i'm show business i'll see you then. i'm afshin rattansi we're going underground on the opening day of london's future artillery conference where events include increasing precision reducing burden sponsored by raytheon a company whose smart bombs are allegedly killing civilians in yemen coming up to show a very british crew on next week's e.u. elections an establishment conspiracy to overturn brecht said we asked the man who predicted the rise of corbin author chris smalling and we have documents from britain's national audit office casting doubt on democracy in britain disgraced defense secretary gavin williamson may have gone but the u.k. military set for the biggest privatization deal since the liquidation of karelian we investigate comparisons between your liberalism and the circle of hell all this

of all coming up in today's going on the ground but 1st it's 32 years since margaret thatcher denied to the house of commons any of the spycatcher conspiracy allegations about an attempt by u.k. secret intelligence agencies to overthrow the british government led by labor prime minister harold wilson the book spycatcher was banned by the british government a fact no doubt not lost on the current labor leader jeremy corbyn there is an ongoing inquiry into secret intelligence activities against him with no real news on when it will report it was corbin's number 2 john mcdonnell who appeared to get corwin's of trouble ahead of the last u.k. general election when interviewed about any possible shake up of britain's allegedly unaccountable secret services what about money for the security services how could we take that seriously when your shadow chancellor was photographed holding a letter which called for the abolition of bear my 5 the abolition of a special branch and the disarming of the police given the juries of mayors

presided over $20000.00 police officers jobs being cut it was relatively easy for corbett about the way that question about security but only my 5. long suspected of dirty tricks against the left in britain he said this except since leaving the ball here my 5 also excepts the need for the accountability to parliament of our security services which is important but he also accepts as only do the need to have security services that do protect as well the role of the u.k. security services together with powerful forces in the city of london and elite classes in overthrowing elected socialist government has perhaps never been portrayed more brilliantly than in a very british coup by m.p. chris mullin and now there's a sequel the friends of harry perkins christianity now christiane welcome to going underground let's just start with a reminder of your classic political conspiracy thriller a very british coup well it was written a long time ago it's been in print for the last 37 years it's fact it's enjoying a bit of

a comeback with the rise of jeremy corbett basically it was set in the 1980 s. when there was speculation about the possibility of a government led by someone like tony benn. and the establishment conspired to bring it down the establishment in this case being a sort of mixture of the security and intelligence services the the media barons with a little help from the americans here while the new one of their friends a very perkins the left try again with this character fred thompson who was in the previous book he's centrist not bad night well good friends very perkin starts with harry's funeral it's set many years. away from the previous one it's been going for 7 or 8 years and it's not working out very well and it starts as i say with the funeral of harry perkins who was prime minister in

a very british coup and the opening line which i'll give you for free is that harry perkins was buried on the day that. declared war china and china emerges through the pull offs because there's geopolitical but also very very westminster there's 3 . threads to it $33.00 contemporary issues it's a drama actually woven around 3 issues breck's it the rise of english nationalism. and the growing confrontation between china and the united states now we don't to give too much away but i think one recurring element in and i think we can say the fred thompson twins. released his place in parliament a lot of the plot relies on whistleblowers was julie the sancerre waiting extradition proceedings at the moment where you get the idea for the particular whistle blowing stories that drives fred thompson's political career he exposes

2 separate tory m.p.'s in rackets one is is smuggling migrants and the other one is a tory m.p. who's involved in buying up x. council houses renting them out a distortion that reds you chose housing because it's such a critical issue because i think some of what's outlined in the book is actually happening i'm not saying it's a tory m.p. or anything involved but 40 percent of ex council houses are now in the hands of buy to let landlords and in the town that milton keane's just north of london it's 70 percent now that was never part of the plan as far as i miss is that to start or selling public housing if it was part of the plan we were never told about it so that realistically is what actually happened all i've done is take it on

