the imaginary town c.m. from london we're going underground as a covert positive boris johnson struggles to get hold of basic protection for doctors in a pandemic response characterized by washington as catastrophic coming up on the show just as a taxpayer stepped in to help the banks back in 2008 we will work with the banks to do everything they can to b.p. that fever and support the businesses the people of the united kingdom in their twenty's believe in the british government's daily press briefings on coronavirus

reveal a moral bankruptcy of capitalism we talked to the president of the u.k. faculty of public health use that phrase to characterize the response to a previous epidemic as the tory government stands accused even by a tory media of lethal incompetence disinfo nation and lies and will coronavirus destroy sleepy joe biden as john says of beating donald trump while the antibodies stand as democrats establishment threatens to risk their lives rather than put spode in tomorrow's wisconsin primary we trace how today's politics is shaped from beyond the biosphere and how november's election could be determined by an ancient american see a little more coming up in today's going underground but 1st after the u.s. a medically supported by the russian military slammed boris johnson's response to the corona virus pandemic britain faces the prospect of millions now infected because the prime minister's aborted herd immunity policy for more let's go straight to the former president of the u.k. faculty of public health professor john asked. and he joins me now via skype from

denton the yorkshire dales john thanks so much for coming on so trump officials have used the lack of ventilators to a contrast to other countries' responses to coronavirus this week we're supposed to get 30 new ventilators manufactured with much trumpeting by miss sadie's and mclaren will they make a big difference to what we're facing here in britain i'm afraid they look they're desperate shortage of ventilators has to be considered alongside the failure to test the shortage of p.c.r. machines and i understand slopes the personal protective equipment and i also understand that there's now an emerging issue about oxygen supplies for ventilating people even if we have the ventilator so. this all goes back to the failure to get a grip on this emergency right at the beginning when it became apparent that something was happening very serious at the end of january beginning of february

when the prime minister failed to convene and share kerber of the emergency committee for governments because what should have happened at that point was to take stock to get the right people around the table not just a narrow segment of science and to look and say what was likely to be coming down the track if they didn't or they would have put systematic testing in place they would have ordered all the stuff that we're now shorts of and they would have realised that in order to take the public with you our list journey into the under . this written real restrictions on freedom in a liberal democracy that they would have to be open and transparent and all these things they failed to do so we're in a really bad place as the numbers of deaths are now climbing very stately and will continue to do so over the next few weeks well you say all that but. morris

transfers office is briefing that the reason maybe we didn't get the information was that china was giving us disinfo mation that china has been their big factor here and will face a reckoning they could be considered a pariah state there is nothing about your ventilator numbers and lack of oxygen today this is the fault of beijing seems to be what's coming out of downing street i think it's very sad that we reached a situation where the failures of our own governments are being just ignored and not learnt from the lessons learnt from and rather hitting out in all directions that i think at the very beginning of this it seems as though the chinese les have been slow to recall what was going on the numbers initially from december lips of january may not have been reliable but law recently and particularly since the world health organization became involved with china the charities have been demonstrating really quite extraordinary leadership they've been sharing our line

globally all their treatment protocols all their lessons learned if only we would wake up and listen to what's been going on elsewhere and copy best practice that's the way they've been behaving here rather depending on theorists rather than seeing what works in other parts of the world i'm guessing on and during yes and following the advice of the director general of the w.h.o. to test test test and then act on the testing on social media certainly we've seen pictures of chinese medics dressed in their personal protective equipment what do you make of warnings of disciplinary action now being given to national health service staff if they dare to talk to the media about their lack of equipment is there any clinical reason for the british government or n.h.s. england to be giving such warnings the problem we interface is that the failure to be open and transparent. and test and share the data with the public coupled with

a really cold communication strategy means that there's a failure of trust the breakdown of trust between the public and the governments ironically what we're going to finish up with is law repressive and possibly totalitarian measures from a government that really sees itself as a libertarian government as a result of not taking people are naturally in agreement together as a partnership but wait a minute you have a senior position in public health in this country is there really no clinical reason why the authorities here should be threatening doctors and nurses were talking to journalists it's been a great tradition in this country going back to the origins of the national health service that doctors and other critical stuff could speak out in public if they were concerned about matters that affected their patients and the public so it's

