PREVIEW: Realpolitik #9 | The UK Is Unrecognisable with Peter McCormack
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
174.6279
Summary
In this episode of RealPolitik, I chat with Peter McCormack about his views on British politics and the state of the country. Peter is a father, a business owner and a concerned voter, and has a lot of experience in the world of politics.
Transcript
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Hello, and welcome to another episode of RealPolitik.
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and secondly, because I really wanted to get his views
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He's been talking to a lot of extremely interesting people,
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and I think that he's got a lot of interesting ideas
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I'm sitting here because of the first interview I did with you.
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It led to a chain of events that ended up with me
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joining the Lotus Eaters and doing this show with them,
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and this was largely because of me meeting you,
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Well, actually, it came from a very good tweet.
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who I'm trying to pray for regularly these days.
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but when you've set up your own entire politics
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I don't usually go this side of the conversation.
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and try and understand what's happening in the world.
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and I am very concerned about the state of our country
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But very concerned about the state of our country,
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from the policies that have come from successive governments now,
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I'm seeing the economic and moral decline of our country.
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They don't necessarily come from an intellectual background,
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Look, I found that opinions that come from experience
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are often better than opinions that come from books.
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because that's probably going to be like a basis
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for some of the things we're going to talk about today.
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the terrible representation we have in government.
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I wouldn't offer a job in any business I operate.
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and just a collapsing moral foundation in this country.
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and I made that for the last seven and a half years in America.
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and go and make a bunch of shows and come back.
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And so, I would kind of be flying in and out of Bedford
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and I didn't spend too much time in the town center
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But I bought a football club three and a half years ago
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with the goal of trying to get a team into the football league.
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and I gradually got involved in the local economics of Bedford.
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I became very alarmed at the combination of factors,
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but generally the economic and moral collapse of the town.
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I mean, we have a significant problem of addiction in the town center.
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We have crackheads roaming the streets of Bedford,
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in between fixes, roaming through the streets of the town
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At the top of our high street, there's a green area.
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And so we have this range of issues in the town
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which has led to people not coming into the town.
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in place where if people aren't coming into town,
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and said if they do not start enforcing the law
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Ensuring that the rule of law was being obeyed.
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And look, this isn't that I don't have sympathy
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I don't think we can have this suicidal empathy.
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Because it becomes like a gangrene of the town.
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And then again, I've not seen the police since.
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Businesses could refuse to pay their business rates.
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for enforcement of the law that's not happening?
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So it's an additional tax to operate a premises.
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it's because the economics of them is different.
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well, the council are not enforcing the PSP orders
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As such, Bedford, like towns up and down the UK,
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When I tweeted out my letter in the local paper,
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And this seems to be a political choice by the police.
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I mean, we have a massive increase in knife and gun crime.
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Organized crime, county lines, abusive families, social issues.
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I'm in no doubt that the police are absolutely stretched.
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they think open drug dealing and smoking of crack
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and shoplifting as minor compared to some of the other issues
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And maybe they are right, but at the same time,
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that is causing the terminal decline of the town.
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I mean, I think if you look at the number of crimes that are solved,
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you see that the figures are absolutely atrocious.
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And I think you see that some police forces can't solve something like 70% of burglaries,
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How much, you know, what is the size of the police force?
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How much time are they wasted in bureaucracy and red tape and filling in forms?
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All I know is I pay a tax for them to serve my business
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and provide policing that protects my business,
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When you get into how would they deal with this,
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Is throwing somebody who is a drug addict into prison
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for their first shoplifting offense a sensible idea?
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But I certainly think somebody who's been arrested 30 times or 50 times,
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I know the stats are, I wish I had a couple of the stats here,
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but I know the stats are that a very high number of the antisocial crimes
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are committed by a very small sense of the population.
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But, you know, my job is to operate a cafe to be profitable.
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I pay my, you know, this is a division of responsibilities.
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So my answer is to consider a private security option in the town.
