TRIGGERnometry - Brendan O'Neill on Free Speech, Identity Politics, Grenfell & Social Medi

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantin Kissing.

00:00:10.440 And this is a show for you if you're bored of people arguing on the internet over subjects

00:00:15.120 they know nothing about. At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts, we ask the experts.

00:00:20.960 here at our new studio our amazing expert guest this week is brendan o'neill who's the editor

00:00:33.960 of spiked online brendan welcome to trigonometry thank you very much well it's great to have you

00:00:39.240 here you are known in addition to all your writing of course particularly for the free speech

00:00:43.360 issue that you focused on so much people call you a free speech absolutist yeah are you a free

00:00:48.020 speech absolutist? What does that mean exactly? It means that I think freedom of speech is

00:00:52.920 absolute and there should be no restrictions on it whatsoever. No hate speech laws, I want to

00:00:58.540 scrap all of those. No public order legislation that targets speech. No libel laws, I think there

00:01:04.760 should be no restrictions whatsoever and the best response to speech that is wrong or dangerous or

00:01:11.260 racist or horrible is always more speech never censorship never laws never putting someone in

00:01:18.420 prison so I'm a free speech absolutist because I think freedom of speech should be completely

00:01:23.200 unfettered and let loose on the world. So you think for instance it should be acceptable for

00:01:29.840 somebody for instance an imam to be able to go up on a street corner stand on a pallet and say 0.97

00:01:38.120 homosexuals should be murdered for instance? Yes. Yes. And I actually have defended imams 1.00

00:01:45.180 who have horrible views about homosexuality or women or whatever else it might be, which

00:01:50.600 a lot of free speech activists, they actually run out of steam when it comes to defending

00:01:54.260 extreme Islamists. I definitely do, I think. Right. And they suddenly think, oh, I can't 1.00

00:01:58.360 do that. But I think obviously there is such a thing as incitement to violence. And that's

00:02:03.120 not a free speech issue from the point of view that if you are inciting violence, you

00:02:07.820 are conspiring in the commission of a crime so that goes beyond freedom of speech and then you

00:02:11.980 are part of a criminal conspiracy of some description but i think even when it comes

00:02:16.460 to incitement to violence we have to be really specific because that has become a very misused

00:02:23.180 term i was really struck that the metropolitan police um this week or last week they were

00:02:28.300 talking about drill videos on youtube drill is the latest form of grime music lots of young black 1.00

00:02:33.500 kids listen to it in london and elsewhere uh very violent music kind of praises gangs and stabbing

00:02:39.580 attacks and guns and so on so it's and people are very scared it's like the new gangster rap scare

00:02:45.180 but in britain instead of the us and the police made this incredibly interesting statement where

00:02:50.300 they said we're taking down hundreds of these videos because we think they're dangerous so i

00:02:54.540 think that was an act of police censorship um and they said uh even if there is no obvious

00:03:02.380 act of violence that has been incited by these videos, we can still say that these videos

00:03:08.340 incite violence. I thought that was really interesting because incitement to violence

00:03:11.980 now means pretty much anything you want it to mean. It basically just means that you

00:03:16.660 really hate this form of speech, whether it's a drill video, whether it's Jermaine Greer

00:03:20.920 going to Cardiff University and arguing that trans people aren't real women, that's also

00:03:25.620 described as incitement to violence. Pretty much any form of speech can now be described

00:03:29.520 an assignment to violence. So even there I think we have to be very specific and I would

00:03:34.160 like to see evidence that the speech in question directly contributed to an act of violence

00:03:39.420 before I would be willing to sanction any form of punishment for that speech.

00:03:44.580 What's interesting about that is that that argument has always been with us. If you think

00:03:49.500 about the Jamie Bulger killings 20 odd years ago, that was blamed on computer video games.

00:03:54.740 If you think about the school students in Boulder, Colorado,

00:03:58.900 they blamed it on Marilyn Manson.

00:04:00.620 Do you think you can ever attribute an act of violence

00:04:05.240 to a particular type of thought?

00:04:08.720 Oh, yeah. I think you can.

00:04:10.940 I think, you know, the guy, Mark David Chapman,

00:04:14.720 who shot John Lennon, was inspired to do so

00:04:16.840 by J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye.

00:04:19.420 He really genuinely thought that Catcher in the Rye 0.66

00:04:22.060 was giving him a message to kill John Lennon.

00:04:24.000 And so you could argue that Catcher in the Rye caused the death of John Lennon or Charles Manson and his crazy family were inspired to kill all those people in Los Angeles by the White Album. 0.97

00:04:34.560 I mean, they really genuinely believed deep in their heart that the White Album by the Beatles contained all these messages about race wars and the piggies in the capitalist society who needed to be slaughtered and so on. 0.96

00:04:46.600 they really believe that and of course you know countless numbers of people have killed because

00:04:52.360 they read something in the bible or they believe something in the quran so it's unquestionable that

00:04:56.860 ideas can encourage people to commit violent acts it's unquestionable that some people will look at

00:05:02.540 a piece of art or read a book or hear a song and think to themselves this work of art is telling

00:05:08.140 me to do something really bad but if you were to organize society on the basis that that might

00:05:13.720 happen then you are basically creating a lunatic asylum in which all of us are punished on the 0.96

00:05:21.160 basis that one or two crazy people might do something stupid after reading Catcher in the 0.98

00:05:25.380 Rye or listening to the White Album and that would be a deeply unpleasant society because there's no 0.99

00:05:30.520 end of cultural products or artistic things that could be said to inspire violence or

00:05:37.900 hatefulness in one form or another so i but my issue with media effects theory which is this

00:05:45.260 idea that video nasties cause mass killings or video games make the james bulger murder happen

00:05:51.200 or in the modern version because the left the effects theory used to be very prominent on the

00:05:57.740 right among kind of old christian women and merry white house types and very conservative 0.94

00:06:02.760 stiff people now it's kind of shifted to the left and it's very much more often the left now that

00:06:08.680 argues about media effects theory and will say that lads mags if they're in shop on shop shelves

00:06:16.000 will cause men to become rapacious and anti-women or violence against women in films will cause men

00:06:22.960 to commit violence against women in real life so the left has utterly embraced the media effects

00:06:27.400 theory. My problem with the media effects theory is that it presents all people as almost like

00:06:33.280 animals who just look at something and then think I must act on that. And that is a very demeaning

00:06:39.460 view of the vast majority of human beings who actually are perfectly capable of thinking for

00:06:44.240 themselves and perfectly capable of making a decision about what they should do with their

00:06:48.280 lives. So I would be very wary of any justification of censorship that was made on the basis that

00:06:54.660 we basically are monkey see monkey do and that we see something or hear

00:06:59.960 something and then immediately feel that we have to commit a violent act on the

00:07:02.980 back of it.

00:07:03.980 What about France's specific example about the imam, right, who's out on the 0.97

00:07:08.400 street saying homosexuals must be stoned to death, for example. Is that 0.95

00:07:12.600 incitement to violence?

00:07:14.120 Not necessarily. There is an actual example of this, which was I got into a

00:07:19.320 debate with Peter Tatchell about...

00:07:20.880 We had him on the show a couple of weeks ago.

00:07:22.300 Right. And I agree with him on many things, but one thing that we disagreed on very much about 10 or 15 years ago was dancehall music from Jamaica, which has homophobic lyrics.

00:07:34.400 And it includes things like, it says things like, throw the gays onto the fire and things like that, you know, so quite violent imagery.

00:07:43.540 And Brighton, I think it was in Brighton, some clubs started to ban this music and then people were calling for a ban across Britain,

00:07:49.460 that it shouldn't be played in public that you should even ban the sale of it potentially

00:07:53.040 and peter tatchell although he's generally quite good on the freedom of speech question

00:07:57.500 was on on the side of banning this music precisely because he said it's incitement to violence and i

00:08:03.140 was against that on the basis that to my mind that wasn't a specific enough example of incitement

00:08:08.940 to violence i think if you're in a club at two o'clock in the morning and you're dancing and

00:08:13.180 you're drunk and there's a song on the speaker over there and probably the most of the lyrics

00:08:19.340 are actually quite unintelligible because it's very loud and the music's thumping and you hear

00:08:24.240 someone say throw gaze onto the fire or whatever the lyric was if you then go out and do something

00:08:29.660 like that you have completely and utterly made a free choice you've used your free will you have

00:08:36.580 decided to do this thing this terrible thing and to hold the music responsible for that i think

00:08:43.000 is ridiculous, and a complete cop-out, and actually calls into question the very notion

00:08:47.880 of free will. 0.85

00:08:48.880 Well in the music I would totally agree with you, but what about the imam on the street 0.99

00:08:52.600 literally saying these people should be killed?

00:08:57.100 Well even there the question comes back to how he's saying it, the context in which he's

00:09:02.500 saying it, and whether he's saying it about specific individuals.

00:09:05.000 If he was on a street corner and he was pointing at a gay couple and saying these people need 0.94

00:09:09.320 to be killed, that's not freedom of speech, that is an incitement to violence. 0.88

00:09:12.760 particularly if there was an atmosphere around him 0.96

00:09:15.460 say there were other radical Muslims

00:09:17.460 listening to him and getting heated up

00:09:19.240 and he pointed at 1.00

00:09:21.520 someone specific and said they deserve to die 1.00

00:09:23.420 because they're gay, that's not a free speech issue 1.00

00:09:25.220 that is what I would call incitement to violence 0.95

00:09:27.240 the American Civil Liberties Union

00:09:29.680 which is infinitely better on the question

00:09:31.640 of freedom of speech than any organisation in Britain

00:09:33.800 has a very clear definition

00:09:35.480 of incitement to violence which is

00:09:37.260 speech where there is

00:09:39.060 you should know as a reasonable

00:09:41.240 human being that you're there is a clear and present possibility that your words will cause

00:09:46.980 violence um so if there and i generally accept that definition of incitement of violence so if

00:09:52.960 that imam was pointing at a specific people and there was a mob around him and they were getting

00:09:56.780 angry and being homophobic and everything else and he instructed them to do something and they did it

00:10:01.520 he could be held responsible alongside them for what happened but if he's on a soapbox saying 0.97

00:10:09.960 homosexuality is sinful and homosexuality should be put to death that's different that's the 1.00

00:10:15.240 expression of a repugnant religious conviction as opposed to a direct call for violence as opposed 0.99

00:10:21.400 to a direct incitement of specific people to attack specific people yeah and the reason i

00:10:27.020 think that's important to um hold up that distinction is because people have been

00:10:31.060 arrested in britain for saying homophobic things in public a christian preacher was arrested two

00:10:36.360 two or three years ago because he was on a soapbox in public he didn't inside violence but he said

00:10:42.440 homosexuality is repugnant and he quoted from the book of revelations and various other things 0.99

00:10:48.280 and uh some a young gay couple walking past took offense and phoned the police and he was arrested 0.98

00:10:53.400 and he was put in a prison cell for 19 hours and then eventually the charges against him were

00:10:58.440 dropped the police decided in their infinite wisdom that he hadn't crossed the line into

00:11:02.280 committing a crime but he was in a cell for 19 hours I find it terrifying that in Britain in

00:11:08.780 the 21st century you can be put into a jail cell for 19 hours effectively for reading from the

00:11:13.640 book of revelations in public I think that's the kind of tyrannical developments that we should be

00:11:20.100 more concerned about rather than the possibility that an imam will get up in public and say those

00:11:25.240 things which actually strikes me as increasingly unlikely because not least because a few years

00:11:32.160 ago when radical Muslims marched in public with placards saying behead critics of Islam

00:11:36.860 or whatever, behead the blasphemers, a lot of them were arrested and punished, which 0.65

00:11:41.720 I have a problem with, but that is what happened and subsequent to that there have been fewer 0.82

00:11:46.220 of those violently imaged protests by radical Muslims.

