The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 522. The New Conservative Party ｜ Kemi Badenoch

00:00:00.000 My dad used to talk about a law of homogeneity, and he said people find their kind of people and they stick together.

00:00:07.160 And I had this experience when I joined the Conservative Party.

00:00:10.160 There are preconditions for liberalism to work in the classic sense, and those preconditions are conservative.

00:00:15.840 When they vanish, then the liberal project doesn't work.

00:00:18.520 A lot of what I see that has gone wrong is the corruption of liberalism.

00:00:22.820 People have found the weakest points and are twisting it to do things it shouldn't be doing.

00:00:28.560 In a low-trust society, everyone's a potential enemy.

00:00:31.540 And if a politician is prepared to tell you something that we all know is not true, then what else will they tell you?

00:00:38.160 Now, you're kind of looking at the UK as an outsider when you think about the unity of culture that brings people together.

00:00:43.940 And there's a lot to unpack.

00:00:45.200 There are a large number of people who are suffering from what I call cargo cult syndrome.

00:00:49.800 Do you know what I mean by cargo cult syndrome?

00:00:51.540 You should explain it for people, though.

00:00:58.560 Hello, everybody.

00:01:09.800 I had the privilege today, because it was a privilege, to speak to the new leader of the Conservative Party in the UK.

00:01:19.220 And the Conservative Party is likely the most successful political party that has ever existed in the West as a whole.

00:01:27.400 And its leadership is, well, a position of cardinal importance.

00:01:33.720 And 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.

00:01:52.600 She's an engineer and has extensive legal training.

00:01:56.380 And 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.

00:02:09.040 And 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.

00:02:24.060 And 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.

00:02:50.040 And we talked about that in some detail as well.

00:02:52.140 We 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.

00:03:13.500 And 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.

00:03:21.520 We 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.

00:03:28.620 The 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.

00:03:40.460 And 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.

00:03:50.880 And 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.

00:04:00.460 She 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.

00:04:11.740 So join us for a vision of the new Conservative Party in the UK.

00:04:18.200 So, 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.

00:04:31.080 You'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.

00:04:44.900 So maybe take us back to your childhood to begin with, and let's start there.

00:04:50.280 I had a very interesting and varied childhood.

00:04:53.300 I was born in London.

00:04:55.340 I was born in Wimbledon, but purely by accident.

00:04:58.460 It was not by design.

00:05:01.080 My mother, who's a professor of physiology, had an obstetric referral, and her doctor said,

00:05:10.140 you need to go see this doctor in the UK, and, you know, she had me at a private hospital at a time when, if you were born in the UK,

00:05:20.580 you got citizenship automatically, which she was unaware of.

00:05:25.220 And my childhood was, you know, us coming, you know, on holiday back and forth to the UK.

00:05:31.100 We lived in the US for about a year.

00:05:33.640 She had a fellowship there.

00:05:34.600 So I come from a very academic family, not just my parents, but their siblings and so on.

00:05:39.180 And she had a fellowship at the University of Nebraska.

00:05:41.820 So a lot of my early childhood memories, really vivid ones, are actually of Omaha and the snow and the first grade.

00:05:49.300 It's hard to have vivid memories of Omaha.

00:05:52.540 Do you?

00:05:54.420 So, and where was your family from?

00:05:57.000 What's the country of origin?

00:05:58.240 Oh, 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.

00:06:08.900 And I don't know how much of the history you know, but Nigeria was a very wealthy country in the, in the 70s.

00:06:16.820 And it was a country on the up, post-colonial times, they discovered oil.

00:06:22.280 So I was an oil boom baby.

00:06:24.880 And it was at the height of the oil boom.

00:06:27.840 There 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.

00:06:36.740 Nobody was really thinking about moving here the way that we see the mass migration now.

00:06:43.280 And it just goes to show just how the fortunes of countries over the latter half of the 20th century have really changed.

00:06:50.980 And by sort of 1995, the country is in a really terrible place.

00:06:56.240 It's been kicked out of the Commonwealth.

00:06:58.440 Universities are on strike.

00:07:00.360 And I, by this point, 96, I'm doing very well in my studies.

00:07:05.100 I have scholarships, part scholarship to go to Stanford.

00:07:08.860 And there's nowhere for me to go.

00:07:10.540 And my mother says, you need to leave the country.

00:07:13.020 And by this time, we had discovered that I could come to the UK.

00:07:17.320 It wasn't where she originally wanted me to come to.

00:07:19.640 But I had a family friend who was here and who said, well, why doesn't she come stay in London with me?

00:07:26.180 So my mother said, you should go and stay with her.

00:07:28.200 I will take you.

00:07:29.240 And my dad gave me his last hundred pounds.

00:07:31.880 He spent all his money on the flights.

00:07:33.600 Exchange rate was terrible.

00:07:35.400 And I came here and it was just so amazing because I couldn't remember the UK from my early childhood.

00:07:43.160 And it was like watching TV and just thinking the amount of opportunity I had was fantastic, how lucky I was.

00:07:51.800 But also it was at a time where leaving was just something that felt like an escape from a place where no one could escape from.

00:08:01.240 And I always feel very lucky about that.

00:08:02.960 So I see the UK as a place of hope and opportunity.

00:08:06.640 And one of the things I'm most worried about now is that the country is changing.

00:08:11.640 It's not the same place that I moved back to in 1996.

00:08:16.120 It's not the same place that I came back to.

00:08:17.760 It's changed a lot.

00:08:18.860 And that worries me.

00:08:20.140 So I think you and I probably have something in common here.

00:08:23.740 I 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.

00:08:46.220 All 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.

00:08:55.120 And 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.

00:09:10.960 And 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.

00:09:22.520 And yes, people can eat different foods and have songs and so on, but those are the very superficial markers of culture.

00:09:30.140 Culture trumps everything.

00:09:31.240 It's much deeper things.

00:09:33.240 Customs, norms, how we treat each other, the expectations that you have of society and more importantly, what society has of you.

00:09:42.220 What are your responsibilities, not just your rights?

00:09:45.720 And those are the things that led me on the journey to conservatism, but it is very rooted in my having two places to compare to.

00:09:53.640 So you were born in 1980 and you moved to the UK in 1996.

00:09:58.060 So you were 16 or 17, okay.

00:10:01.320 16.

00:10:01.880 16.

00:10:02.460 And you said your studies were going well in Nigeria.

00:10:05.420 What were you interested in and what did you study?

00:10:08.060 Now you have a background in engineering and law, which are very disparate fields.

00:10:12.260 So I'm very curious about that.

00:10:14.060 So what were you oriented to academically when you were 16?

00:10:18.480 And did you have political aspirations or ambitions that early?

00:10:24.060 No.

00:10:24.500 How would I have political aspirations?

00:10:26.700 I grew up under a military government.

00:10:29.040 I didn't even know what politics was.

00:10:31.060 You kind of knew what democracy was, but you knew you didn't have it.

00:10:34.060 So the politics and the political sort of interest came much, much later.

00:10:39.180 Now, I was supposed to be a doctor like my parents and my uncles and aunts and all their friends.

00:10:45.660 That was the family that I was born.

00:10:47.360 That was the sort of family that I was born into.

00:10:50.520 And 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.

00:10:58.420 And that was age 16.

00:10:59.680 So 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.

00:11:08.900 So I got a job at McDonald's and I went to a college part time for sort of 16 to 18 year olds.

00:11:16.660 It's called a further education college.

00:11:18.340 And I just thought, well, you know, my parents are doctors.

00:11:21.160 Of course, I will be a doctor as well.

00:11:23.100 And 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.

00:11:35.780 And I also had my first experience of what I call the poverty of low, the soft bigotry of low expectations.

00:11:44.660 Because I had grown up in a relatively wealthy middle class family.

00:11:49.040 Everybody's a doctor.

00:11:50.500 And of course, you get all A's and of course you do well.

00:11:53.980 It just wasn't even a thing to not succeed academically.

00:11:57.700 And I got to a school where failing was okay.

00:12:00.800 And it didn't matter if you didn't get the top grades.

00:12:02.900 And the teachers would say, well, why do you want to be a doctor?

00:12:05.700 You can be a nurse instead.

00:12:07.440 And it wasn't because they wanted to keep me down. 0.94

00:12:12.460 It 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. 0.84

00:12:19.400 And so they set lower targets and give you a huge congratulations and a round of applause for meeting them.

00:12:25.160 That was the complete opposite of my upbringing.

00:12:28.260 Well, Nigerians do particularly well when they immigrate, let's say, to the United States.

00:12:34.240 And so there doesn't seem to be a culture of low expectation that's pervasive in Nigeria.

00:12:40.120 I mean, I don't know how to account for the differential success of Nigerians.

00:12:44.000 Maybe you can shed some light on that or maybe you just did.

00:12:47.320 And 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.

00:12:57.760 And 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.

00:13:08.220 But economically, from what I understand, it was still relatively tough going at times in Nigeria.

00:13:14.460 Being relatively wealthy in a poor country is very different from being relatively wealthy in, you know, in the West.

00:13:25.120 For me, being relatively wealthy meant that we had a car and we certainly up until I was about 13, we had running water.

00:13:35.380 After 13, we stopped having running water.

00:13:37.600 And we could occasionally, but not very frequently, travel on holiday.

00:13:43.840 But we didn't have electricity a lot of the time.

00:13:46.860 So 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.

00:13:58.260 So no electricity, eventually no running water, lots of fuel shortages.

00:14:02.980 But I was never hungry.

00:14:04.080 So that's what I mean by that.

00:14:07.420 And you're absolutely right.

00:14:11.120 A 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.

00:14:21.960 And 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.

00:14:28.620 And it is not just money.

00:14:30.520 It is many of the things that go with culture, the attitude to entrepreneurship, whether you live in a high trust or a low trust society.

00:14:38.600 It's a very low trust society.

00:14:40.420 You get a lot of clan behavior.

00:14:42.800 But it is also it's a very competitive place.

00:14:45.860 So 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.

00:14:57.240 And I think that's one of the things that explains the fact is when people look at the look at the demographics.

00:15:02.200 Say that last part again.

