The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - Where Do We Go From Here？｜ Interview with Henry Martin

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to this Lotus Eaters interview. I'm Harry, joined today by returning guest Henry

00:00:06.720 Martin, otherwise known as Reactionary Reading Law. Thank you very much for coming into the

00:00:11.540 studio. It's a pleasure to have you again. It's a pleasure to be here. And if you're wondering

00:00:15.360 what this discussion is going to be about, last time Henry came in was to speak about his book

00:00:21.020 published through Imperium Press. Would you like to remind the audience of that? Yes, it's a book

00:00:25.760 called Political Lawfare, Practical Approaches, and it discusses the topic of political lawfare

00:00:32.300 in an academic sense and how it can be best used as a means of achieving political goals.

00:00:40.820 And it's a UK-US comparison, which if you read the first chapter, why I chose that model will

00:00:46.280 come clear. Yes, it's a very interesting book, very useful for anybody who's interested in that

00:00:51.440 subject and wants to have a greater depth of knowledge on it. You also on Substack and which

00:00:57.780 your book's available on Amazon and other retailers you've got your Substack reactionary

00:01:02.220 reading law yes so you can find him there but the last discussion that we had was about your book

00:01:08.200 but also it was back in December we were speaking about Restore Britain and the developments that

00:01:13.760 have been going on with that when it was still a political movement more of a pressure group

00:01:19.680 would you agree? Yes. And we've been discussing about the future of where we thought it was going

00:01:24.620 and I thought we'd get a nice catch up today because since then obviously there's been a lot

00:01:29.140 of developments. They've become a political party as of February. They have contested a number of

00:01:34.580 elections, Maker Field, the Greater Manchester Mayoral election most recently. And looking

00:01:41.800 through your sub stack and listening to some of the streams that you've been doing on some of the

00:01:47.460 policy papers. I know that you have a number of pertinent criticisms, which I think are very

00:01:54.380 useful for people to hear so that we can know where we're going with this and what we can do

00:01:59.840 to improve the situation going forwards and make meaningful political change or improve our

00:02:05.660 chances of making meaningful political change. So it would be good to have that discussion with you

00:02:11.240 now because you've got a good mind uh for this stuff yeah it's especially with my interest has

00:02:18.920 changed because i've basically written as far as i can tell everything that i think i can on things

00:02:25.880 like political lawfare and legal and political strategy and i've moved towards reviewing policy

00:02:33.880 and talking about policy and other approaches for legal people and government in a more

00:02:43.200 academic way.

00:02:44.220 And I do some of that stuff behind the scenes.

00:02:45.780 And when I started my Substack nearly five years ago, there wasn't really any either

00:02:54.040 anonymous or public right wing or whatever that even means now.

00:03:01.100 you could say nativist you could say conservative lawyers who are openly would talk about such

00:03:09.880 matters and other legal academics so whereas now there has been it's got a long way to go but a

00:03:19.180 little bit of a blogosphere that has been set up and been created by people who are either

00:03:27.880 interested in law because we're a legal academic or a practicing lawyer, like Michael Rayner's,

00:03:33.000 for example, I reviewed one of his suggestions or draft bills.

00:03:38.520 This was the most recent upload onto your Substack, wasn't it?

00:03:42.520 Yes. He had something which he called the Oblivion Act 2026, which was a

00:03:48.440 a draft bill that would require that legislation from, I believe, 1920 or thereabouts be justified

00:04:02.680 by the government departments or as set out in the legislation, it would be gotten rid of.

00:04:11.800 In terms of my review of that, I think it's an interesting idea. I'm a bit more conservative

00:04:17.720 in terms of getting rid of primary and secondary legislation

00:04:21.620 because as someone who is focused on an area of interest

00:04:29.900 is business law and regulations and that type of thing,

00:04:35.560 especially for things like energy and industry,

00:04:41.060 most regulations and legislation around that exists for a reason.

00:04:45.740 and yes, there is stuff that you can get rid of

00:04:49.620 and would improve the economy and the profitability of those interests

00:04:56.180 as well as those industries.

00:04:58.460 It's not something that should be done quickly

00:05:02.940 and my approach to repealing legislation

00:05:07.840 is that any government who wants to enact their own agenda

00:05:15.000 if it doesn't comply with the post-Blairite paradigm

00:05:19.820 is going to have to, before they go into government,

00:05:22.980 have a pretty substantial list of legislation

00:05:25.760 they want to get rid of or amend

00:05:30.020 so that they can, over the next five years, enact their agenda.

00:05:34.680 This has been recognised by the likes of Dr David Starkey

00:05:37.840 and the term Great Repeal Act is thrown around a lot.

00:05:42.600 relevant to Restore Britain, something that we'll get onto later with some of the policy papers that

00:05:47.860 they've been putting forward, certainly something that Harrison Pitt has suggested as well in

00:05:52.600 reference to David Starkey, that there needs to be the great repeal of a lot of legislation,

00:05:57.700 which does seem to be a bias amongst people on the right and centre-right conservative sphere

00:06:04.280 to kind of want to just wash away any and all legislation that they're aware of that they think

00:06:11.540 will impede them. In terms of the Great Repeal Act, I wrote a review about a year or so ago on my

00:06:19.720 substack on the thought of it and wanted to put my own Blairite legislation in and what I would

00:06:27.060 get rid of because there doesn't exist, as far as I'm aware, certainly not from David Starkey or

00:06:33.640 Harrison Pitt or basically anyone else a draft copy of the Great Repeal Act. It's just something

00:06:43.040 that seems to exist as a sentiment and not something that exists in reality and I think

00:06:49.500 that's why Michael Rayner did his Oblivion Act because it was him trying to enact something like

00:06:58.600 that in his way of doing it, which I applaud him for, because more of that type of thing needs

00:07:04.120 doing. Yeah, taking it out of the abstract and into reality. Yeah, putting it down on paper.

00:07:10.780 And the difficulty with that is when you start to do that, there may be flaws, there may be issues

00:07:15.860 with what you put down. But at the very least, it's good to get started on this. And this is

00:07:20.380 one thing that I always find a little bit frustrating is that so often people will talk

00:07:24.580 about doing something, and nobody will ever actually do it, and it will only remain in

00:07:30.300 the realm of online conversation.

00:07:33.180 We should do this.

00:07:35.140 Nobody does anything.

00:07:36.140 I think that's a mixture of laziness or being unable to do certain things, but also there

00:07:41.220 is a reluctance to try things.

00:07:43.580 Which is relevant as well, to get another quick plug in, for your article, which is

00:07:49.120 in the latest Islander, Islander Six, titled Influence Is Not Power, which is one of my

00:07:54.400 favourite articles from it, actually. You bring up a number of very, very relevant criticisms

00:08:00.020 and pointers for where the right goes wrong through its social media activism lens, and

00:08:08.000 some of your issues that I share with you about the fact that a lot of people on the

00:08:12.900 right again um don't they either are charlatans attracting um attracting influence and attracting

00:08:21.940 patronage or the people who are offering the patronage are um are not looking for our ends

00:08:29.920 either yeah you get multiple extremes of that you get people who are just have got a bit of money

00:08:36.640 and want to be high status in a particular circle for whatever reasons and then you get people who

00:08:41.920 are actively putting money into things so that it's wasted and nothing can actually get done

00:08:49.640 because over the past few years, the amount of projects that I've seen either go nowhere

00:08:56.300 because there's no funding available for them or money, in some cases quite substantial amounts

00:09:04.080 of money, has been allocated to projects that don't go anywhere because the people they're 1.00

00:09:11.140 giving money to are idiots. I've seen it happen myself a number of times. I'm sure we've both 1.00

00:09:16.560 seen some of the same ones it's happened to. Moving on to restoring your criticisms of them.

00:09:23.200 First, I would like to just get your views since our last discussion, seeing as it's where we ended

00:09:28.840 off. When they were a political pressure group, I think we both agreed at the end of the discussion

00:09:34.280 that we thought it was better at the time that they remain a political pressure group,

00:09:41.540 which of course came undone about two months later when they converted into a political party.

00:09:48.600 What do you think about that initial decision?

00:09:51.540 What are your thoughts on the motivations of it and the potential of it?

00:09:57.860 What did you think at the time?

00:09:59.460 Right. I was against it beginning a political party from the start.

00:10:04.280 I'll try and be as diplomatic as possible, Restore, as I criticised when it was a pressure group,

00:10:11.960 the available policy wing and the organisation of it was, in my opinion, lacking. So when they

00:10:23.000 set themselves up as a political party, they were quite obviously and quite visibly overwhelmed by

00:10:32.200 by tens of thousands of people wanting to get involved in Restore.

00:10:38.200 And there was a time after Rupert Lowe's excellent video on the farm, which I liked.

