PREVIEW： The Future of Britain ｜ Interview with Harrison Pitt
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Summary
In this episode, I chat with Harrison Pitt from the New Culture Forum and the European Conservative Party about the state of British politics at the moment. We talk about the grooming scandal in Rotherham, the Netflix documentary 'Adolescence' and the lack of leadership in British politics.
Transcript
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Hi, folks. Thanks for joining me. I have the pleasure and privilege of sitting down and
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having a chat with Harrison Pitt from New Culture Forum, European Conservative, and
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lots of other things that you do. Thanks so much for being here.
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And taking the time to sit down and have a little chat. So I thought we would just talk
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about the state of Britain and British politics, right? Because at the moment, there's a strange
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tendency, and I don't know whether you've seen this, for government by Netflix special.
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And this, of course, was evident with the Netflix documentary that Keir Starmer mistakenly
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called this fictional program Adolescence, which became something of a moral panic amongst
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our ruling class. But also, Channel 4 recently put out a documentary about the grooming gangs,
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and I saw Sarah Champion retweeting this today, the Rotherham Labour MP, who was honestly one
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of the first people to start speaking out solidly about this, so to her credit, saying that
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we need proper investigations or inquiries or something done about the grooming gangs.
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But this kind of is a bit of an issue, isn't it? Because, I mean, one, we know everything
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that happened. We've had lots of inquiries. We know why it was done. We know who it was
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done to. We know the tremendously awful results that have occurred from it and the fact that
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it's still going on today. So I'm not even sure what an inquiry or investigation or whatever
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it is they want would actually accomplish. But I'm also worried about the fact that our
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MPs are so dim that generally this seems to be Britain is governed by whatever the most
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compelling piece of TV they've watched is. What do you think about this?
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Well, it's a classic textbook case of elites who already know what they want to achieve
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in politics and already know the kind of policies that they want to promote, trying to manufacture
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consent for them, and also trying to neutralise a populace that is feeling increasingly seized
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by righteous indignation because of what has been happening to the British people over the
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last 30 to 40 years. Certainly since 1997, despite endless imported horrors from endemic
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knife crime, industrial rape gangs you mentioned, of course, Islamist intimidation in local and
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national politics, even terrorist incidents. There is always this need to try and maintain
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the ragged tapestry of multiculturalism as best they can. And therefore, at best, to imply that
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yes, we face these imported challenges, but we also face some horrible indigenous challenges that also
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need to be kept under wraps. And gosh, we need to make sure that you have this kind of phantom threat
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of the far right. So there's this sort of false pursuit of balance to try and make out that the problem
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isn't really what the problem is. And that's the best version of it. And the worst is to engage
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in deliberate falsifying propaganda that effectively invents crimes where they do not exist.
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And so in the case of adolescence, you actually watched it. I've not watched it. And so you actually
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had quite an interesting take on it I saw on the podcast, which was quite meta. And I expect
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beyond the intentions of the actual creators, I should expect. Namely that it is a very, in many ways,
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quite a powerful artistic testament to the loss of manliness in our societies, I suppose
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And the current state of affairs as well, because since the sort of institution of the, I hate
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to just crassly call it the Blairite paradigm, but that's really what it is. The loss of authority
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in the institutions themselves as well. And so generally, the quality of everything represented
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in adolescence is very poor. Nobody likes the place they're in. Nobody's going to do
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their jobs. And it's a cascading series of failures on every single level.
