Five Questions with Author and Economist Ann Pettifor

We like to give our speakers a hard time before they come to Queen Square! We asked author and economist Ann Pettifor five questions and here are her answers.

Don’t forget to join us tomorrow evening, 8 March to hear more from Ann Pettifor and her vision for the Green New Deal!

What inspired you to write the new green deal?

Alexandria Ocasio Cortes – urged on by the Sunrise Movement – was campaigning for a GND…that was different in some key respects from the British version – especially with regard to the need to transform the globalised financial system…So I decided to write about it, but also to elaborate on what a GND would look like…

Do you think pressure movements like XR have any lasting impact on government policy?

I have witnessed a lifetime of protests – against apartheid, for women’s rights, against Soviet repression, for black rights and for gay rights…The world today is, in many respects, hardly recognisable from the one I grew up in in the 1950s. So yes, sure social movements can be transformative…

The first Green new Deal got lost within the financial crash, have we lost precious time because of it?

We have lost precious time these last 30-40 years…

Post pandemic and with Icecaps melting, Is globalization any longer a workable proposition?

This war is in my view, an outcome of financialised globalisation, as is the rise of nationalism and autocracy worldwide…and will trigger its reversal. And probably not in a way that we could regard as progressive…