The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - June 23, 2026


PREVIEW: Brokenomics | Left Wing Lies and Civil War with Ed Dutton


Episode Stats


Length

27 minutes

Words per minute

168.31

Word count

4,619

Sentence count

55


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Brokonomics.
00:00:29.280 Now, yesterday, Ed Dutton got in touch to say that he'd done some research.
00:00:33.660 Now, that was all I needed to hear before inviting him on,
00:00:36.840 because I've read some of his books.
00:00:38.680 And whenever Ed does research, I kind of want to know what's going on.
00:00:42.380 So I'm coming into this a bit blind.
00:00:44.520 Don't know what it's about.
00:00:45.380 Hopefully it's not too spicy.
00:00:47.340 But Ed, thank you for joining us.
00:00:50.080 Thank you for having me.
00:00:51.220 I hope that you're enjoying the beginnings of summer.
00:00:55.500 Yeah, it's an interesting anomaly.
00:00:58.600 and it's an anomaly that for some reason i can't seem to get the mainstream newspapers
00:01:02.760 um interested in um and it's with regard to our former deputy prime minister and perhaps future
00:01:09.300 chancellor of the exchequer angela rayner well also possibly future prime minister i mean she
00:01:15.260 is the favorite amongst the back benches at the moment is that right well yes she's she said some
00:01:20.480 interesting things about her childhood she by all according to her she had an extremely dysfunctional
00:01:26.480 and difficult childhood. In an interview, she said, we weren't wanted. I didn't feel I'd ever
00:01:31.600 been loved. She said that her mother was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Her mother tried to commit
00:01:37.960 suicide when Angela was 13 by slashing her wrists. And Angela was her legal carer. And in an article
00:01:45.740 in iNews in 2016, entitled Labour MP Angela Rayner's inspirational mother, she said that her
00:01:53.200 mother was one of 12 children um which is a lot of children well i know all of that i mean i would
00:02:01.020 agree but that sounds like a horrific upbringing well yeah it doesn't sound very nice but it i
00:02:07.020 wonder well if it's quite as unnice as is this an anomaly she says her mother is one of 12 children
00:02:14.540 in an interview in high news in 2016 an interview in spectator uh australia in 2021 called i'll eat
00:02:22.200 you alive she said that two of her siblings her mother's siblings were given away to christian
00:02:28.560 neighbors and never seen again um and that her mother left school at 12 couldn't read and would
00:02:36.280 just follow the fairground so that's what she said her mother was one of 12 children and two of those
00:02:43.820 children indeed because they were so hot up were given away to christian neighbors and never seen
00:02:49.420 again that's what she said well hang on a minute um if if if if two of her mother's siblings were
00:02:57.840 given away to neighbors how bloody big are these houses are these like landed estates because
00:03:03.500 presumably you'd see them every time you walked out your front door and they were coming home or
00:03:07.360 something this is this is odd but then she said other things that are odd as well which no one's
00:03:11.600 questioned such as that the mother used to feed them dog food because she couldn't read and thought
00:03:16.200 it was braising steak now i would but hang on surely then you go on the pictures and the pitch
00:03:22.100 has a right right right so that's a bit odd isn't it did she think that she was eating dog
00:03:26.020 i don't know right but no one no one questioned this or that the interviewer didn't question this
00:03:32.980 um or that she said things like she had to go to her grandmother's once a week for a bath
00:03:37.960 implicitly because they couldn't have afford to have a bath that where she did with her mum
00:03:42.740 but then she said oh i used to bathe my mother all the time she used to have to bathe her mother
00:03:47.180 because her mother was so depressed and couldn't do it for herself it's very odd some of the things
00:03:51.180 she says and nobody questions it perhaps because she's a woman or perhaps because they don't want
00:03:55.920 to seem like a snob i don't know but the weirdest thing was saying that she was one of 12 the mother
00:04:02.280 was one of 12 her mother was one of 12 siblings and i thought well that's testable but is that true
00:04:08.780 And I got quite into genealogy and I've traced my family tree and my family trees and various other people's family trees, things like this.
00:04:16.620 And so I know how to I know where the records are and how you can check these things.
