Love Island for geopolitics.
The leaders of the world's richest nations have arrived
for the first face-to-face summit since the pandemic began.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II:
BORIS JOHNSON: Yes. Definitely.
It is vital that we don't repeat the mistake of the last great crisis,
the last great economic recession in 2008.
We don't repeat the mistake of 2008.
REPORTER: The crowd are attacking a branch of the RBS bank.
Our society still scarred by too much unfairness and inequality.
The fat cats, they rob all money.
What do we want? CROWD: Thieves out!
When do we want it? CROWD: Now!
I still ask myself, what else could have been done
in those circumstances?
The sense of anger and alienation that wasn't appearing
in any of this consensus was there, on the streets.
What I wanted to do was use the political honeymoon that you get
after an election to do the hard stuff.
George Osborne needs to stop drinking the Kool-Aid.
He got it wrong.
The government just poured enormous quantities of money into the system.
Those of us in private equity got incredibly wealthy.
In one day, basically,
I've made as much money as my dad made in his whole career,
and it just was, pff.
Owners of assets have all made out like bandits.
Every month! I scrape by to make a living every month!
Those at the top have never done better,
but average wages have barely budged.
This was us saying, actually, you didn't look after us,
you neglected us, you treated us badly and here we are.
The big winners of the last ten-to-12 years
have been those at the top. It's a very simple story.
The fact that we've got nurses going to food banks...
We have fought against the multinationals.
We fought against big politics.
CHEERING
People felt we'd been told that we should accept the discipline
of a market economy and it wasn't being applied to the elite.
There's one rule for the rest of us, but a different rule for the elite.
Well, it was a Tuesday morning, 7th of October.
It was a pretty dramatic day.
I was working at the US investment banking arm of RBS.
What I saw from the inside was a prime example of a bank run amok.
On the 7th of October 2008, management was missing.
There was just nobody around and it was... Clearly,
they were in meetings, trying to figure out what was happening.
I took a call from Tom McKillop,
who was then the chairman of RBS.
And, you know, what he said shook me to the core.
Probably the most scariest call I've ever taken.
And he said, "Look, we're haemorrhaging money.
"We're going to run out of money this afternoon,
"in about three hours' time."
I metaphorically signed a cheque for £36 billion,
which we lent to the Royal Bank of Scotland.
There was no argument about it. The game was up.
You either did what was necessary and did it quickly
and did it on a greater scale than anyone expected,
or it would not work.
We never thought this could happen.
You know, we thought the banks were a safe bet.
We never thought they could go under. And, by the way,
when they go under, they take the rest of the economy with them
unless you stop and intervene.
We would have faced, in effect, financial Armageddon.
That was not a difficult decision to make.
Without that, the economy would have completely gone under.
I think that was the right decision.
However, as with most things, there are unintended consequences
and the effects of recapitalising the economy to the extent they did
was that the rich survived, and indeed got richer.
Full disclosure - the hedge fund industry
was a big beneficiary of the bailouts.
All of the financial system benefited from the bailouts.
In some ways, it's obvious that if you plonk
a whole lot of money into the system,
it's going to end up going to those who've got money.
But in some ways, it's not. And the way it's not
is that government assumes that money goes in
and it gets spread equally.
Rather than realising that money goes in and it gets attracted
to money. If you've got money and more money appears,
you will get it.
The solution that Wall Street faction are pushing
is to make sure assets increase,
stocks for particularly real estate, hard assets,
and do it with zero interest rates, with bailouts, etc,
paid for by the working class.
So I said,
if history shows us anything on a financial collapse like this...
..populism... The answer will be populism.
The massive amounts of money that were put into the banking system...
..none of this would ever have been done
for other kinds of companies.
This seemed deeply unfair.
And it is deeply unfair,
and it created that sense of anger which continued
way beyond the immediate end of the financial crisis.
It's official, then -
the UK is in recession for the first time since 1991.
Waving goodbye as the shutters come down
on the final day of trading for Woolworths.
Corus now joins an ever-growing list of major manufacturers
in Britain, such as Honda, Waterford Wedgwood and JCB,
which are buckling under the strain.
850 agency workers have lost their jobs at the BMW car plant.
The way that it's been done to you people is a disgrace.
JEERS AND SHOUTING
In early 2009, the banks, although they'd been recapitalised,
didn't renew loans and didn't make new loans,
so the money supply was contracting.
Quantitative easing was a sort of strange term,
and it was quite interesting -
when it was first used in Parliament by Alistair Darling,
a lot of MPs said, "What is it?
"What's quantitative easing? Does anybody know?"
And they all went around saying
quantitative easing is a very good thing.
Most of them hadn't got a clue what it was.
At the time, quantitative easing was known as unconventional monetary
policy because it was... It just wasn't used - unconventional.
But we decided it would work.
It was an entirely new experiment.
The ideas for how to operate that originated with the central bank.
INTERVIEWER:
It was the Bank of England.
Let's be clear about what quantitative easing is.
It is basically about putting more money into the economy.
Alistair Darling was upset that we didn't go on television
immediately after 12 noon to explain QE when we started it.
Frankly, most people didn't need to know about QE
before six o'clock.
The severity of Britain's recession has forced the Bank of England
into taking unprecedented action.
It's literally creating £75 billion in the next few months
to get money moving around the economy again.
March of 2009, I got a phone call.
I was asked by the Fed
whether I would manage the largest financial markets intervention
by any government ever in world history -
a $1.25 trillion programme.
It felt as if any day we could actually break
the financial markets.
The level of cash, the level of money printing
that the Fed was doing to try to deal with the crisis
and to try to help was incredible.
It was up to $8 billion to $10 billion a day of bond buys.
And my job was to figure out how to actually spend that money.
We kept the economy going.
People who'd otherwise have lost their jobs didn't.
In 2009, it certainly did work,
because we prevented a repetition of the Great Depression.
All this newly printed monies is being siphoned off
into the purchasing of guilt.
The quantitative easing measures are helping
add to the process of recovery.
The government just poured enormous quantities of money into the system.
The money had to go somewhere,
and it increased the value of assets.
So all of a sudden, those of us in private equity
got incredibly wealthy.
The particular form of QE benefits above all banks,
who have lots of assets, which are inflated by QE,
and people with assets generally,
which includes, you put it in the property market,
people who own companies,
people in investment management, like me.
Owners of assets have all made out like bandits.
2009, very quickly, I saw that the Fed's programme wasn't working
entirely the way that it was planned.
For the amount of money being spent,
it was a very small percentage that was actually getting out
and making a difference in the lives of everyday people.
Huge amounts of the resources coming out the banking sector
are going into other financial institutions,
they're going into real estate,
and it's not doing the job
of funding the rest of the real economy.
If you like, it was a shot of adrenaline.
When we introduced it, I believed it would last for a couple of years
and that's it. Because I remember saying to my officials,
"What do we do in two or three years' time to unwind this?"
And they said, "Well, it hasn't been done before. Let's see."
APPLAUSE
HOST: Good evening and welcome to the first election debate.
If we do things differently, we can create the fair society,
the fair country, we all want.
An economy no longer held hostage by greedy bankers.
We've just been going through the biggest global financial crisis
in our lives, and I believe we're moving on a road
to prosperity for all.
We're all in this together.
The 2010 election campaign was the most weird experience.
I was knocking on doors in my constituency, as candidates do,
and I've got to look them in the eye and say, "Well, you know,
"we'll do our best," and things like that,
knowing full well we were campaigning
to cut public expenditure,
and Alistair Darling said as much.
He said we're going to make massive cuts in public expenditure.
It was absolutely obvious in 2010
that whoever was going to be the government
was going to have to deal with the budget deficit.
ARCHIVE: It's still unclear who is going to be leading the country,
but I can tell you that we are going to be heading for a hung parliament.
It may all hang on just a handful of seats.
This is the first coalition government in Britain for 65 years.
United behind three key principles -
freedom, fairness and responsibility.
The economy is still struggling to get to its feet.
The public finance is in a mess.
Our society still scarred by too much unfairness and inequality.
I remember, shortly after entering into Whitehall, a sort of
expressionless Treasury official saying to me, very calmly,
"You do realise, Deputy Prime Minister, that the," you know,
"the toxic debts of the British banking system
"are five times the size of the whole British economy?"
And, sort of, the blood drained from my face.
I remember receiving from my private secretary a really significant paper
on the first day I think I was in the Treasury.
They were inviting us in a fairly clear direction,
because there was sort of option A, B, C.
The option A looked sort of so modest
in terms of the amount of fiscal tightening
that it would have almost no impact on restoring confidence,
and it was described in those terms by the Treasury officials.
It was clear they didn't want us to pick that option.
Option C was so extreme in the opposite direction
that I think any government trying to implement the degree of tax
increases, spending cuts and fiscal consolidation
would have been out of power within a couple of weeks.
And it was clear, therefore, that we were being steered to Option B.
One of the greatest myths - I would go further than that,
falsehoods - in the way in which economic policy in this country
has been conducted over the last decade or so,
which has been... You know, history has been rewritten.
There's an assertion that somehow there was a debate or a dispute
about whether we needed to make significant fiscal savings.
That's not...not the case.
CHANTING
Block the streets! Whose streets? Our streets!
SCREAMS
These people have stolen not millions, not billions,
but trillions of dollars to bail out the banks,
the bankers and their bonuses.
Why can't you find a fraction of the money to bail out the workers?
George Bush had been there -
at the beginning of the crash, had been replaced by Barack Obama.
