Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, this is Pod Save the UK. I'm Nish Kumar.
And I'm Coco Kahn. Police are investigating after the latest Epstein files apparently showed the leaking of sensitive financial information by Lord Mandelson when he was in government.
You know it's bad when a photo of Peter Mandelson in his pants is the least horrifying bit of info that's coming out.
Chapter 2: What revelations from the Epstein files impact Lord Mandelson?
We'll break it all down for you.
And the economist who predicted the global financial crisis is at it again with her new book. Anne Pettifor will join us to talk about the winners and losers in the global casino. Spoiler alert, the winners are probably already billionaires.
Now, Coco, eagle-eyed viewers and maybe very, very eagle-eared listeners might have noticed that you and I are not in the same room currently.
Do eagles have really good hearing?
I actually don't know. What's something that has good hearing? Mothers when you're saying rude things about them in the next room. That's the one.
Okay.
That's why I was good hearing. The eagle-eared mothers.
Yes. The eagle-eared mothers will know that I'm not in the studio this week. I am beaming in from a, I'd love to, I wanted to say somewhere really tropical and amazing, but I'm just in my in-law's house. So if you hear a landline, they still exist here. Enjoy this blast from the past.
Well, I'm sad not to be there with you, not least just so we can console each other over what is genuinely some of the most horrifying news I've seen. And we do this podcast every week.
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Chapter 3: How does the Mandelson scandal affect Keir Starmer's government?
It is a serious question for Keir Starmer about his political judgment. It is a really serious question because lives have been destroyed. People are dead. Women were sexually assaulted and sexually exploited. If we're really taking violence against women and girls seriously, which we supposedly are as a society, we have to question how seriously we can be taking it.
if given what we already knew about Mandelson's relationship with Epstein, the prime minister of this country was willing to give him a job as an ambassador to the United States. Listen, before we move on, let me just say, and I just want to say I'm saying this entirely of my own volition. I just feel like I have to bring this up. Peter Mandelson denies all wrongdoing.
So I'm just bringing that up of my own accord. And in no way I'm doing that because we are legally obliged to. That's just something I wanted to throw into the mix.
Just wanted to throw in there.
Sometimes it's nice to... bring in a denial of wrongdoing, you know, when you're alleged to have lobbied on behalf of the banking industry on the instructions of a pedophile. Sometimes it's nice to throw in the denial that you've issued so far. Anyway, let's move on.
Let's move on. Next up, so we have Andrew, Prince Andrew, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, and a new police investigation after a woman told the BBC that she was trafficked to the UK for sex in 2010. Added to the latest truly grim photos from the Epstein files show the former prince kneeling over a fully dressed woman who is lying on the floor. I'm sure we've all seen the pictures.
They are absolutely chilling.
Calls have grown for him to give evidence to the United States Congress over his links to the convicted sex offender. Keir Starmer has backed those calls, saying that Epstein's victims have to be the first priority.
Emails from Andrew's ex-wife Sarah Ferguson to Epstein were also released, in which she calls him the baby brother she always wanted. And in another, she thanks him for his generosity and kindness. All of these emails were sent after his conviction for child sex offences, but they do not imply any wrongdoing.
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Chapter 4: What insights does economist Ann Pettifor provide about the global financial system?
circle, that kind of high profile circle. There's an anecdote that's being reported in the FT, actually, that the journalist Tina Brown was invited to an Epstein dinner in 2010. She's reported to have said, what the fuck is this? The pedophile bull, which just gives you an insight into how many people, you know, within the media certainly knew that this conviction had happened.
So the idea that his close friends didn't, it just doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
Absolutely astonishing. Just to clear up, because we've talked a lot about Jeffrey Epstein's convictions and what people knew and what people didn't know. In 2008, Epstein pled guilty to charges of procuring a child for prostitution and soliciting a prostitute. Now, this was done as a plea deal, even though federal officials had identified a total of 36 abuse victims, some as young as 14.
He served almost 13 months in custody. So that's 2008. He was then arrested again in Florida in July 2019 on federal charges for sex trafficking of minors in Florida and New York. And a month later, was found dead in his cell. So when people say they didn't know, they certainly knew in 2008 that he had pled guilty to charges for procuring a child for prostitution.
So again, the sort of obfuscations and explanations... are pretty nauseating. And it's hard to even start to imagine how Epstein's victims are feeling this week.
Very briefly, when we were on a break from this record, I went onto the DOJ's website. I don't know why I did this. And I just typed in Me Too, just to see. Was Epstein talking about the Me Too movement to anyone? And yeah, he was. I mean, there were so many emails. I only had like a first pass on like the first couple of pages. But it was like nauseating to see him talk to Woody Allen's wife.
about how Me Too movement had gone too far. And I just felt like screaming at the computer, the Me Too movement did not go far enough, my friend. I really seriously hope we see some actual consequences for this. So anyway, Keir Starmer, his trip to China, that feels like a really long time ago, doesn't it? He was in Japan as well. That was seen as a pretty successful visit.