00:04:19.700 And so I looked into it. And what I found was that her mother, Lynn Dean, was born in Stockport in 1960.
00:04:28.260 The mother had an illegitimate child, Darren Dean, in 1975.
00:04:32.920 in 1977 she married Martin Bowen that's Angela's father in Stockport but for some reason on the
00:04:42.200 marriage certificate she puts her name down as Ingram now her mother hasn't married in Ingram
00:04:48.840 she's not Ingram but apropos of nothing she puts her surname on her marriage certificate
00:04:54.840 is ingram this is weird now she has angela in 1980 in chester and ellsmore port and she has
00:05:04.660 a brother michael joseph in 1983 in chester and ellsmore port this lynn dean i tracked down her
00:05:12.080 mother her mother is evelyn dean born stockport 1941 marries a brian uh even in delves sorry
00:05:20.080 1941 marries a brian dean 1959 stockport has lynn 1960 and a brother andrew 1968
00:05:29.020 and that's it so i can't find any evidence of what angela said that her mother had
00:05:37.380 well that's not 12 11 siblings her mother had one sibling and that is this person called andrew
00:05:45.320 born in 1968. Now, what might be going on? And remember that this woman, this Lin, got married
00:05:53.980 at 17. So she's out of the house by 17. Did her mother remarry? Well, I find an Evelyn Dean
00:06:02.040 who remarries in Halifax in 1971. So that's nowhere near. That's nowhere near Cheshire.
00:06:09.580 um and but this is the one born in Bradford in 1954 I can't find any evidence of illegitimate
00:06:17.180 children she might have had because if she'd had illegitimate children after 1968 they would have
00:06:22.200 been under the name Dean or if she reverted to her maiden name Delves and which you didn't do in
00:06:28.660 those days anyway they're not so then I tracked down did the father for some reason that makes
00:06:35.860 no sense come with a whole brood of children from a previous marriage well i looked into the uh into
00:06:42.700 the into the brian deans you have in stockport one born and died in 1939 one who marries a janet
00:06:50.180 brindley in 1970 but he's i've tracked them down he was still alive in 2008 um and so he's clearly
00:07:00.060 the one that was born in 1947 and then you have another one born in 1932 and dies in 1988 and that
00:07:07.820 seems to be uh Angela's grandmother this Brian grandfather this um this Brian Dean and it says
00:07:15.000 on his death certificate that he was born in 1932 which makes sense then because he gets married in
00:07:20.880 1959. So I don't know what's going on. Is it that she has 10 siblings whose births weren't registered?
00:07:31.420 Is it that she has 10 siblings that were born abroad, which seems unlikely considering the
00:07:38.680 poverty they were supposedly brought up in? Is it that Brian came with a series of illegitimate
00:07:44.900 children that were all registered under his mother's under his um uh under the mother's
00:07:50.460 surname um and if that's the case then like he'd have to have started at about the age of 16 for
00:07:57.780 there to be enough by the time he got married so none of these things make any sense it's a bizarre
00:08:04.860 anomaly that i can't make head nor tail off and i thought of part oh well maybe there's a kind of
00:08:09.480 weird blended nature to her family but if you look into the records that's that doesn't that
00:08:14.680 doesn't fit so something's off well a simple explanation would be that she's lying
00:08:22.460 yes that would i couldn't possibly comment but that but or that she was told this in good faith
00:08:35.420 by her mother and the mother during one of those barbs perhaps um and and she never thought to
00:08:43.240 question it but whatever is the case the so the the i don't want to accuse people of lie we have
00:08:49.200 certain libel laws in this country but um the it doesn't it's it's an anomaly that doesn't make
00:08:55.220 sense and i can't come up with a way of making it make sense because if they were illegitimate
00:08:59.280 children then i would find them in the records under the surname dean a mother's maiden mother's
00:09:05.080 maiden name delves um and i don't um if there were children and that were registered and they
00:09:11.520 were illegitimate but they were registered under the father's name i would find mother's maiden
00:09:15.380 name dean but i can't find any evidence of the other than that the mother was one of two so
00:09:22.820 it's very very strange that's all i wanted to say yeah i mean in a prior era you kind of expect
00:09:31.760 journalists to perhaps ask a follow-on question to some of this stuff but we kind of entered an
00:09:36.620 era where the politics where the journalists basically just either reading out corporate