00:11:52.340 So you've talked about some of the things of where we are in Britain with free speech

00:11:56.920 and also where you'd like to be, how you see the world ideally.

00:12:01.120 Where are we now? What's the reality of the free speech issue in Britain today?

00:12:05.220 It's really in a bad state. We don't have freedom of speech in Britain. Now, when you

00:12:10.420 say that to people, they say, oh, but I can generally say whatever I want. Yeah, you can,

00:12:14.680 but not everyone else can. And freedom of speech, by its definition, either extends

00:12:19.620 to everyone or extends to no one.

00:12:21.960 So who is unable to speak now?

00:12:25.240 Various people have been arrested for things that they said or questioned by the police

00:12:28.320 for jokes that they made um there's the example of count dankula who was arrested and charged with

00:12:34.480 a grossly offensive crime for getting his girlfriend's pug to do a nazi salute which is

00:12:39.120 i told that story in brazil at a conference in brazil a few weeks ago and they were they couldn't

00:12:43.660 believe this was happening and that's a country not long out of actual dictatorship um count

00:12:50.380 dankula is one example um there have been other examples a couple of weeks ago no one wants to

00:12:55.200 talk about this because it is deeply controversial a man was arrested and charged with a crime for

00:12:59.280 making an anti-jewish speech in um a jewish area of london golders green or stamford hill i can't

00:13:05.020 remember which one uh clearly an anti-semite um the um allison chabloss was last week she's a 1.00

00:13:13.680 notorious holocaust denier a vile vile despicable woman who was a few years ago prevented from 1.00

00:13:18.900 performing at edinburgh because her songs were included references to the holocaust being a sham

00:13:24.920 and so on she was found guilty last week a few a few days ago of being grossly offensive online

00:13:32.940 because she posted two songs on youtube in which she denied the holocaust and that's a really

00:13:37.420 significant case because britain has always refused to criminalize holocaust denial which

00:13:42.500 i think is the right thing to do we we should absolutely challenge holocaust denial we should

00:13:47.360 ridicule it we should combat it with all the army of facts that demonstrate what happened in europe

00:13:53.100 in the 1930s and 40s but we shouldn't criminalize it so because she couldn't be found guilty of 0.96

00:13:59.420 Holocaust now because that's not a crime in Britain instead she was found guilty of being 0.99

00:14:03.140 grossly offensive under the 2003 communications act which basically means that this is an

00:14:08.780 incredibly section 127 of this act which says that if you post or say something grossly offensive

00:14:15.460 online you could be taken to court I think that section 127 is a despicable menace to freedom

00:14:21.300 speech and has been used in an incredibly promiscuous fashion to punish all sorts of

00:14:26.740 people, including Count Dankler and others who simply say things that some people find

00:14:31.880 unpalatable or offensive or nauseating or wrong. So what's the state of free speech

00:14:38.880 in Britain? The state of free speech in Britain is that we have actual laws that prevent you

00:14:42.040 from saying certain things. We have actual people being arrested and fined for having

00:14:46.320 said things that they believe to be true or having made jokes that people find offensive

00:14:51.040 and we have the police knocking on people's doors

00:14:54.820 and telling them off the things that they said on Twitter

00:14:57.000 this actually happened

00:14:58.660 one example is the young guy in Newcastle

00:15:03.400 I think who made a joke about the Glasgow lorry disaster

00:15:07.260 at Christmas a couple of years ago

00:15:08.860 a lorry spun out of control and killed six people in Glasgow on the high street

00:15:12.840 someone made a joke on Twitter

00:15:14.800 which I won't repeat because it was really actually was a horrible joke

00:15:17.800 the police went to his house and told him to stop saying these things online

00:15:22.280 so free speech is in a really poor way and um people i think need to realize that and they

00:15:30.820 need to realize fundamentally that if we don't have freedom of speech for all these people who

00:15:35.360 we might consider to be on the outskirts of acceptable thinking then we don't have freedom

00:15:39.340 of speech we have licensed speech we have speech we have a situation where you are allowed to say

00:15:45.060 things so long as you don't offend someone in a position of authority that's not freedom of speech

00:15:50.280 that's licensed speech we're all now basically speaking on license and if we cross a line we

00:15:55.900 could actually go to court but what's wrong with having licensed speech i mean i'll be honest with

00:15:59.880 you i don't want to hear someone who's denying the holocaust because it's nonsense i don't want

00:16:03.240 to hear people having people having the right to talk about beheading people who don't who are

00:16:08.540 unbelievers or who don't or apostates what's wrong with that it's wrong for two reasons firstly it's

00:16:13.780 wrong because however much you don't want to hear these things and I don't want to hear them either

00:16:17.480 as it happens some people believe them and I think it's always wrong to prevent people from

00:16:24.180 saying what they believe it's always important to remember that one man's hate speech is another

00:16:28.260 man's deeply held moral conviction some people really believe as a deeply held moral conviction

00:16:35.460 that the holocaust didn't happen I think they're bar me I think they are all racist I think holocaust

00:16:40.980 and hell is always driven by racism i think they are they twist facts or they make the facts up 0.90

00:16:47.820 i think they're crazy i think they're deluded but they they really believe that they build their

00:16:52.780 whole lives around this moral conviction or to give a more mainstream example there are some 0.99

00:16:58.020 people smaller numbers than in the past but there are some people who think that gay sex is sinful 0.99

00:17:03.380 and disgusting and if you do it you will literally burn in hell they genuinely believe that 0.99

00:17:09.780 and if you punish people for what they genuinely believe then you have entered into a an actual 0.56

00:17:17.020 orwellian society so um because who's to tell when the definition of an unacceptable belief

00:17:24.720 won't be expanded and won't at some point include what you believe or what i believe or what any of

00:17:29.680 us believe so that's the first problem you should never stop people from saying what they think to

00:17:34.060 be true even if you know that it's not true and then the second reason uh that we should let them

00:17:40.100 say these things is because the the rest of us the audience the ordinary people the public needs to

00:17:45.700 have the right to hear this stuff so that we can decide for ourselves whether it's good or bad

00:17:50.920 whether it's right or wrong and how we might confront it i think one of the worst problems

00:17:55.740 with censorship is that it infantilizes the public it treats us as these children who have to have our

00:18:02.060 ears and eyes covered by gracious people in positions of authority so that we never hear

00:18:08.120 things that they've decided on our behalf are wrong or incorrect or offensive so censorship

00:18:14.620 has this incredibly corrosive infantilizing impact across society where everyone is reduced to the

00:18:21.260 level of a child and as a consequence your moral and mental muscles get weaker and weaker because

00:18:26.860 they're never called into use you never have to use them to decide for yourself to use your moral 0.66

00:18:31.960 judgment and decide okay that idea is bullshit and I know this because I've thought about it I've 0.67

00:18:37.460 talked to people about it I've read about it and I've investigated it. John Stuart Mill makes this 0.96

00:18:41.660 point in On Liberty which is probably the best thing ever written about freedom of speech he

00:18:45.640 makes the point that if you are prevented from using your moral muscles if you are prevented

00:18:52.500 from hearing everything and making a judgment between these different things you hear then you

00:18:58.680 are basically not a human you're an ape and you're following orders and you're being instructed on 0.99

00:19:03.840 how to govern your way through life so i would say censorship is bad for two reasons firstly

00:19:08.680 because it stops people from saying things that they think are true and good and interesting even

00:19:13.240 if most people think they're not and even worse it reduces the public to the level of infants or

00:19:19.920 animals who have to be protected from things they couldn't possibly understand so it has an

00:19:25.060 incredibly corrosive impact on public life itself.

00:19:29.600 So I was actually going to move on from that.

00:19:31.980 No, I was going to dig in a little bit more.

00:19:33.580 Okay, you go for it, you dig in a little bit more.

00:19:35.420 Actually, it's interesting for me because I agree with you to a large extent,

00:19:39.240 not fully, but to a large extent on the principle around freedom of speech.

00:19:43.780 But the difficulty, and Frances and I have talked with various guests about this,

00:19:47.900 the difficulty that we have is free speech has become so associated with right-wing politics,

00:19:54.760 with the old right now that when you talk about the reason that we have a problem with free speech

00:20:00.200 in this country is that a holocaust denier couldn't go into gold is green and do an anti-holocaust

00:20:05.780 denial speech or whatever right i kind of i struggle to go yeah that's that's of course i'm

00:20:11.140 gonna you know get behind you know i struggle you don't say that in private mate you're bang on it

00:20:18.060 no but you know what i mean like in principle i totally agree with you but the practical reality

00:20:24.200 is that the people who are now being bandied about

00:20:27.540 as these champions of free speech

00:20:29.140 are horrible people

00:20:30.840 with whom none of us would want to have anything to do with.

00:20:33.700 I completely agree.

00:20:34.500 And fighting, and I get it.

00:20:36.020 I get that the idea of free speech

00:20:37.440 is you fight for free speech for the person you despise

00:20:40.360 because anything else isn't free speech.

00:20:42.880 But it's so difficult, I think,

00:20:44.320 particularly in the current climate,

00:20:45.660 to go, yeah, well, these Holocaust deniers,

00:20:48.240 they should be free to speak.

00:20:50.180 Yeah, but I think you're right. 0.99

00:20:51.800 You have to defend scum 0.96

00:20:53.460 in order to defend freedom for everyone and that's always been the way freedom of speech 0.94

00:20:57.500 has worked but the way i see it when i defend freedom of speech for like the the holocaust 0.77

00:21:02.000 the singing holocaust denier who was recently convicted i see myself as not defending her but

00:21:07.520 defending us ordinary people because what i'm saying is i trust people to be able to hear these

00:21:14.600 things and to know that they're wrong i trust people to be able to use their mental faculties

00:21:19.580 and come to a good, sensible decision.

