The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1309

00:00:00.000 Hello folks, welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Teasers for Wednesday the 3rd of December 2025.

00:00:04.060 I'm John Bahari and Josh. Hello. And today we're going to be talking about how we're living in the

00:00:08.080 long shadow of the British Empire as we are about on the precipice of abolishing trial by jury.

00:00:14.080 Not something I thought I'd ever actually say. I mean, who would have predicted it? It wasn't in

00:00:18.660 the Labour Manifesto and I thought it was, I thought it'd be worth us having actually a deep

00:00:24.120 dive into this. It'd be quite a circuitous route that we go back through the events that have led

00:00:30.460 us to this point. But frankly, it explodes a bunch of the Liberal myths if you actually just trace it

00:00:36.200 in a linear fashion as to what has happened and what the people now in charge of our country say

00:00:43.240 and do. Well, I mean, if you're going to say Liberal, this is all a function of managerialism.

00:00:49.620 And for managerialism, efficiency, as Jacques Ellul would put it, technique, the idea of putting

00:00:56.920 efficiency as the sole god to worship and aim towards and strive towards. Liberalism over top

00:01:03.420 of managerialism is basically just a thin veneer. It doesn't really mean anything.

00:01:08.920 Yes. And I mean, they're essentially one in the same when it comes to their worldview.

00:01:16.740 They view just, and the British Empire is just as guilty of this as anyone else, of viewing

00:01:22.100 human beings, all empires operate in the same way, as just numbers, numbers on spreadsheets.

00:01:27.280 For example, the reason that there are loads of Bangladeshis in Burma is because at the end

00:01:33.660 of the 19th century, we were like, okay, we need plantation workers. So we just imported

00:01:37.900 something like 300,000 Bangladeshis into Burma. And now they're called the Rohingya. And the

00:01:43.760 Burmese are like, they keep committing acts of terror for some reason. It's because, of

00:01:48.620 course, they have a different religion. And so the British Empire just is guilty. I mean,

00:01:53.080 this is why we have so many Indians in Africa that then came back to Britain after decolonization,

00:01:58.080 which we'll go through all this in a minute. But the point is, we are living in the long

00:02:01.960 shadow of the British Empire, and it's costing us our liberty now. And so the world has changed.

00:02:06.580 Everything has changed, in fact. And we are still using the same sort of governing software

00:02:13.000 that was literally brought in and implemented in this country during the Empire. And so we

00:02:21.320 need to basically update the way that we look at the rest of the world, because we haven't.

00:02:26.200 And now we are kind of being cursed by it. So I guess we'll begin. This is the British Empire

00:02:31.600 in 1948. Pretty bloody expansive, isn't it? We were marvelling at this before we went

00:02:38.520 on air. It is amazing that our tiny little island managed to control all of this. Yeah,

00:02:45.040 and we're certainly paying the price for that now, just out of my eye. But yeah, so this

00:02:49.600 is what Britain looked like at the close of World War II. And so you have, after the close

00:02:57.740 World War II, the period of decolonization. And it just begins really quite quickly with

00:03:02.500 India and Pakistan becoming independent in 1947. The end of the British Raj, the partition

00:03:07.040 of India and Pakistan is created. They kill a million people in the process, and blame

00:03:12.160 us for it, somehow.

00:03:13.700 Typical, really.

00:03:14.540 Yeah. Then you get the independence of Sri Lanka at the same time. 1948, Burma becomes independent,

00:03:20.900 Israel is established, ending the British mandate of Palestine. Ireland, in 1949, formally leaves

00:03:26.740 the Commonwealth. You've got the Irish Free State. In the 1950s, Africa and Asian decolonization

00:03:32.660 begins. You get the Sudanese independence. We have the Suez Crisis in 1956, in the same

00:03:39.120 year, which is the point that shows that Britain is no longer a world empire and can't act as

00:03:44.840 a global imperial power. In 1957, Ghana becomes the first independent sub-Saharan African nation.

00:03:51.240 Then this is the sort of African independence wave that begins. In 1957, again, you get

00:03:56.540 Malaysia gains independence. Then in 1960, it's known as the Year of Africa, 17 African countries

00:04:04.420 gain their independence. Not just from Britain, by the way. There are also, of course, French

00:04:08.480 and German ones. Well, probably not German ones at this point. But there are French ones

00:04:12.400 as well, and probably other ones. You get from us, though, Nigeria gains independence in

00:04:18.060 1960. Sierra Leone gains independence in 1961. Uganda, 1962. Although Uganda, I don't think

00:04:25.360 it was ever actually a colony. I think it was a protectorate. 1963, Kenya, after the Maumau

00:04:30.580 rebellion. 64 is Malawi and Zambia. And then in the 1960s and 70s, you get 65 is Rhodesia,

00:04:40.120 declares its illegal independence because of based Ian Smith. He's like, I'm not going

00:04:44.800 to become a commie, mate. Unfortunately, they lost that because we sided against them. We

00:04:49.320 recognised their independence in 1980, incidentally. In 1966, Barbados gained independence. Then in

00:04:55.960 1968, Mauritius. In 70 to 74, the Caribbean nations gained independence. Fiji, Bahamas,

00:05:01.620 Granada, things like that. And then in 1973, you get Britain's presence in most of the east

00:05:07.420 of Suez territories end, withdraw from the Persian Gulf. In the 1980s and 1990s are the final major

00:05:13.900 decolonisation steps, so Zimbabwe gains full independence. In 1981, Belize is independent.

00:05:20.120 That's a tiny nation somewhere in, like, Americas. St. Kitts and Nevis independence. Namibia gains

00:05:27.580 independence from South African rule. And capped at the very end with the British handing Hong Kong

00:05:33.560 over to China. We still do control some, like, remote islands in various oceans miles away from

00:05:41.000 anywhere, but basically that is the end of the British Empire. Now, this, I think, is an important

00:05:47.620 thing to remember, because in 1948, we decided to pass the British Nationality Act. Now, the British

00:05:54.980 Nationality Act created the status of citizen of the United Kingdom and colonies. Sorry, first,

00:05:59.680 is it worth speaking briefly about why it is that we decolonised? Yeah, why not? Because,

00:06:05.920 Josh, you have a copy of... Because we lost the war. I do. Well, yeah, we... I've actually been reading this

00:06:11.040 at the minute. It's an imperial obituary by Major General Richard Hilton, who fought in both

00:06:17.100 world wars, and it's very, very interesting. Very much recommend everyone pick this up,

00:06:21.560 because it's... It's put in such sort of pleasant to read terms, in a way. Not that it's a pleasant

00:06:30.940 subject, of course. Yeah. But he's a martial man, and he's quite plain speaking in how he puts things

00:06:37.580 across, but also fair-handed. Obviously, he has a bit of a bias towards Britain. However, he does

00:06:42.860 acknowledge... He does acknowledge, like, listen, there are competing interpretations

00:06:47.400 of this, and he acknowledges them. But it's interesting as well, because he talks a great

00:06:51.600 deal about why it was Britain and nowhere else, which I found very interesting, because I've

00:06:57.460 not really heard that addressed very much. Oh, go on. What's the reason?

00:07:00.820 So, he's basically saying that there was competition between the Spanish and the Portuguese and the

00:07:07.600 Dutch, as well as, of course, the French. And the Spanish basically dedicated too much money

00:07:14.140 on trying to proselytize people, as well as losing some key wars. The Portuguese were just

00:07:19.560 too small to out-compete the other European powers. Same with the Dutch. He's saying that

00:07:24.980 they were good, they managed things well, but they were just too small a nation to succeed,

00:07:29.660 and therefore, it came down to England and France, basically. And we had the jockey, and

00:07:36.200 eventually, we basically just outmaneuvered the French politically and also...

00:07:40.420 Monetarily. Exactly.

00:07:42.620 Yeah. Crossed them in, like, Trafalgar and...

00:07:45.360 But the actual details of it, I know that sounds quite common sense, is fascinating, because

00:07:50.120 it breaks down, like, the individual conflicts. And particularly, the thing that I really enjoyed

00:07:55.420 was how we basically took over North America from the French. That... I learned a lot there.

00:08:01.680 Well, I look forward to reading it myself. Harry's got my copy, so...

00:08:05.000 Well, you lent me...

00:08:05.980 I did, I know.

00:08:06.960 It's only short. I'll get through it in a couple of days. But from what I remember, I

00:08:11.640 know that AA did a lot of content on Hilton's work when he found it. I think he's probably

00:08:16.840 the reason that some of his books have been republished now, because it's that one and the

00:08:21.440 13th power that I think whifflings have. I've got...

00:08:24.360 I remember AA speaking about it and putting forward the idea that what he got from the

00:08:29.320 books was essentially that a number of administrators of the Imperial Empire, by the beginning of

00:08:36.280 the 20th century, had essentially ideologically given up on the idea of it, and had in fact

00:08:41.720 gone complete the opposite way around, saying that actually it's wrong of us to be doing

00:08:46.520 this. We need to be shepherding these nations so that they are ready and fit for independence.

00:08:52.780 So it was starting to come to the long... They were starting to view history and the way

00:08:57.700 that it was about to proceed as a tunnel through to the light of independence for all of these

00:09:03.600 nations, rather than an empire that had existed for its own sake.

00:09:08.020 So this is, I think, a really unspoken aspect of the end of World War II. One of the few

00:09:19.960 people who really speaks about this is Julius Avola, right? Where he, you know, the arch-pagan

00:09:24.760 traditionalist, who points out that the victory of World War II was the victory of ideology over

00:09:32.840 a tradition. It was the... And the ideology is the ideology of equality. It is just manifested

00:09:38.540 in different ways. In America, you have a more liberal view of equality. Someone like

00:09:44.840 de Tocqueville... Yeah, it was de Tocqueville who wrote Democracy in America, isn't he?

00:09:49.840 Yes.

00:09:50.840 He explains in Democracy in America, the principle of equality is the primary principle. The Americans

00:09:57.180 would broach anything other than a civilization that had a sort of caste system within it.

00:10:05.680 And that's why black slavery in America is such a sore wound, because the primary commitment

00:10:12.380 of the Americans is to the concept of equality, social equality, rather than liberty, which

00:10:17.880 is actually a corollary of that, he views. And so... And of course, in the East, you have

00:10:22.380 the Soviet Union, which is explicitly communist, and therefore equality being the explicit, avowed,

00:10:27.880 stated principle.

00:10:28.880 The only real two winners of World War II were the Soviet Union and...

00:10:31.880 The American states, yeah.

00:10:32.880 Yeah, exactly.

00:10:33.880 Well, yeah. And then they immediately erupted into conflict with one another. A Cold War,

00:10:36.880 yes.

00:10:37.880 Sure.

00:10:38.880 But one of the interesting things about the period of decolonization that I got from reading...

00:10:43.880 I've not read the full book yet, but it's called something like Generation 68 by Kerry Bolton,

00:10:50.380 um, was that decolonization and the attempts of the US and the USSR to try to attract each

00:10:59.880 of those countries that's decolonizing into its own sphere of influence, because of course,

00:11:05.380 when you're in a period of empires, and the USSR was definitely an empire, America became

00:11:10.880 an empire, that you can never have civilization without empire of one form or another. It

00:11:15.480 becomes a question of whose sphere of influence that you exist within. And the argument can

00:11:20.880 easily be made, especially when you look into how much of, like, the student movement and

00:11:26.380 the student outreach programs in the 1950s were illicitly being funded by the CIA, formerly

00:11:33.380 the OSS, uh, through things like the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The decolonize... the period

00:11:38.880 of decolonization has a huge impact on the internal politics as well. Because the US is

00:11:44.080 trying to advertise itself to all of these nations that are suddenly independent, say,

00:11:48.880 you should align with us. But the USSR can easily just point to the US and point to all

00:11:53.280 of these African countries and say, why would you want to align with them when they still

00:11:57.580 have, uh, no civil rights for blacks? Why would you want to go align with them when they

00:12:02.680 still have laws like Jim Crow? And then all of a sudden in the 1950s you see all of these

00:12:07.320 massive sweeping changes. Eisenhower bringing in the National Guard to desegregate schools

00:12:12.520 after Brown v. Board of Education. So I think people don't realize with the period of decolonization

00:12:18.920 how much the geopolitical conflict that was going on kind of forced the hand for the internal

00:12:25.220 politics of the US in particular to shift. And of course with the US being the center of

00:12:31.820 the Western world, the UK and other countries within its sphere of influence then have to

00:12:36.620 shift alongside it. It's not so difficult.

