that research subversive crime can take many forms such as human trafficking and labor exploitation environmental crime arms trafficking illegal gambling and health care fraud it's believed amsterdam's coffee shops are aiding and abetting the ugliest saw i do of the city's drug business now there are allegations that the coffee shops and sells deal back door with organized crime gangs and some being used to criminal money that has cooled for a crackdown. suppression of mockers between hard drugs and some drugs has a greater urgency because of the trade and hard drugs while many cities around the world are looking to coffee dutch cities toller and mobile m sadam itself may move away from its longstanding policy questioning whether the experiment has any contributed to drug and crime problems so let's even ski all see in amsterdam.

at all for this hour news wise but if you're looking for more head on over to our website r.t. dot com for countless articles and interviews thanks for tuning in. i mention are times you were going underground as amid an international coronavirus crisis the u.k. government unveils a budget just weeks after pm boris johnson fired his own finance minister coming up on the show is it too late to pump money into health infrastructure devastated by the tory austerity that followed the 2008 western economic crash or is britain's

new liberal epidemic of inequality killing off the poorest too quickly we speak to economist guy standing who is set to advise the jeremy corbyn government if we did 1 december general election and we ask the author of why nations fail british economist james robinson if the u.k. chancellor should today be looking to communist china for tips on reviving britain's economy plus we ask a former u.k. home office minister why a pandemic hasn't yet been declared in britain and who really stands to gain from vaccine research funded by taxpayers money all the support coming up in today's going underground 1st today marks britain's 1st budget since leaving the world's largest trading bloc the e.u. the headlines are awash with government funding to deal with the u.k.'s recent flooding and soaring rates of coronavirus but what about the poorest in our society 14000000 of whom live in poverty including 4000000 children it's a metric u.k. shadow chancellor john mcdonald will measure this budget with joining me now from geneva in switzerland is someone who has advised a shadow chancellor who has

a guy standing co-founder of the basic income earth network guy thanks so much for coming back on so after years of tory austerity the un called it callous policies driven by a political deciphered social reengineering how well prepared is the chancellor to offer policies in response to something like coronavirus well to be frank i think it's almost. irresponsible to be having a budget today the chancellor is a young man who's never had a senior government position before and he's been in the job for weeks to prepare a complex budget and an extremely sensitive moment in our modern history when we've not only got the pandemic rushing towards us but the world economy is at the very very fragile state where bad mistakes at national and international level could lead us into

a big recession i want to get to those macro level top topics in a 2nd but i'm not sure in geneva or if you've been following it but obviously boris johnson fired his defacto finance minister a few weeks ago and they say it's dominic cummings who is the real chancellor of the country so we can take maybe something from cummings's blog he said he would support ignat of income tax to boost growth what do you make of that in the indeed happens at the budget today well i i'm around the worried by the way that the government is relying very much on this shadowy figure who has not been elected dominic cummings and i think the way that the previous chancellor was pushed out of his position by having is advisors sacked i think that's very ominous when he comes to talk about a negative income tax i am surprised if he knows really what that means i don't

think we need a negative income tax in the sense that it was originally conceived by milton friedman many many years ago but i do think we need a major reform of our welfare system because universal credit is one of the most disgraceful social policies certainly in my lifetime we need to have a basic. um where every citizen has a right to basic economic security and then i think would be tremendously helpful in combat thing both the medical crisis that is associated with the pandemic and the social scryer with homelessness rising morbidity rising death rates in certain age groups and so on and and also i think we've got to realize that at this instance e.u.'s economy is stalling and the chinese are closing their

factories and we need a multilateral balanced mature approach so i think we've got a whole combination of things and to force someone who's not in an elected position to be throwing out policies on an ad hoc basis when we have a new young chancellor without any practical experience in the high level politics is meant to be delivering a budget today well i'm sure the chinese government would say their opening factories in the trump government would certainly say that the economy is doing fine but in fairness to boris johnson obviously universal credit was accepted by the electorate at the election the abolition of it which was proposed by the labor party was rejected at the ballot box if you were advising the shadow chancellor today john mcdonnell how on earth would you be able to advise coping with coronavirus given the structure immigration controls of new paid

jobs are there affecting the economy we have one of the lowest hospital beds because peter. and in fact we've lost 43 percent of them general and acute bed since 97 how how could you possibly cope with years of brown blair major in government well i think we've had 10 years. of austerity which boris johnson and his ministers backed faithfully in that period and that those 10 years of austerity have sort of held back our infrastructure denuded public social services of brazil was is and have created a perfect storm of circumstances in which a crises on top of all that leave us very ill prepared to deal with it and i think the chancellor has has a very difficult job today he's going to throw

