Hello and welcome to another episode of PTO Extra. My guest today is Grace Blakely. We spoke about the current state of the UK economy, whether the era of austerity is over, and why even in the face of a no-deal Brexit, the UK is unlikely to experience an attack of the bond market vigilantes.

Grace is a staff writer at Tribune magazine, host of the A World to Win podcast, and author of Stolen, How to Save the World from Financialisation.

Her most recent book is The Corona Crash, How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism.

I began the interview by asking Grace about her excellent new podcast, A World to Win, which like PTO is part of Tribune Radio, and what her

aims and hopes for the show were when she was conceiving of it. Yeah, so my ambitions for the show

were really about obviously kind of promoting political education, but also linking up different

struggles in different parts of the world. I think that was really the thing, was to allow socialists in different parts of the

world to learn from each other's successes and failures. Because I think particularly over the

last couple of years on the left, when there was like, you know, the Corbin moment and in the US,

the Bernie moment, there was a tendency to be kind of insular and to see the fate of socialism

around the world as kind

of hinging on the success of those movements in particular countries. Whereas not only is that

not the case, so not only are they very strong and vibrant and interesting socialist movements

taking place all around the world, but actually I feel like that was a lot to learn from

historical movements and also movements that exist currently in different places.

That if those lessons had been learned better and if there was a greater understanding of the general challenges of trying to build a, well, kind of take over or create a new democratic

socialist party, which aims to gain some control over the state in order to shift power

relations between labor and capital, of which, you know, there are many common problems.

Then things might have been slightly different, right? So I think that's basically the aim. It was like,

look, stuff's going on elsewhere, don't lose hope for my audience in the UK. And just for like socialists

everywhere, just to say there are all these lessons, there's all this stuff, there are all these

movements, these campaigns that are taking place every day. And yeah, we need to learn from each other and we need to support

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