00:12:39.020 Sorry, I want to pick up on that point because that's exactly correct. Because what we're seeing

00:12:43.420 is essentially moderate liberalism and extreme liberalism represented in America and the Soviet

00:12:49.820 Union both now vying for essentially world domination. And that's what the Cold War is. Which version of

00:12:55.020 liberalism are we going to get communism or American-style neoliberal capitalism? And what

00:13:00.220 this did is completely invalidate the European empires. Because the European empires were not built on

00:13:06.220 liberal principles. They were built fundamentally on the principle of inequality. The conquerors

00:13:12.220 have a superior place and therefore are in some way superior people, not necessarily genetically,

00:13:17.900 but have a superior culture or legal system or economic system or military. And so this is an

00:13:24.460 expressly hierarchical way of viewing the world and it has its merits. It can produce well-run,

00:13:35.020 well-governed societies as the British Empire showed, right? You look at some of the old photos

00:13:39.420 of like Kingston in Jamaica and things like that where it's just gorgeous, and South Africa,

00:13:42.700 gorgeous clean streets and you know everything's just going back normally.

00:13:45.340 Oops, we accidentally created paradise.

00:13:47.580 Yes, but it wasn't equal. That's the thing. It was an unequal society. And therefore,

00:13:54.380 if your primary governing principle is equality, well, the liberal view on either side is the European

00:14:00.780 empires have to be destroyed because they are, frankly, in violation of our primary principle. And so

00:14:06.940 it was understandable that essentially the people at the time felt morally discredited because they

00:14:14.780 weren't liberals. They were like, no, we have this, well, essentially a racial hierarchy that rules

00:14:19.740 the world. And the people who have just, we are devastated, you know, we've got no money,

00:14:25.020 we've got no infrastructure, we've got no, you know, we need help, you know, the martial plans

00:14:29.420 and whatever to rebuild. And the people who are paying the piper get to call the tune, right? And if they

00:14:34.860 say, okay, well, you've got to rebuild in the spirit of equality, which is the thing that genuinely has won this

00:14:40.300 war, you ruined yourselves over your empires of inequality, we're going to pay to rebuild

00:14:45.980 you through the spirit of equality, it's not surprising that the people at the time lost

00:14:49.900 complete confidence in their own moral principles.

00:14:52.540 I mean, I mean, we gave away all of our gold reserves to the US, we spent, we bankrupted

00:14:58.140 ourselves fighting the Second World War, we put ourselves into their debt to the point that by 1954

00:15:03.420 we were still on rations.

00:15:04.620 Yeah, I know. And I know. And the but that's the point, right, is the the paradigm has shifted,

00:15:11.020 there's no power left in the old imperial model, the power has shifted to the equalitarian model

00:15:17.180 of the Soviets or the Americans. And so basically, it's the sort of the new wave of the liberal

00:15:23.900 mindset. And so you can see how this then flows through Western society. So right, okay, everything

00:15:28.220 should be equal, where it was never equal. And, you know, the civil rights movements and stuff

00:15:33.100 like this. And you can see how this captures the zeitgeist of the era. And so the era of the 20th

00:15:37.420 century is the century of equality. And for we're living in the ruins of that now.

00:15:44.380 So one of the fundamental problems of this equality thing and why it's so destructive

00:15:49.100 is that it's far easier to drag the exceptional down than it is to elevate the exceptional.

00:15:55.660 Exactly. And one thing I wanted to add on what you were saying earlier, Harry, is that people

00:16:00.060 don't really realize that the Cold War was a sort of total war that affected every aspect

00:16:05.260 of life, particularly younger people who didn't actually live through it, because it didn't

00:16:11.500 actually have that much, you know, on the ground combat.

00:16:14.380 The only thing it wasn't is a hot physical war, in all other ways, ideologically, morally,

00:16:20.380 spiritually, economically. You're absolutely right, it was a total war. And they measured themselves

00:16:25.660 by their competition with us. Like, Mao was constantly going on about having more steel

00:16:29.100 output than Britain. Because, of course, we were a major industrial power at the time.

00:16:32.620 And the Soviets were constantly comparing themselves to the United States. So it was,

00:16:36.620 you were absolutely right. And people forget, like, you know, the boomers go on about Russia

00:16:41.900 all the time. But you can't really blame them, because they live, they grew up in an era where

00:16:47.260 Russia was the reason that they did everything. You know, they had to beat the Russians.

00:16:51.420 And so you can't really believe- Well, they grew up in the shadow of the Russian bomb.

00:16:54.620 Exactly. Right. And it's not their fault. It's just the way things are. But anyway,

00:16:58.460 so that's a really excellent way of setting the scene, actually. And I'm glad you brought

00:17:04.220 in the ideological aspect of it upon decolonization as well. Because it's in 1948 that we bring in

00:17:09.900 the British Nationality Act. And this is such a revealingly liberal thing to try and do,

00:17:17.260 but so obviously inappropriate for the time and place. So what it did is it created the

00:17:22.460 status of citizen of the United Kingdom and colonies, which meant that all Commonwealth

00:17:28.540 citizens were recognized as British subjects. And this act granted Commonwealth citizens the

00:17:33.420 automatic right to enter, live, and work in the United Kingdom. Now, this is crazy if you think

00:17:40.620 about it through the imperial lens. Right. So there are like 500 million people in India now,

00:17:45.820 and like 40 million people in Britain. And all of them now have the right to just, you know-

00:17:51.900 Show up on your doorstep.

00:17:52.860 Camp of the Saints style. Get on a boat.

00:17:54.460 Well, that doesn't think they weren't really thinking about it. From all of the reports that

00:17:59.900 I've seen, it was basically seen as a token gesture.

00:18:02.940 Because we want to celebrate that after the end of this horrifying war, we're all united under the

00:18:11.900 Commonwealth as one people, as subjects under the crown. We're going to pass this piece of

00:18:16.460 legislation. As a token gesture, whoops were flooded with migrants.

00:18:20.620 Well, hang on. It actually wasn't that bad initially.

00:18:23.260 Well, not initially, yes.

00:18:25.260 Before the age of air travel, isn't it?

00:18:27.180 It is.

00:18:27.420 Cheap air travel of the 1970s.

00:18:28.780 It is, but-

00:18:29.500 That made it possible for-

00:18:30.780 What you're not seeing on this is tens of thousands of ships traveling all over the

00:18:35.100 world all the time. So there's-

00:18:37.100 It's still bottleneck things more so than the modern day.

00:18:41.180 Yeah, it does. But we had massive merchant navy. You know, it's like, you know, like,

00:18:46.700 you could get a boat anywhere in the world.

00:18:48.380 Mm-hmm.

00:18:49.020 Of course.

00:18:49.420 You would be able to travel. It would just take three months or six months or whatever,

00:18:52.780 rather than-

00:18:53.500 It made it a lot more expensive and also a lot of them were military rather than-

00:18:58.300 Sure, sure.

00:18:59.020 But we-

00:18:59.500 No, sure.

00:19:00.140 Sure. But the point is, like, as Piers Morgan said in this chat with Tucker Castle, people

00:19:05.580 just couldn't travel. No, they could, Piers, you moron. Right? They absolutely did travel.

00:19:10.060 But the point is, it was people from the empire just didn't have the right, if they were not

00:19:14.380 British, to come to Britain. Because why would they? It's the imperial heartland, you know?

00:19:19.900 And so England actually survives the British empire as a deeply homogenous and bucolic place.

00:19:27.740 And when you've got the sort of A.J.P. Taylor in 1915, the average Englishman can go from

00:19:32.780 cradle to grave without ever interacting with the state beyond the post office. Imagine that!

00:19:38.620 My utopia around them. Absolutely, that's my utopia.

00:19:42.140 It's always the most depressing quote to be heard of me.

00:19:45.260 It's not, that's not verbatim.

00:19:46.780 Because I've never experienced that personally.

00:19:49.740 I know, but is it-

00:19:51.340 But literally, we honestly had heaven on earth. And we were like, well, we need equality now,

00:19:57.660 right? But this is the, it's the product of inequality. It's saying, no, we will come to

00:20:01.580 your countries, you will not come to our countries. This is an unequal system. And they're not wrong

00:20:08.940 to criticize us on those grounds, if you think equality is a valid and predominant principle

00:20:13.580 that you want to apply to the world. And so, as you say, you know, they'd lost moral confidence

00:20:17.580 in their own system. They're like, oh, we'll just, we'll have the British nationality. The

00:20:21.020 Americans are all equals. Then we should be equals. Okay, fine. Uh, then large-scale immigration into

00:20:26.380 the UK begins. Uh, this is, of course, the year of the Empire Windrush. Would you like to tell us a

00:20:31.980 little bit about the Empire Windrush? Because you've, you've looked into it a lot more.

00:20:34.780 Oh, I, yeah, I've got a lot of information on the Windrush. And the first thing to say is,

00:20:39.020 I think partially there is a lot of evidence to suggest that the Windrush was some kind of,

00:20:44.060 um, behind-the-scenes cartel action not to intentionally flood the UK with immigrants.

00:20:51.740 After all, the amount of people from the Caribbean who were, you know, black Caribbeans

00:20:57.020 on the Windrush who came over was only 417. Right. But it does seem to have been

00:21:02.540 part of a larger, uh, conspiracy to just profit, to just make a lot of money, right? Yeah.

00:21:09.820 So, so first of all, there's the, there's the interesting thing, which is that, um,

00:21:14.140 the Empire, I've got an article in front of me. I won't tell you the name of it. Uh,

00:21:17.980 the Empire Windrush was passed from ownership from the government. Well, not ownership,

00:21:23.420 but it was operated initially by the government. It was captured from the German. It was originally

00:21:27.660 a German ship called the Monte, uh, Monte Rosa, which had been used in the 1930s for cruises,

00:21:34.780 and then repurposed during the war and then captured and repurposed for the British Empire.

00:21:39.580 And originally it was just used by the, uh, secretary for war under Clement Attlee to ferry

00:21:45.340 people from one place to another who were British, uh, subjects and who were mainly like soldiers.

00:21:50.620 But then in around 1947, he signs that over to a company called the New Zealand Shipping Company,

00:21:57.980 who then carry on those operations. And then after that, it's the, uh, green light is given by the

00:22:04.860 Minister for Transport to, uh, say, well, we can make some money off of this. So if there's any free

00:22:12.140 spaces on the ship, then you can fill them up with people and send them over.

00:22:18.220 Now, sorry, this cough, but the Nationality Act makes that suddenly legal.

00:22:26.060 But also, the government weren't aware that the Minister for Transport had allowed this.

00:22:32.860 Somehow, the Minister for Transport was just able to give the green light to these...

00:22:37.660 Well, government, you know, the ministers are given a relatively large degree of autonomy.

00:22:42.140 Yeah, they had a large degree of autonomy, but given that this could and did have such

00:22:47.260 wide-ranging ramifications, the impact of this was so, was potentially huge.

00:22:53.180 It's pretty crazy that this Minister for Transport, whose name is escaping me right now, uh,

00:22:59.900 I could probably find it in the article, uh, but I'll just carry on. Uh, he, he just green lights it,

00:23:04.780 says, like, any free spaces, go ahead. Throw people on them. And then,

00:23:10.220 all of a sudden, while it's heading to Jamaica, obviously it's got spaces free, so they say,

00:23:18.780 we can do this. But before it even arrives, right, before it even arrives, uh, the, uh, the Gleaner,

00:23:26.460 a Jamaican magazine, part of the Gleaner company, just three weeks before, starts, uh, uh, advertising

00:23:34.140 cheap travel to Britain, because obviously the- Silver made legal.

00:23:37.580 The, the, the, the price of it was 28 pounds and 10 shillings, which I think was half or a

00:23:42.220 third of the price it would normally cost. So it was a discount.

00:23:45.100 That's still expensive.

00:23:46.140 But, but, it's a discount, a massive bargain discount price. So all of a sudden, you get all

00:23:52.700 of these Jamaicans being bombarded with ads for cheap travel to Britain, and articles telling them

00:23:59.260 about this amazing new life that they could live in London. And there's a quote here from an author

00:24:05.020 called Stephen Pollard that says, the response was almost instantaneous. Queues formed outside

00:24:10.620 the booking agency, and every place was sold. It carries on to say, many of the ads were propaganda

00:24:16.300 pieces that presented an idealized picture of life and job opportunities in Britain, in stark contrast

00:24:21.900 to the bleak reality of what Britain was like in 1948, when we were still really recovering and

00:24:28.460 rebuilding from the war. Because there's other articles that I've got, some from IM 1776 by

00:24:35.740 Lin Manuel, who's a really great poster on Twitter. You should follow him. But they're very detailed

00:24:40.780 articles talking about the fact that at the time, they try and justify it now by saying that there was

00:24:48.060 a labour shortage. And you can go into the documents, and you can find that between 1945 and 1960,

00:24:56.460 the unemployment rate reached a peak in 1947 of 3.1%, but averaged below 2% through that entire period.