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Yes. Well, I just think that this might have worked. So this attempt to manufacture consent
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for policies that have, well, it's not even manufacture consent. You're trying to retroactively
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justify policies that have already been pursued, and potentially manufacture consent for more policies,
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in particular online censorship, to try and tame British public opinion. The problem today,
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of course, is that this isn't true of all generations, but particularly of my generation,
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the Zoomers, and even to some extent of millennials, people opt into their own sort of media experiences
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these days. We're not living in the age where there are just, say, five TV channels and everyone's
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watching the same thing, and can therefore be supplied with a uniform media diet. We do to some extent
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choose our own media diet. And so it isn't noticeable in a way that they did choose to put this on
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Netflix rather than on something like Channel 4, because Netflix is a testament, is in fact one of
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those companies that testifies to the way in which our media ecosystem has been disrupted. So maybe that
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was a clever move on their part. But I also think that people in Britain, they're not hugely
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knowledgeable about the exact situation in which we find ourselves. So for example, we mentioned this on the
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podcast today, a good chunk, the vast majority of British people think that net immigration, or the median
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British voter, thinks that net immigration is running at about 70,000 a year, when in fact, it's north of a million.
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And so, but, so they're not very well informed about the nuts and bolts and the details, and nor should they be.
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And you're probably a little bit mental if you take too obsessive an interest in, in what's going on in
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day-to-day politics. But they do have very strong intuitions. And they are, they are aware that whenever
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they do read about a stabbing, and when, or whenever they do read about a terrorist attack, or whenever
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they do read about, or see an instance online of, you know, third world behavior on the streets of
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Britain, when they see, or what they see in their daily lives, or when they see Birmingham filled to
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the rafters with, with rubbish, that they know what the true sources of social dysfunction in our
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society are. And it's not, you know, like, you know, innocent looking 13 year old white boys who
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are causing these problems. And so the attempt to try to try and race swap, I don't think is going to
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be successful. And I will make one more point as well. I forget whether it was juvenile or Cicero,
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who said that if you want a docile population, give them bread and circuses. I think it might have been
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juvenile, actually. And this is a very clever way in which you can, rulers who are badly motivated,
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can sap the people over whom they're ruling of the kind of civic virtue that would give them the
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power to resist and to say, no, we're not going to tolerate that. It makes sense for a tyrant or
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for a tyrannical regime to want their people to be as domesticated as possible. And to some extent,
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Netflix already performs this function, as does, I would argue, pornography and all the
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video games and Deliveroo. And it's not to attack those things necessarily, because I'm no
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certain person in this room who's very keen on video games.
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I'm not, but it doesn't seem to have domesticated you.
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No, Joe Rogan got in a lot of trouble a couple of years back by saying, well, video games are kind
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of a waste of time. It's like, yeah, they're entertainment, you know, they're relaxation.
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Yeah, well, you know, I like video games as much as anyone else, but like, it's true they're not productive.
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It is. Yes, indeed. And I think our elite political class is Mr. Trick here. And rather,
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as I did with the Gamergate thing, it makes more sense given their long-term goals, which are very
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unjust. But basically, we're talking about the successful end of replacement migration being
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achieved. If you're trying to do that, it makes sense to keep people as docile and as domesticated
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as possible. And if you're then invading the very things that do that, like Netflix or gaming,
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with your own very brazen political messaging, it's going to have exactly the reverse effect.
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It's going to radicalize them, which I think is a good thing.
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Which is why we're here now. And certainly in your case, in your origins with the Gamergate.
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But I'm unaware of anyone, apart from people who already agree with the objectives of the regime,
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who sees adolescents as anything but a very brazen case of regime propaganda. And so,
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if anything, it's more likely to wake people up than it is to send them further to sleep,
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which you would imagine should be their plan. So, I think they've missed a trick there.
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So, what's interesting is there was a natural reaction to adolescence before anyone had even
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actually seen it. When it was announced, people understood, oh, it's a white boy who's at Stabberism.
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And so you're exactly correct. We learned the other day that there was 150 stabbings a day in Britain,
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which I just was not the case when I was young. When I was your age, this just didn't happen.
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But what I find interesting is you say, oh, this is a conscious effort by the regime,
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a narrative control and about controlling people's thoughts. You know what? I have trouble believing it.
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I think they might actually be captured by their own emotions, because I think I agree completely
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with your characterization that the Blairite Multiculti Internationalist project is fraying at the edges.
