In this episode, I speak to the new leader of the Conservative Party in the UK, Kemi Badenau. We discuss her childhood, her educational background, her rise to prominence in the party, and her views on issues such as net zero.
00:01:09.800I had the privilege today, because it was a privilege, to speak to the new leader of the Conservative Party in the UK.
00:01:19.220And the Conservative Party is likely the most successful political party that has ever existed in the West as a whole.
00:01:27.400And its leadership is, well, a position of cardinal importance.
00:01:33.720And Kemi Bednock, the new leader, is a relatively young woman who's come to the UK from another country who is grateful for the intellectual and cultural heritage of the UK and who understands it deeply.
00:01:52.600She's an engineer and has extensive legal training.
00:01:56.380And that's a very interesting combination, because engineers are very practical and task-oriented, and they know how to build things that work, because they have to deal with the realities of the real physical world.
00:02:09.040And her legal training has given her deep insight into the legal structure of not only the UK, but the Western world in general, because so many of the institutions that we rely on in the West were originated in the UK.
00:02:24.060And I got a chance to talk to her about her childhood, her educational background, her rise to predominance in the Conservative Party, her forthright stance on issues such as net zero, which the Conservatives moved towards in a fit of, you have to say, foolishness, egotism, and cowardice.
00:02:50.040And we talked about that in some detail as well.
00:02:52.140We discussed why she believes that she became leader of the Conservative Party, but why she's also an extremely effective alternative, let's say, to Nigel Farage and the Reform Party, which is a right-wing party in the UK as well, that's on the up and up, and that has things going for it.
00:03:13.500And I believe we'll be speaking with Mr. Farage, I interviewed him last year, we're going to do that again relatively soon on the podcast.
00:03:21.520We got a chance to speak about the West in general, and that's part of the reason this podcast should be relevant to everyone in the Western world.
00:03:28.620The UK is a pillar of Western society, and it would be lovely to have a leader in place who understands and appreciates exactly what that culture is and what it's offered to the world.
00:03:40.460And it seems to me that Ms. Badenau comported herself highly successfully in the interview, and I think its fundamental shortcoming was that it wasn't long enough.
00:03:50.880And it's very good to see a leader emerge on the international stage who's brave enough to bear the threat of long-term format interview that's unscripted.
00:04:00.460She had no questions provided to her before this interview, and then to have concluded at the end of it that the best thing that could have happened with the interview, it would have been better if it was twice as long.
00:04:11.740So join us for a vision of the new Conservative Party in the UK.
00:04:18.200So, Ms. Badenau, I think what we'll do to begin with is just walk through your life biographically and let people get a chance to situate you.
00:04:31.080You've emerged into a very influential position on the international scene relatively recently, and so everyone who's watching and listening is going to be curious about where you came from and who you are.
00:04:44.900So maybe take us back to your childhood to begin with, and let's start there.
00:04:50.280I had a very interesting and varied childhood.
00:05:58.240Oh, so, so, so, so, yeah, so my family are from Nigeria, Lagos, so the southwest, the very sort of cosmopolitan city that's by the, by the Atlantic.
00:06:08.900And I don't know how much of the history you know, but Nigeria was a very wealthy country in the, in the 70s.
00:06:16.820And it was a country on the up, post-colonial times, they discovered oil.
00:06:24.880And it was at the height of the oil boom.
00:06:27.840There was a lot of wealth going on, lots of people, you know, buying homes in Knightsbridge in London at a time when the UK was actually having a downturn.
00:06:36.740Nobody was really thinking about moving here the way that we see the mass migration now.
00:06:43.280And it just goes to show just how the fortunes of countries over the latter half of the 20th century have really changed.
00:06:50.980And by sort of 1995, the country is in a really terrible place.
00:06:56.240It's been kicked out of the Commonwealth.
00:08:20.140So I think you and I probably have something in common here.
00:08:23.740I think that we are classified as conservatives now, but really what we are conserving is classical liberalism, like the old liberalism, not the horrible postmodern lefty nonsense stuff, but the good stuff, the enlightenment values, you know, freedom of speech, you know, things like the presumption of innocence, free enterprise.
00:08:46.220All of the things that I think helped make this country really great and a lot of the countries around the West slowly being forgotten, being taken for granted.
00:08:55.120And I can never forget those things because I have a comparison country and I have lived and seen a place where those things are not respected, institutions are not respected, where everybody looked like me, but it was multicultural and there was so much conflict.
