Chloe Westley on Tax, Brexit & Socialism
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Summary
Chloe Wesley is the Campaign Manager at the Taxpayers alliance, a political organisation dedicated to fighting for a fairer, more just and fairer Britain. She talks to us about how she got into politics, how she developed her ideas and views, and how she became a Eurosceptic.
Transcript
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Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissing. And this is
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the show for you if you're bored of people arguing on the internet over subjects they
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know nothing about. At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts, we ask the experts.
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Our fantastic guest this week didn't want to be introduced as an expert, but we think she'll
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be absolutely fascinating to talk to. She's the campaign manager at the Taxpayers Alliance.
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Chloe Wesley, welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks for having me.
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It's great to have you. And before we get on with the show, just tell us a little bit
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about who you are, how did you get to where you are, and maybe a little bit about kind
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of your thoughts and your background, how you developed your ideas and your views.
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Sure. Well, I'm from Australia originally. As people find out when they see me on TV,
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They're like, what's that accent? I'm from Brisbane in Queensland. I didn't grow up wanting to be a
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campaign manager for a tax organisation. That wasn't really part of the plan. I was just very,
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very interested in politics from a very young age. I was a complete nerd at school. I remember
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actually being picked on a little bit for being a bit obsessed with politics because I was always
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reading newspapers and watching political shows. It was quite an odd obsession that I had. My
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parents were like, where does this come from? It was just a natural thing that I was really
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interested in. So as I was reading as a young person, developing my thoughts, I was very open
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to lots of different ideas. But when I was about 16, I think I was a little bit more left-wing than
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I am now. So I thought the world was really unfair. There were some people that were struggling and
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others that were doing really well. And I was very skeptical of authority and of the system. And
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I read a lot of French and German philosophy, and I read this book by Albert Camus called The Rebel, where he writes about revolutions, and he wrote about the Soviet Union, and it changed a lot of my thinking about things, because he pointed out the flaws in his thinking, and that he was a left-wing person who wanted to empower people, but he saw that when you do have socialist and communist regimes, actually people can become enslaved.
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You just transfer power to a state, and actually that's a different kind of enslavement.
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So it made me very sceptical of statist ideologies, and actually I became a lot more fond of the
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idea of individualism, that societies where people are free and they have the most freedom
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to choose things are far more prosperous and people thrive a lot more than in societies
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so that's kind of how my views developed but I moved to London to study philosophy just after
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high school so when I was about 18 and I really got to engage a lot of these ideas on a deeper
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level and I met some incredible philosophers I was very lucky I went to a philosophy college
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so we had 12 different professors and experts in all different kinds of areas and I did read a lot
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of Marx. I was fascinated. I think he identified a problem, but proposed the completely wrong
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solution, in my opinion. I fell in love with Aristotle, Greek philosophy, and I just, I really
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loved ideas, and I became very interested in British politics over here, because everyone was
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talking about this, and everyone was talking about the European Union, and that was, from a very early
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time when I moved here, I remember that was already part of the national conversation, at least in
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the common room and students talking about these things. And I didn't really set out to
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get into politics over here. At the end of my second year of university, I volunteered for an
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MP to help him get elected on the conservative side. And then completely unexpectedly, while I
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was still a student, he offered me a job. And that was life-changing, because instead of just
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reading about politics and debating it online and watching Question Time and shouting at the TV,
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I was actually, I got to be part of it, I got to work in Parliament and it was incredible
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and I felt very, very lucky and also a little bit surprised that, you know, from growing
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up in Queensland to working in the British Parliament, it wasn't really an obvious thing
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for me to turn out to do, so that was incredible and I feel very lucky to have that experience
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And even working in Parliament, I was still reading and studying and learning more about the EU.
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I mean, one of the reasons why I wanted to work for this MP was because he was very Eurosceptic at the time.
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Because it was my scepticism of, you know, centralised control, of taking control away from the individual.
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And the more I read about the EU, the more I thought, hang on, this is a really, really bad thing for this country.
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And even though this wasn't the country I'm born in, this is a country where I have family and history,
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and I just felt like the country was moving in their own direction.
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And I got to work on the Leave campaign, something that I really, really wanted to do.
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I didn't think we were going to win the referendum, but I thought we'd come pretty close.
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If there was going to be this referendum in Britain at a time when I was living here,
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I wanted to have it known that I was on the side of the anti, the EU side.
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And from there, I helped launch another Brexit group after the referendum
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Gisela Stewart, Labour MP, she's fantastic, one of my heroes.
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which is very much in line with my kind of scepticism of government
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I think people are taxed way too much in this country.
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I think in general there is a move towards, you know,
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the first thought of most politicians and most commentators
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So we've got a problem with, you know, childhood obesity,
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This is the kind of way of thinking in Westminster at the moment.
