forward.

And it is the economy, uh, stupid, but it is the economy in various different forms, in a way that is nothing to do, really strikingly very, very little to do with the economy as it is usually presented as an object that we're supposed to talk about.

Now, and, and I don't really include, I'm, I'm mentioning this to Aditya here, I don't really include the economics correspondents of our fine national media in this.

But if you drag out some of the political correspondents, without naming too many names, although one of them for the BBC was so bad, the BBC had to commission an independent review into its own economic cove- coverage because she kept referring to, you know, the credit card that, uh, the national economy is supposed to be like, and it was being maxed out, and all this sort of nonsense.

And the obsessions that this particular form of coverage of the economy has, which is it's about government debt and about, uh, the deficit, and it's about huge, massive things up here, and very, very rarely does it ever get down to the brass tacks of what people are talking about, which is stuff is really expensive and nothing really works.

These are fundamental economic questions.

So in a, in an essay you've been writing, uh, for this project, the After Order project, you talk about climate sovereignty after a crisis of the Anthropocene, and you've been also connecting what might be the end of the neoliberal period to the emergence of, uh, new forms of renewable energy and the rise of China.What would you identify as the big transformations in political economy as they connect to some of the things you were discussing earlier?

Do you wanna just talk our viewers through what the issue is with JP Morgan and Tower Hamlets?

Well, this is, um, yeah, this is something that's, that's really sort of blown up in the last sort of few months or so, uh, that Tower Hamlets also contains Canary Wharf.

Um, Canary Wharf is now London's, you know, the historic home is the city of London for finance.

It's now Canary Wharf.

There's any number of big company headquarters, all sorts down there.

It's absolutely a huge employer.

Uh, and that's Canary Wharf at the south end of the borough, from which Tower Hamlets is in the fortunate position of getting about one hundred and seventy million pounds of retained business rates.

-as a lay member and then putting your, yourself to the banner and going, "Yeah, I'm with them." Why did you leave?

Why? Why is Britain so peculiarly delusional? 'Cause I think most people would probably agree with that.

Because we went, my, my short version of that is I think we went furthest into believing that globalization really would be, as Blair said in, what, the 2005 Labour Conference, something you couldn't disagree with.

It'd be like trying to disagree with the coming of the spring, right? It was like pretending the seasons weren't gonna happen.

PS, here we all are and the seasons are all over the place.

But, and so globalization is on its, uh, way out, so Blair kind of wrong in two respects there.

But the important one for this conversation is that a rock-solid belief that the world was globalized, that Britain had negotiated itself i-i-in a, in a feat of sort of brilliant state management, managed to get itself by around aboutCall it 2001, 2000, let's say, to a position where it was perfectly positioned to make full, take full advantage of this globalized world.

It didn't need a domestic manufacturing base.

Peterborough, strangely.

Now, um, what do you think Rachel Reeves should do in terms of putting up taxes?

Well there, this is...

Oh, God.

I want to say it's a hundred and billion-dollar question, but it's, it's actually significantly more than that.

I mean, the IFS thinks this, uh, black hole, so-called, is going to be about £20 billion at least, and it's probably northwards, uh, uh, of that estimate.

Uh, she doesn't have many options left.

If she sticks to the manifesto, there's not much there.

Um, so it could, it could be very counterproductive.