00:09:40.700 press releases or accepting politicians entirely at their word so yes i mean i mean we get this a
00:09:50.880 lot from labour politicians don't we we get the sort of rachel reeves who just makes up whole
00:09:54.620 sections of her cv uh and then it is exposed sometime later but it sounds like you might
00:09:59.820 of exposed that that was it uh angela rayner's origin story is um questionable oh but it's and
00:10:09.960 it's not it's there's other things i would i would have thought this thing about eating dog food is
00:10:13.920 just so obviously unlikely it's so obviously improbable that anybody even if they could read
00:10:20.820 would think that dog food uh in the dog food section of a shop um was was anything other than
00:10:28.300 dog food and so it it's it's it's most it's most unlikely and this idea yes and and also as somebody
00:10:37.040 who has small children even if you give them um even if they like fish fingers and you give them
00:10:44.560 fish fingers um of a different type you give them hate fish fingers as opposed to codfish fingers
00:10:50.880 which is the ones they like they kick up an enormous stink and and yet she tells it in a way
00:10:56.220 that on multiple occasions she was fed dog food
00:10:59.520 and we're expected to believe that young children
00:11:01.420 did not kick up a stink about this.
00:11:04.180 When, you know, as anyone with small children knows,
00:11:06.620 that is not how small children work.
00:11:09.880 No, precisely.
00:11:10.880 They will react with disgust.
00:11:13.280 I mean, I've just put in now just to check something.
00:11:15.200 So between 1968 and 1978,
00:11:17.160 there's a mother's maiden named Delves in Stockport.
00:11:21.140 People with different names,
00:11:23.100 presumably it would be a number of people
00:11:24.880 with the same surname.
00:11:26.220 By any way of trying to come up with an explanation for this,
00:11:29.700 other than the one you did, it just doesn't fit.
00:11:33.920 Well, I suppose there's the unregistered bit.
00:11:36.640 So maybe, you know, she only registered the two children
00:11:40.380 and all the other children she just had in her living room
00:11:43.320 and just never got around to registering them and they just, something.
00:11:47.360 That's the only explanation I can think of.
00:11:49.440 But if that's the case, then she's committed 10 different criminal offences
00:11:53.280 and those those children don't have birth certificates um they don't legally exist
00:11:59.980 so i'm interested to know how they're getting along um it it it's just bizarre i mean even
00:12:08.220 to say that your mother is one of 12 is pretty unlikely it's unlikely if someone says they're
00:12:13.220 one of 12 well it's worth thinking about are they and and and so it's um i i just think it's
00:12:19.500 an example of of them um giving her a different standard of what is exceptional to say it's as
00:12:26.280 though angela is allowed to exaggerate things angela is allowed to tell fibs angela is possibly
00:12:31.940 angela she's allowed to exaggerate because if we question her narrative being from a terrible
00:12:37.820 terrible terrible background then this is mean and unkind and we look unkind is there some sort
00:12:43.980 of psychological mechanism where you want to do performative because what she's what you're kind
00:12:48.760 of implying that she's doing she's she's applying this performative i am more common than you can
00:12:54.500 possibly imagine type shtick it's like you wouldn't you wouldn't believe how working class i am and
00:13:00.580 how working class my origin are you wouldn't believe what a victim i am yes yes yeah there
00:13:07.620 are there are but we have to be very i'm not making i don't i want to get absolutely clear
00:13:12.340 i'm not saying this is true of angela rayner um because i'm a you'd have to be a doctor and you'd
00:13:18.220 have to see her but in general there are certain um kinds of personality such as vulnerable
00:13:25.400 narcissism or uh borderline personality uh yeah it has to be disorders that are associated with
00:13:34.420 um with vulnerability signaling and with exaggerating the extent of your vulnerability
00:13:42.340 in order to gain sympathy and control and if you look at michael ashcroft's biography of her which
00:13:50.540 is called red queen um uh those that know her talk about her as being manipulative talk about her as
00:13:59.080 being haughty talk about her as being temperamental talk about her as being insecure this thing that
00:14:06.000 she said about not being loved is completely consistent with the kind of thing that these
00:14:10.740 kinds of women will say and so it's it's a means of um of supercharging a social bond with somebody