a few bits that will appear to reduce poverty that will appear to be addressing the infrastructure program problems but those problems are the result of 10 years of under successive conservative governments supported by boris johnson and if i was still advise ing john mcdonnell and his successes in the labor party i would say that they've got to hold the government to account one of the 1st things i would do which would help combat the virus and the effect of the virus is i would overhaul the welfare system because millions of our fellow citizens are suffering from the threat of homelessness actual homelessness rising morbidity and a lot of those problems will be intensified by the virus and the effects of the virus

will be much worse because people are in such vulnerable social circumstances you see you mentioned the chancellor and just a moment for being so young the the chance let me know and be allowed to have his own advisors obviously we know he's been married to a billionaire or a billionaire's daughter he worked at gold. sachs doesn't that to help him in making his budget the former bank of england governor mark carney i think he leaves his post in a few days' time also former goldman sachs actually struck a deal to bail out goldman should a 2008 crisis repeat itself do you think we can expect anything for about tax havens and tax avoidance in the budget given his past. i don't think you should hold up too many hopes of such a set of moves you're right he worked for goldman sachs for some years didn't

distinguish himself in any way and then was involved in the hedge fund and investing in a number of american companies including private health companies which might be indicative of which way the trade deals with the united states might go and with the privatization of our n.h.s. so there are a lot of worrying signs there but i think it's too early for us to rush to judgment there's nothing wrong with being being young and inexperienced i just worry that he won't have the gravitas and weight to with stand some rather shadowy people behind him you mention privatization the doctors association union here says that not even one percent of doctors in a survey believe the n.h.s. is will prepared for coronavirus if you are advising the chancellor today would you say that all outsourced private contracts should be renationalise and brought back

into the state sector i think those those structural changes are desperately needed but i think the 1st priority must be to increase preparation for the oncoming affects of the virus i i think we're seeing the results of years of resource deprivation and privatisation. it's stealth but i think what the chancellor must do is set aside significant extra resources for responding to the immediate needs of of people who are going to be very sick and very frightened when we do need the structural changes that preserve the n.h.s. in its. original form or close to it and deep privatized what has already been privatized i think that that is a longer term challenge there's been some controversy in the united states over the bill the trumpet ministrations sponsored because of it it's impact from big

pharma in that they may be able to charge what they like for any possible scene or cure for coronavirus despite the fact the taxpayer is funding the research what do you think of those responses in these economies to coronavirus you know it may or may benefit the bottom line of big pharmaceutical companies of the expense of the population well i think that's merely the latest sign of the fact that we are living in an age of rentier capitalism in which the owners of property including intellectual property are making most of the money while most other people are struggling with low wages with fluctuating wages and loss of benefits and lack of entitlement to social services and i think that this pit in my eyes is the fragile nature of the international economy with household debt in the united states and

a record high corporate debt and also a record high the disruption to the world economy by the outcome of the virus could tip all of the the world's economy into a deep recession that will will be very similar in the intensity. the financial crisis of 2008 and i think just hope that governments and multinational organizations and multilateral organizations such as the world bank and the i.m.f. have learned their lessons from the calamitous mistakes made in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and those those mistakes included the policy of quantitative easing by which they pumped been hundreds of billions of dollars euros and pounds into the financial markets to enrich the financier's and

the big corporations at the expense of sort of really lowering the living standards of millions and millions of people will some of called it the new liberal plague reza guys antic thank you. after the break who's feeling the war coronavirus sends 2 of the world's oil superpowers russia and saudi arabia into a price battle while traders watch wrong to see you will blink and why are british special forces in syria and his u.k. coronavirus money being funneled into big pharma profits home office minister. the symbol coming up about 2 and going on the ground. the world is driven by shaped by.

the day or thinks. we dare to ask. join me every day on the alex simon show and i'll be speaking to guests of the world of politics or business i'm show business i'll see you then. welcome back his nature nations arguably fall into a state of panic amid coronavirus fears which threaten to rock the global economy what actually makes nations fail joining me now via skype from chicago is the british economist and author of why nations fail professor james robinson thanks so

much jane for coming on how resilient da the economies with a 20 can only get to a genetically began to a real contagion literal contagion like coronavirus well what you mean china i think from ups but. there's a lot so there are lots of problems about. how resilient china is you know child china has what we call extractive political institutions and they're good at doing some things but they're very bad at doing other things and getting people to cooperate with them and trust them which is essential for fighting something like this is not well or things that the chinese government is good at but china is already reporting fewer increases in numbers of cases than where you're talking to me from the united states make china is closing down some of the pop up hospital they built well it may be reporting that but i don't think we trust the information and i think one of the problems in china has been you know the lack of proper information about how many cases there are. and you know china distorts its

