Okay. Welcome back to Garys Economics.

Today

we are finally going to explain

how we can stop the economy from collapsing.

Okay, so in the last couple of months,

I've been on tour.

I've been up and down the country a couple of times,

we've had a massive press campaign,

so I've been all over the TV, radio, the internet,

basically explaining that the economy is collapsing,

that it will continue to collapse,

and that ordinary families

will be driven into poverty,

that our kids and our grandkids

won't be able to afford homes and financial security.

And,

we've been getting a lot of press,

and that has obviously been

basically worrying a lot of people,

people should be worried because this is happening.

And people are asking me, okay, Gary, what can we do?

How can we stop that?

And, I’ve

spent quite a lot of time explaining the problem,

but perhaps not so much explaining

what we can do to stop the problem.

So today, what I'm going to try my best to do

is explain

really clearly, as much as possible

from the ground up,

how I think we can stop

this economic collapse from happening.

All right.

So the very first thing we need to do

is just recap very quickly what the economic problem

actually is in its most basic terms.

And I'm going to try to explain that

in a simple diagram, which I'm going to draw here.

Okay. So we've got these four groups in society.

We've got the working class,

we've got the middle class,

you've got the government and we've got the rich.

Now for most of history and in most of the world today,

pretty much all of the wealth in society,

the land, the property, the natural resources,

the businesses are owned by the rich.

But for a period of time after the Second World War,

we had a situation where basically all of these groups

held a decent amount of wealth.

So in my parents generation,

it was normal for even working class families

to have a pension

and own their own property, for example.

So we had a period where all of these groups

had a decent amount of wealth,

but the rich had more,

and especially after their taxes were cut in the 80s,

they started to accumulate more and more.

And that meant that

when other groups in society

wanted to access this wealth, wanted to use this

wealth, wanted to use

housing, property, natural resources,

buildings, they had to pay

rents, profits, dividends to the rich,

and wealth started to flow

away from these other groups and towards the rich.

And these flows

really started to increase,

especially during the 2008 crisis

and during the Covid crisis.

And it led to a situation where really

there was very large scale transfer of wealth,

and that is still ongoing.

And the end result

was that the working class lost pretty much

all their wealth and got into a bit of debt as well.

The government is now massively in negative wealth,

so they've only got debt.

And the middle class,

they kept some of their wealth, but not so much.

The wealth of the rich

just got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger,

especially during Covid.

What this meant was

because these groups of society,

who traditionally are the big spenders

in terms of proportion of their wealth,

were losing their wealth.

Spending fell, wages fell

and because these guys have much more wealth now

and these guys have less

these transfer payments

which you have to make to

use wealth, access resources, went up

because you've got less resources now they've got more.

So you need to pay to use

a greater amount of resources.

So these flows increased.

And now we're in a situation

where basically these groups are basically wiped out.

The working class has basically nothing left.

These guys already live

in increasingly desperate poverty.

The government is, like, totally bankrupted,

they're out.

And the middle class has just this little bit left,

which they're hanging on to,

but it's gradually being sucked out.

And, before long, they will be gone too.

And then you end up in this situation

where basically the rich own everything.

You have no middle class, nobody else owns anything.

And an economy like that looks like,

looks like Nigeria, looks like India, looks like Brazil.

And basically you have very broad poverty.

If you want to fix this,

you need to get wealth flowing back

in the other direction.

And, there are different ways to do this.

In theory, you can do it without taxes.

And if you are interested in non-tax solutions

for getting ordinary families their wealth back,

we have a video

called The Wealth Time Limit, which I did years ago.

But realistically,

I think you're only realistic hope

of getting the wealth back in the working class,

back in the middle class, getting wealth

to flow away

from the rich is, to quote the Dutch historian

Bregman, “Taxes, taxes,

taxes”.

I do really think this is the only way.

I know it's difficult because the rich will oppose it,

but I think

unless we can get much higher

levels of tax on the rich,

I don't think there is any way we can get

that wealth back to working

class and middle class families.

So if we're talking about tax,

I always think

when we are discussing the question of

how can we tax the rich more,

tax working families less,

get wealth flowing back to working class families.

I always think it's really,

really helpful to break that question of tax down

into two completely separate questions.

Question one,

what specific changes do we want in the tax system?

