The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - June 16, 2026


PREVIEW: Brokenomics | Restore Policy with Harrison Pitt


Episode Stats


Length

21 minutes

Words per minute

187.95

Word count

4,102

Sentence count

170

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

9

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Brokonomics.
00:00:29.040 Now, in this episode, I'm absolutely delighted to be joined by Harrison Pitt.
00:00:32.700 Harrison, thank you for coming on.
00:00:34.040 Thank you, Dan.
00:00:34.680 Now, you're a clever young chap, and you went to Durham, didn't you?
00:00:38.880 And then you went to Cambridge.
00:00:40.240 Yep.
00:00:41.600 So you've got an excellent CV behind you.
00:00:43.640 With that, you could have sort of written your ticket to go anywhere,
00:00:47.480 and yet you kind of went straight into right-wing circles
00:00:51.120 and then gravitated to reform.
00:00:53.820 Restore.
00:00:54.400 Restore, restore, before it even sort of had any traction.
00:00:59.040 and it was basically just one MP.
00:01:01.860 Given that you could have gone anywhere,
00:01:04.420 what attracted you to a store?
00:01:06.740 Well, I'm not sure I could have quite have gone anywhere
00:01:08.240 because I never...
00:01:10.780 True, I suppose I could have pursued life as a lawyer
00:01:15.440 if I'd wanted to do that.
00:01:17.840 Maybe done something similar to what Sumption did
00:01:21.600 because he got a bit bored of the academy
00:01:24.160 because he didn't feel like he was making enough money,
00:01:25.880 and so that's why he went into the law in his 30s,
00:01:27.720 having written lots of sort of academic historical works
00:01:30.280 about medieval French history
00:01:31.320 and all the rest of it in his 20s at Maudelin.
00:01:33.400 But I wanted to pursue a life in the academy,
00:01:35.380 which actually is not that well remunerative
00:01:37.900 unless you live in the United States.
00:01:40.280 Here, it pays a pittance, but that is my passion.
00:01:43.360 I'm interested in philosophy,
00:01:44.900 I'm interested in intellectual history,
00:01:46.000 I'm interested in a field of philosophy called metaethics.
00:01:49.260 And I would have liked to have pursued that
00:01:52.320 within the academy.
00:01:54.000 And I was sort of on course to do that.
00:01:55.980 I did a kind of philosophy and history degree at Cambridge
00:01:58.480 and MPhil at Cambridge.
00:01:59.880 But it became, which I suppose must have finished
00:02:01.880 in around 2022, 2023.
00:02:04.400 But it became clearer and clearer to me.
00:02:05.800 I already had, you know,
00:02:06.960 I was already fairly well ensconced
00:02:08.180 within what we might call
00:02:08.940 the transatlantic right-wing sphere,
00:02:10.740 given my connections to two people in particular,
00:02:13.440 Ellen Fantini and Mario Fantini,
00:02:15.000 who are very well-connected American expats
00:02:17.000 living in Europe,
00:02:18.000 who run the European Conservative magazine.
00:02:20.840 They wanted me as a senior editor.
00:02:22.520 And it just became clearer and clearer to me
00:02:24.300 that my skills, such as they are,
00:02:27.240 were more needed in this public struggle than...
00:02:31.600 So you made the decision you wanted to go into the political sphere,
00:02:34.880 but nevertheless, still, at that point,
00:02:37.980 Conservatives would have taken you, Reform would have taken you.
00:02:40.140 Oh, I see, right.
00:02:40.820 But you jumped straight over those.
00:02:42.340 Oh, right, I see.
00:02:42.540 And you said, I'm going to go to the thing with one MP
00:02:45.840 and sort of no real electoral track record behind it
00:02:51.320 because that one MP was elected as a Reform MP.
00:02:53.700 Yes.
00:02:54.300 why did you do that? Well, because I think much more highly of Rupert Lowe than I do of any of
00:02:59.160 the otherwise mentioned. For what reasons? Well, okay, if you want some of the backstory on that,
00:03:05.480 which maybe you do, I was already in the commentary space, I suppose, in that I was
00:03:09.200 speaking at the, I still am a fellow at the New Culture Forum Institute in London, so I was doing
00:03:15.880 regular sort of political commentary programs with Conor Tomlinson called Deprogram, which
00:03:21.160 since been discontinued. And I was writing regular essays for the European Conservative
00:03:25.880 Journal, which is a kind of quarterly academic, semi-academic journal, led by Mario and Ellen
