The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - Why Are We So Angry With Modern Politicians？

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to this not a political chat because there is nobody here for me to talk to.

00:00:05.220 Carl has gone off to Oxford to give a speech so I'm left rattling around in this building all by

00:00:11.400 myself and I thought well I won't let the time slot go to waste. What I'll do is I will try and

00:00:16.720 explain to younger people why Carl and I are so bothered about what's going on in politics at the

00:00:24.460 moment. Why don't we be so viscerally disgusted with the state of politics at the moment? What

00:00:29.980 what is it that we're remembering that is better than that um the 90s the 90s were basically a

00:00:39.460 golden age if you play a video game and you complete it and you get the pop-up screen that

00:00:45.480 says congratulations you've completed it that was basically the 90s we we'd completed it we

00:00:50.400 everything is fine the nhs worked services worked uh as much as people as much as the

00:00:58.100 leftists try to complain that it didn't politics was genuinely boring genuinely proper boring

00:01:04.520 this is john major the prime minister through much of the 90s um universally regarded as a very

00:01:12.600 boring individual he was basically keir starmer without the um without the rent boys and the

00:01:19.740 utter hatred of the british people he was he was far too boring for any of that um

00:01:25.880 um and what do we what do we worry about back then what was the concern that we had

00:01:33.400 in the 90s well i'll tell you and you're going to think i'm making this up you're genuinely going

00:01:39.580 to think that i'm making this up but i'm not and that's why i wanted to to give you some primary

00:01:44.580 evidence so this is a um a speech that john major gave in 1992 let me see if i can find

00:01:51.300 the relevant bit where is it um i'll i'll tell you actually here we go

00:02:03.000 so one of the hot button political issues of the day

00:02:07.840 and take another frustration of everyday life motorway cones

00:02:12.480 sometimes one to be forgiven for believing that they had taken over the roads and were marching

00:02:20.340 on the town so in 1992 we had so few problems that the issue of having too many cones on the

00:02:31.940 motorway was considered a a primary political issue and so in 1992 John Major set up a dedicated

00:02:40.620 hotline for motorists so that if you saw some cones on the road and you thought well they've

00:02:47.520 got too many cones you can ring up this hotline and you can report it because that's about what

00:02:54.020 you had to be annoyed about at the time and so they set up this this hotline originally staffed

00:03:02.380 by one person during office hours and they took calls from people two and a half thousand calls

00:03:11.860 initially um about errant cones on the motorway later it was outsourced to a private contractor

00:03:20.720 for 20 grand which is probably closer to 50 or 60 grand in today's money because a lot of

00:03:28.480 inflation has happened since then and in the lifetime of this hotline it had 19 500 phone

00:03:36.600 calls to it and apparently half of them had nothing to do with cones now the

00:03:45.360 the information I've seen doesn't cover what they were about possibly wrong

00:03:50.940 numbers I don't know maybe it was very similar to another popular hotline or

00:03:56.700 something but you know you know what the the success of this this this was

00:04:03.900 um three cones were removed in in the lifetime of the service

00:04:10.560 got a i'll come back to that got a link here here we go hansard um to ask the secretary of state

00:04:21.600 how many complaints have been uh received by the traffic cone hotline and what's the follow-up so

00:04:27.060 again i'm giving you primary sources here so you don't think that i'm making this up

00:04:31.000 um here we go so this is early stages in the in the in the hotline 2,500 calls eventually

00:04:37.500 went up to 19,500 um and three cones had been removed

00:04:42.880 they took another 17,000 calls after this and none of those resulted in the cone being removed

00:04:51.380 so it's about it's about 6,700 per cone actually no it's 20 grand a year isn't it so no it would

00:05:00.160 have been actually about 20 grand per cone uh that were removed

00:05:04.020 this is what we had to deal with in the 90s

00:05:09.680 this is how tough it got and just going back to john major here uh let me just read that again

00:05:19.220 um someone could be forgiven for believing that they had taken over the roads that were marching

00:05:24.680 on the town so basically john major was saying that if you're uh if you're a boomer or or you

00:05:31.200 know what would have been quite a young gen x at the time if this is your mental model

00:05:36.000 of how bad it was getting in britain you could be forgiven

00:05:41.800 you could be forgiven for thinking that cones had taken over the roads and were now marching on your

00:05:50.240 town because we didn't have any serious problems to worry about

00:05:58.480 we just didn't although interestingly here we go independent article um they mention in here

00:06:08.000 that the government actually considered this one of the most successful programs

00:06:11.920 because 83 of road users had heard of the scheme and normally when they were doing stuff because

00:06:18.080 politics was so boring back then for people to pay any attention to politics was considered a plus 0.98

00:06:27.200 so this cones hotline dragged around for years i mean it was obviously a stupid idea didn't get 0.81