00:25:09.980 And even despite that, at the time, we had the stuff like the £10 POM for people who wanted to

00:25:15.420 emigrate over to Australia. The government was trying to encourage people to leave the country

00:25:21.900 because we actually had far too much of a surplus of labour. So the whole idea that we needed these

00:25:27.820 people was a complete lie. Yeah, I mean, if we're exporting people whilst we're apparently rebuilding

00:25:35.660 from the war... Yeah. So this whole thing is just a post-hoc rationalization.

00:25:42.700 I was going to say exactly that, that it's been mythologized after the fact, but at the time,

00:25:47.260 if you actually look at what was being discussed about it, it wasn't nearly of that character.

00:25:52.300 And in fact, and in fact, he goes on to state in this article that most people prior to about

00:26:01.580 1998 probably would never have heard of the Windrush. Yeah, no, I'd never heard of it as a kid.

00:26:08.300 There was no reference to it, even within the Caribbean migrant experience on BBC radio.

00:26:14.940 Yeah, no, I mean, I remember it, right? So I remember, I was well, I was probably in my 30s,

00:26:20.700 like late 20s, early 30s, before, you know, the Empire Windrush became a talking point.

00:26:26.060 Like, it was never, never spoken about. Because on its 50th anniversary in 1998,

00:26:31.340 there was a BB2 documentary series celebrating it. Following New Labour getting in, the BBC

00:26:38.940 decided to do a big 50th anniversary on this thing. And then it really, and then it gets

00:26:44.780 featured in things like the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony that Danny Boyle did. But if you search

00:26:50.700 on Google Ngram viewer, for instance, about how much the Windrush showed up in books and in articles

00:26:58.220 and such, even by the late 90s, it's not very much. What you see a huge spike around is around 2015,

00:27:05.340 16, 17, 18, with the Windrush scandal. Yes. And that puts it firmly in the public.

00:27:11.180 So that seems to have been what gave it this huge push beyond what Blair's government and the

00:27:17.580 Olympics were doing. And the whole mythology of it has been carefully developed since then

00:27:23.660 as an excuse and as a justification for why it all happened.

00:27:30.060 You can see why this is the liberal foundational myth of New Britain, right? As in, in 1948,

00:27:36.380 we are ruined and the Nationality Act is signed, which effectively is the proper liberalization

00:27:47.260 of the country. So everything's equal. Everyone across the empire is equal. You know, that's the

00:27:51.580 first, the proper introduction of the principle of equality into law is really that everyone is the same.

00:27:57.100 I do think there is another reason for it, which is by highlighting specifically black Jamaican

00:28:06.380 immigration, it hides and distracts from the fact that the vast majority of immigration into Britain

00:28:15.100 from foreign third world countries has been historically from places like Pakistan.

00:28:20.060 I was going to, I was going to mention that actually, yeah.

00:28:22.220 And from places like India, like I've got population.

00:28:23.820 India and Pakistan, yeah.

00:28:24.700 I've got population statistics up right in front of me that are the estimates of Caribbean ethnic

00:28:31.740 population. And I assume that that would have been just a shorthand for black population in the UK

00:28:37.500 at the time, from 1951 through to 1988. And it peaks in 1971 at 548,000. And that includes new arrivals

00:28:49.420 and people who had been born to previous arrivals. And then it starts slowly going down. Before in 1988,

00:28:58.140 it's gone down to 495,000. Now that's only a difference of 50,000.

00:29:02.700 I can explain why that happens, actually.

00:29:04.700 Um, well, yeah, right. So that's great. I'm glad you brought that up because you're, you're exactly

00:29:09.820 right. Um, but the, just to, just to hammer the point home, the reason that it begins in 1948 and

00:29:15.260 why all this happens is because of the Nationality Act and the way it ties in dovetails with the Empire

00:29:21.260 Windrush and creates the modern multicultural Britain. Because up until that point, Britain was literally

00:29:26.940 99.9% native. And the only, uh, people who weren't natives were people who lived in, like,

00:29:33.180 very small enclaves in London, who were like, you know, trading outposts and things like that.

00:29:37.500 It was mainly people around the ports.

00:29:39.100 Yeah, exactly.

00:29:39.660 Like I explained in my segment last week.

00:29:41.900 Exactly, right. So there was just no question of, are we a multicultural society? We are not a

00:29:46.540 nation of immigrants. We are a nation that was deeply settled for a thousand years.

00:29:51.260 It's also, sorry.

00:29:52.380 Sorry, go on.

00:29:53.180 I was going to point out that when the Windrush did turn up and people did occupy jobs, the

00:29:58.860 mythology says that they rebuilt Britain, but they were such a tiny portion of the population,

00:30:03.740 and also they didn't occupy construction jobs.

00:30:06.380 Yeah, they were NHS a lot of them.

00:30:09.100 Yeah, NHS, bus drivers famously, and things like that, where it's important, but it's not

00:30:14.540 rebuilding the country necessarily.

00:30:16.220 I mean, by 1951, I think it was about 17,000 people of black ancestry.

00:30:26.620 Very, very small number. It was really the Transport for London scheme in 1955 that started to bring

00:30:35.900 them over in huge numbers, and that's when you get an explosion of 50,000 and then 86,000.

00:30:41.180 Let me carry on then.

00:30:42.380 Oh yeah, yeah, carry on.

00:30:43.100 So yeah, so the reason, like I said, the Windrush is the modern founding mythology of the country

00:30:48.300 is because it's the place in which the laws and the empire is essentially liberalized.

00:30:52.940 And then, as you say, large-scale migration to the UK begins. Now, when we say large-scale,

00:30:59.100 I mean, compared to the immigration we get today, it's nothing. But of course, back in the day,

00:31:04.300 having, how much was it, do you say, like 20,000 or something?

00:31:06.620 It was about 17,000 to 18,000 in 1951.

00:31:09.820 I mean, that would have been shocking, right? That would have been genuinely shocking at the time.

00:31:13.900 Now, that for us is probably a week, if that actually, of immigration. But large-scale

00:31:21.180 immigration begins to save from India, Pakistan, other Commonwealth countries, and a small percentage

00:31:25.020 from the Caribbean. And then, so this happens for about a decade, and people start getting

00:31:30.700 really upset by immigration. In 1962, they have the Commonwealth Immigrants Act,

00:31:35.660 which is the first major restriction on Commonwealth migration. So you can see

00:31:39.500 that the liberal ideology has just been imposed on Britain and the empire, which still exists,

00:31:43.740 mostly, at this point. The empire has it imposed upon it, and then suddenly everyone's like,

00:31:47.740 oh, no, no, this was a bad move, right? Because it was just an idea in principle,

00:31:51.260 the principle of equality has to be imposed on the country, and we don't like it, and it's ruining

00:31:55.580 everything. And so this is the first major restriction that introduces work permits, and so

00:32:00.380 Commonwealth citizens now needed permission to live and work in the UK.

00:32:03.340 And then, in 1968, there's the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which is amended, which requires,

00:32:09.820 then, in addition, a close connection to the UK, i.e., a parent or grandparent born in the UK.

00:32:15.340 And this is largely aimed at Commonwealth passport holders of South Asian descent in East Africa.

00:32:19.660 This is how Priti Patel ends up here, right? So, you know, Idi Amin, in 1971, kicks out all the

00:32:25.020 Indians. We have provided a legal route for the Indians in Africa, who were our imperial administration.

00:32:31.180 So one could argue, okay, we've got some obligation to them, because they were there serving the

00:32:36.060 British Empire, and we allowed Africa to go, and so they were going to get massacred by various

00:32:43.020 warlords, or we, you know, they could have gone back to India, I suppose, or we give them things.

00:32:47.660 So that's what we've done there. And then in 19... that also further reduced free movement rights.

00:32:52.540 And then in 1971, we introduced the Immigration Act, which introduced the right of abode.

00:32:57.580 And so these are called patrials. British citizens with UK-born grandparents or parents

00:33:03.260 had the automatic right to live and work in the UK. So most Commonwealth citizens actually lost

00:33:08.300 their automatic residency rights here. And so that's where you can see that Britain's like,

00:33:12.620 well, hang on a second. And like...

00:33:14.700 And again, that's where, from the statistics that I was reading out, that's where the

00:33:18.060 West Indian population peaked.

00:33:20.620 Yeah.

00:33:21.020 And then slowly starts to go down.

00:33:23.020 Because it was going to come in and they...

00:33:24.460 And it really does seem to be that from 71 through to 98, the flow had basically stopped

00:33:32.140 for the most part.

00:33:33.180 Yes.

00:33:33.740 But there were years where we'd have negative.

00:33:35.180 Yeah. And then it's when Blair comes in and you get him sending out squads of people

00:33:42.300 under Mandelson to try and rub the right's nose in diversity.

00:33:45.900 That's when the floodgates opened back up.

00:33:48.460 That's exactly right.

00:33:49.580 And I just want to...

00:33:50.780 One last thing to really demolish the whole, we needed them.

00:33:54.940 We needed them to rebuild the country, like argument, is that in 1953, in December,

00:34:04.300 there was a report that was completed where civil servants stated that the new population,

00:34:10.700 which was about 42, sorry, it was about 30 to 40,000 at the time,

00:34:16.460 the new population found it difficult to secure employment, not because of prejudice among whites,

00:34:22.140 but because the newcomers had, quote,

00:34:24.300 low output and their working life was marked by, quote,

00:34:27.980 irresponsibility, quarrelsomeness, and lack of discipline, end quote.

00:34:33.580 And so all of the imperial concept, the initial liberal imperial concept of citizenship ended

00:34:43.900 in 1981 with the British Nationality Act. It ended the imperial citizenship model entirely,

00:34:51.260 created what we understand to be modern British citizenship. Commonwealth citizens are no longer

00:34:55.260 British subjects. And therefore, as you say, immigration basically stopped, which basically

00:35:00.860 didn't get any more immigration for a couple of decades.

00:35:05.420 Yeah, I mean, that was, that was the thing looking at the figures that shocked me the most.

00:35:08.700 It was like, oh, we really did just like, the population of immigrants in the country from

00:35:13.100 that period was just the holdover from those who had come in and the children that they were having.

00:35:17.420 So the, after the close of World War II, there was kind of an immigration experiment in the country,

00:35:23.260 which created very small proportionally communities of just in the tens of thousands of foreign peoples,

00:35:30.780 in Britain. And that ended, like I say, and then if you look at it, there are years where it's just

00:35:35.100 net outflow, because we're not, we're just not bringing in foreigners to the country.

00:35:39.340 And at the time, the country is something like 95% white British. And then in 1997,

00:35:48.140 something happened. I don't know if this Tom Harwood clocked onto this yet. This is just the population

00:35:54.860 overall, which you can see has changed things dramatically. And that only goes up to 2022 as well.

00:35:59.500 Amazing how the population keeps rising despite our falling rebirth rates.

00:36:03.820 Yeah. Well, this is just for England and Wales as well. So it's, uh, it was apparently 59 in 2021,

00:36:10.220 which, uh, well, no, it says more than that actually on that.

00:36:12.940 Well, do you want to know something funny? So Josh referred to his book, uh, someone whose name I

00:36:18.220 cannot remember, but I thank you greatly for sending it in, sent us in a load of Enoch Powell books a few

00:36:24.220 weeks ago. Uh, and this one is a collection of speeches that he'd been doing from 19 six,

00:36:29.820 late sixties to early seventies. Most of it's about economics and socialism and why socialism is bad.

00:36:34.780 You'd like that bit, Josh, but there is one chapter on immigration. And even within that chapter,

00:36:40.140 he's talking about the 1971 act, how he hopes that it passes. But he's saying that even if it does pass and

00:36:47.820 we get this complete restriction on immigration that we're looking for, we still may need to,

00:36:53.420 he doesn't say remigrate, but he says mass repatriation simply because of the birth rates

00:36:59.660 situation. And he was also complaining about the fact that even in the 1960s, that the civil servants

00:37:07.660 in the home office had been going out of their way to hide the actual numbers of immigrants in the

00:37:14.780 country, like he was saying, okay, according to official records, it should be about one and a

00:37:21.340 half million. Yeah. But judging by birth rates of people, of people born to foreign born parents

00:37:27.820 in the hospitals, it appears closer to about 2 million. So they'd been hiding about 500,000

00:37:36.060 off of the books. And he says, he just says here, how came it that the departments with all the

00:37:40.380 resources and information available to them continued either not to ascertain the truth,

00:37:45.740 or if they knew or suspected it, not to communicate it to ministers. That's a good impression.

