PREVIEW： Realpolitik #22 ｜ The Situation in Britain with Joseph Robertson
Episode Stats
Summary
Joseph Robertson is a former adviser to Reform and a candidate in the local council elections. He is also a supporter of the party, and we chat with him about the current situation in Britain, reforms, and what can we expect between now and the next election scheduled for 2029.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
I am your host, Firas Modad. I am joined in the studio by Joseph Robertson.
00:00:04.960
He's a former advisor to reform. He ran as a candidate for them for council elections,
00:00:11.140
and he's a big reform supporter. And we wanted to bring him onto the show and have a chat with him
00:00:18.180
about the current situation of Britain, reforms, future plans, and what can we expect between now
00:00:25.100
and the next general election scheduled for 2029, but it might happen sooner given how the Labour
00:00:32.980
government is imploding. So, Joseph, thank you so much for joining me.
00:00:37.440
Good to see you, Firas, as always, and thank you for the introduction.
00:00:40.500
Yeah, there's a lot to cover in one sitting, but we can try.
00:00:44.120
There is a lot to talk about. There is a lot to talk about. I guess the question on everybody's
00:00:50.980
mind is that there is a critique of reform that is coming from online circles, but now is also
00:00:58.840
coming from Jacob B. Smog and Alistair Heath. And their question is along the following lines.
00:01:07.540
To govern Britain, there's got to be a bench of up to 1,000 people between the 300-400 MPs who are
00:01:18.200
necessary, the 400 MP candidates, 500 MP candidates, at least, that are necessary, between the SPADs,
00:01:26.580
the appointees to the Lords, et cetera, et cetera. This is a massive HR operation.
00:01:34.680
And this is necessary because if you're going to have people sitting in parliamentary committees
00:01:38.840
and asking the heads of these quangos and the various civil servants, what are they doing,
00:01:46.220
and why are they doing it, and when will they start doing it properly, this expertise is going
00:01:51.400
to be necessary. So this is really the first concern that friends of reform have about the party.
00:02:01.220
Well, first of all, I think there's a very important point that we've forgotten about
00:02:05.020
in Britain, which is our constitutional sovereignty of parliament. Now, in America, we saw under Trump
00:02:11.700
one that they didn't manage to do much, let's be quite frank. You know, there was a big wave of
00:02:16.580
optimism about what would happen. The reality is whether or not you think the 2020 election was
00:02:20.840
stolen. There was certainly, you know, a decline in support for Trump at that point, either way.
00:02:27.580
Come around the next time, they knew exactly what to do. They had the right people in place.
00:02:31.280
They weren't fooled into recruiting the same old people who would make sure that nothing happened.
00:02:37.960
And that brilliant day, I was fortunate enough to be in DC for the inauguration and to see,
00:02:44.620
you know, as it was happening live, him signing all of the new executive orders and throwing the
00:02:48.640
pens away. Wonderful theatre, but it was a deeper meaning, which was, we know exactly what we're doing
00:02:53.760
right now. Well, our equivalent to those executive orders is the vote in parliament. So first of all,
00:02:59.520
you have to have a majority that can pass that. Reform's good at that bit. They're going to do
00:03:04.600
that bit, right? We're so far ahead in the polls as long as the momentum sustains through to the
00:03:09.680
next general election. I don't think they'll have a problem on that front. Now, to address your second
00:03:14.320
question, where it gets more technical is that you have to have preparatory legislation drafted to
00:03:21.060
pass through parliament. If you've done that well, and you're able to get to the position where you
00:03:27.340
can elect permanent secretaries, civil servants, you know, whatever else we need to do with the
00:03:33.200
financial institutions as well, you don't have to worry too much about who your MPs are. You don't
00:03:39.660
have to worry too much about who's in the House of Lords. As long as you have the numbers and you
00:03:43.520
have a good whip managing the party or whip's office, you can get a lot done in British politics.