00:03:32.480 Fantini. But it became clearer and clearer to me that reform in around, I suppose, here we're
00:03:39.040 talking about the years 2023 to 2024, were kind of veering away from what many people thought they
00:03:45.480 were, namely a movement to prioritise the interests of the host population of Britain
00:03:51.880 over the interests of imported subcultures.
00:03:54.200 I mean, I very much remember watching that track myself and thinking, oh dear, this is
00:03:58.320 a bit worrying.
00:03:59.120 Yes.
00:03:59.500 But at least they've got one good MP.
00:04:00.980 I like that Rupert chat.
00:04:01.840 Yeah, and that was one of the reasons why I hadn't fully thrown my toys out of the pram
00:04:07.580 yet when they still had Rupert Lowe in the party.
00:04:09.140 But although I was very concerned about it, and what actually happened, and this is now
00:04:11.920 This is now in the public domain. In December of 2024, Peter Whittle, the late Peter Whittle,
00:04:17.660 the director of the New Culture Forum, used to host these little monthly seminars within
00:04:23.520 Tufton Street inside London, in which he would gather the great and the good of public-facing
00:04:30.840 right-wing think tank world and politicians and all the rest of it, to have monthly discussions
00:04:35.760 on the state of the nation. What are we going to do about it? Is the Conservative Party the vehicle?
00:04:39.280 it's reformed the vehicle. And every month, different guests would be invited. So Matt
00:04:44.000 Goodwin addressed one of them. And I was quite critical even then. James Orr addressed one of
00:04:48.940 them. David Starkey addressed one of them. Ben Habib addressed one of them. Alp Mehmet addressed
00:04:52.500 one of them. And eventually, in December 2024, I think it must have been Rupert Lowe. It was
00:04:58.600 Rupert Lowe's turn to address us. And I was there. Conor Tomlinson was there. Charlie Downs was there.
00:05:04.160 then some other assorted right-wing reprobates were there too. And I didn't challenge, I similarly
00:05:12.080 was very fond of Rupert Lowe even then, and I saw him as one of the best remaining things about
00:05:17.180 reform, such as it was in December 2024. I keep saying 25, I mean 24, I mean 24. But I was also
00:05:25.060 fairly critical of the way in which reform were drifting. I was very critical of Farage. I was
00:05:28.560 even somewhat critical in a gentlemanly way of some of the things that Lowe himself had said,
00:05:32.020 and I was struck by the fact that whereas Farage doesn't take at all well to criticism,
00:05:35.360 Lowe actually thrived off it and does so even now.
00:05:38.880 He and I have calls fairly regularly and we don't always see eye to eye
00:05:41.800 and he's actually interested and he's actually curious
00:05:43.400 because he wants to get things done right.
00:05:45.100 And it became clear to me that he really was a serious person,
00:05:49.120 not just because of the edits that were online,
00:05:51.900 but because of the interpersonal interaction that I had had with him
00:05:55.520 during that hour and a half and then we went to the pub afterwards and all the rest of it.
00:05:58.580 And then it was in February that, you know, he was chucked out of the party on sort of trumped up charges of bullying.
00:06:04.920 Farage has now admitted that it had more to do with politics and had more to do with egos.
00:06:08.480 That's Farage admitting that, not Lowe admitting that.
00:06:10.180 Specifically, it was because Rupert was saying that we need to support the grooming gang's communities.
00:06:14.500 Yep.
00:06:14.880 And Nigel later admitted on stage that this was a thing that was completely unacceptable.
00:06:19.640 We must, of course, keep the grooming gang communities.
00:06:22.600 We can't support them.
00:06:23.600 Yes.
00:06:23.900 And that's why they made up charges against him.
00:06:25.420 That's exactly right.
00:06:26.000 But if I had to put it in a nutshell why I saw, by the way, I think that's part of the reason why I was brought on when Restore Britain was launched first as a movement in, I think, June of 2025 is because I think that Rupert Lowe and his team admired the fact that even though it wasn't in perhaps my professional interests to be so supportive of him as I was during that whole debacle, and in the same way that Charlie Downs was, in the same way that Lewis Bratwell was, in the same way that Conor Tomlinson was, and others,