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It's fraying in the middle. The very center of it is coming apart. And I think that the people
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in parliament at the moment are overwhelmingly committed to the paradigm. They are either
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themselves DEI hires. They were on short lists in both Conservative and Labour, and have worked their
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way up through the system by parroting the system's own sayings and phrases and morality. And so I think
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the fact that it's clear that there's something else coming out from under it is frightening to them.
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And I also think they're a bit thick. I can't help but notice that, I mean,
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with Jacob Rees-Mogg gone, it's hard to think of a particularly bright politician.
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Even Nigel Farage is smart enough, but I don't think he's conceptually advanced enough to establish
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this kind of meta-understanding of the current state of the country, right? I think he's still
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very much trapped in the institutions are failing, quality of life is going down, therefore we just
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need to improve the institutions to restore the quality of life. It's like, no, there's something
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much broader going on here. And we need to be able to really tangle with this. And I just don't
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think our politicians have got that kind of capacity. And so I think that actually when
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something like adolescence is thrown at their feet, I think a lot of them are kind of genuinely
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taken in by it, genuinely taken, oh, here's, here's a way we can get the point across that
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we've got to stop young boys from watching Andrew Tate or else, or else the entire thing goes down.
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It's like, look, Andrew Tate isn't the, the, the, the, the hinge upon which the entire multicultural
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project revolves. Actually, there are way worse problems than Andrew Tate. Uh, and so I, I think
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it's actually kind of a desperation that they're latching onto this thing. And because I think
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they can feel the sand slowly slipping through there. Yes. I expect that a great many of them
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are taken in by the propaganda more than they are manufacturing their own propaganda, more than they
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see themselves as cynically manufacturing it. And I think that they're as, as in most cases,
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most processes that go on in the world, there's very rarely a kind of single guiding intelligence.
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It, these sorts, which isn't to say that conspiracies don't happen. When people say you, you, you're
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conspiracy mongering, this is a very foolish way of thinking. Yeah. Yeah. There's a foolish way of,
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foolish way of thinking. I mean, Julius Caesar was killed by a conspiracy. So conspiracies do exist.
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Um, why, why has Fauci been pardoned retroactively back 2014? Sorry, I don't believe they don't exist.
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And this sort of, yeah, that's, that's, that's exactly the point. Um, but even when they do exist,
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often they are the result of a congruence of interests coming together, not, and not every
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single person involved necessarily has the same motivation. So I, or even knows that there's a
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conspiracy. So I, I suspect there are quite, quite a lot of people, maybe even the creators themselves,
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but certainly I would imagine the, the actors who are unlikely to be very bright, uh,
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who are not likely to be very bright in adolescence. And indeed the politicians who've been
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taken in by it and have been like having these sorts of like theatrical seminars in Whitehall about
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Nadia Whitten stands up and pines on it. It's like, okay.
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Exactly. And, and you know, people, I don't much care if it can be bad or not, but people
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trying to rake her over the coals for not having watched it, which is just absurd. And frankly,
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I think she's handled herself very well when she's been, when she's been pressed on, on those sorts
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of things, but yes, it will be a congruence of interest. But I, I do suspect that, and I can't
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prove this, but there must've been people involved some way along the line in the process who are well
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aware of what crime rates in Britain really are like. And it, and, and who are well aware of what,
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like disaggregating crime according to ethnicity and race and religion will yield in terms of
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statistical demographic results who nevertheless decided that it would be more politically correct.
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And it would be to, to, to basically pin many of these imported problems on innocent
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young members of the host population, like people like me, like people like my, my, my younger brothers.
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I think it is a, I think it is like a grotesque instance of race swapping. And I think that some,
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many of the people involved would have known exactly what they were doing, even if Nadia Whitten
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See, I, I'm genuinely worried at this point that, and loath as I am to
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rake my, uh, hoist myself in my own petard here. But I mean, the, did you watch Chernobyl?