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And the organization I work for, we're in the minority.
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We're the group saying, hang on, maybe every problem in society isn't solved by a big government spending money and taxing people.
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Maybe there are free market solutions to these things.
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So I've been with the Taxpayers Alliance for about a year, and I'm loving it.
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I'm not loving the criticism, because it's very brave to go out and argue for lower taxes in the current climate.
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I think I'm always outnumbered in all the shows that I do.
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I remember I did Any Questions and there was two MPs and a priest,
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and they were all talking about the cost of living
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And I said, well, what about taking less money away from people
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So it is a non-conventional viewpoint at the moment.
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We love to have people with non-conventional viewpoints on the show.
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Well, we try and connect activists to government and also speak for taxpayers.
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So the Taxpayers Alliance was founded in 2004 by a couple of guys, Andrew Allum and Matthew
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And at the time, every politician, every political party was calling for higher taxes and more
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And there was a lot of lobbying in Parliament in Westminster for more money.
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So charities would lobby for more money, different pressure groups.
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There wasn't really a pressure group or a group representing taxpayers, the people that
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I think mostly to just put pressure on political parties to think about taxpayers and their right
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policy, actually, and just expose how much government spending there is, what it's being
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spent on, and point out some areas where money can be saved. So at the moment, we're a pretty
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small organisation still, but we get a lot of press attention because I think we have a unique
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viewpoint at the moment in Westminster. And we do a lot. We do reports on what the tax system
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should look like. So in 2012, we released the single income tax, which outlined how we would
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simplify taxes, what areas of spending we would cut, and what the kind of perfect Britain would
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look like. Not perfect Britain, but where the country could go. And it was very practical.
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It was, you know, government spending should be about a third of GDP, and taxes on income should
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be about 33%. And figured out, you know, all the numbers and the way that the government could move
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towards this position. At the moment, government spending is about 40%. And if you're a lower
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earner, you're taxed at a rate of about 40%. And if you're a higher earner, the tax rate is 53%.
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So we've got a long way to go to get to that vision. But we do a lot of local work. So the
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things that people don't really see the Taxpayers Alliance do is all of our local campaigning. So
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So we do national press releases and reports and we go on political shows, but the day-to-day work, a lot of it is just local activist calls and says, I think my local council is spending money on this thing.
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Can you help me set up a stand so I can protest it?
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Or can you tell me the person I can get in touch with to change this?
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So at the moment we're doing a campaign in Southampton because they want to introduce this new surcharge, this clean air zone surcharge.
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So if you want to drive into Southampton, you've got to pay £100, which is essentially a tax to visit Southampton.
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No, I wouldn't pay a fiver to go there, I'll be honest.
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But if there was a £100 charge, I'd be much less likely to.
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And so that's just one of the campaigns we're doing.
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We do a lot on council tax, which is one of the most hated taxes in Britain, because you have to pay that.
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like it doesn't just come out of your income straight away you have you get a bill and you
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have to pay it and that means people are really ticked off about it um and they really care about
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how that money is spent and sometimes it's spent well but more often than not we find areas where
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it's not spent well so we do we do a lot of things um but yeah one of the things so you what you're
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proposing sounds great my worry is number one what happens to our public services i mean let's be
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fair the nhs isn't well it doesn't look like it's doing that well it needs more money the roads are
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in a horrible state in london they're talking about cutting police services crime spiking
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don't we need people to pay more tax to pay for these public services well at the moment
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government spending is about 30 000 pounds per household um so government spending is very very
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high there's a lot of money in the kitty and at the there's billions of pounds being spent
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in projects and areas that aren't essential services.
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So about $14 billion in foreign aid, for example,
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It's going to make this infrastructure project.
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There's so many areas of spending that you could cut
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I think there are areas of public services that need more money.
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I think it was a huge mistake to make it separate to the NHS.
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and then to lump that cost into local council. Social care does need to be
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funded. I think policing probably needs money to be spent well and it isn't
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always spent well but also they probably need more funding and when you pay your
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taxes and things you think about it's the NHS, it's bin collection, it's
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education, policing, defence and these areas are areas where actually government
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has cut down on spending. One area the government hasn't cut down on is public
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sector pensions, which costs about $38 billion a year more than the education budget in England.
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So I understand the argument that politicians make that we need to put up taxes to pay for
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public services, but you can't make that argument if you're spending a lot of money on things that
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just aren't necessary. State-funded art, it's not necessary. Like, if I was a politician and I had
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to choose between putting more money into the health system or spending millions to give to
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drawings that go in galleries that people probably
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But on public services as well, we're doing a lot of work on technology and automation.
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So how technology can actually improve, particularly the NHS.