00:09:10.960And it's one of the reasons why I describe the UK as a multi-ethnic country, not a multicultural one, because you need to make sure that you have a shared dominant culture.
00:09:22.520And yes, people can eat different foods and have songs and so on, but those are the very superficial markers of culture.
00:10:47.360That was the sort of family that I was born into.
00:10:50.520And I had, you know, when I talked about that part scholarship, I had a pre-med part scholarship to Stanford and my father couldn't afford the rest of it.
00:10:59.680So there was time and I came here and the first thing I did was get a job because I was left on my own and I wanted money.
00:11:08.900So I got a job at McDonald's and I went to a college part time for sort of 16 to 18 year olds.
00:11:16.660It's called a further education college.
00:11:18.340And I just thought, well, you know, my parents are doctors.
00:11:21.160Of course, I will be a doctor as well.
00:11:23.100And what I didn't realize was that between the expectations of the school I was going to and the amount of time I was spending, you know, earning money and flipping burgers and eating them, that actually I was no longer on that academic track.
00:11:35.780And I also had my first experience of what I call the poverty of low, the soft bigotry of low expectations.
00:11:44.660Because I had grown up in a relatively wealthy middle class family.
00:12:07.440And it wasn't because they wanted to keep me down.
00:12:12.460It was because what they had seen was that if you're black, then you probably shouldn't be stretched too much because you won't achieve it.
00:12:19.400And so they set lower targets and give you a huge congratulations and a round of applause for meeting them.
00:12:25.160That was the complete opposite of my upbringing.
00:12:28.260Well, Nigerians do particularly well when they immigrate, let's say, to the United States.
00:12:34.240And so there doesn't seem to be a culture of low expectation that's pervasive in Nigeria.
00:12:40.120I mean, I don't know how to account for the differential success of Nigerians.
00:12:44.000Maybe you can shed some light on that or maybe you just did.
00:12:47.320And I'm also curious about your statement that your family was relatively wealthy in Nigeria because you might want to clarify that too because there's a difference between relatively wealthy and wealthy.
00:12:57.760And so a little bit more about like you were obviously upper middle class, let's say, in terms of educational background, your family and aspiration.
00:13:08.220But economically, from what I understand, it was still relatively tough going at times in Nigeria.
00:13:14.460Being relatively wealthy in a poor country is very different from being relatively wealthy in, you know, in the West.
00:13:25.120For me, being relatively wealthy meant that we had a car and we certainly up until I was about 13, we had running water.
00:13:35.380After 13, we stopped having running water.
00:13:37.600And we could occasionally, but not very frequently, travel on holiday.
00:13:43.840But we didn't have electricity a lot of the time.
00:13:46.860So it's an experience that comes from just being in a poor country that even when you have a bit of money, you still experience life like people who don't have any.
00:13:58.260So no electricity, eventually no running water, lots of fuel shortages.
00:14:11.120A lot of Nigerians who do leave the country end up doing well because they have left a system that holds them back and go to a system that allows them to flourish.
00:14:21.960And that's why I'm so interested in what is it that holds people back in one place and allows them to flourish in another.
00:14:42.800But it is also it's a very competitive place.
00:14:45.860So if you grow up in a very competitive culture and you then live in a place where competition is allowed and is allowed to flourish, you will very likely do well.
00:14:57.240And I think that's one of the things that explains the fact is when people look at the look at the demographics.
00:15:10.940So I think that if you live in a place, if you've come from a country that is very competitive because there are limited resources, because there are not enough jobs to go around, there are not enough university places.
00:15:25.160So you need to be very academic, you need to be, you know, very hustling in your in your behavior.
00:15:31.740And then you then move to a place where you don't have those barriers, but you still have that culture, you are more likely to succeed.
00:15:40.480And I think that that is what explains some of the success of I think it's West Africans, not just Nigerians.
00:15:47.920But as we, as I suspect, as you see more and more lower skilled migration, I think you will start to see those improvements disappearing as well.
00:16:00.400I think that's one of the things I remember seeing a study that mentioned that.
00:16:04.040So, you know, the relative class of the people who move makes a difference.
00:16:09.460And it's one of the reasons why I say it's not just about the country people come from, but who is coming, what skills are they bringing and do they want the place to succeed?
00:16:58.640I got to get out of this based on a true story.