00:10:44.200 I think it was still a very effective video, still quite inspiring.

00:10:48.200 Yes. They ended up having, as far as I can tell, from what I saw as an outsider,

00:10:57.200 but also knowing some of the insiders and what I was getting told

00:11:01.340 was they can't do it, they can't catch up

00:11:05.200 because they were completely unprepared for processing that many people.

00:11:10.220 And I think what should have happened, in my opinion,

00:11:14.040 before they even thought about registering as a party

00:11:17.360 was had some locals' events

00:11:22.060 because before they started as a political party,

00:11:24.600 they had roughly 20,000 members.

00:11:27.200 and what they should have done in my opinion was got people to volunteer as regional organizers

00:11:34.860 and built something of a network both in localities and also in terms of people who are

00:11:44.180 solid who could organize stuff so that Restore can draw upon its members when it was a pressure

00:11:52.020 group to get involved and help with whatever, what would that have been towards the end

00:11:57.440 of?

00:11:58.440 Well, so it was quite obvious that there was no ability to process people and answer

00:12:07.560 emails.

00:12:08.280 I'm sure if Restore had planned this, they probably could have gotten a load of people

00:12:18.520 on a freelance basis or whatever, whether on volunteers, probably not volunteers, and

00:12:24.320 planned out so they had an admin team ready to process the influx of memberships that,

00:12:32.200 let's be honest, I'd say it was quite obvious it was going to happen because that's what

00:12:36.840 they were planning for.

00:12:37.780 They were planning for that video to get as much reach as possible and increase membership.

00:12:43.120 and it was concerning for me for them being a government-in-waiting

00:12:50.840 not being able to organise the basics of that.

00:12:54.760 Are these not just sort of the normal kind of growing pains

00:12:57.320 that you would expect to experience with any fledgling party?

00:13:02.100 Yes and no.

00:13:04.240 I think if it's a fledgling party that wasn't as popular as Restore,

00:13:12.420 it wouldn't have been an issue. But if it was just that, I wouldn't have the concerns that I do.

00:13:20.420 But there does seem to be a huge organizational problem with Restore and its ability to

00:13:28.460 run its day-to-day operations, whether that be campaigning or policy. And it just seems that

00:13:37.020 everyone is, because it's such a small team, everyone's inundated with work and there's

00:13:45.020 no real focus on what people are meant to be doing. So it ends up with a team of people who,

00:13:56.460 as far as I can tell, are good, well-meaning, clever people, but because they don't really

00:14:04.160 have experience running organizations they're not able to preempt some of the problems they've

00:14:10.120 encountered and work from there for example one of the things I think since we're on what I think

00:14:16.740 store should have done is they should have built a network of people who are on site so they're not

00:14:25.700 isolated who could help with things like policy or administration or whatever because having

00:14:35.140 that network of people who can be organised for other things that aren't just doing leaflets is

00:14:43.300 a really powerful thing. If you've got a pressure group with 20,000 members and you've got

00:14:49.460 200 of them who can be relied upon to take part in activities, whether that's campaigns or whether

00:15:00.000 that's helping out with administration, organising events, and local outreach. Quite a lot of

00:15:07.600 organisations would kill for that, especially organisations that are pressure groups and

00:15:14.080 political parties, their in real life engagement is quite low.

00:15:19.360 When I was at university, I went to the Student Labour Party or saw an event and there was

00:15:23.560 five people there.

00:15:25.120 A Restore meeting has, judging by the photos, anywhere from 50 to 100 of people who want

00:15:33.040 to show up and want to do something.

00:15:35.960 In general, I don't think enough was done to preempt that and be able to deal with that.

00:15:41.120 So it's a little bit of a case of too much, too fast.

00:15:43.440 Yes. And obviously you've said that they could have prepared for that a little bit better and they would have inundated it and made sure that they had infrastructure organizations already set up before they did this, or at least nodes of organization already set up to be able to handle all of this.

00:15:59.820 But given where we are now and how popular they were, what do you think the central attraction for people has been and continues to be for people who have joined Restore, especially those who've jumped over from Reform to Restore?

00:16:16.320 I think part of it is that Reform is it's not doing what it's set out to be. It's not being the nativist party.

00:16:26.240 So there has always been a space since the 1950s and if not before for a nativist party because the need for an openly nativist party has grown and grown and grown because as the demographics of Britain change.

00:16:51.020 Particularly as it accelerates as well.

00:16:52.760 It's the decline in the British population and the massive increase in foreign-born migrants and communities 0.59

00:17:02.940 not having a party that will represent the interests of British people.

00:17:08.920 I think BLM did quite a lot as well because people my age aren't really able to think in a way that isn't ethnic or racial

00:17:20.560 because you were growing up listening to and in some cases being taught critical race theory

00:17:28.680 and the events of BLM in the 2020 certainly made most people ethnically conscious in a way that

00:17:39.680 they hadn't been previously because and able to articulate that because there's quite a lot of

00:17:45.880 that British or English people specifically, and to a lesser extent Northwestern Europeans,

00:17:52.880 are considerably less ethnically conscious than other groups of people.

00:17:57.880 It's why the I is capitalised, we're more individual.

00:18:00.880 And in England especially, it's not really true for places like Ireland and other parts of Europe.

00:18:09.880 English people haven't really had to live in communities that are close to other ethnic communities,

00:18:19.940 whereas in the Middle East, for example, in China, or even places like Japan as well,

00:18:27.520 those groups throughout their history have been...

00:18:31.200 There's the strong tribal division which creates stronger ties.

00:18:36.200 England is quite a remarkable country in how early we were unified as a people

00:18:43.120 as opposed to remaining separate warring tribes

00:18:46.120 with the bringing together of the kingdoms into the English nation

00:18:53.080 and then further centralisation and unification under William the Conqueror.

00:18:58.060 Terrible things he did to do so,

00:19:01.460 but it did end up unifying all of us under the crown.

00:19:03.960 And we've had a much longer gestation period than lots of different other peoples as a broader but unified group where the town next over is not conceived of as, oh, that's a completely separate tribe and nation of people.

00:19:19.840 No, they're Englishmen like you or I. Whereas now, since 1948, really, in the Windrush generation, the influx of mass migration, you are right, that it's massively accelerated and changed the way that people are seeing that.

00:19:32.980 Whereas before they were like, my next door neighbor is just like me.

00:19:35.800 He's anybody and I should treat him fairly.

00:19:39.000 They're getting people moving in next door who are not like them

00:19:41.420 and certainly do not want to be friends with them

00:19:46.240 and do not share a culture or meaningful relationship or history with them.

00:19:51.240 And they can see the quality of life going downhill as a result of that.

00:19:54.420 So the appeal being that it seems like a party that is willing to represent the natives.

00:20:00.560 Yes, it is. And also, I know for people like me who are quite business interested, though Rupert Lowe has been criticised for his Thatcherism, I like his enterprising spirit, even though I'm not a huge fan of how much he talks about being a Thatcherite and Ayn Rand, for example.

00:20:25.140 I think that a lot of free market economics and deregulation sides of the argument

00:20:34.420 is a joke and hasn't really adapted seriously to the way that technology economies have developed

00:20:46.040 because there's something that Rupert Lowe is often saying that you can't regulate for growth

00:20:53.780 And that's, as a universal statement, that can be questioned quite convincingly by many investors, academic institutions, for example,

00:21:05.020 because a lot of industries, especially industries such as energy, such as infrastructure, such as construction, such as medicine, for example,

00:21:16.080 investing in those industries is very difficult if you don't have a stable regulatory framework

00:21:23.900 because especially if you're an outside investor because if you can invest in I don't know a plant

00:21:30.920 manufacture medication whatever kind of medication it is in England we have we have I know some people

00:21:39.220 disagree with me on this, especially post-COVID, quite a well-regulated system. There are problems

00:21:46.440 with it, I'm sure, but for an investor and for all parties involved, it's best that those

00:21:57.200 industries are regulated fairly in a way that isn't overly burdensome, but also is done

00:22:03.280 for health and safety and also the stability of investments.

00:22:08.560 Because if you've got sensible regulation that's stable,

00:22:11.680 that will likely mean that your investments in industries

00:22:16.560 are more stable and likely to be more safe

00:22:20.780 because it's a well-regulated industry.

00:22:23.960 Whereas if it's not well-regulated,

00:22:26.540 if it's legal highs, for example,

00:22:29.600 I wouldn't, in investors in legal highs,

00:22:32.100 it wasn't regulated at all,

00:22:34.080 And then because they were so bad for people's health.

00:22:37.760 So when I say legal highs...

00:22:39.440 I know what you're talking about and I've seen a number of people who've done them

00:22:44.080 and they were certainly not good for you, but add some context for the audience.