00:14:20.060 else and making them care for you by uh but by get by talking about by signaling inaccurately or in
00:14:28.280 exaggerated form how vulnerable you are yes now i think you're right we don't want to just talk
00:14:34.440 about and we're not talking about angela here but just just ask you a question about in general
00:14:40.960 women or individuals who seek out a victim narrative who try and turbo charge victim
00:14:48.800 narratives who have bipolar personality disorder in general those kind of people what would be
00:14:56.560 the concerns about putting them in a position such as i don't know chancellor or prime minister
00:15:02.240 something like that is is is there any sort of incompatibility with people aggressively seeking
00:15:07.920 victimhood status and having a major office of state if they have if that seeking victimhood
00:15:16.360 is part of a broader pattern of of a personality disorder such as vulnerable narcissism or
00:15:23.660 borderline personality then um in the in the case of borderline personality these people will
00:15:29.900 fear uh that will have a constant sense of emptiness and will act in a very insecure way
00:15:36.460 accordingly they will deeply fear abandonment and will act perhaps in an unwise way uh and
00:15:44.300 accordingly they will have problems with emotional regulation so that's obviously a very serious
00:15:50.160 problem if you're in a position of power under severe stress they can become paranoid and go
00:15:56.320 into what's called borderline schizophrenia where they think that everybody is out to get them
00:16:02.380 they can engage in acts of self-harm or or self-sabotage which if you are symbolizing the
00:16:10.660 nation you could maybe even engage in an act of self-sabotage in relation to the nation
00:16:14.920 they will have tremendous problems controlling anger and so this again you can see is a is a is
00:16:22.100 an issue. So they will be very, very difficult to work with. And in fact, there is a guy,
00:16:30.280 I'm just finishing a book about this at the moment, actually, I'm finishing a book at the
00:16:33.440 moment about women with borderline personality and positions of power. And some people have
00:16:38.520 argued that Margaret Thatcher reflects quite a few of these traits. So she would surround herself
00:16:44.360 with admiring, fawning men, which would, whatever insecurity she might have had about herself,
00:16:50.780 that you know not feeling good enough or whatever which is consistent with this
00:16:55.220 disorder then she would surround herself with quite unpleasant men a lot of the time
00:17:00.840 that would direct her in in difficult ways she would she would become she would deal with
00:17:05.560 problems by becoming very black and white and very angry she would treat opponents like jeffrey
00:17:09.740 howe very very badly it would cause you to sort of make mistakes if you if you had that kind of
00:17:18.840 everybody speculates on donald trump having narcissistic grandiose narcissistic personality
00:17:24.260 disorder well there are good things about that i.e that you you you're very confident uh you ooze
00:17:30.440 confidence and so for people you make a kind of cold world feel warm again you're likely to be
00:17:35.600 very decisive um that there's um you're likely to take risks in a way that somebody else wouldn't
00:17:42.240 and cut through the crap there's all kinds of positive things about it but there's negative
00:17:45.580 things about it such as if something really bad happens to you that sort of punctures your sense
00:17:50.240 that you're superior then you can you can uh reflect in narcissistic rage in going absolutely
00:17:57.060 crazy in sabotaging things um and and obviously the straits of hormones for example perhaps yes
00:18:04.460 and you and you can be very bad at taking advice because you're certain that you're correct and so
00:18:09.100 you might do unwise things there certainly are a lot of studies um that have come to the conclusion
00:18:15.060 that people that are involved in politics
00:18:16.780 are elevated in narcissistic traits
00:18:19.380 with basically low agreeableness.
00:18:24.240 Because in order to arise top of politics,
00:18:27.560 you've got to be a bit cutthroat.
00:18:29.060 You've got to be a bit selfish.
00:18:31.340 You've got to be highly confident and so on.
00:18:35.260 And that charismatic-type politicians,
00:18:37.780 as opposed to bureaucratic John Major-type ones,
00:18:40.580 the charismatic-type politicians
00:18:41.920 are higher in those kinds of traits.
00:18:45.060 so it seems to me perfectly real and there was analysis by a guy called felix post which looked
00:18:51.480 at very very important political figures and found they were all elevated in various kinds