00:17:01.280New season Mondays only on W stream live and on demand on stack TV.
00:17:05.720See, the funny thing about you, so to speak, and this is how I felt when I lived in Montreal, because I didn't have a lot of money as a graduate student.
00:17:13.420And I lived among relatively poor people by Montreal standards, which, you know, they were still doing fine.
00:17:19.560I wasn't poor because I of the my level of aspiration and possibility.
00:17:24.700And the idea that poverty is a consequence merely of lack of money is an unbelievably foolish presumption.
00:17:31.100And you your your your your your your upper middle class status, as you already pointed out, wasn't a consequence of absolute wealth, although relatively you were doing OK.
00:17:42.540It was a consequence of the fact that your family was so educated and so aspirational that it was an unspoken reality that you would could and would succeed.
00:17:55.640Yes, it is. It is more important than just pure money, because it means that you can be thrown into any sort of circumstance and you are likely to succeed.
00:18:05.760And I always consider myself so lucky because had I been born into a different family, I might have had a different trajectory.
00:18:13.580And it's one of the reasons why I think that family is something that is not talked about enough in UK politics.
00:18:20.480And maybe we talk about a little bit more child care for mothers and certain, you know, certain policy elements.
00:18:26.440But family is the biggest determinant of your success and your life outcomes.
00:18:32.220And we need to make sure that we have more stable families.
00:18:35.060Yeah, well, we know, for example, the literature on fatherlessness, for example, is that there's almost nothing that puts a child at higher risk for poor long term life outcome than fatherlessness, for example.
00:18:47.860And so we have I think we have a statistic here that 95 percent of the prison population or certainly in the 90s, the 90 percent plus of the prison population, the male prison population grew up without their father.
00:19:02.700Yeah, so there's even there's effects of fatherlessness that are that are not only behavioral in the in the way that you just described, some more dysregulated aggression among men, but even more fundamental physiological alteration.
00:19:16.500So boys who are fatherless have shorter telomeres by the age of 12, which means that their life expectancy is shorter.
00:19:38.000And so that just shows you how how what would you say pronounced and fundamental that disintegration of family below the nuclear level actually is.
00:19:47.560And that's not that's certainly not merely an economic problem, although it's also an economic problem.
00:19:52.360OK, so you moved when you were 16 and so you were already you already had been doing well enough academically to get a scholarship offer from Stanford.
00:20:01.780So how was it that you were doing well enough academically at 16 to be offered a scholarship from Stanford?
00:20:16.140I remember my my my English was better than my teachers, which they found very frustrating.
00:20:21.840And I think some of that would have been just the exposure, you know, living in the US, having parents who, you know, bought books.
00:20:28.720So I read a lot and I was good academically.
00:20:32.260But something different happened when I moved to the UK, I stopped being good academically and I just became pretty average.
00:20:40.420And I didn't understand why that was happening.
00:20:43.840And my friends who left Nigeria at the same time I did and went to the private schools, they've got a lot of money.
00:20:52.280You know, they had parents far wealthier than mine, certainly by that time, by the by the mid 90s, whatever relative wealth we had was gone.
00:20:59.480And they did. These were people who I used to beat easily at school.
00:21:12.320And there are other schools which people pass through.
00:21:15.280And it was one of the things that I think was the foundation of my conservatism, that making sure everybody's got an equal chance or the best opportunity.
00:21:23.820And I realized that, yes, there would have been a baseline level of, you know, good academics or, you know, intelligence with me.
00:21:32.720But actually, the things that made the difference were the family that I had, the schools that I went to, the culture around me.
00:21:40.280All of those things added to however smart I was in maths and English.
00:21:44.780And when you took those things away, and when I started hanging out with children who didn't care about those things, then my academic results dropped.
00:21:54.540And it took a while for me to get back on track.
00:23:04.340I met a lot of other people who were going to Oxford and Cambridge.
00:23:07.680And they had more of the sort of culture that I had grown up with.
00:23:11.480So, hanging out with people who were different in a different setting also had an influence.
00:23:17.460And then also just knowing that if I didn't get my act together, my life trajectory would end up in a place that I would not like.
00:23:24.300I'd already had all the values instilled in me by my parents.
00:23:28.080So, 16, technically still a child, but just old enough to know how to, you know, it's just old enough to remember and not forget what the values that you've been inculcated with, I would say.