00:37:50.780 There may have been incompetence, but I confess I do not believe that the government and public

00:37:56.060 could have been misled so persistently and gravely without a certain determination in some quarters

00:38:03.100 to leave facts unascertained or to play down for as long as possible those that were known,

00:38:08.860 so that when the true situation could no longer be concealed, it should be irreversible.

00:38:15.180 Nothing new under the sun. Yeah. So it was, it was hidden from the public. They purposefully

00:38:20.220 kept the figures in the dark. And then 50 or so years later, you get the Windrush scandal where

00:38:26.380 they're like, oh, they did all of this for racism. No, actually, no, actually, the Home Office weren't

00:38:32.620 keeping proper records so that mean old Enoch Powell wouldn't have all the proper figures to base his

00:38:38.700 arguments off of. It's amazing how this works. Incredible. Incredible. So anyway, that is how we

00:38:44.380 ended up with foreigners in our politics. We had many who came over because of an experiment legally,

00:38:51.100 a liberal experiment with the liberalization of our concept of citizenship. It flooded the country with

00:38:57.580 tens of thousands of people who nobody actually wanted here. And we are saddled with the consequences

00:39:03.740 of that now. And so let's, let's talk about the foreigners in our politics, because this has become

00:39:07.900 a salient issue recently because of this tweet. Here you have Lucy White. And let's just have a quick

00:39:16.140 look at the six million views on this tweet, which, you know, she, she's, how many followers does she have?

00:39:21.180 Well, 21,000 followers. So you can see this, this, I've never heard of her before this.

00:39:25.820 I haven't, you know, no, no, no shade or anything. Yeah, credit to her for this. Yeah. Yeah. But this

00:39:29.980 escaped containment and because it, it prodded them in a particular way, didn't it? She says,

00:39:37.500 the deputy speaker presiding of the budget statement is Nus Ghani. She was born in Kashmir,

00:39:42.620 Pakistan. There should not be a single person born in Pakistan in the UK House of Commons. Now that's

00:39:47.420 actually a really tepid statement, right? Yeah, it could be far stronger. And I mean,

00:39:53.260 sure, if I were to make a statement on a similar sort of thing, I'd probably make it a bit stronger

00:39:57.420 than that. But the principle here is obviously, yeah, exactly. It's the idea that people from

00:40:04.220 outside of your in group outside of your nationality, perhaps, might not have the same

00:40:10.700 interest. This is sort of reading between the lines here. But everyone sort of knows what's being said

00:40:15.660 here, that people inherently have biases towards their own group. And if you are to have people

00:40:22.860 who are meant to be your political representatives, surely you want them to be biased in favor of your

00:40:27.740 interests, right? That's your group or your group. I mean, there's a reason that the president of the

00:40:31.900 United States has to have has to be a natural born American. I was going to bring that exact

00:40:36.060 thing up because despite all of these so-called anti-racist rhetoric in the United States, no one

00:40:41.660 ever talks about that aspect of it, even though you'd think it would be quite important to them.

00:40:46.220 But they sort of understand it, don't they, that to be an American president, you've got to be

00:40:50.780 American. Because if, you know, for example, when it, you know, they were in the Cold War,

00:40:55.500 the Soviet Union, and you had a Russian president, people would be asking questions, wouldn't they?

00:40:59.820 What is it if you have foreigners governing over you? Well, it's actually colonial rule.

00:41:05.340 That's literally what they were gaining independence for.

00:41:07.420 But, I mean, it doesn't really matter as much for America when they've got instant birthright

00:41:12.700 citizens. Sure, sure. It's a different conversation, different calendar.

00:41:15.180 And then somebody like Ilhan Omar can end up, is she in the Senate or House of Representatives?

00:41:19.340 Yes. Absolutely. But this is the thing that was really highlighted by Nuskani here. And now,

00:41:25.820 I just want to be clear, from all accounts, Nuskani is actually a good, reliable Conservative MP,

00:41:32.460 right? So I'm not in any way trying to throw shade at Nuskani, because apparently she actually does a

00:41:37.180 good job for her, what is it, East Sussex or something? Which is 90-plus percent white English,

00:41:41.980 right? So... Low bar, but fair play. Sure. But the point is, that's not to say that she can't be a

00:41:48.460 good MP, right? Now, yeah, I don't actually know much about her personal career, but I've heard lots

00:41:52.620 of accounts that, you know, everyone in the Conservatives has come out and said, no,

00:41:55.900 she's actually really good. And she didn't get elected on ethnic sympathies, because, of course,

00:42:01.820 she's the MP from a mostly English area by a long way. And if you see her in the way she comports

00:42:09.260 herself, she's very Anglicised, right? So it's not that she is there in some weird ethnic toga or

00:42:15.260 something, you know? So, on the personal merits of herself, actually not terribly objectionable,

00:42:23.260 but what Lucy is highlighting here is actually the principle of the thing. How many British-born

00:42:28.940 native Brits, English, Welsh, Scots, or Irish, are ruling in Pakistan at the moment? And the answer

00:42:34.540 is, of course, none. That, you know, they don't have any, and why would you? Right? That's the

00:42:39.260 point. That was the point of decolonisation, that was the point of leaving the empire, and that was

00:42:43.580 the point of essentially restricting, in the Nationality Act, back to only British people and

00:42:50.620 not allowing the Commonwealth to just move to this country. As in, oh yeah, we've moved from the

00:42:56.220 imperial model, where foreigners rule over foreign nations, to a national model, where nations are

00:43:03.740 ruled by themselves. And that's fine. That's totally fine. In fact, I'm completely in favour of it.

00:43:09.660 But why then do we have non-natives, and this person born overseas, eligible to become politicians

00:43:17.820 in this country? And the answer is because we never had to worry about it throughout history. We were

00:43:21.580 exporting people to them. They were not coming here. This is new and has not been accounted for.

00:43:26.780 And the thing is, back in, you know, 1948 or whatever, to 1958, when, say, 50,000 people came

00:43:33.020 over. Okay, 50,000 people's a lot. But even then, that's still a tiny sliver of the demographic.

00:43:39.900 It doesn't matter too much until Tony Blair cranks open the borders, and then Boris cranks them open even

00:43:44.860 further. And so now more than a quarter of this country is made up of people who are not native

00:43:51.580 British. Now it becomes a really salient political issue, right? Yeah, and the interesting thing is

00:43:56.220 not the character of Nuskani, necessarily. It's what the issue represents here. And that's why lots of

00:44:01.580 people were interested in it in the first place. And this received lots of backlash, because I believe

00:44:06.620 she would go on GB News and talk TV and the like. Yeah, and they were trying to personalise about

00:44:11.180 Nuskani, which is not personal about Nuskani. It's about the fact that we're living with an imperial

00:44:15.660 legacy that's not being addressed. Yeah, and I think the question of,

00:44:19.500 do these foreign MPs really represent our interests? And there are lots of examples of that

00:44:25.100 not being the case that I'll get to later. But the controversies here, I'm going to quickly go over

00:44:29.740 them. They're not really, it's predictable at this rate. But the Mail, which is purportedly right-wing

00:44:35.100 apparently, GB News and talk TV contributor in racism, Rao, after saying there should not be a single

00:44:40.620 person born in Pakistan in the UK House of Commons, which if a Pakistani commentator said that about

00:44:49.180 English people, people would not bat an eye. It is just applying the global standard to ourselves at

00:44:54.940 this rate. In principle, there shouldn't be anything wrong with it. No, of course not. That's a great

00:44:59.180 way. It's applying a global standard to ourselves. So that's all that this is. And apparently we're not

00:45:04.940 allowed to do that. We have this ancestral guilt for empire. For being exceptional, we must be punished.

00:45:11.980 And here's the Guardian, of course. GB News urged to cut ties with contributor accused of racism.

00:45:16.940 Of course, it was urged by people who already hate GB News and people saying this sort of thing.

00:45:21.580 She wasn't being racist. She didn't actually say, she wasn't saying people from Pakistan are bad.

00:45:27.420 She wasn't even elaborating the argument that they might have different interests to the native

00:45:31.020 British population. She was actually making a civic argument that British politicians ought to be

00:45:37.020 born and bred in Britain, which seems very reasonable. I also think in the Daily Mail article,

00:45:42.700 there was some kind of comment from GB News and Talk TV along the lines of that as a result of all of

00:45:49.420 this, they're not planning on having her on again anytime soon. I'm sure which is fantastic that they'll

00:45:54.380 just give in immediately. The free speech platforms. No thought behind it. Anyway, sorry, Karen.

00:46:00.860 And yeah, there were also comments from politicians. Conservative politicians.

00:46:06.780 Yes. Lucy is a racist. No broadcaster should put this racist on TV to spread her despicable hatred.

00:46:14.620 You're acting, Liam, from the 1948 law that was superseded by the 1981 law because it wasn't

00:46:21.260 appropriate to our country. And the empire is gone, Liam. Let it go.

00:46:25.660 There's also, you know, a principle at play here that these ideas simply shouldn't be discussed,

00:46:32.700 that they're off the reservation, which, of course, if you purport to be in favour of things like

00:46:38.060 democracy, is very antithetical to that. So you could argue that this guy just wants to de-platform

00:46:43.740 people and say that you can't speak about these things just because you've got opinions that I

00:46:48.380 don't agree with, which, you know, okay. He's a conservative.

00:46:52.140 Yeah. Well done. Well done. Typical conservative values.

00:46:54.780 Yeah. Well, who needs, you know, this class of politician? I certainly don't.

00:46:59.900 And then you've got Tom Tugganhat saying, Deputy Speaker Naskani has stood up for her community's

00:47:06.380 interest for a decade, defended Parliament's interest from the Speaker's chair for 18 months,

00:47:10.940 been sanctioned by China and Russia for defending our country's interest from dictators.

00:47:15.260 She's been voted in four times by those who trust her in Sussex, once by the MPs who trust

00:47:20.620 her in Westminster. She needs no help from me to call out cretins, but I'll join her just the same.

00:47:26.540 Now, this is a fair defence of Naskani, right? I don't think she's done anything personally wrong,

00:47:33.580 but the problem is the system is not actually, it needs to be reformed in order to deal with the

00:47:39.980 problems that we have now and not solve ideological problems that we had in the 20th century.

00:47:46.300 And I found it very interesting that Ben Habib, who himself is part Pakistani,

00:47:52.380 understood where she was coming from.

00:47:53.900 And it's quite long, so I'm not going to read all of it, but he's basically saying that

00:47:58.620 it's reasonable to be concerned about people from abroad representing you.

00:48:02.460 Well, I mean, the whole thing, like Lucy White, I think everybody is interpreting

00:48:07.260 her original tweet with a fair degree of bad faith because I don't see any actual criticism

00:48:14.380 personally of Noose in that tweet. It's on the principle of it. I think it's fair for an Englishman

00:48:22.620 to look at his politics or her politics and see that, oh, the House of Commons is filled with a load

00:48:28.700 of foreigners. Apparently there are 35 MPs who are born overseas. I mean, there you go. And it's not

00:48:34.460 to say anything about the personal character of those individual MPs to say, that's not how our

00:48:40.140 national politics should be run. Well, this is also following the incessant talk that I found

00:48:45.340 insufferable of, well, I don't see any black faces. I need people to look like me. Otherwise,

00:48:50.060 I'm not interested. We've had that in our ears constantly in our own country. And, you know,

00:48:55.420 obviously, it's good enough for them. Why isn't it good enough for us? Yeah, well,

00:48:57.820 neutralism for you, identitarianism for me. Yeah, but the thing is, all it's done is just

00:49:02.620 make more white British people identitarian. And fair enough in the face of this, because if you're

00:49:07.100 not, then you face being taken advantage of. Well, there's a real concern that, okay, well,

00:49:11.660 if there's no particular limit, then anyone from anywhere could move here. I mean, like, if,

00:49:17.100 for example, you know, Communist Party of China decided, right, okay, we can just take over the British

00:49:21.420 electoral system by getting people elected. So we'll just send people over who are our agents,

00:49:28.780 help them to get elected, fund them, get them a constituency, wherever. And if they can become

00:49:34.140 elected in the UK, then isn't that a security risk? Is there not anything concerning about this?