Now you had the Conservative government in Britain.
Everyone knew you had to deal with the budget deficit.
The question was, how fast?
My plan was to halve the deficit
during the course of the following Parliament - to 2015.
Because I thought that was at a rate that was acceptable,
that it was doable and would not crash the economy.
The Tories said, "No, we want to eliminate the deficit
"in the course of five years."
There were three options available to any government,
and you could mix them to get to the right balance.
One was you basically look to pump prime the economy.
Because, if you could do that, you increase tax receipts
and that allows you to bear down on the deficit.
The other was to take cuts and to try and cut your way through this.
And the third was to increase taxes.
We chose to heavy... Go heavy on cuts.
I thought that, in the state in which the UK was -
very strong fiscal austerity and the numbers were very scary -
was the wrong decision.
And I communicated that felt opinion very strongly inside the Fund.
And at the top, Christine Lagarde was a good friend of Osborne.
And I think she didn't quite know which way to go and was reluctant
to send a very negative message to Osborne at the time.
Osborne was a good friend of the IMF.
You're careful with your friends.
To back down now and abandon our plans
would be the road to economic ruin.
And there was a political aspect -
those were very courageous decisions.
Courageous decisions can be stupid
but are courageous, and people reward courage.
He convinced markets that he was tough,
that he was taking the right decisions.
Markets...approved.
It looked like a man who knew where he wanted to go,
and maybe he thought this was the right thing to do.
INTERVIEWER: That became the Coalition catchphrase.
Who coined that? No, I think it was...
I think it was a... I think it was an Osborne phrase.
Um... Yeah, yeah.
And, look, I mean...
It's one, of course, I believe in, and I feel we acted on it
much more than I think often is acknowledged.
I thought it was very important that the better-off people
in society bore the burden of the austerity.
And that's why I had the phrase "we're all in this together".
We all bought the Kool-Aid that we had to...
We had to give some lip service to austerity.
There was no questioning about whether austerity
was the right thing.
The question was, who bore the pain?
ARCHIVE: They marched all afternoon.
Those at the end arriving several hours after those at the front.
Protesters poured into London in their thousands,
standing up to the cuts.
Cut the bankers, not public services!
My brother, who has severe autism, got a letter
saying that his benefits were being cut dramatically.
And I just remember thinking,
"Why is my brother essentially paying for this crisis
"caused by a bunch of bankers?"
Literally that week, I'd read that
Vodafone had been let off a tax bill,
and it just seemed completely bonkers to me that these huge
corporations that could easily pay their fair share of tax
weren't paying their tax. And then people like my brother
were having to kind of foot the bill, essentially.
When I first became the chair of the Public Accounts Committee
in 2010, I actually thought it was going to be quite dull.
One of the first people who came up to me was David Davis,
who had been chair of the Public Accounts Committee before.
And then he poked a finger at me and he said,
"Vodafone. Look at Vodafone's tax affairs."
I joined the legal department of HMRC.
HMRC's work in collecting tax is called compliance.
When it came to large companies, they call it cooperative compliance.
Instead of taking tax disputes to courts for decisions,
you settle it in secret deals.
HMRC entered into a series of deals with large companies.
The first one that was entered in the summer of 2010
was with Vodafone.
I just got really angry, and I was, you know, I kind of was talking
to some friends about it and they'd mention UK Uncut
and this kind of group of people that were coalescing
around inequality and were upset about the cuts
and upset about tax avoidance.
And I said, "I'm in."
The government is letting corporations like Vodafone
get away with not paying taxes, and cutting our public services,
so we're telling Vodafone what we think of it.
The fat cats!
They rob all money!
Once again, the state steps in to protect our corporations.
We all pay our taxes. I pay my tax, you know?
One day, she'll pay her tax, and that's a good thing.
We should pay taxes and we should give back to society.
But why shouldn't Vodafone pay their taxes?
What do you reckon to what's going on here today?
No, this is...this is daylight robbery, to be quite honest.
Because you find most people, you owe council tax, maybe £5,
they take you to court and they want to charge you more.
So why don't they charge Vodafone as well?
Most taxpayers will have had experience of how HMRC
deal with them, you know -
very strict and demanding every penny involved.
So to see large companies
being given secret sweetheart deals,
they probably didn't like that.
One day, we got a tip-off that Dave Hartnett, the HMRC boss,
was going to be at this posh kind of gala dinner in Oxford College,
celebrating his work on his tax achievements.
So we thought, well, we obviously have to gate-crash that.
Just last-minute checks.
Everyone's looking smart.
And let's go and see Mr Hartnett.
So we kind of got on tuxes and posh dresses
and we pretended to be Vodafone executives.
We had kind of Vodafone badges on us and stuff, and we snuck in.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but if I can take a few moments of your time...
And we presented Dave Hartnett, much to his embarrassment,
with a kind of golden handshake award for his lifetime achievement
and his services to corporate tax avoidance.
Thank you. APPLAUSE
These people are trespassers...
# For he's a jolly good fellow
# And so save all the tax. #
Go. You're trespassing. So sorry...
You are trespassing scum. Go.
No, Robert! Cool it.
We did get some changes in how, if there were deals struck
between a particular taxpayer and the tax authorities,
the person who struck the deal couldn't then sign it off.
CHANTING: Pay your tax! Pay your tax!
Because if big corporations don't pay a fair amount of tax,
there is less money around, or other people have to be taxed more,
to keep public spending going.
NEWS REPORT: Despite making hundreds of millions of pounds each year,
the companies pay relatively small amounts to the government.
UK-based companies should be telling us exactly where they undertake
their activity and where they make their profits.
So there was noise in the system and there was the beginnings
of exposure of big corporations
paying derisory sums of money in tax.
CHANTING: All week, Occupy Wall Street!
I was watching Occupy Wall Street unfold on the television,
and it was really motivating and moving to see that people,
rather than sitting and being frustrated and angry and screaming
at the television like I was frequently doing,
they actually got up and did something.
And so I said to my sister, "I think we should go and get involved."
We weren't there to bring a solution,
we were there to announce that the problem had grown too big
to ignore any further.
This is the beginning!
I mean, when you think about - we bailed out the banks.
At what point did we bail out the planet, bail out the people,
bail out education, bail out health care?
But no, no, we'll bail out the banks and hope for a trickle down.
I thought the Occupy movement and the anger
against the financial system was fully justified.
That financial crisis demonstrated
banks know that they're too big to fail.
If everything goes wrong, they will be bailed out.
It just seemed obvious to me then, as it does now,
that just sometimes, for the country's sake,
you've just got to take pretty difficult decisions,
take them as fairly and reasonably
as you possibly can,
but you've got to crunch through.
And, of course, that means that people will shout and scream.
There's a real sense of unfairness that you have a banking crisis
caused by the bankers and the whole country is suffering.
But the truth is, you're telling people a lie
if you say 99% of people can be better off if we punish the 1%.
You know, the maths doesn't work.
We were evicted, I think, in the February.
Did we achieve anything?
Oh, so much. So much.
To us, I suppose, and certainly to me,
I felt - we are the 99% -
felt like there was maybe 1% with power, control and authority
who were pulling the strings of the rest of us.
And Occupy pulled the conversation back a bit.
It pulled it back to real humans.
This was us saying, actually, you didn't look after us,
you neglected us, you treated us badly and here we are.
It wasn't quite as simple as the Occupy movement had suggested,
but I think it certainly resonated with the deeper
and more justified concerns.
The banks were seen as the elite. I mean, they WERE the elite.
The people who ran the banks, the big banks in the UK,
were very powerful politically as well.
And all of this merged with the picture
that the very powerful people
were the ones who were being bailed out
but the people who weren't powerful were not bailed out.
We had what is called the Traders Offsite,
which is where all the traders in the world get together,
have a bit of a jolly up
and talk about what we're going to do that year.
And that year, early 2011, it was held in a country manor
in, I think, Hertfordshire.
When we went in, I couldn't believe what they...
They gave us, um...
They gave us these hats - these hats here -
saying on the front, "Go big or go home."
And the idea behind this is,
if you're willing to take a bet in $1 million,
take it in $10 million.
If you back yourself for $1 million, do it in 10.
Telling us all, like, take way more risk.
And I couldn't believe it, right, that they gave...
Because it's only two years after we - the bank, basically -
brought the world economy to its knees by taking too much risk.
The main way that people discussed the financial crisis
on the trading floor
was not really as though they were active participants in it.
It was more that they were trying
to, you know, come up with trade ideas
that they could sell to hedge funds and pension funds
that were kind of like positions that these firms could take
that would help hedge them against the risk.
But there really was just, sort of, no remorse there.
It was just... Just another... Just another trade idea.
They're incentivised to just take a load of risk.
And they know, if it doesn't work out, they're already millionaires,
they're not going to lose out. They might get a bailout anyway,
so they just want us all to take a ton of risk.
Oh, yeah, I've never claimed to be,
like, a great sort of moral philosopher, but this is...
It's taking the piss, to be honest, isn't it? Really.
It became, you have to comply with this regulation now.
You have to be squeaky clean.
There's nothing... There's nothing that they should be able to get
on you to make it look like you don't take it seriously.
That was how you had to performatively behave.
But the idea that everyone at banks thought that all the rules
were sensible and put in place in a sensible way
is just not how it was.
I mean, I took massive amounts of risk as a very young trader,
and because I was making money nobody really questioned it.
Risk management got a little bit tighter as I got...
..as I got a bit older.