And question two,

how do we make

those changes happen.

And the reason why

I think it's really important to separate them

is because these are really

just two completely separate questions.

This number one is a question of...

really it's a technical question.

It's a kind of a, it's a tax

advisers, it's a tax planners question. It's...

it's a technical economics question.

And number two is a question of, of power.

It's a question of how do we force these things.

And the reason why

I think it's really, really important to separate them

is because we tend to focus very,

very much on this - question one.

Especially when we are talking to

people like me who are economists.

We want to say, okay, well,

what are the changes in the tax system?

What are the change in the tax system?

And I think this is

perhaps a little bit naive to the fact

that basically at the moment

we are losing this debate for question two,

which is at the moment we're not getting any taxes.

at all.

We are increasingly seeing changes in the tax system

which tax rich people less.

Which tax working people more.

That is true

even in countries that have

centre left governments

who you might think

would be more supportive of richer...

of poor people.

It's true here in the UK, we have a Labour government.

It was true under Joe Biden.

We are seeing even under governments

that are supposed to be left wing,

the inability to raise taxes at all.

So I think

it's really important to recognise

that these two things are separate,

because we can often end up in a situation where

somebody like me is trying to make a very strong case

for the fact

that if we don't change the tax system,

we will see basically a collapse of society

and somebody who

perhaps is rich or is funded by

the rich will come in and say, “Aha!

But what specific changes do you want to make?”

And they would ask you to sort of sit down

and carefully plan

a brand new tax system right there in front of them,

and then they will say, “Oh, well,

this specific problem is wrong

and this is not going to work.” Listen,

I am not particularly passionate

about the specific form of tax that we take.

I am aware that it is really,

really important that this is carefully designed

to hit the richest rather than the middle class.

I'm totally aware of this problem,

and I'm aware that different

forms of taxes will have different problems.

And I'm aware that we need to be really, really careful

about how we plan it, how we design it.

But the truth is,

the most important thing is that we get a change

and there are a number of forms that change can take.

I campaign for wealth taxes.

Some people campaign

for equalising capital gains with income tax.

Some people talk about closing down the loopholes

that very rich families use to pay zero taxes.

These are all good plans,

but I don't think we should let the perfect

be the enemy of the good.

The truth is, we are losing

this battle for question two.

And if we lose this battle for question two,

then your family will be bankrupted.

So I came into this game, you know, as an economist,

who thought a lot about question one.

And I kind of became a campaigner. A YouTuber.

I literally taught myself how to write a book,

because I could see

we were going to lose question two.

So I am going to focus

for the rest of this video on question two.

The only thing I will say about question one is

I think we need to deal with the fact

that some people say

there's no point trying to tax the rich

because reducing inequality is impossible.

And the answer to that is 100%.

It is possible because we did it in the 20th century.

In the beginning of the 20th century,

inequality in this country,

across Europe, across

the United States, was extreme high.

And ordinary families like yours

and mine lived in desperate poverty.

And over the course of the 20th century,

we reduced wealth inequality really significantly.

That got wealth into the hands of ordinary families,

and it led to really significant increases

in living standards,

which meant that our parents

and grandparents lived much,

much better lives than people

in the early 20th century did.

So for now,

we need to focus on getting some form of change,

because if we spend all of our time

arguing about the specific form of the change,

we wont get anything at all.

There's no point arguing about battle tactics

until you have an army.

So let's talk about how can we force these politicians

to give us the things that we need. All right, so. I,

as most of you will know, if you've been watching

this channel, was an economist,

mathematician and a trader.

I worked as a trader from 2008 to 2014.

I made a lot of money

by recognising,

basically, exactly the diagram

I showed you at the beginning of the video,

which was that wealth

has, was and still is being drained

out of the middle class, out of the working class,

accumulated by the very rich,

that was going to suck

spending power out of the economy,

and that was going to impoverish

most ordinary families.

I bet on that.

And I was very successful

betting that the economy would collapse.

And I made a lot of money on that.

And I quit trading in 2014.

I was living in Tokyo at the time,

and I came back to London,

basically with this conviction

that I was right in this relatively

simple economic understanding that we would see

continued further and further

and further worsening of living standards.

And I didn't want that to happen.

I don't want that to happen.