00:23:43.760And so, you also point there to the importance of peer selection, especially when you're making important life decisions.
00:23:51.340Yeah, well, it's one of the things that was a real relief to me when I went off to college.
00:23:55.580And I was about the same age you were when I left my hometown, was that my high school compatriots in northern Alberta, most of them stayed in our hometown.
00:24:58.680Like, where have you guys been all my life?
00:25:00.560People who I agreed with on almost everything.
00:25:03.160People who thought the way I did about so much.
00:25:06.680And I think when you are in a place where the people around you think so differently, you feel very isolated.
00:25:11.640And I think that making sure that young people in particular have a sense of belonging is so critical for mental health.
00:25:20.100And it is why I hate so much of, you know, whether you call it postmodernism, woke, but so much that tries to detach people from what is right for them and give them this horrible, deconstructed nonsense and say, this is what's real.
00:25:35.820I think it's terrible for mental health.
00:25:39.580It's partly because our definition of mental health in the West is, it's too individualistic.
00:25:44.460And we should return to that when we talk about, we will talk about the overlap and the distinctions between classic liberalism and conservatism.
00:25:52.520Because I've rethought that to some fair degree over the last five years.
00:25:56.500Well, partly, well, partly because people kept telling me I was conservative and I had never really thought that, as you pointed out earlier, you know, I'd thought about myself like you had as a more of a classic liberal.
00:26:09.780But I understand, I understand the, there are preconditions for liberalism to work in the classic sense.
00:26:16.620And those preconditions are conservative.
00:26:18.640And so when they vanish, then the liberal project doesn't work.
00:27:07.640So I went to, it was really night school.
00:27:10.480I went to the University of London, but they have a college called Birkbeck where the classes are in the evening.
00:27:15.440And so I went to night school while working about 2005.
00:27:20.040So I'm about 25 and I do a law degree part-time, which was fascinating because I learned so much about the principles of all of the things we talk about.
00:27:30.660You know, the rule of law, jurisprudence, but also a lot of the history of the UK, which I would have learned had I gone to primary or secondary school here.
00:27:39.600I learned in my law degree and it was just so amazing.
00:27:43.340And at the end of it, I thought, I don't want to be a lawyer.
00:27:46.500Definitely don't want to be a lawyer, but I love having this stuff in my head.
00:27:49.740And I'd become quite political by that time.
00:27:52.180And I was more interested in helping to make good law, so being a legislator, than being, you know, a corporate lawyer or something like that.
00:28:24.980I was working in consulting and I still wasn't happy.
00:28:28.240And I was looking, I didn't know what I was looking for, but I knew I was looking for something.
00:28:32.760And I thought another degree would give it to me.
00:28:37.380And what I really was looking for was the vocation which I found in politics.
00:28:42.240And it was a long journey over, probably from age 16 onwards, having that experience of the, you know, that low expectation culture, which I thought was very race coded.
00:28:55.800And looking back on it, it was extremely race coded.
00:28:58.380If I was, I think, a white child, I would have been treated differently.
00:29:01.740And again, it was sort of left-wing teachers who were trying to be helpful, but actually creating a lot of destruction along the way.
00:29:10.020That experience is at university where I think I've met my first sort of proper left-wing students culture type person.
00:29:23.460They, because by this time, of course, I know a lot about Africa.
00:29:26.120And they talked about Africa as this place where they would come in and help the people, you know, who was, you know, just these helpless people.
00:32:20.060And I think people not understanding that is why there are a lot of, I have a lot of critiques about the way people speak about religion, Islam in particular, in this country.
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00:33:06.400Okay, well, we're definitely going to, we're definitely going to return to that.
00:33:43.240And so, you went to law school and you've, a part-time, and you found that compelling intellectually.
00:33:49.060But you also, is that where you ran across your leftist nemeses and first started to understand what the pathologies of the, of post-modern, post-modernism, that kind of sly Marxism that's a part of that?
00:34:03.500And why did that strike you so intensely?
00:34:06.980Like, you tangled that together a little bit in your self-description with that bigotry of low expectations that you encountered with the more leftist teachers.
00:36:18.340I also know that I don't like teachers who just set very low expectations.
00:36:22.840I'm learning that family has actually been the most important thing in making me who I am.
00:36:27.480And I didn't realise that long enough.
00:36:29.340So, all of these things are taking me on the journey to conservatism.