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So at the moment, NHS servers are using Windows 98.
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There's been examples of doctors using WhatsApp to share patient records, which isn't just bad.
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So there needs to be a lot of reform in efficiency
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and that kind of thing, and we're doing some research on that.
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That's why it's so vulnerable to cyber attacks.
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Was it WannaCry or WannaBeCry attack last year?
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Well, this is what I was going to ask you, Chloe.
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There must be a few examples that if you just tell an ordinary person
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this is what the government's doing with your money,
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they've got to be you probably have a few of those where you kind of go this is what they do
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and people go you know and freak out what can you give us a few examples of something like that
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well i think the one that frustrates people the most is pay for public sector staff not
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frontline staff not nurses and teachers bureaucrats civil servants and bosses um the amount of money
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that goes into not just salaries but also bonuses and payouts for top staff is extraordinary.
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And because there isn't a lot of scrutiny over it, you just assume that the government spends
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money well, right? It's only groups at the Taxpayers Alliance that kick up a fuss and say,
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hang on, why are you giving a local government boss a £300,000 payout? That's twice the salary
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of the Prime Minister. Something's going wrong here. So that's the one that I think annoys people
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the most in our research so we do every year we do um a report called the town hall rich list
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which is top paid local government chief executives in the country and quite a lot of them are earning
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more than theresa may which is that's fair considering how well she's doing at the moment
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i deducted just for that fucking dance right i thought it was a good dance really i think it
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And so I liked it, but it distracted from, you know, everything else.
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I think it was very smart politics because everyone was talking about her dance.
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They weren't talking about the fact that she didn't use the word checkers once in her speech.
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Look incompetent at something you're not supposed to be doing.
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And then no one cares that you're incompetent in what you are doing.
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So the chief executives get paid more than Theresa May.
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But still, that's definitely going to piss people off.
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Is there like a thing that we spend tons of money on?
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I'm not against infrastructure projects, but this is so unnecessary.
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It's just a vanity project from George Osborne.
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Politicians love to say, here's my project, I got it done, success story.
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What you've done is you've spent a bunch of money on something that nobody really needs.
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And at the beginning, they said it was going to be, what, $30 billion.
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Now it's looking, it could be up to $80 to $100 billion.
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and by the time it's built, it's actually going to be quite outdated.
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So the main argument they're making is that it's,
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so we need a train that gets from London to Birmingham 20 minutes quicker.
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and now they're saying it's about jobs because they're creating lots of jobs
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because there's lots of PR firms being hired by HS2 to sell the project.
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So that is one area of spending that, if I was Prime Minister,
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I would cut on day one because that's a lot of money.
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I mean, if you compare it to education in England, that's $33 billion.
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The entire defence budget, it's about $38 billion.
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and it's actually ruining people's homes as well,
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they've got to build through a lot of towns and areas.
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And it's causing a lot of upset and we're working really hard.
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But at the moment, they're saying, we've spent $4 billion on it so far, so we might as well waste another $50, $60 billion, which I think is a very poor argument.
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And I would back any politician who had the guts to say, we got it wrong.
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So it's the NHS is technically a quango, I think, but it's essentially a publicly funded organization that isn't really a government department.
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So Public Health England is one of the most famous ones.
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There are so many of them that we don't even have a list compiled.
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And they cost a lot of money, and they have really high salaries for bosses that come in,
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sometimes ex-politicians or people that are friends of politicians.
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And then they get a cushy job at a quango, and they sit and write reports all day that nobody really reads.
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So there are quangos for so many different things.
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You could merge them into, say, 12 main health quangos and save so much money.
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um and david cameron's promised a bonfire of quangos when he when he came in so he said
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these are so you know we have too many we've got hundreds of quangos we don't need them
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let's just you know scrap a lot of them and i think he cut down like a couple dozen not even that
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um but they don't really reach the headlines in the same way as and why do you think that is why
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why were they not able to do that what's what's the difficulty in getting rid of them or merging
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them? I just think it wasn't really a priority. There are so many things that aren't a priority,
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like simplification of the tax system, like simplifying the tax system would save so many
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problems, but it would take a long time. It would be very complicated. And at the moment,
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I think there are politicians of other things in their mind. But it's a shame because there are so
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many things that could be improved by either merging quangos, simplifying government,
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um you know getting rid of bureaucracy but there just isn't the political willpower for it imagine
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like that's your political platform like okay everyone i'm just going to focus on just organizing
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it i'm going to give the government a spring clean um and just make sure that everything's
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working well that's that's not as inspiring as saying i'm going to spend all this money on on
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this project or i'm going to fund this or fund that but that's the vote winner and that's why
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i think jeremy corbyn is very popular he's promising to to do things but those things all
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costs money and the way that he wants to fund it is to actually kind of drain the wealth and the
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desire to create wealth in this country um which would be a very bad thing well don't forget that
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dig in there very good yeah you mentioned the criticism that that you guys get and you're
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called right wing i mean first of all i think nazis i imagine oh quite often yeah i've gone i'm
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pro-fascist oh really yeah according to some a couple of people on the internet yeah yeah so
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Yeah, pointing out deficiencies that even I wasn't aware of.