00:06:34.520 abolished until 1995 because so many people had actually heard of a government program that was

00:06:39.980 novelty and they decided that um that was a mark of great success now remarkably um

00:06:48.220 the there we go that's them getting rid of it in 1995 now remarkably um the the new zealanders have

00:06:57.980 decided to um resurrect this idea so i don't know how bad things are in new zealand but i'm going to

00:07:03.680 assume if they're making this a political priority uh things can't be too bad in new zealand they're

00:07:09.040 spending 170 000 new zealand dollars on it um and and so far they've managed to remove 200 cones

00:07:16.820 so that's only 650 new zealand dollars per cone no 850 new zealand dollars per cone so

00:07:29.220 so they're getting a bit more uh bang for their buck out of their out of their phone thing um

00:07:34.200 it wasn't just cones that was considered a political issue in the 90s i mean what else

00:07:38.340 what other pressing problems did we have to deal with

00:07:41.520 beats repetitive beats and again I'm showing you a primary source so you can see for yourself

00:07:52.460 this is genuinely in there so this is legislation brought forward to deal with raves

00:07:59.340 where they went about uh defining and criminalizing um repetitive beats and the

00:08:08.680 language in here i won't scroll through the whole thing it's quite a long document

00:08:11.940 the legislation defines certain music as sounds wholly or predominantly characterized by the

00:08:19.280 emission of succession of repetitive beats stopping young Gen X's like myself at the time

00:08:31.920 from going to raves was about the biggest problem that the John Major government had

00:08:37.260 that and cones cones and raves Gen X's going off into a field somewhere 0.83

00:08:45.320 tripping on something playing rave music dancing around with glow sticks

00:08:51.260 that was an issue they needed to do something about that can't have those repetitive beats

00:08:58.060 if you want to get an idea of just how horrifying this sort of thing was i'll play a bit for you now

00:09:15.320 Yeah, so anyway, you get the idea.

00:09:42.320 Yeah, so that had to be stopped.

00:09:45.320 that had to be stopped because basically politics there was there was nothing

00:09:49.760 else to do in politics just just just there just wasn't much to be getting on

00:09:55.380 with

00:09:59.440 apart from dealing with errant cones and repetitive music there we go there's the

00:10:09.080 uh there's this legislation um that ultimately made it through uh actually led to um some some

00:10:16.600 protests gen x's didn't like that much they went out tried to kill the bill um unfortunately a bit

00:10:23.400 infested with socialist workers party who uh who who took particular umbridge to this bill

00:10:30.020 um although believe it or not back then back in the 90s people who described themselves as

00:10:37.600 socialists actually had jobs you won't believe that but no back then people who described

00:10:45.520 themselves as socialists um had a job usually a sort of manual laboring job or something like that

00:10:51.320 or or some sort of academia or maybe a journalist or something um and and they just wanted a bit

00:10:56.660 more state spending a bit more in work benefits or something but they actually had jobs since then

00:11:02.300 the socialists have realized of course um that why do you bother having a job why not just get

00:11:07.040 the money sent directly to you from government and and maybe a free car as well and a house

00:11:13.580 well actually i suppose if you're native you're not going to get a house but

00:11:16.640 you know the the idea that they they did actually at least do something back then

00:11:20.760 um what else was high on the political agenda in the 90s

00:11:25.740 uh this is the european union this is um a bit of legislation uh eu regulation 225794 now you're

00:11:38.480 probably wondering what is it what um pressing issue uh with the european union trying to deal

00:11:44.180 with because of course today they're trying to shut down free speech and basically criminalize

00:11:48.160 opposition to mass immigration um in 1994 the european union was legislating to ban bendy

00:11:56.560 bananas again i am not joking i gave you a primary source because otherwise you won't

00:12:05.420 and i don't blame you if you're if you're in your teens 20s or early 30s and you don't remember this

00:12:13.220 just speak to an old person and they will confirm that one of the eu's top

00:12:20.120 requirements at the time was stopping you being able to buy a banana that is too bendy

00:12:26.800 i think the issue is something like if all the bananas bend you can't get as many of them in a

00:12:37.000 box and therefore packing becomes inefficient and they were trying to make banana sales more

00:12:43.700 efficient by making sure that all the bananas were straight and therefore they were easier to pack

00:12:49.240 and again i've just got to stress i am not joking about any of this

00:12:56.840 this is genuinely what was on the political agenda at the time

00:13:01.200 um now you may have heard of brexit

00:13:03.480 after we achieved brexit um the british government looked at this uh particular

00:13:11.200 bit of legislation and decided that actually that we're going to keep that

00:13:14.600 we're going to keep the rule

00:13:18.880 about bendy bananas there we go eu regulation on bendy bananas will be staying in the uk