00:22:48.080 So legal highs used to be a thing about 10 years, I think it's a bit longer, but they got...

00:22:54.400 They were still around at that time.

00:22:55.520 Yeah, they got banned because these were being promoted to people

00:23:00.880 as fun recreational drugs that weren't illegal.

00:23:03.280 and they were suggested to be safe, but within the space of a year or two,

00:23:08.280 they proved to be quite dangerous for people and they were just banned.

00:23:13.280 So to give an example of something that was formerly a legal high, something like Spice.

00:23:16.280 I was going to ask if Spice was included among the legal highs, because that's quite a notorious one.

00:23:21.280 Yeah, as far as I'm aware, yes. But the point I'm making is that if you don't have an industry that is well and sensibly regulated,

00:23:30.280 I know it's an extreme example that I just used, but a lot of the problems that wise

00:23:37.320 regulators could have foreseen and taken steps to mitigate will happen.

00:23:43.900 And when that happens, you'll likely create an excessively regulated environment which

00:23:49.120 doesn't work really for anyone, apart from bureaucrats.

00:23:53.560 But despite all of your criticisms of his statement on regulation, you have appreciated his enterprising spirit.

00:24:01.780 Yes, I love it.

00:24:03.000 Yeah, because he is still quite a charismatic figure.

00:24:06.020 He does play to the camera quite well sometimes, despite some of the gaffes that he's been criticized for over the past six months.

00:24:15.140 I think that's a case of recognizing that he is not some extreme radical.

00:24:20.900 he is an older gentleman who does have you know like old-fashioned neoliberal Thatcherite style

00:24:31.880 economic views and views on individualism and integration and such like that which did not

00:24:37.460 come as too much of a surprise for me but did seem to be in somewhat of disparity between the

00:24:43.240 way that certain people I even include people on this podcast I can't remember every statement I've

00:24:49.360 ever made about Rupert Lowe, perhaps even myself, I'm happy to criticise things that I've said in

00:24:53.500 the past, there was a disparity between the way that he was being sold and the actual vision of

00:24:58.920 the real man. And I think that's not actually really Rupert's fault that people were selling

00:25:05.020 him as some kind of extreme political radical when he's actually much more moderate than that.

00:25:10.700 But either way, the party seemed to be an interesting vehicle for nativists

00:25:18.180 and seemed to be an interesting vehicle to get the political outcomes that they want.

00:25:22.520 Do you see, in our current climate, before we get on to some of your greater criticisms,

00:25:27.200 do you see any better alternatives than Restore at the moment

00:25:30.500 or are they still the best bet for aspiring patriots?

00:25:34.100 Not really, outside of things, niche parties like the Homeland Party

00:25:39.740 and...

00:25:40.740 Are they still around?

00:25:41.740 I don't know if they are.

00:25:43.740 Nobody's heard about them for a long while.

00:25:45.740 Who's the guy who's running against Nigel Farage and Clacton?

00:25:49.740 Oh, Kai.

00:25:51.740 Kai and he's part of the British Democrats party, I think is their name.

00:25:56.740 He's an openly nationalist.

00:25:58.740 I suppose if you want nativism, you could probably support them.

00:26:04.740 But are they going to get anywhere?

00:26:06.740 Probably not.

00:26:07.740 Because small organisations that are unlikely to get anywhere as political parties, I think

00:26:15.740 that being a political party and standing for action is just a waste of time.

00:26:19.340 Because unless it's like some local initiative to take over the council to achieve a desired

00:26:25.940 outcome, whether that stops your local council wasting money, it's not really worth doing

00:26:33.380 to generate, get money off people when you've got 100 members paying

00:26:38.820 and just standing in elections that you're not going to win.

00:26:41.700 So what I've learned there is that we have said no to the National Rebirth Party.

00:26:48.260 I haven't heard of this.

00:26:49.380 Well, there you go.

00:26:51.360 I'll leave that at that.

00:26:53.200 So for the time being, Restore for aspiring nationalists and patriots

00:26:58.900 still seems to be a better vehicle for electoral and other political pressure from what we're

00:27:09.040 seeing. But now on to some of the criticisms that you have had of them. And this is related to an

00:27:15.520 article that you have written. I think you also appeared on a stream, was it, with Blam Blass?

00:27:20.400 Yes.

00:27:21.240 Discussing the Rape Gang Inquiry Report. Now, I'm going to preface this by saying that we

00:27:26.220 understand that this is a very emotive subject. This is not to denigrate in any way the experiences

00:27:34.120 of the victims who gave testimony or anything like that. Your criticisms of this are a criticism of

00:27:44.340 the way the report was structured and the way that it was written and some of the things that

00:27:49.420 have been said about potential safeguarding issues as well that have been raised. Unverified still

00:27:56.160 for the time being I believe though. Yes, so there's been some concerns about safeguarding and

00:28:06.720 by that Donna Rachel woman. Donna Rachel. Now just to remind people, she was the woman who

00:28:16.080 had a very, shall we say, poorly thought out video in response to it where she came across

00:28:22.640 as a little bit more jovial and smug than she should have in raising the criticisms.

00:28:29.840 She started off the thing laughing, and I know that she was laughing at what she saw

00:28:34.460 as the poor quality of the report, but a lot of people saw it as being very dismissive

00:28:38.420 of the testimonies that were held within it.

00:28:41.320 Either way, she was ruthlessly attacked for that and locked her account for a long while 0.59

00:28:45.540 on social media.

00:28:46.820 Despite that, and despite the way that she conveyed the message, was there legitimacy

00:28:51.980 see to her actual criticisms.

00:28:53.620 Right, so one of her main criticisms was that there wasn't a proper methodology and there

00:29:01.520 wasn't a clear plan of what the inquiry would entail and what its research questions were

00:29:08.620 or its inquiry questions were.

00:29:10.640 And that, from reading the report, as far as I can see, that's a fair criticism.

00:29:15.820 She's also made the safeguarding concerns that you alluded to just a minute ago, which

00:29:21.860 which are that some of the people who had given testimony had been traumatised because

00:29:30.460 of the process and there wasn't adequate safeguarding involved.

00:29:34.100 I should add, as some context to this, from the video that she posted, which I think was

00:29:39.360 on the 17th of June?

00:29:41.620 I couldn't give you the exact date, sorry.

00:29:44.360 Either or.

00:29:45.360 I've got it in my notes, but it doesn't really matter.

00:29:48.540 She went on to explain that she was initially consulted about the inquiry by Alastair Harrison,

00:29:56.040 who I believe is Rupert Lowe's chief of staff.

00:29:59.560 And her reasoning, she wanted to direct, because she runs a victim's support group for victims of grooming,

00:30:09.600 she wanted to try and make sure that this was done properly, as she saw it with the necessary professionals

00:30:15.900 and the right methodology and safeguarding. What she said was, in that video, that the reason she

00:30:25.500 stopped being involved was because Alistair Harrison didn't have an adequate safeguarding

00:30:33.320 plan and wasn't amenable to creating an adequate safeguarding plan. This was disputed by other

00:30:40.700 people on Twitter, I can't remember exactly who, but it was argued that the reason she in fact

00:30:47.580 chose not to be involved with the inquiry was that they wouldn't pay her for her involvement.

00:30:55.340 Yes, I was going to bring that up. A lot of people were instead suggesting that because she wasn't

00:31:01.560 getting either paid for it or the right amount of money that she thought was adequate for her 0.62

00:31:05.960 services as part of a lot of accusations were being made of her being sort of money grubbing

00:31:11.600 and she was only in it for the money looking to take advantage of people who had been victims of

00:31:17.080 the grooming gang so that she could profit off of it now would you say that those were fair

00:31:22.160 criticisms or would you say that that was uh that was unreasonable given the level of work that

00:31:28.680 needs to be involved in these i would say those unreasonable criticisms because

00:31:32.520 Because I'll tie into the lawyer who was involved in this and power to him doing the report for free.

00:31:44.680 It was pro bono, wasn't it?

00:31:45.720 Pro bono, yeah. He did it for free. He was involved in the inquiry and he did that for free.

00:31:50.680 That's power to him and it was a very good thing for him to do.

00:31:54.200 You're clearly very personally motivated to do something like that.

00:31:57.240 Yes. However, when I looked up his CV, Graham Smith is his name, it seems that his area

00:32:10.040 of expertise isn't in inquiry-type work. It's commercial sports law and trusts, which is

00:32:18.280 quite a different skill set. So normally, the type of people who would run an independent

00:32:24.200 inquiry of that nature would be specialists at doing that. And I think because they weren't

00:32:34.780 willing to pay someone to do it, or that's what it seemed to be, some of the problems did occur

00:32:42.400 whereby these issues with the report that we're going to go into were present. Whereas if they'd

00:32:49.580 paid someone whose expertise and their day-to-day is engaging in these types of inquiries, they

00:32:57.360 probably would have got a much better report in terms of an inquiry.

