Accidental Gods Election Special 3 - Labour party Manifesto - anything worthwhile? with Jeremy Gilbert
What are we being offered by the incoming Labour Government? What's good in their Manifesto (spoiler alert, not very much)? What's not good? What could be improved upon and how do we go about pushing them to a place where they actually do something useful that isn't simply a repeat of the same-old, same-old we've had for the past decade and a half?
Our third Election Special Guest is Dr Jeremy Gilbert, professor of culture and political theory at the University of East London. He's the author of several books including Twenty First Century Socialism and Hegemony Now: How Wall Street and Big Tech won the world - and how we can win it back which was written with Alex Wiliams.
Jeremy's been on the podcast before back in Episode #95 - and he's always my go-to person for insight into progressive thinking within the current Labour party, and for a broader, more political scientific view of where we're at.
As chance would have it the Labour party published their manifesto about thirty six hours before we were due to record, so I took the chance to ask Jeremy what he thought of it: what's good, what could be better, what can we who care about people and planet do to help shift us onto a trajectory where we're not barrelling towards the edge of the biophysical cliff. It's not the most upbeat of conversations - because the answers to all three are 'not a lot, but joining a union is probably one of the most useful things you can do' - but it gave us a chance to look into a bit of the ideological, conceptual and pragmatic views of the current Labour party - and how we can shape things for a world that will work.
Jeremy's Website
Jeremy's Books
Jeremy on Twitter
Green Party Manifesto
Liberal Democrat Manifesto
Labour Party Manifesto