a step further although probably being so key in any arguably progressive policy this this. man fred thompson sells out the unilateralism in terms of nuclear weapons a very perkins i would say sells it out but fred thompson although his heritage the mantle of harry perkins turned out to be a good deal more pragmatic and what's made him more as you chris well he's currently well there's use of tony blair that ringback there's a bit of me in there yes there is a bit of me there. i came to the view by died in 97 having suffered for successive election defeats we couldn't afford to take even a little punt on the outcome of the 5th election i think fred thompson which is a similar conclusion after a long period in the wilderness such was your desperation to alleviate the gross inequality in poverty yes i mean the i've represented some blood south which is. one of the poorer areas of the country an old industrial town where

a lot of the traditional industries had collapsed and i would say the situation there was fairly desperate after 18 years of tory rules that me a decade of misses that. and there was the desperation is for there to be a labor government and actually the labor government which was in office for 13 years i can say with my hand on my heart made a serious difference to the lives of my least well off constituents but the britain you describe your cause as as food banks things have deteriorated but the britain where since the areas where we're sitting in has has food banks the britain described in the novel is primarily britain 7 or 8 years down the line based on the assumption that we do actually leave the who it is and i would say 100 percent are very very questionable but rupert murdoch is dead and i would say that a t.v. program in this book he has whereas in the. very british coup the power of media

all agog says is plain they're kind of together now the media and. the intelligence services in the friends of her perkins oh i would say early due diligence services think they can get the media around to whatever they want them to do yes i mean in a way the roles of a few of those who feature prominently in the friends of harry perkins is different from how the same characters behaved in in the original novel a very british coup and breaks it is the cause of that for example the the m i 5 has come to the conclusion that and i imagine this is probably the case anyway. that leaving the e.u. isn't in the national interest for a jewel of this book when i don't know there is the conspiracy theories feel as a conspiracy by elites and only intelligent persons as personally i like a good conspiracy what i have learned over the years is that most most of the

things that happen to bits by by the. conspiracy theory of life sure but it is in this book the intelligent so here's a little touch on the tele yes any irony here that the in the 1st book the international monetary fund was so critical in the downfall of well in a way it was seen in the left wing government here the anti democratic pressure is not from the i.m.f. the anti democratic pressure is from the remained side of british society of the british establishment there's always forces working away just under the surface on both sides of british politics i guess that's true politics in a lot of countries because jumping even further than that is is doll trump a bit like harry perkins albeit. albeit not associated with the left obviously because trump was talking about mining communities in the midwest in wisconsin the deep states and the tax on. all occasions donald trump is an unprincipled

right wing populist and harry perks. this was a principled. left wing socialist but this idea of the deep state and the status quo elites the rule frustrated me democratic design changes there's always been an establishment. the whole point about a very british coup the reason it's called very british is because although it's a coup no one actually gets killed there are no tanks in the streets it's all done behind the scenes do you think something's happening like that even before general recall when the number 10 as many of corgan supporters believe it is a conspiracy against him using the media the intelligence services the city of london businesses well i think some things have changed the media will behave badly that because they always do and they do whatever their proprietors want them to do the intelligence services i don't but so far as m i 5 is concerned that's the

internal security service i don't think they'll interfere i think they've been cleaned up since the scandals of the 1980 s. your book they were you know your book areas yes they did schmidt inquiry is changing but they are investigating today attacks or surveillance of jeremy called them i had when i was in government at the parliament personal dealings with the last 3 heads of m i 5 and but my impression was that it's an entirely different organization to what it was but i'm not so sure about is where the m i 6 that's the overseas intelligence service has been cleaned up in quite the same way we've there have been one of 2 little signs that that they might still interfere with some of them that the former head of m i 6 a man called so that to dare not have published an article on the front page of the daily telegraph saying that corbin was a threat to the nation the day before the law no on the day of the last general

