and livingston can thanks for coming back on before we get to these weighty issues the president mayor of london issued a warning about not jogging and walking fast in london the british capital because of the degree of air pollution this week because of the warm weather which is catastrophic i've worked in central london for fifty years all my life my lungs record for someone five years older and so we've got to tackle this problem we've got to get rid of d.s. so we've got a massively improve our air quality sand let's get on to this business about the mainstream media suddenly discovering a compazine for last year's labor conference why do you think there's been such a hollow ballou about repeating the that there could be a second referendum if different stages of this process were read it was there in the tea party labor's preference is they want a general elections they want get rid of trees that might be if he can get a general election it was absolutely clear at conference we want to second people.

so i don't see why one for me so surprised it's been covered as a great betrayal and particularly saying how can a second vote be all knowing the referendum which labor prevails if you look back at the referendum what both sides were saying to remain as and believe has it all turned out not to be true i.e. what we've now got is much more detailed analysis of what's going happen and the defining issue has been diffused with the business community overwhelmingly every business thinks there will be major problems if we leave and that as that's come across in the media i think that's why there's been a shift now and you can't deny people are not a vote if they change their mind i like we've never been alexa here on the left of the sort of tony benn's side of bricks it's you know just when they were actually in the first referendum back in one nine hundred seventy five i voted to leave you were because of them was about two to one in favor of remaining and so you. when

people say should we have a second referendum this will be the third one ok but i mean i noticed the derivatives market has already been so in the city of london visa v. europe even in a no deals integration they seem to always get all the deals quicker than medicine and food supply it's easier for the financial sector to work its way around the damage that will be done much more difficult for manufacturing and so on if you've been part of the biggest trading bloc in the world for forty five years your economy is that it's the that and to suddenly will be i said does it so so easily arguably they spend all their lives doing money laundering and tax dodging they know their way to get round things just on the electoral issue that london school of economics analysis shows that based on core wins a very successful twenty sixteen electoral success a majority of gains needed to put germany corporate in number ten downing street leave voting constituencies surely the feeling of betrayal perceived bridge rail is

a word means that that means corby's lost the election and in the run up to the two thousand and seventeen election jeremy's poll ratings were abysmal but the moment the election started and we were discussing bringing the trains back into public ownership the energy companies and so on massively expanding and manufacturing base all of that once you get to the general election all of our radio and television media acaba by the door has to be equal coverage and it will be i know i don't think perhaps it will dominate that people's mind concern is who can create a better britain in which i my kids will get a good job and be adequate. it's interesting you say that that legislation makes such an impact on voting perceptual because in the media every in this week in the past twenty four hours the murdoch times poll is claiming eighteen percent will vote for this independent grouping which isn't even a political party in parliament the blairite sort of labor. when the nation we had

a split like this back in ninety one when i read that in about twenty five diagram create b.s.t. paid within a year bad a poll rating of fifty percent a year later virtual written off their seats and once you hit and that should people be saying well how can you have labor people in a new party with these tories who destroyed so much of our way of life i was quite pleased to see. he's leaving the party because i never thought of them as labor i'd be quiet to see a few more go as well say that the the dories would deny that the cuts were bad in fact they were proud of the cuts that were made and after all it was a majority that abstained famously when harriet harman was acting. leader of the parliamentary party and welfare cuts and austerity was all and that was what triggered the surge of support for jeremy because jeremy came out he voted against

whereas mostly i'm actually just went along with wanted so i've always thought that harriet harman decision to do more to elect jeremy as leader. than anything else because he was seen as standing up for a decent welfare state if you listen view or. any other consumption of british media those are not the issue is the issue is as being the anti semitism in the labor party surprise that the tory hope not hate reporters will be even more widely distributed as a mayoral montez next year sure maybe the tory candidate it seems as insult to single mothers working class voters black families hindus young women didn't report it and was slim's why is it only slimmer feelings make a good candidate tory party rank and file voted for him i think because he's deeply reactionary but this isn't new if you go back to the last minute action i made the tour. campaign against city com was

a says i mean basically claiming he was linked to muslim terrorists which a bit rejects as a young kid growing up in tooting motion might to be embedded in some islamic state since city come though his indorsing unlike the european union to resume his desire to brand lebanese members of parliament terrorists what do you make of city. saying his will or must be his will or politicians like the balloons was because it's terrorists the simple fact is you have to deal with who is in power and yet me and jeremy corbyn got a lot of flak back in the early eighty's for your saying britain has to negotiate with i right we need to end this conflict and we would denounce is pro terrorist and so on then about the best thing tony blair did when he came prime minister will sit down negotiate the i write and do a deal and you can't ignore they represent a substantial minority of opinion across the middle east and you couldn't negotiate