So the incentivisation on traders is not to,
like, take massive bets and win.
Traders now have massive salaries and not big bonuses.
I think what was really the most nail-biting moment of the Coalition
was that the plan just wasn't working
for the first couple of years. It just wasn't working.
ARCHIVE: ..seems to be the growth of the working poor,
and these are people who have had their hours cut
or who have very recently lost their jobs
as a result of the hard economic times.
The new and alarming phenomenon -
thousands of people going to US-style food banks
because they can't afford to feed themselves.
As the parliament went on, as 2010 turned into 2011 and 2012,
the issue that really did concern us about the economy
wasn't so much about whether we were doing deficit reduction fairly,
because we felt that we were doing it as fairly as possible.
It was the difficulties we faced because of the disappointing
economic growth figures in 2011 and 2012,
and that is where most of the economic worries
of the Coalition parties focused.
The Bank of England has decided to intervene again.
In its latest round of quantitative easing,
it will inject another £50 billion of cash into the financial system.
When one looks at quantitative easing and the effect it's had,
those with assets have obviously become wealthier.
This is very, very basic economics.
It's, you know, frankly, it's A-level economics at most.
Well, QE is really difficult, this printing money,
because its purpose is that people who already have something -
like a house or a pension or some shares -
will see the value of those things go up.
That's what the policy is designed to do.
And it feels unfair because the people who don't have those things
aren't getting the benefits of the policy.
But, ultimately, I came to the conclusion
it's better to try and keep the economy floating
rather than let everything crash.
I think an active decision was effectively made to support...
..those with assets.
INTERVIEWER: What did you think QE was supposed to do,
and did you feel that it achieved that?
I was in favour at the time, strongly.
We all hoped that, because of the sheer scale
at which this was operating - I mean, the scale of it was just huge,
far greater than anything we could do in terms of tax and spend.
I think it's obvious now that consequences have not been
as-as-as positive as I would have liked.
I... I still ask myself, what else, you know, could have been done
in those circumstances?
I wanted to understand why this recovery wasn't happening.
And I started to think, well,
these rich people are not going to boost the economy,
cos they get the money.
All they're doing is buying houses, buying stocks and shares.
So what's probably going to happen is, house prices are going to go up,
stock prices are going to go up,
the economy is not going to recover.
And I started to bet very heavily
that, actually, there'll never be a recovery.
On the back of this bet that there will never be an economic recovery,
I became Citibank's globally most-profitable trader
in foreign exchange and short-term interest rates.
Early 2013, there was a huge amount of pressure on us.
It felt like the economy wasn't moving forward.
We kind of thought, take these difficult decisions,
set them out, let the monetary authorities
significantly reduce interest rates,
pour money into the economy and things will come good.
It didn't work. It wasn't working.
Lending money was not happening, and that included lending money
to people who wanted to buy their first home.
So this Budget makes a new offer to our aspiration nation,
and what symbolises that more than the desire to own your own home?
Today, I can announce Help To Buy.
Help To Buy was introduced to help first-time buyers
get on that housing ladder.
George asked me to put together some thoughts on the nature of mortgage
lending and its fundamental role within the economy.
And the thing which I set out there is that -
and it's quite a paradox to understand -
that more easy mortgage lending is good up to a certain point.
And then beyond that point, it's bad.
All of us at the Bank of England
felt that the problem with Help To Buy
is that it doesn't in itself increase the supply of houses.
And it may well push up the price of houses
because people have got more money to spend on houses.
It makes other future first-time buyers
even further priced out of the market.
And it's politically very sensitive, because people like -
of course, who doesn't? -
living in a home, thinking, "Oh, look, it's gone up in value again."
House prices have risen by an average of 8.4% over 2013.
So if you had a house, you suddenly became...
Well, we created more millionaires through house price inflation
than anything else.
And for people under 40,
the number who could afford to buy their own house halved.
The rich are obviously winning. Poor people are obviously losing.
But there's this real problem, I think, where people in the middle
are seeing their house prices going up.
They think they're winning, but it's going to cause their kids
and their grandkids to not have homes to live in.
The scheme, that had its critics at the time, has been incredibly
successful since at getting loads of families onto that housing ladder
who otherwise just simply couldn't afford the large deposits
that the mortgage companies were asking for.
Reliance on galloping property price increases is neither fair
nor economically sensible, and it's something that I certainly
don't think the Coalition got this one right.
But I think it's... Actually, I don't think it's one
that any government so far has got right.
My job was to look at the economy and take the temperature.
Is it good? Is it bad? You know, I come from a poor background.
My friends come from poor backgrounds,
my family comes from a poor background.
I can see how ordinary people are being affected.
But now I'm a millionaire, right, and I'm sitting down
and I'm looking at the economy and I'm saying,
"Well, what do I think's going to happen?
"I think it's going to be a disaster.
"I think it's going to be rubbish for years, for decades."
And I could bet on that again,
and I can make another million quid, again.
But then, after the money hit the bank,
it just didn't feel right, basically, any more.
I know it has been hard for families since the crash.
It's not a case of not understanding these difficulties.
It's a case of being honest about why things are difficult.
So here's another hard truth -
welfare cannot be protected from further substantial cuts.
There were lots of people across the country
who were feeling the pain of this.
And it wasn't just austerity,
it was the fact that austerity came
at the very time that wages were stagnant.
The Conservatives realised that they were, you know,
not unsurprisingly, you know,
reacquainting themselves with the sort of nasty party reputation.
So the Conservatives started talking about inequality
because they realised it was politically convenient to do so.
I'd been doing so incessantly since the first day.
Under this government,
income inequality is at its lowest level for 28 years.
Under Labour, inequality widened. With us, it's narrowed.
The real party of compassion and social justice today
is not the Labour Party,
it's the party here in this hall - we Conservatives.
Thinking about what we could do on the minimum wage,
I actually went to the Low Pay Commission and said,
"What about a big increase in minimum wage?"
It was pretty striking
that the Living Wage was actually introduced
under a sort of Osborne-Iain Duncan Smith-Cameron-type administration.
And that reflects, I think, a greater recognition
that wealth and income growth is not always shared
as it should be across society.
Everyone was willing to suck up a bit of inequality
as long we were all being lifted up.
As long as that stopped,
the very logic of that model, I think, broke down.
BOTTLES SMASH
Inequality is increasingly on the global community radar screen.
Those at the top, they have never done better,
but average wages have barely budged.
Inequality has deepened.
ARCHIVE: This was the scene in Athens ahead of a crucial vote.
Clashes erupted during an anti-austerity protest
close to parliament.
HUW EDWARDS: Yanis Varoufakis, the new Greek finance minister,
visits Downing Street.
Inequality is discussed a lot more than in the past,
because even those who are benefiting from it
find it very hard to justify it.
The little people suffer greatly.
More and more and more,
they have to accept third-rate-quality jobs, if any,
whereas, the rich, they are fabulously
more wealthy than they were before.
Just look at the math. You've had the greatest concentration of wealth
in the history of the world on people's backs,
and it's just not right. It's unfair.
And I would say it's actually evil.
I thought, "All right, the problem's inequality.
"We're not going to fix it."
I started to feel like...
..I needed to tell someone.
Like, if you know a disaster is going to happen,
you need to say something, right? You know what I mean?
Like, if you know your neighbour's house is going to burn down,
you don't bet on it. You tell them, right?
And then my boss called me in for, like, a half-yearly meeting.
I hadn't even planned it and I just said,
"I don't think I can do this any more.
"I think I need to quit."
I think most people would have guessed that,
if you put two political parties together for five years,
lock them in coalition at a time of austerity,
by the last Cabinet meeting
they'd be absolutely at each other's throats
and determined to part company.
Actually, I think most of the people sitting around that Cabinet table
were pretty proud of what we'd achieved.
We took some decisions
which I, of course, wish we didn't have to take. Who does?
Who wants to be in government when you're having to, you know,
take these agonising decisions?
I've just had an audience with Her Majesty the Queen
following the dissolution of Parliament.
The general election will be held on May 7th.
CHEERING
It's about sticking to the long-term economic plan
that is really beginning to deliver for our country.
Hello! Hi! Nice to see you. Hello.
Britain needs a Labour government.
Friends, let's make it happen. Thank you very much.
KIDS CHEER
Tomorrow, when the polls close,
the Liberal Democrats will be the surprise story
of this general election campaign.
One of the big themes has been the Conservative ability
to take seats away from the Lib Dems.
These were all Lib Dem seats.
They are now all Conservative.
Among the most high-profile names to go,
the schools minister David Laws.
The Conservatives have defied all the pundits
and won a majority of MPs in parliament.
In the wake of the results,
Labour's Ed Miliband, the Liberal Democrats' Nick Clegg
and Nigel Farage of UKIP have all resigned as their party's leader.
The Conservative Party is one of the most successful,
politically successful, parties in the democratic world,
and I think one of the reasons for that
is that they are extremely attuned to what their voters want.
ARCHIVE: Mr Cameron has bucked the pollsters and delighted his party.
Countless times during the coalition, I would say...
We'd have an argument about house-building and they would say,
"Why are you doing that? None of these people vote for you."
And look - as a result, they're in government, I'm out of politics.
The 2015 election was a validation that, if you're honest with people
about the economic problems the country faces,
if you front up to people
that there's going to be some hard decisions,
you take those hard decisions and people see the benefits of them,
then you get rewarded politically.
Osborne and Cameron are very able communicators.
They're very good at it.
That's what they do.