election the 217 general election that's too far fetched evil for all of your this is a live one of the reasons very british coup has endured for so long is because some of the things that are in the novel actually came to pass that's to say i had m i 5 agent on the council to see india the campaign for nuclear disarmament and in 1000 a. 32 years after the novel was published that turned out to be someone called harry newton who been there all along and i had someone vesting senior employees at the b.b.c. and in 18065 years after that all was published that turned out to be brigadier von teese tone and then of course peter wright a former senior officer demo 5 votes his memoirs describing how he and a small group of his colleagues and all of them by any means. believe that howell wilson the former labor prime minister was a soffit daja and. that they'd made attempts to. to bring it down

so all of that helped keep my novel in the public eye. and since the rise of jeremy corbyn son but that speculation has started again because upon thank you after the wreck i think kick back some dodgy loans just for developing countries destroyed by the international monetary fund we expose documents from britain's national audit office the democracy itself and one of the demons of neo liberalism even stronger more than a decade after the financial crash and can they be slain all of them all coming off a bunch of going underground. foreign policy is on steroids. forced regime change like a flu that won't go away russia gave appears to have a life. welcome

back while you gave mainstream media gives you these reports on party politics like it's a game of polls and behind closed door labor tory bricks it negotiations austerity continues one reason may be that whoever won at this month's local elections the shadow of the city of london is the true determinant we have documents that may point to the fact of the city not democracy controls our access to libraries social care and aid for the most vulnerable in society joining me now is joel benjamin spokesperson for the resistance u.k. who has been investigating lobo loans for a decade joel thanks so much for coming back on we're under book because we had to be elections but in a way you know what affects every party just remind us what little balloons are and then we'll go through this document. type of complex learns they can out by local authorities and housing associations from u.k.

european. in a new way spanks the major feature of a lowbrow loan is that the banks actually have the option to increase interest rate on the local authority at a given point in peaches so they can check out the rates when you can least expect it ok and we're going to go into that more in a 2nd we have figure of 15000000000 or 16000000000 pounds but you have these new documents let's see one of them and you can maybe take us through it because i'm afraid it was raised because that doesn't tell me much sure some in over the past 2 to 3 years we've been working with local residents around the country to raise concerns about lobello needs to the extent of what is his films here like a p. and g. and you know there's a column there with s 33 and the call yeah it's are in and these are figures for 20 twentieth's is it what is this $33.00 mean sure basically what this tells us is under the freedom of information act the organization that controls a sum from ation which is the national audit office has rejected the names of all

the local authorities of lowbrow loans which they deem to be sensitive information that's a lot of us told us that they have no jurisdiction over local authority ordering and all but for the present as to what they should off been doing is having secret meetings with the order in the way of the chartered institute of public finance and accountancy to work out a kind of backroom deal for resolving this labor learned problem a council which is already saying one local authority northhampton should go bankrupt to manage this financial problem before it becomes a political problem you don't know if the redactions by the national audit office because the audit office it is and it's up to the local councils when they replied to your feeder information requests this is a request from the national audit office so this information has been obtained by for here what this means is approximately 16000000000 pounds has been or will be lost from local authority budgets because the interest rates of these loans are so much higher than if the councils have borrowed from the usual source of funds which is from the public which like

a board from the government or as they would say making good business sense for their clients i mean a lot of cash out of out of this does go to an e-mail at least less redacted arguably and. this is the one of the crucial paragraphs you think yes i mean seriously the subject the term going concern what does it tell us it tells us that the person who's seen this original which originated from a local authority we don't know which one we know it's one of the local authorities with learns from because they were the most toxic problematic loans from oh yes the bank that's only by the british tax so basically what this loan what this. is sitting out is a couple of things a local authority finance director so the person who run is the one of the central government the chartered institute of public finance and accountancy and so the local government association which is like the political body for councils and we spent so as to the people who are used to work. what was the dog of the u.k. one which is rejected. the names of the authorities or the names of people seen in