00:36:32.880Then I do the law degree, where I'm reading about John Stuart Mill and Edmund Burke and, you know, how the rule of law is so critical to, you know, the West, but how this country functions.
00:36:47.380And you learn the power of institutions.
00:36:50.100You see how you need to preserve institutions from generation to generation.
00:36:55.720You then compare with what happened during the colonial era, where institutions are brought and, you know, dropped in a place.
00:37:03.120And so, yes, there's now a common law tradition, but the culture has really changed, and eventually the culture erodes it.
00:37:10.780So, a lot of it is personal experience and observation and lots of arguing.
00:37:17.960And I remember when I was in that job working as a systems analysis, there was a lefty French guy who worked with me.
00:37:25.920And he kept saying, you are so right-wing, you are so right-wing.
00:37:29.000And I didn't know enough then, and I said, no, I'm not right-wing, because right-wing, as I had been taught, was a bad thing.
00:37:36.620You know, the media, the cultural establishment always used right-wing as a pejorative term.
00:37:42.000So, I would say, no, I'm not right-wing, but I was.
00:37:44.340And I remember when I really sat down and read the canon and the text, and, you know, you read Hayek, and, of course, Thomas Sowell, who I love very much.
00:37:52.000I realized, oh, my goodness, I'm very right-wing, and I'm proud of that.
00:37:55.460This is not something to be embarrassed or ashamed about.
00:37:59.300And my being very much on the right is that mix of the cultural conservatism, because I want us to preserve the things that are amazing here.
00:38:08.460And one of the things that is amazing is the classic liberalism, not the postmodern, you know, sort of corruption of that.
00:38:17.820And a lot of what I see that has gone wrong is the corruption of liberalism.
00:38:22.560And I gave a speech in December where I said liberalism has been hacked, that people have found the weakest points and are twisting it to do things it shouldn't be doing.
00:38:33.320And you need muscular liberals to defend their turf.
00:38:37.960And instead, what they've been doing is giving away their turf.
00:38:40.840And that is how we ended up with a lot of the extreme gender ideology coming into play, because it wore the clothes of the gay rights movement.
00:38:51.300And that's how we saw a lot of the craziness of critical race theory, the BLM movement, set race relations in a terrible negative territory.
00:39:00.660But it wore the clothes of the civil rights movement.
00:39:03.820And you need people who are in touch with reality, who can say, no, this is not real.
00:39:20.240And I am amazed that we have politicians, including the British Prime Minister, who will say things like 99% of women don't have a penis, as if 1% of women do.
00:39:33.340And if a politician is prepared to tell you something that we all know is not true, then what else will they tell you?
00:39:41.200Yeah, well, there isn't a bigger lie than a man can be a woman.
00:39:45.300I don't think there's a bigger, there's not a bigger perceptual falsehood that's even possible than that.
00:39:52.620It's more fundamental than up versus down or night versus day.
00:39:57.600You know, so even creatures without nervous systems can distinguish between the sexes.
00:40:02.960And so, yeah, there's something very pathological going on there.
00:40:07.020So let's delve into some concepts now because you're moving in that direction.
00:40:13.040And so I want to throw something out for you and you tell me what you think about this.
00:40:18.460I mean, when I regarded myself, let's say, more as a classic liberal, the fundamental reason for that, as far as I'm concerned, was that I believe that societies function better when the individual is the essential unit of analysis or identity.
00:40:37.540But then, and I do believe that's true, and so I don't like ethnic categorizations or racial categorizations or sexual categorizations.
00:40:46.420I think merit itself and ability are independent of those fundamentally, but even more, particularly, if you start identifying people in terms of their group membership, you get pathological attributions like group guilt or group privilege for that matter.
00:41:06.220But what I've come to understand more recently is that that liberal project, which really originated in many ways in the UK, I know the Americans like to take credit for it, but really they just...
00:41:22.040And in a very serious way, and that's why it's so terrible to see the UK lose faith in itself because, well, of its common law tradition and its immense contribution philosophically in terms of sketching out liberalism.
00:41:36.660But then you might say, well, what are the preconditions for being able to use the individual as the fundamental unit of analysis, like perceptual analysis?
00:41:49.380And it seems to me, it's like it has something to do with Christianity.
00:41:54.480And I say that partly because every Protestant and Catholic majority country outside of Africa is a functional democracy.