with me so you have to like him don't act agree with them but they are there and they're not going to go away some people and certainly the daily mail newspaper saying that the labor of communicating these things properly in the mail saying that this is the fault of seamus milne the executive director of communications for the british labor party and reports in british media saying that the former head of m i six richard dearlove claims that someone like milne would not even be able to give and be given security clearance and according to government which would in danger the national security this country would you make by recent knowledge since i mean seamus has just been a a brilliant reporter and right i or he's lying on me i don't think anyone seriously consider that he's an agent of i am proud to be a putin or something like that will trump. just finally identified who catch security clearance. man for. is overseeing the the you know dealing with terrorism

well just finally on venezuela because one of the reasons given for mike gapes who left the labor bottom of your body and the labor body was saying that coburn is roland syria russia and venezuela. i mean same as mills dad used to run the b.b.c. you'll be watching b.b.c. coverage why do you think suddenly media has is it's just that my dura must go the british government must continue economic warfare against the government is willing well this is you know one of donald trump's objectives to get rid of the venezuelan government but what we've had is america undermining the venezuelan economy by attempting to overthrow the previous president chavez in that the coup in two thousand and two and if you look at the the data now it's interesting that the levels of poverty i mean that the question of size of the economy had a population venezuela risen hato brazil and colombia and yet everything in our

media depicts it as a basket case one of the reasons material is still in power is a whole generation grew up under chavez and saw all the launch try and form for the better i literally i go shares it with where do i get myself and because he was the one who when chavez came and said look we will help you cut the fares to the on employed in london in london he gave us i think about forty million icon and the exact figure in order to the majority just struck me as a really good guy to negotiate with and america shouldn't be intervening in opera countries and trying to overthrow their governments it when we actually took the interventions in iraq in afghanistan in syria in libya what's been the legacy vast numbers of dead coyotes and civil war still continuing we should stop intervening in other people's countries and there isn't thank you thanks. club

member of the government social mobility commission explains the feeling of never getting anywhere no matter how hard you work on from the news the railway or you judge the water on the pole literally as u.s. soldiers dig up a bloody british. you're going on the ground. join me every thursday on the alex simon short and i'll be speaking to us from the world of politics. i'm sure. i'll see you then. need. all my dough for sixteen novels.

isis fighters. philippine. i'm. not for. ninety nine dollars. dollars still don't know what's waiting for them. to. be new and i am not sure. how to get out of. the man on the line.

my son was doing drugs my nephew's was still in drugs my sister just with doing drugs it was like an epidemic of drug abuse america's public enemy number one in the united states is drug abuse he started going after the users in the prison population who are we started treating sick people people who are addicted to these drugs like criminals while i was on the hill i increasingly became convinced that the war on drugs was a mistake there are countless numbers of people who are in prison for inconceivable sentence in this for minor minor offenders in the drug trade it's a lot watching your children grow up and miss you in wave and say by day as you're walking out of a business it's just it doesn't get easy. seems

wrong. but we're all just all. me you get to shape out just to become educated and in gauge equals betrayal. when something find themselves worlds apart. she's to look for common ground. welcome back joining me now to give you some of the week's top stories is former liberal democrat challenged secretary sage lembit oh big lembit donald trump trying his best to sort out a nuclear war in the stage or start or stop it career the computer he's trying to stop is meeting him under sorry sorry sorry yes look at this just what he's trying to do that then there is this i know is a problem the economic times says china is india pakistan to exercise restraint after airstrike it might not be donald trump at all that presses the button turns

out that india has performed an air strike in two pakistani territory french warplanes and allegedly to try and break up some terrorist groups but this border let's remember goes right back to the early seventy's when india and pakistan were not of war so this is blatant nuclear provocation and they know it such are the stakes people saying fifty percent of the ozone there would be destroyed yes but we've got tactical nuclear weapons and the problem with that is they're less destructive still kill hundreds of thousands of people but it makes nuclear war more likely some say that's upping the stakes to well let's now go on to hide from the chinese russian india talks china and russia obviously have been against this war in afghanistan for years still going on because of this this goes right back on hundred forty years almost the time supports my wand the afghan side of a british massacre looted by u.s. troops now the history here is that almost a thousand british and indian troops fighting together were killed at this location