00:49:39.740 Of course. Going beyond, going beyond the, don't the British people deserve to represent themselves

00:49:44.620 like every other country on earth, right? I mean, there are lots and lots of different

00:49:48.220 considerations. It's just not fair. And of course, all of this goes on in the shadow of

00:49:52.780 massive Tory betrayal. And so people don't really trust politicians full stop, no matter where they're

00:50:00.540 from. But the best chance you have of actually someone representing the interests of the native

00:50:06.700 British people is if they're native British. And so people are a bit more hardline about this,

00:50:13.180 because they don't want to be betrayed again. And that is why people have become more radical on this,

00:50:19.740 and people want people from their own group, because at least then there's more of a chance

00:50:24.940 of them keeping their word, because they're more tied to the interests of the people they're representing.

00:50:29.980 And we will show a prime example of that very shortly. Is it all right if we skip to the

00:50:35.980 Tulip Sadiq part, just for the interest of time?

00:50:38.620 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just had a bunch of her responses to things. So you can read those in

00:50:43.980 the reading list if you want.

00:50:44.940 Again, totally reasonable responses.

00:50:46.780 She was fair to point out that the media were taking all of the negative responses and completely

00:50:51.260 ignoring all of the positive feedback she had.

00:50:54.220 I also quickly point this out, because it points out some of the hypocrisy. So we got Pete North

00:50:59.180 here, who came on the podcast not too long ago, talking about how he once applied for the MOD to

00:51:03.660 work on nuclear weapons. And he got through the interviews and everything. And there was delays

00:51:09.340 because he had to supply proof that even his grandparents were born in Britain. And I would

00:51:14.940 argue that sure, nuclear weapons should have these sorts of checks, but also the levers of power.

00:51:20.380 Yes.

00:51:20.700 They're just as important.

00:51:22.780 And we will show you why these are important in a minute, in fact. Let's quickly go over Tulip

00:51:27.820 Sadiq though.

00:51:28.380 I'll get back to that part because that's important. Okay. Where are we?

00:51:33.900 Um, where is the Tulip Sadiq? Here we go. There you go. Yeah.

00:51:37.740 Oh, well, I've, I mean, if you want to talk about that, that'd be fine. But I, yeah, so she's

00:51:42.460 um, Bangladeshi and she was convicted in a court, uh, for corruption in Bangladesh. And I believe

00:51:51.100 guilty of using her influence with her aunt, the former Bangladeshi prime minister,

00:51:55.260 Sheikh Hanisa to secure land near the capital.

00:51:58.380 Exactly. And I think she was given a sentence of two years in prison, but actually she won't

00:52:04.060 go to prison. Of course.

00:52:05.340 Because she's in Britain.

00:52:06.220 Yeah. And also because she's a politician and apparently she's just going to pay a fine.

00:52:11.260 Incredible. So this, but this is a Labour MP for constituency in the United Kingdom. And there

00:52:18.940 are, there are other councillors in Tower Hamlets who are campaigning to become MPs in Bangladesh.

00:52:23.900 We covered this recently for the, you know, the, the Aspire party here, which is a very progressive

00:52:28.860 party, open borders party, but they're literally running for the Bangladeshi national party,

00:52:33.980 the BNP of Bangladesh.

00:52:36.300 I'm not even joking. It's like, so it's, it's one of those things. And we skipped over very quickly this,

00:52:40.860 but, uh, the, the point, um, of Nusrat Ghani, she took her oath in Urdu to honor her mother.

00:52:46.460 It's like, okay, well let's, let's, let's have a talk about what foreigners are actually doing to

00:52:51.660 our politics then. Right? So the question of trial by jury has been made salient in British

00:52:59.980 politics in the last couple of days because David Lammy has come out and said, I'm going to abolish

00:53:05.020 it for crimes that carry a sentence of three years or lower. Now that's actually a deeply concerning

00:53:12.540 precedent because of course trial by jury is one of the ancient rights of an Englishman.

00:53:19.100 Well, sorry. What was, what was the important part that Josh wanted to get back to? Oh, sorry.

00:53:25.100 Oh, I was just going to mention that, uh, when it comes to areas outside of politics, people, um,

00:53:31.020 are more than happy to admit, uh, that there is a link between genetic proximity. So, um, here's Reuters,

00:53:39.900 uh, in 2014 saying, if your friends feel like family, there's a good reason for it. And they

00:53:44.140 acknowledge that people prefer people who are genetically related to them and treat them better,

00:53:49.420 more likely to do favors for them, more likely to associate with them. Uh, and all of the things

00:53:54.140 that you would expect a reasonable person to admit, but you know, when you apply this to politics,

00:53:58.940 that doesn't happen. That was all I was going to say is that the Birkin concentric circles.

00:54:02.860 Exactly. Right. Yeah. Okay. So, um, yeah, so let's, let's talk about, um, the, the, the point of David

00:54:10.940 Lammy coming out and saying, well, look, we're going to abolish trial by jury for crimes that are three

00:54:15.740 years or lower for their sentencing. And they're just going to be judged by a single judge who will,

00:54:22.700 for bureaucratic efficiency sake, be able to do that. Now, so let's, let's talk about the trial by

00:54:27.900 jury. So the Anglo-Saxons had something called the shire court or the moot court, uh, which is a

00:54:33.100 meeting of, uh, local administrators, um, uh, free men, uh, the shire reeve, the earl, magnates,

00:54:42.940 you know, the church. And so they would come together and decide questions of law. This is the

00:54:47.740 sort of earliest roots of what we would consider to be trial by jury. And as you can imagine, it was,

00:54:53.660 well, kind of, uh, how to describe sort of, um, um, inclusive, right? So the, the free men get

00:55:02.260 together with the men of rank and they discuss and in a very sort of proto way go through what

00:55:10.000 is kind of like a jury. It's not what we would consider to be a modern jury, of course, because

00:55:14.440 this was over a thousand years ago. It's also very, especially for the time, uh, very democratic

00:55:20.660 and an expression of a kind of aristocratic bottom up idea of where authority, uh, originates

00:55:30.680 from. And it's a very English idea. This idea. It's a very Germanic idea. Very, very Germanic.

00:55:35.820 I'll come to that. It can kind of be traced back as well to the Indo-Europeans. I'm going to touch

00:55:41.040 on sort of the ancient Roman accounts of the Germans and the like. I wasn't, I wasn't going

00:55:45.260 to, but basically the, the ancient German accounts are supported by the way the Anglo-Saxons

00:55:49.260 lived, but also the Franks. So the Normans brought with them something called the Frankish

00:55:53.720 inquest, right? Uh, this involved summoning a group of local men under oath to answer questions

00:55:58.860 about land ownership, taxation, wrongdoing, whatever. And this, this is the more formal

00:56:03.620 beginning of the concept of trial by jury. Uh, William the Conqueror used sworn inquests in

00:56:09.260 the Doomsday Book. Um, and then you have Henry the 11th, uh, Henry the Second's, not

00:56:14.400 the 11th. Henry the Second's, uh, legal reforms, which effectively create trial by jury as we

00:56:20.000 understand it today. Uh, in the Grand Assies of 1166, which allowed a land dispute to be settled

00:56:24.800 by 12 sworn knights or free men. Uh, so if you were a yeoman in England, you would be called to one

00:56:31.140 of these juries as well as if you're a knight. And then you have the Assies of Clarendon in 1166,

00:56:35.680 which establishes the Grand Jury, uh, where local men were required to report under oath who in their

00:56:40.120 community was suspected of crimes. You had the Petite Jury, uh, by the late 12th century, groups

00:56:44.820 of locals, eventually 12, we used to decide whether guilt was, uh, whether a person was guilty

00:56:49.600 and not to merely accuse people. So these developments essentially are the beginning of

00:56:55.060 what we call, uh, in fact, the formalization of what we call a jury trial. And of course,

00:56:59.300 then we come to the Magna Carta. I didn't get a picture for some reason. Uh, then we come to the

00:57:03.580 Magna Carta in 1215. You know what the Magna Carta looks like. Just, yeah, there you go.

00:57:07.400 I hate it in your mind. Yeah. We know you can, Lotus Eater's audience.

00:57:11.220 The jury trial in the Magna Carta becomes a right. A right of Englishmen. It's Article 39.

00:57:18.080 Quote, no free man shall be seized or imprisoned or stripped of his rights or possessions or

00:57:21.680 outlawed or exiled or deprived of his standing in any way, nor will we proceed with force against

00:57:27.780 him or send others to do so except by the lawful judgment of his equals or the law of the land.

00:57:33.060 This is very significant because it goes from an informal contract between the governed and the

00:57:39.860 governing party, so to speak. Yes. And now it's formalized in the Magna Carta. Yes, it is explicitly

00:57:47.180 formalized. You will not, you will not have any force done against you except with a judgment of

00:57:53.800 your peers. And this, of course, is one of what, I was going to say is, was, or is, you know,

00:58:00.520 theoretically, one of the few remaining provisions of the Magna Carta that's still enforcing English

00:58:05.200 law. There are other things that happen. In 1215, the church also bans trial by ordeal.

00:58:10.400 So jury trial becomes the standard method of proof of guilt or whatnot. And this becomes,

00:58:19.380 innocence, yeah. I can't even imagine the word anymore. I don't believe in it anymore. I've

00:58:24.860 seen too many crimes. You do this job for long enough and it's like, you know, is anyone really

00:58:29.120 innocent? You know, show me the man and I'll show you the crime, Harry. But then this, this

00:58:34.820 then becomes a core component of what is known to be the rights of Englishmen. And these come

00:58:39.100 from, of course, the Anglo-Saxon tradition. So back in like 600, 700, you've got customary

00:58:44.060 rights and obligations and legal procedures, as we covered. Then you get Alfred the Great's

00:58:47.520 Legal Reforms in 1890, which emphasise the rule of law, the right to some sort of legal

00:58:52.760 process, even though they don't have a tribal jury, and the limits to royal power. And then,

00:58:56.920 of course, you have these from the Norman Conquest. But in 1258, you get the provisions

00:59:00.080 of Oxford, which forces Henry III to accept constraints and forces him to convene regular

00:59:07.480 parliaments. In 1295, you get the model parliament, which establishes the principle that the king

00:59:12.300 consults with the commons, as well as the noble and clergy, as in the common, yeoman, the

00:59:15.780 free men of England. 1354, you get the Statute of Westminster, which is the first use of the

00:59:21.160 phrase due process of law and statutory form, which reinforces personal liberty against

00:59:25.540 arbitrary arrest. In 1628, you get a petition of rights. So that's no taxation without parliament,

00:59:30.140 no forced loans, no imprisonment without stated charges, no quartering of soldiers in private

00:59:33.780 homes. In 1641, you get the abolition of the Star Chamber, which was basically the king's

00:59:38.480 personal torture chamber. In 1651, the English Civil War ends, but that establishes the sovereignty

00:59:44.740 of parliament. That's where it all starts to go wrong. Well, I mean, I don't know, actually.

00:59:49.240 Like, it seems to be after, a lot, far after this actually goes wrong.

00:59:54.220 It's the case of 500 years out, yeah. Like, there are other points, right? There are other

00:59:57.200 things. In 1679, you get habeas corpus, which means the king can't just hold you for an indefinite

01:00:01.800 period of time. In 1689, you get the English Bill of Rights. And in 1701, you get the Act

01:00:06.460 of Settlement, and suddenly you can see how the Americans got their constitution. It all

01:00:11.080 comes out of these innovations, slowly but surely accruing in England as the rights of

01:00:17.120 Englishmen. So let's talk about David Lammy. Now, David Lammy is a...

01:00:24.180 Our glorious history, Lammy.

01:00:30.180 Well, he's currently the Secretary of State for Justice.

01:00:32.300 I know, I know. I know. I'm not saying it's your fault, Carl. Just life is full of...

01:00:37.440 It's funny, though. ...infinite disappointments.

01:00:39.860 Because for anyone, if you're not aware of David Lammy, he is primarily known in England

01:00:45.660 as just being a buffoon. He's the moron who thinks that, you know, Henry VIII's son was

01:00:50.860 Henry VII, and things like this. Just so many different clips of him acting like a moron.

01:00:56.800 There's no point...

01:00:57.180 Lester was a form of blue cheese.

01:00:59.120 Did he?

01:01:00.360 It was the same mastermind.

01:01:01.880 Jesus Christ.