I assume you don't want that to happen

because it will mean poverty for you and your kids.

And my plan was

basically, simply to come back to London

and show people this, this truth.

And I've been spending basically those,

nearly 11 years now since I came back,

trying to figure out

how can we actually stop this crisis from happening.

And my plan has always been

really relatively simply,

this crisis will impoverish

70%, 80%, 90% of the population here in the UK,

in the US,

in Australia, in Europe, wherever you're watching,

and you're seeing that happening,

you are seeing larger and larger

percentages of the population being impoverished.

And it doesn't make sense

for the public to accept that.

So all we need to do

is show them what's happening,

make it clear to them what's happening,

and they will reject it, basically.

But it's been 11 years now

and we haven't achieved it yet.

So I would like to explain basically how my thinking

has developed and refined into trying

to figure out a way that we can really effectively

stop it.

So when I first came back, the first place I went to

was I worked for an economics

think tank in London

called the New Economics Foundation.

I volunteered there for about six months.

You know, this is a progressive economics

think tank in London.

I kind of figured that these would be the guys

who would help you

sort of introduce new economics ideas into society.

Their name was literally the New Economics Foundation.

And I volunteered there for six months.

I met a lot of nice people.

Some of them I'm still friends with now.

But I basically became convinced that they

didn't really have the capacity

to really push this new idea out.

There was very, very little appetite

for ideas and inequality.

They needed to get funding

for all of their individual projects.

And, you know,

they could get a lot of funding

for global warming stuff

and kind of identity politics stuff.

But there was basically nobody

funding wealth inequality stuff.

The space was quite middle class.

So in many cases there weren’t

people who were not themselves being directly hurt.

I make the point a lot on this channel,

and I think this is important

to recognise, crises of inequality,

they impoverish 90% of the population,

but they make like 1% or 2% of the population

absolutely, really bloody rich.

And these guys, they benefit from it.

And there's another sort of 3%,

4% below that that are pretty well protected.

And I sort of found in that think tank space,

a lot of these protected people basically,

and unfortunately whilst

they are in many cases

very well-meaning,

I didn't see any chance of getting

change essentially from that think tank space.

So I went then to university, I did a two year

economics master's at Oxford, and,

you could probably imagine

if the think tank space was quite

rich and quite upper middle class, the

Oxford University

was unbelievably rich and middle class.

And,

you know, good luck to anyone

who's trying to make change in academia,

and we do need people in those spaces.

I became pretty convinced that

academia was almost completely

a dead end at the moment.

I think, you know, we've made videos on this.

I think the situation of university,

especially elite university academic economics, is just

if the situation wasn't so serious,

it would be quite funny, really.

You've got a lot of very smart kids

that are locked in

tiny, windowless rooms, doing

unbelievably complicated mathematics,

with absolutely no idea what's happening in the world.

So I don't think that we're going

to make change from those spaces.

I eventually decided

to try and move into the media space.

I made that space in early 2020.

And the idea was basically, you know,

I've spent

5, 6 years now

trying to convince rich people to deal with inequality.

I don't think they're going to do it.

The people who are affected by and

and hurt by this economic crisis of inequality

are ordinary families, ordinary families like you,

ordinary families like your kids.

And I was hoping that in the media space,

I might be able to basically

speak to the people who are being hurt.

Speak to people who are being affected.

Instead of speaking to,

you know, the rich guys who are benefiting.

And, that is really when I started to develop

the plan that I've been doing the last

four years, especially the last 2 or 3 years.

Which is I genuinely think that the vast

majority of people in this country,

and I think this is true if you're here

or in the States or in Europe or in Australia

do not have a single person

in the mainstream media

who is communicating

effectively, clearly, understandably,

what is happening in this economic crisis

that is increasingly devastating living conditions

for millions of ordinary families across the world.

And I started to feel that there was a massive gap,

basically a huge gap,

a huge gap to fill, basically telling people

what is happening.

And I started to feel that really strongly

during Covid,

that basically the quality of our economics media

was extremely low.

The quality of our politics

from an economics perspective was extremely low.

And we were because of those failures,

we were going to see a continuation of fall

in living standards.

But we were going to see this

enormous unmet demand

for somebody who was simply talking about

and explaining

what is actually happening in the economy.