And they were able to portray the banking crisis
as somehow or other Labour's mismanagement and Labour's fault,
then got through as, somehow or other,
Labour accepts this is the problem,
therefore you're accepting the solution as well.
Cut back? We say fight back!
No public sector cuts!
The sense of anger and alienation
that wasn't appearing in any of this consensus
was there, on the streets.
It was there, at the workplace.
But those voices were not being heard in the media
and not being articulated by either front bench at the time.
This is about a social movement of all of us
that can re-change our society into something good,
rather than something that is cruel and divided.
Jeremy Corbyn,
251,000...
CHEERING
You had large numbers of people who,
when they looked at both parties,
they saw the Conservatives as an austerity party.
They saw Labour as a sort of austerity-lite,
not really clear enough on how they'd tackle the economic issues,
particularly around austerity.
So what they wanted was someone to stand up and say,
"This is what I believe in,
"this is what the alternative is, and we can do it."
What I wanted to do was use the political honeymoon
that you get after an election to do the hard stuff.
George Osborne made it very clear in a speech
that he wanted 25 billion of cuts and reductions
over on top of what we'd done
and, of course, the lion's share of that was to fall on welfare.
What the Conservatives did
the moment the Liberal Democrats were ejected from office
was to impose, I thought, an unforgivable sort of swathe of cuts
to the most vulnerable in society,
£12 billion worth of welfare cuts,
which I blocked year after year after year,
and actually introduced a bunch of tax cuts to the very wealthiest.
I didn't have the Liberal Democrats to leverage off,
which we had done before,
it always managed to help.
I used them ruthlessly.
I hoped to persuade the Prime Minister's Office
that they shouldn't go along with this,
but I got a pretty shirty response back from his private office
to say not only am I expected to make this,
but I'm to look for further reductions.
And thinking to myself...
.."I don't think I can do this any longer,
"because this is not what I signed up for."
By 2015-2016, Britain was booming.
And if you can't live within your means then,
what hope have you got if the economy turns down again?
I think there's an argument you hear which is,
"We're growing and things are doing well,
"so we can afford to spend more money."
And then, when things are bad, they go,
"We're doing badly, so we NEED to spend more money."
In other words, there's always an argument for spending more money.
The harder thing is to say,
"Actually, now's the time when we need to cut back a little
"and live within our means."
The argument started that, "You're cutting disability by this much
"and you're doing a tax cut there."
But when I saw the two figures together, I just thought to myself,
"This is going to be really difficult,"
because I could no longer live with myself
to continue doing what I was doing.
You know, sometimes you have to look at yourself in the mirror, really,
and I just knew that this was wrong.
ARCHIVE: The Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith
has resigned from the Cabinet,
terming cuts to benefits for the disabled.
In his resignation letter, he said, "They are not defensible
"within a budget that benefits higher-earning taxpayers."
Now the Government says it has no plans
to make new cuts to welfare benefits at all.
I've said, we've listened, we learned,
we made a mistake, we withdrew the proposals.
We still had the job to do of a high budget deficit,
and so we set out how to take further steps.
People didn't want to hear it.
They thought the job had been done, but it hadn't.
You know, Iain Duncan Smith was looking for an excuse
to resign from the government.
He needs to stop drinking the Kool-Aid that he does
and start looking at what had actually happened around that time.
You know, and what had happened was, he got it wrong,
and I don't believe he can ever admit it,
but he got this badly wrong.
The breakdown of consensus around austerity
got a head of steam in the sort of 2015-onwards period
was the fact that it was just unfair
and people could see it was unfair.
There are huge points when, essentially,
people are saying, "We want change."
The bottom 20% in Britain while I was chancellor did better.
Their wages rose more quickly
than at any previous period in British history.
More jobs were created than under any other British government,
and this was after an enormous banking crash
the like of which we hadn't seen for almost 100 years.
So, you know, I think we did everything we could
to make sure that the least well-off,
the most vulnerable, were protected.
A lot of people were saying, you know, "This is not fair."
And actually, for a government, you know, it's a bad place to be in
if people think it's not fair.
To me, it laid the ground for Brexit being possible.
Not probable, but possible.
The British people decide our future in Europe
through an in-out referendum
on Thursday, 23rd June.
The fledgling Remain campaign
gathered for several meetings in Westminster
and were trying to figure out a strategy.
People were feeling a sense of public service cuts,
they were feeling a sense of wage stagnation,
they were feeling their household incomes had been damaged.
And they wanted to push back
and, ultimately, I think, kick the establishment.
I was campaigning as energetically as I could
in England and Wales and Scotland against Brexit.
Before 2008...
..the majority of the people in Britain were sold the lie
that they would become rich
through financialization in the City of London.
After 2008, the same people
who were offering them that lie
went in overdrive, bailing out the
City of London at their expense.
They were angry.
They would vote for anything that pissed off -
excuse my French -
the elites that they held responsible.
The rights that you have as a worker... Yeah? ..come from Europe.
You've changed for the worse! You've changed for the worse!
The EU has become, I believe,
a friend of the haves rather than a friend of the have-nots.
Every month! I scrape by to make a living every month!
What I saw outside London during the campaign for the referendum
was that people were just sceptical
about the propaganda that they were being given by both sides.
People felt, you know, we'd been told
that we should accept the discipline of a market economy
and it wasn't being applied to the elite.
It's another case of one rule for them
and a different rule for the rest of us.
We received a message from someone who called himself John Doe,
and the big question, "Are you interested in data?"
I answered, "Yes, of course."
It was the biggest leak that ever any journalist had had.
11.5 million documents and 2.6 terabytes of data,
and it was a fascinating insight into how the offshore world works.
It came from Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm
that had all these super-rich and wealthy clients
around the world.
We could already sense
that this is going to be something more than a normal story
that we are normally working on here at Suddeutsche Zeitung.
The day the story broke,
we had probably three weeks without any sleep.
And then we hoped that the pope would not die on this day,
because we needed the front page.
Tax authorities around the globe have promised action.
Millions of documents from a legal firm based in Panama
which show the extent of tax avoidance by the rich and powerful.
The whole world is currently speaking and reading
and discussing tax havens
and the offshore world - inequality, wealth.
The head of our newsroom, he came in and said,
"There's another mass demonstration in Argentine.
"There's a mass demonstration in Paris.
"People are hitting the streets in Malta.
"There is a raid at the UEFA."
You know, it was just like,
it was just like coming over us like this, this huge wave.
The City of London was almost like a funnel
where money was being poured into and then filtered out
into the overseas territories and the tax havens.
The other thing it absolutely made clear
was the role of what we call the enablers.
So that's the banks, the accountants,
the lawyers, the advisers.
It showed the extent of the complicity
and deliberate acts of all these institutions.
When I found out
that David Cameron's father was implicated in all of this,
I wasn't surprised.
ARCHIVE: David Cameron has called for greater transparency
in the offshore world,
but his late father is revealed in the files
as a client of Mossack Fonseca.
Blairmore Holdings was called after Blairmore,
the traditional seat of the Cameron family in Scotland,
and it was set up in the tax haven of the Bahamas.
Ian Cameron basically collected money to invest it.
When we first approached David Cameron with those facts,
he basically claimed to the public
that he does not have money in Blairmore.
I have no shares, no offshore trusts,
no offshore funds, nothing like that.
From that moment on, you could basically watch a car crashing
because seeing him and his team
trying to basically change the discussion...
There were lots of allegations being levelled,
at the prime minister in particular, and we had to unpick them.
They were trying to say something, but not saying too much
and, in the end, we learned
that even he had invested money in Blairmore.
It took a few days, but he finally got there.
The prime minister says, yes,
he did have a stake in his dad's offshore fund.
Samantha and I had a joint account
and we owned 5,000 units in Blairmore Investment Trust,
which we sold in January 2010.
From that moment on, it was hard to convince the public like,
that he is the fighter for more transparency,
the fighter at the forefront against tax havens.
I think people suddenly woke up
to the scale of what was going on
and just how much it was costing us
in terms of investment within our own country.
The Tories have been stealing our tax,
and domestic violence services are closing. Just explain what you mean.
We're talking about the Panama Papers.
It's like almost the elephant in the room.
Cameron did... He did not look after the vulnerable.
He made sure the rich got richer...
This is all happening that eight weeks
before the biggest decision the country had faced in 50, 60 years.
And I do wonder now, when you look back at the week -
it led the BBC News for a whole week -
maybe if we'd spent some of that time
thinking about the really big issue facing the country,
we might be in a better place.
OK, three, two, one, let's go.
There we go, gang.
We've got a beautiful backdrop.
Well done, folks.
We are on the verge, I think, of making history in our country.
This is the inside of the door.
I don't believe that the Brexit referendum
had much to do with the EU.
It had to do with a sense of frustration
and of needing to punish
both Blair and Cameron,
both Brown and Osborne.
Decisions were being taken in the interests of elites
and without enough attention to the casualties from globalism.
And that was seen, the EU was seen by many people as symbolic of that.
When you have the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank,
President Obama himself threatening
Britons with Armageddon
if they dare vote for Brexit,
they brought out the Blitz spirit.
Our focus is in negotiating with a big bloc, the European Union,
to get a trade agreement done.
And the UK is going to be in the back of the queue.
They saw the bankers get up to no good, the economy blow up,
they were having to work incredibly hard for the same pay
or take a pay cut,
and that erodes the fundamental promise of capitalism,
which is that there's a relationship
between how hard you work and how you're rewarded.