01:01:02.720 Some of the answers are really painful.

01:01:04.980 David Lammy's just a moron, right? And it's fine, it would be fine if he was just a backbench

01:01:10.040 moron, right? For Tottenham.

01:01:11.940 Now he's Deputy Prime Minister.

01:01:13.760 And the Lord Chancellor, Secretary of State for Justice, and Deputy Prime Minister, as you

01:01:19.660 say. And he's previously been the Foreign Secretary, which was amusing. And it's like, how are the

01:01:23.700 Labour Party scraping the bottom of the barrel? Like, that's right. Like, if you need David

01:01:28.040 Lammy to occupy these positions, you're in trouble.

01:01:30.380 You know what I think it is? It's because the Labour frontbench has been very, very white

01:01:36.240 to middle class for a very long time, and they're probably doing it to not look like hypocrites.

01:01:40.660 No doubt, no doubt.

01:01:41.880 Is he an improvement or downgrade from Olange, as Deputy Prime Minister?

01:01:50.540 Well, I mean, she didn't try to abolish trial by jury.

01:01:53.960 So she just didn't get around to it? I'll take Angela Rayner.

01:01:56.660 I don't think it would be in her constitution, mate. You know, like, I don't think she would

01:01:59.960 have thought, oh, we need to get rid of these jury trials. But that's what Lammy has unironically

01:02:03.760 done. So just a quick background on Lammy, right? So Lammy is, of course, the consequence

01:02:08.280 of the Windrush generation. He was born in 1972 in a hospital in North London to Guyanese

01:02:13.460 parents. That's the one colony we had in South America, for anyone who doesn't know.

01:02:20.400 And his four siblings were raised solely by his mother after his father left the family

01:02:23.920 when he was 12.

01:02:24.600 And so he grew up in Tottenham, went to Downhill's primary school. He was awarded an Inner London

01:02:34.000 Education Authority choral scholarship to St. Peterborough Cathedral and received a private

01:02:38.820 school education at the King's School in Peterborough. So essentially, they were like, oh, right,

01:02:42.780 he's black. We will put him through the education system. So he studied at the School of Oriental

01:02:48.860 and African Studies at the University of London, got 2-1 in law, called to the bar in 1994,

01:02:53.780 went to study at Harvard University. He became the first black Briton to attend Harvard Law

01:02:57.660 School, studied for a master's degree in law, and graduated in 1997. After Harvard, Lammy

01:03:03.100 was employed as an attorney at various places, and then he ends up joining the Labour Party

01:03:08.360 and ends up in charge of the legal system of the country. So he's not our best and brightest.

01:03:14.040 He seems to be a bit of a diversity hire, frankly. I mean, Harvard at the time was a

01:03:19.280 bit notorious for it, so. Yeah. I was going to say, I'm surprised he managed to get into

01:03:23.280 Harvard Law School after only getting a 2-1. Yeah. Again, all of these things, honestly,

01:03:28.900 David Lammy's entire career seems to be about failing upwards. Genuinely. Also, these days,

01:03:33.620 getting a scholarship from Harvard isn't that difficult. Even I got offered one. Yeah, but

01:03:36.940 we're talking about, what, the early 90s here? Yeah, 1995. You would expect there to have

01:03:41.240 been higher standards 30 years ago. I suppose. But anyway, so David Lammy, born and raised in

01:03:46.960 the country, you would think he would have integrated. Especially when he was born, Britain

01:03:53.280 was 97.5% white British. It's not like he, you know, had the option of living in a diverse

01:04:00.300 London that was only 30% English or whatever. No, he had to live around English people. He

01:04:05.080 had to imbibe the culture. And to be honest with you, he is very much a product of the country.

01:04:10.200 Like, if you were to drop David Lammy in Africa, I think it'd be the funniest reality TV documentary

01:04:15.040 ever. Watching him actually experience Africa, right? I would pay good money to watch that

01:04:20.140 because you know that he'd be like, why? What? Oh, you know, he would have no idea it'd be

01:04:24.100 total fish out of water, right? But there is also the question of his feeling of belonging

01:04:31.240 and attachment. Because this is something that has come up many times. And I remember Lammy's

01:04:36.440 legal background as well. That'll come up later. So you may remember that in 2020 he wrote a book

01:04:41.060 called Tribes because he had done genetic testing on himself and discovered that he came from a

01:04:46.480 series of tribes in sort of West Africa, sub-Saharan tribes in my house. Somebody sent this book into

01:04:50.900 the office and it's on my desk. Do not send any more copies in, please. We've already got a copy,

01:04:55.560 don't worry. And he found, of course, that he comes from various tribes. These were involved in slave

01:05:00.640 trading and that's how his ancestors ended up going to British Guyana because they were captured

01:05:04.780 in some sort of raid, obviously, and shipped out. And so, okay, that's interesting. But the fact

01:05:12.480 that he's doing this and he's written an entire book about his own genetic ancestry shows that

01:05:17.840 there's a kind of disconnect, right? It shows a lack of belonging. He feels like a fish out of water.

01:05:22.100 And so what's this fair to do to him?

01:05:24.100 It's also, like, interesting that subtitle, if that's the subject of the book, how our need to

01:05:28.200 belong can make or break society. Like, he's taking his own neuroticism on his own background

01:05:34.540 in history and trying to apply it universally.

01:05:38.140 Yes. And it's because, honestly, we didn't have a good framework for integration. Because the

01:05:44.100 Americans at least have a narrative, right? You've got a story. You come to America, you work hard,

01:05:47.880 you sing the national anthem, you wave the stars and stripes, you can be an American. And the Americans

01:05:51.640 just accept you like that. Well, Britain wasn't the same. Britain was an old racist imperial power

01:05:56.360 that had literally, it was a racially hierarchical empire. And in 1948, no, equality. Well, sorry,

01:06:03.580 what are you talking about? That's just not the British experience of interactions with other

01:06:08.060 peoples. And so this has been kind of imposed upon everyone. And he would have honestly been on the

01:06:14.140 raw end of it. He would have on the wrong side of this, which isn't, I think, fair to have done to

01:06:18.360 him. So you can see why he's an insane leftist who wants the promise that was made when his parents

01:06:24.020 came over to this country that has not been fulfilled. But it's like, okay, well, you know,

01:06:27.980 lots to discuss there. But the point is, he personally doesn't identify as an English person.

01:06:35.100 Now, there are going to be people saying, well, he's black, obviously he doesn't. Well,

01:06:38.260 you know, whatever, you know, I don't want to get into the weeds on that one. But you get this from

01:06:43.240 2018. As Caribbean people, we are not going to forget our history. We don't just want to hear

01:06:50.160 an apology. We want reparation. Okay. I mean, he's traced his ancestry back. Surely you can find

01:06:56.820 the ancestor, like the descendants of that tribe that kidnapped his family. And extract reparations

01:07:02.140 from them. Get the money from them, right? West Africa is going to have a really big bill.

01:07:05.860 It is. But the point is, this was in 2018 at the height of woke, when he decided, oh,

01:07:11.520 I can make something out of being woke. You know, we are Caribbean people. We will not forget our

01:07:15.100 history. We demand reparations. Right. So you're not British. That's fine. I accept it from your

01:07:20.720 framing, David. That's what you are saying when you say that. Because otherwise, you'd be like,

01:07:25.280 I demand reparations from myself. You know, it doesn't make sense. Conceptually, you have to be

01:07:30.420 declaring yourself to be an outsider. And therefore, what can we look at you as other than an outsider?

01:07:37.480 Well, he's sort of got this Schrodinger's identity thing going on that many

01:07:41.140 groups have, whereby they identify which, with whichever identity is most expedient to them

01:07:47.000 at the time. You know what? I don't know. Because I mean, like he, when he, when he became the

01:07:52.820 foreign secretary, he took down a picture of the queen and put up a pan-African flag.

01:08:00.340 So actually, I think that he's not necessarily confusing his identity here.

01:08:05.360 But even there, you know, he's describing himself as Caribbean, which is something distinct from

01:08:10.220 Africa.

01:08:11.220 Well, if it helps.

01:08:13.860 I mean, if it's the pan-African flag, it's trying to unify all of the diaspora along with

01:08:18.580 the people on the continent.

01:08:21.600 So it's just one of those things where it's like, okay, look, I would be happy to say,

01:08:26.300 yes, Lammy is obviously a product of Britain, because sending him to Africa feels cruel.

01:08:31.200 But also funny. But I would be happy to accept David Lammy as British, right? He's born in

01:08:39.920 Britain. He's had a British education in the law. So I know that he knows it. Well, not

01:08:46.140 too well, apparently.

01:08:47.540 I know that he should know it. And yet we've got to the point where he's like, no, I'm a

01:08:52.700 Caribbean. I'm not like you. I put up the pan-African flag over the queen. So I'm just

01:08:58.740 to be clear. I'm declaring my flag is against you. And now I want to scrap jury trials for

01:09:05.280 sentences less than three years. And it's like, okay, I'm sorry that there is an ethnic

01:09:11.240 dimension to this. Because for us, I tweeted about this because I was talking about this

01:09:16.680 all yesterday because I was just livid, absolutely livid that this would even, I mean, an inconceivable,

01:09:22.720 inconceivable, five years ago, this headline. I mean, can you imagine? At any point in previous

01:09:30.320 British politics, I'm saying, yeah, so we're going to scrap jury trials. It would just never

01:09:36.440 happen.

01:09:36.920 Again, it's all, I mean, outside of the ethnic dimension of it. And I do think that Lammy

01:09:42.600 would be like the guy to do this. As we can see, because he is. And he doesn't have the

01:09:49.880 same attachment or sentiment to it that we do. But I do imagine as well that this was

01:09:56.180 a more general bureaucratic decision.

01:09:58.680 Well, I'll get to that in a second, actually. So there are lots of things that you can do

01:10:03.440 for bureaucracy. And like I said, we'll come to that in a minute. But it was Feras, I was

01:10:07.760 tweeting about this all yesterday. And Feras just replied, he doesn't feel the same way

01:10:12.280 about it that you do. He doesn't understand why you feel this way. And it's because to

01:10:16.420 me, this is essentially a spiritual crime, right? My feelings as an Englishman are that

01:10:22.540 this is sacred. You would never, like, you would never even think of being like, oh yeah,

01:10:27.960 we're just going to abolish trial by jury. I would never think about going beyond that.

01:10:32.120 And yet for David Lammy, that isn't the issue at all. Because as you said, it is about

01:10:36.420 managerial efficiency. So at the moment, there are 78,329 court cases outstanding. If we go

01:10:43.340 back to the chart about immigration, and as you've seen the population going up, well,

01:10:50.100 as the population has gone up, everything is getting worse. The NHS appointments are getting

01:10:54.580 worse, the roads are getting worse, the trains are getting worse, and the jury system is getting

01:10:58.940 worse. The criminal justice system is getting worse. Like in all things in Britain, demand is

01:11:03.600 outplacing supply. Because actually, bringing in somewhere around the region of 20 million new

01:11:08.360 foreigners wasn't a good idea. There is a genuine problem in just the logistics of the thing,

01:11:18.080 if nothing else. Now, David has explained himself. He said, look, victims have waited long enough.

01:11:24.320 Tradition, for its own sake, cannot stand in the way of justice. We are taking the bold decisions we

01:11:29.480 needed to fix the emergency in our court and secure swift of justice for victims. Now, that, I mean,

01:11:34.700 to me, I'm going to self-censor on what that makes me feel.

01:11:41.340 It's very sacrilegious to, this is an actual, like, mythology. Forget the Windrush, this is

01:11:46.720 actually something that is foundational to our national sense of self. And because he's not of

01:11:52.460 our people, he just doesn't, it doesn't compute, as Firas says, he just doesn't understand why it's

01:11:57.800 important to us. Yeah. He just doesn't understand. And so I'm genuinely furious about this. And I'm

01:12:05.900 trying to keep my calm, because I could easily stop ranting and raving. And then, you know, he

01:12:13.380 keeps going on. Like, so look, and I'm not saying there aren't problems. There obviously are problems,

01:12:16.940 right? If you're raped today, as Natalie points out, you could be waiting until 2030 for a trial.

01:12:20.920 Yeah, that's bad. Don't get me wrong. Maybe stop importing rapists, right? That would be a good start.