00:18:55.180 of psychology and particularly things like narcissistic personality and so there's obviously
00:19:01.320 good sides to having that disorder and being in a position of power and there's bad sides to it
00:19:06.540 the bad sides will be arrogance entitlement not caring about the detail thinking you're about
00:19:12.100 everything thinking you can get away with things when you can't um all of those kinds of things
00:19:16.800 that seem to bring down the charismatic type politician and i think thatcher who we can talk
00:19:21.960 about frieda because she's dead is is is a good example that someone like that probably was quite
00:19:27.340 narcissistic anyway she was very interested in fashion and what she looked like her two main
00:19:32.760 interests were politics and fashion um she had a much older husband um that's consistent with
00:19:39.560 borderline personality because women in general are sexually attracted to age because it gives
00:19:43.660 them security and resources that it's associated with that and so this is going to be turbocharged
00:19:49.240 with a borderline who fears abandonment and wants to be looked after she's of course can be attracted
00:19:53.680 to much older men um she uh she didn't get on with she had very few female friends and didn't
00:19:59.180 get on with women that's often a factor with borderline personality they tend to have male
00:20:03.060 friends because they burn their way through the village in the words of my friend dr hannah spear
00:20:08.160 the women realise
00:20:10.740 these people are out to get their men
00:20:12.280 and are devious and manipulative and they don't want to be their friends
00:20:14.540 and they're anyway
00:20:16.480 all about getting male attention and so on
00:20:18.340 So you're not suggesting that Margaret Thatcher
00:20:20.360 was putting it about, are you?
00:20:22.760 Well, if you read, there's a book
00:20:23.980 what's the name of the book? I think it's called
00:20:26.280 Incidental Feminist
00:20:27.700 which presents a lot of evidence that she had
00:20:30.480 at least one affair when she was an MP
00:20:32.600 even though she was married
00:20:34.160 with a guy called Humphrey Atkins
00:20:36.960 um so again that that that would that would be having an affair is another aspect by the way
00:20:44.780 of borderline is is impulsive risk-taking and you you could argue that that is that is not good in
00:20:51.080 government impulsive risk-taking and one of the ways in which they'll take risks will be things
00:20:55.400 like having affairs so with all the men so so you know so it's it's it there are there are
00:21:02.400 definite positive size these kinds of people personality is um associated with being creative
00:21:07.900 uh because you're experiencing feelings very intensely and you have a need to
00:21:12.720 sort of with with it's associated with what's called identity disturbance there's nine traits
00:21:18.520 and i find it very difficult to remember them all off the top of my head um i've now gone through
00:21:22.660 all nine um identity disturbance which is that you you feel so insecure and so unhappy um that
00:21:28.840 when something bad happens to you rather than say oh well a bad thing's happened and i'll make this
00:21:34.340 change you think well i'm fundamentally bad i must change myself so one of the markers of this
00:21:39.460 condition is a dramatic change in identity um there's no evidence that mrs thatcher underwent
00:21:46.640 that but you only have to have half of the traits to be diagnosed but one of the things if a person
00:21:52.160 has moved most obviously from being on the extreme left to being on the extreme right
00:21:57.820 um that or from being a leftist to being a traditional catholic or something yes um that
00:22:05.780 would obviously be an example of identity disturbance and um and having identity
00:22:10.300 disturbance is probably not good if you're in a position of influence well i mean all of those
00:22:14.800 things that you listed you know dealing with stress and abandonment i mean that's not really
00:22:19.520 the person you want dealing with the bond market especially at a time like this so no um ed that
00:22:25.480 that is fascinating thank you very much for bringing us to that um uh hopefully this is
00:22:29.880 something will start to get picked up so you you mentioned that you're sort of putting this out
00:22:34.080 there on a number of outlets so so hopefully this worms its way back into somebody who's actually
00:22:38.900 allowed into press conferences with angela rayner and um a few more questions because if she's just
00:22:45.080 making stuff up wholesale um it would kind of be good to know that she has this i put it to