00:33:03.680 Just to clarify, so obviously you're criticising his area of expertise not potentially being

00:33:10.340 the one that's relevant or adequate for the work that he's being asked for.

00:33:16.360 What kind of qualifications expertise do you hold?

00:33:20.920 That's...

00:33:21.920 I'm anonymous.

00:33:22.920 I'm not answering that question because I can be right without being an expert in political,

00:33:29.080 without being an expert in doing these types of inquiries.

00:33:32.440 Just asking to clarify for the audience.

00:33:34.240 Yes.

00:33:35.240 That's okay.

00:33:36.240 So...

00:33:37.240 I wasn't criticising his expertise.

00:33:38.240 I was just making the point that his area of expertise from the available information

00:33:44.400 I was able to find on the internet from his CV that is available, that's not his usual

00:33:53.140 line of work.

00:33:54.140 He's doing it as a volunteer, which power to him for doing, but because of some of the

00:34:03.960 issues that the report has had, which we'll go into soon, I don't think that if they'd

00:34:11.840 of paid someone whose expertise is doing public inquiries or private inquiries of this kind,

00:34:20.400 the problems with the report that we'll go into would have been present. I wasn't trying to

00:34:26.840 criticise his expertise. All I'm saying is it is relevant. No, no, of course. I know. I just

00:34:32.880 wanted to, because I would imagine the audience would be wanting to just clarify that, but that's

00:34:37.580 absolutely fine. We'll move past that. So when we talk about the problems that this has caused

00:34:44.260 within the paper itself, what problems would you draw attention to?

00:34:51.260 Right. So I'll start with some of the criticisms that a guy called Adam Wren made when he was

00:34:58.260 writing for UnHerd. And one of the criticisms that he has made and others was the 250,000 number.

00:35:07.000 And his point was essentially that the number wasn't really that accurate.

00:35:13.960 It was quite flawed in terms of it being an estimate.

00:35:17.620 The criticism that he has also made, and Conor Tomlinson also discussed this on his podcast live stream,

00:35:27.840 was that especially the account of someone called Katie, whether that's the real name or not,

00:35:37.000 was quite difficult to believe and it may have been the result of some people with traumatic experiences

00:35:47.520 are also prone to making things up as a coping mechanism.

00:35:51.560 Was Katie the one who discussed the dog?

00:35:54.640 I believe so, yes.

00:35:56.500 Yeah, because that was one of the more shocking statements that had come out of it.

00:36:03.040 Yes, and I do agree with Adam Wren's criticism there that I'm just not sure that enough was done to verify these accounts and make sure that you didn't get accounts of people who may have had something awful happen to them, but may also be unable to distinguish between fact and fiction.

00:36:33.040 I mean, within the paper itself, was there any sort of explanation of what was done to verify these accounts, the methodology for them?

00:36:40.440 No.

00:36:41.340 Would that be normal for a paper like this to give some explanation of methodology for it?

00:36:46.600 Yes.

00:36:47.600 Okay, so that's a shortcoming there.

00:36:49.720 That's a shortcoming.

00:36:50.520 And in terms of other sort of academic shortcomings that were present in the report was,

00:37:01.680 I'll get to this now, other than the testimonies of the alleged victims,

00:37:10.060 or in some cases genuine victims because of prosecutions,

00:37:14.040 because some of them are verifiably victims that abusers have rightly been put in prison where they belong,

00:37:20.520 but other than that, the report doesn't really make any new findings

00:37:28.080 that weren't already available to the public

00:37:31.300 through previous government inquiries or the work of other people.

00:37:37.800 I mean, this was something that crossed my mind when it first came out.

00:37:43.060 I was wondering, other than the just explicit details of the testimony,

00:37:49.560 which as tragic and relevant and necessary to know as some of it is, also seemed to be a case

00:37:58.360 where people were using it to almost generate engagement on social media through spectacle

00:38:05.080 look at the shocking lurid detail that I'm sharing. I asked outside of some of the specific

00:38:12.160 testimony. What new information are we gathering from this? I know there were certain accusations

00:38:20.100 made about the role of somebody like Andy Burnham in potentially covering it up, but what further

00:38:25.440 investigations were able to be done off of the back of some of those allegations? The 250,000

00:38:31.080 figure, while I don't think it's anywhere near out of the realm of possibility at all, is essentially

00:38:37.820 an oft-repeated figure from, what, 2019 from the House of Lords when one of the Lords made

00:38:43.320 an off-the-top-of-the-head kind of estimate, kind of just going off, well, if this many

00:38:49.760 happened in Rochdale and we extrapolate that out to the rest of the country, then the ballpark

00:38:55.040 would be 250,000, which isn't an actual scientific or sociological methodology for any of this.

00:39:01.400 Considering that £600,000 were raised for this report, I expected a lot more and that repeating that £250,000 number without doing any further research, I wasn't very impressed with.

00:39:19.820 And I would be very interested to know actually where that £600,000 was spent.

00:39:26.020 Wasn't £600,000 also for the inquiry itself?

00:39:29.080 Yes, it was the inquiry itself. But I think that given the quality of the report and the inquiry, I'm not saying there has been anything in terms of inappropriate...

00:39:43.620 You're not alleging corruption or fraud or anything like that?

00:39:46.160 No, I just think that some transparency as to where the £600,000 went,

00:39:53.140 how much is left over, because Rupert and others from Restore have said

00:39:58.160 that they're going to do everything they can to seek private prosecutions

00:40:03.540 for the grooming gang victims or alleged victims.

00:40:10.520 And I hope that happens.

00:40:12.920 I would probably suggest that someone called Robin Tilbrook is better qualified to organise that type of thing

00:40:20.160 because he himself has, as far as I'm aware, pro bono, represented these victims of this type of abuse

00:40:29.420 and sought civil claims against their abusers and won some quite amazing damages, actually,

00:40:40.620 in terms of like hundreds of thousands of pounds for these victims.

00:40:45.840 So he's someone that you would recommend.

00:40:48.300 If anybody involved in Restore is watching this,

00:40:51.880 he is somebody that you should look into

00:40:53.320 if you're not already in contact with him

00:40:55.480 to try and go forward with private prosecutions.

00:40:59.620 Private prosecutions and seeking compensation for victims

00:41:01.980 because he's got experience doing that.

00:41:03.560 Yeah, because there still can be limited.

00:41:07.720 Obviously, it's not statutory, so they're unable to force people to give evidence or

00:41:13.920 testimony or anything, but there can still be limited but positive outcomes result from

00:41:19.620 the back of this, despite the criticisms that we're putting forward.

00:41:25.180 Which is the best case scenario for all of this?

00:41:26.680 Yeah, the best case scenario is lessons are learned and more work is done to make sure

00:41:33.940 that these victims and their alleged perpetrators go to prison and spend a lot of time in prison.

00:41:42.280 Absolutely. What would you say some of the shortcomings that you've seen from the report

00:41:49.040 says about the wider party organization as well? Can we take what we've seen as some of the

00:41:55.740 shortcomings here and see what it says about the broader party organization, where it can improve,

00:42:03.240 where it's got shortcomings or we can go further into some of the other criticisms that you've got.

00:42:07.240 Right, okay. I'm not convinced from reading the report that it was just edited by the lads at

00:42:16.920 Restore. First of all, I'll get this out there now, if it's being labelled and described as an

00:42:22.120 independent inquiry, Harrison Pitt, Charlie Downs and Josh Firm should not have been editing the

00:42:28.680 report as employees of Restore Britain, as a political party. They shouldn't have been

00:42:32.760 editing it.

00:42:33.760 Because that, by definition, is not independent.

00:42:37.140 Yes.

00:42:38.140 But...

00:42:39.140 So should that have been just outsourced to an independent?

00:42:41.280 That should have been outsourced either to a lawyer or someone independent should have

00:42:47.920 been ideally paid, because when you pay people you get better work, paid to edit it.

00:42:55.200 I don't know to what extent their role was limited to just editing it because the report itself is, especially on its recommendations, is incredibly vague and it doesn't engage with the topic in much detail.

00:43:15.200 Yeah, and in your written work I noticed that this was a consistent complaint, which was that there was just a lack of specificity in anything.

00:43:25.600 It was saying we should do something about X piece of legislation, we should do something about Y piece of legislation, without going into any detail of what that something should be.

00:43:39.680 Yes. And from reading the legal analysis section, it did seem that there wasn't a deep, strong understanding of the current criminal justice system.

00:43:53.700 And again, that's because the person, the lawyer writing it, is not a criminal barrister.

00:44:05.320 He was just writing it outside of his area of expertise.