these emails have been rejected and freedom of information requests a basically is a kind of begging letter is a letter and address of a need says i fear there may be an argument at some point which will run of counts as a different do commercial organizations to the extent that international and u.k. accounting standards puts public services at risk so that this is a key paragraph so it's more or less what the accounting standards putting the council risk its effect that the councils took out inappropriate risky toxic loans from banks. and now what these new accounting standards have been brought and brought in to try and clean up all those toxic on the bank on the local authority what these orders has and what the government's arguing as if we actually apply the new accounting stain is which show you just how toxic these learns are the councils go bankrupt so what the government in the words has been talking about behind closed doors is can we bring in a waiver

a statutory override to these accounting standards so that the local authorities don't have to apply the new standard they can continue kicking the can down the road pretending. so whine and not sharing the full liabilities and the council's ok will our shadow chancellor joe mcdonald says he wants a full public inquiry investigation if corby never gets into power but in fairness to r.b.s. which i own and the british taxpayer own 62 percent of which we bailed out they've started to listen to your concerns barclays is this new yanks are coming around to understand you can see it's been some movement so i think partially because of the concern by order and by some parts of government like the national audit office it would appear there's been some pressure existed on some particular so the reason your council budget is being cut is because of in many cases criminal activity by the same banks so if it was a mere jette these counts as being screwed over again by banks or just bailed out

which is precisely a. global lines if there was to become public knowledge obviously people would not be happy about it the banks and the famous like and who are pushing these loans on the councils have never been held accountable so john mcdonnell was absolutely right to be calling for a public inquiry into this because he's been. an ongoing cover up in a face it begins to the core reason for this problem in the criminal behavior there because there is that context of the fact that london was the center of fraudulently interest rate setting as part of libel that xena status lost and these loans were on that there's a half a 1000000000 pound case leads nuke us a lot of them so all these kinds of. barclays occurring in them and one politician of this bill does one want an inquiry. what do you see is the real solution obviously the fact that these loans were paid to lie boards problematic particular . so maybe that you know the council was

a millions of pounds out of pocket because he says for leaving the interest rates the bigger issue which is the more systemic one which. as yet to be tackled any of these legal cases is that the information provided to the council was the advice given to them by the likes of capita but as i care to enter into these loans in the 1st place. to be the basis of the case i mean so that they have means that they haven't been targeted at all to date so the people who instructed the local authorities under advisory contract to go and take out a loan and transpires since we're taking europe thousands of pounds in kickbacks for doing so from the banks there's been no legal action against the treasury management advises today so what we're calling it would seem kickbacks we call them commission and i would also say that is green liberal democrat all the t's accord up and it's the main no no one is clean on this issue and partly that's because in our view is not the fault of local in many cases the local authorities themselves

national office communities and local government financial conduct authority none of these institutions take any responsibility they are fighting so many fires with this wave of austerity which is crippling the public sector what across the board benjamin thank you well if the local council budgets of the dodgers into the 28 city crash no arguably have been those of the n.h.s. english doctors now have 48 hours to sign a contract that critics say marks a demonic transformation to privatized u.s. style health care in britain joining me now via skype from chicago in the u.s. to tell us about his new book new liberalism is demons is dr adam call to go out and welcome to going underground to tell me about the book and how were these a trio as you term them catastrophes of new liberalism iraq 28 the crash trump how they are they are the big catastrophes and how clinton in sanders get their definitions of neo liberalism wrong

a lot of people understand. iraq war and the bush era as almost. exotic. where the power was suddenly asserted where sovereign emergency powers were claimed and then it was kind of over and it was taken taken over by events related to the neoliberal order specifically the financial crisis and lo and behold we're now in another crisis for instance joe biden claims it's going to just wind up being a random episode. the trumpet ministration and what i want to think about in the book is how we can think of all those things together as part of just kind of one overarching konami. that i think of in terms of neo liberalism and one reason that people tend to think of them as separate tend to think of the iraq war and bush for instance is very different the neo liberalism is that supposedly neo liberalism is getting rid of the state getting the state out of the way of the economy as though