00:06:52.980 because it wasn't advantageous for us to speak out as indeed we did then and alienate reform
00:06:58.600 as we did irreparably during those early months of 2025. We did so anyway because we didn't think
00:07:05.620 that this could be defended on principle. And so I like that Rupert is, contrary to more or less
00:07:10.500 everyone else on the right, a principled man who crucially, and this is the main reason why I feel
00:07:15.860 restore, I believe restore to be such a vital vehicle for the restoration of Britain. He is
00:07:21.500 not committed, he being Rupert, is not committed to playing politics obediently within the
00:07:26.260 progressive framework that we've had served up to us and which has functioned as this sort of
00:07:30.320 de facto over the window. It's remarkably refreshing. It's incredibly refreshing. So for
00:07:33.780 instance, he has never said that, you know, Britain isn't, immigrants are the lifeblood
00:07:38.860 of this nation. He has never said as Farage did that mass deportations would be politically
00:07:45.640 impossible. Rupert is on record saying that he is concerned about the demographic expansion of
00:07:51.000 Islam. Across the British Isles, Faraj, as we all know from that Winston Marshall interview,
00:07:55.160 is more fearful of alienating the Muslim community than he is of standing up for the
00:07:59.380 interests of a host population that has nowhere else to go if it becomes stateless. So on all of 0.92
00:08:03.680 these sort of crucial points, these sort of pillars that underpin in many ways the very
00:08:10.000 progressive framework that is smothering us as a nation and euthanizing us as a people,
00:08:14.120 Rupert is willing to take all sorts of slings and arrows to dissent from that in a way. And
00:08:18.900 Whereas Farage tries to play a slightly more tactical and strategic game.
00:08:22.720 Well, there's a distinction I always get with Osir is that when I'm hearing Farage speak,
00:08:27.020 what I'm hearing is a timescale that goes up to the next election.
00:08:30.360 Or if he ever goes beyond that, if somebody pushes him to say,
00:08:35.160 OK, well, what about 2050 when we're a minority in his own country?
00:08:38.720 His mind goes to, and how do we win elections in 2050?
00:08:41.960 Yeah, right, yes.
00:08:43.020 Whereas when Lowe talks, you can hear he's quite clearly talking about
00:08:46.960 the next thousand years in this country. It's a completely different perspective of what matters.
00:08:53.200 So you're on the Restore team. What is it you do for them?
00:08:57.760 So day-to-day, obviously I lend assistance wherever it's needed from moment to moment,
00:09:04.000 because we're a very small team and sometimes we need to be somewhat dynamic in assigning jobs to
00:09:09.520 people. But for the most part, overwhelmingly, what I do is I work and lead effectively the
00:09:14.320 policy unit within Restore Britain. And we have put out a number of detailed policy papers. Our
00:09:20.740 first one, our first massive one, which took quite a long time, which I wrote, was on sort of mass
00:09:25.140 deportations, legitimacy, legality, and logistics, good sort of 100 plus pages or so. That was
00:09:32.600 released in, that was published to much fanfare in, I suppose it must have been November of last
00:09:37.300 year. Since then, we've done a paper on anarcho-tyranny, which I wrote. We did a paper on
00:09:42.280 the restoration of the British pub, which I didn't write, but which I oversaw. We've done one on
00:09:47.660 energy security, which I wrote, but given that I'm not technically an energy specialist, I wrote with
00:09:52.280 the assistance of a lot of people behind the scenes, including critical people within the
00:09:57.300 energy sector itself. I am responsible for all of our formal, let's say, policy output,
00:10:04.000 whether it's writing it, thinking about it, or if it's an area in which I'm not technically that
00:10:10.440 strong just overseeing it and editing it and overseeing the peer review process an editor and
00:10:16.460 writer but a lot of them i have i have written because i i do have domain knowledge here and
00:10:21.440 there but of course not everywhere and you talk about sort of sampling widely from the people
00:10:24.880 you reach out to for this but obviously working with rupert is a key aspect yeah so i meet with
00:10:29.000 rupert uh fairly regularly uh um we're at the moment if people are interested what we're working