00:03:50.500
You don't need a team of 500 superheroes in capes as your MPs. What really needs to happen is that
00:03:57.520
you need to overhaul radically the administrative deep state, if you want to call it that. And by the
00:04:02.620
way, even from America, the conversations I have with our colleagues across the Atlantic, it's normally
00:04:08.640
you guys, the originals, you guys had the deep state long before we even existed, right? Look at what
00:04:14.720
happened with the Russia hoax document. Who do they go to, to get that prepared? A British spy,
00:04:20.840
right? Okay. We're the original malfactors, right? Okay. You know, we're the original deep state. And
00:04:27.940
the reason why there's been so much entrenched resistance to change since Tony Blair basically
00:04:33.720
butchered our constitution in 1997 is a lack of understanding in the fundamental sovereignty of
00:04:39.220
parliament. If reform, and I think they do now, I know they do, understands this very sophisticated
00:04:47.400
balancing act that you have to play out and understand where the power lies, which again,
00:04:52.940
I think they do. A lot can happen within the first hundred days. And I think really the reason why I say
00:05:01.300
that they know is because we've already had Trump on. We had Liz Truss. Yes. Everyone forgets that.
00:05:07.760
It's not like this hasn't already happened. And Liz Truss and Trump one are identical. Okay.
00:05:14.860
Constitutionally, there's a different electoral cycle. You can't kick the president out. The only
00:05:19.140
reason why she was ousted in 50 days, and it was four years for Trump is constitutional. Yes. You can
00:05:24.460
manage to do that here. But if you go in clear eyed, understanding exactly what needs to be done in
00:05:30.360
the first hundred days, when you have that base of power, because everyone knows after that point,
00:05:34.560
your support wanes. Yes. If you already have things prepared, like you said, on the HR front,
00:05:40.200
but most importantly, on the legislative front, that's where the real kicker is. You can do
00:05:45.360
whatever you want. Afuera, afuera, afuera. You can be Malay. You can be Trump. You can be whoever,
00:05:49.940
as long as you understand parliamentary sovereignty. And so one of the questions has been,
00:05:57.140
where are the policies, where are the bits of legislation that reform will want to pass in
00:06:04.100
this first hundred days? Can you update us on specifics? Can you update us on specific policies?
00:06:14.780
I don't know, agriculture, fisheries, local enforcement, strengthening local authorities?
00:06:22.180
Is the nitty gritty? Sure. Yeah. I mean, look, the best way to talk about this, I think,
00:06:29.600
is to reverse the question. It's not what do you want to add into the legislature? What do you need
00:06:34.380
to take away? Okay. Now, a lot of people would say, well, you need to undo all the Blairite legislation,
00:06:40.700
get rid of the Supreme Court, bring the law lords back into the House of Lords, start with the basics,
00:06:44.760
right? And that's fine. But that doesn't go far enough. You've got things that prevent you from
00:06:50.280
doing other things. So with the agriculture industry, the destruction of the milk board led
00:06:54.840
to milk prices going up. With planning, the Town and Country Planning Act destroyed the ability to
00:07:01.340
build things. There are all these pieces of ingrained legislation. Yes, we can talk all day
00:07:05.540
long about immigration and how that's happened and wokery and all this stuff. And that's all
00:07:09.980
important, but that's all post-1970 stuff, particularly post-1997 stuff. And of course,
00:07:16.660
there are pieces of legislation to look at on that. And that's a big, important issue, don't get me
00:07:20.180
wrong. But what about all the rest of it? How do we get this country flourishing again in a way that
00:07:27.600
attracts people to come back? Because our biggest problem is brain drain. Yes. No one wants to start
00:07:33.560
a company, let alone continue a company here. Most of my friends and clients in the investor class
00:07:40.620
around the world, a lot of them are British, but they're not living here. They're not working here.
00:07:45.260
They care about this country, but they don't want to be here unless they have to for a meeting,
00:07:50.160
right? Which is inevitable. How do you bring those people back? Well, you're right. Agricultural policy,
00:07:56.440
education policy. It's a big thing. If you want to raise a child in this country,
00:08:01.180
they're going to be indoctrinated or you're going to be able to see them flourish in the way you want
00:08:05.120
to see them flourish. I very often find that billionaires and taxi drivers are saying exactly
00:08:10.540
the same things about the state of this country and everyone else is caught in the middle.