00:15:04.260 I want to just make sure I followed your argumentation there about competitiveness.

00:15:09.720 I think, yes.

00:15:10.940 So 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.

00:15:25.160 So you need to be very academic, you need to be, you know, very hustling in your in your behavior.

00:15:31.740 And 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.

00:15:40.480 And I think that that is what explains some of the success of I think it's West Africans, not just Nigerians.

00:15:47.920 But 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.

00:16:00.400 I think that's one of the things I remember seeing a study that mentioned that.

00:16:04.040 So, you know, the relative class of the people who move makes a difference.

00:16:09.460 And 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?

00:16:19.240 Right, right.

00:16:19.740 Well, and that's not even precisely class in the Marxist economic sense.

00:16:25.200 It's more like level of intrinsic aspiration.

00:16:28.780 And there'd be the determinants of that are actually relatively difficult to specify, you know, what what makes someone.

00:16:36.200 Like so worried about my sister.

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00:17:05.720 See, 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.

00:17:13.420 And I lived among relatively poor people by Montreal standards, which, you know, they were still doing fine.

00:17:19.560 I wasn't poor because I of the my level of aspiration and possibility.

00:17:24.160 Right. 0.98

00:17:24.700 And the idea that poverty is a consequence merely of lack of money is an unbelievably foolish presumption.

00:17:31.100 And 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.

00:17:42.540 It 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.

00:17:53.520 Right. That's wealth to have that.

00:17:55.640 Yes, 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.

00:18:05.760 And I always consider myself so lucky because had I been born into a different family, I might have had a different trajectory.

00:18:13.580 And it's one of the reasons why I think that family is something that is not talked about enough in UK politics.

00:18:20.480 And maybe we talk about a little bit more child care for mothers and certain, you know, certain policy elements.

00:18:26.440 But family is the biggest determinant of your success and your life outcomes.

00:18:32.220 And we need to make sure that we have more stable families.

00:18:35.060 Yeah, 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.

00:18:47.860 And 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.

00:19:02.700 Yeah, 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.

00:19:16.500 So boys who are fatherless have shorter telomeres by the age of 12, which means that their life expectancy is shorter.

00:19:25.680 And girls really?

00:19:27.140 Yes, absolutely.

00:19:28.240 15, 12 to 15 percent shorter.

00:19:30.200 It's remarkable.

00:19:31.120 And girls who lack a father hit puberty one year earlier. 0.89

00:19:35.980 Right.

00:19:36.200 That's a major change.

00:19:38.000 And so that just shows you how how what would you say pronounced and fundamental that disintegration of family below the nuclear level actually is.

00:19:47.560 And that's not that's certainly not merely an economic problem, although it's also an economic problem.

00:19:52.360 OK, 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.

00:20:01.780 So how was it that you were doing well enough academically at 16 to be offered a scholarship from Stanford?

00:20:09.000 I don't know.

00:20:09.720 I just was I, you know, I was I was I was a good all rounder at school.

00:20:13.600 I was very good at maths.

00:20:14.980 I was very good at English.

00:20:16.140 I remember my my my English was better than my teachers, which they found very frustrating.

00:20:21.840 And I think some of that would have been just the exposure, you know, living in the US, having parents who, you know, bought books.

00:20:28.720 So I read a lot and I was good academically.

00:20:32.260 But something different happened when I moved to the UK, I stopped being good academically and I just became pretty average.

00:20:40.420 And I didn't understand why that was happening.

00:20:43.840 And my friends who left Nigeria at the same time I did and went to the private schools, they've got a lot of money.

00:20:52.280 You 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.

00:20:59.480 And they did. These were people who I used to beat easily at school.

00:21:04.020 They were suddenly doing very well.

00:21:05.440 And I realized that not all the schools are the same here, that there are some schools that are very focused.

00:21:10.860 They coach, they train.

00:21:12.320 And there are other schools which people pass through.

00:21:15.280 And 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.

00:21:23.820 And I realized that, yes, there would have been a baseline level of, you know, good academics or, you know, intelligence with me.

00:21:32.720 But actually, the things that made the difference were the family that I had, the schools that I went to, the culture around me.

00:21:40.280 All of those things added to however smart I was in maths and English.

00:21:44.780 And 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.

00:21:54.540 And it took a while for me to get back on track.

00:21:57.680 And I ended up studying engineering.

00:21:59.840 Sorry?

00:22:00.340 How did you get back on track?

00:22:01.880 So, it took a while for me to just figure out what I wanted to do.

00:22:08.040 Engineering was, when I realized I couldn't get into medical school here, very competitive.

00:22:13.920 And the number of places are regulated in the UK.

00:22:16.880 So, there's a limit on how many places that can be.

00:22:20.500 Engineering, on the other hand, is not.

00:22:22.640 And the society that I grew up in had four magic courses.

00:22:26.520 There was medicine, engineering, law and accounting.

00:22:28.900 And if you, you know, you were almost judged if you didn't do one of those four things.

00:22:33.120 So, I thought, well, I can't do medicine.

00:22:35.240 I'm, you know, good at maths.

00:22:36.620 I like computers a lot.

00:22:38.100 By then, I was already coding.

00:22:39.360 I'd been coding since I was seven years old.

00:22:41.600 My dad got me a ZX81 and then a Spectrum Plus 2.

00:22:44.780 So, all of these things, just the exposure to those sorts of things helped me.

00:22:48.400 So, I went on to a course for systems engineering.

00:22:52.000 And I just kept reading.

00:22:53.540 And I took a year off to work because I needed to save up money for university.

00:22:58.900 And I met a lot of kids during my apprenticeship.

00:23:02.160 I worked as an apprentice engineer.

00:23:04.340 I met a lot of other people who were going to Oxford and Cambridge.

00:23:07.680 And they had more of the sort of culture that I had grown up with.

00:23:11.480 So, hanging out with people who were different in a different setting also had an influence.

00:23:17.460 And 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.

00:23:24.300 I'd already had all the values instilled in me by my parents.

00:23:28.080 So, 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.

00:23:42.520 Right, right.

00:23:43.760 And so, you also point there to the importance of peer selection, especially when you're making important life decisions.

00:23:51.340 Yeah, well, it's one of the things that was a real relief to me when I went off to college.

00:23:55.580 And 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.

00:24:10.540 Their ambitions didn't really extend.

00:24:12.420 Their vision didn't really extend past the boundaries of the town.

00:24:15.880 I left with a couple of my friends, but it was a very small minority of people.

00:24:19.460 And when I got to college, my new peer group was much more ambitious and outward looking.

00:24:26.500 And that was formative and also a great relief because it was something that was, well, something that I was striving for.

00:24:34.880 It is a great relief.

00:24:36.540 Do you know why it's a great relief?

00:24:37.740 Because you then, you find your people.

00:24:40.700 And my dad used to talk about, when he was alive and when I was younger, he used to talk about a law of homogeneity.

00:24:45.900 And he said, people find their kind of people and you will always get, they find each other and they stick together.

00:24:53.860 And I had this experience when I joined the Conservative Party.

00:24:57.240 I thought, these are my people.

00:24:58.680 Like, where have you guys been all my life?

00:25:00.560 People who I agreed with on almost everything.

00:25:03.160 People who thought the way I did about so much.

00:25:06.680 And I think when you are in a place where the people around you think so differently, you feel very isolated.

00:25:11.640 And I think that making sure that young people in particular have a sense of belonging is so critical for mental health.

00:25:20.100 And 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.

00:25:35.820 I think it's terrible for mental health.

00:25:37.800 It's terrible for society.

00:25:38.800 It is, it is.

00:25:39.580 It's partly because our definition of mental health in the West is, it's too individualistic.

00:25:44.460 And we should return to that when we talk about, we will talk about the overlap and the distinctions between classic liberalism and conservatism.

00:25:52.520 Because I've rethought that to some fair degree over the last five years.

00:25:56.500 Well, 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.

00:26:09.780 But I understand, I understand the, there are preconditions for liberalism to work in the classic sense.

00:26:16.620 And those preconditions are conservative.

00:26:18.640 And so when they vanish, then the liberal project doesn't work.

00:26:22.760 Okay.

00:26:23.080 So now you, you studied systems engineering and, but then you went to law.

00:26:30.200 Yes.

00:26:30.680 So after I finished my, my university degree and I did a longer degree, I did a four-year engineering degree rather than a three-year one.

00:26:39.200 Where, where was that?

00:26:41.060 At the University of Sussex, which is on the south coast of England.

00:26:46.600 And, you know, after university, everybody disappears.

00:26:51.400 You all go off to different places.

00:26:52.940 You get different jobs, different parts of the country.

00:26:55.300 And I just had this feeling that of unfulfillment.

00:26:58.900 And I thought I made a mistake.

00:27:00.540 Maybe I shouldn't have done engineering.

00:27:02.100 Maybe I should have done something else.

00:27:03.300 And everybody says, you know, I speak very well and I make good arguments.

00:27:06.440 I should have been a lawyer.

00:27:07.640 So I went to, it was really night school.

00:27:10.480 I went to the University of London, but they have a college called Birkbeck where the classes are in the evening.

00:27:15.440 And so I went to night school while working about 2005.

00:27:20.040 So 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.

00:27:30.660 You 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.

00:27:39.600 I learned in my law degree and it was just so amazing.

00:27:43.340 And at the end of it, I thought, I don't want to be a lawyer.

00:27:46.500 Definitely don't want to be a lawyer, but I love having this stuff in my head.

00:27:49.740 And I'd become quite political by that time.

00:27:52.180 And 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.

00:28:00.360 Okay.

00:28:00.560 So how did you become political and why did you decide that you weren't going to be a lawyer?

00:28:05.300 Well, I think, yeah.

00:28:06.840 Do you know the term, the quarter life crisis?

00:28:10.360 No, no, I'm not familiar with that, but it sounds like you had one.

00:28:14.160 Yes, I think I had a quarter life crisis, sort of 25, and I've done everything I'm supposed to do.

00:28:18.820 You know, you finish prime school, you finish secondary school, you do your A-levels, you get your degree, you get a job.

00:28:24.000 I had a good job.

00:28:24.980 I was working in consulting and I still wasn't happy.

