Dan Edelstyn chats to Sarah-Jayne Clifton, director of Jubilee Debt Campaign about the huge changes afoot in the UK and international economies. Among the subjects discussed are the Bank of England who are effectively, bailing out banks, businesses, normal people, while their jobs have stopped or their businesses are stopped. Spanish universal basic income. How to keep up the momentum towards a fairer economy for all.. Edelstyn asks: "So I guess, the question that I'm really interested in is if all of these new things are shown to be possible, is this also a time where we could argue that a personal debt bailout across Britain is also possible? And also, how necessary do you feel that that is, as the Director of Jubilee Debt Campaign? " Sarah Jayne replies "we're seeing at the moment a simultaneous global health crisis and global economic crisis. And really, in terms of where we're focused, the intersection between debt and finance and poverty, the real impacts of that crisis, we don't think have actually fully been felt yet. They're just starting really to be set in motion. And we actually seen that much worse impacts are on the horizon, both in terms of personal debt in the UK, but also the global South debt situation for poor countries. And I think just to start with, it's just really important to recognize that this is only coming just a decade after the 2008 financial crisis. We were already struggling to really fully recover from that crisis, and now we are being hit by another global economic crisis. And I think what we're seeing also from this is that the resilience of our economies and our health systems is really weak, and it has been weakened by the economic model that we've seen governments pursuing, not just the last 10 years but for the last 40 years. The economic model of neoliberalism, which is about free markets and weak regulation, weak investment in public services, the slashing of the social safety net, which means a lot of countries are just really ill prepared to weather this crisis now, both in terms of being able to actually have the health infrastructure set up to actually support people and get through the pandemic, but also to weather the economic impacts. So on the UK household debt side, obviously we had a household debt crisis before COVID-19. Household debt levels in UK were already at a record level, higher than before 2008, about 230 billion or something. We had 9 million people in this country in problem debt, and the big overlap between people in problem debt and people in poverty, this growing household debt poverty trap. I think it's 14 million people in the UK we're in poverty prior to COVID-19, so that's about 20% of our population. So we were already facing really significant problems. We've seen actually some really quite significant action by the government in the UK to try and mitigate the worst of the economic impacts of the crisis, to really try and protect jobs and incomes, and that is really welcome. We've obviously seen the job retention scheme, where employees can be furloughed on 80% of their wages. Then they realized that actually that left out all self-employed people, so there was action on self-employed. But we know already that there are some really big gaps and there have been some big delays in this government package, that already 2 million self-employed people are just not going to be eligible for this program. Also, a lot of people have already lost their jobs, and it's laying bare something that people who cared about poverty and economic injustice have known for a long time, which is our social safety net is in absolute tatters and people are being asked to live on levels of Universal Credit and Job Seekers Allowance, which is just not possible to live on. So, in the range of £70 to £90/ week. The government's just put it up, but it's obviously still not enough. Which means that people who are reliant on that safety net have no choice really, either to become destitute or to get into further debt. So it was really important for us as an organization to try and address some of these holes that we were seeing in the government's package. So last week, we wrote a letter to the chancellor with around 80 other academics and leaders and civil society organizations, charities, think tanks and others, calling for an urgent additional package of measures specifically at tackling the household debt trap. So in order to basically stop the families and households who are already in debt, getting into more debt because of coronavirus, but also stopping a load more people whose incomes have been impacted by the pandemic from falling into a debt trap as well. The two then discuss "a seismic shift in what's considered politically acceptable intervention in the economy in the last two weeks. We've seen it not just here in the UK, but also across the world."