00:08:13.780
All right. Yes. It's a fascinating phenomenon. If you go into a reform branch, a local branch,
00:08:21.140
I've spoken at local branches in different parts of the country, you will see on one side of the room,
00:08:26.920
the investor class, people who run businesses, people who are taking risks, maybe people who have
00:08:32.820
had a career and are retired. On the other side, you'll see nurses, you'll see taxi drivers,
00:08:37.780
you'll see police officers. And that's quite compelling because it basically means that both
00:08:45.080
So how do you solve that? Well, you get back to basics. That doesn't necessarily mean adding
00:08:49.580
legislation because that's exactly what Tony Blair did. That means getting rid of it.
00:08:58.900
I would call it a great restoration bill, but you know, you're trying to restore as to what it was
00:09:03.760
before that we had. Okay. Because we were competitive. Yes. We are the most overperforming
00:09:09.620
country in the world by a long shot. Right. You know, in every metric, we're not always the most
00:09:17.540
powerful, but we're always someone who's in the conversation. And there are certain sectors,
00:09:23.580
certain industries that we relied on to make that happen. Now it's probably our services sector more than
00:09:28.540
anything else. But in the past, it was steel. It was exports. It was trade all around the world.
00:09:35.560
It was our logistics, our military. All of these things are things we've got to resurrect. And to
00:09:42.260
do that, we've got to get rid of the amount of entrenched bureaucracy, the amount of red tape.
00:09:47.200
In some ways, I want us to move away. Yeah. Everyone hates the phrase Singapore on terms, right? Yes.
00:09:53.520
I'm going to introduce one that will rise the heckles of people even more. Okay.
00:09:58.540
Okay. I think we need Dubai on terms. Okay. Now, why do I say that? Not because I want the Middle
00:10:04.660
East to come to London. Right. It's already here. But what I do want to happen is this regulatory
00:10:11.300
sense of freedom that attracts the best in the world. Because let's face it, no one really wants
00:10:18.620
to live in Dubai. There's not that much there culturally. Yes. There's no green spaces. There's
00:10:24.020
no place. Yet, people go there. Even people with young families, my friends living in Dubai, why are
00:10:29.040
they there? Opportunity. Right. A lower crime rate. A lack of terrorism. These are all things we've got to
00:10:36.060
solve here. The guys who have already solved that are MBS and MBZ. Okay. Now, I'm not saying that we agree
00:10:44.000
with their worldview or that we're part of the East in any way. What I'm saying is that we already have
00:10:49.320
the canvas. We already have the green countryside. We already have the museums and the architecture
00:10:54.660
and Winter Wonderland and Hyde Park. People are still going to come to London no matter what.
00:10:59.640
If you can then unlock the second half of what they've done, stop regulating. Don't over-regulate.
00:11:05.240
Don't over-complicate. Don't over-tax. Build up your tech sector. The world is moving towards
00:11:10.920
tech. Focus on tech. These are all supposedly things that a lot of conservatives might sneer
00:11:16.220
at because they would say, well, it's, you know, we should go back to farming. All right.
00:11:21.280
Okay. But the world has moved on. So you either compete, preserve what you have, preserve the
00:11:26.540
countryside, scrap net zero, do all of those wonderful things, but build for the future and
00:11:33.780
thus preserve the past. Do you see a, uh, need to restore industrial jobs or to strengthen the
00:11:42.420
agricultural sector? Um, if only from a national security perspective, if, if, if you can't build
00:11:50.040
steel, if you can't, um, have a decent energy policy, if you can't build, uh, chips, then you're
00:11:59.140
not an independent power. Um, um, in the same way, if you can't feed yourself, you have a fundamental
00:12:07.540
security problem that imposes certain behaviors in order to secure your food supply chains, in order
00:12:14.720
to secure, um, things that you absolutely must have to survive in any conflict. Um, so do you see a need
00:12:23.780
for a cooperative relationship between the state and industrial sectors, a sort of industrial policy
00:12:31.140
to use a dirty word, um, or is it closer to a libertarian approach?
00:12:39.760
Well, we've already got a lot of what we need. We're just not allowed to use it.