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And that is a common thing that's happening now.
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Up and down the country, businesses or residents of certain neighborhoods
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are getting together and employing private security to protect them
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No, it's happening across the board, and I think there's a bigger theme
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of the state refusing to do a lot of its basic duties,
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from border enforcement to policing to even, you know,
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obviously everybody knows that the NHS is collapsing.
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And you see these governments that have shared the same ideology.
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do you feel that there is real intellectual ideological diversity in British politics?
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I don't feel there is much of a difference now between the Conservative Party and the Labour Party.
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I have zero interest in anything they have to say.
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I've listened to their ideas regarding economics and diversity, and I just write them off.
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I don't have very much of an interest in the Liberal Democrats.
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I think that's a party for the Islington elite.
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So if you look at what's left between Labour and Conservatives,
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the Conservative Party over the last two decades have drifted to the centre,
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And if you look at the Labour Party, in only eight months or nine months they've been in power,
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they've tried to be a left-wing party as much as the current Labour Party is a left-wing party,
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So there's this kind of convergence between them, and it's serving little purpose.
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It's serving little benefit to the voters of this country.
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The only option that seems to have come to the table, which is a viable alternative, is the Reform Party.
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But even with reform, I fear that they either cannot make the changes that are required
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or that they are still going to be adopting a lot of left-wing economic ideas.
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The signal coming from the party recently has been to continue to support a welfare state.
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They are proposing policies which oppose some of the policies which Labour have put in place
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They're now opposing that, which obviously then becomes a risk.
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What I don't think we really have is a true, very strong, conservative, libertarian party,
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a party that really understands why we need small government, why we need free markets,
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why we should trust the decentralized idea of the market.
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I don't think that exists in mainstream politics at the moment.
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And that, to me, is quite depressing, really, because it just means we are going to continue
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on this path of big state, surveillance state, high taxation, high borrowing, high inflation,
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low-growth, stagnant economy, which is leading to this economic and moral collapse of our country.
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I mean, look, there's certain signals that I see that our country is losing discipline.
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It's all about police incidents in London, a crime incidents in London.
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But almost every day now, you will see somebody go into a Tesco's or a Gregg's or a Prêt-a-Manger
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with a bag, with a shopping bag, and they'll just fill it with stuff and walk out.
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And you can see the staff there, and you can see the security there.
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And I don't know if they're instructed not to do anything, but the people going in and
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stealing are doing so because they know there will be no repercussions, or they don't care
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Now, you go into a local Tesco's and you feel like you're going into what the banks used
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to do in case there was somebody coming to rob the bank.
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We have these big kind of plastic shields between the staff and the customers.
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I mean, that's not the local grocer that we know from growing up where you go and you
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It's this kind of barrier between you and them.
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Everything is tagged or locked behind cabinets.
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If you take a stake off the shelf, it sounds an alarm in the Sainsbury's.
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That is the same acceptance that we have with the open drug dealing and drug taking.
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And so I think it's this kind of weird acceptance of a lack of discipline around the rules,
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you know, the rules and order that create a function in society.
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But I also blame it on the kind of economic failure of this country in that the larger
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the state grows, the more it impoverishes people.
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The more it impoverishes people, the more desperate people get.
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And like I say, if you're below the poverty line and you cannot afford to make ends meet,
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Or if you've fallen between the cracks of society and you've lost your home and you've
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ended up on the streets and ended up with an addiction issue, what have you got to lose
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Interestingly, I found out there's this whole secondary economy that now exists on Facebook.
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Because if you go and look at the things people are stealing, yes, they might be stealing alcohol,
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but they're also stealing large chocolate bars.
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There's this secondary marketplace on Facebook where the shoplifters are going to resell the
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items they've stolen in order to fund their addiction.
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And so we could pick any subject for us, but it feels like in every direction, everything
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we measure about a functioning, ordered, prosperous society, everything, every measure is going
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