Okay. So let's talk about

what is happening in

economics and politics.

I think you basically have

two strands of economic thought

and two strands of political thought,

which is you have this kind of

old school,

the kind of dominant economic ideology of the last

30, 40 years,

which is really,

I think, personified

by the current Labour government,

which is if

we just do everything a little bit more efficiently,

things will get better.

There's no explicit focus on inequality at all.

They often tend to focus on trying to change the system

in such a way that it benefits the rich,

which means inequality

tends to get worse over time,

and living standards fall for the majority.

While this kind of

semi elite group of politicians and economists

themselves are protected.

And this is really clearly dying.

You can see it in the complete collapse

in support for

almost all of the traditional centre

left and centre right parties across Europe.

Those parties are only really hanging on in the UK

and the US

under systems

which basically make it

almost impossible to replace them.

And you're seeing them,

you're seeing even in those countries,

those parties become extremely unpopular and die.

That creates this massive, massive gap for new ideas.

So I think we are here in this space now.

There is a massive,

massive popular demand for new ideas.

And really,

the political left has almost completely failed to put

any new ideas on the table.

And that gap is

being filled by

a new political right,

which I think has been very effective

in doing things like utilising social media,

utilising influencers,

especially on the right

to basically sell a new political story.

And they are, in a sense,

taking advantage of the exact same thing

which I've just described to you,

which is that politics is...

has failed, media has failed.

There is massive demand for something which is new

because people know that the status quo is failing,

and these guys are filling that gap

with ‘The problem is foreigners.

The problem is immigrants’,

and they will be very successful.

You know, they clearly have taken power

of the US government.

They will increasingly take control

of European governments.

And they have taken control

of many European governments.

They are successful,

I think, not necessarily because they are

good.

I think simply because no one else

has really tried to occupy that gap.

I think there is

massive demand for a massive potential for

a simple message delivered to working people.

The reason you are getting poor

is because your wealth is being squeezed out

by the rich and the super rich.

They are taking their wealth from you.

You are unable to compete with them.

The working class is being bankrupted.

The middle class is disappearing. Tax wealth not work.

I honestly think we have a chance

of winning power on that.

And I think in this country in the short term, our...

because we have this centrist party in power,

our problem is how do we squeeze the centre on that?

And I think the power we have

is that the centre is number one,

phenomenally unpopular, and number two

will fail on the economy.

So I think we really have power there.

The longer term risk is not the centre

because I think the centre

will progressively lose popularity,

but these new right ideas.

The problem we have is that they will always be

much, much, much better funded than us.

Quite simply because

once billionaires realise

that the long term battle is a battle between tax

the rich and blame the foreigners,

the billionaires will increasingly aggressively fund

blame the foreigners as an idea.

But we do also have a kind of trump card against this

new right,

which is

when it comes to economic policy,

almost all of these new right parties

want to slash taxes on rich people.

And I think that's partly ideological.

And I think it's partly

because they're funded by billionaires.

And, you know, that's what the billionaires want,

which means that even in the cases where these guys

do take power, and we've seen it

in some European countries, but,

you know, most obviously

we've seen it recently in the US.

These guys will also preside over

an increase

in wealth inequality,

which will mean, again,

a squeeze of assets away from the middle class,

away from the working class,

and further falls in ordinary families

living conditions.

So these guys, whilst they will be very well-funded

and they are very clearly in the ascendancy,

they have a really, really serious weakness,

which is they are literally

impoverishing their own supporters.

But this is not just the weakness

of the political right.

This is also the weakness of the political centre.

You know, I put a video out

a few weeks ago saying,

Trump and Labour will both fail

because they will both allow wealth

inequality to increase,

which means the squeezing out of wealth

from ordinary families to the rich.

And as much as,

you know, this movement is small

and it's it's almost completely unfunded,

the power that we have is

both of our competitors are actively impoverishing

their voter base,

aggressively impoverishing their voter base.

So I think we really, really

have a chance

by pushing

a single message

again and again and again,

wealth inequality is what is making you poor.

The only way to protect your families from poverty

is to get the wealth back from the very rich.

That means fixing a broken tax system

which taxes you at higher rates than them.

It means changing the tax system

to tax them more, to tax you less.

Tax wealth, not work.