00:21:22.380 What the state is saying

00:21:23.580 and what all these kind of supposedly

00:21:25.520 left-wing demanders of censorship

00:21:27.720 are saying is they don't trust us.

00:21:29.840 They don't trust people. They think we're

00:21:31.660 idiots. They think we're stupid. They think 1.00

00:21:33.560 we're children and they must look after us.

00:21:35.700 That's the dynamic that has to be challenged.

00:21:37.700 It's not as if I'm on the street corner saying 1.00

00:21:39.500 I really desperately want to hear this stupid 1.00

00:21:41.620 woman's Holocaust denying songs. 1.00

00:21:44.260 As it happens, I have watched them 1.00

00:21:45.540 and they're dreadful and she's an idiot and everything 1.00

00:21:47.600 else and they're not even catchy. 0.99

00:21:48.820 So it's not as if I'm out there because I'm so desperate to hear this stuff, but I am incredibly keen to defend the idea that the great thing about freedom of speech is that it creates a situation where ordinary people are trusted to make decisions for themselves.

00:22:04.720 That's the main thing about it.

00:22:06.420 And that means you have to defend awful people.

00:22:08.140 H.L. Mencken, the great American journalist, made this point.

00:22:11.540 he said you have to defend scoundrels because laws of censorship and laws of authoritarianism

00:22:16.760 always target scoundrels first and if you let them fall by the wayside it could be you next

00:22:23.260 Thomas Paine made this argument the great Thomas Paine the English radical probably my one hero

00:22:29.440 in history made the point that if you don't defend freedom for your enemy then you set in motion a 0.97

00:22:36.420 precedent that will one day come and bite you on the arse he didn't say that he said it in better

00:22:41.020 english and that still stands that's still true that is still true and as an example in the 1980s 0.99

00:22:47.340 the 1990s and the 2000s the left in britain having lost the plot and given up on freedom

00:22:53.500 to such a great extent would often argue for far-right marches to be banned and for far-right

00:22:59.100 protests to be banned and the government because the government loves banning things said fine

00:23:03.500 we'll do it lo and behold there were some occasions when left-wing activists said okay

00:23:08.460 now we want to hold an anti-racist and anti-fascist march to show that we are really serious about

00:23:13.320 this and the government said oh no we think that will be disruptive as well so now we've we sorted

00:23:18.340 out the situation for you so go home and they banned those demonstrations as well if you demand

00:23:23.020 if you call for people to be censored you haven't got a leg to stand on when someone someone comes

00:23:28.320 to censor you you haven't got a leg to stand on and that's what these leftist censors don't

00:23:33.640 understand the reason you have to defend free speech for fascists and racists and homophobes

00:23:38.160 and islamists and everyone else is because you have to defend freedom of speech for yourself

00:23:44.800 and that's the thing they always forget i mean it's absolutely i was going to say

00:23:52.040 i've been criticized many times on the podcast for saying it's fascinating but you know what it was 0.99

00:23:57.280 i would disagree with you and i would ban that woman's uh comedy songs because i hate shit 1.00

00:24:02.720 comedy and i've listened to too much of it and i pan it immediately and it was up to you half 0.95

00:24:09.540 the comedy circle oh yeah no mate they've been the gulag and absolutely and i like the fact that

00:24:15.100 you criticized you said it was horrible it was racist and the worst thing not even catching

00:24:19.100 but um we'll move on a little bit now um i find it very very interesting your point

00:24:32.500 about, in particular, identity politics.

00:24:35.580 Would you be able to talk about identity politics,

00:24:37.920 in particular what identity politics means to you?

00:24:41.500 Identity politics means, to me,

00:24:44.580 it really means an abandonment of the ideals of universalism

00:24:47.460 and the idea that what we share in common

00:24:50.420 is more important than what differentiates us.

00:24:54.280 And this is an idea as old as time.

00:24:56.340 I mean, it's most clearly expressed, of course,

00:24:57.840 by Martin Luther King and his dream of a future

00:25:00.040 in which people would be judged according to their character

00:25:02.060 rather than the colour of their skin.

00:25:03.780 That, I think, is a pretty good progressive view

00:25:06.800 of how we should live.

00:25:08.820 But the left recently, the faux left, the phony left, 0.98

00:25:11.680 the bullshit left, or whatever we want to refer to it as, 0.98

00:25:14.180 has completely abandoned the idea of universalism 0.98

00:25:16.680 or the idea that human beings have much in common

00:25:20.300 despite their different backgrounds,

00:25:21.700 despite their different skin colours,

00:25:22.980 despite their different genders,

00:25:24.140 and has gone down the road of this separatist,

00:25:27.560 divisive, racial politics of identity.

00:25:31.580 and now what we have is a left that thinks hyper racially all the time about everything you know

00:25:38.860 they go and watch a movie and then they go home and write a tumblr post about how many black people

00:25:42.900 were in it or how much speaking time the black woman had or they will stand up on campus and say 0.72

00:25:48.360 as a black lesbian or as a muslim homosexual or as a or as a white man and then they always make 0.91

00:25:55.380 a very apologetic statement about their privileged lives um so you have this bizarre situation where

00:26:02.200 the left where used to be at the forefront of challenging the whole idea of race basically

00:26:07.040 saying race is nonsense it's a made-up category which doesn't actually define how human beings

00:26:12.960 exist or or what we're like that's what the left always said they said it was made up and we should

00:26:17.280 stop using it to now to a situation where the left embraces the politics of racial difference

00:26:22.820 in fact and the politics of sexual difference and will often and defines everyone and every

00:26:30.480 aspect of life according to race background cultural inherited traits and so on so i find

00:26:38.140 that identity politics i find it to be incredibly divisive and poisonous and destructive and i think

00:26:44.400 the left's embrace of it really speaks to the left's abandonment of some of its good traditional

00:26:50.220 ideals primarily that to be universal and to see the universal similarities in human beings is a

00:26:57.840 good idea. Why do you say it's the left because I recognize what you're talking about on the left

00:27:02.260 but I think fundamentally it's happening on the right as well yeah and that's actually to me a

00:27:06.440 much bigger concern is the the adoption of identity politics on the right because we've

00:27:11.520 seen where that leads before and if there's one group of people that that you worry about banding

00:27:16.460 together on the basis of identities, white men.

00:27:19.560 Well, I think you're right.

00:27:22.080 I think, in fact, identity politics, in its original form,

00:27:24.740 going back a couple of hundred years, comes from the right. 0.76

00:27:27.560 In fact, identity politics could be seen very much

00:27:30.020 as a kind of right-wing reactionary response

00:27:32.280 to the Enlightenment.

00:27:33.660 So you have the Enlightenment.

00:27:34.500 You have this great progressive leap forward.

00:27:36.160 Everyone's saying, let's use our moral reason.

00:27:37.920 Let's have freedom of speech.

00:27:39.220 Let's give this idea a go that ordinary people can run

00:27:43.620 their lives without having priests and kings

00:27:46.080 breathing down their necks all the time.

00:27:47.460 Wonderful step forward for human thought and human society.

00:27:52.380 And the right, or reactionary elements,

00:27:54.500 or romantic elements, as they sometimes

00:27:56.180 refer to themselves, responded to that

00:27:58.520 by basically saying, ah, but human beings are very different.

00:28:01.580 So the Enlightenment philosophers often talked about man.

00:28:05.320 You know, they're a little bit sexist.

00:28:06.600 They didn't talk about men and women,

00:28:07.900 but they talked about man, this idea of universal man.

00:28:11.480 And there was one famous French reactionary,

00:28:14.640 Joseph de Maistre, who responded to that by saying, what is man? All I see is Italian men 0.98

00:28:20.680 and French men and white men and black men. So that's a very early expression of identity

00:28:25.120 politics in response to a progressive, enlightened view of human beings as being

00:28:30.840 quite universal and so on. So it comes from the right to begin with. Tragically, I think it's

00:28:38.840 really is an epic tragedy. The left then starts to adopt it really from the mid 20th century onwards

00:28:44.000 and then really, in a pronounced way, from the 1980s onwards.

00:28:49.240 And as you say, the right never really gave it up, as it happens.

00:28:53.040 They've always been into identity.

00:28:54.200 They've always thought there were significant differences between races and so on.

00:28:59.020 And now the right is embracing it again through the alt-right

00:29:02.420 and through white nationalism and other things like that.

00:29:04.660 I see that very much as a response to the institutionalization of identity politics by certain elements on the left and by the political class itself.

00:29:18.700 So I think if you create a situation where you are constantly saying to people, you're a white man, you're a white man, you're a white man, you can't say that you're a white man, you shouldn't be here, you're a white man, you shouldn't be speaking over this woman because you're a white man.

00:29:33.260 eventually those white men are going to turn around and say okay I'm a white man

00:29:36.740 and that's how you're defining me and everything I do and everything I believe

00:29:40.520 so maybe that's how I should define myself and everything I do and everything I believe

00:29:45.080 so I think this new tragic sad possibly dangerous movement of white men which I still think is quite 0.99

00:29:53.440 a minority I think it gets slightly blown out of proportion I do see that as a response to

00:29:58.420 this new identity politics and this encouragement this incitement of people

00:30:03.140 to constantly define themselves by their skin color and their sex lo and behold you have a new 0.74

00:30:08.640 movement of white men saying okay that's all we are we're white men and we're going to stick

00:30:12.540 together and we're going to have white pride so i think that's a new manifestation of the old

00:30:17.560 right-wing identity politics and it's been encouraged and infused and shaped i think

00:30:21.900 by left-wing identity politics which i think is now an incredibly powerful movement so we're

00:30:28.020 talking about identity and whiteness and skin color and all these things here we are three

00:30:32.880 white men or technically i mean francis mother is from venezuela so he's technically latino

00:30:36.700 i'm from russia i have quite dark skin but nominally we're still three white men well

00:30:42.040 i'm irish and we're the blacks of europe right according to roddy okay so none of us none of us

00:30:46.160 here is white but actually i i when we had andrew dolan i told him that when i was growing up in

00:30:52.560 russia if someone wanted to be rude to me on the street which happened every now and again

00:30:56.740 they would say to me you're black go home because people who have dark skin like me in russia they're 0.83

00:31:03.380 the discriminator against minority but anyway in this country we're white right yeah uh three of 0.97

00:31:09.160 us talking about race in a room that's got to be a hate crime in itself yeah um you you just wrote

00:31:13.580 recently a column about how uh white guilt is essentially become a perverse way of signaling

00:31:21.960 your virtue and it's become almost white pride in a way that sounds very counterintuitive what

00:31:26.980 do you mean by that yeah it's all these people who are constantly checking their white privilege