00:12:44.640
So we already have tremendous oil supplies. We already have huge expenses of agricultural land
00:12:51.940
that are lying unused or being rewilded or having, uh, solar panels put on agricultural land,
00:12:58.220
which by the way, kills agricultural land for the next 10 years. It becomes unusable once you put
00:13:02.300
solar panels on and remove them. There are all these things happening, which if they weren't
00:13:07.600
happening, we would have the resources. This isn't a question of building out something new.
00:13:12.640
It's not even a question of going all the way backwards because we have technology that helps
00:13:16.500
us move forwards. It's unlocking it. So how do you unlock it? Well, first of all,
00:13:20.160
you've got to deregulate. Okay. And that's the most important thing. But then the second thing is
00:13:24.420
also to pull away from international pressure and focus on what you already have at home.
00:13:31.680
You said the point about us being, uh, you know, energy dependent, agricultural dependent,
00:13:38.740
we're also militarily dependent. There's a lot of things that we're dependent on. Our water systems
00:13:43.360
are owned by foreign national. Yes. Right. This is a huge problem because do they really care about
00:13:50.160
water in this country? No, no, they care about their bottom line. Right. Now, if you have a British
00:13:55.100
company that owns those, well, they could still be bad, but there's a lot more communal, uh, let's
00:14:03.540
call it communal spirit. I wouldn't even call it spirit. I would call it, um, analysis. It's very easy to
00:14:13.940
know if your competitor next door is better than you, but to know if your competitor in Japan is better
00:14:18.620
than your own domestic market is really difficult. So the process with reform, I think for a reform
00:14:24.840
government, you, in some ways you have to reclaim all this stuff first. You're going to have to
00:14:28.900
nationalize things again, not very popular with elements of the right, but after that, you've got
00:14:35.120
to retender to British companies and you've got to make sure that they are the ones ensuring quality
00:14:41.680
in these areas, be that steel, be that water, whatever it is. First of all, start at home.
00:14:48.760
This is what Trump tried to do with Detroit. Okay. You bring back manufacturing to America,
00:14:53.440
but you tender to American companies. First of all, you've got to seize control. Right. We've lost
00:14:58.460
control. So we need to seize control back and then we need to start building out from that point again.
00:15:03.800
And I think if you do that across all sectors, agriculture as well, why the hell are we still
00:15:10.300
following entrenched EU guidelines on farming? Why? We had Brexit. So why are we still doing that?
00:15:18.360
We're doing that because there's an international consensus that you don't break international
00:15:22.680
treaties. To hell with that. You need sovereignty. Unless you properly reclaim sovereignty, which is
00:15:29.280
exactly what Nigel's laid out, by the way, on deportation plans, which I'm sure we'll get into
00:15:34.140
later. Not only do you have to withdraw from the ECHR, you also have to withdraw from UN conventions.
00:15:41.700
Not only did Trump say we're going to open up industry again, he withdrew from the Paris climate
00:15:47.780
accord. Yes. You've got to get back and pull back. It's not isolationist. It's pragmatic. You can't be
00:15:54.500
reliant on the international community to support you during a war. Correct. The name of this
00:15:59.120
show is real politic, right? A dose of real politics. No one is your friend. No one is
00:16:04.020
your friend. You're the only player that you have to rely on. Yes. And so you've got to start with
00:16:10.120
Britain, but also at the same time, build out your industries like tech, like your financial
00:16:16.460
services, rebuild those industries. That's what will attract foreign interest. How do you rebuild
00:16:21.580
them? Deregulate. Okay. You've got to deregulate. Um, subsidies, uh, loans, a dedicated bank for
00:16:35.240
re-industrialization, a, um, investment, investment, private investment, private investment. Okay. If
00:16:42.480
you look at, uh, what companies want now, they want two things. They want access to data and they
00:16:49.100
want data centers. Right. Okay. All your big multinationals are investing in data centers.