He was barely back before the news broke and he found his decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as the UK ambassador to the US under the spotlight once again. Labour just... They just love bringing this guy back. This is his fourth resignation, if resignations also include being forced to quit.
It's also a massive headache for Starmer's chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney. Mandelson was his mentor and reportedly McSweeney promoted his move to US ambassador. As we're recording at 11am on Wednesday, the news has broken that Starmer is going to attempt to try and Get ahead of this latest turning of the wheel in this scandal.
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Chapter 5: How does the release of emails complicate Mandelson's narrative?
But I must say, I'm one of the few women that did. You know, I'd written a book called The Coming First World Debt Crisis. And I tell you, it felt like a lead balloon. I mean, that was a book that didn't sell.
Wow.
And everybody just said, oh, she's that old lefty. Don't take any notice of her. But then amazingly, after the crisis broke, people began to say, oh, that little woman. So that's been quite nice.
Okay, well, referring to a book that didn't sell is an incredible way to open a conversation that starts with your new book.
Yeah.
Your new book is called The Global Casino. It's absolutely brilliant. Before we talk about the issues it raises, just spell out to us the concept of the global casino.
So I wanted to... make people aware of something economists call the international financial and monetary system. And I want ordinary people, when I say ordinary people, I mean me and you, to understand that this is like a sort of construction. This is a construction. It's a kind of architecture. And I envisage it as a casino because actually there's so much gambling that goes on in there.
But what I want to show people is that this is like a giant casino. And inside the casino are little booths. And these are countries. This is Britain. This is France. That's the United States, China. That's South Africa. This is Sierra Leone. And they're inside this giant casino. And People inside the booths are scarcely aware of the fact they're inside a casino.
The key thing about the booths is that they've got their doors wide open and they never close their doors, with the exception of China. And so people in the casino, which are mainly gamblers, speculators, is what they're called in the financial system, but also gangsters, the mafia, terrorists, drug dealers, they're all speculators. you know, swanning around inside the casino.
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Chapter 6: What new investigations are being launched against Mandelson?
And Mrs. Thatcher gets wind of this and thinks, oh, why don't we do that too here? And BlackRock comes along and scoops up our pensions and says, leave it to me. I'm going to invest your pension in, I don't know, the US dollar, which never falls in value. And all, you know, in whatever gold or silver or whatever I think would make you more money. And we say, fine, here it is.
So we're extremely vulnerable. So the point of the book is to say this system impacts on you, dear reader, on a daily basis. Your pension, the price of your food, you know, all these agricultural goods that are traded. Yeah. And energy. These are key things, not to mention house prices.
That open door means capital can flow into your country and inflate the value of your properties and render you homeless. And because we're ignorant of that, we blame our neighbours, we blame supply and demand, but we don't blame the system.
This is a very interesting week for you and me to be having this conversation. Absolutely. Because journalists around the world have been digging into the Epstein files and we're getting some sense through this story of... the architecture of this kind of shadow banking system that the book points out.
In the book, you write about how the globalised financial system operates beyond the reach of regulatory democracy and the law. So one big revelation this week has been Peter Mandelson leaking sensitive information to Epstein. And the police are reviewing claims that when he was business secretary, he gave advance notice to Jeffrey Epstein of bailout from the European Union. Now...
And can I just take a guess that you have not necessarily been as surprised, say, as some of us have been by some of the revelations, not just this EU bailout, but also the fact that Mandelson, seemingly at the instruction of Epstein, was lobbying about bankers' bonuses in 2009.
What's really bugging me at the moment, Nish, is that none of the big media outlets are focusing except for the Financial Times. And Jim Pickard must get real credit for this. Nobody's focusing on the fact that this is a Wall Street story. This is a banker's story. And they wanted to attack the post-crisis regulation. Now, we were watching all this from here.
Yeah.
And there was something called Dodds-Frank where finally the government said after the great financial crisis in which millions of people lost their homes, their jobs, they suffered divorce, they committed suicide. After all of that chaos, we're not going to manage the system. Yeah. We're going to regulate it.
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Chapter 7: How does Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor fit into the latest Epstein revelations?
And in my book, I argue, along with Karl Polanyi, that they're so mad they're looking for strong men to protect them from these bad guys. And that strong man could be Donald Trump. You know, I was shocked. Donald Trump went to Davos and he talked to the bankers and he said, you've got to put a cap on interest rates on credit cards. You know, like that is so blindingly obviously a wrong.
And it takes a fascist to make the point, really. But what he's doing there is saying, don't worry, I haven't forgotten my base here. My base elected me because they said they want to, you know. Of course, I won't touch Wall Street and I ain't going to mess with Elon Musk. But every so often I'm going to throw a bone.
Yeah, it's such an interesting point. This thing about Trump occasionally just says something like, you know, you have to cap credit card debt at Davos, but he's not doing anything to really endanger his real paymasters. You know, we saw the inauguration. You saw who was sat in that room. After the break is the Green New Deal, which Anne helped to create dead in the water.
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