00:44:07.420 Yes. Which is what happens, in my opinion, when you don't pay people. Because it's great that people will volunteer their time and help out in any way they can. But if they're not an expert in particular fields, like the legal recommendations, because it's mostly an area of criminal law and also NHS procedure in local government for dealing with vulnerable children,

00:44:37.420 Really, that aspect of the report should have used consultants.

00:44:42.480 And I'm not saying this would have been an easy thing to do

00:44:44.540 because I would imagine that you may have had people reluctant

00:44:49.600 to get involved in this because it's not a government inquiry

00:44:55.120 and it's done by an arguably controversial politician

00:44:59.180 and his organisation, which was a pressure group

00:45:01.680 and then turned into a party.

00:45:02.800 There are any number of factors making this a difficult subject to tackle,

00:45:08.960 particularly given the circumstances. It's emotive, politically charged,

00:45:13.520 political party involvement, any number of things.

00:45:16.080 Yes. And when I was reading, especially the legality section, I'm like,

00:45:22.000 if the report was written by the lawyer, Graham Smith, I believe his name was,

00:45:29.760 and it was just edited by the lads at the store.

00:45:32.880 I think not enough time was spent on writing it, as should have been,

00:45:39.520 and I do think it is a problem that you had a general lawyer doing it, writing the report,

00:45:46.080 and from what I can tell from publicly available information,

00:45:51.440 there wasn't any support in understanding areas of criminal law.

00:45:56.720 So there are some suggestions that are made as to how criminal law should be amended, but through reading them, it's unclear what of the suggestions that have been made are actually already the case.

00:46:13.140 So one that sticks out to me was the reasonable adjustments for giving evidence.

00:46:19.480 In the report, it just seemed to me that there wasn't as strong of an understanding of how victims of grooming gangs should be entitled under current law anyway to reasonable adjustments, such as giving evidence behind a screen or that type of thing.

00:46:37.080 And the legal part generally was quite vague.

00:46:43.480 And it just doesn't read like someone who has specific knowledge of that area.

00:46:48.960 With regards to the overall presentation of the report,

00:46:54.820 what do you think of the decision to do things like include Albert Einstein in niche quotes?

00:47:01.860 It's just not appropriate, is it?

00:47:03.180 It's not what you should be doing in a serious independent inquiry.

00:47:08.340 I mean, this is a worry that I had.

00:47:10.820 Would you say that the paper had something more of a polemical tone

00:47:16.140 than that of a neutral and objective inquiry?

00:47:20.100 And this was, again, a worry that I had was that it had so much hype about it

00:47:26.760 and it had so much excitement going on it.

00:47:31.140 But the polemical tone, the issues that you and others have identified, the use of quotes, it seemed more like, I hate to say this because it seems somewhat dismissive, and I really don't want to be dismissive of such a serious subject, but the shortcomings are forcing me to.

00:47:51.560 It seemed more like a polemical stunt to be used for engagement through people like Elon Musk.

00:47:59.820 And it can raise awareness of this subject.

00:48:03.500 But I think a lot of people are already well aware of this subject by this point.

00:48:11.200 We're no longer in the early to mid-2000s when we were at peak blackout on this topic.

00:48:18.820 Everybody's well aware.

00:48:20.280 the people who are going to listen have listened. The people who are going to stick their head in

00:48:25.420 the sand have stuck their head in the sand. What needs to move forward right now is hopefully with

00:48:31.960 private prosecutions, but more broadly, the people who facilitated this and committed these awful

00:48:37.560 crimes need to be held to account. Yes. And I didn't see exactly without presenting the new

00:48:44.280 information without coming with new findings and new conclusions, how this report actually

00:48:50.600 helped us get closer to that.

00:48:52.200 I don't think it did. I actually think that it's worse than that, it's hindered it.

00:48:57.400 How so?

00:48:58.920 Because for all the reasons mentioned, the report was very inadequate and it gives people ammunition

00:49:10.680 who have false pretenses or to say in a political sense this issue is being pushed by the right

00:49:23.020 because they're racist, because they don't like Pakistanis.

00:49:26.920 And the tone of the report, I wouldn't say it was racist,

00:49:30.060 I'm just saying that because the report has its problems,

00:49:35.840 it's not particularly heavy in terms of new information,

00:49:39.740 and the people that they were taking evidence from

00:49:44.940 were people like Conor Tomlinson and Ayaan Hirsi Ali,

00:49:50.400 it just seems politically charged.

00:49:53.000 So Conor Tomlinson is actually quite a good investigative journalist.

00:49:57.660 However...

00:49:58.660 Not going to disagree with you there.

00:50:00.200 No, he's good at what he does.

00:50:01.400 However, I don't think it was wise to have Conor Tomlinson,

00:50:07.760 who is friends with Charlie Downs and Harrison Pitt and the Restore team giving evidence at the

00:50:16.040 inquiry because it's another thing that seems not to be independent. So if you are the type of person

00:50:24.160 who wants to push the narrative that these people are making it up or in some cases they're

00:50:30.080 genuine victims but the ethnic component of this issue is being exaggerated by the right because

00:50:37.580 they're racist, it doesn't help when the report in of itself, and the inquiry as well, has

00:50:49.220 heavy involvement from political commentators who are, I don't want to use the term radical,

00:50:58.340 but are quite controversial or arguably controversial.

00:51:02.160 Outside of what most people would consider moderate.

00:51:06.220 Yes, quite possibly.

00:51:07.220 Possibly. Let's say. People who are considered partisan.

00:51:11.020 Yes. I think would be a reasonable way of putting it. Is it not fair to say that any sort of report on this particular subject, though, would inevitably face heavy politicization from any and all sides? Is it something that's avoidable at all?

00:51:29.120 no but what i mean when i say independent is i don't mean it's going to be a neutral issue

00:51:38.000 because it's not a neutral issue particular communities in the uk are commit child sexual 0.79

00:51:44.580 grooming at rates that are quite frankly ridiculous and these communities whether it's 0.97

00:51:51.440 because of Islam as a religion, or because of criminality more broadly, tolerate it. 0.99

00:51:59.200 One thing that the investigation or the inquiry didn't touch was the effect of cousin marriage 0.96

00:52:07.380 on these types of crimes, whether both from a genetic point of view and the genetic issues

00:52:12.440 that come with cousin marriage, and the further clanification that comes with cousin marriage.

00:52:19.600 If it was done independently by a group of lawyers who no one had ever heard of who had

00:52:26.340 expertise in this area, in my opinion, it would be much harder to frame the rape gang

00:52:37.420 inquiry as a far-right dog whistle or whatever people say.

00:52:42.980 Well, I agree with what you're saying, certainly regarding the clannish nature of it. 0.51

00:52:49.580 We've seen it where family members of people who have been convicted and found guilty for these crimes are in the courtroom protesting and chanting against, despite the fact that they allegedly knew what was going on and had helped to conceal it as part of the broader communal ties that these communities had.

00:53:10.660 You spoke about Adam Wren earlier.

00:53:14.180 His work with Open Justice getting some of the court transcripts publicly released,

00:53:19.220 particularly I believe the full court transcript that is available on that website so far is the Bradford one.

00:53:24.520 But I've read through a number of the sentencing remarks from the judges regarding Oxford and such.

00:53:29.840 I did a video on it a while back.

00:53:31.800 It was pretty horrifying when you hear the judges speak about just how heavily involved the community was in this,

00:53:38.880 how these activities were seen as being a sort of thing

00:53:43.380 that you do on the weekend to blow off steam

00:53:45.720 with your friends and with your cousins

00:53:48.440 and everybody was defending themselves,

00:53:50.880 defending each other is a horrifying thing to consider.

00:53:54.520 So your recommendations, despite it being like...

00:54:00.520 Your recommendations would be if something like this

00:54:04.440 was to happen again in the future would be to pursue it

00:54:06.520 with a more independent set of solicitors and lawyers

00:54:10.000 involve proper funding for it.

00:54:13.620 So obviously it was great that they were able to raise money

00:54:16.460 from people who cared about the subject,

00:54:18.540 who cared about the issues,

00:54:20.400 but if they were able to properly pay people for their time

00:54:23.580 in a way that you would expect to be compensated

00:54:26.000 could have resulted in something much better.

00:54:29.680 Yes, that said, I do think that it is a huge problem

00:54:34.340 that this was done without statutory powers because one of the biggest questions that

00:54:42.140 is always going through my head when I hear this stuff is, why on earth are the responsible

00:54:51.920 adults, whether they're social workers, teachers, or care workers, making these types of mistakes?

00:54:59.340 I don't buy that it is just them not wanting to be racist.

00:55:05.360 I don't think that's the case.

00:55:07.040 It does seem to be something that's systematically going on.

00:55:12.700 I would be very surprised if there wasn't, in these cases, guidance that had been put in place to allow for or encourage the way that health workers and responsible adults more broadly had acted towards these kids.

