Radio: I Discuss Liz Truss and the UK’s Ongoing Tory Brexit Nightmare – Plus Guantánamo and Julian Assange – with Chris Cook on Gorilla Radio

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I’m delighted to have been interviewed on Saturday by Chris Cook, in Canada, for his Gorilla Radio show, available worldwide through the miracle of the internet, via his brand-new Substack account. The show is also available here as an MP3.

The first 20 minutes of our half-hour discussion involved the sad decline of post-Brexit Britain under a succession of witless Prime Ministers — most recently Liz Truss, who lasted just 44 days, but managed in her brief window of opportunity to crash the economy, as the markets reacted with revulsion to a ‘mini-budget’ that promised massive unfunded tax cuts for the rich at the worst time imaginable, during a time of rampant inflation and spiralling energy prices. 

Our discussion followed on from my recent article, Now that the Execrable Liz Truss Has Gone, Only a General Election Can Validly Deliver the UK’s Next Leader, and I was pleased to have had the opportunity to discuss the role played in the mad ideology of Truss and her Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng by a number of supposed ‘free market’ lobbying groups based in Tufton Street, close to Parliament — including the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Taxpayers’ Alliance, the Centre for Policy Studies, the Adam Smith Institute, Civitas and the climate change-denying Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) — who dress themselves up as think-tanks, and, shamefully, have secured charitable status, even though they have persistently failed to explain who funds them (although US far-right dark money is clearly involved).

We also discussed the baleful role of Brexit in Truss’s brief premiership, in which the Tufton Street lobbying groups also played a major part, having long pushed for Brexit to involve not just a suicidal end to our membership of the single market and of freedom of movement, but also the opportunity, in the absence of the UK having a written constitution, of all the laws involving workers’ rights and environmental rights, for example, that had been part of our membership of the EU.

Times move fast in the UK’s ongoing clown show, and while we discussed Boris Johnson on Saturday, his disgraceful hope of once more being crowned leader collapsed almost as soon as he returned from the latest in a series of holidays that have consumed most of his time since he was dismissed in July, and today Rishi Sunak, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer under Johnson, who lost to Truss in the summer, became the new Prime Minister, chosen only by his fellow MPs.

It now falls to Sunak to deal with the colossal challenges facing the country, including the ongoing fallout from Brexit, which, as the billionaire businessman and Tory backer Guy Hands explained today, needs the Tories to start “admitting some of the mistakes they have made over the last six years, which have frankly put this country on a path to be the sick man of Europe.”

Brexit, as I explained to Chris, is, absurdly, a taboo subject for politicians and most of the media in the UK, even though small- and medium-sized companies have almost entirely lost the ability to trade with the 27 countries across the Channel that they used to be able to trade with seamlessly, profoundly damaging the economy, and even though the end of freedom of movement has led to a colossal shortage of workers — in the NHS, in care homes, in hospitality, and in the UK’s fields, where they used to pick fruit and vegetables. For more on this, do check out this authoritative half-hour video by the FT, ‘The Brexit effect: how leaving the EU hit the UK’, which currently has over 2.3 million views.

As for the EU laws that Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng wanted to burn in a bonfire of rights and protections (2,400 laws, intended to be scrapped by December next year), Sunak needs to listen to Jonathan Jones, the head of the government’s legal service from 2014 to 2020, who dealt with issues relating to Brexit, and who has warned that the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill, which will have its second reading in the Commons tomorrow, “will create deep uncertainty for businesses and many other organisations”, as the Guardian described it yesterday, noting that “ministers are facing mounting opposition from business groups, environmentalists, legal experts, unions and opposition parties to what is being described as another dangerous, ideologically driven experiment by pro-Brexit Tory rightwingers.” For more criticism, see here.

21 minutes in, Chris and I discussed the ongoing plight of WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange, who is still held in Belmarsh maximum-security prison as his lawyers fight to prevent his extradition to the US to face risible espionage charges relating to his work as a journalist and publisher. We talked about the recent Human Chain around Parliament, which was an extraordinary achievement, and which I wrote about here, but as I explained, commending US campaigners for their own action on the same day, surrounding the Justice Department, the US government needs to drop the extradition request, which was initiated under Donald Trump. Attorney General Merrick Garland ought to understand how wrong it is, as should President Biden, who was vice president when Obama concluded that prosecuting Assange would have a chilling effect on press freedom overall, eroding, as I explained, one of the key differences between our “free” societies, however compromised they are, and dictatorships.

At 25:30, Chris and I discussed Guantánamo, and I explained how the good news is that President Biden has accepted that, after 20 years, it is unacceptable to continue holding, indefinitely, men who have never been charged or tried, so that, as a result, most of those men have been approved for release since he took office — although I also pointed out that, sadly, the Biden administration has been slow to actually free these men.

We also discussed the men facing trials — currently nine of the 36 men still held — and the recent confirmation that Biden is not stopping plea deal negotiations taking place with these men, who, as I see it, have some power in the negotiations, because, whether they accept plea deals or not, they know that they will continue to be held indefinitely at Guantánamo, and may, possibly, be arguing that they should stay at Guantánamo rather then being sent to a Supermax prison. This conclusion, I suggested, primarily reveals quite how extraordinarily horrible Supermax prisons are, with their grotesque institutionalisation of solitary confinement — which is perhaps even more soul-crushing than Guantánamo — and as Chris pointed out, a Supermax prison is also exactly where the Biden administration apparently intends Julian Assange to end up.

At the end of our interview, at 30:00, Chris played the first verse and chorus of The Four Fathers’ anti-Brexit anthem, ‘I Want My Country Back (From The People Who Wanted Their Country Back)’, which can be heard in full on Bandcamp here, and is also posted below.

It was a pleasure, as always, to talk to Chris, who has had me on his show numerous times over many years, and I hope you have time to listen to it, and that you’ll share it if you find it useful.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the struggle for housing justice — and against environmental destruction — continues.

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Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.