00:16:54.980
Okay. How many jobs do these create? Well, this is a secondary question, right? Because we're still
00:16:59.640
talking about the city. Right. You mentioned industrialization. There's no AI that can go and
00:17:05.120
take a tractor out yet. There's no AI that can go picking in the fields. There are a lot of very neat
00:17:11.340
fixes to labor shortage and labor supply that just haven't been tried. I'll give you an example. So
00:17:18.700
if we, if we go to the other end of the spectrum, when we need more workers for seasonal labor,
00:17:24.160
we have to advertise to the whole world and see who responds. It is a really simple solution.
00:17:28.960
If you have a treaty with Australia, Canada, New Zealand, perhaps the US and the UK, in which you
00:17:35.680
have an unlimited movement for seasonal workers, Kanzuk plus the US, you've solved your issue.
00:17:44.660
Everyone speaks English. Everyone moves freely between the countries. You can do exchange programs
00:17:49.560
with students between those countries. You have a powerful trading block because we've gone out
00:17:54.340
with this European mindset and we have to make a deal through the EU and only work with our
00:18:00.240
carefully vetted and prepared partners around the world. We're not allowed to just go and do stuff.
00:18:06.380
If we did that, it would solve so many issues overnight. And you can start to just take that
00:18:10.760
all the way through the supply chain. You're saying, do we need more job creation? Yes.
00:18:14.420
But also there's jobs that have to be filled. I mean, farmers are talking about not getting enough
00:18:19.240
seasonal labor because of Brexit. So what? Find other people who already speak English to come
00:18:24.860
into the country. We can do that as an exchange program. There's so many neat solutions. If you
00:18:31.340
want more jobs, open up the steel factories. AI isn't going in with a welding suit.
00:18:39.520
Well, that's where you've got to get the state to take back control of what is a failed industry.
00:18:43.900
Okay. And that's why nationalization is part of this.
00:18:46.400
That's not nationalization long term because we know the state eventually
00:18:49.700
gets things wrong. But it has to step in at some point and say, this isn't working.
00:18:56.820
So what you're describing here is a sort of real economic pragmatism
00:19:02.200
that looks at a case-by-case basis that has a bit of a
00:19:09.300
element that requires re-nationalization of industries
00:19:14.980
to put them back in British hands and in the hands of British capital, with the idea
00:19:25.600
Okay. With the idea being that the oligarchy must act in the national interest.
00:19:31.780
Well, the oligarchy will not exist unless it acts in the national interest. It will be
00:19:37.400
The oligarchy can't survive. If you want to talk about the different layers, the state
00:19:42.360
and the oligarchy have fundamentally fallen out. I think this is something people don't
00:19:45.880
understand. In a traditional structure, you have competing oligarchies trying to pull the
00:19:53.140
government in their direction. Now, in this new framework of globalization, you have
00:19:59.780
supranational, not really oligarchs, collectives pulling against each other, okay? And for their
00:20:06.460
own vested interests, which aren't always financial.
00:20:10.500
And so the people who are purely focused on finance are the ones, A, leaving. But also,
00:20:17.160
if you had a private conversation, eight out of ten will agree with Nigel Farage, will agree
00:20:22.160
with what Liz Truss did. Maybe not publicly, because they can't be political for whatever reason.
00:20:27.500
They own a corporation. But if you had a one-to-one conversation, I don't see that they would
00:20:32.020
disagree with much. So it's not really the oligarchy. The oligarchy are going to be re-invited
00:20:38.000
by the state to join the equation, if anything. We've got to move away from this idea that they're
00:20:43.220
still pulling strings. They're all moving out. I mean, if inheritance tax and wealth tax
00:20:50.040
are in this week's budget, even more of them are going to go. There's already hardly any left.
00:20:55.840
But I know, I can hear these conversations happening around me all the time.
00:21:00.500
They've already got places prepared. Most of them are already somewhere and thinking,
00:21:06.920
Why do they need to? They can go to Dubai. If they want to experience the English countryside,
00:21:11.480
they can go to New England. They can move around. These guys have opportunities everywhere.
00:21:19.360
Well, yeah, there is a very legitimate question here about how do you get the
00:21:26.480
investment class interested in Britain, because if you speak to them, they will tell you that
00:21:33.180
If you enjoyed this piece of premium content from the Lotus Eaters,