00:28:28.240 And I was looking, I didn't know what I was looking for, but I knew I was looking for something.

00:28:32.760 And I thought another degree would give it to me.

00:28:37.380 And what I really was looking for was the vocation which I found in politics.

00:28:42.240 And 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. 0.91

00:28:55.800 And looking back on it, it was extremely race coded.

00:28:58.380 If I was, I think, a white child, I would have been treated differently.

00:29:01.740 And again, it was sort of left-wing teachers who were trying to be helpful, but actually creating a lot of destruction along the way.

00:29:10.020 That experience is at university where I think I've met my first sort of proper left-wing students culture type person.

00:29:19.660 And I did not like it. 0.96

00:29:21.260 I thought they were very ignorant. 0.97

00:29:23.460 They, because by this time, of course, I know a lot about Africa. 0.86

00:29:26.120 And 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.

00:29:34.880 No agency whatsoever.

00:29:36.740 They were not interested in the real problems.

00:29:39.240 And it was really a way for them to virtue signal.

00:29:42.200 And I found that so aggravating.

00:29:44.700 And that also, you know, semi-radicalized me around what we do with aid, for example,

00:29:50.200 and how we let a lot of, you know, African countries get away with things that they shouldn't do.

00:29:55.220 An irritation with what I call moral colonialism, where rather than focusing on growth and how to make these countries self-sufficient,

00:30:04.040 we sort of preach values which the West has come to after a long period and try and impose them in places where there's no, you know,

00:30:13.100 they're not ready to receive them or interested and not engaging with people on that level.

00:30:17.260 So I had that radicalism, that radicalization process.

00:30:21.240 And that was actually my first work with the Conservative Party.

00:30:25.260 So it's 2005.

00:30:26.840 I'm 25, you know, 2006.

00:30:30.280 David Cameron sets up these policy commissions.

00:30:32.500 And one of them was called Globalization and Global Poverty.

00:30:35.680 And I really cared about this subject because I thought a lot of money was being wasted and sent to places where it shouldn't be sent to,

00:30:42.760 when actually what people needed was partnerships, business, more sensible ideas.

00:30:49.440 And it was supposed to, even back then in 2006 onwards, it was how do we tackle globalization?

00:30:54.440 How do we make sure it works for everyone else?

00:30:56.200 But these things end up getting co-opted always by, you know, vested interests, which is a real shame.

00:31:03.140 So many things took me on the journey to conservatism.

00:31:06.540 I think also culturally, I am a Christian.

00:31:09.980 I don't believe anymore.

00:31:12.700 I used to.

00:31:13.400 There was something changed.

00:31:14.920 Something happened about 2008, which changed my views on Christianity.

00:31:19.180 But still, I am culturally a Christian.

00:31:21.640 My grandfather was a reverend in the Methodist church.

00:31:24.500 I went to a Church of England school.

00:31:26.940 And many of the things that are formative in my experience, singing hymns and, you know, knowing them off.

00:31:32.960 But, you know, off by heart.

00:31:34.500 And just a lot of the stuff that you end up doing in an African country, almost all of which are very religious, can shape you.

00:31:43.380 And I find the interpretation of Christianity in the UK quite interesting compared to certainly Africa and Nigeria.

00:31:52.360 People believe that.

00:31:53.880 It's not just something you do on a Sunday.

00:31:55.960 The Bible is a living word of God and you have to do all these things.

00:31:59.180 And, of course, they're inconsistent and there are all sorts of hypocrisies.

00:32:02.800 But, you know, growing up in a country that was genuinely multicultural, half the people were Muslim.

00:32:08.240 We had both Christian and Muslim prayers in my school.

00:32:11.420 You look at the behaviours and so on.

00:32:13.240 You just get a lot of insight into religion as an aspect of culture.

00:32:16.920 Religion, in my view, is downstream of culture. 0.88

00:32:19.460 It's not upstream.

00:32:20.060 And 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.

00:32:29.720 I don't think they understand it.

00:32:31.200 I think that they miscategorise a lot of people in a way that should not happen.

00:32:36.400 This is Carry the Fire.

00:32:39.820 I'm your host, Lisa Laflamme.

00:32:42.360 Carry the Fire, a podcast by the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation featuring inspiring personal stories about what happens when world-leading doctors, nurses, researchers, and their patients come together to ignite breakthroughs.

00:32:59.360 Carry the Fire launches Monday, January 27th, wherever you get your podcasts.

00:33:06.400 Okay, well, we're definitely going to, we're definitely going to return to that.

00:33:11.200 And so, you're at law school now.

00:33:13.180 You're doing that at night.

00:33:14.320 What are you working, how, what are you, what are you doing as a job during the day?

00:33:19.120 I'm working as a systems analyst for a company that no longer exists.

00:33:23.500 It was called Logica.

00:33:24.460 It was quite big at the time.

00:33:25.760 It was a sort of dot-com boom software, software company.

00:33:30.000 And it was fine.

00:33:30.940 And I was earning good money and saving.

00:33:32.880 I had enough, you know, earning enough to save for a house deposit.

00:33:35.720 It was okay, but I wasn't there in the, you know, hierarchy of fulfillment.

00:33:42.800 Right.

00:33:43.240 And so, you went to law school and you've, a part-time, and you found that compelling intellectually.

00:33:49.060 But 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?

00:34:03.500 And why did that strike you so intensely?

00:34:06.980 Like, 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.

00:34:15.840 And so, that's all percolating.

00:34:17.300 But it sounds to me like there were some actual striking experiences that perhaps you had in law school that politicized you.

00:34:25.840 And it also sounds like your politicization, in part, was at least initially, I definitely don't want that.

00:34:34.260 Right?

00:34:34.520 Yes.

00:34:34.940 Very much.

00:34:35.760 Very, very much so.

00:34:36.880 Well, so let's walk through that, because I'd like to disentangle that.

00:34:41.080 There's the bigotry of low expectations that you described and that deviation that you had in your academic striving and consequence.

00:34:48.840 And now you're at law school.

00:34:50.080 And what are you seeing among the leftist students there?

00:34:53.940 And why is that raising your hackles?

00:34:56.260 So, actually, what I saw started before law school, but I just couldn't define it.

00:35:02.900 It was the stuff that I saw when I was studying engineering with those students.

00:35:06.920 That was the first degree.

00:35:08.580 And I had just a very dim view of a lot of the students studying the humanities courses,

00:35:14.660 because they didn't need to work as hard as those of us studying engineering.

00:35:18.580 I think I had about 26 hours of, you know, teaching time and lab time.

00:35:24.680 You know, we were in the laboratory all the time.

00:35:26.800 And then you had these people studying arts, and they were all sort of, you know, just messing around all the time.

00:35:32.620 They were acting plays and having lots of fun and going on demonstrations and protests.

00:35:37.520 And I thought, where do they have time for this?

00:35:39.340 And they were all so sort of smug and condescending.

00:35:42.980 So, I realised, well, I don't like this.

00:35:46.160 And because I have the self-confidence of growing up in a relatively wealthy family,

00:35:52.120 I don't feel intimidated by them.

00:35:55.040 And I challenge them.

00:35:56.320 I have arguments with them.

00:35:57.800 And they lose, and they get angry.

00:36:00.780 And I think that they are just very weak people who don't like arguments.

00:36:04.960 And they say things like, well, you can't say that.

00:36:07.900 Or how can you say that? 0.96

00:36:09.960 You're black. 1.00

00:36:10.560 You should know that, you know, all these people are racist, and we're just trying to be helpful, and so on. 0.98

00:36:15.280 And they were so condescending.

00:36:16.860 So, I know I don't like that.

00:36:18.340 I also know that I don't like teachers who just set very low expectations.

00:36:22.840 I'm learning that family has actually been the most important thing in making me who I am.

00:36:27.480 And I didn't realise that long enough.

00:36:29.340 So, all of these things are taking me on the journey to conservatism.

00:36:32.880 Then 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.

00:36:47.380 And you learn the power of institutions.

00:36:50.100 You see how you need to preserve institutions from generation to generation.

00:36:55.720 You then compare with what happened during the colonial era, where institutions are brought and, you know, dropped in a place.

00:37:03.120 And so, yes, there's now a common law tradition, but the culture has really changed, and eventually the culture erodes it.

00:37:10.780 So, a lot of it is personal experience and observation and lots of arguing.

00:37:15.240 So, I loved arguing, loved debating.

00:37:17.960 And I remember when I was in that job working as a systems analysis, there was a lefty French guy who worked with me.

00:37:25.920 And he kept saying, you are so right-wing, you are so right-wing.

00:37:29.000 And 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.

00:37:36.620 You know, the media, the cultural establishment always used right-wing as a pejorative term.

00:37:42.000 So, I would say, no, I'm not right-wing, but I was.

00:37:44.340 And 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.

00:37:52.000 I realized, oh, my goodness, I'm very right-wing, and I'm proud of that.

00:37:55.460 This is not something to be embarrassed or ashamed about.

00:37:59.300 And 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.

00:38:08.460 And one of the things that is amazing is the classic liberalism, not the postmodern, you know, sort of corruption of that.

00:38:17.820 And a lot of what I see that has gone wrong is the corruption of liberalism.

00:38:22.560 And 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.

00:38:33.320 And you need muscular liberals to defend their turf. 0.96

00:38:37.960 And instead, what they've been doing is giving away their turf.

00:38:40.840 And 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. 0.66

00:38:50.180 It's nothing like that.

00:38:51.300 And 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. 0.93

00:39:00.660 But it wore the clothes of the civil rights movement.

00:39:03.820 And you need people who are in touch with reality, who can say, no, this is not real.

00:39:09.660 This is not true.

00:39:10.620 And I think that is something which I am lucky to have, that I just don't get detached from everyday life.

00:39:18.080 I know what is real and what isn't. 0.99

00:39:20.240 And 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. 0.99

00:39:31.660 This is just not real. 0.98

00:39:33.340 And if a politician is prepared to tell you something that we all know is not true, then what else will they tell you?

00:39:41.200 Yeah, well, there isn't a bigger lie than a man can be a woman. 0.98

00:39:45.300 I don't think there's a bigger, there's not a bigger perceptual falsehood that's even possible than that.