And then a whole bunch of snake oil salesmen come along and say,
"Oh, look, let's vote for Brexit - all will be well."
BIG BEN TOLLS
Big Ben has struck ten o'clock.
The drama of referendum night can begin.
We fought against the big merchant banks.
We fought against big politics.
JEREMY VINE: We're thinking, wait,
is Leave's vote here a lot stronger than anyone was thinking?
For an illustrated look into the wealth gap
and how it affects us all, head over to...
..and follow the links to the Open University.
Love Island for geopolitics.
The leaders of the world's richest nations have arrived
for the first face-to-face summit since the pandemic began.
It is vital that we don't repeat the mistake
of the last great crisis, last great economic recession in 2008,
we don't repeat the mistake of 2008.
The crowd are attacking a branch of the RBS bank.
LOUD SHOUTING
Our society's still scarred by too much unfairness and inequality.
DAVID DIMBLEBY: The British people have spoken
and the answer is, we're out.
I've got my country back!
She thought, "I'm here to demonstrate
"a change from David Cameron."
That was not why she had been chosen.
I'm putting you on warning - this can't go on any more.
That was quite an aggressive tone.
People took the trouble to seek me out and say,
"What the hell was that all about?"
Philip Hammond used to apparently say to his officials,
"These are just wacky ideas dreamt up by Nick Timothy."
That whole collection was the most feckless,
hapless group I've ever seen, and, quite frankly, a disgrace.
Covid? Worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, basically.
Stocks gone up, gone up.
The Government just poured enormous quantities of money into the system.
Those of us in private equity got incredibly wealthy.
You do now have billionaires launching rockets into space.
Go NASA! Go SpaceX!
Every month, I scrape, I scrape by to make a living, every month.
When you're working 70 hours, 80 hours, even 90 hours a week
just to make nothing, that can't be right.
CAR HORNS HOOT
We are going shut it down, unless Uber stops being greedy.
The big winners of the last ten to 12 years have been those at the top.
It's a very simple story. It's a story of inequality.
The fact that we've got nurses going to food banks,
the type of politicians we've had this far have created this mess.
People felt, you know,
we'd been told that we should accept the discipline of a market economy
and it wasn't being applied to the elite.
There's one rule for the rest of us, but a different rule for the elite.
NIGEL FARAGE: We fought against the multinationals,
we fought against the big merchant banks,
we fought against big politics,
we fought against lies...
We did it.
What are you hoping will change now? Everything. Everything.
Working conditions, housing.
It is scary, but I think it's excitingly scary.
Absolutely blinding brilliant.
Best day this country's had for years.
My personal view always was that we would have been better off
to have remained members of the European Union.
The country made the decision that that wasn't going to happen.
The people have spoken out against the Government,
the bankers, whatever you want to call it,
legislation in Brussels and everything.
People have just had enough.
I was watching on the television
with a number of colleagues from the Home Office,
people who worked for Theresa May at the time,
and it was like a bomb had gone off in Whitehall.
There was a very clear sense
that Downing Street had not anticipated the result at all.
I think they should maybe bring the Government
up to the middle of the country, let us all have a say
because we all get really sick of the way things are.
When I spoke to Theresa on the phone at that point,
she was actually very upset about the result
and was, I think, quite immediately concerned
about the economic consequences.
Global markets are rocked
by Britain's decision to leave the EU.
Fear really came back to this market around the world today.
Panic on the markets
on a scale not seen since the global financial crisis.
I was based in California
and I was driving my daughter to a rehearsal,
and I dropped her off and I had the BBC on.
I started hearing about the pound...
..collapsing.
And I remember calling some colleagues in London,
and they were as shocked, I think, as most people were,
and the marketplace was not ready for this at all.
$2 trillion wiped out across global markets.
We have seen a huge global reaction across asset classes.
It has been a seismic event for the financial market.
A negotiation with the European Union will need to begin
under a new Prime Minister, and I think it's right
that this new Prime Minister start the formal and legal process
of leaving the EU.
I was actually in Sicily when the result came through,
so hastily rebooked some tickets and flew home
as soon as I saw David had resigned.
I have just been to Buckingham Palace,
where Her Majesty the Queen has asked me to form a new government.
And I accepted.
The Brexit referendum result had been a surprise,
and at the heart of that, Theresa May felt
that there was a sense that politics wasn't listening to people.
There was one rule for a certain set of people,
another rule for everyone else,
a sense that there was a lack of fairness
and a lack of opportunity.
The Government I lead will be driven
not by the interests of the privileged few,
but by yours.
We will do everything we can to give you more control over your lives.
What we were trying to do was to demonstrate
that this was going to be a different government
to the one that had been led by David Cameron and George Osborne.
Nick Timothy, who now, as Theresa May's joint chief of staff,
is said to be the most powerful man in Britain.
It was time to move on from austerity and change fiscal policy.
I think she thought,
"I'm here to demonstrate a change from David Cameron."
That was not why she had been chosen.
She had been chosen to find a consensus on Brexit.
HUW EDWARDS: Theresa May wasted no time
in sacking George Osborne as Chancellor.
LAURA KUENSSBERG: His services were no longer required.
George had been the author and main spokesman of Project Fear.
He'd said that immediately after the referendum,
if there was a Leave vote,
there would be a sudden and sharp recession
and the loss of very many jobs.
And I think she was probably quite right
that he couldn't be the Chancellor to lead the country's economy
through the departure from the EU.
Theresa had a pretty expansive agenda.
She recognised that Brexit was a moment in time
where it was possible to harness that energy
and reshape the forces of society and the economy
to make it work much better for people.
There'd certainly been a disconnect, I think,
between Theresa May's view of the world
and her Chancellor's view of the world from the start.
It was clear that having gone as far as we had as a nation,
we had to finish the job.
That is the process of getting the public finances
back into good order and to reassure foreign investors, big businesses
that things weren't about to change
in a way that would be disruptive to them.
The economic outlook following the vote to leave the European Union
is challenging, according to Mark Carney,
the Governor of the Bank of England.
We are having a domestic shock, a domestic economic shock right now.
It's what it will do to our five-year investment plan
and our jobs, really.
July sales, against last year, down a full 30%,
and August doesn't look like it's going to be any different.
Disruption in trade just isn't an option for us.
It has to be sorted.
People didn't know at that stage in the autumn of 2016
whether we were going to leave the EU immediately,
whether we were going to leave with a negotiated exit
or whether we were just going to leave with no deal.
And for business in particular, it was quite an alarming period
and the early message that I was receiving from businesses was,
"We need some clarity."
Leading economists, they now fear that there is this, look at that,
50-50, 50-50 chance of the UK falling into recession
as a result of the Brexit vote.
We're living through a time of considerable uncertainty.
And one thing we can do is reduce the uncertainties
over the issues we have control.
Remember how quantitative easing is supposed to work?
The Bank of England creates a lot of money at the push of a button
as only a central bank can.
Once it's made that money, the bank goes out and spends it
so the extra cash can get out into the broader economy.
But our central bank doesn't spend it in the shops or down the pub.
It spends the money in the City buying government bonds, or IOUs,
from financial institutions.
By buying assets, they encourage other people to buy.
As all of us buy, we push up the price of these assets.
The idea is that you and I will think,
"Oh, our houses are worth more.
"Our investments are worth more."
And because we are richer, we will go and spend more.
When we spend more, companies look and say,
"Wow, there's a lot of demand. I'd better invest more.
"I'd better build more factories."
And the next thing you know, we pull the whole economy up.
That's the theory.
Our priority was to try to reassure investors
about the path to the future
and get investors investing, consumers consuming
and get the economy moving forward as much as it was possible to do.
But you know what?
Every time they've done it, they say, the money, you know,
is supposed to get out there in the economy.
It ends up in the markets, though, doesn't it?
Doesn't really benefit the average Joe Bloggs.
It has succeeded in pushing up asset prices,
but not in promoting genuine, durable
and inclusive economic growth.
And then you get the side-effects,
rising inequality and anger
that the central banks have been co-opted by the rich.
QE doesn't work. It doesn't stimulate the real economy.
Stop doing QE for the financial sector
and just start doing it for people.
The way in which quantitative easing decisions are made is,
they're made independently by the Bank of England
with formal oversight from the Treasury.
When the bank made that decision to extend QE,
that wasn't a decision that Number 10 was directly involved with.
What we thought was, when the Bank is making those decisions,
it needs to take much greater account
of the distributional effects of those decisions
and judge those trade-offs perhaps a bit differently.
The problem is that people have regarded central banks
as being the only game in town so that whenever there's bad news,
then they have to do more of it.
That was a terrible mistake
because there were lots of other policies
that might have helped improve economic growth.
And so people tended to think,
"We'll just leave it to central banks."
The massive thing we understand
is that simply printing money is not anywhere close to as effective
as economists thought it was going to be.
It's a very, very weak tool.
I was at breakfast for hedge funds with Mark Carney,
and I suggested to him and to the other people around the table
that we were all very big beneficiaries of QE,
more than other people, and that it was important politically
for it to be in the public domain
that QE benefited the richest the most.
Mark Carney's response was that that was not true,
people most at risk of unemployment
were big beneficiaries as well.
Since interest rates were cut and QE was launched,
2.5 million jobs have been created
and the UK has consistently been
one of the strongest economies in the G7.
But my view is, quite clearly, it's the top 1% or 5%
who have benefited the most.
Soaring house prices and booming executive and bankers' pay
are believed to be factors
in why Britain's richest 1% own more than 20 times the wealth
of the poorest 12 million people in Britain.
