Yanis Varoufakis speaks truth to power at Clapton economics talk

Big name: Yanis Varoufakis speaks at Clapton Round Chapel. Photograph: Hackney Citizen

“Debt is to capitalism what hell is to Christianity”, Yanis Varoufakis told an audience at the Round Chapel on Tuesday, “horrible, but absolutely necessary”.

More than one thousand people had packed out the Clapton venue to hear the self-styled “recovering former finance minister of Greece” speak at a free panel event, ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Economics’.

Varoufakis give a whistle-stop tour of the Greek economic crisis and how banks profited, he said, from encouraging further debt. “This is the funny part,” said Varoufakis. “The banks said ‘We will lend Greece the money, but we will do this on the condition that you do not earn any more money’.”

Ann Pettifor, director of Policy Research in Macroeconomics and Mufti Abdur Rahman Mangera, Imam at Casenove Mosque, joined Varoufakis on the panel of the event, which examined how people and states fall into debt.

False dogma

The talk was the second in a series of lectures and workshops for People’s PPE, a new initiative across Hackney and Tower Hamlets designed to empower the grassroots and engage ‘ordinary people’ in philosophy, politics and economics.

The event organiser, Imad Ahmed, is also an English teacher at Clapton Girls’ Academy. He said: “Democracy cannot function without knowledge.

“People’s PPE was born out of a need to find out what the false dogma are that exist about politics and economics, and see whether we can educate ourselves to make better informed choices.”

The Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) course at Oxford University has called the “surest ticket to the top” for aspiring politicians of all parties, counting David Cameron, David and Ed Miliband, Lord Mandelson, and Edward Heath amongst its alumni.

“If people want to become engaged in democracy that course is precisely the knowledge they need,” said Mr Ahmed.

“There are some things on the news that I don’t feel adequately informed to understand. We are about to go into probably the most important referendum of our lifetime and I would contend that most people are not well enough informed about it.”

So far the turnout at the events has far exceeded Mr Ahmed’s expectations. For the first event – with Peter Oborne, Owen Jones and Dr. Layli Uddin, an academic born in Tower Hamlets – Ahmed had booked a 400-seater room, and 1,000 people turned up. “We’ve hit a nerve,” said Ahmed, “it shows there’s a real thirst for it”.