00:10:33.680 on at the moment obviously at the moment all of our time my time particularly is taken up with
00:10:37.660 the Rape Gang Inquiry Report, which this is an example of one that I have not written. It was
00:10:42.760 written by the barrister who led the whole effort, the week in which we were hearing testimony and
00:10:49.580 all the rest of it, and has done the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of the legwork on this,
00:10:56.480 of course, aided crucially by the very brave survivors and witnesses themselves who agreed
00:11:04.400 to speak to us. Many of them will, of course, have their names redacted in the final report.
00:11:09.020 But I'm in the process of editing and threading that all together just so it reads well, getting
00:11:12.400 rid of duplication and all the rest of it. So the grooming gangs one, I suppose, is perhaps
00:11:15.500 a bit of a special case. But nevertheless, all of the policies that you're putting together,
00:11:19.180 and you talked about deportations and energy and pubs and a whole bunch of other things
00:11:24.580 that you're looking at. What is the sort of consistent thread? What is the golden vein
00:11:29.320 that runs through all of the policy work
00:11:31.780 in terms of what it is that Restore is trying to achieve?
00:11:35.200 I suppose, well, the experience,
00:11:39.580 I think this is felt very acutely by young people in particular,
00:11:42.580 and so I will naturally bring that angle to it.
00:11:44.520 But I think the experience of being a young,
00:11:46.200 conservative-minded patriot today
00:11:48.760 is that of feeling cheated out of an inheritance
00:11:51.620 that was rightly yours,
00:11:53.360 that should, in a fair world,
00:11:56.400 have been handed down to you more or less intact,
00:11:59.120 if not enlarged, but which we have been sort of like spitefully or due to cowardice on the part
00:12:08.240 of our leaders cheated out of. And so across a whole range of dimensions, I mean, it sounds a
00:12:14.240 little bit trite in a way, but the major thread that runs through all of these reports is that
00:12:19.800 We used to have not a perfect country, but a very good one that ran with, you know, relative to the, you know, other nations around the world ran with a kind of relative Rolls Royce like per.
00:12:34.060 We had a very blessed demographic inheritance, for instance.
00:12:37.320 We didn't need to depend too much on statute law.
00:12:40.920 Statute law is the classic Anglo-American conservative critique of statute law.
00:12:44.620 That is to say laws passed rationalistically by parliament.
00:12:47.540 the major critique made of this by conservatives stretching from Fortescue to Roger Scruton,
00:12:53.820 is that statute law, the kind that prevails on the continent, anticipates problems in advance,
00:13:00.580 tries to construct general principles for dealing with them, and then those general principles stoop
00:13:05.500 down in order to meet the particulars. The great virtue of common law, which is a completely
00:13:10.120 different form of law, spearheaded and trialled by the English.
00:13:14.340 Which emerges from the judgment of juries.
00:13:15.180 It emerges from the judgment. Yes, it is sometimes called in the literature, sometimes called judge made law. But as Cruton argues, it's probably better described as judge discovered law, because we're talking here about judges and juries working on the basis of moral intuitions that address the particulars, and then the general principles are then built out of the particulars.
00:13:35.380 So with statute law, what you do is the general tries to enfame the particular,
00:13:40.400 or the universal tries to enfame the particular,
00:13:42.280 whereas the distinct virtue of common law is that it is out of particulars
00:13:47.060 and out of genuine cases, practical circumstances,
00:13:49.780 that general principles grow, and then they can be applied to future cases
00:13:53.280 insofar as they resemble the previous ones.
00:13:55.540 So we had that whole body of common law, which in the last hundred years,
00:13:59.800 to get back to your point, it sounds a bit pompous in a way,
00:14:01.740 but has been eroded by consistent passages of statute law,
00:14:09.240 which have, in fact, scrambled this whole very pleasant arrangement.
00:14:12.560 So on everything from Britain's legal system to our ancient constitution