very worrying to see this these tractor trailers in recent days where we've heard various stories of critical stuff being disciplined for speaking out about the shortage of personal protective equipment even the tory media in this country is now asking questions of their our government the government they supported do you think it's lies or do you think it's incompetence for instance when one of johnson's ministers robert general said. we don't have the religion and the right chemicals to test people and then the chemical industries association denied claims that there were shortages in is there johnson government lying or are they just incompetent i think it's very interesting development that the newspapers that normally are firm supporters of the conservative party are now beginning to criticize the government this is a public health emergency this is not a party political my. but what we've got is

a government this has laid terrible mistakes and is now covering up those mistakes by yes lying or at least being economical with the truth and restricting the history i mean this whole story of herd immunity totally preposterous notion that seem to be conjured up out of thin air even if that meant many more deaths would occur that if we were taking traditional public health measures of testing isolating quarantining tracing and really putting a lid on it as the government finds it hard to say those very simple words sorry we got it wrong we need to learn now from our experience and get it right as we go forward into this most acute part of this crisis well doctors and nurses seem to be defying the authorities here telling them to not talk to the public they're

showing pictures of their much poorer protective equipment contrasted with that found in china what about a hospital cleaners what about cafeteria workers there was a cap of 15 percent on testing i understand that's the only being lifted on all spittal stuff how important will it be to test what was recently called low skilled workers by the home secretary pretty good telia it's very important bio security and the protection against this virus is certainly a stroke as its weakest link cleaners are fundamental to bio security in a clinical environments i'm sorry to say that in this class written society of the united kingdom we tend to think the only important people are those top of the trade the doctors and the nurses and the cleaners and the courses and these are the stuff you know don't really matter very much but they are ab. salut central to

getting on top of this how significant then is the public private partnership dimension to this health service pursued by the tony blair the gordon brown government the major government made government cameron how as significant because simon stevens of course the boss of n.h.s. england used to be a boss of the us health company united health known for scandals patrick vallance senior adviser here used to work at g s k another scandal that multinational company pharmaceutical company well many of us have been worried about this progressive privatization of the national health service. from the beginning my own view is that it has a role at the margins but not much more than us and we see how difficult it is to caroll to organize so lobel our ace every think that's needed when so much of this is lower provided by private companies who will only do

things you know really if it's written into the contracts and they're being paid for it if you take public health itself local public health teams no longer have their own community public health nurses who you could use to deploy it outbreak like this in an epidemic to do the concept tracing i think when this is all over that one of the things that leads to come out of this is a fundamental reappraisal of the role of the private sector in the national health service but do you think ahead of any future public independent inquiry a regardless of what judges church has a do you think people in whitehall in the civil service let alone in government departments are already shredding documents about coronavirus actually from my time when i was a regional director of public health and we had the b.s.e. scandal. you know the police. were crawling all over white all over richmond ouse

trying to find out what had happened in meetings who'd said watts there were certain very scared officials because of the way in which a lot of the decisions have been taken you know that's 20 years ago now and so much lower is old computers and hard disks but when this is over. really i think before then the police need to be securing the evidence for what will inevitably become a very serious and low running inquiry it's a who got it wrong and what shouldn't be happening after this is that the guilty and the negligent should be rewarded for their guilt and negligence with knighthoods and dame ships and all rest of the regalia which is how the british tend city with these matters and just finally the fragmentation right now today do you think there will be people who die because of coronavirus and you can

trace their deaths to the fragmentation of the n.h.s. not envisioned at all arguably by the architect one of the architects and are in van well i'm very certain that there are already deaths that were avoidable not least among the 3 or 4 doctors that have so far died because they didn't have adequate personal protective equipment i'm very sadly we're going to see much floor of the us as this crisis unravels i should just also us for those watching who have private health insurance in britain already the insurers are a rewriting policy is to exclude coronavirus do you think there might be calls to nationalize the health insurers the private health insurers subsidised by the government enjoys like bupa after this crisis is over well you know bloopers always been an anachronism when you look at a charity then you have to ask some basic questions like. who is better to see if

it's run as a charity and over the years that paid a small proportion of medical consultants who made any notice the learns of money out of the arrangements and the other private private hospital systems which masquerade as charities i think in the 2nd well we brought together the private hospitals the voluntary hospitals and the poor spittles i'm crafted into the national health service we've hardly see yet. that's likely to happen of deaths in homes in this country because it's largely privacy it's all over the place where this is all over we need a national care service as well as a national health service reza john ashton thank you very much we always invite the head of blooper on the show to after the break we talk to professor lewis dartnell who is always warned that a pandemic was a more immediate threat to the human species than climate change about have shakes