00:39:52.620 It's more fundamental than up versus down or night versus day.

00:39:57.600 You know, so even creatures without nervous systems can distinguish between the sexes. 0.93

00:40:02.960 And so, yeah, there's something very pathological going on there.

00:40:07.020 So let's delve into some concepts now because you're moving in that direction.

00:40:13.040 And so I want to throw something out for you and you tell me what you think about this.

00:40:18.460 I 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.

00:40:37.540 But then, and I do believe that's true, and so I don't like ethnic categorizations or racial categorizations or sexual categorizations.

00:40:46.420 I 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.

00:41:03.180 And that doesn't go anywhere good.

00:41:06.220 But 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...

00:41:18.960 But it was us, really.

00:41:19.920 That's right.

00:41:20.480 Really, it was.

00:41:21.260 Really, it was.

00:41:22.040 And 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.

00:41:36.660 But 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?

00:41:49.380 And it seems to me, it's like it has something to do with Christianity.

00:41:54.480 And I say that partly because every Protestant and Catholic majority country outside of Africa is a functional democracy.

00:42:03.860 And so that's a very striking fact.

00:42:05.560 It has something to do with the presumption of intact family, right?

00:42:11.200 So imagine liberalism works, individual liberalism works.

00:42:15.200 If 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.

00:42:31.580 And also the fundamental equality between men and women at the level of ultimate value.

00:42:36.800 And so those are preconditions.

00:42:38.820 And then the sanctity of the family and the stability of the family.

00:42:42.380 And that would be the long-term committed child-focused monogamous family, which is a very particular type of family arrangement.

00:42:49.840 And then once you have that, then the liberal project will work.

00:42:53.540 But it stops working if that understructure starts to disintegrate.

00:42:59.460 And 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.

00:43:10.640 That's a tricky thing, and that's something that you referred to.

00:43:13.960 It'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?

00:43:32.500 Now, you're kind of looking at the UK as an outsider, in a sense, right?

00:43:36.080 And an appreciative outsider.

00:43:38.000 You're kind of like Ayaan Hirsi Ali in that regard, right?

00:43:41.700 Because 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.

00:43:52.400 So 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? 1.00

00:44:06.100 So what are the preconditions?

00:44:08.220 And there's a lot to unpack in what you've just said.

00:44:11.700 So you are right.

00:44:12.960 I force myself to always try and look at our country from an outside lens, and that's how I know that it is, in my view, you will differ.

00:44:25.040 You will disagree, because you're in Canada.

00:44:27.500 This is the best place to be, despite a lot of efforts to change it.

00:44:32.740 It still is wonderful.

00:44:34.020 So you're asking, what are the preconditions?

00:44:37.740 In my view, having a high-trust society is so critical.

00:44:44.100 People need to be able to trust each other.

00:44:46.580 And 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.

00:45:01.820 Whether you're looking at Nigeria or Northern Ireland, where Protestants and Catholics had endless troubles and turmoil, everybody looks the same. 1.00

00:45:12.740 We need to get past the skin color categorization, because it's just a correlation.

00:45:19.500 It's not the underlying thing.

00:45:20.740 You need to create a society where people can trust each other.

00:45:24.080 The 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.

00:45:33.660 We're all safe.

00:45:34.880 We're not worried about people harming each other.

00:45:37.300 Anything 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.

00:45:48.620 And that creates a problem.

00:45:51.140 There's then competition for resources.

00:45:53.520 People aren't collaborating.

00:45:55.140 They're not cooperating.

00:45:56.700 And 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.

00:46:11.080 This is something that's very unique.

00:46:13.100 Most countries, if you're bringing in something else, it gets killed or you are forced to assimilate.

00:46:20.000 It's not just allowed to be its own thing and just sit there.

00:46:23.840 And I think that that's something that's really special about a lot of Western culture.

00:46:29.240 And it has allowed it to thrive and take the very best from what's all around the world.

00:46:33.200 But the dominant culture has to be reinforced.

00:46:36.460 And 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.

00:46:48.580 You end up with the relativism.

00:46:50.500 It doesn't matter, you know, what people's cultures are and so on.

00:46:53.180 As long as they follow these rules, everything will be fine.

00:46:55.980 And yes, the rules are important.

00:46:57.200 But if your culture is strong enough, quite often you don't even need the rules.

00:47:02.980 People just know.

00:47:04.120 They know that you don't behave this way.

00:47:06.040 They know that you don't speak like this to other people.

00:47:09.000 It's just in, you know, it's in the system.

00:47:13.180 And that's where I want us to get to.

00:47:15.580 That's where I want us to get to as a country.

00:47:17.840 And you can see, you know, I haven't done, you know, theses and written books about this.

00:47:25.100 A lot of it is just pure, as you say, anthropological observation.

00:47:29.560 I look at a lot of Christianity or a lot of churches in Africa.

00:47:34.040 And there are elements of the way that worship takes place that is exactly as it used to be when it was an animist society.

00:47:42.080 It's the, and the cultures take the bits of Christianity that they like the most. 0.94

00:47:48.000 So there is a lot of speaking in tongues, which is almost unheard of in Catholic and Protestant sort of churches in the UK.

00:47:56.480 You go to Africa, there's a lot of speaking in tongues and people throwing themselves on the floor. 1.00

00:48:01.120 They love the exorcisms, the witchcraft bits of the Bible, which are barely spoken or land in a sermon in the West. 0.78

00:48:08.560 So, because that's what the culture demands.

00:48:10.840 The culture's like, okay, there's this new thing called Christianity. 0.68

00:48:14.940 What do we like here?

00:48:16.040 All right, we like exorcisms.

00:48:17.160 We like speaking in tongues.

00:48:18.300 We like all the bits.

00:48:19.180 There's more singing and dancing.

00:48:20.840 It's very vibrant.

00:48:21.900 And the culture starts to take over and it interprets text in a way that works for it. 0.91

00:48:28.280 And this is the thing about, you know, text.

00:48:30.940 You have to really guard.

00:48:32.380 If you wanted to keep doing what it was always doing, you have to really pay attention.

00:48:36.680 You have to really guard it.

00:48:38.000 Otherwise, people can appropriate it and almost make it do the opposite of what it was meant to do.

00:48:43.260 And I see this with a lot of UK legislation.

00:48:46.520 We see it with the non-hate crime incidents, this nonsense where people get arrested for saying things online.

00:48:52.700 These laws have been there for 30 years, but the culture is changing.

00:48:56.700 You have judges who think differently about this stuff.

00:48:59.480 It's the same with the Equality Act.

00:49:01.060 The Equality Act was there as a shield, not a sword.

00:49:04.620 It was there to protect people from discrimination.

00:49:07.200 It started being used to discriminate between different groups.

00:49:10.600 Oh, let's have some positive action.

00:49:12.560 These groups are being treated unfairly, so we'll give them a boost and treat these other people unfairly.

00:49:16.960 You need to guard your text carefully.

00:49:19.480 And that needs principles.

00:49:21.260 I think conservative principles.

00:49:22.540 So, what do you think—so, I'm curious about your thoughts, because I would organize the hierarchy.

00:49:31.100 It sounds like slightly different than you do, but I see why you're doing it.

00:49:36.280 I think about the religious presuppositions as being the deepest presuppositions,

00:49:40.840 and then the cultural presuppositions nested inside those.

00:49:44.300 Now, you just pointed to a situation where the cultural framework supersedes the religious and alters it.

00:49:51.380 And so, you know, you can see that there could be a shift in that.

00:49:55.000 But having said that, I'm very curious about your comments on a high-trust society,

00:50:01.440 because it's been my understanding that there actually isn't any natural resource except trust.

00:50:09.740 Like, if you have trust, then everything can become a resource.

00:50:14.300 Because you can now cooperate or even compete in a civilized manner that's sustainable and productive over the long run.

00:50:22.080 But it does require this intrinsic trust.

00:50:25.300 And then the question would be, you know, what are the characteristics of a high-trust society?

00:50:29.600 And you pointed to some.

00:50:31.200 Well, there's—everyone thinks violence is wrong.

00:50:34.860 That would be one.

00:50:36.020 Nobody steals, no matter what, right?

00:50:38.660 And this is something that's particularly characteristic right now, let's say, of Japan that's starting to disintegrate in the West. 0.79

00:50:45.080 And we've seen a lot of that in the United States, for example.

00:50:48.700 Like, the problem with low-trust societies is you have to be suspicious.

00:50:52.720 At precisely 8.23 p.m., Roger Kwan was not waiting for a table outside his favorite restaurant with his girlfriend,

00:50:59.040 so a passing sports coupe did not splash slush all over her, making her question why she was dating him.

00:51:05.240 And a second car did not splash her again, confirming her belief.

00:51:09.660 All because Roger skipped it, stayed in, and with the Skip app ordered the best chicken tikka masala she'd ever had,

00:51:15.680 confirming Roger might just be the one.

00:51:18.500 Way to go, Raj. Skip to the good part. 0.87

00:51:22.720 In a low-trust society, everyone's a potential enemy.

00:51:27.220 In a high-trust society, everyone's a potential friend and collaborator.

00:51:31.060 Well, you're rich in a society like that, and that Japanese are another good example of that. 1.00

00:51:35.360 Japanese have no natural resources, but they're rich.

00:51:39.700 And their richness, their wealth, is their ethos, their moral ethos.

00:51:45.620 The fact that the default Japanese citizen is unbelievably law-abiding, unbelievably law-abiding.

00:51:55.980 Now, your sense, your intuition is that you fragment high-trust societies with a careless immigration policy, say.

00:52:07.720 A careless multiculturalism. 0.99

00:52:09.640 And there's Robert Putnam, the Harvard professor, has shown that quite clearly,

00:52:15.140 that more homogenous societies, let's say, tend to be higher trust.

00:52:19.160 And I guess it's partly because there are just fewer differences to take into account, right?

00:52:23.980 There's a shared set of presumptions about the nature of proper behavior and of reality itself.

00:52:30.240 And if you diversify that to great a degree, nobody knows which way is up.