00:13:28.780 it has been revealed despite brexit giving the country the opportunity to disregard them

00:13:34.540 yes we can't get rid of that valuable anti-bendy banana 0.98

00:13:40.040 legislation that the europeans helpfully passed for us so thank you very much for that uh what

00:13:49.960 else what else was on the agenda in in this benighted age of the 90s which which you often

00:13:56.460 hear you often hear gen x's tell you the 90s were an absolute golden age because they were

00:14:04.500 and nobody cared about nobody thought about politics you were right weirdo if you involved

00:14:11.660 yourself in politics you didn't need to the government didn't hate you it wasn't against you

00:14:17.460 you could have a job you go out the weekend you could do things you could have fun could buy a

00:14:22.700 house

00:14:26.460 and i know a lot of you young people might be upset with the state of the world today

00:14:31.420 but trust me if if you if you could remember an alternative to the hellscape that we have now

00:14:39.840 you would be a hell of a lot more upset let's move on from bendy bananas what what other top

00:14:46.360 issues were there at the time oh yeah um tony blair when he came in uh what did he need to do

00:14:53.940 well he needed to ban t-bone steaks

00:14:58.000 this is because of the whole um bse controversy or or hysteria that we had at the time

00:15:09.400 a a government scientist mentioned to blair that uh there's a slightly higher chance of

00:15:19.240 of getting bse mad cow disease um if your if your steak has a bone in it so the response was to ban

00:15:28.280 steaks that had a bone in it like the t-bone

00:15:36.440 i don't know if this is more absurd than the banana thing so yeah in december 1997 fairly uh

00:15:43.640 early on in his tenure uh yeah the blair government banned these stakes uh over these

00:15:49.640 minor health concerns now there was a a scottish um hotelier um jim sutherland and and he decided

00:15:58.520 to um defy the ban by serving criminal that he was and and this is the level of the criminality

00:16:06.280 we used to have to worry about uh he he sold t-bone steaks and so the the government um

00:16:13.340 launched legal action against him and he was facing jail for selling a steak

00:16:21.680 and this case rumbled on for for a couple of years um facing jail um ultimately because this

00:16:30.540 was considered so absurd by absolutely everybody um and back then governments vaguely listened to

00:16:36.760 people uh they decided to drop it there you go crown drops beef charges a hotelier a hotelier

00:16:48.080 believed to be the first person prosecuted under the beef on the bone was celebrating yesterday

00:16:53.420 after the charges against him were dropped again this sort of thing was

00:17:01.040 considered the the natural arena of government at the time and I think we've

00:17:06.860 got another John Major one now we got this that's his speech again what else

00:17:15.320 was a was top of mind for him let's see if I can find the bit for you here we go

00:17:21.180 um there are other simple but necessary things that we must be doing

00:17:26.180 public services are much more human if they come with a name

00:17:30.980 anonymity can be intimidating bear in mind we didn't know what the burka was back then

00:17:37.700 nobody had a clue what the burka was so having having another english person sat there in front

00:17:44.240 of you but having forgotten their name after they'd introduced themselves to you that was

00:17:49.320 considered to be intimidating not being not being a 12 year old girl walking to school in um an

00:18:00.240 incredibly muslim area and being harassed abducted on your way to school now that that that no we

00:18:06.620 didn't know anything about that at the time uh what we knew is that doris introduced herself

00:18:13.200 at the job center a few minutes ago and you've already forgotten her name so uh john major goes

00:18:18.080 on and anonymity can be very intimidating very shortly 35 000 employment service local officials

00:18:24.900 will be wearing the name badges and other parts of the public sector are doing the same

00:18:30.520 i mean i'm not going to claim that it's unreasonable for public sector workers to

00:18:39.560 wear a name badge what i'm saying is is that this is where political capital was being spent

00:18:46.280 i mean another case i should have i should have added an image or two of this

00:18:52.980 but there was a conservative mp who took 50 pounds to ask a question in the house of commons

00:19:01.700 one time and that was a scandal that lasted six months nightly news night after night for six

00:19:09.320 months this tory mp who had asked a question and they called it cash for questions and the

00:19:16.100 bbc and it and all the rest and they went really hard on this it was night after night it was bang

00:19:22.640 new revelations there weren't actually any new revelation because because basically that was

00:19:26.560 the whole story he took 50 quid to ask a question in the house of commons and this was considered

00:19:31.800 um an example of extravagant corruption in politics and they talked about almost nothing

00:19:39.700 else for six months a 50 quid bung to ask a question in the house of commons and actually

00:19:48.840 by the standards of the time as you can see by the standards of the time that that actually was

00:19:54.420 a hot button issue

00:19:55.960 in the early 90s a considerable amount of the political agenda was basically um yeah it's

00:20:08.180 pretty good, how can we make things slightly more responsive and accountable?