01:12:26.760 Whoa. Crazy. I know, I know. Have you got a means test study proving that? Or should we just abolish

01:12:32.860 the Magna Carta? That would be a lot quicker. So we could have executive trials done by woke judges

01:12:39.380 who can just shuffle you through the courts, guilty, guilty, guilty, snapping me, just like they did with

01:12:44.160 the Southport rioters. Because what they did is they encouraged them to plead guilty, though they didn't

01:12:48.740 need a jury. And so the judge can be like, right, maximum sentence, maximum sentence. And those sentences

01:12:53.620 were about two years long, right? The sentence. So what David Lammy is proposing is that the next

01:12:59.060 time a Southport riot happens, well, these will, which it absolutely will, you know, and you absolutely

01:13:04.560 know it will from some Welsh choir boy, the rioters won't even need they even if they claim to be

01:13:13.160 innocent, they won't have a jury to judge them guilty or not. And the ones that did, there were only a

01:13:18.960 handful of people who did plead innocence, and they were all acquitted. All of them were acquitted.

01:13:24.400 It was only the ones who pled guilty the judges were like, right, making an example, maximum

01:13:27.740 sentences. There's no incentive to plead guilty in the British justice system anyway. Of course not.

01:13:32.640 But the point is, because they're less than three-year sentences, that would include anyone

01:13:37.760 who riots in the future. The state will come down on you, you will have nothing. It's also a weird

01:13:42.860 incentive to commit as much crime as possible to get over the three-year threshold.

01:13:46.740 That's a good point, actually.

01:13:49.420 To be seen to commit. All of them are going to be claiming that they were the ones leading

01:13:55.120 the riots next time. Next time that this happens, to try and push the sentence.

01:13:59.520 It's going to be like fake murders going on, so they get a jury, but actually it's like

01:14:03.460 no one actually...

01:14:03.940 That's a great point. It totally incentivizes criminality from the English point of view,

01:14:08.520 because you're like, well, yeah, I do want to be judged by a jury of my peers, obviously.

01:14:12.200 Um, but that's the point. Anyway, the point is...

01:14:15.360 It's kind of similar to when Peter Hitchens, he is not in Abolition of Liberty, he took

01:14:20.560 the chapter out, but in the Brief History of Crime, he has a chapter on the death penalty,

01:14:25.420 and argued that removing the death penalty actually incentivized criminals to kill witnesses.

01:14:31.740 100%.

01:14:32.180 Because if you killed a witness when there was a death penalty, if you all got caught,

01:14:36.640 you're all going to the noose.

01:14:37.820 Yeah.

01:14:38.820 Without the noose's incentive, well, I mean, we could get caught, but we won't die.

01:14:44.260 You might not if the witness is dead.

01:14:45.480 Yeah, but we might not.

01:14:46.460 Yeah, exactly. No, you're exactly right.

01:14:48.000 Anyway, so the point being, uh, he's putting victims first, which is the moral argument that

01:14:56.100 they are making. You can see me, uh, ratioing him on, under every tweet here, because I've

01:15:00.400 been furious, furious about this. Look at this, 179 to my 1.4 thousand. You know, that was only,

01:15:08.360 that was a smaller tweet, but yeah, you can see how angry I've been about this. Um, but

01:15:12.340 he wrote this in the Times, and I, I absolutely adore this, uh, this argument, um, because

01:15:17.860 it's mad, right? So, obviously, David Lammy, uh, says this. I remember studying the Bleak

01:15:23.800 House for my A-Levels, that's a Charles Dickens novel, and the Jaundice and Jaundice case

01:15:27.820 went on and on. That's a fictional case. We cannot go back to a Victorian system in which

01:15:33.940 all new people who are the victims of crime don't get justice. That was made up. That was

01:15:37.620 a fictional case.

01:15:39.000 Charles Dickens wrote it that way.

01:15:40.840 Sure. It was a narrative plot. And so, he literally says, uh, the system is not working

01:15:50.780 for you, and, uh, elsewhere he says that this, this is about saving the system itself, using

01:15:57.340 the precedent of a Charles Dickens court case, and, uh, frankly, the, the fact that it's the

01:16:05.880 system itself that he's concerned about. He, he wants to save the current managerial

01:16:10.220 paradigm. And actually, the easiest thing to do would be to dispose of tradition for its

01:16:14.120 own sake, in order to just appoint the judges who have it now in executive power over the

01:16:18.980 court. And, uh, just mad. Absolutely mad. And I'm obviously completely against it. And

01:16:24.100 so is, uh, Tulip Sadiq, at least by some degree, because she claims that her verdict was flawed

01:16:30.020 and farcical because she was found guilty by a judge and not a jury. In Bangladesh.

01:16:34.100 So, interesting how that works, isn't it? Uh, but you know who the dark horse who came

01:16:39.820 out against David Lammy on this was?

01:16:42.220 Jeremy Corbyn?

01:16:43.220 Diane Abbott.

01:16:44.220 Oh.

01:16:45.600 Based Diane Abbott.

01:16:47.740 Also, uh, Windrush, uh, or a second generation Windrush, uh, person, born and raised in the UK.

01:16:55.760 Okay. And, uh, and she, uh, she literally quotes Keir Starmer saying, the right to trial

01:17:01.600 by jury is an important factor in the delicate balance between the power of the state and

01:17:04.160 the power of the individual. Keir Starmer in 1992. So, honestly, based Diane, well done.

01:17:10.100 Like, would have rather you been the Justice Secretary than Lammy, uh, by a long way.

01:17:14.580 Use yourself.

01:17:15.300 Yeah. Obviously, Lammy has defended this in the past because he's a moron. Um, but the, the,

01:17:20.420 the thing that I was frustrated with was Kemi Badenock's response as well. And I, again,

01:17:25.200 can't help but notice that these are all African immigrants or second generation immigrants

01:17:29.540 who are not actually addressing the issue as we as Englishmen actually feel it. Lammy

01:17:34.360 is today scrapping the same jury trials he once lauded. It's an attack on our democracy

01:17:38.300 and on our individual rights.

01:17:40.080 Ooh. I don't like that framing at all.

01:17:41.700 Exactly. Modern, libtard framing, right? No, no. This is an attack on the Magna Carta,

01:17:46.800 Kemi. Right? I realize that you literally are a, uh, literally an immigrant who came over

01:17:53.420 a few years ago, but this is an attack on like, you know, our ancestors from 800 years ago.

01:17:58.780 Yeah. They didn't have modern democracy. Yeah, exactly. You know, or individual rights.

01:18:03.540 Well, you know, the way you, no, no, no. This is an attack on the rights of Englishmen

01:18:06.240 and that's the true spiritual malaise here. David Lammy doesn't get it.

01:18:10.880 Kemi Badenock doesn't get it. Weirdly, Diane Abbott gets it.

01:18:13.580 So, you know, I'm not saying there's no integration, um, but this, again, it would

01:18:21.640 be, it would be horrible. Model minority.

01:18:24.480 It would be horrible to dump Diane Abbott in Africa. Like, it would be a horrible thing

01:18:29.000 to do. Like, she can't even find a right shoe.

01:18:31.600 I feel like, I feel like it's cruel enough.

01:18:31.940 This is another series of that game show, Carl. We've got at least two series planned

01:18:35.600 now. I feel like it's cruel enough to let her go out and accompany it.

01:18:38.780 I agree. When Kit Stun was like, I'm going to kick Diane Abbott at that party, I was like,

01:18:42.760 I remember at the time, I was like, that's a bit harsh. Like, come on, it's Diane Abbott.

01:18:46.380 Where else is she?

01:18:47.080 Yeah, exactly. It's like kicking your nan out, right? Like, no, get out now. It's like, where

01:18:51.260 is she going? Anyway, he didn't kick her out in the end, you know, human empathy won

01:18:55.420 out, um, finally.

01:18:57.160 Shockingly with Starmer.

01:18:58.260 Yeah, um, so anyway, so just to, just to finish, so this, this is how we got to where

01:19:02.620 we are. Um, it was this sequence of events from the decolonization of the British

01:19:07.060 Empire, the, uh, changing of the laws to make them more liberal and the importation

01:19:12.200 of a bunch of foreigners before the laws are restricted, which have allowed people of foreign

01:19:17.620 ancestry, who proudly describe themselves as foreign, to get to the point where they're

01:19:22.460 going to, or at least try, to abolish, in part, our right to a trial by jury. Now, it's

01:19:29.540 probably not going to happen. I think there is actually going to be a Labour Bank bench

01:19:32.300 revolt over this, um, led by Diane Abbott, actually, but again, based Diane Abbott. Um, there

01:19:39.160 will be a Labour backbench revolt over this. I don't think it's going to happen, but we

01:19:42.220 shouldn't be in a position where we are discussing whether we're going to be abolishing the Magna

01:19:46.420 Carta or not, right? This is, this is not appropriate. And so, actually, the question

01:19:50.240 is, should we have foreign, and we can say born overseas, or we can talk about ethnicity

01:19:56.700 in this regard as well, because I think this is an ethnic issue, um, should this be permissible?

01:20:02.460 And so, Lucy White, I don't think is wrong to have raised the subject, and I think everyone

01:20:07.740 responding to her has not really thought about the context in which the question has arisen.

01:20:13.520 The context was from a world that has long gone, and even in that world, they essentially

01:20:18.460 were saying no, which is why they changed the Nationality Act to something completely

01:20:22.680 different. So, I think that, uh, there's a lot to think about on that. Um, should we go

01:20:27.540 to the video comments, Samson? And in the meantime, Kevin says, question regarding immigrant workers

01:20:34.800 coming to the UK. Having worked in Asia, in order to get a job, I have to provide my documents

01:20:38.320 to prove my eligibility to work. Oh, we've not got any video, oh wait. We've got loads,

01:20:42.520 uh, but let me go through this quickly. Um, so he's got loads of documents. This is no doubt

01:20:47.140 why we end up with nurses, uh, oh, foreigners coming from Asia to Africa to work, and the UK

01:20:51.720 do not need the same, and he lists, like, half a dozen documents. This is no doubt why we end

01:20:56.000 up nurses who had proxies sit their final exams and doctors working in the NHS for 23 years

01:20:59.880 who had never trained or qualified as a doctor. So countries are sending people to work in

01:21:03.360 the UK to place higher standards of proof of qualification than we put on people. Yeah,

01:21:07.380 it's mad. It's absolutely mad. And this is, this is the problem with all of it, though,

01:21:11.400 right? The, it's all essentially predicated on the assumption that the British will be

01:21:16.540 running everything, because it's all predicated on old imperial ideas that are being sort of

01:21:22.440 inappropriately remodelled for the liberal era. It's sort of like a Singaporean view that,

01:21:27.820 um, if you, you require far more authoritarian measures, the more diversity you have.

01:21:34.720 Yes. Sorry, I, um, I didn't go through the soup chats, I wanted to get through all of that

01:21:38.040 first as well. Yeah, I, I just want to do one, one very, very quick. So, uh, uh, somebody says,

01:21:43.120 uh, Charles Francis, Windrush was built by Blom and Voss back when it was still German.

01:21:47.540 Right. The yard that built the Bismarck, it did more damage. There is even more irony to the

01:21:52.700 whole thing. So that company that operated them during the Windrush thing, uh, New Zealand shipping

01:21:58.520 company don't exist anymore. They were absorbed into P&O cruises. That is one of the most bitter

01:22:07.920 ironies I've ever heard. So boomers can go on their cruises. Yep. Drunk Changely says,

01:22:14.140 can you guys check on Dan? He left the last podcast martyring about milking and I haven't

01:22:17.560 heard from him since. Uh, I don't know what that's about. I'm afraid. I was on that one.

01:22:22.340 Um, what was that about actually? Uh, oh, he was on about Danes. That's why he wants to

01:22:27.860 milk Danes. No, no, it's that they put, they've put a threshold for, um, IQ for sperm. Oh,

01:22:34.880 right. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Uh, Osudor says, so they are trying to equalize crime rates, crime

01:22:40.440 rates by ethnicity with the jury issue. Um, no, what they're trying to do is just essentially

01:22:46.100 save the system that's destroying us. Uh, and they've decided that your ancestral rights

01:22:50.940 are the things that can be sacrificed because I mean, tradition for its own sake, can't have

01:22:54.140 that. Uh, thank you by the way, Eddie. Um, based ape says, we're building the inverse

01:22:58.340 empire. It's still our burden to civilize the world, but invading their land is mean. So

01:23:02.560 we'll move every person on earth to this tiny Island so we can rule over them here. Uh, yeah.