00:42:15.200If there's an underlying unitary ethos, and that would be the antithesis of the multiculturalism that you described, that's predicated on belief in the intrinsic value of every individual as a fundamental axiom.
00:42:31.580And also the fundamental equality between men and women at the level of ultimate value.
00:42:38.820And then the sanctity of the family and the stability of the family.
00:42:42.380And that would be the long-term committed child-focused monogamous family, which is a very particular type of family arrangement.
00:42:49.840And then once you have that, then the liberal project will work.
00:42:53.540But it stops working if that understructure starts to disintegrate.
00:42:59.460And that seems to me to be where modern conservatism can play its most salutary role, is to remind us, well, no, we need a unity of culture.
00:43:10.640That's a tricky thing, and that's something that you referred to.
00:43:13.960It's like, when you think about unity of culture, and you made some reference to the relationship between that and religion, when you think about the unity of culture that brings people together, what is it that you think is irreplaceable?
00:43:32.500Now, you're kind of looking at the UK as an outsider, in a sense, right?
00:43:38.000You're kind of like Ayaan Hirsi Ali in that regard, right?
00:43:41.700Because you can really see the advantages, and you had to come at that understanding of that advantages really in an intellectual manner, and as an anthropologist almost.
00:43:52.400So what do you see as the necessary preconditions for the kind of unity that brings a country together, and that is a barrier to multicultural disintegration, nihilism, and conflict?
00:44:34.020So you're asking, what are the preconditions?
00:44:37.740In my view, having a high-trust society is so critical.
00:44:44.100People need to be able to trust each other.
00:44:46.580And the problem with having lots of different groups and lots of different group identities rather than one shared group identity is that no matter how hard you try, people will compete with each other, even when they look exactly the same.
00:45:01.820Whether you're looking at Nigeria or Northern Ireland, where Protestants and Catholics had endless troubles and turmoil, everybody looks the same.
00:45:12.740We need to get past the skin color categorization, because it's just a correlation.
00:45:20.740You need to create a society where people can trust each other.
00:45:24.080The more they trust each other, the more they will interact, the more you will have, you know, better businesses, because you don't have to worry about people stealing.
00:45:34.880We're not worried about people harming each other.
00:45:37.300Anything that creates lots of different groups, where the group identity becomes more powerful than anything else, means that you start to dislike or distrust other groups.
00:45:56.700And I think what has been remarkably successful about Western society is that it has had a dominant culture for a very long time, but has been able to tolerate other strains within it.
00:46:13.100Most countries, if you're bringing in something else, it gets killed or you are forced to assimilate.
00:46:20.000It's not just allowed to be its own thing and just sit there.
00:46:23.840And I think that that's something that's really special about a lot of Western culture.
00:46:29.240And it has allowed it to thrive and take the very best from what's all around the world.
00:46:33.200But the dominant culture has to be reinforced.
00:46:36.460And when we move away from culture as the starting point and think it's law or it's religion, we start to get confused about where we're going to end up.
00:53:53.460Because everybody thought someone else was dealing with it.
00:53:57.660And, you know, whether the ministers thought the civil service was doing it or the civil service thought that the border people were doing it and so on.
00:54:05.240At the end of the day, we as the political party in charge have to take responsibility for that.
00:54:09.140But it's one of the things that I find most frustrating because there is a complacency in this country that it doesn't matter when something's happening because everything's going to be okay.
00:54:47.980When people were very alive to the threat from other people, other countries, when you have generations that have grown up where everybody is having a great time and we're not really at war.
00:55:00.900And, you know, I think all of that contributes to the complacency.
00:56:01.520And it is what happens when people have a very superficial observation of what is happening and assume that they understand it all and they know everything.
01:09:05.060And I was dismissively waved away by the minister at the time saying the plans will be forthcoming.
01:09:10.060That minister now works, you know, in the green industries, I'm told.
01:09:14.500And I think that the reason why this happened is because a lot of people are afraid of being attacked, of cancellation, of going against the grain.
01:09:27.540This was a way for us to say we're showing global leadership.
01:09:30.900There's this thing that a lot of politicians like to have, you know, walking on stage.
01:12:32.660Well, I want to delve into that some more because it's a huge catastrophe.
01:12:37.540And let me reflect your argument back to you and then we'll elaborate on it a little bit.
01:12:43.060And I'm going to push things a little bit farther.
01:12:45.260So you pointed to two causal factors, two primary causal factors, three really.
