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Following are slides for my
presentation on a panel at ‘The World Transformed’ conference in Brighton on
Monday 23 September. It was well-attended, with probably some 400-500 people
under the ‘Big Tent’, some out in the rain. The topic was ‘financialisation’, a
term that I find misleading at best. Those who use this term often do not understand the role financial markets play, and often it is a cloak for
their soppy reformist policies. So I decided to switch the focus to imperialism
and finance instead, and to expose UK Labour Party hypocrisy.
I had fifteen minutes, as did
the other panel speakers, Yanis Varoufakis, Ann Pettifor and Kali Akuno. My
presentation was marred by the lack of a promised presentation screen. It
led to me fumbling a little over my notes instead, but I should have realised that
this absence was close to inevitable. There was a good reception for what I said,
but most acclaim, unsurprisingly at this Labour Conference-related event, was
given to the ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!’ angle taken by Varoufakis and Pettifor.
The Q&A period enabled me to
develop points on the hypocrisy of the Labour Party’s reliance on the rest of
the world for a living and its support for Britain’s imperial status –
illustrated with reference to how the 1945 Labour government funded the
introduction of the welfare state (see here for
details).
And so, to the slides below …