00:31:31.060 and um you know they go online they go on twitter they go on facebook or they write articles and

00:31:37.360 they say i'm white um i have to recognize that i'm a very privileged person i shouldn't speak

00:31:43.260 over black people i shouldn't speak over women and so on um and i've been watching this go on

00:31:48.900 for a few years now and I was thinking it's really strange because it's it looks shameful you know 0.52

00:31:53.160 they're very ashamed of being white they're very ashamed of what they call white history and

00:31:56.520 colonialism and empire and everything else so they express this great shame but they do it in such a 0.92

00:32:01.420 showy narcissistic ostentatious way like look at me I'm so ashamed and what you realize is that

00:32:08.180 actually there's a real boastfulness to this checking of your white privilege and they're

00:32:12.160 really making a public display of it so I think what's going on here is that this expression of

00:32:17.440 white shame or this expression of white guilt has really become a new form of white pride because

00:32:22.240 in essence what they're saying is we are good white people we're very socially and politically

00:32:28.180 aware we're switched on we're sensitive to the crimes of history we're sensitive to the needs

00:32:33.520 and interests of black people we're good whites not like those other whites the uneducated ones 0.83

00:32:41.180 the uncouth ones the ones who didn't go to Oxford University the ones who don't read the Guardian 0.99

00:32:44.920 and the ones who don't use Twitter, they're the bad whites. 0.97

00:32:48.780 So what you see is they're creating almost this new white nationalism, ironically, 0.98

00:32:53.100 where they are demonstrating their decent whiteness in contrast largely to bad white people. 0.66

00:32:59.400 So it's a very racially driven form of narcissism, I think, this checking of your white privilege. 0.63

00:33:05.640 It's also, so not only does it demean bad whites, I think implicitly demeans bad whites, 0.93

00:33:10.040 it also demeans black people because it's driven by this idea that black people are quite fragile 0.98

00:33:16.040 and therefore there are certain things you shouldn't say in their presence or there are 0.71

00:33:20.040 certain things that we maybe shouldn't publish or there are certain speakers we shouldn't invite to

00:33:23.440 campus because black people would disappear into a crisis of self-esteem which I think is also a

00:33:29.060 very racially driven denigrated view of black people so I think this idea that whiteness is 0.66

00:33:35.620 this all-powerful thing and it can even induce trauma in people because you know whiteness is 0.98

00:33:40.960 this powerful force. Actually what that says is that white people are very strong and black people 0.96

00:33:47.380 who might crumble if you say something racist or might crumble if you invite Tommy Robinson to your 0.99

00:33:52.300 campus are very weak. So it actually rehabilitates this politically correct white guilt which is now

00:33:59.820 incredibly fashionable actually recreates the idea that whites are the adults with great

00:34:05.340 power to cause distress. And blacks are the children who might sometimes need censorship 0.94

00:34:10.980 and other things to protect them from offensive ideas. I find it really repugnant. And that's 0.99

00:34:15.880 one of the examples of how identity politics, when you think hyper-racially all the time,

00:34:21.380 you end up rehabilitating racial stereotypes. In this case, that whites are all-powerful 0.50

00:34:28.060 and blacks are weak and that's where this identity politics is taking us it's taken us down a very 0.94

00:34:33.440 dark alley towards the old racist politics that so many of us spend a lot of time trying to escape 0.98

00:34:38.760 and or to defeat so what do you make of the concept of white privilege in general then 0.95

00:34:43.440 i think it's bullshit i think it's uh it expresses a very infantile way of understanding society and 0.93

00:34:51.440 the dynamics within society. Do I think there's racism? Of course. But I also think racism 0.98

00:34:58.740 is far rarer now than it was in the past. I think it's become this minority pursuit 1.00

00:35:04.440 among pockets of people, whereas in the past, and even I'm old enough to remember this,

00:35:08.800 it was a fairly dominant ideology in Western societies. I think that's faded away, and

00:35:16.560 that's all to the good. But racism, yes, racism still exists.

00:35:20.060 But white privilege isn't about racism. Sorry to interrupt. It's not about racism. It's the idea that you and I walking down the street will be treated differently to two black people walking down the street by other people, by shop assistants, by the police, by whatever. That's the idea of white privilege.

00:35:33.640 Yeah, but that's not necessarily true. But the reason I think it's a very narrow way to understand society is because I think a far greater influence on people's fortunes is class. And that's how I think is a far better way to understand society.

00:35:49.060 So the idea that, you know, people say privileged white men, privileged white this, privileged white that, the vast majority of white people don't enjoy any form of privilege and are actually quite poor or working class, the majority of them.

00:36:02.780 and the idea of white privilege is actually one that comes from the very privileged strata of

00:36:10.500 society which is academia and professors and all these kind of young people brought up in very

00:36:16.100 middle-class homes who go off to university and come up with these theories about white privilege 0.97

00:36:19.400 so it's this very bizarre twisted ridiculous idea that you know these like those black kids at 1.00

00:36:28.840 Oxford who are all there on Rhodes scholarships so they come from 0.80

00:36:32.020 incredibly privileged backgrounds and they're on Rhodes scholarships at

00:36:35.460 Oxford the finest university in the world and they spend the whole time

00:36:38.460 going on about how privileged white people are what including the the

00:36:41.600 Polish white man who who built the extension to your house or I don't know

00:36:47.800 the the Turkish white man who cleans your toilet what are we talking about

00:36:53.860 here there's a real unwillingness to understand the complexities of modern

00:36:58.180 society and the fact that, in my view, class remains the deciding factor as to your fortunes

00:37:05.760 and where you go and how successful you can be.

00:37:08.940 You know, this was really brought home by, there's a trans, there's a black trans woman

00:37:13.340 called Monroe Bergdorf, and she gave an interview to The Guardian recently because she got in 0.81

00:37:17.880 trouble because she said all white people are racist. 0.99

00:37:20.420 And she gave an interview to The Guardian and she was explaining her concept of white 0.86

00:37:23.800 privilege and she said, even a homeless white man has privilege.

00:37:27.020 and the justification she gave was that in comparison with a homeless black man he's got

00:37:33.780 more chance of getting out now she didn't provide any statistics for that or anything like that

00:37:37.080 but the point is she came she comes from an incredibly privileged background her mother

00:37:41.480 was very successful in business she had a lovely upbringing she now has a very lovely life and she

00:37:46.580 is telling the man who lives under a bridge and is addicted to heroin and might starve to death

00:37:51.260 any moment now that he enjoys privilege that's how screwed up identity politics has become and

00:37:56.900 And I think identity politics increasingly looks like the revenge of the elite, and it's

00:38:03.340 a way for them to fly in the face of all the evidence and to argue that they are the victim.

00:38:11.240 They are the great victims of life because the white man who's living in a skip has more 0.89

00:38:17.220 privilege than they do.

00:38:19.060 It's utterly surreal.

00:38:20.060 I don't think it's sustainable.

00:38:21.940 And I think, again, it's a very poisonous argument because it divides society along

00:38:25.880 racial lines, when in fact I think the key divide in society is still on matters of wealth

00:38:32.340 and class.

00:38:33.920 That's very, very interesting how you pointed that out.

00:38:36.660 To me, I think that identity politics is actually one of the greatest dangers to freedom of

00:38:41.820 speech in that people are unwilling to engage in debate because what people now do is they

00:38:46.820 don't, like you put forward that argument, but I know that there's a counter-argument

00:38:50.700 to that which would just be, well, as a white man, you're not entitled to those views or

00:38:55.280 opinions simply because you've never experienced the struggle in inverted

00:38:59.280 commas and therefore completely denigrating your argument instead of

00:39:02.840 actually engaging with the argument and putting forward a counter counter

00:39:06.620 point of view which is entirely reasonable it's simply to attack the

00:39:10.400 person speaking and the moment you do that I think they're all semblance of

00:39:15.920 discussion and freedom of speech it just goes out the window it's dead yeah

00:39:19.280 it's terrible because people's ideas and views are judged on the basis of their

00:39:24.080 skin colour and or their genitals or whatever it might be rather than on what they're actually

00:39:28.440 saying which runs counter to every democratic liberal ideal which is that you should hear

00:39:36.000 people out have the discussion have an open discussion and then work out as a society

00:39:40.360 what's good and what's bad and where we should go and so on so it runs I completely agree it's

00:39:44.900 completely destructive of freedom of speech and open debate and what it does it really causes

00:39:50.860 people to clam up so people feel that there are certain things they shouldn't say in public or

00:39:54.940 and lots of when i go to campuses and so on there's often white men who just are really

00:40:00.220 unsure about whether they should say something in this meeting or they should just sit there and

00:40:03.900 it was really brought home there was some demonstration in the u.s a year or so ago

00:40:08.300 and there was this white man on it holding up a placard saying i was going to write a placard

00:40:12.700 but i thought it was we've heard enough from white men so i won't and that was his placard 0.98

00:40:16.620 which is which I thought well apart from anything else it's still a fucking placard yeah it's still 1.00

00:40:22.380 a placard so he's an idiot but it was a very good it was a very good example of how narcissistic 0.99

00:40:26.760 this checking of white privilege is because he was really saying I'm I'm a I'm the best white 1.00

00:40:30.820 person in the world that's what he was really saying um but it's that thing of people close

00:40:35.340 down and clam up they're not sure what they can say and so it gives rise to one of the great

00:40:39.960 scourges of our time I think which is self-censorship and that uncertainty and that well can I say this

00:40:45.780 I've got white skin I was born male am I allowed to say this or should I not say it and you think

00:40:51.400 what a destructive situation that is for us to find ourselves in I think it also the other side

00:40:57.860 of it it's not only that it is destructive for freedom of speech it also really whips up this

00:41:02.220 victim politics because you have this competitive victimhood now where everyone is trying to

00:41:06.780 demonstrate that they are a greater victim than someone else because being a victim is now the

00:41:11.900 way in which you win um social praise even in some cases um government funding you know that's

00:41:18.440 the basis on which lots of community groups win government funding is through saying we have all

00:41:22.200 these various problems um it's the way in which you win moral authority through being a victim

00:41:27.080 whereas in the past you might have won moral authority by demonstrating your autonomy and

00:41:30.800 your adulthood and the fact that you were capable of governing your own life now in a complete flip

00:41:35.440 reversal you win moral authority in 21st century britain by showing your wounds i'm a victim i've 0.98

00:41:41.420 had a really crap life. So what that does, it encourages people to constantly exaggerate

00:41:47.200 and blow out of proportion the problems they faced. And so I think there's a lot of myth-making

00:41:52.800 among some of these identitarians about how awful their lives have been. I don't buy it

00:41:56.100 for a minute because they're encouraged to do that because they need that victim authority.

00:42:01.460 And also it gives rise to this incredibly divisive competition between different groups.