00:52:35.740 Nobody can tell the difference between a man and a woman, for example. 0.99

00:52:38.400 But what do you think's dissolved in, what do you think's dissolved or is dissolving in the West, in the UK more particularly,

00:52:46.100 that is undermining that high-trust reality that was part and parcel of UK culture?

00:52:53.500 I mean, the queuing is a good example of that even.

00:52:55.880 And, I mean, it's something that people always point to when they go to the UK.

00:52:59.720 But it really matters that people will spontaneously organize themselves without duress in a civilized manner, right?

00:53:08.060 It speaks volumes about the nature of the culture itself.

00:53:11.000 What do you think has undermined that?

00:53:13.500 We still queue, by the way.

00:53:14.960 I remember someone showing a video.

00:53:19.120 There was a set of riots that happened about 10, 15 years ago.

00:53:22.920 And the looters were queuing to get into the shop.

00:53:28.220 We still queue.

00:53:28.820 That's good.

00:53:29.220 Civilized looters.

00:53:30.280 That's a good thing to see.

00:53:31.760 Yes, we still queue.

00:53:33.580 So the question is, what is the thing that is undermining the high-trust nature of our society?

00:53:40.800 And I think it's complacency.

00:53:43.800 And, you know, you talked about the careless immigration policy.

00:53:46.940 This is something that I find unbelievably infuriating.

00:53:51.300 How did this happen?

00:53:53.460 Because everybody thought someone else was dealing with it.

00:53:57.660 And, 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.

00:54:05.240 At the end of the day, we as the political party in charge have to take responsibility for that.

00:54:09.140 But 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.

00:54:21.460 We are the UK.

00:54:22.560 We are a rich country.

00:54:23.760 And so everything's going to be fine.

00:54:25.380 And it doesn't matter what you do.

00:54:26.980 The UK is the UK.

00:54:28.220 It's a civilized country.

00:54:29.440 People queue.

00:54:30.320 And it doesn't matter how many people come in.

00:54:32.060 We're always going to be the UK.

00:54:33.180 And everything's going to be everything's going to be fine.

00:54:36.460 It is complacency.

00:54:38.060 And the complacency comes from, my view, the memories of harder times receding, almost fading from living memory.

00:54:46.680 And by that, I mean war.

00:54:47.980 When 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.

00:55:00.900 And, you know, I think all of that contributes to the complacency.

00:55:05.120 That's number one.

00:55:06.300 And complacency means that people stop looking after things because they think it's always going to be like that.

00:55:11.640 And there are a large number of people across our cultural establishment, even the political establishment, I would say.

00:55:19.880 In fact, it's probably especially the political establishment, who are suffering from what I call cargo cult syndrome.

00:55:25.320 Do you know what I mean by cargo cult syndrome?

00:55:27.200 You should explain it for people, though.

00:55:29.540 Okay.

00:55:30.000 So just to summarize and paraphrase, in World War II, there was a plane that would drop supplies on a Pacific island.

00:55:40.040 And the islanders saw, you know, air traffic control, people moving their arms.

00:55:44.700 They saw runways had been drawn and eventually a plane would come around and drop the food.

00:55:48.960 And after the plane stopped coming, they wanted the food supplies to return.

00:55:52.620 So they drew lines on the ground and they made the hand signals, but they didn't understand why the food was no longer coming.

00:56:00.260 Why were the planes not coming?

00:56:01.520 And 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.

00:56:09.440 They don't test themselves.

00:56:11.460 They don't really query.

00:56:13.140 And I see that behavior in a lot of politics.

00:56:15.500 Just today, we had a chancellor who went out and made a whole bunch of announcements.

00:56:21.260 Oh, we're going to do this.

00:56:22.220 We're going to do that.

00:56:23.040 And said, we're delivering growth.

00:56:24.420 That is not how growth is created.

00:56:27.180 Announcements are not policy.

00:56:28.960 But many politicians have just seen that you stand up and you say, we're going to do this.

00:56:34.040 And they imagine that there's an army of minions somewhere that make the thing happen.

00:56:37.860 This is what happened with our immigration policy.

00:56:41.060 The ministers would say, the prime minister would say, we're going to cut immigration, vote for us. 1.00

00:56:46.080 And an assumption that we've said it, of course, the people who are responsible for doing it will make it happen.

00:56:52.100 It was complacency.

00:56:53.340 And I hate it because I always felt that immigration in this country was too high. 0.99

00:57:00.180 But I did know that we needed to get good people coming in high skilled because other people were leaving and you needed to replace that.

00:57:07.960 It never once crossed my mind that as we were saying, let's have some good high skilled immigration in limited numbers,

00:57:14.560 that people would use that to wedge the door open and effectively just let anyone who had a good story come in.

00:57:22.060 That needs to be fixed.

00:57:23.400 And just because we got it wrong before doesn't mean that we don't have a right to talk about it anymore.

00:57:29.740 We know more about this than anyone else.

00:57:32.340 We know how to fix it in a way that other parties don't.

00:57:35.920 And we have the will as well, certainly under my leadership.

00:57:38.700 And that's one of the things that I'm trying to get people to see, that the Conservative Party is under new leadership.

00:57:43.660 I am a different person from what we had before.

00:57:46.300 And yes, I was there, you know, when we had those previous governments.

00:57:50.900 But I was working on the inside to stop a lot of nonsense, which is aggravating people out there.

00:57:55.780 And I will never stop doing that.

00:57:58.200 Okay, so let's lay out the political landscape then.

00:58:01.080 Let's turn to the political.

00:58:02.860 We haven't talked about how you moved from your burgeoning political interest to leadership of the Conservative Party in the UK,

00:58:10.780 because that's quite a story.

00:58:11.760 But I think we'll just put that aside for the time being and focus on the political.

00:58:16.500 The first thing you might want to do for people, since it's an international audience as well, that's listening to this,

00:58:22.860 is why don't you outline what you see as the differences between the three major political parties in the UK,

00:58:30.340 Conservative, Reform, Labour, and describe the relationships as you see them presently,

00:58:36.800 and maybe the relative strengths and weaknesses of each position,

00:58:40.380 assuming there are any strengths at all on the Labour side, which I doubt, by the way.

00:58:44.940 Cynthia, I might as well put my...

00:58:46.300 Well, seriously.

00:58:47.740 I mean, seriously.

00:58:48.980 But okay, so let's go through the party structure.

00:58:52.520 And I'd like to hear your thoughts about the current situation in relationship to the political parties in the UK.

00:58:59.780 Okay.

00:59:00.040 So it's very interesting that you said reform as the third party.

00:59:05.240 Reform is not the third party in this country.

00:59:07.500 It's doing well in the polls at the moment.

00:59:10.060 But the third party in this country is the Liberal Democrats,

00:59:12.300 who had more votes and have 14 times as many members of Parliament as reform.

00:59:17.520 Reform has five.

00:59:18.680 Liberal Democrats have 70.

00:59:20.180 We have 100.

00:59:21.300 Yes, yes.

00:59:21.540 120.

00:59:22.180 Yes, my mistake.

00:59:22.960 And then Labour has 400 and something.

00:59:25.480 I can't even remember the exact number.

00:59:26.820 But I would say the difference between the four parties.

00:59:30.380 So the Labour Party used to be the party of the working class blue-collar workers.

00:59:37.100 It has now become the party of the bureaucracy,

00:59:41.040 whether it's the public sector or people who live off government.

00:59:45.340 So people who live off government regulations, compliance and so on.

00:59:49.220 That's who they speak for now.

00:59:51.040 They don't speak for the, you know, what we would call blue-collar.

00:59:54.560 We are the traditional party of the rise.

00:59:56.500 The Conservative Party is the most successful political party, I think, in history,

01:00:00.840 certainly with our longevity.

01:00:02.640 And we are the centre-right party.

01:00:05.180 And we are traditionally the party of the entrepreneurs, low tax.

01:00:09.920 We've merged what I would call classic liberalism with old-school conservatism.

01:00:15.580 And that's where we are now.

01:00:18.240 The Liberal Democrats are basically a protest party for mainly people on the left.

01:00:23.560 And they don't have much of an ideology other than being nice.

01:00:27.580 They will go with all sorts of extreme things, you know, extreme gender ideology, etc.

01:00:32.080 And reform is representing the rage that a lot of people are feeling about things going wrong in the country.

01:00:39.620 But it's all rage.

01:00:42.080 It's not courage.

01:00:43.540 And I understand why a lot of traditional Conservative voters have gone to reform.

01:00:48.680 Because they're angry with us because they think we let them down.

01:00:51.640 And a lot of traditional Labour voters are also going to reform because they're angry with their traditional party.

01:00:57.900 And then people who don't want to have anything to do with it vote Liberal Democrat.

01:01:00.820 That's a good summary.

01:01:02.640 Well, I guess one of the things I'm curious about is why the Liberal Democrats are so invisible.

01:01:09.420 I mean, they get no coverage at all on the international side, for example.

01:01:12.940 Like, really, none.

01:01:13.820 They are not on Twitter.

01:01:16.260 But they are in local communities.

01:01:20.420 And what you tend to, you will tend to get, a typical Liberal Democrat will be somebody who is good at fixing their church roof.

01:01:27.720 And, you know, people in the community like them.

01:01:29.860 Oh, you fixed the church roof.

01:01:31.260 Right, right.

01:01:31.660 You should be a member of Parliament.

01:01:33.040 And they want to be nice.

01:01:35.360 And then they get there. 0.99

01:01:36.320 But actually, they've got lots of very silly and foolish ideas, along with, you know, being able to fundraise for a local community. 0.98

01:01:43.860 And then they have bad views on national security, for example. 0.98

01:01:49.100 They don't want us to keep maybe a nuclear deterrence. 0.86

01:01:51.940 They have silly ideas about education.

01:01:54.520 They're always, you know, they don't want people to go to prison. 0.83

01:01:56.780 They want prisons closed down.

01:01:58.440 Let's just have restorative justice. 0.85

01:02:00.520 You know, people being nice.

01:02:01.740 And if you're not paying attention, you will think that's a good one.

01:02:05.280 These are nice people.

01:02:06.340 We should vote for them.

01:02:07.120 But actually, they will destroy the whole country if you let them at it.