00:14:18.100 to our blessed demographic inheritance,
00:14:20.540 we are in favour of restoring the pre-revolutionary state of things.
00:14:26.240 Yes, getting back there.
00:14:27.300 I mean, on that last point, I remember when I did my degree many years ago,
00:14:30.920 this would have been about 1997, I did one module on law.
00:14:35.820 And the guy who was teaching the course, he said,
00:14:38.880 well, of course, you know, the Italians, they have many laws 1.00
00:14:42.060 and they tend not to obey them. 1.00
00:14:43.900 Whereas in Britain, we have very few laws and we tend to obey them.
00:14:47.280 Now, that is something you could say in 1997.
00:14:49.520 You cannot say it 30 years later in 2026.
00:14:52.800 We now have many laws and the British psyche is having to update
00:14:57.420 with all that.
00:14:58.040 It's like, well, if we're going to have all of these laws and they're covering absolutely everything, what wasn't it for me?
00:15:04.960 It's driving a different agenda.
00:15:07.240 So what you're saying is the party is really aptly named.
00:15:11.220 It is a question of a restoration of something that we had and was lost.
00:15:16.300 And that is the consistent theme through all of your policy work.
00:15:18.880 Absolutely. On everything from law to demographics to the constitution to state capacity to
00:15:24.780 industrial capacity. On all of those fronts, we are interested in... We should be clear,
00:15:32.700 not because we regard the past as an axiomatically good thing. There are all sorts of ways in which
00:15:42.540 things are better now than they were in 1926 or 1826.
00:15:47.580 Can you give an example?
00:15:51.300 Well, the one that people will point to is the state of modern medicine, I suppose.
00:15:54.660 So, you know, we have made sort of technological advances.
00:15:57.860 Not very good for the funding model of the NHS, that.
00:16:00.820 No, no, that's true.
00:16:02.280 And you know a hell of a lot more about it than I do,
00:16:04.640 which is why I like the way that Peter Hitchens has tended to put these things.
00:16:07.320 It's not so much that we look through the past through rose-tinted spectacles.
00:16:11.080 It's more that we note the fact that given where we have been in the past,
00:16:15.100 we have been consistently picking the wrong future.
00:16:17.180 And so I suppose we want Britain in 2026 or 2029 or 2034 or 2039
00:16:25.140 or whenever it is to resemble the Britain that we were on course to be but for.
00:16:32.200 Yeah, I mean, I simply note that the British people
00:16:34.980 have had the largest empire the world has ever known. 1.00
00:16:38.380 The Anglos that went off to Canada had this big, open, bloody space. 1.00
00:16:41.580 What are you going to do with this? 1.00
00:16:42.280 And they turned it into a successful country.
00:16:43.840 you know we sent a bunch we sent our lowest of the low our criminals to australia yes and they
00:16:49.900 turned enormous desert into a thriving first world country new zealand's doing right and the
00:16:54.500 americans i mean they they've got something to their credit um today in terms of in terms of a
00:16:59.660 bit of an empire so the anglo people are enormously thriving um i mean their their track record on the
00:17:06.680 on the global stages is unparalleled so i know what we can do as a people yep um i also know
00:17:13.180 we are doing almost none of that today we are we are moribund there's there's no growth there's no
00:17:19.000 enthusiasm i mean the morale has collapsed um i mean simple things like army recruitment you know
00:17:24.020 young people you ask them you know would you would you sign up to fight in our latest globalist war
00:17:29.140 i mean every part of that is wrong because they they don't agree with the strategic direction of
00:17:33.540 the the geopolitical aims of our elite class and also they ask the question well what would i be
00:17:39.200 fighting for you know what you've given everything away uh for my country so i i i i i completely get
00:17:45.960 all of that um but what what does restoration really start to look like because the reason
00:17:52.720 i mentioned what the anglo people can do is that was always done in an era where there was next to
00:17:59.180 no restrictions on what they could do i mean there's i mean the restrictions were you know
00:18:03.780 don't kill anybody don't cheat anybody yeah um it was the basic obvious stuff it was the stuff