remains were buried there more recently like very recently u.s. soldiers came across the site started digging it up found all kinds of trinkets binoculars to find this well the movie is there it is alleged and. as we condemn the improper removal of objects from historic sites so it seems pretty likely that it's happened and it said lot of this was shipped off to united states and. collector why the coverage of this when more bombs were dropped last year than ever six thousand bombs three thousand eight hundred civilians nine hundred children killed by u.s. bombing according to the united nations to find the scientists and afghan security personnel killed since twenty fourteen this war hasn't gone cool it's just gone off the radar in the western media well let's go to the new british and american and e.u. war against another country and richard branson pink floyd's roger waters slams richard branson for fronting u.s. trojan horse aid to venezuela short version here is richard branson has put

together a massive musical concert to raise millions of pounds apparently to in defiance of the red cross and u.n. aid but in support of the u.s. attempts to finally bring aid into venezuela he's stumbled into a quagmire of politics here and doesn't seem to understand the nuances which you've already in fired in your introduction to this piece is you don't get this you know the four i should say the foreign minister who did this week mr area has been on this show says the three million refugees fleeing venezuela he denied that figure he also denied inflation is one million percent in venezuela and says negotiations are continuing with the trumpet ministration well known reporting on the world that's how biased the reporting is nobody really knows exactly where to draw the line in terms of what the americans are saying and what madeira saying waters in rather colorful language is saying that branson is doing this to promote himself rather than just a joy he would deny that any jury is

a maze as we have to go to economic war with venezuela because of the poor in your next story is about the poor in london oh and in a very dark story the mirror southern rail worker pulls dirty water on the homeless man in front of horrified passengers now this took place in a rather wealthy part of london called sutton and presumably not thinking and it was watching him it was filmed pouring in. water not once but a number of times from a bucket was he had used to clean the ground on this one he even took the trouble apart of prodding the man to wake him up the socialist gentleman and then soaked him with this water but what kind of country do we have now when this kind of thing is happening in the nation's capital just the fact that nobody he thought nobody was watching is hardly any justification and when a neuroscientist on the other week telling us about attitudes to the poor we what next guess is going to talk about meritocracy this feeling that is being engender

monks people who have enough to eat that maybe they just made the wrong life choices is the only way of consciously coping with this albeit that the air pollution this week was bad enough if that doesn't get you but there's some other psychology here as well this is a hierarchy of disempowerment we've got people kicking each other from the top to the bottom not much kicking going on at the top of course and this perhaps suggests that the social condition of this country is far far more fragile than the government would have you believe number because i think you. well reports of tens of thousands allegedly killed by tourism is welfare policies that alone are slamming the un for its report on british extreme poverty don't make the news much here in britain today meanwhile season ngo telling parliament that bank bailouts austerity looks set to create record child poverty but is inequality not just about the twenty eight crash but something more profound in british society and is the political goal of america craddock society part of the problem joining me now is

a l.s.e. academic and member of the government social mobility commission dr sam freedman co-author of the class ceiling why pays to be privileged so i'm welcome to going underground so it's widely accepted that media t.v. journalism is all. or has a degree of power you begin you choose to begin the book the glass ceiling with some. character mark using this character to talk about class privilege who's more was a story so mark was. a senior commissioner at the book cost that we were looking at and he really represented i think a really interesting example of somebody whose career had sort of preceded that incredible sort of pace and what was really interesting was sort of digging into his career and seeing how really in his words he sort of started to race with

a number of advanced parents successful professionals he'd been educated at one of the top private schools he went on to oxford more broadly there was this sense of of mark acknowledging throughout his description of his career how he'd been able to sort of fit in with what he called the tele tripe all of these forces together had been sort of pivotal in what he said was a sort of following wind heard frank his entire career trajectory he did well he did very well he was if it was a school i would have to say i'm not work. to say that. but i'm always your we're going to broaden this out in a second break but you allege that that shows that there's a huge bias towards elite class privilege in this country to which of course the immediate thing we're going to cover of course is people saying oh but what about those individuals that come from working class backgrounds or do really well they prove that there is no class ceiling anyone if they work hard enough and i know

they're going to get divert their make it yeah i mean i think i mean it's important to say from the off that of course many people do from working class backgrounds get to the very top but i suppose that's why in a way what we want to start by doing this really find a robust evidence base actually so investigate this question so we started looking at great britain's biggest employment the labor force. and isolating those working in the occupations and then examining their class backgrounds and then looking at their earnings within those occupations to see well is it really the case that those from working class backgrounds get on and do as well and actually what we found is that on average they earn about sixteen percent less than their privileged colleagues and particularly in important sectors you show that media law medicine in the u.k. are a closed shop to you those who are for the u.k.