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Right. So in that they do a very, they do a very good job of representing the kind of communist mindset
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of it's, it's not even that they are, they know something's wrong, but they don't necessarily
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know the exact details of what's wrong. Uh, but because for political reasons and reasons of
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ideology, um, they don't look into it all that hard. Right. And so when, when it finally gets
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to the point where the guy's like, oh, look, the nuclear power plants explode and there's graphite
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on the roof. The other guy says, and there's no graphite on the roof because logically,
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according to the ideology, there's not, uh, I'm not sure that our politically correct establishment
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have looked sufficiently at the statistics. Uh, and the, the people involved in creating
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adolescence, I'm not sure they do know. And it's, it's not that, I mean, I think to them,
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this is a kind of part of their mind that they have to kill off say, well, no, that would be far
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right. So I, I can't look into that, but you know, I mean, I think they'll just look at the aggregated
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statistics and say, knife crimes, 150 a day. Well, I'm not going to break that down by a testy.
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Uh, and so for them it might, and I'm not saying this is true. I, like I said, I can't prove this
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either, but I, I genuinely worry that we're being guided by people who are too afraid to look at the
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details, uh, and are genuinely not all that bright and are ideologically captured. And so this, this is
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a real concern I have. I mean, I, like I said, I don't know if it's true or not, but.
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Well, yes, I think that, um, it's hard to think of a time in, uh, in British history where
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the caliber of MP has been as low as I would argue it is today. Like many of them are just
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pretty like, like naked ethnocentric tribalists. Like we've got, we've got at least four of those
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people. And that's the best of them. And that's the best. Oh, and not for us, by the way.
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Not for us. That goes without saying. We've got the thickies.
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Yes. And even the other day, I, again, I'm, you and I both slightly, well, quite considerably,
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considerably disappointed in the way that Faraj has been operating lately. But leaving that aside,
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when he was speaking, um, in parliament on Wednesday, which is to say yesterday,
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we're filming this on Thursday and, and pointing out how many of the people coming in on small boats
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and, and, you know, being given bed and board at taxpayers expense and often loitering outside
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playgrounds and loitering outside schools and all this sort of thing come from alien cultures.
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That's the word that Faraj used. All of a sudden, I think they were Lib Dems or maybe Greens on the,
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on the bench just behind him, which is like, just looked absolutely horrified that he would,
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that he would point out what seems to me to be the blindingly obvious. And so you're,
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you're, they must be from alien cultures. Otherwise how are they illegal?
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I mean, alien just descends from the Latin word for other.
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Exactly. How could they not be alien to our culture? They're not the British refugees.
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Yes, exactly. So it's, it's absurd. And you're right. It's not that they,
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like we're talking, what we're talking about here, we're talking about, um,
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we're talking about the difference between people who use ideological projects as a pretext for what
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they want to do, which is more cynical and the difference between them and true believers.
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Yeah. And it's very difficult to know. Like we only really know from, we can, we can try and
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infer from people's actions, of course. So for example, let me see if I can think of an example
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of this. Okay. I would argue that someone like, um, Owen Jones is in large part, like a genuine
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true believer in the, in the whole sort of like woke utopian drive. Jeremy Corbyn.
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I think Corbyn as well. I think he's obviously a true believer. Clearly. And so here, so for those people,
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their opt in to this ideology is having read the requisite thinkers. It is maybe not on Corbyn's
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case, but in Jones's case, having read the requisite thinkers, um, really believing it,
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that this is what justice in the real world looks like. And I think they're wrong about all this.
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And it may be true that they're partly driven to it by unhappiness in their own personal life as well.