00:20:18.240 How can we slightly reduce the friction on you?

00:20:24.200 And today, the political agenda is, how can we stop the state from going bankrupt or falling

00:20:30.200 into civil war?

00:20:31.100 what changed between now and the early 1990s well i've already mentioned it once um tony

00:20:41.260 blair came in in 1997 and he decided that the existing electorates were not good enough

00:20:46.660 they needed to go they needed to be replaced and then the conservative party um after they had to

00:20:57.120 sort of put up with all those years of Tony Blair governments when they got in they thought

00:21:01.700 let's massively double down on this

00:21:05.760 Tony Blair had been running immigration about 300,000 a year the Tories got in and said let's 1.00

00:21:12.740 take it to 1.3 million let's get as many Africans as we possibly can shipped in

00:21:20.460 as many former terrorists as we possibly can so let's contrast what was considered

00:21:27.680 pressing political issues in the 90s to today but i'll give you one more i'll give you one more

00:21:36.280 oldie story uh and and it relates to today so i'm going to give you the last images of ken bigley

00:21:43.140 so he was a british guy i believe it was 90s who was captured by isis

00:21:48.060 and he got his head sawn off on camera by some isis guys and they decided to

00:21:59.440 post it on the early internet of the time

00:22:04.240 who did that who did the head soaring who was part of the crew who imprisoned him and

00:22:15.560 um yeah arranged his execution it was muhammad yassin there we go muhammad yassin

00:22:21.460 oh and he was also responsible for setting fire to women and girls in cages

00:22:27.420 because they didn't submit to islam you might be asking where is muhammad yassin now

00:22:33.600 let's have a look shall we

00:22:39.760 there he is coming out of co-op

00:22:41.560 because the british state has decided um we need this guy walking around our country

00:22:51.220 we need to give him a house we need to give him an income of course he can't work he's not eligible

00:22:58.540 to work but he's eligible to get a house and he's eligible to get an income so that he can go

00:23:04.100 shopping in the co-op and his picture coming out of there how his benefits paid well they're paid

00:23:10.480 for by you and me and they're paid for by the surviving family of ken bigley they a

00:23:16.360 proportion of their taxes um every month have to go to the guy who killed their family member

00:23:24.400 so that you can have a house and benefits

00:23:28.580 this would be simply incomprehensible in the 90s absolutely if if you try to tell anybody

00:23:41.060 in the 90s that this is what it would be like in 30 years time none of them would have believed you

00:23:45.460 it would have seemed simply too insane too dystopian to even imagine and yet this story

00:23:54.420 it isn't getting any coverage i mean i don't watch a lot of mainstream media but

00:24:00.060 if you still watch the bbc and itv are they covering this are they covering it breathlessly

00:24:06.320 for six months like they did with well i mean of course they wouldn't every day and i could have

00:24:12.960 picked anything to close on this segment i could have picked god knows how many murders or rapes

00:24:17.860 i was just i mean i saw on twitter just a little while ago that apparently 35 of the murders that

00:24:23.700 particular police forces investigating all linked back to migrant HMOs

00:24:30.980 and yet we're now paying for a house and benefits for people who cut British men's

00:24:35.780 heads off in the 90s that's the contrast where we were then

00:24:43.460 and as Dominic Cummings points out he has his flaws Dominic but he's not wrong on this

00:24:48.180 and he says just a reminder just yesterday we learned that a former isis guard um who beheaded

00:24:55.760 of yeah of an isis beheading squad um came illegally to the uk on a boat

00:25:02.980 and obviously because of echr and human rights act he can't be jailed or deported so he's just

00:25:12.060 living freely in this country and being given a house we also learned that the SAS guys sent on

00:25:18.820 a mission to deal with ISIS beheaders were then arrested for murder years later arrested for

00:25:26.400 murdering ISIS beheaders our government have arrested them because the ECHR in Human Rights

00:25:35.060 act means that anytime some lawyer like herma wants to team up with nutters on an easy arch

00:25:41.860 case the government will be forced to investigate

00:25:49.460 so that's where we are we've gone from complaining about too many traffic cones

00:25:57.060 bent bananas and steaks with bones in it or or young gen x's raving away to repetitive beats

00:26:08.080 to housing and providing an income for people who beheaded Britishmen that is why in summary

00:26:20.400 carl and i are so completely disgusted by the state of this country today 0.60

00:26:25.620 and if if the young people today could remember because they don't know what we've lost if they

00:26:34.100 could remember what we've actually lost what we've lost has been immense and we can go back at any

00:26:41.660 time but we need to clear out the current ruling class they've got to go

00:26:50.620 They've got to go.

00:26:51.800 We deserve better.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - October 22, 2026

Why Are We So Angry With Modern Politicians？

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