Now, I want to make it clear,

because I'm in the business of predictions,

what will happen if we don't get this onto the table.

If we don't get this idea onto the table,

then we will be left with, essentially

the two voices on the table that are already there,

which is one

this kind of tired old centrism where we just say

business, business, business,

growth, growth, growth,

entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship,

entrepreneurship to ourselves again and again

a million times, whilst

we impoverish the working class.

And this new right idea of the problem is immigrants,

the problem is foreigners.

And because you have only two basic ideas on the table,

what you will have is you will get one party in power.

So for example, in this country

we currently have the boring centrists in power.

They will oversee a growth in inequality

and they will become very unpopular

and they will be replaced

by a ‘The problem is foreigners’ party and ‘the problem

is foreigners’ party will also

watch inequality

grow and they will eventually become unpopular

and people will vote the boring centrists in again.

And what you will see

here is

the right wing party ‘the problem is foreigners’

party has space to move into,

which is they can say, okay,

the reason we failed was because we weren't

hard enough on foreigners.

They can rebrand

and they can come in further to the right.

And this is basically exactly what we saw

in this country.

You know,

we had

David Cameron, who was this kind of essentially

a boring centrist,

and he was replaced

briefly by Theresa May,

but eventually by Boris Johnson,

who was essentially,

a re flanking to the right of the political right,

which is, you know, we don't want to...

he really was replacing of a boring

centrist with ‘the problem is foreigners.’

And when he lost he was replaced by,

very briefly

Liz Truss, who again was flanked further to the right.

And when she immediately crashed the economy,

we again got boring centrist Rishi Sunak.

And he was replaced by boring centrist Keir Starmer.

And what you are seeing now in

this country is the growth of Nigel Farage,

who is again the political right

moving to the right.

And you see the same thing in the US.

So in the US you have Donald Trump.

He is a ‘the problem is foreigners’ politician.

He will fail.

He could be followed by another boring centrist,

or he could be followed

by another new sort

of rebranding of the political right,

which is what we need to do is, is be more extreme

on the right.

And,

billionaires will probably be funding these,

these new right wing parties

because they see them

as protecting them from taxing the rich.

And what you’ll see is eventually

these right wing parties

will become more and more extreme,

because it's the only way

you can keep winning elections,

when you keep failing on the economy.

What you are being

popular for is blaming foreigners and immigrants,

and if you're not succeeding on the economy,

you can just, you can keep doubling down on that.

You have space to the right to go into,

whereas the centre kind of have nowhere to go.

They'll become increasingly unpopular.

So, I think we have to be realistic about this.

That leads you over a period of time

from what might may initially have been sensible

seeming, ‘the problem is foreigners’ politics

closer and closer and closer to real fascism.

I mean, that is...

that is where it goes.

And I'm not saying Farage is a fascist,

I'm not saying Trump is a fascist.

That is where it will go over time.

This is exactly what happened

in the early 20th century.

That is what will happen

if we do not get a new voice on the table.

And I think it's worth

seeing and thinking about that for a minute,

because I know we,

we live in countries, you know, here in the UK,

but I know we've got a growing US viewership,

we live in countries

where politics is increasingly factional

and people who view themselves as on the left

hate people who view themselves as on the right.

People who view themselves as on the right,

hate people who view themselves as on the left.

The way this will go will be a...

I was going to say slow,

but it could become increasingly quick,

slide into fascism

whilst both of you,

those of you who view yourselves

as on the left

and those of you who view yourselves as on the right,

will slide further

and further and further into poverty.

So I think it's really,

really important

that you recognise neither of these groups

are going to give you what you need,

which is your houses back

and your ability to be able to have a family. Okay. So

this is a

fight which I genuinely believe we can win.

Not because we are strong

and not because we are well-funded,

but quite simply

because we are competing with two political ideologies

which are both bankrupting the public,

bankrupting 80%, 90% of the public.

And that makes them

very weak to a campaign

which basically simply reveals

the truth of what is happening,

which is the reason you are getting poor,

is because the rich are eating your cake.

They are squeezing you out.

They are taking your assets.

They're driving a family into poverty.

The power that we have is...

really we've got two powers.

One, we are the only voice

which will protect ordinary people from poverty.

And two, we have strength in numbers.