national income accounts it distorts its growth statistics and we know that so so i think one should be fairly skeptical about so given the fact that the w.h.o. is relying on data from china and the whole world in terms of the medical fraternity and sorority is talking about reliant on data from china you think it's not worth the paper it's written on well i don't know that but i think you know you have to prepare for eventualities which don't rely on china that china truthfully revealing information because of course some people have been commenting that since the austerity that the un has said. took over this country of the 28 crash in fact presided over by david cameron who says one of his favorite books is your book since then the numbers of beds the numbers of acute hospital beds and so on they've continued to decline and our health infrastructure has suffered so

we'd be in a much poorer position to respond to a threat like coronavirus be i'd be quick to add that you know we in no way into 'd all stock david cameron's policy and he certainly didn't derive it from our book certain you know i mean we emphasize a lot how critical public services are and invest. and in public services and i think this this virus is a kind of wake up call you know this we had a bolo but a bowler started in sierra leone you know work week which you can easily lock down but you can't so easily lockdown will happen and and so so i think you know we should rethink this will lead us to rethink lots of decisions that we've made perhaps about health and investment in services that were too short sighted but everyone seems to agree that china has been swiftest and being able to respond to coronavirus and that's why it effectively in terms of the crisis over as it will soon be in south korea what implications does this have for the kind of things

you've been writing about when it comes to liberty should we be taking lessons from the communist party of china. i don't think so i mean you know to the extent that draconian measures banning movement and you know closing things are attractive from an epidemiological point of view then the chinese government is good at that you know the chinese government is very good at locking up hundreds of thousands of people and forcing people to live in certain areas you know in france has italy of course have banned all the movement as well do you think that. think that a response like one made on c n b c b by a presenter saying instead of having stocks losing value week to week in the crisis being eaten on gated better to give coronavirus to everyone have it all sorted out and the death toll in terms of morbidity will be the same as it would be over months rather than days or do you think that is a some kind of a free market. for

a lot of the gone mad when it comes to coronavirus yeah i think the best evidence we have for example with respect to the spanish flu after the 1st will war was you know within the united states at least the more rapid public health interventions were in public health measures to lower the mortality rate was so i you know i think the idea that the mortality rate is kind of independent of these public health interventions is just factually incorrect so i mean obviously people are talking about super tuesday coronavirus do you think the long term implications of say the oil war as it's been termed between saudi arabia and russia will be considered a bigger deal than coronavirus in the medium term that you know there's a strategic calculation being made by russia about you know the not the us is now the world's biggest oil producer which is probably the 1st time it's been like that maybe it was like that in the late 19th century back in the days of rockefeller but

but you know i think that but that the fracking and many of these techniques for producing oil in the united states are only vial. bill that relatively high prices so i think one of the strategies behind keeping prices low is to make the u.s. a little production and profitable so it's a kind of long run geo political and economic strategy that the russians are playing i don't know quite how disastrous that it was the price of oil tends to be if when the price of oil it's low that's for the good for the economy so i would think that the short term effect at least is positive not negative which is different from coronavirus professor james robinson thank you well joining me now to give you some of the week's top stories is former u.k. home office minister norman baker norman welcome back to the program obviously appalling he has arguably coming from italy and from other countries about coronavirus but some people are making money out of it it's not all stock markets plummeting oil prices plummeting when people with money from anything into montreal

make any money out of it are not making enemies of the tragic situation so this is prompted this big pharma to stem the coronavirus crisis an industry hope to win him over for good and in a sense trump is in a difficult situation because he's been attacking a pharmaceutical industry in the usa to be exploiting the position and the states making too much money and here you're going to go to them cap in hand and say can you help me out with this particular medical situation that the states and embryos now has i mean i understand that the bill originally in the united states was supposed to protect price gouging by the big pharmaceutical companies after the taxpayer paid for the or indeed for the vaccines or the or the cure for coronavirus over here do you think there's a degree of lobbying in the restaurants of westminster where big pharmaceutical companies are saying give us the taxpayer research and development money and then you can pay to look at the bottom line is that what the public need to any particular point to not necessarily commercially what a pharmaceutical company wants to produce the same thing it's not the reason the

reasons we have for not to inaction on the antibiotics for example over the years because of no money in it particularly the. the period of development to so long and the payback is short if you're taking a commercial view so therefore the government whatever government it is has to be involved in to encourage on the uni's matters the issue then comes that if the couple to put the money in who gets a profit thereafter who are asking why do you think it's not a pandemic is concerned as considered by the w.h.o. well this is rise of what i told while the cause of epidemic around the pandemic and if you look at the dictionary a pandemic appears to be more serious and implies that the contagion takes place away from the original source but one thing is for sure coronavirus well being tragic for thousands of people around the world is is a good thing for some people arguably because perhaps less attention to this there might have been paid thanks a group yes here's our 11 time try to avoid the walking disaster that is prince andrew prince andrew hans-peter shots or pinochet lawyers f.b.i.