00:42:06.360 well we're bigger victims than you and it has this fragmentary process even within identity

00:42:11.760 groups so even within for example trans the trans community as it's called even there

00:42:16.500 people will say oh but you're a white trans person i'm a black trans person and we have it worse than

00:42:21.580 you or in the gay community people will say oh but i'm muslim and gay that's far harder than

00:42:27.200 some whatever peter tatchell's ever had to face so this kind of complete breaking apart even of the

00:42:33.980 identity groups themselves so that you end up with all these tiny sectarian blocks who just are

00:42:39.720 constantly fighting for that moral high ground of victimhood so they can say well I'm the chief

00:42:45.000 victim therefore I deserve the money and I deserve the newspaper column and I deserve the sympathy

00:42:48.820 so um that's really bad and and I think it's had a really destructive impact on the new generation 0.89

00:42:54.960 in particular because I go to campuses and speak and I constantly meet these young people who have

00:42:59.500 really plummy posh voices and you can tell they had really nice upbringing and they want to

00:43:04.540 convince you that they suffer from structural oppression that they are they've faced abuse and

00:43:09.980 hardship every day of their life that they are um the most downtrodden community in living memory

00:43:16.120 and you just want to shake them and say that's not true but of course what you really should do

00:43:20.220 as someone who cares about the future of society is check your privilege it's check my privilege

00:43:23.980 and try and work out why they're saying this why are they saying these things which are patently

00:43:29.140 untrue and the reason they're saying them is because identity politics encourages you to see 0.91

00:43:33.760 yourself as weak and pathetic whereas left-wing politics in particular but also right-wing liberal

00:43:39.720 politics used to encourage you to see yourself as confident and capable and that shift is really 0.97

00:43:47.100 worrying. Now how did we get to this age of victimhood because it seems to be everywhere

00:43:51.180 isn't it like what you're talking about I think a lot of people who are not interested in identity

00:43:56.240 politics or all these political conversations i think a lot of people i was speaking to someone

00:44:00.320 earlier today who isn't into at all but this general purveying sense that now being a victim

00:44:06.800 is better than not being a victim somehow that instead of striving instead of trying to achieve

00:44:11.920 things instead of trying to make the best of your lot in life instead of overcoming challenges

00:44:17.360 your job in life is to identify and broadcast to the world the challenges that you've faced

00:44:23.440 how how did we get here i was going to say do you not think it's just simply because it's easier

00:44:29.280 just to go my life is hard then going all right i face these challenges i've got to work hard i've

00:44:34.240 got to look at myself i've got to improve i'm going to have to take knockbacks yeah i think

00:44:39.600 there's an element where it's easier but but then the flip side of that is that it also makes for a

00:44:44.800 shallower lamer life and and i think if you when people embrace that victim script

00:44:50.800 i think sometimes they actually become quite depressed or down because they realize that

00:44:57.420 their life is quite hollow because all they're doing constantly is exaggerating every problem

00:45:01.920 they face and then they go out there with this victim antennae on always switched up to high

00:45:06.260 so that you know the man who brushes past them on the tube that's an example of patriarchal

00:45:11.360 misogyny or the person who says to them to a black woman i love your hair where did you get

00:45:18.700 it done that's a microaggression which is evidence of the continued existence of racism so they

00:45:23.260 they can't even engage in everyday conversation i thought the roads must fall campaign in oxford

00:45:29.120 where they want to take down this statue of cecil rhodes who is a old colonialist was a good example 1.00

00:45:35.080 of this because they the students who want to tear that down described it as an environmental

00:45:38.460 microaggression so they even see inanimate objects statues buildings as things that are

00:45:45.540 attacking them. So I think when you have this victim identity, you perceive yourself as being

00:45:52.120 constantly under attack when you're not at all. But everything, every conversation starter,

00:45:56.380 every statue on the street corner, every person who just asks you a perfectly innocent question

00:46:02.180 is evidence of your victimhood and consequently evidence of everyone else's horribleness.

00:46:09.020 So you go through life with a very misanthropic view of society, I think.

00:46:12.100 so I think it does make things easier but it makes for a much shallower existence as to where

00:46:20.920 it came from I think you know I get attacked for left bashing but I do think the left bears a lot

00:46:28.460 of responsibility for this and I do think that the left's turn you know really around the 1960s

00:46:34.200 and then it picks up hugely in the 1980s you have this shift from a left that was interested in

00:46:40.300 jobs and people having enough money and people having a nice life and people

00:46:46.200 being going through life confident and capable and going on strike and making demands and

00:46:52.100 when that was your view of the world people had to be strong they had to be strong because every

00:46:56.980 now and then they would have to make a really firm demand for a better pay and conditions and a better

00:47:02.360 form of existence so the left then would would tend to encourage people you know you're a strong

00:47:07.680 person you can do this we can do this together then sometimes around the 1960s and the 1970s

00:47:13.520 the left shifts from those economic questions to cultural questions shifts from discussing

00:47:20.480 jobs and wages and the right to live in a nice house and all those practical tangible things

00:47:26.560 towards talking about issues of identity and and minority life and women's issues as well although

00:47:34.960 although I do think women's issues are important, 0.86

00:47:36.920 there is this very palpable shift in the left's focus.

00:47:40.660 And I think bit by bit that gives rise to a situation

00:47:43.440 where the left becomes less and less likely to say,

00:47:46.100 you're strong, you can do this, you're a capable person,

00:47:48.580 and more likely to say, maybe you can't do this,

00:47:51.780 maybe you're a victim, maybe we need to set up a new community group

00:47:54.160 to look after people like you,

00:47:55.600 maybe we need to get millions in funding from the government

00:47:58.300 in order to do that.

00:47:59.240 And slowly over time you have a left

00:48:02.300 which is very influential in local councils,

00:48:04.640 very influential in local politics and then eventually very influential in national politics

00:48:09.200 on the basis that many people in society are vulnerable that's their favorite word

00:48:14.800 when they call them the vulnerable and it falls to them to help look after these people so i think

00:48:20.960 that's a really important dynamic in giving rise to a situation where people are actively encouraged

00:48:28.240 to advertise their weaknesses rather than encouraged to believe in their strengths

00:48:35.840 and that's the real problem the thing i find very very difficult is when people hear talk

00:48:41.200 about oppression my mother is from venezuela and you probably know a lot about venezuela you know

00:48:45.680 it's a totalitarian regime essentially if you criticize the government at one o'clock in the

00:48:50.000 morning you will get a knock on the door and you will literally disappear and then when people

00:48:54.800 hear talk about how they're oppressed it just yeah it makes me angry it's it's it's yeah i feel the

00:49:01.200 same um it's it's complete nonsense um my parents are from the west of ireland and they grew up in

00:49:09.520 pretty awful situation and that's why they moved to london because they couldn't work there they

00:49:15.200 wouldn't have really got on in ireland very well at all so they moved to london and then they moved

00:49:19.680 into a one-bedroom flat and very quickly had five children so there were seven people in a one-bedroom

00:49:25.840 flat a council flat and then eventually moved into a council house and so on and that was very 0.99

00:49:32.240 difficult for my parents it was a really that was is what i would describe as a hard life a tough

00:49:36.720 life so when i hear people now who are at oxford and they sound like they've been at elocution

00:49:43.040 lessons for half their life and they uh obviously have never worked a day in their life never mind

00:49:49.040 struggled trying to convince me that they suffer from oppression it makes me quite angry and I

00:49:55.700 think they're talking nonsense but I think that's but trying to work out why they do that and trying

00:50:00.940 to develop a counter-argument that is better than just shaking them by the scruff of their neck

00:50:05.380 that's one of the challenges I think people face now if we want to overturn this kind of politics

00:50:11.160 But I think it's like, you know, they're always chasing that dream of having experienced depression.

00:50:21.860 And it's the reverse.

00:50:25.440 It's like the reverse of the American dream.

00:50:27.500 You know, you would once have chased the dream of having a house and a job and being a kind of capable member of your community.

00:50:34.700 Now you almost do the opposite.

00:50:36.320 So it's tragedy.

00:50:37.720 Well, how much of it is it?

00:50:39.060 It's interesting that you frame it like that.

00:50:40.600 I've never heard a frame letter.

00:50:41.680 It's a very accurate observation, I think.

00:50:43.580 It's a reverse of the American dream.

00:50:45.700 How much of it is it because essentially we in the West,

00:50:50.040 you know, France is from Venezuela.

00:50:51.540 I'm from Russia, as I said.

00:50:53.660 We in the West, we've achieved to a very significant extent

00:50:56.900 what you might refer to as the American dream.

00:50:59.120 We're wealthy, we're prosperous, we're relatively free,

00:51:01.960 we're relatively safe, we're secure.

00:51:04.080 There's a certain kind of stability and predictability to our lives.

00:51:07.260 we don't face the kind of daily challenges that most of the other seven billion people on the

00:51:12.380 planet do face you know these issues are not an issue in russia they're not an issue i'd imagine

00:51:17.260 in venezuela to anywhere near the same extent identity politics no no no i think people are

00:51:22.760 more concerned with um eating yeah food strange yeah widows widows why don't they care about 1.00

00:51:28.220 identities yeah it's not about how oppressed you are when you're yeah yeah well that's my point

00:51:33.260 right so how much of it is essentially we've solved all our basic problems so now we need

00:51:37.860 some other problems to solve because that's how yeah i used to think that about climate change

00:51:42.340 i'm a climate change skeptic not a climate change denier it's a very important difference there

00:51:46.980 i do think it's happening uh and i do think humankind bears some responsibility but i used

00:51:51.580 to think similarly about climate change which i used to think that the west had it pretty good

00:51:56.680 for the most part still poverty still poor people still unemployment and all those things that need

00:52:01.200 to be resolved but generally pretty good and we needed a new focus for all our

00:52:06.660 angst and fury and concerns and I always thought that climate change activism

00:52:12.180 which seems to fizzle out a little bit at least recently which I find really

00:52:15.600 interesting climate change activism I thought was a very middle-class largely

00:52:19.800 middle-class hand-wringing campaign where I thought was exactly that it was a way

00:52:25.800 in which they could find something in an otherwise pretty nice existence that

00:52:31.020 they could say oh my god it's the end of the world we have to do something about this whereas

00:52:34.180 in the third world they don't worry about climate change because they still don't have roads and

00:52:40.320 they still don't have hospitals and they still don't have schools and they still don't have

00:52:43.200 factories and they they want those things um so i think there's an element of that there's i think

00:52:49.180 there's an element where we've reached a certain level in western society of comfort and general

00:52:55.580 freedom or thereabouts or that is collapsing fast and people are looking for another way to

00:53:02.020 to gain meaning in their lives but the great complex question I think is why they now seek

00:53:09.100 meaning through victimhood rather than through other things like autonomy or the pursuit of I