When Theresa May addresses her party this week, she'll be emphasising
that they don't just have a new Prime Minister,
but a new government.
So in October 2016, Theresa May gave a speech
to the Conservative Party conference, and in writing that,
we thought about the right theme to put to it.
I think one of the frustrations we had in Downing Street
was that we were going round trying to say to people,
"You need to understand the importance of the need to change
"as a result of the things that we've been through."
And there were a lot of people who were determined to say,
"Actually, we just need to ride this out, carry on as we were
"and things will get back to normal."
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
It wasn't the wealthy who made the biggest sacrifices
after the financial crisis, but ordinary working class families.
We must acknowledge that the way a small number of businesses behave
fuels the frustration people feel.
So if you're a boss who earns a fortune
but doesn't look after your staff,
an international company that treats tax laws as an optional extra,
I'm putting you on warning -
this can't go on any more.
That was quite an aggressive tone,
and it really woke up investors around the world.
A lot of people, you know, took the trouble to seek me out and say,
"What the hell was that all about?"
Philip Hammond used to apparently say to his officials,
"These are just wacky ideas dreamt up by Nick Timothy."
Those in office always have to remember the markets,
the international investment community,
which is so important to the UK's prosperity.
Quite late on in drafting the conference speech,
we decided to include a passage about QE and the effects of it.
While monetary policy, with super-low interest rates
and quantitative easing,
provided the necessary emergency medicine after the financial crash,
we have to acknowledge that there have been some bad side-effects.
People with assets have got richer.
People without them have suffered.
It was actually a favourite line of Nick Timothy's
that quantitative easing had driven asset price inflation,
making the rich richer, essentially, while not driving wage inflation
and therefore opening up a gap.
But it kind of misses the point that quantitative easing
was just about the only weapon we had left
to deal with threats of a slow-down in the economy.
The point about QE and that speech
was not to criticise the fact that it had happened,
it was to observe some of the effects.
And if you acknowledge that there are effects for people
as QE increases asset prices,
then you need to try to do something about that in wider policy.
You can't just ignore those consequences.
A change has got to come and this party is going to make it.
I remember vividly coming back from that conference,
being bombarded by texts and calls
from the Chancellor's aides and officials in the Treasury
who were somewhat surprised by the line
and not entirely happy
that a Prime Minister was commenting on bank policymaking.
After the conference week, there was a message
from the Bank of England into Number 10,
saying it was not really appropriate for us to be talking about QE
and things that were within their mandate.
We have created a million new jobs,
we've seen a 46,000 reduction in unemployment.
Under this government,
1,000 more jobs have been created every single day.
The Government I was part of oversaw more job creation
than any government in British history before or since,
and I'm really proud of that.
HORNS BLOW
People not even getting the minimum wage
and grotesque levels of danger and exploitation.
What we've seen, particularly since 2010,
is a huge rise in insecure work, whether that's zero-hour jobs
or jobs where essentially,
they don't have particularly secure contracts.
They work for one of the UK's fastest growing tech companies,
but are in protest over pay.
It comes back to what you prioritise and whether you think it's OK
that as long as jobs are being created,
it doesn't matter whether they pay poverty wages.
The gig economy was seen as an area where there was huge unfairness
and, actually, where people were potentially being exploited.
And if it's going to be the future of the economy,
then there were things that needed to be ironed out.
You're suddenly a $60 billion company.
Yeah. Two and a half years ago,
Uber was 400 people and we're now 7,000 people.
Uber is a giant in the gig economy.
In the last decade, we've had an introduction
of technology and app-based devices
where individuals are working in a wholly new way.
And so because of this, drivers were working very long hours
for not much money.
When they first launched their UberX service,
I was one of the first drivers to actually register with them.
Uber's there to make ends meet
for those folks who are maybe finding a transition in their life.
Uber's there for folks
who need to add a little extra income to their job
where they're not seeing the income mobility that they're looking for.
What attracted me to Uber was a bonus scheme
that they were offering
where we were getting paid £10 for each job we did.
So technically, if I did ten jobs, I would get a £100 bonus.
The first few months was amazing for me.
This is a standard Uber technique where they come in,
it's so nice, they give you a lot of money,
they actually lose money just to grab the market,
to get drivers onside, to attract customers.
And then once they've got hold of that market,
you start seeing the other side of Uber
where the bonus has got taken away from us.
We could also see the fares going down and down.
When you're working 70 hours, 80 hours, even 90 hours a week,
that can't be right.
So when we got legal advice, we actually filed a case against Uber.
I was really struck by my first meeting with Yaseen.
He knew what the alarm bells were,
he knew what the pressure points were
and what felt wrong about the relationship.
All he was looking for was the basic protections,
so national minimum wage, holiday pay, the right to rest breaks
and the right not to be discriminated against by Uber.
Uber is facing legal action
over basic workers' rights for its drivers.
Working 70 to 80 hours a week,
it come out to be £4 an hour.
The drivers are currently treated as self-employed,
but they want full worker status.
Driver power!
Respect the drivers!
The company says if drivers became employees,
they would have to work fixed shifts and would lose their flexibility.
CAR HORNS BLARE
I have 4,000 drivers and another 5,000 drivers from LA
that said they will be here.
We are going to shut it down unless Uber stops being greedy.
PROTESTERS CHANT
They are engaging us in the wrong way, and they need to know that.
DRIVERS CHANT
Drivers for the cab-hailing app Uber
have won a landmark employment tribunal
giving them the right to be classed as company workers
rather than self-employed.
The judgment found that, you know, simply because we're working
in an advanced and interesting way,
doesn't mean that these individuals should not be protected
in the same way as they always should have been.
It wasn't just for me as a driver, it was a message to them to say,
"Look, we could take on Uber and we could beat them."
Uber has appealed.
That means they may not have to change their terms and conditions
for their drivers until that appeal has worked its way through,
which could take months or years.
I recognise that employment and types of employment are changing.
Technology is the driver in many of those cases.
That's why I've asked the chief executive of the RSA,
Matthew Taylor, to do a report,
a review of modern employment practices.
And I think this shows that actually,
it is now the Conservative Party that is the party of working people.
Workers weren't being given basic employment rights,
and for Theresa, there was a desire to fix that
on behalf of those people and their families,
and to ensure that companies
weren't taking the mickey out of their own workers.
We'll never be able to fix a rigged system
by counting on the same people who have rigged it in the first place.
It's rigged against you, the American people.
Duterte! Duterte!
The tough-talking politician Rodrigo Duterte
has become the next president of the Philippines.
Voters saw him as anti-establishment.
CLAPPING AND CHANTING
In this country, populism has its loudest voice in this man,
Beppe Grillo.
If Mr Hofer wins, it will be seen as another victory for populism
after Brexit and Donald Trump.
Hillary Clinton made $21.6 million
giving speeches to Wall Street banks.
They totally own her, and that will never, ever change.
CROWD CHEER
What happened on November 8th of 2016, the victory of Donald Trump,
that match was lit in front of the Ov...
In front of the Resolute Desk of George Bush
on September 18th of 2008,
when Bernanke and Paulson were there and told him,
"We need a trillion by the close of business.
"Are the systems done?"
Government intervention is not only warranted, it is essential.
And do it with bailouts, etc, paid for by the working class.
That lit the populist revolt you see today.
Thank you.
Theresa May has arrived in America at the start of a trip
which she hopes will pave the way for a post-Brexit trade deal
with the United States.
In January 2017,
we flew to Washington to meet the new president, Donald Trump,
at the White House.
I think Brexit's going to be a wonderful thing for your country.
I think one of the things we have in common
is that we want to put the interests of ordinary working people
right up there, centre stage.
Following the press conference
that the Prime Minister and president had,
we sat down for a private lunch, and as I went in,
I encountered Steve Bannon, then the president's strategist,
and we had a conversation.
What was clear was the sense that there was a shared analysis
of challenging the status quo.
And certainly in the United States, they took the view
that Donald Trump had been swept to power
on a sense that politicians hadn't been listening to people
for too long, had been doing their own thing.
They were given a mandate by the British people
to get this thing done.
Look at it as an opportunity to be seized, take action.
It was very clear to us that in the things he was saying,
Steve Bannon just didn't really have a grasp of the details
or an understanding of Britain's status
as an outgoing member of the European Union.
That whole collection was the most feckless, hapless group
I've ever seen, and quite frankly, a disgrace.
Not the mentality, not the toughness,
not the steeliness that you have to have.
You think the European Union and all that's
going to just let England just walk away because they had a vote?
So you think they're actually,
they're actually going to let you exit?
That's not going to happen. You've got to fight for this.
The things they were saying in the meetings were sort of,
you know, unbelievably simplistic
and I think not really cognisant of how it really worked.
Trump also told her, "Time is your enemy.
"You've got to get on with this now."
I mean, he was very, I thought, helpful.
What did Napoleon say to his marshals?
"When you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna."
That's the message to May's government,
don't tell me what you're going to do by taking elites.
You've got the mandate from the British... Take, take Vienna.
You know, was it a meeting of the minds?
It couldn't have been further from that.
As we start our negotiations to exit the European Union,
I report today on an economy
that has continued to confound the commentators
with robust growth.
There was a discussion in my office
as to why Theresa May was making a statement in Downing Street
on the street outside.
And so there's some very sharp people in my office
watching it on the television and deciding,
on the basis of what kind of podium was put out,
whether it was a state message about something that had happened
that the whole nation should know about,
or whether it was a political statement.