00:18:08.580 that emerged from common law whereas what you talked about was the statute coming down
00:18:13.660 when trying to start me for example my father um you know i mentioned it in the police in our
00:18:18.240 podcast segment earlier at some point he quit that and he decided to open a business
00:18:22.200 and he just got on with it and and you can't do that in business today you have
00:18:27.100 string of regulations you have a string of requirements you have a string of um training
00:18:33.200 you must put your staff through the the the the the weight of taxation you can't just do things
00:18:39.320 so what what does restoration looking look like is it is it stripping away stuff or is is it
00:18:45.300 something else not not not um blindly and arbitrarily no but i'll give you an example
00:18:49.780 um before the 1965 race relations act which is an example of a of a pernicious statute a malign
00:18:56.580 bit of legislation as far as i'm concerned obviously it sounds like a perfectly who could
00:18:59.360 be against nice race relations. 0.99
00:19:01.000 I can. 1.00
00:19:02.040 On principle.
00:19:03.920 Well, you know, this is what our opponents always do, though, isn't it, Dan?
00:19:06.840 They'll craft a bill filled with all sorts of bilge, and they'll call it the Protecting
00:19:13.900 Fluffy Kittens.
00:19:14.360 The Rainbow and Sunshine Act.
00:19:15.620 Yeah, Protecting Fluffy Kittens Act, and then anyone who's against it wants to see
00:19:19.440 Fluffy Kittens slaughtered.
00:19:20.560 So this is how they operate.
00:19:21.840 But what that did is it replaced something that in English common law is called the breach of the peace principle with more sort of overt sort of anti-discrimination legislation, which was later updated in the form of the 1986 Public Order Act, which saw Lucy Connolly sent to prison.
00:19:42.060 because the Americans were clever,
00:19:44.340 they have this common law breach of the peace principle as well,
00:19:48.720 which, and I actually know how it's,
00:19:51.320 I can't remember exactly how it functions in English common law,
00:19:54.760 the exact phrasing,
00:19:55.540 but in America, you are only guilty of incitement
00:19:58.200 if you are inciting,
00:20:00.540 this is Brandenburg, Ohio, 1969,
00:20:03.880 imminent lawless action.
00:20:05.900 So a very high threshold. 1.00
00:20:07.160 Go and shoot that man over there. 1.00
00:20:08.380 Exactly. 0.99
00:20:08.740 Like a very high threshold was used to be set prior to the 1965 Race Relations Act and then
00:20:14.700 later the 1986 Public Order Act. Prior to those malign bits of legislation, the threshold for 0.74
00:20:22.100 incitement was set incredibly high. And it still remains there in the American case because they
00:20:26.480 had the good sense, understandable given the way in which the behavior of the British Parliament
00:20:32.040 from their point of view in the 1760s and 1770s dimmed the American view of parliamentary
00:20:37.020 sovereignty. That's why they wanted a law-governed constitution. And they actually codified a lot of
00:20:41.580 this stuff in their constitution, not least the First Amendment, which is why the common law
00:20:46.620 breach of the peace principle still formally obtains in the United States in a way that it
00:20:50.660 doesn't here, because it has been eroded technically by parliamentary sovereignty,
00:20:53.840 because parliaments have been busily passing bad legislation, such as the 1965 Race Relations Act
00:20:58.160 and the 1986 Public Order Act. And a good example there would be, again, what they always do with
00:21:03.840 these bits of legislation, there will be some good stuff in there, deliberately put in there,
00:21:07.560 in order to make it so that the bad stuff can survive alongside it. So targeted repeal of
00:21:13.180 the sections and subsections that have been pernicious in those bits of legislation,
00:21:17.840 whether the 65 Act or the 1986 Act, we're talking about that sort of thing. A targeted attempt to
00:21:24.000 restore the previous order of things on these questions, which we think is very much in the
00:21:31.500 interests of the British people. If you enjoyed that content, and of course you did because you
00:21:35.900 are a smart person, then why don't you go over to lotuseaters.com where you can watch the whole
00:21:41.140 episode for as little as five pounds a month, which really is not much money at all and you
00:21:47.280 get loads of really good content.