01:02:10.980 Are they distinguishable?

01:02:11.920 So they are known in, sorry?

01:02:14.160 Are they distinguishable ideologically from the Labour Party?

01:02:18.860 No, the Liberal Democrats are basically trying to be nicer Labour.

01:02:24.420 They will, they have a, what I would say is that they have more of a rural base.

01:02:30.660 So the Labour Party is very urban.

01:02:32.540 It's very sort of towns and cities.

01:02:35.280 You will find Liberal Democrats in a lot of rural constituencies because they talk about

01:02:41.140 the environment, something that we care about as well.

01:02:43.360 But they talk about it in a way that resonates with people who want to maintain things as they

01:02:48.160 are.

01:02:48.380 So Liberal Democrats don't like building anything.

01:02:50.580 They want everything to stay as it is, which in itself appeals to a certain kind of conservative,

01:02:55.480 you know, I don't want anything to change.

01:02:57.820 And they will block any kind of thing being developed.

01:03:01.840 And what is interesting is that as politics becomes more volatile, as we have more social

01:03:08.820 media and people retreat into echo chambers of agreement, we're seeing a lot more fragmentation

01:03:15.900 across the board.

01:03:17.160 If this was a country where you had proportional representation, it would probably come out

01:03:22.080 in the wash.

01:03:22.840 But we don't.

01:03:23.920 So you will have a party like Labour, which has won a landslide majority on 34% of the

01:03:30.440 vote.

01:03:30.900 That is a scandal.

01:03:32.220 And unfortunately, a lot of the people who would have been in the Labour movements that

01:03:36.460 I would have respected because they were culturally conservative.

01:03:39.520 And so we would have something to agree on there, aren't there anymore.

01:03:43.280 So instead, we have a prime minister who, when the Black Lives Matter protests happened,

01:03:48.040 he took the knee right in this room, actually.

01:03:49.760 He took the knee in this room.

01:03:51.720 And I sat there thinking, what on earth is this man doing? 0.99

01:03:54.600 This is completely ludicrous. 0.94

01:03:56.580 But people who will pander to whatever is going on, because they don't, they're not rooted 1.00

01:04:01.800 in anything serious.

01:04:03.120 They are detached from reality.

01:04:05.280 And they don't know what is real and what isn't real.

01:04:07.940 And we are the only party that is real, which means that we're often pragmatic in a way

01:04:13.160 that annoys people.

01:04:14.080 And we don't communicate the pragmatism well enough.

01:04:16.600 And that's what I'm trying to do now.

01:04:18.260 We have new leadership.

01:04:19.440 We're going to be honest.

01:04:20.640 We're going to tell the truth to the public, even when it's difficult.

01:04:24.340 People like to tell the public what they want to hear rather than what's really happening.

01:04:28.600 And I have said that the Conservative Party is not going to do that.

01:04:31.620 People must know the truth.

01:04:32.740 Okay, so let's delve in a little bit into the fragmentation of the right, broadly speaking,

01:04:40.120 in the UK.

01:04:40.880 It's analogous to something that happened in Canada, because our Conservative Party split

01:04:46.440 about 20 years ago into reform and Conservative before reuniting eventually.

01:04:51.560 And I know that the inspiration for the Reform Party in the UK actually, strangely enough,

01:04:57.340 came from Western Canada and the Reform Party.

01:05:00.120 But I want to, if you don't mind, I'm going to speak in some ways on behalf of the Reform Party

01:05:06.480 and let you respond to that, if you would.

01:05:09.460 Well, when I look at the situation in the UK, and it's analogous to the situation in Canada,

01:05:14.240 by the way, and the US, because the same things are happening all across the West.

01:05:17.880 I look at what happened with the Conservatives, who you now head, and I think two things fundamentally.

01:05:25.960 The first thing I think is, what the hell were you thinking with regards to net zero?

01:05:31.120 Because I can't imagine a set of policies, simultaneously less Conservative, more destructive,

01:05:39.160 more woke, more elitist, more globalist than the net zero policies, which, by the way,

01:05:45.280 the presumptive new leader of the Liberal Party in Canada, Mark Carney, is a net zero advocate of the highest order.

01:05:52.900 And a man who's, I believe...

01:05:53.800 He used to be head of the Bank of England.

01:05:56.080 Yes, exactly, exactly.

01:05:57.640 And he's not a follower of the...

01:05:58.480 So now you know.

01:05:59.560 Yes, exactly.

01:06:00.720 He's not a follower of the WEF like Justin Trudeau was.

01:06:04.060 He's a leader.

01:06:04.700 And in any case, the net zero debacle has left England, left the UK, de-industrializing like Germany, 0.99

01:06:15.220 which is a complete bloody catastrophe, because it's a terrible thing to see Europe falter and disintegrate.

01:06:22.660 And it's a real danger.

01:06:24.300 It's left you guys with unconscionably high energy prices.

01:06:29.640 Because you won't frack, even though you could, and produce another economic boom.

01:06:34.560 I mean, and Trump just announced, drill, baby, drill.

01:06:37.420 And the Americans have been pursuing fracking technology like madmen.

01:06:42.460 And that was the basis of the economy of the province that I grew up in, in Canada.

01:06:46.120 By the way, we've been fracking there for like 60 years.

01:06:49.380 It's a very long time.

01:06:50.960 And so there's the net zero debacle.

01:06:52.540 And then there's the weakness, I would say, on the conservative side in the face of this pathological woke ideology,

01:07:01.880 especially with regards to gender and gender identity.

01:07:04.760 And then to top it all off, there's the immigration debacle. 0.68

01:07:08.420 And so two things, you know.

01:07:11.040 How do you account for that emerging within the conservative party?

01:07:14.720 What are you going to do about it?

01:07:16.480 And how do you distinguish, like how do you attract, once again, truly conservative voters

01:07:23.220 who are, as you said, annoyed and irritated and have drifted off into the clutches of the reform party?

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01:07:57.420 TD, ready for you.

01:08:00.300 So I think that we should start by stating what my position is.

01:08:06.940 So I am not a climate change skeptic, but I am very much a net zero skeptic.

01:08:12.040 And the reason why I am a net zero skeptic is because I saw how the legislation was put in place.

01:08:18.560 I was a newish MP when it started.

01:08:22.380 And if you look at how it happened, then you look at why it happened, the whole thing makes sense.

01:08:28.460 So we have a minority government.

01:08:31.560 We can't get any legislation through.

01:08:33.300 And we need to, you know, put something that everybody can agree on.

01:08:38.420 And on both sides of the House, left and right, environmentalism has supporters.

01:08:45.160 There's the center-right type of environmentalism and the center-left.

01:08:48.760 Net zero looks like a thing that everybody can agree on.

01:08:51.160 And I remember asking in the debate, it was a 90-minute debate for this trillion-pound legislation.

01:08:57.420 And I stood up.

01:08:58.400 I was one of only two people who asked a skeptical question.

01:09:02.340 I said, how are we going to pay for this?

01:09:03.980 Where is the plan?

01:09:05.060 And I was dismissively waved away by the minister at the time saying the plans will be forthcoming.

01:09:10.060 That minister now works, you know, in the green industries, I'm told.

01:09:14.500 And 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.

01:09:27.540 This was a way for us to say we're showing global leadership.

01:09:30.900 There's this thing that a lot of politicians like to have, you know, walking on stage.

01:09:34.620 I'm at these conferences.

01:09:36.100 Global leadership.

01:09:37.000 We signed this thing.

01:09:37.820 We were the first to do it.

01:09:38.900 And I think that that's how we ended up there.

01:09:41.000 And what year was that?

01:09:42.360 That's 2019.

01:09:45.500 I think it's middle of 2019.

01:09:47.440 Okay.

01:09:47.820 So I've been an MP for two years.

01:09:49.740 And I'm already seeing quite a lot of what I call bad science, bad faith arguments to deal with climate change.

01:09:56.940 And I know that conservatives love the environment.

01:10:00.560 You know, of course, that's what we want to conserve, amongst other things.

01:10:03.860 We want to keep things as they are.

01:10:06.540 We want to leave a next generation inheritance. 0.87

01:10:09.340 Let's give something to our children.

01:10:10.800 So there's fertile soil here.

01:10:13.600 But the net zero idea is bad because there is no plan.

01:10:17.860 It's just an announcement.

01:10:19.320 So we say we're going to do this thing and then we start working it out later.

01:10:23.100 This is one of the things that I want to stop.

01:10:25.400 Conservative parties under new leadership, we're not just going to say things and figure it out later.

01:10:29.760 We will figure it out.

01:10:30.780 And then when we know how to do it, we can say it.

01:10:33.640 But the why it happened, that fear of cancellation, that fear of going against the grain is a more fundamental problem.

01:10:41.280 People are so afraid of challenging bad orthodoxies.

01:10:45.260 There is a terror of being heterodox.

01:10:47.420 And I think that I am on one level an outlier.

01:10:51.760 You know how you describe yourself as being extreme on this?

01:10:54.580 Well, for me, it is an outlier when it comes to telling the truth and challenging orthodoxies.

01:11:00.180 And nothing will stop me from saying it.

01:11:02.100 And a lot of people think that I'm very combative.

01:11:04.040 If you look at almost every single argument I have had where people have said that, it was because somebody was lying or being inaccurate.

01:11:11.660 And I hate that.

01:11:13.040 We have to tell the truth.

01:11:15.060 And you've gone through this thing where you say something and a lot of people agree with you, but they're all afraid of speaking out.

01:11:23.000 People are afraid of being labelled.

01:11:25.120 They're afraid of being called climate change sceptics.

01:11:28.240 They're not able to speak up for themselves.

01:11:30.300 And so they stay quiet.

01:11:31.860 And that's how it happens.

01:11:33.080 It's all part of the proliferation of identity politics, which goes well beyond race and religion and so on.

01:11:39.720 It's even the identity of ideas.

01:11:42.180 We are environmentalists.

01:11:43.300 So this is what we believe in.

01:11:44.440 You've got to do all these tick boxes.

01:11:46.280 And with no one challenging or those few people who are challenged labelled as climate change deniers, I should say.

01:11:52.620 They're not worried about being called sceptics.