I have just chaired a meeting of the Cabinet
where we agreed that the Government should call a general election
to be held on June 8th.
I sort of said, well, why would she do that?
Erm, she's got a majority, you know,
and she can, she can govern.
Having laid out an agenda which was about change,
it became clear to a number of us in Number 10 at the same time, really,
that actually, in order to have a mandate for some of those changes,
Theresa May needed her own mandate through an election.
Whatever the nature of Brexit,
there was basically no majority in that parliament
for any one outcome, and we needed to find a way
of breaking out of that situation
in order to be able to make it all work.
It looks like the Conservative Party is heading for a decisive victory
in next month's general election.
We hired consultants to run the campaign.
We were very aware that we'd never run
a national election campaign before.
So you had the kind of Downing Street team strategy
which was about change, but then you had the strategy
that was the strategy set by the consultants,
which was to say, she's the big, sort of strong brand.
It's about strong and stable leadership.
Every vote for me is a vote for a strong and stable leadership.
..to get the strong and stable leadership and government
that will deliver that vision for the future.
Those two things sat very badly with one another.
She was deeply uncomfortable with it,
and it showed right the way through the election.
And looking ahead to the general election because we want,
I think we need a strong government,
strong and stable leadership to actually now see that through.
She wanted to run the campaign
around the "country that works for everyone" theme that she had set out
in that first speech she gave as Prime Minister
on the steps of Number 10.
And that's what she believed, and that's her politics,
and that's the message that she wanted to put
at the centre of the election,
and she was advised that that wasn't the right thing to do.
The idea for the policy
was that we needed to fund the system properly,
and rather than ask working-age people,
who already have a quite high level of taxation,
we wanted to say, well, we would raise the money
by taking some of the costs of care from the family home after death.
Good morning. Good morning.
Sorry to interrupt your lawnmowing.
And there was an immediate reaction on the doorstep.
Dementia tax and, you know, home ownership, scare me quite a bit
because we didn't buy a house to pass it on to the Government.
We bought a house to pass it on to her.
There was an immediate step change in decrease in our support,
and increase in the support for Labour.
And from that moment onwards, I knew that I was in real trouble.
CHEERING
Shake your hand. I love you. Oh, thank you.
People wanted hope.
They wanted to see some light at the end of the tunnel.
They'd endured long years of austerity.
A lot of sacrifices had been made.
People felt that there was only so much they could take any more.
I know people who work two jobs
and are still struggling to pay their bills,
the fact that we've got nurses going to food banks.
The type of politicians we've had this far have created this mess.
This is our chance, our moment
to actually change the political narrative and consensus
and say austerity has got to go.
CHEERING
CROWD CHANTS: Corbyn! Corbyn!
Theresa May is under some pressure over the policy on social care,
her political opponents really jumping on this,
dubbing it a dementia tax.
Theresa rightly felt that the social care system needed reform,
that people that had assets should make a greater contribution
to the cost of the care.
We knew that actually, we were trying to be brave,
in the words of the civil servant in Yes Minister,
but it was a mistake to raise it in a general election
where things are very hot,
which was probably quite obvious.
You have just announced a significant change
to what was offered in your manifesto,
saying there will now be the possibility of a cap on social care
that was not in the plans that was announced just four days ago.
That doesn't look so strong and stable, Prime Minister, does it?
She obviously felt under huge pressure
that the manifesto hadn't gone well.
The policy was under attack, she was changing it slightly.
And, yeah, I think she was under pressure and her patience snapped.
Nothing has changed.
We have not changed the principles that we set out in the manifesto.
Something HAD changed,
so to say in a kind of grumpy way, "nothing has changed"
was quite a damaging moment, I think.
Are you embarrassed by this U-turn, Prime Minister?
First indications of whether she's got what she wanted
or whether Jeremy Corbyn has dashed her hopes
will come with the exit poll at ten.
I will probably never forget where I was
the night of the 2017 election.
I was in Conservative Party headquarters,
standing around the central table
where Nick Timothy, Fiona Hill worked with Lynton Crosby
and the other campaign chiefs,
waiting for the result to come in.
I remember vividly the whispers
starting to kind of go around the room
that the exit poll had not been everything we hoped it would be.
The exit poll was due to come in at ten o'clock,
and at one or two minutes to ten
Fi had actually received a tip-off with the results and told me,
and I actually... I actually thought she was joking.
They don't have an overall majority at this stage.
314 for the Conservatives,
266 for Labour.
Oh... Oh, Labour gains.
Oh, my God!
Oh, my God.
With anything like this, May's gone.
Extraordinary. Labour have done some serious damage
to Conservative seats.
Theresa May has played a high-risk political game
and it appears she may have lost her gamble.
We'd thrown away an opportunity
to deliver the changes
that Theresa May really thought that the country needed.
And, for me, that was a devastating moment.
It was the worst night of my life, without question.
The snap general election
has backfired spectacularly for the Conservatives.
The UK now has a hung parliament.
Is this strong and stable, Prime Minister?
The mood in the party was astonishment.
I mean, remember, we started this campaign with the forecast
of a 100 seat-odd majority,
and then anger,
and the anger very quickly focused in on the Joint Chiefs of Staff
who had effectively monopolised the campaign.
Theresa May's two closest advisers, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill,
have resigned following the Conservative Party's failure
to win a majority in Parliament in the general election.
It wasn't a victory because we didn't win the election,
but it did change the narrative, it did enthuse and excite people,
and it did bring forward the ideas
that a society has to care for all, not the few.
The Government has been under pressure on public sector pay
for some time.
CHANTING: Scrap the cap! Scrap the cap!
After eight years of pay freezes and pay caps,
people have simply had enough.
You've seen what the Chancellor said in Cabinet about low pay,
how public sector workers are overpaid.
I was at Barts Hospital yesterday with the cleaners.
One of the cleaners gave me a payslip.
Full-time worker earns £297 a week.
At the moment, median rent in London is nearly £1,500.
To buy a house in London is half a million pounds.
Ask Philip Hammond if he can live on that.
I've got her payslip here. It's a weekly payslip.
£297 is what she takes home.
Do you think that's overpaid? No, of course it's not overpaid.
Look... That's very, very hard to live on.
John McDonnell needs to remember
that it was a Conservative government
that introduced the National Living Wage.
One of the biggest ever leaks of offshore secrets.
13 million documents.
They are known as the Paradise Papers,
and they reveal the tax affairs
of rich and powerful people around the world.
When we received the Paradise Papers,
one part of us was saying, "Oh, no, not again."
When we published the Panama Papers, many people said,
"Yeah, well, I mean, you're looking at those rich individuals,
"but what about the companies, you know,
"what about the multinationals?"
Now we had, what we had in our hands
was exactly how the multinationals were working.
And so, yeah, so we started another investigation.
The technology giant Apple has been managing
most of its untaxed cash reserve offshore
on the Channel Island of Jersey.
The arrangement isn't illegal,
but means the technology giant saves billions in corporation tax.
US companies alone are estimated
to have over $2 trillion stashed offshore.
It's not OK that they take part of our society,
but they don't give anything back.
It was interesting because after the Panama Papers revelations,
we heard several experts
and representatives of the financial industry telling us, like,
well, Panama Papers was about Mossack Fonseca.
It's like the black sheep of the industry.
This is not a problem of one or two law firms or consultancy firms.
It's a problem of a whole industry that is, at least in my opinion,
rotten, and that has basically lost its compass and its values
for what is right and what is wrong.
I had taken over as Chief of Staff,
and I remember the Prime Minister was uncomfortable
about some of the revelations there.
In her 2016 conference speech,
she was criticising the sort of global elite,
and she particularly referenced people
that were not paying their fair share of tax.
You know, she talked the talk. She didn't walk the walk.
There's a whole load of initiatives which are hugely important
in clamping down on tax avoidance,
which she just didn't put into place.
It's probably not an issue
that she devoted the time she would have done
if she hadn't had all of the Brexit issues running alongside it.
She would have probably spent more time trying to address
some of the things which those papers revealed.
Protesters are accusing President Macron
of continuing France's economic divisions.
This movement is about the cost of living, the minimum wage
and broader questions of inequality.
PROTESTERS CHANT
The United Kingdom has the weakest wage growth of all G20 nations.
What is so wrong with our economy
that our pay growth is so much worse?
Prime Minister. We now see wages growing faster
than they have for nearly a decade,
more people in work than ever before.
There was ultimately a difference
between Theresa May's view of politics
and actually, a number of people in her Cabinet
who felt that she was going too far
in terms of being interventionist and trying to meddle too much
in areas of the economy that traditionally, Conservatives think
should be left to the market to sort out.
The concerns came from Philip and the Treasury primarily,
and they would say, "We need to be really careful that we don't damage
"the flexible labour market that we've got in this country
"that has allowed us to create all these jobs.
I just think we always have to be very careful
when the messaging we deliver can be capable of an interpretation
which then comes back to bite us through damaging the economy,
damaging people's prosperity.
You'd expect a Chancellor to say that.
She allowed the Cabinet to really water the agenda down,
such that most of the most radical proposals were lost,
and it became clear to me that if that was the decision on that,
that was going to be the decision on other things as well.
And that was one of the reasons why ultimately, I decided not to stay.
Top executive pay has leapt by 11% in the last year,
taking the average salary to nearly £4 million,
145 times more than their employees.
Persimmon gave its chief executive £50 million worth of shares.