pursues probing the royals leads with paedophile epstein and of course what's happened here is that prince andrew after disasters interview on the b.b.c. . presenter non-grata he was told not to be a member at all family in any public sense i didn't think i would hear the commonwealth he didn't see the westminster abbey on monday. doesn't he but he also said under pressure forty's after that terrible interview that he would cooperate with the f.b.i. and give him every possible assistance well it's very possible sort of short of actual help because what he's done has been keeping well out of the way and now employing so we're told a specialist in extradition in terms of legal qualifications to try and stop him being taken to the u.s. to answer questions always or even answer them here but he denies all the allegations and as you say it does appear that he doesn't want to voluntarily submit to questioning in the united states but why would he think of hiring pinochet's lawyer the british backed dictator of chile response of the torture and disappearance is a sensitive people the answer to your question is of course that pinochet was

successful in that particular case and prince andrew did out things you can be successful as well in avoiding any so. from justice or accountability for what he did ok well 11 institution that has a lot of good p.r. and really knows how to do p.r. arguably we invite the israeli ambassador to london on this program is the government of israel this look at this from her rants this is actually in my view the most serious and disgusting story we're covering today 42 knees in one day israeli snipers open up about shooting in gaza protesters you know this is totally inhumane and for a democracy like israel which is disgusting you know ones are not that are in any way the course of right to exist and i'm not denying also that in some ways the arab states have been there almost had a 1000000 tons of denying the right of israel to be searched but there's no excuse for this sort of behavior on all what exactly has happened because this hasn't been really covered it is written as record sales to israel's obviously we have a robust sales strategy the government says and we've been selling weapons to the

israeli defense forces what do you what is this evidence and what is proved we have it what's happening here are the israeli defense forces on the border who are told to take care of the palestinians by shooting the kneecaps rather than anything else and there's lots of pictures of palestinians walking around lost boys who have one leg i'm sure that it's going to be almost a game it's like a game in a fairground to see how many they can pick off it's a contest and they're not treating palestinians as human beings this is a subspecies now for these israeli soldiers but are sort actually what i want to have before once when i had to regularly was in my council days and what worried me i was not the way the animals were killed it was a deadness in the eyes of the men who were there undertaking the killing oh if you kill every day and shoot every day people you lose any sense of morality and sense of compassion that's what's happening here well. he said he corroborates what has

been found by the united nations in investigators of course then as in coronavirus . may have appeared in gaza the largest open air prison camp on earth i'm not sure whether international corporate news values allow for that story to emerge i don't know what it will or not but i do know that what we have in the west bank and gaza is now an apartheid regime so look south africa which had been created by the israelis want to liberally well britain has at least been saying that the military may be involved in our fight against coronavirus but this story from the daily mirror suggests that we have soldiers that the parliament doesn't particularly know about in syria are you trying to save s. us soldier wounded and all you teach splosion in syria whether it's be just on the practice for what i guess is doing in syria well i mean we don't know what they're doing in syria but it's been standard practice for us to use acts against people on the cover in all sorts of reason in all sorts of situations in the middle east

where for decades you're a home office minister and you know or do you know that there are special forces in countries that may be related in some way to a policy that you may be carrying out or britain has been talking about foreign policy that much per se except only grab visited turkey don't you just read one in saudi arabia of course where there's quite a lot of instability being well that wasn't a home office matter it was a foreign office matter but i do suppose the foreign office even knew themselves over for a few minutes knew themselves they would regard these i think the army others as operational matters so even the prime minister might not know the only also the i mean this probably is probably an overarching. authorization for the prime minister or for the foreign secretary for particular actions to be taken place in a general sense and then the detail of it is left to the army to sort out its own big thank you adam for the show will be back on saturday ahead of the one year anniversary of mass demonstrations in damascus that were hijacked by international proxies to ferment the syrian war that killed wounded or displaced millions until

that he went on to answer for me to join you on the ground or use your twitter satellite instagram and. facebook. what is the difference between embarrassing gaffes and elder abuse joe biden certainly excels at the former and maybe is the big game of the latter we are told mention of mental health is off limits to what degree is the public the right to know. i'm. going to. open up.

a little such. as the coronavirus takes hold around the globe the world health organization that labels the outbreak as a pandemic. also this hour and the latest of what appear to be a politically motivated attacks in germany a car of a prominent right wing politician is torched and berlin. over a car set on fire all. the. attacked you can be sure this is an attack against a 50. and joe biden records another strong performance in the latest wrong on the u.s. democratic party presidential primaries look at how the establishment favorite appears to be the chosen one despite some embarrassing moments.