01:11:54.580 They're worried about being called climate change deniers and being ostracised.

01:11:57.560 So they stay with the herd.

01:11:59.240 What's everybody saying?

01:12:00.560 All right, I want to be with that crowd.

01:12:01.920 And you add on top of that the diminishing of free speech.

01:12:07.300 And you suddenly get a place where people are afraid to point out what's going wrong.

01:12:12.140 And that's how we ended up with net zero.

01:12:13.640 And throughout my time as a minister, I was constantly challenging it, saying no to things.

01:12:18.680 I got some of the laws we had scaled back.

01:12:21.280 But one person cannot change everything unless they are the leader and unless they are the prime minister.

01:12:27.640 It all starts from the top.

01:12:28.920 How does that explain it?

01:12:32.660 Well, I want to delve into that some more because it's a huge catastrophe.

01:12:37.540 And let me reflect your argument back to you and then we'll elaborate on it a little bit.

01:12:43.060 And I'm going to push things a little bit farther.

01:12:45.260 So you pointed to two causal factors, two primary causal factors, three really.

01:12:53.640 One was that the conservative government believed that the environmental movement was a place where cross-party cooperation could be had.

01:13:04.020 And 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.

01:13:20.320 Okay, so there's...

01:13:21.660 And that's not a bad thing to want.

01:13:23.500 Fair enough, fair enough.

01:13:24.800 I'm trying to give the devil his due here, you know.

01:13:26.820 And 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.

01:13:47.500 And that's a form of narcissism that's...

01:13:50.260 I mean, Jesus, really, if being prime minister isn't enough for you, now you have to make your name on the international stage.

01:13:57.260 It's like, is there any limits whatsoever to your hubris?

01:14:00.440 And the answer to that is no.

01:14:01.820 And someone like Justin Trudeau is an absolutely stellar example of exactly that pathology.

01:14:06.640 And I think it was Keir Starmer himself who said, if I remember correctly, that Westminster, in some ways, was beneath him.

01:14:13.940 And that the real action was at places like Davos, you know, with the...

01:14:17.840 They have the highest quality call girls there, for example, which is one of the indications of just how stellar an organization it is, right?

01:14:26.140 And so there's that hubris.

01:14:28.880 And that's really not good.

01:14:31.220 Like, it's seriously not good.

01:14:32.500 And then that's allied with this fear of cancellation.

01:14:36.300 Now, that fear of cancellation is actually real, you know.

01:14:39.580 I mean, one of the reasons that my license as a clinical psychologist is under assault in Canada.

01:14:46.360 This is literally...

01:14:47.700 This is the literal truth.

01:14:49.420 One 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.

01:14:59.220 And 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.

01:15:17.200 And that all of that is preposterous.

01:15:19.060 And that was enough, as far as my governing board was concerned, to make me unfit to be a clinical psychologist.

01:15:25.220 And that's been a real problem.

01:15:26.860 It scared the hell out of psychologists and professionals all across Canada, including MDs.

01:15:31.640 That is extraordinary.

01:15:33.100 That should not be happening.

01:15:35.160 That should not be happening.

01:15:36.040 Well, it's 100% happening.

01:15:38.140 And the reason that I'm bringing it up is to point out that that fear is of something real.

01:15:44.220 That doesn't mean it's justifiable, but it is of something real.

01:15:47.680 And it's why I don't point fingers and blame.

01:15:51.240 I just say, this is what we need to do.

01:15:53.420 And, you know, I love the Reagan slogan of never speak ill of a fellow conservative.

01:15:58.200 There's just no time for that.

01:15:59.560 People just need to know there's a new leader.

01:16:01.400 She does things differently. 0.51

01:16:03.160 But one of the other things that I think is such a scam is that people don't know what other countries are doing.

01:16:09.080 We are, as you say, basically exporting our carbon emissions to countries that are opening up new coal-fired plants every week.

01:16:18.060 It's just not serious.

01:16:19.400 It's this complacency and an assumption that everything is going to be all right.

01:16:23.360 And we are losing resilience.

01:16:25.860 And one of the things that I tried to do was sort of save a couple of our steel plants, maybe let them turn into electric arc furnaces.

01:16:32.840 But we need to be able to do these things.

01:16:34.760 You need national resilience.

01:16:36.340 And 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.

01:16:49.760 And 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.

01:17:04.920 And 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.

01:17:12.100 And I have seen the inside.

01:17:13.880 And I just think that we need to get real very quickly.

01:17:17.180 We need to get serious and stop messing around.

01:17:19.760 Okay, so let's talk about that seriousness because this is obviously with Trump pulling out of the Paris Accords as well.

01:17:28.780 This is about to become, there's renewed seriousness in this regard.

01:17:34.240 So I'm a scientist.

01:17:36.800 I've published 100 scientific papers and I'm not a climate scientist, but I can read research.

01:17:41.580 And I'm pretty good at striking to the core of the topic at hand.

01:17:46.780 And so I've spent a lot of time reviewing the carbon debate and this is what it looks like to me.

01:17:53.920 And I would like your opinion about this.

01:17:57.300 The 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.

01:18:07.580 That's a very long time, 500 million years.

01:18:10.220 And 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.

01:18:27.780 So we're really at historic lows.

01:18:30.260 Now, there is evidence that the planet has greened quite substantively in the last 20 years because of increased carbon dioxide levels.

01:18:39.580 Whether that's human caused or not is not exactly fixed, but there's some possibility of it.

01:18:45.060 But not only has the planet green 20%, which is an immense amount, an immense amount.

01:18:51.280 It is the cardinal piece of data on the carbon dioxide front, that greening.

01:18:55.820 It's also greened most spectacularly in semi-arid and desert areas because plants with more carbon dioxide can tolerate more arid conditions.

01:19:09.080 And so the planet is greener and crop yields are up.

01:19:12.700 And 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.

01:19:23.800 Is that it looks to me like there's some reason to believe that increased carbon dioxide is, I think, incontrovertibly a net good.

01:19:32.980 And 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.

01:19:39.240 And then let's add a couple of dimensions to that.

01:19:44.500 So 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.

01:19:54.060 But 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.

01:20:02.860 And so we're de-industrializing Germany. 0.77

01:20:04.660 We're de-industrializing the UK.

01:20:06.940 We're de-industrializing Australia. 0.84

01:20:09.160 Mark Carney, who wants to run Canada, thinks 85% of fossil fuels need to stay in the ground.

01:20:14.720 And we're doing this while China is having an absolute bloody field day. 0.72

01:20:18.920 And we're doing all of it to virtue signal at the international level and to protect us from cancellation.

01:20:27.540 This is what I mean by us not being serious, where you're not really solving the problem.

01:20:33.740 You're just giving yourself a nice announcement or a nice headline.

01:20:37.120 So there's certain things that I know.

01:20:39.900 One is that the decisions we're making now, most of us will not be alive to see how it turns out.

01:20:46.480 And it could be that we don't necessarily get the impact we want from net zero, even if we achieve net zero.

01:20:53.540 So you need to make sure that you are doing other things as well.

01:20:56.760 You're making the planet better.

01:20:58.100 You'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.

01:21:08.800 I 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.

01:21:23.260 That 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.

01:21:36.440 Like they don't like people.

01:21:37.440 They see us as being alien to the planet and it should just be nature without people in them.

01:21:43.760 And 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.

01:22:03.100 But he became someone who felt that human beings shouldn't be here and why are we doing this to the planet?

01:22:08.860 And I see a lot of that in, you know, much of the rhetoric around the climate change extremists and I don't like it.

01:22:17.460 I don't like things that are anti-human. 0.96

01:22:19.280 I 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.

01:22:29.340 I don't like any of that stuff. And so I have a scepticism towards this movement and the outcomes I have seen.

01:22:36.280 I 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.

01:22:45.780 This is crazy. We have to stop it.

01:22:47.540 And there I was fighting my own colleagues and saying we have to stop this.

01:22:51.920 And they would say Paris Agreement, the Climate Change Act, the Labour brought in, we've got to do it.

01:22:57.260 Otherwise, we're legally liable and so on.

01:22:59.260 So we did not try to remove the framework of the left.

01:23:03.220 We went along with it for many understandable reasons.

01:23:06.960 We didn't have the numbers for most of the time.

01:23:09.240 When we did have the numbers, we were dealing with COVID.

01:23:11.960 But that time has passed now.

01:23:13.660 We need to talk about the future.

01:23:15.020 What are we leaving for our children?

01:23:17.400 A much better environment, I think, is important.

01:23:19.760 And I don't think we will get it by just closing down all our industry and hoping that China looks after us.

01:23:25.060 That is not serious.

01:23:26.500 We have to be smarter than that.

01:23:28.660 Okay, so let me, let me, I, I, I, we're running out of time, which is really unfortunate

01:23:34.220 because there's many other things that we didn't discuss that are necessary to discuss.

01:23:38.800 Immigration, for example, the relationship between the Islamic world and the Western world.

01:23:44.180 That's a, like a hot potato, to say the least.

01:23:47.720 And we, we can't delve into those rabbit holes.

01:23:50.760 But I, I would like to summarize, I think, why, because one of the questions I had that you obviously need to address is,

01:23:58.200 why should people trust you and why should they prefer you, let's say, to Nigel Farage on the reform side?

01:24:04.520 And I'm going to summarize, I think, what you've said about that.

01:24:09.020 And then I'll, I'll ask you if you'll, if you'll add to that.

01:24:12.340 You know, you said, for example, that you're in a unique position to evaluate the strengths of UK culture

01:24:20.460 because you've benefited from it so indirectly and directly, and you're conscious of its value.

01:24:26.720 And I compared you in that regard to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, which I think is a good comparison.

01:24:31.300 And so, you know, that's, that's really worth thinking about is that you have reason to be grateful

01:24:35.880 for what UK culture has brought to the world, and you know what those reasons are.

01:24:42.100 And so, you know, that's, that's, that's, that's a big deal.

01:24:44.780 And then you said as well, and maybe we can make a bit more of this, that you were one of the people

01:24:51.380 who had expressed skepticism and doubt about the rampage to a trillion dollar expense on the net zero side.