It's the first payment of what's been described as an obscene bonus.
When we made investments on behalf of our clients,
what we were looking for the companies to do
was act in a responsible manner.
The pay situation at Persimmon made big headlines, and rightly so,
because the original award to the chief executive,
Jeff Fairburn, represented a new high watermark in UK pay.
It was approaching 110 million,
and we challenged that with the company.
It was a small concession, well, it was a large concession
in terms of the amount of money that Jeff Fairburn was willing to forego,
but it only took the bonus down to, I think, £75 million at the time,
which we still found untenable.
Shareholders in the York house-builder Persimmon
have shown their displeasure at a controversial bonus scheme
at the company.
Too much. Too much.
Totally and utterly unjustified.
We attended the AGM to voice our concerns.
If there's one person or one small group of individuals
taking an unfair portion of the spoils,
then it really does affect a company's reputation.
We think that if companies get these things wrong,
it will endanger their business
and it will endanger the future return profile of that business.
I'd rather not talk about that, it's been well covered, actually, so...
So you don't want to discuss that today?
Are any lessons, are there any lessons to be learned from that?
It was the biggest bonus in the country.
OK. Right, fine. I think that's really unfortunate, actually,
that you've done that.
CROWD CHANTS: Theresa May must go!
Theresa May must go!
Theresa May has got to go!
Say, hey! Hey! Ho! Ho!
Theresa May has got to go!
The economy was actually doing rather well,
especially considering the uncertainty
that the country was facing.
The public finances were looking in much better shape
than we would dare, would have dared to have hoped.
Over the summer, I had gone to a meeting at the Treasury
to get a briefing on what the public finances looked like
in the run-up to the Budget. And I looked at the numbers
and thought, there is actually an opportunity
for the Prime Minister to say that we can bring austerity to an end.
MUSIC: Dancing Queen by Abba
The British people need to know that the end is in sight.
A decade after the financial crash,
people need to know that the austerity it led to is over.
Voters had not decided that we were wrong to have taken action
to try and sort out the public finances,
but they were looking now for that to come to an end
and for more money to go into them,
and for the Prime Minister to recognise that publicly, I think,
was a hugely important moment.
Here today, the Prime Minister announcing the end of austerity
if she gets a good Brexit deal.
And, of course, that is a pretty big if.
I think she genuinely came in with a belief
that, actually, the economy was skewed
to the advantage of a minority.
But everything about her premiership became about Brexit.
It dominated every single part of it.
You know, even in the areas where she talked about, for example,
changing the labour market to give workers more say,
didn't have the bandwidth to drive it through.
The agenda sort of stopped, which is understandable.
The election result meant that the government
was to some extent paralysed.
It was bogged down in the Brexit wars.
The House of Commons inflicts a crushing defeat
on Theresa May's Brexit agreement.
The Prime Minister has once again
suffered a heavy parliamentary defeat on her Brexit deal.
What do you want? Brexit!
When do you want it? Now!
The Prime Minister's Brexit divorce plan
is rejected by Parliament yet again on the very day
that the United Kingdom was supposed to leave the European Union.
Shame on you! Shame on you!
I will shortly leave the job
that it has been the honour of my life to hold.
I do so with no ill will,
but with enormous and enduring gratitude
to have had the opportunity to serve the country I love.
APPLAUSE
The doubters, the doomsters, the gloomsters,
they are going to get it wrong again.
It is time we unleashed the productive power,
not just of London and the southeast,
but of every corner of England, Scotland,
Wales and Northern Ireland.
We'll level up across Britain with higher wages, a higher living wage,
higher productivity and giving business the confidence
to invest across the UK.
I think a big part of Boris Johnson's agenda
resonates with what Theresa May was talking about.
Levelling up is fundamentally about fairness.
It's about creating greater equality of opportunity.
And Boris Johnson talks a lot about rebalancing the economy
beyond London and the southeast.
That's a continuation in many ways of the agenda Theresa May laid out.
In central China, a man has died
following an outbreak of an unknown pneumonia-like virus.
The outbreak began in the central city of Wuhan.
Investors around the world have been gripped by fear
that not just the human cost, but the financial cost, of this virus...
The coronavirus crisis has sent stocks worldwide
into a global spiral of turmoil.
I remember getting lots of phone calls,
lots of people got phone calls, "What's going on? Why is it?"
And we explained
that the whole economic system had been put on pause.
It wasn't functioning any more.
Take a look at this ugly, ugly day on Wall Street.
The Dow collapsing, its worst single-day loss ever.
This is going to create what's called a sudden stop
and, literally, it's like turning the lights off.
The Fed announced a multimillion dollar package
of quantitative easing to encourage spending.
They're going to be purchasing $500 billion of treasuries
and $200 billion of mortgage-backed securities,
and that number could increase.
The European Central Bank has announced
it will pump three-quarters of a trillion euros,
that's around $820 billion, into the financial system.
This is the Bank of England kind of on overdrive,
trying to create a kind of airbed for the whole economy
by cutting interest rates and £200 billion of quantitative easing.
The Bank of England intervention
was to try and give people confidence
that we're not living in a world of total uncertainty.
After a paid leave package passed today,
this would be the biggest wave of money unlocked
to combat the coronavirus.
The size and the urgency of this
is evocative of the bank rescue package from the financial crisis.
Today, I can announce that for the first time in our history,
the Government is going to step in and help to pay people's wages.
Breaking news, the Federal Reserve was signalling moments ago
it will take major new action to prop up the economy.
Look at that, right off the bat, the Dow Jones up 6%.
We've gone straight up.
At this moment, the Dow industrials are up close to 1,200 points.
The Bank of England is pumping an additional £100 billion
into the financial system.
Markets riding a wave of euphoria.
We have used economic policy very actively and very substantially,
and that has to be the right thing to do in the current circumstances.
It keeps liquidity in the economy available for other uses
because it supports businesses and it supports households.
Covid - worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, basically.
Stocks, gone up. Gone up.
What it has created is a bizarre situation
where the consequence of economic collapse
and the consequence of economic crisis
is repeatedly a massive increase in stock and asset prices.
And who owns stocks and who owns assets?
Well, mainly, it's wealthy people.
The Thai economy has come to a standstill.
The government has been mismanaging the economy.
Misrule, really, we've had.
IN PORTUGUESE:
Calculations by Oxfam
suggest the combined wealth of ten of the world's richest men
has increased during the coronavirus pandemic by £400 billion.
Fuck Jeff Bezos!
CROWD: Fuck Jeff Bezos!
Fuck Jeff Bezos!
The rich are getting richer. Everyone else is getting poorer.
If it continues, we're going to wind up
with an even more volatile society in which everybody hates each other.
They're taxing me on unemployment,
they're taxing me at every corner I get,
but you have a man that's a billionaire
and all of them are billionaires, and they're not being taxed.
Tell me where the right and wrong is in that.
Those in poverty were nearly four times more likely
to die from Covid than more affluent groups.
It says the pandemic has widened the gap between rich and poor in the UK.
Over the last 12 years,
we're talking about unprecedented amounts of money being printed
and funnelled into the markets,
banks being showered with trillions
upon trillions upon trillions of dollars,
ultimately benefitting the most privileged in our societies.
So you do now have billionaires launching rockets into space.
Lift off of the Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon. Go NASA! Go SpaceX!
I think this is something that should really get people,
I mean, right in the heart.
You have certain elements of society that are soaring...
This team is amazing. We just feel really good about it.
..and other parts of our society
that are being unfortunately left ever further behind.
What quantitative easing has done
is to make the cost of borrowing affordable for businesses,
particularly during the Covid crisis.
Now, what that does, let's come to the inequality point,
that has kept unemployment down and by the way,
throughout the last decade,
throughout the time when quantitative easing has been,
you know, to a greater or lesser extent, present,
unemployment has tended to be lower in this country
than it was forecast to be.
Now let's move to the US because the Federal Reserve,
the Central Bank, could be set to start removing
its support for the economy sooner than expected.
The European Central Bank could be about to start scaling back
the cash it's pumping into the economy.
What we will initially do
is to cease to reinvest in government bonds
and over time, that will reduce the stock of government bonds we hold
and will bring the size of the Bank of England's balance sheet down.
Since 2008, there's been something like $20 trillion
spent on QE by the main four central banks.
And each time they've tried to stop, the markets have panicked,
so yes, in a way, markets are addicted
and central banks have become very nervous indeed
about removing the drug.
We have been through the biggest monetary policy stimulus
the world has ever seen.
And the obvious fact that jumps out of it
is that if you've had the biggest monetary policy stimulus
the world's ever seen
and you still haven't had adequate economic growth,
maybe the answer is not yet more monetary policy stimulus.
The big winners of the last ten to 12 years have been those at the top.
It's a very simple story, it's a story of inequality.
We're all in this together. We can deal with our debts.
We can get our economy growing.
Fairness without a strong economy doesn't work.
A strong economy without fairness doesn't work either.
We will make Britain a country that works not for a privileged few,
but for every one us.
We can no longer tolerate a setup
where the real economy, in which millions work,
is just a sort of sideshow for the City of London.
We have one of the most imbalanced societies
and lopsided economies of all the richer countries.
We are going to fix this economy and build back better than ever before.
Many people feel that the political establishment failed them
and naturally, people feel, having been let down once, you know,
it will take a lot of change
before they feel they can rely on the same governmental systems
to take care of their future problems.
For an illustrated look into the wealth gap
and how it affects us all, head over to...
..and follow the links to the Open University.