01:12:53.640One was that the conservative government believed that the environmental movement was a place where cross-party cooperation could be had.
01:13:04.020And that I imagine, too, the conservatives believed that taking a pro-environmental stance, especially in relationship to climate change, might broaden the appeal of the conservative party outside of its standard, what would you say, standard realm of acceptability.
01:13:24.800I'm trying to give the devil his due here, you know.
01:13:26.820And then the next thing you said, which is much more unforgivable, I would say, not because you said it, but because it exists, is the desire of preening narcissistic politicians to rise above even their national prominence and strut about the international stage as undeserving planetary saviors.
01:13:47.500And that's a form of narcissism that's...
01:13:50.260I mean, Jesus, really, if being prime minister isn't enough for you, now you have to make your name on the international stage.
01:13:57.260It's like, is there any limits whatsoever to your hubris?
01:14:01.820And someone like Justin Trudeau is an absolutely stellar example of exactly that pathology.
01:14:06.640And I think it was Keir Starmer himself who said, if I remember correctly, that Westminster, in some ways, was beneath him.
01:14:13.940And that the real action was at places like Davos, you know, with the...
01:14:17.840They have the highest quality call girls there, for example, which is one of the indications of just how stellar an organization it is, right?
01:14:49.420One of the reasons is that somebody who wasn't even a Canadian submitted the entire transcript of a conversation I had with Joe Rogan to my licensing board.
01:14:59.220And I was complaining about climate change policy, pointing out that we're stacking unbelievably unstable economic models that purport to project out 100 years, which is completely preposterous, on top of climate models that are really no more stable than the economic models.
01:16:36.340And you need people who understand the system, who can make sure that they don't use all these legalistic frameworks, whether it's on cancellation, judicial review, et cetera, to unwind it all.
01:16:49.760And when you have a party that can see how to do things and another party that says what it wants to do but doesn't know how to do things and it starts to do better, we're in a tricky situation because you need to tell people the truth.
01:17:04.920And what I have at the moment are parties on either side who are telling people exactly what they want to hear one way or another on the left and on the right.
01:17:36.800I've published 100 scientific papers and I'm not a climate scientist, but I can read research.
01:17:41.580And I'm pretty good at striking to the core of the topic at hand.
01:17:46.780And so I've spent a lot of time reviewing the carbon debate and this is what it looks like to me.
01:17:53.920And I would like your opinion about this.
01:17:57.300The first thing that I think is incontrovertible is that carbon dioxide levels are at a historic low when calculated over a 500 million year period.
01:18:07.580That's a very long time, 500 million years.
01:18:10.220And we're low enough so that Patrick Moore, who was one of the people who founded Greenpeace, believed that had we not started burning fossil fuels and cranking up carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, that plants would have started to die en masse within 100 or 200 years.
01:18:30.260Now, there is evidence that the planet has greened quite substantively in the last 20 years because of increased carbon dioxide levels.
01:18:39.580Whether that's human caused or not is not exactly fixed, but there's some possibility of it.
01:18:45.060But not only has the planet green 20%, which is an immense amount, an immense amount.
01:18:51.280It is the cardinal piece of data on the carbon dioxide front, that greening.
01:18:55.820It's also greened most spectacularly in semi-arid and desert areas because plants with more carbon dioxide can tolerate more arid conditions.
01:19:09.080And so the planet is greener and crop yields are up.
01:19:12.700And so as far as I can tell, and I'm going to push the envelope here, not only are the carbon dioxide fear mongers wrong, they're telling the opposite of the truth.
01:19:23.800Is that it looks to me like there's some reason to believe that increased carbon dioxide is, I think, incontrovertibly a net good.
01:19:32.980And I can say that you don't have to agree, and I don't even expect you to agree, but it's a topic that needs to be broached.
01:19:39.240And then let's add a couple of dimensions to that.
01:19:44.500So we have a situation in Australia, for example, where the Australians will sell coal to the Chinese who are building these plants that you described at a rate that's just beyond comprehension.
01:19:54.060But they won't build coal plants in their own country, even though the air we breathe, as the environmentalists keep pointing out, is pretty much the same everywhere.
01:20:02.860And so we're de-industrializing Germany.
01:20:58.100You're creating renewable energy sources, for example, so that if one day the fossil fuels do run out in 500 or 1,000 years or whenever it is, that we have built something that is in place.