00:55:38.640 Because, so you think this could actually be within their own guidance, and this is something that definitely needs to invest.

00:55:45.160 Because my suggestion was going to be with Donna Rachel, one of the criticisms that she brought up was the way that the report had used the term county lines.

00:55:52.720 And given that county lines does refer to using basically mules to traffic drugs from counties,

00:55:59.580 obviously there's a heavy criminal gang involvement outside of just the sex crimes as well.

00:56:04.280 There's drug crimes going on.

00:56:05.600 I was wondering if there was something to do with bribery, involvement.

00:56:10.000 I wouldn't be shocked, but you're going even further and saying this might actually be

00:56:13.120 part of how these organisations are structured in the first place.

00:56:17.120 Yes, because I'm a pro-life activist and I'm quite interested in pro-life issues, one of

00:56:24.040 the things that gets spoken about quite a lot by pro-life advocates is that in the UK,

00:56:33.760 Up until fairly recently, you're meant to have two doctors see you and sign off that

00:56:38.320 getting an abortion is in your best interests.

00:56:41.220 And the SPUC and other organizations have constantly documented that that doesn't happen.

00:56:50.160 That because of arguably time pressures, it changed massively with COVID.

00:56:56.760 If you want to get an abortion, what ends up happening is you might see one doctor and

00:57:02.040 another doctor will just sign it off without seeing you and you'll be rushed through and

00:57:05.660 you won't have adequate assessments.

00:57:07.380 I would be interested to know whether a similar thing is going on whereby are there procedures

00:57:14.700 that are being followed, that are meant to safeguard these kids, or are they not being

00:57:19.160 followed?

00:57:20.460 Because everyone I know who works with vulnerable children, I know one or two people, and the

00:57:28.960 The way they talk about it is there are some very strict procedures that must be followed,

00:57:35.400 and the question I would have that this report doesn't answer is, is there systematic rejection

00:57:45.640 of safeguarding procedures by local councils, by teachers, and if not, is there a problem

00:57:53.880 with the guidance itself that it allows for these children who are vulnerable to be failed in this

00:58:01.280 way. I mean, another thing that I've noticed is dealing with vulnerable people is extremely

00:58:07.220 difficult because people who are genuinely vulnerable are often not very nice to work with

00:58:13.360 and they have very particular needs that will make them often act in a way that is quite hostile to

00:58:22.000 those who are responsible for them. A number of women that I know have worked in the care sector 0.91

00:58:27.480 and it's very, very difficult. And you do hear some horror stories of how the people they're

00:58:32.180 caring for behave towards them. Yeah. Is it that there is something going on whereby the carers

00:58:42.480 just don't have the training and don't have the selection criteria to be able to deal with

00:58:48.120 these victims who, from reading their accounts, they've normally got multiple drug problems,

00:58:53.600 they're normally severe mental health disorders that mean that these children just get lost in

00:58:57.820 the cracks. And a lot of those questions that we've spent the past 10 minutes talking about

00:59:02.680 weren't really addressed. And I think that's a mistake. And I don't actually think a public

00:59:10.140 inquiry would really solve this. I think- It would have to be statutory at that level.

00:59:13.840 It would have to be statutory. And I think it would be better to do it as a private inquiry

00:59:17.780 because private inquiries are cheaper, but statutory private inquiries also have statutory powers,

00:59:23.720 they're cheaper, and you normally will send in an appointed lawyer normally

00:59:28.280 or other professional to review what they want reviewing.

00:59:31.480 And who would have the power to launch something like that?

00:59:34.120 The government.

00:59:34.680 Just the government.

00:59:35.380 Yes.

00:59:37.040 I mean, if I was in charge, given Lord Protector of the Realm,

00:59:41.740 I would get a whole team of people together who would be placed inside of every local authority

00:59:49.320 this has happened and they would go through with a fine tooth comb everything that has gone on and

00:59:56.420 discuss and investigate the reasons and anybody who had committed a crime through neglecting these

01:00:04.800 kids or taking bribes as you suggested may have been the case I would want to want them put in

01:00:09.980 Because that's the only way of dealing with this.

01:00:11.980 Yes, absolutely.

01:00:12.980 There needs to be repercussions for this kind of behaviour in highest...

01:00:15.980 Well, forcing people to understand that these are the standards.

01:00:19.980 You adhere to them.

01:00:21.980 They exist for a reason.

01:00:22.980 They exist for a reason and you will be adequately punished.

01:00:24.980 If not.

01:00:25.980 Yes.

01:00:26.980 Because the most horrible thing about this is that lots of these children...

01:00:31.980 This is something I noticed when I was reading there,

01:00:33.980 had been failed by basically every responsible adult.

01:00:36.980 or in some cases they'd even been raped by their stepdad in one or two cases, 0.96

01:00:41.460 and it's just disgusting. 0.95

01:00:42.500 Yeah, these girls are vulnerable for a reason, 0.94

01:00:45.620 and it's not started with the gangs, it started at home,

01:00:49.540 then through the care system, and then they've just been failed

01:00:52.580 at every step of their lives, and it's just sort of the culmination

01:00:56.340 of all of that building up. It's easy to see why it's so emotive,

01:01:00.660 and I can truly understand with Restore the motivation, the desire

01:01:06.100 to try to do something about it but what we're talking about right now is is constructive in

01:01:12.180 if you do want to do something about it yes you want to focus your attention in ways that is going

01:01:19.700 to be more productive in the end and make it so that sadly the report for a lot of people is just

01:01:26.180 something that got lost in the mix after a while people got their people got their engagement

01:01:31.460 from tweeting going look at this particularly horrible paragraph I found in the testimony

01:01:37.320 people got their engagement from going and going like oh oh look at this um uh look at this

01:01:43.880 recommendation they've got here we need to do this and then people have moved past it and

01:01:47.620 yeah it's not made the lasting impact that you would hope something that would uh like this

01:01:52.980 would have hopefully we could see some private prosecutions in the future I've personally not

01:01:58.260 heard of any i think the inquiry of in itself because it didn't have such prowls it wasn't as

01:02:02.800 effective as it could have been if it was up if it was me if i was making the decision i would have

01:02:07.600 gone for the more starting off with public private prosecutions and getting as much compensation for

01:02:13.940 the victims and maybe lobbying for changes to make it more easy for victims to get compensation

01:02:20.380 At the time of recording, the most recent development that I've seen regarding Restore was the reaching out of Rupert to offer a joiner between Restore and Reform, which I've seen a lot of people getting very hyped about.

01:02:41.300 I've seen a lot of people getting very excited about.

01:02:43.580 By the time this video has been edited and published,

01:02:46.860 you'll be able to see what this ended up being,

01:02:48.820 if it went nowhere, if it ended up actually doing something.

01:02:51.400 But I've sat here right now, I can't help but feel that this,

01:02:55.220 like a lot of the other stuff that they've been doing recently,

01:02:58.400 feels more like a political stunt for the base

01:03:02.480 rather than a serious political maneuver.

01:03:05.340 It feels like them trying to get a gotcha on reform

01:03:08.180 so that when reforms say, you stand in the same area as us, you're splitting the vote,

01:03:13.140 they can say afterwards if they reject it, well, ha-ha, you rejected a joiner with us,

01:03:18.980 therefore, you've only got yourselves to blame. What are your thoughts on this?

01:03:23.060 My thoughts are slightly different. The impression that I got from that is Restore Britain is,

01:03:30.500 and especially maybe some people in the party, or especially running it, are regretting the move

01:03:37.940 to run and build a national political party by 2029

01:03:43.580 because it's very expensive.

01:03:46.700 It requires lots of hard work.

01:03:48.880 So one of the reasons that's been floated to me

01:03:53.020 why they keep running in elections that they're not going to win

01:03:57.120 is to build the data so they can map out where their likely voters are

01:04:03.060 and canvas them over the next few years

01:04:06.920 so that they can turn non-voters or reform voters into Restore voters

01:04:14.680 so they can get some more seats.

01:04:18.340 So it's kind of just a fact-finding mission.

01:04:20.520 Yes, and it's expensive and hard to do that.

01:04:23.660 And if that's what Restore are going to spend the next 2026,

01:04:29.520 three years doing until the next election,

01:04:31.020 I think what's going to happen is their activist base is probably going to decline.

01:04:40.460 Would people lose enthusiasm after engaging in too many canvassing sessions?

01:04:45.200 It's incredibly boring.

01:04:47.520 Well, during Makerfield, I went out with some of the canvassers,

01:04:52.180 and they were all, to a T, very kind and enthusiastic people.

01:04:57.340 And I really respected their conviction and what they were doing.

01:05:00.280 But I can imagine that if you start to do that on a more regular basis, it could get boring.