This is genuinely in the financial interests

of the vast majority of people,

both on the political left and on the political right.

This works for them financially.

So I genuinely believe this is a fight we can win.

The problem is, we're not fighting it.

There's just not enough people

getting this idea into the public domain.

And I want to talk a little bit about two ideas.

One is the Overton window

and the other is message discipline.

So the Overton window is an idea in,

I guess, in politics

that there's a kind of window of ideas

which are considered

acceptable, sensible, normal,

non extreme at a given point in time.

We've got some videos on this channel.

Maybe I'll link one in the description

talking about why economists

don't talk about wealth inequality.

The vast majority of economists are rich people

who are not being hurt by this.

They are benefiting from it,

and they do not think inequality is the problem.

That means that at the moment,

focusing on and centralising inequality,

wealth inequality as the core problem,

is not popular with economists,

and it's outside the Overton window.

This really is the key challenge that we have.

And people sometimes ask me, you know,

why don't Labour talk to you?

Why don't Labour get this idea in their manifesto?

Really, it comes down to very simply that answer.

This is outside the Overton window.

The group of people in this country

and in most countries across the world who decide

what is acceptable, what is sensible, what is wise,

is a very small group of rich and posh people.

And they've decided that this

idea is simply unacceptable.

We need to push back on that.

But in order to do that, we need message discipline.

So this is the second concept I want to introduce.

Message discipline is again another political idea.

This is the reason why when when politicians go on TV,

they're always unbelievably, painfully boring,

which is that they get told by their political party

if this subject comes up, you have to say this.

And when they go on the TV,

they're not really thinking, what's my opinion on that?

What do I think about that?

They're thinking,

what has my political

party told me to say about this issue?

And for that reason, when politicians go on TV,

they all say the exact same thing

again and again and again and again and again

and the reason they do

this is this is how you get an idea

into the Overton window.

If you say an idea again and again and again

and again, and it's important

that a variety of people say it.

And then you guys out there

hear 25 different

posh looking, smart sounding people

saying the same idea ‘the problem is immigrants,

the problem is immigrants,

the problem is immigrants’ on the TV,

then you start to believe that idea.

This is how

an idea goes from being crazy, wacky,

unbelievable, no, no way true, to being common sense.

An idea travels from being absolutely outrageous

to being commonly accepted as common sense

simply by lots of people

saying it again and again

and again and again and again.

Now, I'm not a political party.

We don't have a political party.

We will and are trying to influence

the political parties.

What I have is this YouTube channel, and you.

And we need to start using this message discipline now.

I need to keep saying, and you need to keep saying,

and you need to get your friends

and your family to keep saying,

obviously, the reason why you guys are getting poor

is because of growing wealth inequality.

And you can choose when you push that message,

either to use my name and my videos or not.

So you can go to your friends and family and say,

hey, look, there's this guy, Garys Economics,

I think he's explained it really, really well.

I think if you watch his videos, it's really compelling

that actually the reason for growing poverty

is inequality.

I think it's important that you, to stress this,

you increasingly say it's obviously true

because it is obviously true.

Obviously, you cannot squeeze

all of the wealth out of the middle class

and not expect poverty.

You cannot concentrate the wealth

into an unbelievably small group of people

and not expect poverty.

These things are obviously true,

and we need to make it understood

that they're obviously true by saying them again

and again and again and again.

And when I say you can use this channel or not

use this channel,

what I mean is,

if you think it's the best way to convince someone

to send that podcast

or to send them to our Understanding

the Economy series, do that.

But I think one weakness that we have,

one weakness that I have

is that this channel is called Garys Economics.

The logo is like my face

and it's become very attached to my personal brand.

It's very, very important

that these ideas are not 100% attached to

‘these are Gary Stephenson's ideas’,

because it's easy to take out one guy, basically,

I know how this is going to work.

If this keeps growing at the way...

at the rate that it’s growing,

I will get attacked more and more

and more and more and more by the press, by the media.

And eventually these guys will land the punch

that's going to land, and I will probably be gone,

and I understand that's how it works.

It's important

that rather than just saying

“Go watch Garys Economics”,

that you start understanding these ideas yourself

and talking about them

as your ideas, as ideas that are obviously true,

that you understand

it's really, really important

that we have a diversity of voices saying this

and that it's not just me, it's not just me.