01:23:06.200 And because we want to be liberal about it, they can rule over us is literally the way

01:23:11.100 that this is working. And I'm sorry, it just shouldn't. Uh, we do indeed hold the record

01:23:14.760 for the shortest war in history. Uh, we hold, we, we heard that there was slave trading in

01:23:18.500 Zanzibar. So we shelled them 45 minutes and they gave up. It was amazing. Um, Johnny says

01:23:24.720 land acknowledgement. I live on land, which was a former British colony. I'm eternally grateful

01:23:28.440 for it. Well, many people are actually, uh, Aquila says, Harry for the theme tune fund.

01:23:33.880 Uh, Oh yeah. I still need to do a theme tune or something. Yeah. Yeah. We need copyright

01:23:38.520 free. I'm just going to write something absurdly heavy. Just possibly not fit the, uh, no blast

01:23:46.920 beats. You need a sort of top gear esque thing. Let's go to the video cards. Yeah. I'm

01:23:54.320 thinking Scotty and our top story today, Carl Benjamin, famed media personality is accused

01:23:58.600 of going woke. You could look at it from a woke traditionalist perspective. Dare I say I'm

01:24:03.600 for diversity. Well, I've got six cats and my wife wants more babies, but instead we

01:24:09.360 end up getting cats. That's what a woke traditionalist is. Stay tuned for that as well as our following

01:24:14.540 story. Why are the far right obsessed with the dangerous conspiracy theory known as malicious

01:24:18.240 editing and how is it linked to Russian disinformation? This feels like it was sponsored by James Lindsay.

01:24:24.600 Pretty compelling evidence, Carl. I mean, I, I, I await my trial by jury. I found this interesting

01:24:32.940 list on the UK's website. Apparently between the months of April and June of this year, only

01:24:38.560 712 people were found illegally working in the country. Now these 712 are a little bit ambitious.

01:24:45.700 What they should have been doing is not working and just getting free money from the government.

01:24:50.040 Duh. But look at the list of these companies. You'll notice some patterns.

01:24:55.160 Yeah. There's one called Goyal Supermarket. I saw that.

01:24:58.000 Yeah, it's an Indian name. Uh, let's go to the next one.

01:25:04.320 I'm too sexy for my love. Too sexy for my love. Love's going to leave me.

01:25:10.740 With Nigel Farage, I'm too sexy for my shirt.

01:25:14.240 Too sexy for my shirt. Too sexy for my shirt. So sexy it hurts.

01:25:20.560 I do know the Fairbrass Brothers that produced that hit. You know, I'm too sexy for my shirt.

01:25:25.720 You've got to get your shirt off.

01:25:27.300 Sorry, guys!

01:25:32.200 Thanks for the reminder.

01:25:37.520 Yeah.

01:25:38.060 That's our future Prime Minister there.

01:25:40.120 To be fair, he handled it pretty well. It was better than George Galloway on Big Brother.

01:25:43.520 George Galloway was on Big Brother.

01:25:47.200 It's worse than you think.

01:25:50.600 For those who know that...

01:25:52.040 No.

01:25:55.460 Here we are.

01:25:58.280 Here is...

01:26:00.520 Happy boy.

01:26:05.720 Dog playing in the snow.

01:26:07.900 And now, dog back in the house.

01:26:10.320 Well, here it is.

01:26:15.320 The second snowfall in New York.

01:26:20.080 Or at least in my area of New York.

01:26:26.680 Just finished snow blowing the driveway.

01:26:29.720 At least you're going to have a white Christmas.

01:26:33.840 Yeah.

01:26:34.900 There are two kinds of dogs in this world.

01:26:37.040 There are those who love the snow and go out there and you can't get them in.

01:26:40.020 And those who refuse to go out whatsoever.

01:26:42.040 Yeah.

01:26:43.260 There's no in between.

01:26:44.440 I do love snow.

01:26:45.600 It's a pain in the arse, but it looks gorgeous.

01:26:47.520 This is what I was talking about before we started.

01:26:50.580 Did you look up the George Galloway thing, by the way?

01:26:52.360 I've seen that the YouTube videos are coming up saying,

01:26:55.440 George Galloway, would you like me to be the cat scene?

01:26:58.620 Yeah, you can watch that.

01:26:59.800 Did he pretend to be a cat?

01:27:01.260 It's really awful.

01:27:03.620 Nigel Farage singing I'm Too Sexy and Taking Off Your Shirt is utterly milquetoast.

01:27:08.160 I guess I'm going to relive the cringiest moment in British TV history.

01:27:13.120 So anyway, yeah, let's go to the next video comment.

01:27:19.240 Kim Kardashian is stunned to learn her brain has low activity.

01:27:23.080 I'm less stunned.

01:27:24.120 I didn't expect for it to be scientifically proven though,

01:27:27.580 let alone bragged about publicly.

01:27:29.960 Wait, we get to see Kim Kardashian's brain?

01:27:32.580 I didn't even think it existed.

01:27:34.300 You can see the brain and then you're like,

01:27:36.420 oh, okay, I'm assuming that this is skull.

01:27:38.720 Otherwise, the entire exterior of it.

01:27:40.600 No, that is bra-

01:27:41.300 Look, there's the-

01:27:41.920 No, it is just her brain.

01:27:43.300 That's not her skull.

01:27:44.140 Oh my-

01:27:44.400 Look at this!

01:27:45.480 There's nothing going on in most of her brain.

01:27:50.260 Josh, you've looked at brains before.

01:27:52.320 I've even looked at my own.

01:27:53.440 Is that a pretty low activity brain that you see there?

01:27:56.960 It is a little bit alarming, to be honest.

01:28:04.240 I mean,

01:28:05.420 I've seen brains light up like a Christmas tree

01:28:08.740 and that's like one that's had a power cut there.

01:28:11.580 To be honest with you though,

01:28:13.060 I'm a bit envious.

01:28:15.460 It must be bliss.

01:28:16.780 Exactly.

01:28:17.340 It must be stupid and rich.

01:28:18.720 It's like the two best combinations.

01:28:20.220 Imagine how tranquil her days must be.

01:28:22.680 She doesn't think about, you know,

01:28:24.820 the futility of existence, does she?

01:28:26.340 Yeah, no nihilism for her.

01:28:27.680 She gets up, she looks at her bank account,

01:28:29.480 oh, $500 million or however much,

01:28:30.980 I don't know what she's worth,

01:28:31.800 but like, you know,

01:28:32.860 tens of millions of dollars.

01:28:33.820 Great, okay, I've got all the money I'll ever need.

01:28:35.780 Maybe I'll have a bath.

01:28:37.280 Maybe I'll just be unconcerned.

01:28:38.380 Maybe I'll go get a pedicure or whatever it is women get.

01:28:40.620 And all of the microplastics in her body

01:28:42.460 are slowly getting absorbed into her brain

01:28:44.240 and eroding what little cognition she has.

01:28:46.460 But just imagine how happy she is.

01:28:48.360 Imagine how nice her life is.

01:28:50.840 I'm envious of Kim Kardashian.

01:28:53.320 Is there another one?

01:28:54.860 I am.

01:28:55.860 No, that's right.

01:28:57.280 Stuart says,

01:28:57.880 didn't the communists during the early years

01:28:59.580 of the Soviet Union remodel the legal system

01:29:01.720 similar to what Lammy is trying?

01:29:04.520 Probably.

01:29:05.000 I haven't actually studied the communist legal system

01:29:07.300 in the Soviet Union.

01:29:08.260 I wouldn't be shocked.

01:29:09.220 It's probably just like judgment by commissar.

01:29:11.580 Yeah, absolutely.

01:29:12.120 Why wouldn't it be anything else?

01:29:13.420 Soviet Union's found you guilty,

01:29:14.780 now you're going to be shot.

01:29:15.720 Bye.

01:29:17.080 Steve says,

01:29:17.920 instead of abolishing the jury,

01:29:19.000 why not make them a professional jury?

01:29:20.380 A national body of jurors paid as much as they are now

01:29:22.620 to be sent to wherever they are needed.

01:29:24.200 It may not seem wise,

01:29:25.740 but it's not wise in the abolishing jury trials.

01:29:28.620 Well, I mean, that's actually not a bad suggestion

01:29:30.240 if we have to do anything.

01:29:32.180 But I would actually rather just suck it up, frankly.

01:29:35.900 I don't want to get rid of my right to trial by jury.

01:29:40.220 But also, I mean, I've seen them arguing

01:29:42.500 that they could, you know,

01:29:44.020 just hire more judges, you know,

01:29:46.860 create more trials to get through the backlog.

01:29:50.740 But then the question is,

01:29:51.700 why do we have a backlog?

01:29:52.460 Just throw out all the BS cases

01:29:54.800 that are to do with, like,

01:29:55.740 oh, somebody sent a text.

01:29:56.940 12,000 speech cases a year.

01:29:58.760 Yeah.

01:29:58.980 I mean, not for that 78,000.

01:30:00.420 Just throw the ones out

01:30:02.000 that are completely frivolous.

01:30:03.580 Loads of pointless crimes,

01:30:05.000 loads of foreigners that need not be here.

01:30:06.640 And so many people don't go anywhere anyway.

01:30:08.800 Exactly.

01:30:09.240 You know, they don't investigate

01:30:10.060 or anything like that.

01:30:10.700 It's just ridiculous.

01:30:12.760 Baron von Warhawk says,

01:30:13.640 They're out of their mind.

01:30:22.560 Yeah, absolutely mad.

01:30:24.460 Absolutely mad.

01:30:25.500 Jimbo says,

01:30:26.300 Well, I mean, he's had to think.

01:30:30.920 Imagine Lamming in an exam.

01:30:32.980 That must have been stress.

01:30:33.600 I mean, we can imagine it very clearly.

01:30:36.020 Do I just referring to the mastermind for him?

01:30:37.900 He was actually sweating there.

01:30:40.680 Yeah, exactly.

01:30:41.600 So I disagree with you, Jimbo.

01:30:43.900 He has definitely felt discomfort.

01:30:46.040 But if we let him usher in

01:30:47.140 a global digital fascist regime,

01:30:48.520 we deserve everything we get.

01:30:49.960 Yeah, I know.

01:30:50.540 I mean, like I said,

01:30:51.440 I don't think this is going to go anywhere.

01:30:52.540 But if this does,

01:30:54.660 I mean, I'm not happy at all.

01:30:56.480 I've got an honourable mention here

01:30:57.700 that I need to address.

01:30:58.520 Josh, the people demand monkey news.

01:31:00.820 I've already answered that call.

01:31:02.720 You just need to wait until around Christmas time.

01:31:06.220 There we go.

01:31:06.460 Yeah, the editors are just monkeying about

01:31:08.100 with it right now.

01:31:08.580 It might be worth adding something to it, though, right?

01:31:10.260 I mean, you know.

01:31:11.200 Kim Kardashian.

01:31:14.440 Now in Bonobo news.

01:31:16.480 Richard says,

01:31:17.380 The British government has always adjusted figures

01:31:18.860 on immigration crime.

01:31:19.720 Yeah.

01:31:20.380 Steve says,

01:31:21.280 The Minister of Transport at the time of Windrush

01:31:23.000 was James Callaghan.

01:31:24.500 I'm not saying any more.

01:31:26.340 Russian says,

01:31:27.000 You're on, Harry.

01:31:27.580 The winners of World War II are the banks.

01:31:29.340 I'll keep this comment on YouTube for any good thinking.

01:31:31.280 Yeah, we all...

01:31:32.280 Like, the banks, the profitees,

01:31:34.340 the people buying and selling the guns,

01:31:36.840 they're always the ones

01:31:38.000 who are actually winning from war.

01:31:40.160 Yeah.

01:31:40.500 Hector Rex also wants to know

01:31:41.840 if I fell asleep

01:31:42.680 and my daughter clocked me in the face again.

01:31:45.220 No, a dumbbell slipped in my hand

01:31:47.080 and I clocked myself in the face

01:31:48.540 with it by accident.

01:31:50.720 I don't know if that's better or worse,

01:31:52.220 to be honest.

01:31:52.820 At least if your daughter does it,

01:31:54.320 you're unconscious.

01:31:54.960 You can't defend yourself.

01:31:56.100 If you do it to yourself...

01:31:56.340 At least I know it was pure,

01:31:59.340 utter incompetence on my part

01:32:01.240 rather than what I assume is, like,

01:32:03.400 malice from my daughter.

01:32:05.760 Anyway, thank you for joining us, folks.

01:32:07.380 We will be back at the same time tomorrow,

01:32:09.180 so we'll see you then.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - December 03, 2025

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1309

Episode Stats

Length

Words per Minute

Word Count

Sentence Count

Misogynist Sentences

Hate Speech Sentences

Summary

Transcript