00:53:15.020 don't know hobbies and interests or the creation of new forms new ways of living or new forms of

00:53:21.560 society there's so many or putting your energies into recreating the space race or developing

00:53:27.400 nuclear technology there are so many positive things that even a society that's reached a

00:53:31.380 pretty good level of wealth and and openness could still pursue but instead we kind of

00:53:36.740 poo-poo all that stuff is really dangerous and damaging and just focus on stare at our own navels 0.99

00:53:42.380 and our own victimhood so i'm interested in as to why the question of why when society reaches this

00:53:48.440 level it goes it's now gone down this incredibly negative route but i think the key thing about

00:53:53.580 victim politics i think is that it it works best for the people who actually aren't victims of life

00:53:59.940 like middle class people academics professors well-off students and so on but it doesn't work

00:54:05.680 for people who actually are victims of life like the poor and people looking for a job and people

00:54:09.660 struggling to make ends meet because they still have to be strong because otherwise they won't

00:54:15.800 get to the end of the week without getting hungry so that's the real interesting split in victim

00:54:20.840 politics which is i always think that the people who play the victim card most must have a really

00:54:26.180 nice life because if you are um living on the streets or in a small house and you've got five

00:54:32.420 mouths to feed and you're going to run out of work in a few weeks time and you need to find more work

00:54:36.720 you can't go around saying oh woe is me my life's so hard my my great grandfather was enslaved you

00:54:42.600 haven't got time for all that stuff you have to focus and you have to have self-drive and you have

00:54:49.000 to magic up all your moral autonomy and self-confidence and capability in order to

00:54:55.260 continue living so that I think is very interesting where I think victim politics is most pronounced

00:55:01.260 among those who've had a very cushioned existence whereas I think it is a very unuseful politics

00:55:07.200 among those who haven't had a cushioned existence and therefore still need to demonstrate their

00:55:12.320 moral independence if they're going to get through life in in good shape

00:55:16.920 moving on now you i was reading an article that spiked magazine did and it was a very very

00:55:32.220 interesting attack on the left over grenfell and the way that they have used politicized grenfell

00:55:38.460 and used it as a way to attack right-wing politics and in particular Theresa May and her government

00:55:44.780 and how in many ways immoral that is. Would you like to expand on that a little bit?

00:55:49.220 Yeah, I think what the left has done with Grenfell is really obnoxious.

00:55:52.920 Well, Brendan, actually, before you get into that, sorry, why don't you tell us a little bit about Grenfell

00:55:56.420 for international viewers who might not know what we're talking about.

00:55:59.660 So Grenfell was this unspeakable disaster that happened in London about a year ago

00:56:05.060 in which a block of flats caught fire and 71 people killed

00:56:09.560 in Kensington and Chelsea, so a really nice part of London,

00:56:13.820 but this was a very working class or immigrant or lower class block.

00:56:20.820 And it caught fire very quickly, and within three hours or so,

00:56:25.640 71 people had been killed.

00:56:27.060 So a really shocking incident in British history,

00:56:30.760 a black mark against this nation, I would say.

00:56:32.660 so a lot of questions need to be asked and answered and there's currently an inquiry

00:56:36.720 looking into why it happened and what went wrong and and what we can do in the future to prevent

00:56:41.920 anything like this from happening again what happened with the left is that almost as soon

00:56:47.340 as the fire happened they were using it exploiting it i would say to make political points about

00:56:55.360 things like neoliberalism and capitalism and the tories and all these things they don't like

00:57:01.100 and creating this very childish, I think, narrative

00:57:04.980 which said that this fire was caused by Thatcherism

00:57:08.420 and neoliberalism and evil Tory rule

00:57:11.340 in a way that just didn't quite stack up, didn't make sense.

00:57:15.340 It didn't make sense for a number of reasons.

00:57:17.040 Firstly, Grenfell Tower's been there for ages and ages and ages

00:57:19.380 and the Tories have only been in power in this country since 2010.

00:57:23.420 Prior to that, Labour was in power for 13 years.

00:57:27.140 So when you read Polly Toynbee, who wrote after Grenfell in The Guardian,

00:57:32.280 Polly Toynbee wrote, this fire sums up the politics of the last seven years.

00:57:36.820 That's exactly how long the Tories have been in power.

00:57:39.080 So apparently it told us nothing about when her favoured party was in power.

00:57:43.640 I just found that utterly unconvincing.

00:57:47.180 And also there were other questions that they were just unwilling to ask,

00:57:51.560 like, you know, why do people stay in their flats?

00:57:57.120 Why didn't they leave their flats?

00:57:58.420 And now, through the inquiry, we're discovering that that's because the fire service, mistakenly in my view,

00:58:03.760 has a stay-put policy where it tells people to stay in their flats.

00:58:06.820 And it was telling people to stay in their flats right up till 2.45 in the morning,

00:58:10.580 which was two and a half hours after the fire started.

00:58:14.340 That was brushed over.

00:58:15.880 The question of why the building was covered in cladding was brushed over.

00:58:19.520 Or it was simply explained, well, all the rich people in Kensington wanted the building to look nice

00:58:23.800 and they demanded cladding.

00:58:25.020 Not true.

00:58:25.480 In fact, the cladding is very much related to the Climate Change Act, which encourages public buildings, particularly residential buildings, to have cladding which keeps heat inside so people turn on their heaters less often.

00:58:40.740 So there are so many different political, social, historical questions that influence this tragedy, like are we spinning out of control with climate change policies? Is the fire service too risk-averse and unwilling to encourage people to take risks to save their lives?

00:58:58.440 all these things and they completely brushed over that they're coming out now thanks to the

00:59:02.840 London Review of Books which published a an amazing 60,000 word essay on Grenfell last week

00:59:08.480 which I would encourage everyone to read really really interesting and the inquiries they're

00:59:13.520 coming out there as well but what the left did it just ignored all those complexities all those

00:59:17.680 difficult questions or the possibility that you know left-wing officials also contributed to these

00:59:23.340 situations as much as right-wing people did they ignored all that and just used this tragedy

00:59:27.560 to demonise the Tories and to big up Corbyn,

00:59:34.580 Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party.

00:59:36.320 I thought it was deeply sinister and very ugly

00:59:39.420 and in fact told us a very interesting story

00:59:41.720 about how distant that new left,

00:59:45.140 how distant that Corbynista left is

00:59:47.500 from ordinary working-class Londoners.

00:59:50.600 The fact that it could exploit their horrific situation

00:59:54.500 so casually, without any consideration,

00:59:57.560 to whether it was wise to use the tragedy to score political points.

01:00:02.740 They see these people in many ways

01:00:04.780 almost as a stage upon which they might make a performance of their own virtue.

01:00:09.700 But isn't that just politics?

01:00:10.980 Isn't that what politicians always do?

01:00:13.880 Yeah, they do.

01:00:15.400 Not all of them, but politicians do that.

01:00:17.920 But I think the left, in response to Grenfell,

01:00:21.660 did it in a really bad way and took it to another level.

01:00:26.500 And I think it did tell us something very important about the opportunism of the Corbyn movement

01:00:31.540 and their willingness to use any tragic event to dent the prestige of the Tories

01:00:39.620 and boost the standing of the Corbyn movement.

01:00:42.460 I just thought it was nasty.

01:00:44.840 Blair had the same thing, the good day to very bad news on 9-11, right?

01:00:48.840 It's the same thing.

01:00:49.760 Oh, yeah.

01:00:50.540 And I'm sure the Tories get up to exactly the same thing.

01:00:52.780 Well, Blair did it with a number of instances.

01:00:54.700 Blair did it shortly after the Bulger murder, which you mentioned earlier.

01:00:58.780 He wasn't leader of the Labour Party then.

01:01:00.560 He was shadow.

01:01:01.920 Home Office Secretary, yeah.

01:01:03.560 Broken Britain.

01:01:04.340 Broken Britain.

01:01:05.100 He created all these phrases.

01:01:06.540 So the Blairites weren't averse to using tragedies to forward their agenda.

01:01:12.160 Of course, 9-11 being the perfect example, where they used that to not only bury bad 0.96

01:01:16.500 news, but also to venture into the Middle East in what I consider to be a very foolish, 0.96

01:01:20.520 destructive way. 0.89

01:01:21.180 uh oh yeah you don't need to tell me about the horribleness of the blairites i've kind of

01:01:26.320 but my point is it's a general it's the nature of politics rather than a particular thing about

01:01:31.980 no i think it is the nature of politics but i think there was something specific about the

01:01:36.380 exploitation of groundfell which is i is that it was very fast um very thoughtless and i do think

01:01:44.360 it suggests i think it is bound up with because of course what we have now which we didn't have

01:01:48.820 in bulger or 2011 or in other instances we have the whole social media climate where these things

01:01:55.280 can happen very quickly and you have this process of virtue signaling and this rush to demonstrate

01:02:00.280 that you're a good person so i was really shocked so you so you're right in a way this is politics

01:02:06.780 as normal but i was also shocked by the speed and brutality with which people did it in response to

01:02:11.700 this fire we didn't even know how many people had died before they were making these political

01:02:15.040 statements and i think it's bound up to a certain extent with the social media the rush to

01:02:19.520 the rush to signal your virtue over what i would consider the more civilized approach of

01:02:27.040 of waiting in a reasoned way for more information before you have your analysis about what's gone

01:02:33.080 wrong well see this is a point at which we can tell our viewers and listeners that you don't

01:02:36.500 use twitter so you're not familiar with how it works quite to the same extent but that is the way

01:02:45.040 on a side note don't you think social media has actually contributed in many ways to the death

01:02:53.480 of nuanced journalism because when you think about it you know it's what what journalism is

01:02:59.080 now a lot of the time is you want to boost your article you want to get hits on your article you

01:03:02.820 want to get clicks on your article you want to get likes and sadly the reality with grenfall

01:03:07.080 of anything is is that it's incredibly complex and it's going to take years months to find out

01:03:12.820 what genuinely happened yeah and a knee-jerk reaction is never going to be accurate but if

01:03:18.280 you create a knee-jerk response which is simplistic it will tap into people's emotional responses

01:03:23.540 which means that you will get the likes the hits the clicks yeah i think there's that's true i

01:03:28.560 think there's this um you know we live in a very rash times where people they kind of virtue

01:03:36.400 signaling before they think uh and there's that rush to and i think social media plays a large

01:03:41.080 part in that where you are constantly thinking well how can i use this thing that's happened

01:03:45.580 to make a statement about myself and i think that also springs from the politics of identity and the

01:03:51.140 politics of um that very narcissistic politics where you're constantly making statements about

01:03:56.820 your life and your person and your views and yourself rather than thinking more rationally

01:04:02.340 or more collectively or more coolly and waiting a bit so yeah one of the reasons i don't use

01:04:07.240 Twitter is because the thought of having a gadget in my hand on which I could

01:04:10.360 express my thoughts to the world at the press of a button horrifies me I have

01:04:15.580 some really bad thoughts they're not well thought out some people would say

01:04:20.180 they come through in my articles but I hope I managed to filter them out we all 1.00

01:04:24.340 have thoughts that we wouldn't express or you might only express them to your

01:04:29.280 best friend or you might express them within in a family situation we've

01:04:32.440 there's traditionally been this barrier between your private life and your

01:04:35.880 public life and in your private life you might be more honest you might break down in front of a

01:04:42.700 loved one and say my life's forming apart but you wouldn't do that in public and and you needed that

01:04:47.340 private sphere in which you could cut loose and be honest in order to then go out into the public

01:04:51.460 world as a kind of repaired confident individual but that line has been erased and now people have

01:04:58.100 the breakdown in public and tweet about it you know they live tweet it and and they say things

01:05:05.000 on twitter that previously they might only have kept in their head or said to a very good friend

01:05:09.300 so i don't like that direction society is going in and anything i can do to create a physical

01:05:15.720 barrier between myself and that situation i will do but when you think about how the american

01:05:20.520 president i mean he literally got to power using that and everything that you've talked about just

01:05:25.900 saying things off the top of his head and tweeting them out he's actually found an audience who are

01:05:31.080 willing to support him all the way.