01:25:00.700 Now, interestingly enough, it's, isn't it, isn't it fascinating that we talked about the notion that

01:25:05.860 it was fear of cancellation that would stop people from doing what you did.

01:25:10.500 But the consequence for you, indirect though it may be, is that you're now the leader of the Conservative Party,

01:25:17.700 which is, you know, that wasn't exactly an obvious outcome, and yet it happened.

01:25:22.280 And, you know, one of the things we haven't talked about, so let's, let's close with this.

01:25:25.900 Like, why in the world are you the leader?

01:25:28.260 How the hell did that happen?

01:25:29.520 And why do you think it's, why do you think that that, why is that a good thing?

01:25:35.520 Why do you think you're, you're a good leader, but also why are you a leader that's good in comparison, let's say,

01:25:42.620 as a choice, if the choice is Nigel Farage and the Reform Party,

01:25:46.520 why should people who feel that they've been burned by the Conservative Party trust you and the party now?

01:25:53.520 So why should they trust me?

01:25:55.500 Because they can look at my record.

01:25:57.320 When the net zero debate was happening, you can see me on the screen literally questioning it.

01:26:03.660 So you can trust because of what I have done before.

01:26:06.480 So it's, it's asking people to look at what I did when I had the chance.

01:26:10.540 And it is because every point where I had a fight, I was quite often fighting for other people.

01:26:18.740 Tackling extreme gender ideology, this was something that took hold the social contagion across the West. 0.51

01:26:25.160 And I fought despite a lot of personal attacks, a lot of threats of cancellation, and I broke through.

01:26:31.300 So I'm not going to hide and not tell people the truth.

01:26:34.360 It is because I am honest that they can trust me.

01:26:37.700 But it is also because I like fixing things.

01:26:40.880 I'm an engineer.

01:26:41.900 I don't like seeing stuff that's broken and wondering who's coming by to deal with it.

01:26:46.640 I like to deal, I like to deal with it.

01:26:49.160 And I love this country.

01:26:50.740 I love its institutions.

01:26:52.080 I am a builder.

01:26:52.800 I want us to build things.

01:26:54.060 And the problem I have with other people on the right is that they're so angry, they want to destroy things.

01:27:02.300 They don't have a plan for how to build things.

01:27:04.780 They 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. 0.87

01:27:11.300 You can't seriously think that that will work.

01:27:14.280 These are people who've never been in the system.

01:27:16.380 So I am a realist.

01:27:17.480 I'm an honest realist.

01:27:18.780 I know how to fix things.

01:27:19.980 I have the experience, which, you know, you were talking about the reform leader.

01:27:24.720 He doesn't have that experience.

01:27:26.220 He is more a media personality.

01:27:28.780 He talks a lot.

01:27:29.820 If we do not get Labour out because the right is split, we're going to have so much more of this.

01:27:36.760 And we don't want a party that has never had to deal with these things in government before.

01:27:41.720 There is a system that works.

01:27:43.740 If you try and burn it down without knowing how to replace it, we'll be in trouble.

01:27:47.360 And this is where my experience of other countries comes in.

01:27:51.980 You look at the Arab Spring, for example.

01:27:54.180 You look at revolutions across the world.

01:27:56.620 This sort of rage, and we're going to have a revolution and we'll tear the establishment down, does not tend to end well.

01:28:02.960 And this isn't saying that people have no right to be angry.

01:28:05.440 Of course they have a right to be angry.

01:28:07.120 I am furious about immigration. 1.00

01:28:09.180 It's absolutely too high.

01:28:10.720 There was a lot of carelessness.

01:28:12.340 Who's coming into our country? 1.00

01:28:13.660 The culture, the levels of integration are getting lower and lower.

01:28:17.280 No one has a plan for integration.

01:28:19.120 I'm going to work on one.

01:28:20.300 That is what is different about me.

01:28:22.180 If you just want someone who's going to be angry with you, then that's a totally different proposition.

01:28:27.240 I'm not here to be angry with you.

01:28:28.820 I feel your anger, but I am here to fix things.

01:28:31.560 And that's the big difference between the two of us.

01:28:33.860 Whether it's on net zero, whether it's on extreme ideology, whether it's on deregulation,

01:28:38.360 whether it was fighting for women's rights, I am somebody who always makes sure that I speak on behalf of those who have no voice.

01:28:45.900 That is what I see my job as.

01:28:47.560 I do not understand this love of global summits and so on.

01:28:51.000 I went to Davos as a secretary of state.

01:28:54.000 Ministers from all over the world tend to meet there because they're all there at the same time.

01:28:57.960 And I can see why a lot of people are angry about it because it looks like a closed room where decisions are being made.

01:29:04.980 It's not really.

01:29:05.720 It's more like a boring conference where people spend a lot of time preening.

01:29:09.400 And I didn't enjoy it.

01:29:10.880 But once you start seeing those things, you start to understand how people get influenced, how decisions are made.

01:29:16.720 And I am quite immune to a lot of that.

01:29:18.940 And that is what I want to bring to the leadership of this country.

01:29:21.700 And we've got four more years, at least, of labor.

01:29:25.200 By the time they have finished, there's going to be a big mess to fix.

01:29:29.080 And you're going to want people who understand it and who get it to clean up that mess.

01:29:33.580 You're not going to want people who will just start thinking about it and learning on the job.

01:29:37.780 And that's the offer.

01:29:38.600 Yeah, 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.

01:29:48.860 Now, I've worked with a lot of engineers, well, and a lot of lawyers for that matter.

01:29:52.620 But one of the things that's very interesting about engineers, two things.

01:29:56.040 First of all, they tend to be pretty truthful.

01:29:58.480 I think that's partly their autistic proclivity, let's say. 1.00

01:30:01.740 They don't have the social skills to lie.

01:30:04.520 But it's also the fact that they actually have to build things that work.

01:30:08.220 And they have to build them from the bottom up.

01:30:10.420 And 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.

01:30:21.560 But they do have to build systems that work.

01:30:24.240 And if they make mistakes, the systems don't work.

01:30:27.200 Right, right.

01:30:27.640 And so the fact that you're an engineer by education and a lawyer, that's a really interesting combination.

01:30:33.920 I'm not a lawyer.

01:30:35.440 I went to law school.

01:30:36.100 Sorry, sorry, that you went to law school.

01:30:38.220 Right, right, right.

01:30:38.900 That you have extensive legal training.

01:30:41.320 Right, okay, okay.

01:30:42.420 And so, all right.

01:30:43.780 And so, well, I guess we could close.

01:30:47.400 We're going to see each other at ARC, at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Convention.

01:30:52.280 And, yeah, I'm looking forward to that.

01:30:54.980 We'll get about 4,000 people there.

01:30:57.000 And, you know, we're trying to outline a visionary, classic, liberal, conservative policy set on the cultural side in particular.

01:31:07.580 And so, we'll have a chance to speak again.

01:31:11.120 And then we can talk about political Islam and how we manage to tackle those problems while having an integrated society.

01:31:21.440 How we fix immigration, which has gone very wrong. 0.90

01:31:24.180 And I have a plan.

01:31:25.200 There's so much that we can dive into.

01:31:27.580 But I think too many people have not done the foundational work.

01:31:30.740 And they're just angry and they're just talking.

01:31:33.340 We have a Labour government that is completely clueless.

01:31:35.680 No plans.

01:31:36.200 They've just accidentally found themselves where they are.

01:31:38.860 But there's a way out.

01:31:39.980 And I'm very optimistic about the future, especially for young people.

01:31:43.480 And 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. 0.81

01:31:51.960 Because 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.

01:31:59.880 I just didn't know which way to go.

01:32:02.120 And the young people today don't see that anymore.

01:32:06.200 They don't go out.

01:32:07.520 They're not drinking.

01:32:08.640 They're not socialising the way they used to.

01:32:10.920 They're just becoming different.

01:32:13.460 And that worries me about the future.

01:32:15.480 And it also means that they are more susceptible to a lot of bad ideas, both, you know, what I call the woke left and the woke right.

01:32:22.400 I've now started using the word woke.

01:32:23.940 I never used to before.

01:32:24.760 There's a woke left and a woke right.

01:32:26.560 And they're going to those places because they're angry about migration and how it looks like it's taken opportunity away from them.

01:32:33.840 They're angry because they think the world is unfair, intergenerational unfairness.

01:32:37.680 We need to give young people the sort of optimism that we had when we were younger.

01:32:42.980 Remember what it was like being 25.

01:32:44.880 It was great.

01:32:45.580 How can we take that away from people?

01:32:47.380 And between COVID and high house prices and so on, there is so much that has created despair.

01:32:54.660 And I remember having a conversation with Pierre Polyev about this.

01:32:57.720 He's my kindred spirit, by the way.

01:32:59.340 I love him.

01:32:59.940 He's fantastic.

01:33:01.020 And, you know, he is six months older than me.

01:33:02.820 And we see these things in the same way.

01:33:04.920 We have to give people hope.

01:33:06.300 And 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.

01:33:16.680 All right.

01:33:17.340 Well, that's a good place to end, I would say.

01:33:19.580 For everybody watching and listening, we're going to continue our conversation on the Daily Wire side.

01:33:24.480 And 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.

01:33:51.460 Perils and opportunities in the era of Trump, let's say.

01:33:55.200 And we can cover that on the Daily Wire side so everybody could join us there.

01:33:58.900 Thank you very much.

01:34:00.140 It'd be lovely to sit down with you again at some point if you're inclined.

01:34:03.300 We 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.

01:34:13.500 And 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.

01:34:33.680 So there's sparks of hope there, all the signatories of the Abraham Accords. 0.99

01:34:38.160 So thank you very much.

01:34:39.500 Yes, we must talk about Abraham Accords too.

01:34:41.700 There's a lot more to discuss.

01:34:43.580 There certainly is.

01:34:44.540 Thank you, Dr. Peterson.

01:34:45.320 Yes, yes.

01:34:46.060 It was a pleasure, by the way.

01:34:47.100 And thank you very much for agreeing to do this.

01:34:48.960 And 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.

01:34:55.600 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - February 17, 2025

522. The New Conservative Party ｜ Kemi Badenoch

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