00:22:51.220 somebody that works for the daily mail and he thought it was a brilliant idea and he said god
00:22:55.580 if it's true it'll end her career and and he took it to the sub-editor and the sub-editor said no
00:23:00.980 i'm not interested huh it's very strange right okay uh yes that's a kind of state of modern
00:23:09.220 version um there was also something else i wanted to ask you about ed because um we we got our lads
00:23:16.640 in makerfield this week and so so this this recording is probably gonna have to go out next
00:23:20.500 week uh but at the time of recording um it is the morning well it is the morning after the the the
00:23:29.100 night before in belfast so two nights ago from our perspective a man was was almost beheaded
00:23:35.000 in Belfast and last night there were massive protests but the protests were very different
00:23:41.680 in Belfast to how they were in Southampton. In Southampton the protesters were almost
00:23:46.360 performing to the state. They sought out the police, they went to the police and they protested
00:23:53.700 in front of them and they did all sorts of performative things like taking the knee and
00:23:57.320 saying well you knelt for George Floyd why aren't you kneeling for us but they were essentially
00:24:01.840 seeking out the police and the ones who did do things that got them in trouble um they walked
00:24:07.940 around without masks they got themselves filmed they basically handed the state a prosecution
00:24:13.100 file through the and they did the evidence collection for them in belfast it was very
00:24:17.900 very different um no live streaming was allowed press wasn't allowed near they covered their
00:24:24.040 faces they left their phones at home they did not seek out the police what they did is they
00:24:27.960 is they sought out where the police were not they went straight to hmo and and uh immigrant
00:24:33.160 businesses and they targeted them you know where whatever it was a petrol bomb rocks through the
00:24:38.280 windows and then they vanished again it was very very targeted and it was it was clearly not a
00:24:43.260 performance to the state it was bypassing the state now the reason i want to ask you about
00:24:48.720 this is because you you came on our general election stream uh at the time of the last
00:24:53.640 general election when when starmer got into power and you were the first person i i heard made this
00:24:59.520 point i've heard other people make it since but you were the first you got it straight away
00:25:02.920 and you said this is the beginning of secretarian politics in britain because we just had something
00:25:08.000 like 15 gaza mps elected you know member for gaza central member of gaza west or whatever it was but
00:25:15.060 you had all these gaza mps so you've obviously seen and you saw something very early with the
00:25:21.060 direction that this country is going in and it just feels to me that belfast last night
00:25:25.380 was a prime example of how we are moving past the political and into the secretarian i wondered if
00:25:31.340 this is something you've been thinking about as well yeah i have been thinking about it today
00:25:35.020 i've been thinking that i wrote an article on it for my sub stack actually jolly heresy okay um
00:25:39.760 i was thinking that in many ways northern ireland is the worst place for a sudanese person to attempt
00:25:48.520 to behead and frankly he had probably blinded um i believe he is yes this this poor chap ogilvy
00:25:54.640 uh in uh in north belfast and it's the worst place because as you say there's something um
00:26:03.700 not that i am disparaging the british protesters in southampton um and i'm sure there was raw
00:26:11.100 emotion there and and and so on and people were very angry and it was appalling what happened
00:26:16.160 but um what they were doing was protesting against the police and saying look this is unfair there's
00:26:25.040 two-tier policing this is wrong what the people in northern ireland were doing was so completely
00:26:30.780 different it was it was very much we are we this person is part of the community of foreigners
00:26:38.340 these foreigners are a problem in belfast and we will therefore drive them out
00:26:45.680 and that's and that's a and that's a completely different way of of seeing things of what you're
00:26:52.240 doing what what one what one group is doing is saying okay we accept foreigners are here we just
00:26:57.160 we just want them to be treated equally to us another group is in a country where most people
00:27:02.800 are still white um is is saying no these foreigners have come it's causing problems they are to leave
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