01:05:32.420 I heard he tweets on the toilet,

01:05:34.320 which I thought was just terrifying.

01:05:37.980 It's like even, I thought that was terrifying,

01:05:39.880 firstly, because he's the president,

01:05:40.940 he shouldn't be doing that.

01:05:42.120 But secondly, because-

01:05:43.180 Hey, the president's allowed to use the toilet. 0.95

01:05:44.620 Yeah, he's like, you can do that,

01:05:45.580 but you should leave the phone outside.

01:05:47.020 But it's like, even the bathroom is now a place

01:05:51.320 from which you can speak to the world.

01:05:53.480 Even that place where previously you would have just

01:05:55.740 gone on your own and had your whatever privately, 1.00

01:05:59.760 Even then, you're still saying, ah, fuck this, fuck that, whatever people are saying. 0.99

01:06:04.260 And I just think those boundaries between private life and public life existed for a reason. 0.99

01:06:09.760 And the key reason I think they existed was because everyone needs a sphere in which they can just be themselves and relax and get away from the kind of demands of public life and the pressures of public life and the pressures of work life and everything else and just like chill out.

01:06:24.800 and I think the more the line gets erased the less we have that private zone and everything

01:06:29.120 is pushed out into the public so um twitter I think I don't think twitter is the cause of this

01:06:35.580 culture but I think it has facilitated it it's kind of it's the tech it's a technology that

01:06:40.160 has molded itself around a culture that pretty much already existed which is this culture where

01:06:45.320 you know when Stephen Fry is diagnosed with cancer he makes a one-hour video

01:06:51.000 youtube video about it now i know that a lot of people like that and they appreciate it but i

01:06:56.480 find it strange and i think the erasure of the boundary between how you live and what you say

01:07:04.320 in public is probably a really bad thing for humans it's very interesting we talk about social

01:07:09.900 media all the time and it's interesting for us because we know now given what's come out in

01:07:15.760 recent months that Facebook essentially they have people sitting there trying to

01:07:21.200 make it more addictive yeah they literally have people dedicated to

01:07:24.540 making it more addictive yeah and social media all the studies pretty much show

01:07:28.240 social media is terrible for your mental health right and we we both know that on

01:07:32.440 the one hand on the other hand we're making the show right and we have to

01:07:36.220 put it out we have to reach people right and social media is a great way of doing

01:07:40.480 it can we just say from everybody here at trigonometry social media is brilliant

01:07:44.100 Please like our videos and follow us.

01:07:46.240 We don't care about your mental health.

01:07:48.200 Just stay with us.

01:07:49.280 Just like us and click like.

01:07:51.140 No, but that's, I think, the contrast as well.

01:07:53.900 I think we focus on the negative aspect of social media, rightly.

01:07:58.700 But there is also an element which has enabled communication.

01:08:01.400 Like, the three of us would not be sitting in this room if it wasn't for social media.

01:08:05.280 I think social media could potentially have been one of the greatest breakthroughs of modern times.

01:08:10.240 because the fact that you you know the plus the downside is that people are saying things they

01:08:15.440 shouldn't be saying or people now live their private lives in public but as i said i don't

01:08:20.080 think social media made that happen i think that had already been occurring social media just made

01:08:24.640 it easier i think that's a cultural problem but on the other side of it the fact that people can

01:08:29.320 now publish stuff at the click of a button walking down the street is really good because in history

01:08:35.520 you know before the invention of the printing press no one could publish anything except

01:08:39.940 churches and monks who used to write books and then publish them and that's all there was

01:08:43.660 then you have the invention of the printing press which caused this huge crisis among the church

01:08:47.660 because they suddenly thought oh crap other people can publish books now as well which they did

01:08:52.620 and then that gives rise to the protestant reformation and the renaissance and the

01:08:56.280 enlightenment and everything else springs from the explosion of ideas that the printing press

01:09:01.500 brought about. And then the internet revolution goes a stage further, which is that you don't

01:09:05.880 even need to have a publisher or an editor to publish yourself. You can literally set up a

01:09:10.660 website on your phone and use your thumb to tell the world what you think. That's great.

01:09:15.960 So I would put the internet revolution on a par with the invention of the printing press

01:09:20.200 in its potential. The downside, of course, is that it tends to be used in a quite narrow way,

01:09:29.740 I think. And as I say, it's moulded itself around a culture of narcissism that I think

01:09:35.640 had been growing for a few decades anyway. Christopher Lash wrote his classic book,

01:09:39.960 The Culture of Narcissism, in 1979, which I still think is the best guide to the problem

01:09:45.220 of politics in the 20th and 21st centuries. So that had been going for a while, and then

01:09:50.380 the internet revolution lent itself to that. So that's the problem. But the potential of

01:09:54.640 the internet is extraordinary, which is the power of people to express themselves without

01:09:59.160 up needing to go through one of the traditional gatekeepers,

01:10:02.220 whether it was a censor or someone in officialdom

01:10:04.620 or an editor or a publisher.

01:10:07.440 So that's great.

01:10:09.440 And I think it is bringing people together,

01:10:11.140 and it is a way for people to express ideas.

01:10:15.480 But it's a double-edged sword, because on the one hand,

01:10:17.720 it's a really good tool for communications.

01:10:20.520 But on the other hand, it has given rise to twitch hunts

01:10:24.300 and the shaming of people for having the wrong opinion

01:10:27.420 and these kind of quite intolerant outbursts

01:10:30.820 against anyone who's considered

01:10:32.020 to have a difficult point of view.

01:10:34.800 So at the moment, it's going through

01:10:36.800 a very difficult birth process,

01:10:39.320 and there are a lot of problems with it.

01:10:40.920 But I would oppose any effort whatsoever

01:10:44.200 by government to control it.

01:10:46.860 I would be completely opposed to that,

01:10:48.260 and I'm very worried at the moment

01:10:49.620 about the way in which the government,

01:10:51.040 in Britain in particular, is outsourcing

01:10:54.320 its desire to control the internet

01:10:55.960 to big companies like Facebook and Twitter.

01:10:58.640 So it's constantly putting pressure on them

01:11:01.240 to take down certain material

01:11:02.720 or to prevent the expression of certain ideas.

01:11:05.080 And I think that process of outsourced state censorship

01:11:08.480 to big corporations is something that should worry us.

01:11:11.080 And those corporations, incidentally,

01:11:12.580 as we again are starting to find out-

01:11:14.140 Oh brilliant, please boost our video.

01:11:18.280 Well yes, do watch the video,

01:11:20.060 but they are not politically neutral at all.

01:11:24.240 coming from California, they don't reflect the full spectrum of opinion, they make sure

01:11:30.680 that certain videos are watched more than others, they make sure that certain people

01:11:34.060 don't, I mean, James Damore is a good example of someone who was working with Google, made

01:11:39.460 some what you might call factual but conservative leaning points about men and women and whatever,

01:11:44.920 and he was dismissed, and that tells you about the culture that exists there, so there's

01:11:48.320 no way that company then has an equal tolerance for all the different political opinions.

01:11:53.160 No, we are sleepwalking into a situation where very politicized, massive companies are getting to decide what you can and can't say in public.

01:12:02.120 Because, you know, this is the new public square.

01:12:05.380 You know, billions of people use Facebook.

01:12:07.560 I don't know, is it a billion or millions of people use Twitter?

01:12:10.860 This is the forum in which politicians speak, in which certain institutions make statements, in which ordinary people gather to have conversations.

01:12:19.980 So if you are prevented from being part of that, or if you are prevented from saying

01:12:24.220 certain things in there, then you are being prevented from expressing yourself in the

01:12:27.180 public square.

01:12:29.300 So that's a real problem.

01:12:32.100 And if these California-based companies with all their vast political prejudices, which

01:12:36.980 tend to veer towards phony left, that's how they view the world, if they are preventing

01:12:42.220 people from joining Twitter, or if they're banning people from Twitter, or if they are

01:12:45.860 saying certain videos and ideas can't be expressed they are controlling public

01:12:50.060 life and they are controlling speech and that's worrying and they now are

01:12:57.260 enjoying almost the monopoly on what isn't isn't said in public so that

01:13:04.760 that's something that is concerning I don't know the answer to it but I think

01:13:09.140 that's something people should be worried about so how would you describe

01:13:12.080 yourself politically brendan and do you ascribe to sort of these corbynista left-wing views which

01:13:17.440 now seem to be more and more prevalent in the political forum i hate corbynism i'm not going

01:13:22.480 to beat around the bush i really do um i i think corbynistas are really unattractive movement

01:13:29.680 i thought you're going to say unattractive people some of them might be but that's uh

01:13:33.360 but there it's a really unattractive movement i think what they really symbolize is the shift

01:13:37.600 that we were talking about earlier of the left from class politics to identity politics from

01:13:43.920 an interest in economic growth to an interest in environmental control uh and from trusting

01:13:48.960 people to run their lives towards kind of censoriousness and authoritarianism these

01:13:52.720 are the big shifts that have taken place on the left the left used to believe in economic growth

01:13:56.800 for more jobs and more industry and wealth now it wants to save the planet and stop the building of

01:14:01.920 factories uh the left used to believe in universalism now believes in the divisive

01:14:06.320 poisonous politics of identity, woke identity politics. The left used to believe in autonomy

01:14:12.360 and independence and now it wants to nanny state every single aspect of our lives from what we eat

01:14:17.580 to how we raise our children to what we say in public. So the left has abandoned its core

01:14:22.340 principles and I think that's one of the big tragedies of the times we find ourselves in.