out global political history all the more coming up about who are going on the ground. matters financial survival guide i don't buy a i pod on if you. think of the friday as of last summer buying from the future cracker kaiser. his community there are people who believe that it's ok if you don't like him it's really hard there are no jobs and you see that kids are asking and as a parent. i think. there's a lot of conflict and again between the cost of the conflict i would say. money and money has made. us why not each other. this is good because

the state of california alone makes $6000000000.00 a year of prison complexes. welcome back well while successive major nation government failed to prepare us for a viral pandemic one scholar always claimed a virus could be the biggest threat to the human species u.k. professor lewis dartnell though i caught up with sky his new book origins how the earth shaped human history traces the way ancient geology may have helped determine that it is boris johnson and donald trump who make today's life or death decisions about coronavirus i started by asking him how he always understood the threat to humanity posed by pandemics yes so might my last book the knowledge is a thought experiment it's all about how you could go about rebuilding everything from scratch if there's been some kind of reset button that's been pushed how do

you make and do all of the things that we just take for granted and our modern everyday lives and they can seat as a premise up thought experiment i imagine some kind of hypothetical apocalypse some kind of global pandemic or an asteroid strike or something like that but the end of the day the knowledge is a book isn't about the apocalypse is not about the end of the world it's about our world and how we got here and how we built it and how our civilization runs behind the scenes to provide everything that we take for granted in our lives and i think the reason this is a person at the moment is the things we're taking for granted are starting to show a little bit of a crack of a wrinkle and people going to supermarkets are finding shelves are running bare so

i think we're all starting to ask ourselves where does the stuff come from where is it may. how is it put together what is it infrastructure and supply chains that are normally completely invisible how do they actually work and. so that's what i explore in the knowledge well going back to today in your new book origins we have of course an official opposition i'm not sure of jeremy corbyn when he has the government over the response of the pandemic realizes your new book says that without 320000000 year old coalfields germy corbin's party might not even exist you're going to have to explain the what i have been looking at with this new book is all the ways that the planet itself that we live on different features of the earth have had a guiding influence and deep and profound effect on our human story so everything from what drove our evolution as incredibly intelligent apes in east

africa through thousands of years of the history of the rise and fall of different civilizations and empires and then right up as you say right up to the modern world of current affairs and the headlines you read we don't use paper over breakfast or in politics and how people choose to vote there is a very clear planetree fingerprints in political maps i give an example of this in the united states and i can trace out the outline of a ancient sea floor and where people are voting for either democrats or republicans in the u.s. and there's another very very clear discernible signal of geology of the rocks beneath our feet in british politics as well and if you look at the political map where people have voted for the labor party in the most recent election and

looking back over the decades the labor votes tend to correlate very very strongly with the rocks and if you're feet that are 330000000 years old on and on the face of it this makes no sense i could be. plants geologists are not digging in their back garden and going are but the rocks beneath my back garden are 50000000 years old that means i'm going to vote for the tories rather than for labor i want to be lefty and i've got to be conservative but what has happened is no direct effect but what has happened is there's been a long chain of cause and effect with one thing leading to the next reaching back through tens of millions of years of our planet's history and then the recent sentry's in decades of human history and culture and speciality and politics and for this particular patent for the labor vote rocks the 330000000 years old

well laid down during a chapter of earth's history called the carboniferous this is when all the coal fields were laid down something broke in the recycling system on planet earth 300000000 years ago and trees grew vigorously and fell over and died but refused to rot the millions of years trees refused to rot and built up these huge that seems of what's affectively fossilized forest fossilized sunshine that we here in britain realize the beginning of the industrial revolution we could dig up o's underground forests throw them into offline ases and power us into the modern age of industrialization and the final step and a chain of cause and effect is that the labor political party grew out of the trade unions of course and most notably the coal miners trade unions that's the final

political layer laid on top of all these deep mistrust of geology and planetary causes and arguably of the miners' strike was one of the big flashpoints against their liberalism in the eighty's the civil rights struggle in the us a. you talk about you over say you'd expect a rosa parks to refuse getting up in the bus in montgomery alabama because of where she was 75000000 year old rocks if you look at the analogous situation in the united states and there's a very distinctive crescent and arc of democratic votes in counties reaching right across the southern states cutting what across the sea of red of otherwise republican areas of the of the southern states of the u.s. and that match is very very closely with 75000000 all blacks as you say rocks laid down in the cretaceous chapter of earth's history and in that period of our past