leaves that also was repeated by the social mobility commission appointed by the government here you're on it how damaging is a closed shop for media law and meds and given the powerful they are. to society i mean i think it's just if we tell ourselves this story of a sort of meritocratic ideal and you know we found it throughout the interviews we did through this book that people very much sign up to this is something that most people in britain sign up to and i think you know to answer your first question. there are certain sectors that have a sort of outsized importance on our culture i mean if you think about media and the culture of creative industries these are the people who you know tell the story that most of us in britain used to understand the world we live around us it's incredibly important those people and the people making decisions particularly those in the most powerful roles are representative of the entire country that we live in the way of this idea of meritocracy being

a good thing come from anywhere for most of the twentieth century it was seen as a pretty idiotic kind of way of organizing society when you talk about this very brewer and how politicians are saying you know legitimate fortune is part of people's upbringing how did that suddenly change because people probably don't remember when it was an insult i think there is this sense that people want to feel that they have. right to the positions that they've gained and i think that you know that has been sort of ramped up in the last few years but i think it's a it's a fairly old idea to some extent what you see is sort of systematic issues here it's not about any one individual and i think it's important we don't necessarily single people out in that way but we understand these things are working on a more systematic level to sort of create barriers for soon which are basically all we're saying systematic level that it's a law in the main the if you work as hard as you can. that you can make it make

your way in society or to lower me some people who may already be saying this and they're already would say ok the bullingdon club private schools cameron blair and so you say there's no evidence that those who do well work harder or have better training or more experience when you look at this systematic difference in earnings in occupations a new subject that to the sort of statistical analysis that allows you to control or adjust for these potentially meritocratic difference is in educational attainment in experience in the hours you work you find that it makes fairly little impact on that class pay gap and i think what that sort of showing is that there must be other factors at play even though those are the drivers that we tend to think of as explaining income inequality the bank of mum and people being able to

just. borrow from them when you're going through any. you also look at the spirit and social codes. the gate keepers warders dress taste as a kid. so this is i mean what we found is that you know you will do it with a few twenties or a dream or two yeah but it was interesting what you mention the one nine hundred twenty s. what you find is that most of these occupations the notion of what is appropriate in the workplace in terms of you know conduct behavior culture is actually a sort of remnant of historically who has done that sort of work in the past and how they've been to him able to sort of embed even institutionalized their version of of what's the right way to be in the workplace and i suppose the key thing there is to actually strip it back and say. to what extent can we reliably say that those

sorts of behavioral codes are actually tied to intelligence or in tied to belittle or even performance i think that relationship is fairly flimsy and in fact what they tend to be are elements that are very much linked to the sort of baggage of a class of a privileged class background that are misread often in workplaces as a sign of talent as a sign of ability as a sign of potential going to give it to the private school boys in me and you talk about how the disenfranchised are then toward to blame themselves for the fact that oh good or somehow through all the system there's a there's a way of making the people feel they are to blame i think that's the thing i mean that's i think for me that's one of the really damaging things about an uncritical meritocratic sort of narrative is what it does say implicitly if you don't make it then there must be something deficient in your character or in your ability to work

rather than sort of understanding that actually the game is fairly rigged from the start and that people have the stratified starting point. dr sam friedman thank you and that's it for the show will be back on saturday following us taliban peace talks in doha to investigate allegations of cia backed death squads with afghan bowl officials. led. by social media. in a world of big part of the new law and conspiracy it's time to wake up to dig deeper to hit the stories that mainstream media refuses to tell more than ever we need to be smarter we need to stop slamming the door. and shouting past each other it's time for critical thinking it's time to fight for the middle for the

troops the time is now for watching closely watching the hawks. came here where you were before you came here when you live. in many us states capital punishment is still practiced convicted prisoners can spend years waiting for execution but most of the time the victims' families they are very much in favor the death penalty there are some people because of what they did have given up the right to live among us somebody even proven innocent of two years on death row and how many more exonerations is it going to take before we as a society realize that this is not working and we actually do something about it. i do think the numbers mean something they've matter us with over one trillion dollars in debt more than ten white collar crime families each day. eighty five

percent of global wealth he longs to be old rich eight weeks six percent world market. thirty percent somewhat one hundred to five hundred three first or second per second and this one rose to twenty thousand dollars. china's building two point one billion dollars. mark but don't let the numbers over. the only number you need to remember one one business show you know for the mid one and only boom but. yeah. i never. was at the time let. me get that up but i got up but it

landed on time do you know why not. open one of the shoot they will have. this hour's headlines stories pakistan say. two indian or force jets over disputed kashmir and countering true pilots as the nuclear armed rivals violence escalates. also one of the most anticipated some of the year is underway as the u.s. and north korean leaders try and make headway over denuclearize ation an ending to a decades long korean war. sources tell the washington post up the u.s. military disrupted internet.