01:14:27.020 And I think the Corbynist has expressed that perfectly because what you have here is a very

01:14:31.720 middle-class movement. It uses the language of Marxism and radicalism and, you know, old

01:14:39.100 labour and all this stuff, but in fact it's a very new form of left-wing politics, which

01:14:43.240 is a narrow, divisive, illiberal, anti-growth politics. And that, in my mind, is unrecognisable

01:14:52.220 in comparison to what the left used to be about. So I think the Corbynistas express

01:14:56.800 that incredibly well so I don't like them for that reason I think in Britain at the moment we

01:15:05.260 have this really incredibly interesting situation where I think there are there are two revolts

01:15:10.480 two political revolts in Britain there's the real one and there's the funky one the real one is

01:15:15.820 brexit which is unquestionably a revolt and you can tell it's a revolt because the entire political

01:15:21.160 establishment across Europe has gone into utter meltdown in response to it and literally cannot 1.00

01:15:25.360 handle the fact that these millions of stupid Britons defied their instructions and voted 1.00

01:15:31.240 against the EU. I think it's the best thing to happen in British politics in at least 50 years, 1.00

01:15:36.240 precisely because it was so revolting and rebellious and an expression of a desire for

01:15:41.120 change. So you have this real revolt, which everyone's freaking out about. Then you have

01:15:44.940 this phony revolt, which is the rise of these middle class Corbynisters who go to Glastonbury

01:15:49.920 and sing about Jeremy Corbyn, and who are constantly on Twitter saying, you know, we're

01:15:54.680 virtuous and wonderful and we love poor people even though they've never met one so you have

01:15:59.280 that phony revolt which the media is far more interested in because it's safe in fact they

01:16:04.660 think they're radical and red and they all go and take selfies of themselves at Karl Marx's

01:16:08.820 gravestone in Highgate but it's an incredibly safe revolt it's a quite posh revolt it's very

01:16:15.180 contained within the narrow remits of identity politics and woke politics so I think that's

01:16:21.800 the most fascinating thing about britain at the moment you have this phony revolt which people

01:16:25.920 love and can't get enough of and then you have this real revolt which people are terrified of

01:16:30.680 and that should tell you about which one of those is more interesting i find it really quite sad

01:16:36.660 the thing with corbyn's voters and that they seem so politically unengaged almost but also they they

01:16:44.320 seem to revere him as an idol and going back to venezuela he refuses to condemn the venezuelan 0.62

01:16:51.340 government for what it's doing to its people and then you try and engage them with that and

01:16:56.800 they just shut it down they avoid the topic yeah i've tried to engage with corbanistas on facebook

01:17:02.820 and i got told that i vote to it not that i'd seen it particularly bad about voting to it's

01:17:07.840 just your political leaning you know that i'm you don't you know but i don't vote to i've never

01:17:12.020 voted to i'm old school left left center left wing and also as well that you know that somehow

01:17:18.020 by criticising him, you are alt-right. That's automatically the label that gets slapped

01:17:24.980 across your chest just because you dare to have a difference of opinion.

01:17:28.860 Absolutely. I think the Corbynists are a really good expression of the new intolerant

01:17:33.200 left, which is anyone whose point of view differs to theirs, anyone who thinks maybe

01:17:39.300 left-wing politics is something different to what you guys are doing, or anyone who

01:17:42.740 says there's some problems with Corbyn, including who he speaks with and who he hangs out with

01:17:47.600 and what he thinks about the world.

01:17:49.600 Anyone who says any of that is written off as horrible and beyond the pale 0.90

01:17:55.280 and a fascist, basically. 0.99

01:17:56.960 You're alt-right or a fascist or a white supremacist 0.99

01:17:59.360 if you raise any of these questions. 0.99

01:18:02.220 It's incredibly intolerant.

01:18:04.000 They have this bristling, instinctive intolerance

01:18:07.360 towards any person who doesn't fully share their view of the world.

01:18:11.800 And I find that really worrying.

01:18:13.440 I think it really does speak to a new kind of politics,

01:18:16.220 which is very sectional and sectarian and bubble-wrapped

01:18:22.420 so that you're either in this little sect or you're not.

01:18:25.840 And that's not a good way to do politics

01:18:28.080 because if you're going to do politics properly,

01:18:29.920 you really do need to be open and open-minded

01:18:32.800 and engaged and talking to people.

01:18:35.680 If you go on YouTube and search for old political debates

01:18:39.120 between Labour people and Tory people,

01:18:41.740 or there's a great video, a debate between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X,

01:18:44.860 right they had completely different views of the world one was super radical and a bit of a

01:18:49.700 separatist and a black nationalist and the other was middle class decent civil rights activist

01:18:54.080 but they have this really civilized debate even though they completely disagree on fundamental

01:19:01.860 matters what we have now in britain and other places is completely uncivilized debate even

01:19:07.740 though in fact they actually tend to agree on lots of things it's what freud referred to as

01:19:12.240 the narcissism of small differences and I think it's often that the less that's at stake in

01:19:17.920 politics the more furious and crazy and intemperate and intolerant the discussion tends to become

01:19:23.040 that's one of the curious things I think about Britain today which is that if you break it down

01:19:27.980 the Tories and the Labour and Labour actually agree on many fundamental things they both agree

01:19:33.420 that Brexit's a real problem it's got to be ironed out or diluted they're both into the politics of

01:19:39.020 identity, as you can see from the Tories' Gender Recognition Act and Corbyn never shutting

01:19:43.360 up about minority groups. They both think environmentalism is really important. They

01:19:48.120 agree on the fundamental matters, but they scream at each other, fascist, scum, racist. 1.00

01:19:53.800 So I think it actually reveals the narcissism of small differences. It actually reveals that 1.00

01:19:57.620 politics has become a very narrow business. So I always think the more shrill and intolerant

01:20:03.720 and shouty the discussion becomes, the more it tells us about how there's sadly not much

01:20:09.000 at stake in politics now because if there was if there were fundamental disagreements about the

01:20:14.160 future of society you would actually need to have a pretty open solid discussion about that

01:20:20.280 but there isn't well there you go listen brendan one question we always like to ask our guests

01:20:25.700 before we we let them go is is there one thing that you think no one's talking about that we

01:20:30.880 should be talking about that's a good question i think we need to talk more about well it's

01:20:40.800 something that i referenced earlier i think we we need to talk more about the fact that huge swathes

01:20:46.300 of mankind still live in absolute shocking dire poverty i know that sounds like a bit of a happy

01:20:51.780 clappy um you know something that a nun might say but i think the reason i think that's important

01:20:58.760 is because I think we have become so navel-gazing in the West

01:21:02.260 and so obsessed with our own problems, which actually aren't problems.

01:21:06.160 And we've become so beholden to a narrow-minded politics

01:21:10.880 which says that economic growth is a problem

01:21:12.620 and the building of new cities and factories is destructive,

01:21:15.880 that we just forget that four billion of our fellow human beings

01:21:21.260 live in really terrible situations.

01:21:24.260 So one thing that I'm very interested in

01:21:27.080 is the way in which the narrow-mindedness, the narcissism,

01:21:30.660 the closed-offness of 21st century Western politics

01:21:35.000 actually blinds you to far bigger problems than we have

01:21:38.620 and blinds you to what were once considered

01:21:41.140 to be the great projects of progressive politics,

01:21:43.480 which was to industrialise the world and modernise the world

01:21:46.720 and encourage all sorts of societies to embrace progress.

01:21:50.900 If you read The Communist Manifesto, which everyone should read,

01:21:53.740 by Marx and Engels, it's a fascinating little book

01:21:55.860 because even though it is the birth of the communist idea,

01:21:59.740 the first seven or eight pages are devoted to praising capitalism

01:22:03.180 and to talking about the wonders of this new capitalist society

01:22:06.700 and the fact that it has civilised all these once poor communities,

01:22:10.500 it's internationalised trade,

01:22:13.000 it's created these new vast cities and factories,

01:22:16.240 and it just praises and praises all the achievements of capitalism.

01:22:20.360 And then, of course, goes on to say that communism would be even better.

01:22:23.440 and I think the left forgets that aspect of it the left forgets the first

01:22:28.240 seven pages of the Communist Manifesto which is this idea that it would be

01:22:32.260 really good if all of mankind enjoyed the same kind of privileges and luxuries

01:22:38.740 that we do but we've become so obsessed with our own navels that we've lost

01:22:42.700 sight of that and I think that's really anti-human and quite tragic well I think

01:22:48.400 I think the viewers and you particularly Francis will agree with me when I say

01:22:51.580 That has been absolutely fantastic.

01:22:52.580 Yeah, it has.

01:22:53.580 So, Brendan, if someone wants to follow you on Twitter, no, I'm not.

01:22:56.580 They can't.

01:22:57.580 They cannot follow you.

01:22:58.580 No, they cannot.

01:22:59.580 But if they want to find you online or find your work, what's the best way to access?

01:23:03.580 They can follow Spiked on Twitter.

01:23:05.580 Yes.

01:23:06.580 So I edit Spiked and they can read me on Spiked.

01:23:08.580 They can read me in The Spectator and they can follow Spiked.

01:23:12.580 Spiked is on Twitter at Spiked Online.

01:23:14.580 They can follow me on Instagram.

01:23:16.580 If they're young and cool enough to use Instagram, that's about it.

01:23:20.580 What's your Instagram username?

01:23:22.080 Burnt Oak Boy.

01:23:23.600 Burnt Oak Boy.

01:23:24.560 Because I'm from there.

01:23:25.740 Oh, okay.

01:23:26.300 So if they want to see a picture of your abs, you know.

01:23:28.680 Go to Instagram.

01:23:29.860 Go on to Instagram.

01:23:31.500 Okay, if you want to follow me, I'm on Twitter at Failing Human.

01:23:34.680 And I'm at Constance and Kissing.

01:23:36.580 Thank you for tuning in this week.

01:23:38.940 Yeah, I think that's it.

01:23:39.940 That's all the social media stuff.

01:23:40.860 Follow us on at TriggerPod on Twitter and Instagram.

01:23:44.540 We're also on Facebook, obviously.

01:23:46.780 Anything else we need to say?

01:23:47.300 And please, if you've enjoyed it, please give us a rating, a review would be very nice,

01:23:54.280 five star please, and also as well, if you really like it, just recommend it to someone.

01:23:59.460 That's it.

01:23:59.820 Tell a friend.

01:24:00.920 Thank you very much, we'll see you next week.

01:24:17.300 You

TRIGGERnometry - July 02, 2018

Brendan O'Neill on Free Speech, Identity Politics, Grenfell & Social Medi

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