it's simply just you know iran style libertarianism and what i want to show in the book is that actually the state has a very central role in kind of creating and in forcing markets and kind of bringing about this vision of society as dominated constantly by. market competition in every area of our lives and one kind of hints is the fact that one of the 1st things the bush administration did when they took power in iraq was to attempt to impose neo liberal best practices on iraq so if they were supposed to be different from the liberalism they didn't get the memo i want to get to. the demons in the title of the book and in a 2nd but i mean if you want to turn on m s n b c o c.n.n. the demons on the demons usual go about it this book and i do want to get on to the the demons are russia and that's why trump is there and that's the explanation of what's gone wrong in anything other than taking responsibility for creating this

phenomenon and creating the conditions that allowed trump to arise and i think this is the case for both media elite. who obviously you know stokes trumps career and his reputation at every stop and also the kind of mainstream centrist politicians who his failed policies lead to the kind of discontent that could make trump seem like a plausible solution tell me about the role of judeo christian ideas of the devil which is the reason you use the devens anyone in a chemist or pharmacy maybe choosing a shampoo you say that the creation of blame is is there in the liberalism in my book the demons are not like outside forces like putin or like evil people like trump within our own system but rather it's us the system is making us into demons and when i read the stories told about how the devil came about it seemed to me

that he was put in a situation where it was impossible where he was given this kind of meaningless arbitrary demand to just submit to god with no question and you know and when he asked questions or when he resisted a little bit he was consigned to an eternity and how and this is a very extreme case but i think that the same basic logic of entrapment works throughout the entire neoliberal system that we're confronted with these choices. and somehow. the bad outcomes that keep happening are all the result of our individual choices like we should have chosen the ad buy rimadyl a friendly tooth toothpaste that we did on climate change to destroy us all or something like this it's our fault the the opportunity of choice creates those demons and just finally do you think that if you're saying the demons are inside us as where in the supermarket doing our shopping do you think that the war is now on the cards perhaps far more of a book elliptic than iraq the main danger the optimism that there is in the book

about freedom it doesn't seem as though on in the western countries at least a mass of wars on the scale of iraq are really something that the public has any appetite for i think that it's almost they don't think really they overreach so brutally that it's been discredited what i worry about more is potentially civil war that would actually most likely be fought by the right wing chorus of those who are just never satisfied you mean within the united states within the united states like a low grade kind of guerrilla warfare on the part of right wingers this is an outcome that a lot of people thought would follow from hillary clinton taking office these are people who just who simply will not take yes for an answer and who will not settle for anything but full control and i just i honestly do not know what to do about those people because obviously in this country you are complementary of colvin but in this country we have leaks from

a senior intelligence official saying that secret intelligence cannot be shared with jeremy colvin because he is too subversive and when you look at how moderate his policies are compared to what's really needed i mean that just shows in a way how fragile the system is becoming and how even a moderate critique it is is a threat that we're reaching a point where the system has become very rigid maybe reaching a breaking point and i think the question is whether some of these are. alternatives are going to have enough energy to take power or whether the worst people in the world are going to wind up taking over and seems to be happening in the us dr adam gault thank you and that's it for the show will be back on wednesday it was full knowledge until he an ambassador to the u.k. friends of to lead us on journalistic astro if the wiki leaks founder will survive in the austerity hit so-called guantanamo britain belmont shield inc you talk about social media we'll see on wednesday.

we have a situation that is very new and that's why. it's like i feel like before the war were to when people were dying but in the morning and there was no end to the school board you know the 2 so the boy it was through to the right of the world to move and to see if the as a medic and the wide spectrum facilities would code of people today. in many diseases because of this would you fully broke up the.

100. these foreign policy chief says that it's vital not to escalate the situation. around the iran nuclear deal that's after the u.s. secretary of state stopped by brussels meeting with russia's foreign minister on tuesday says that he'll be looking for answers from my pump. it will produce tomorrow i will ask mike compare how the u.s. is going to deal with the crisis that was made by washington's unilateral decisions . prosecutors say that they will reopen the investigation into a sexual assault allegation made against wiki.