01:21:08.800I think that there is a way to look at how we create that sort of future that is more sensible than what worries me as being a movement that is inspired by a lot of things that are actually just anti-human in and of themselves.
01:21:23.260That when I hear the rhetoric of a lot of people who talk about net zero, you know, the left wing extremists, not just the traditional left, but the hardcore sort of climate extremists, it's like they don't like humanity itself.
01:21:37.440They see us as being alien to the planet and it should just be nature without people in them.
01:21:43.760And I'm particularly exercised by this because one of my younger cousins killed himself after going down an internet rabbit hole of anti-natalism and pro-mortalism and started, you know, he didn't become an environmentalist, but at least not that I know of.
01:22:03.100But he became someone who felt that human beings shouldn't be here and why are we doing this to the planet?
01:22:08.860And I see a lot of that in, you know, much of the rhetoric around the climate change extremists and I don't like it.
01:22:17.460I don't like things that are anti-human.
01:22:19.280I don't like things that make people feel bad about themselves, whether it's that human beings shouldn't be on the planet or, you know, the identity politics of race and, you know, white people are all evil or whatever.
01:22:29.340I don't like any of that stuff. And so I have a scepticism towards this movement and the outcomes I have seen.
01:22:36.280I was the Secretary of State for Industry and Business and I saw our manufacturing closing down because people said the energy prices were too high.
01:26:54.060And the problem I have with other people on the right is that they're so angry, they want to destroy things.
01:27:02.300They don't have a plan for how to build things.
01:27:04.780They just say, well, we'll just do this and we'll tow boats back to France and we'll shoot the people who are coming there and then everything will be fine.
01:27:11.300You can't seriously think that that will work.
01:27:14.280These are people who've never been in the system.
01:29:38.600Yeah, well, I think one of the things that I really learned about you today that's striking is that combination of engineering and legal education.
01:29:48.860Now, I've worked with a lot of engineers, well, and a lot of lawyers for that matter.
01:29:52.620But one of the things that's very interesting about engineers, two things.
01:29:56.040First of all, they tend to be pretty truthful.
01:29:58.480I think that's partly their autistic proclivity, let's say.
01:30:01.740They don't have the social skills to lie.
01:30:04.520But it's also the fact that they actually have to build things that work.
01:30:08.220And they have to build them from the bottom up.
01:30:10.420And so the engineers I've worked with are very painstaking and very detail-oriented and less flashy and entrepreneurial than you might want if you want to be with someone truly exciting.
01:30:21.560But they do have to build systems that work.
01:30:24.240And if they make mistakes, the systems don't work.
01:31:39.980And I'm very optimistic about the future, especially for young people.
01:31:43.480And I think if I was to leave you with a thought, it is that I am so in despair at how young people see the future.
01:31:51.960Because I remember when I was in my 20s, having that quarter-life crisis and wondering where my life was going, I never thought there was no opportunity.
01:33:06.300And that is really, I think, maybe the difference between me and the other party leaders, that I'm thinking very much about the future and giving people hope, not just about today or yesterday.
01:33:17.340Well, that's a good place to end, I would say.
01:33:19.580For everybody watching and listening, we're going to continue our conversation on the Daily Wire side.
01:33:24.480And I think what I'll do there is tilt towards U.K.-U.S. relationships and talk to Ms. Badenoch about her response to the Trump election victory and her vision of, well, the U.K. relationship with the U.S. certainly, but also U.K. relationship with Europe, given the new dynamic that's emerging because of the electoral transformation on the American side.
01:33:51.460Perils and opportunities in the era of Trump, let's say.
01:33:55.200And we can cover that on the Daily Wire side so everybody could join us there.
01:34:00.140It'd be lovely to sit down with you again at some point if you're inclined.
01:34:03.300We can see how this does and whether it's been of some benefit to the listeners and to you because it would be really good to delve into the immigration issue in some detail.
01:34:13.500And also the issue of coexistence on the religious side between the Islamic world and the Western world, which is a conversation that seriously needs to be had and which many people on the Muslim side are keen to have, especially in places like the United Arab Emirates and increasingly in places like Saudi Arabia.
01:34:33.680So there's sparks of hope there, all the signatories of the Abraham Accords.
01:34:47.100And thank you very much for agreeing to do this.
01:34:48.960And we'll see you in a, well, we'll see you on the Daily Wire side, but we'll also see you in a couple of weeks in London at the ARC conference.