sea levels are much much higher and the ocean laptop run through the middle of the center of north america and so rocks laid down at that period were thick sediments of sea floor model that have been buried and re exposed so that today those cretaceous rocks on this particular are and as realized in the early eighty's hundreds that those cretaceous rocks when they give you when they break down into soil give you a very very rich fertile soil for growing cash crops like cotton and unfortunately that period of history growing cotton and around the colonies meant slave labor people were thrown into chains taken from africa forced to work on plantations and in and in the colonies of the americas and even today off of the hundreds of years of history and the civil war mancipation from slavery and the

civil rights movement the greatest density of black african-americans still they have a long black band of cretaceous age rocks if you look at the map that i show you. the book in origins and the city of montgomery which is where rosa parks refused to give up her seat to a white gentleman on the bus 1000 to 55 that city is smack right in the middle of this band of pretentious a trucks is again that none chain of cause and effect from whole a texan culture and social a genie back through to geology and resources and the earth's past climate that is deep explanations the would be earth underlying everything we read about in history and these correlations with plate tectonics if they're there for civil rights and for different struggles of workers around the world they're also there for how we

came to exist as a species i mean it's not just rivers where rivers cross you talk about something far deeper literally in the earth's core yes so plate tectonics and specifically the ripping open of the skin of the earth the cracking open of earth's crust or the great east african rifai it was that tectonic landscape and climate fluctuations were living there over the last 45000000 years that drove our evolution from harry tree swinging ape like creatures into hairless naked like people upright homan in human like species and specifically it was that chaotic fluctuating environment in the rift valley based africa they drive our evolution to be so exquisitely intelligent

and when there was human migration or hominid migration from east africa given of course right now we're in the midst of a global pandemic we still don't know today why for instance the previous on. migrations in eastern africa disappeared as they went into the middle east we don't know today what wiped out the neanderthal species we don't know today what is it we don't know i mean there are all these theories of competition with the homeless happy and could it have been pandemics there right when we encountered as we migrated in dispersed around the world we encountered our sibling species when crack encountered the neanderthals we encountered other hominid species around the world and we know now that we bred with them or is not entirely clear yes is why the and the tolls then died out why did hemans why did homo sapien and why did we prevail where is neanderthals fell into extinction and what's likely to be the case

is that we simply outcompete we were more intelligent more culturally capable had better language skills but a tool use the neanderthals at least then the theory is not that it's a it's a pandemic i'm just going to ask you we've started by dogging about the fact that the british labor but he could possibly have been influenced by the geology of this country 320000000 years ago you also in the book talk about choke points in maritime routes as important today as they were so many years ago when we get back to normal again if there isn't a step change also do you think that geopolitics will continue to be descended and influenced by what happened hundreds of millions of years ago obviously tony blair was a labor leader it was a war in iraq iraq is where is a concentration of oil produced by geology yeah absolutely so so for hundreds of

years of our history it's not just been a choker fee of a land the importance of where rivers flow or where mountain ranges are locked people moving it's also been the children of the scenes of particular choke points and straights the. constrain where ships can sail makes them vulnerable during the straits and at the moment one of the most geopolitically critical spots on the planet is the straits right in the mouth of the arabian gulf or the persian gulf where a huge amount of oil flows inside oil tankers and the geopolitical concern in recent years has been that a state like iran might choose to block that strait but they could declare that they put mines in that straits an ex no longer safe oil tanker has to go down and that would have an enormous economic and political fallout and once we start

getting squashing down on that point line of crude oil which is the lifeblood of how our world works today professor lives dot thank you and keep professor lewis dartnell speaking to be there and his book origins of the earth human history is out now that's it for the show we'll be back on wednesday for the finale of this season of going underground when we speak to legendary filmmaker john pilger about global injustice is being hidden on the mainstream media coronavirus coverage until then wash your hands and join the underground on you tube twitter sound have an instagram. join me every thursday on the alex simon show and i'll be speaking to guest of the world of politics sports business i'm show business i'll see you then.

thank you. thank. you for the good go to go to. the dance we wanted.