And that brings me to another weakness that we have,

which is,

we need broader buy in from powerful spaces.

So what I mean when I say that is, I decided

very consciously to move to a YouTube channel

as opposed to writing for The Guardian, for example,

because I felt that

it would be meaningful to working class people

to see and hear somebody

from a working class background

speaking about the economy.

And I think that is one of the reasons

why this channel has been popular.

I think that's one of the reasons

why the book is popular,

because working class people

really want to see somebody from the same place

as them, speaking about the economy.

That makes me a powerful communicator

to ordinary people, to the working class.

But it really, really

hurts me

when I'm trying to communicate

to people in positions of power.

So when I say that,

I mean high level politicians

or really any politicians, people

in the media, high level economists,

central bankers, people in think tanks,

people in the civil service,

you know, there's this,

it’s a relatively small group of people

who control the levers of power.

And almost all of them

are rich, posh people

that come from rich, posh schools.

And they don't like me.

They don't like the way that I look.

They don't like the way that I sound.

They don't like the way that I come out of nowhere

having made a ton of money and say,

you guys are all idiots, you guys are all wrong.

And that's very understandable.

That's very, very understandable.

So we need and what I need you to do if you can,

is to act as a go between.

Basically, you act on two levels.

Which is number one,

you really make this common sense wisdom

on the streets amongst ordinary

British men and women or American men and women,

if that's where you are.

Get everybody to understand it.

But if you are able to get into positions of power

or influence people in positions of power,

politicians, media, influencers,

celebrities, you know, love to get Carol Vorderman

on the channel if you're interested.

Civil service, academics,

if you can get into these spaces

or influence these spaces,

especially if you sound less working class than me,

I need people like you to act as go betweens

and don't go in there and say, “Oh, Garys

Economics is really smart and you guys are idiots.”

Go in there and speak in your posh voice and say,

hey, I think this idea is,

I think this idea,

this poverty could be caused by inequality.

We need academics saying it.

We need people on the political left saying it.

We need people like these think tanks saying it.

We really, really, really need more diversity of voice.

We are all part of this conversation.

So I need you to boost the ideas, boost

the videos, boost the channels,

but also start trying

to spread them, trying to understand myself.

I want to see

academics at Oxford or at Harvard

or at Cambridge or LSE writing papers saying

we think the reason for growing inequality,

before growing poverty is growing inequality.

I need other people saying it, other people

saying it, with voices like that, it can't just be me.

And if we do that,

I think we can win.

I think we can win.

You know,

I've been doing this for a long time,

and I never expected it to kind of grow

at this unbelievable pace that it is growing.

And it's

quite scary for me, to be honest,

to see the, like, the growth on the channel and

the book's been number one

for six weeks now and I just...

yeah, I get recognised all the time.

It's scary and it's weird.

But basically I was always convinced that

a simple true message,

which could continually be reproving

by predicting better than the mainstream media,

predicting better than the mainstream politicians

would be believed by the public, and

I think it's starting to be proven to be true.

So my message to you guys is

get on board, start singing from the same hymn sheet.

Get some message discipline.

If you're out there in the political left,

ask your political party you’re

associated with or your think tank you're in,

or the groups you're associated in,

why are we not talking about inequality

as the cause for poverty?

Why are we not saying that?

If you're on the political right,

if you’re a member of the Conservative Party,

if you're a Reform voter,

ask them, why are they not saying that?

You know, this is not a left or right issue.

This is a poverty issue.

This is going to happen in every country.

And it doesn't matter who's in charge.

Both Donald Trump and Labour

are presiding over increasing inequality.

You know, call in to LBC, ask them,

you know why you're not talking about inequality.

Inequality is blowing up.

Stock markets are all time highs.

The rich are richer than they've ever been.

And yet ordinary families can't turn the heating on.

You know, make it common sense.

Of course it's inequality. Of course it's inequality.

Say it again and again.

Share it.

Share it with your friends. Share it with your family.

Share it with anyone who has any position of power.

You know, call into the call in shows.

Make this the new common sense.

And I guess this brings me to the final point,

which is a lot of people

want concrete actions.

They say to me, “What can I do, Gary? What can I do?

You freaked me out. You scared me.

What can I do?”