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But leaving that aside, just like engaging with the arguments themselves and like what
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has driven them to that position. It is genuinely a sort of disinterested moral theory
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about how the world should be. And those, those are your true believers. And those are the people
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who are going to be ideologically blinkered when it comes to noticing, uh, facts that, that, um,
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count against their ideological presupposition. So here we're talking about the kind of people who,
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when I would, if I were to say, well, why don't you disaggregate that data according to ethnicity,
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they wouldn't even say, oh, I've done it. And I've come to this conclusion. They'd say,
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what a horrifying thought that we should even do that. And they may even say, well, this very
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epistemic, this epistemic tool is itself tainted by white supremacy. That is the argument that many
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of them do make. If they knew what the word epistemic meant.
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Which they don't. They would absolutely say that.
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They would cite thinkers who do know what the word epistemic means in order to make the claim
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that there is something illicit about even taking an interest in this sort of, in this sort of data.
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So those are your true believers. And so these are people who are ideologically blinkered,
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and they obviously have varying degrees of intelligence, but they, there is that, sorry, morally,
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morally disinterested commitment to a certain worldview. I think other people are,
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like, and a good example here would be someone maybe like Humza Yusuf. Like,
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we know for a fact that Humza Yusuf isn't against.
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And Sadiq Khan, probably true. We know for a fact, certainly in Humza Yusuf's case,
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this is not a man who's against, say, blood and soil, ethnic nationalism in principle.
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Very publicly in favor of it in Pakistan. When he went there, he even said,
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I speak to you as a son of the soil of Pakistan, which is the sort of thing which,
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if an actual Celtic Scotsman said about Scotland, Humza Yusuf would probably-
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Declare him white, and probably try and throw him into prison.
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So, and obviously he's not first minister anymore, but, so in other words, I think that
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Owen Jones's opt-in to what we might call race communism is, to some extent, morally sincere,
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and driven by disinterested moral belief. Whereas I think someone like,
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the more tribalistic minorities in parliament, they just see this as a very convenient way to further
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certain ethnic objectives, which are actually not morally disinterested whatsoever, but they're
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actually very ethnically partial. So I think that Jones is, to some extent, a universalist about
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the importance of the ideology, whereas other people just see it as a tool to achieve very
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particularist ends. And sometimes those ends will be, like, the furtherance of ethnic ends.
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And maybe in other cases, it will just be the desire to acquire more and more power.
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And it might have nothing to do with ethnicity.
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The leader of the Scottish Labour Party just came out and said this the other day.
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We will have more Pakistanis in charge. We are going to gain power in this country.
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And it's like, oh, I didn't, I didn't realize that was on the table.
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I thought that we were a disinterested moral universalist.
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But the, and the thing that worries me about what you're saying is, I think you're correct, right?
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I think that is correct. And I, the thing that worries me is that the number of
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cynical Machiavellian agents in the British Parliament who are native British is very low,
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I think. Because I think the system has self-selected for Owen Jones-style true believers
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in the Blairite project. And I think that's why Tony Blair himself, the arch Machiavellian operator,
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is coming out and essentially reining in the excesses of the Labour Party. Because he's like,
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what, what are you fools doing? Didn't, don't you know the plan? You're going to ruin everything.
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And I think that's one of his main and their main complaints about the Conservative Party.
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Look, Boris, I don't think he's actually that Machiavellian. I think he's a moron. Well,
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Yeah. He, I think he believes that he is a lib, right? He's fundamentally a lib. And I think he's
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got the dreamy lib opinion that actually all of this can just work. And so the Conservatives,
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is when they're just like ratcheting up the immigration. I don't, I think that Tony Blair's
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objection is that they're going to cause the system to crash. They're going to ruin the
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Blairite project by making it awful. They're going to bring it into disrepute.
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Yes. That's, yes. Maybe that is what he thinks. And I genuinely think that's why he's interceding
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with Keir Starmer right now. Because I think Starmer himself is a true believer. He's,
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there's plenty of him explaining his philosophy and humorous. I mean, like before he was the Prime
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Minister, Keir Starmer would go to places like Jamaica and intercede on behalf of child murderers
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to get them off the death penalty for free. He would do this pro bono. It's like,
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you have to be a true believer. Yeah. If you would like to see the full version of
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