01:05:07.880 But some people really loved that process of going to the door and engaging with somebody and speaking to them.

01:05:14.220 Maybe I'm wrong.

01:05:16.100 And arguably, it's probably a good thing that I'm wrong, certainly for the nativist cause.

01:05:22.320 You want people to maintain enthusiasm when it comes to something as important as demographic stability in your homeland.

01:05:29.560 Yes.

01:05:30.560 And I hope that certainly people can maintain that same level of enthusiasm.

01:05:37.000 But I see that you wanted to talk about the issue of pubs and policy papers as well.

01:05:46.640 Would you like to tell us about what you think of Restore's policy papers and their current

01:05:52.700 stance on Britain's pubs?

01:05:54.600 Right, so I'll start with the pubs policy paper because for the sake of balance, I tried

01:06:03.640 to come up with two or three policy papers that I liked and thought were very good.

01:06:08.640 The first one of those is the pubs.

01:06:10.640 We all love a good pub.

01:06:11.640 Yes, we love pubs.

01:06:12.640 Of course, that's the first thing that an Englishman is going to put the most care into.

01:06:17.000 How can we look after the pubs?

01:06:19.040 Yes, exactly.

01:06:21.000 what I loved about this policy paper was that it was concise and it also was very well researched

01:06:28.460 they'd come up with some really sensible achievable solutions to improve the lot of

01:06:35.320 pubs so less of them close each year maybe there are more pubs and I've got them noted here so

01:06:40.440 there's in the policy paper they propose reducing business rates reducing the VAT on hospitality

01:06:47.480 sales to 12.5% and other minor tax changes that for the sake of time I won't go into,

01:06:56.860 read the report or the policy paper itself, is very good. And the second policy paper that I

01:07:03.800 thought was good, though I had more criticisms of it and maybe some academic

01:07:09.420 disagreements was the mass deportations one.

01:07:15.180 That was the kind of centrepiece, this is the policy paper we're going to advertise

01:07:21.260 ourselves off of.

01:07:22.260 Yes.

01:07:23.260 I liked the structure of it.

01:07:25.260 Legality, logistics, and logismacy.

01:07:27.260 Oh, yes.

01:07:28.260 Yes.

01:07:29.260 I liked the approach of talking about law first, because a lot of the problem with dealing

01:07:33.700 with not being able to deport people who are in the UK legally is because of the law and

01:07:38.100 the process. The changes that are suggested by Harris and Pitt in that are great, though I have

01:07:44.320 my disagreements with some of them. For example, I don't necessarily agree that it's worth leaving

01:07:49.920 the ECHR. I'm more in favour of... Yeah, we discussed this in our last conversation that

01:07:56.060 it's more of a distraction than it needs to be. You could simply bypass it if you were in power,

01:08:01.280 of course. In terms of what I think of Restore's policy papers more generally, there are a few

01:08:07.260 problems that are somewhat reoccurring in that they're too ambitious with things they want to

01:08:14.460 write policy on. I've seen you speak with Alex Masters, who's also been on the show before,

01:08:20.460 shout out to Alex, about their energy paper and I saw you were both critical of the energy policy

01:08:26.380 paper that they presented as well. Yes. The main thing with that is I think that it's a problem

01:08:34.940 because writing an energy paper is extremely difficult.

01:08:39.500 It's huge, for one. Didn't Alex say it was more like an electricity paper?

01:08:44.380 Because it only really focused on production of electricity rather than all of the other sectors.

01:08:49.740 Yes.

01:08:50.140 So that's a case right there, like you were saying, of just over-ambition,

01:08:54.540 not realising the huge scale of what you're supposed to be addressing there.

01:09:00.380 If I got told that I needed to write a policy paper on energy and what's our policy towards energy,

01:09:08.620 I would have turned around and said, yeah, give me 10 years and this amount of money.

01:09:15.180 I think that would be a reasonable thing to expect as well.

01:09:17.980 Yes. So what I would have done is I'd have started by going over the getting rid of net zero,

01:09:29.340 phasing out net zero. And that in of itself is quite difficult. The report undersold that. It

01:09:37.900 framed getting rid of net zero as just, oh, repealing the 2008 Climate Change Act. There's

01:09:44.540 other legislation. Because net zero has been so ingrained in British legislation for the past...

01:09:50.860 Almost 20 years, if you're going back only to 2008.

01:09:54.380 Longer, because before the Paris Agreement and various other agreements and that legislation

01:09:59.340 was passed, it's also been put into planning in law and other areas of the law that are

01:10:06.220 quite difficult and complicated. For, let's say, 30 years, planning law has had to have a

01:10:16.380 a net-zero component to it, so has investment and basically every other area of the economy.

01:10:25.900 So it's just completely baked in?

01:10:28.620 Yeah, it's completely baked in. I've got in my notes a list of legislation that the

01:10:37.020 Prosperity Institute put together on what legislation they would want to amend, and

01:10:43.340 I'll send it to you and you can put it up when we're done or leave in the description

01:10:49.180 because it's quite a long list because it's net zero.

01:10:56.720 If you want to get rid of it, you're going to have to make drastic changes to planning

01:11:01.600 and basically every other area of the British economy and British legislation.

01:11:06.080 It's not an easy thing to do.

01:11:07.640 You could have written a hundred page policy paper on how to get rid of net zero.

01:11:12.340 And that probably wouldn't have been enough by itself for 100 pages.

01:11:15.820 Probably not.

01:11:17.040 Yeah, I mean, there are books, there are dozens of books written about net zero, dozens of papers probably already written about net zero at this point, all going into extravagant detail on it.

01:11:29.140 So just having, as you say, a short section addressing it was not adequate.

01:11:34.880 But something else that I noticed that you said, this is going back to the inquiry report as well,

01:11:40.100 seems to be it was written in a similar polemical tone.

01:11:44.060 Yes, it was.

01:11:45.360 Which seems to be a consistent feature of some of the papers that they put out.

01:11:51.960 I think the problem with this is I don't think Harrison Pitt, who writes most of this stuff,

01:11:57.300 is able to write in anything other than a polemical tone.

01:12:01.640 because though he's had policy roles at the New Culture Forum,

01:12:06.860 as far as I can tell from looking at his CV,

01:12:09.440 he's not really a policy professional in the same way that you would expect.

01:12:17.280 He's a political commentator, first of all,

01:12:20.460 who's had some policy role at the New Culture Forum,

01:12:24.200 which in of itself, it's not like the Tony Blair Institute

01:12:27.720 or the Centre for Social Justice.

01:12:29.100 this. It's not something that discusses policy that they actually think is going to be implemented.

01:12:35.860 And it's mainly focused on culture and preserving the institutions. It's not something

01:12:45.020 that would have given him expertise in things like energy or the ability to know where to start with

01:12:51.460 the energy paper. So going to the energy paper, on my notes, there's a lot of things that weren't

01:12:57.580 included that should have been, especially on the nuclear section. So in 2025, there was a regulatory

01:13:03.660 review conducted by or led by John Fingleton, and this wasn't mentioned by Restore. And what the

01:13:12.540 regulatory report or investigation conducted by him and his team, it came up with 47 recommendations

01:13:19.660 which were things like streamlining the regulatory process. So for nuclear regulation specifically,

01:13:26.380 One of the reasons why it's so expensive to build nuclear reactors in the UK is because you have

01:13:31.740 so many different regulators that you have to deal with separately. And at each stage,

01:13:37.260 in each regulator you're dealing with, you can enter into a prolonged legal battle

01:13:43.260 over whether or not it can go ahead, or whether something should need to satisfy.

01:13:49.100 So that's going to cost a lot of money.

01:13:50.860 Yeah. So you might have a budget of, or get quoted, 10 billion to build a nuclear power station,

01:13:58.460 but because of planning, because of the licensing and this, that and the other,

01:14:03.500 everything else that's going on, you can end up with something that's meant to cost 10 billion

01:14:09.820 being a 10-year project, being a 20 or 30-year project and costing obscene amounts more.

01:14:15.100 Is this anything to do with why HS2 has taken so long?

01:14:20.940 Just all of these regulatory minefields that you end up on?

01:14:25.340 Yes, it is. It's planning.

01:14:29.420 In academic circles that deal with things like public policy and law,

01:14:35.260 there has been an outcry for planning reform and it's ongoing.

01:14:40.460 Would this be a process of reforming it through streamlining?

01:14:43.500 Streamlining it mostly, so this report I've just mentioned, it advocates streamlining

01:14:49.200 the planning and the regulatory process for nuclear projects specifically, but you will

01:14:53.920 find other reports in different areas, whether it's housing, saying, no, the planning process

01:15:00.240 needs to be streamlined because it's so unpredictable.