And I want to finish this video by trying my best

to give, like a really clear

answer to that question of what can you do?

The first thing I want you to do,

is take a big breath in, and a big breath out

and recognise

this economic situation, is an economic situation

that is going to get worse.

It is an economic situation that is going to get worse.

This situation of

dislike of immigrants,

dislike of foreigners is also a situation

that is going to get worse.

Both of those things

are going to affect different people differently.

You know, if you are not the poorest, think about

how that's going to affect people poorer than you.

If you are not on the sharp

end of the anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner hatred,

think about how it's going to affect people who are.

The reason I say those things is twofold.

The first one is,

I need you to be ready emotionally for the difficult

and divisive times that are coming,

because if you are angry,

if you are frightened, if you are scared,

I can't do nothing with you.

I can't do nothing with you.

I want to tell another quick story

from when I went on Piers Morgan a few weeks ago.

So when I went on, piers was running like quite late.

Like an hour, maybe like an hour, 20 minutes late,

which meant I had to sit in the green room

with Dave Rubin and his entourage for

an hour and 20 minutes.

They're very nice.

And while we were in the green room, we could,

we could see on a big TV the interviews

that Piers Morgan was doing.

And,

I don't watch Piers Morgan's channel normally,

but I watched these

about an hour of interviews,

I think it was two interviews before I went on, and

I could see what they were doing, right.

They have their left wing head

and they have their right wing head.

And both the interviews before mine,

they had

the left wing heads were all black

and the right wing heads were all white.

And they tried to say things to make that left

wing head angry,

to make them, to make them lose their temper.

When I was on, they wanted to get...

I think there was a, there was a transsexual who,

they were trying to get her angry about

the Olympics or something.

Just trying to get her to say something outrageous.

Tried to get her to lose her temper.

Then they looked at the audience...

They looked at the audience and say, look,

this is what those people are like.

And what they're trying to do is, is cause division.

They're trying to cause division.

They're trying to make you hate each other.

They're trying to make you angry.

They're trying to make you think those guys out

there are your enemy.

And when I say that,

I'm not just talking to the political right,

I'm talking to the political left as well.

They want you to hate each other.

They want you to be angry.

Listen, here in the UK, in the US, all over the world,

the working class is multiracial,

it's multi-ethnic, it includes

men and women

includes people who own house,

people who don't own houses.

If you hate each other,

if the men hate the women and the women hate the men,

and the white people hate the nonwhite people in the

not white people hate the white people,

I can't do nothing with you.

We will never be able to stand together.

We will never be able to fight.

We'll never be able to win.

The power that we have is that there's more of us.

That is a power we only use if we fight together.

We cannot afford to allow ourselves to be frightened,

to be scared, or to hate each other.

The second thing is, I need you guys

to be prepared for a long fight.

We don't win this tomorrow,

we don't win it the next day,

we don't win this next week,

we don't win this next year. Okay?

Your grandparents, your great-grandparents,

your great-great-grandparents

fought for generations

for the kind of ability

you have to own assets

and that your parents had to own assets.

This is not a fight we win quickly.

The reason that I say that is that I know

people want me to arrange

some kind of march on Parliament.

We talk about this a lot.

I don't want to get you guys to go

crazy, email

your MP every day, march on Parliament,

use all your energy,

and then be a situation

where we're not in a position to get anything.

I don't want you guys to be disappointed.

This is a long fight.

You need to conserve your energy for a marathon,

not a sprint. Okay?

We build,

we build, we build, we build, we build, we build,

and then we go together and we win.

When we have enough power, we can win the argument.

We are fighting against two political ideologies,

which will definitely drive your family

and your kids families into poverty.

They've got nothing to offer you.

The argument is there, the argument is simple.

We need to get wealth back

into the hands of ordinary families.

That means taxing working people

less and rich people more.

Tax wealth, not work, protect ordinary families,

make it common sense.

Tell your friends.

Tell your families. Build the movement.

Support other people who are saying the same things.

Be that person yourself.

We need more voices singing off the same hymn sheet.

We can win this argument.

Win the argument, you get the power,

you change the tax system

and then you get your assets back. And that

is how we stop the economy from collapsing.

Good luck. Thank you.

Send it to your mum. Send your friends, to your family.

Good luck.