01:15:04.860 Because especially for something like building a house, which is simpler to do, planning

01:15:10.620 permission might take six months, it might take two years, and you don't know.

01:15:15.500 So there wasn't really much of a mention in terms of the energy report, and this is what

01:15:20.220 I really didn't like, is there wasn't any interaction really with the other academic

01:15:29.720 works that have been done, and this is a problem that is somewhat systematic of their policy

01:15:34.320 papers.

01:15:35.320 You could say it's systematic of some of the work that's done on the right in general,

01:15:40.600 A lot of people who exist within the commentary space, I include myself in this, are not aware

01:15:48.560 that this work has been done or where to find it if they want to even find it in the first place.

01:15:54.000 Which is where enterprising people like yourself are useful in being able to point us in the

01:16:02.560 right direction and help to guide this rather than people just going at it blindfolded.

01:16:09.640 I can certainly understand why someone like Harrison Pitt, with his background,

01:16:13.920 is not going to be able to write an energy policy paper on his own.

01:16:17.560 He's not going to know what the literature is that he should be reading.

01:16:21.780 You mentioned Harrison as though he wrote it all himself.

01:16:25.380 Was there any acknowledgement of other people writing that paper?

01:16:28.940 From what he said publicly, and I can't remember the exact acknowledgements,

01:16:32.200 it was mostly written by him and there are other people who have been referenced in the report

01:16:36.580 and there are acknowledgements.

01:16:37.660 the way that he described it on his interview with Dan was he was helped a little bit in terms

01:16:43.440 of where to look. That was the impression I got from what he said. But there's just nothing. It

01:16:49.020 doesn't seem like he had a large amount of support to be able to write this policy paper, which if

01:16:56.000 you'd have said to me, can you write a policy paper on energy? I'd have said no. We'll split

01:17:02.140 it up into multiple papers that are written in various parts of them by consultants who

01:17:12.240 have certain expertise.

01:17:13.480 So one of the criticisms I made was in the fracking section of the energy report, they

01:17:18.340 reference, I believe the phraseology is something like, we were told by this person who has

01:17:25.940 expertise in fracking about how unreasonable the fracking licensing is and the health and safety

01:17:33.480 for it is. That seems somewhat insubstantive. Yes, but my point when I read that and put in

01:17:40.580 my article where I reviewed this policy paper was why didn't you get that guy to write the

01:17:46.480 fracking section, like pay him to do it? Yeah. Because this is how really well-drafted policy

01:17:54.320 actually should be getting done on the right. Because most policy, as far as I can tell from

01:18:00.900 my observations, will start its life with a think tank or some academic, and then it'll get

01:18:08.520 drafted into a policy paper. And then what will happen is it will be approved by government or

01:18:16.500 pushed on government. Government will either make any legislative changes or tell the civil service

01:18:20.420 to enact this policy and the civil service will build up what that policy idea looks

01:18:27.720 like in practice.

01:18:29.380 On the right, you don't actually have that option because if you did have a right-wing

01:18:33.280 party such as Restore going into government, you'd be going into a hostile environment

01:18:38.240 whereby the civil service, you couldn't expect them to write policy in line with your wishes.

01:18:48.220 So you can't go in there with vague policy ideas.

01:18:50.840 You'd have to go in there with well-drafted policy papers, legislative changes.

01:18:56.820 Almost step by step.

01:18:58.940 Step by step, yeah.

01:18:59.940 You would have to go in.

01:19:00.940 I mean, that sort of thing.

01:19:02.540 Well, I mean, this isn't to denigrate Harrison.

01:19:07.460 He's a smart guy.

01:19:08.460 Oh, he is.

01:19:09.460 He's a very intelligent guy, very insightful guy.

01:19:13.020 But you are right.

01:19:15.020 If, for instance, I was asked, are you capable of writing a paper like this?

01:19:20.020 I'd say no.

01:19:21.020 No.

01:19:22.020 No?

01:19:23.020 I mean, why would you think that I am?

01:19:25.020 That's not to insult Harrison.

01:19:27.020 That's the constructive criticism that you should be going to these consultants

01:19:33.020 who are the people that you're consulting and paying them to write up those whole sections

01:19:37.020 if they are experts in that field in the first place.

01:19:40.020 For example, my stream with Alex Masters was with a guy called ARG, that's his Anon name.

01:19:46.740 The guy's a nuclear engineer.

01:19:49.020 So pretty well-informed on this.

01:19:50.420 Pretty well-versed, yes.

01:19:51.980 So this was a criticism that he made as well, that in the part of the energy policy paper

01:19:57.600 that discusses the reforms to nuclear energy policy, there weren't any specifics.

01:20:04.900 There was regulations, we will deregulate, without saying what it is, and there was no

01:20:11.140 mention of this paper that I mentioned, the 2025 regulatory review that was conducted

01:20:18.540 by the guy with the impronounceable surname.

01:20:22.400 Fingleton sounds about right.

01:20:25.140 Yes, Mr. Fingleton.

01:20:27.280 And that's quite a detailed paper.

01:20:29.420 I skimmed through it and read its recommendations.

01:20:32.520 And that's something that could have been included, and they didn't really reference

01:20:39.780 it at all, certainly not in any kind of detail, and that would have been a really good place

01:20:44.220 to start.

01:20:45.220 Absolutely.

01:20:46.220 Well, we're coming to time now.

01:20:48.820 We're almost when we need to end.

01:20:50.100 So just to sum up our conversation, what would you say, just very succinctly, the positives,

01:20:59.000 the negatives, and the constructive places that they should go moving forward for Restore.

01:21:05.600 Right. So I think Restore, in terms of policy, needs to get used to the idea that Harrison isn't

01:21:14.080 going to be able to write all their policy papers, or most of them. But what he can do

01:21:18.900 is, because he's very intelligent, decide what a policy paper is going to be written on,

01:21:25.920 whether it's energy, whether it's infrastructure, and find people who know enough about the topic to

01:21:34.880 say to them, right, we would like you to write this part of a policy paper we're coming together on,

01:21:40.960 I don't know, farming, go to someone in the farmers' union. And then when you've got individual

01:21:46.240 bits of a policy paper, amend them so they're in line with the priorities of Restore. For example,

01:21:53.520 The Prosperity Institute, they did an energy paper a few months ago.

01:21:59.360 What they did a good job of was it was a 30-page policy paper on energy,

01:22:03.840 but it was mainly focused around changing a load of legislation on net zero.

01:22:10.480 One of the main recommendations was separate net zero targets from energy,

01:22:16.720 because right now they're linked, which is why energy is so expensive in the UK.

01:22:20.560 And I think they need to get better at, especially the Restore team, going,

01:22:25.600 OK, if this is what we want as a policy paper, we need to delegate most of this

01:22:30.880 at the drafting stage to people who are consultants, who know the area,

01:22:35.520 who in some cases, in the case of the farmers' union, they might do it for free.

01:22:39.360 But other people, you probably would need to pay to get high-quality work.

01:22:43.440 And that's the main takeaway I think Restore needs to, especially the policy team,

01:22:48.800 needs to understand that you can't, even if you're the smartest person in the world,

01:22:54.320 you're not going to be able to come up with policy that is effective and sensible on your own.

01:23:01.440 And you need to build a network of people who, maybe they're consultants, maybe they're unions,

01:23:08.400 maybe they're people that you meet in academic conferences, who you can delegate the job of

01:23:13.680 of writing particular parts of a policy paper and spend your time interrogating it and aligning

01:23:22.220 those parts of the policy paper together to create coherent policy.

01:23:27.660 Well, perhaps with these recent developments with extending the hand to reform, maybe that's

01:23:32.260 the sort of infrastructure that we'll see built. So some constructive points there. I hope you've

01:23:37.460 enjoyed the conversation, folks. I am still broadly rooting for Restore because ultimately

01:23:43.700 they do have good people within the party. They are the only party that is able to at the moment

01:23:50.280 serve as a vehicle for the nativist cause in England. But there are a lot of problems that

01:23:56.560 have become very apparent since they became a party that really need cleaning up. Thank you

01:24:01.060 very much for joining me, Henry. Remind everybody where they can find you. On X, I'm at law reading

01:24:06.660 Substack for Action and Reading Law, and that's about it.

01:24:11.700 Well, you can find him all of those places.

01:24:14.580 Thank you again for joining me.

01:24:15.940 Pick up his book.

01:24:16.740 It's available on Amazon and other retailers,

01:24:19.300 and we'll see you next time.

01:24:20.740 Take care.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - August 06, 2026

Where Do We Go From Here？｜ Interview with Henry Martin

Episode Stats

Transcript

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - August 06, 2026

Where Do We Go From Here？ ｜ Interview with Henry Martin

Episode Stats

Transcript

Where Do We Go From Here？｜ Interview with Henry Martin