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a lot of people use the word right-wing as an insult
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But there is a legitimate kind of right-centre-right position
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So when people talk about the Taxpayers Alliance
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being a right-wing organization, is that accurate?
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I think so, in that if right-wing means less government, then yes.
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where taxpayers alliance doesn't have a position on Brexit
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it just stands for lower taxes, less government spending
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I'm sure there's probably a government quango somewhere
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yeah yeah under jeremy corbyn that would definitely be acquired yeah yeah i i think
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there's a lot of people who think that if you also campaign for lower taxes it means you don't want
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to help people or you don't believe in any kind of public uh service or government and that's just
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not true at all i think there are definitely libertarians out there who support us and who
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would like to prioritize everything and i i wonder who would build the roads to be honest
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and certainly the team that we're with at the moment
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and also just make things run a lot more smoothly
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and now I went into a local council to do some work
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And I think that's the reaction of a lot of people
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One thing I always want to ask people who are involved in tax,
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and this is for the average person on the street,
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and it drives me up the wall, and I'm sure it drives them up the wall.
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Why can't we get big businesses to pay fucking tax?
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It's because the UK has a really overcomplicated tax code.
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and there are so many different taxes and tax codes
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that if you're an accountant and you search hard enough,
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you can find a loophole for just about anything.
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So if you're a really big company or organisation,
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you can afford a team of accountants and lawyers
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That's how big companies like Amazon and Facebook and multinationals
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don't end up paying as much taxes as small organisations.
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They find accountants and lawyers to find holes.
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if you simplify the system and you said here it is everyone's got to pay this there are a few
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exemptions um but this is that these are the rules you wouldn't they wouldn't be allowed to do that
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and this is it really annoys me when politicians say oh we need to crack down on businesses not
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paying their fair share it's in their power like these companies are avoiding tax completely
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legally it's you politician that needs to change the law to make it fairer because it's not fair
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that if you're a small business you can't afford to get an accountant to find loopholes for you so
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you pay your taxes in good faith um when a larger organization can afford to find a loophole it's
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just it's really not fair and it means there isn't trust in the tax system and and it means that
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people start resenting paying their taxes because like why am i paying so much of my my wage or my
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earnings or my you know my small profit to the state when all these larger companies aren't
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that actually it's because it's too complex and it's too difficult
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and it doesn't capture the public's imagination?
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Or is it a part of it, there's a more sinister reason?
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I don't want to think there's a sinister reason.
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I'd like to believe that it's just because it's not a priority.
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But maybe, I don't know, I'm not privy to backroom conversations.
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I know that there is a big problem with corporatism at the moment in the West
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in that you do have companies with larger GDPs than countries,
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huge organisations, and once you get to a certain size,
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You don't want it to be easy for your competition to enter the market.
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So you do cosy up with the EU or bureaucrats in Whitehall
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to try and get the rules written so there are more regulations
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And I think at the moment people distrust business and capitalism
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because they see that happening and that's that's not right that's not free that's not a proper free
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market that's corporatism and that's not really what i stand for and where do you stand on the
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tax rates because you've talked about eliminating waste but you've also said that people pay too
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much tax so is your argument that we if we eliminate you know hs2 we eliminate quangos or
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you know cut down the number of quangos we eliminate other things that you've talked about
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then just by virtue of that the tax rates can come down or is it really about reducing the tax
00:27:21.740
load on people altogether in addition to those things so that we would have less money for
00:27:27.340
other things for public services and whatever you'd have to do both and you'd have to do it
00:27:31.200
gradually so you'd want to lower taxes gradually um and also cut down on spending bit by bit um
00:27:38.400
i'm a you know big fan of the do it now a little bit and wait and see because i think if you did
00:27:43.520
lower some taxes, you'd find you get more revenue in. So when corporation tax was lowered, the
00:27:48.820
government had more revenue because, you know, more people were paying it, there was more of an
00:27:53.000
incentive to pay. So I think if you did lower taxes, you may find that there's more money in
00:28:00.020
the economy and things grow more and you do have more revenue. But like all economics, it really
00:28:06.740
is disputed. And I'm not an economist by any standard. But we had some researchers work out
00:28:14.300
all of these problems in the single income tax, which I spoke about, which was, you know,
00:28:18.320
sitting down and seriously thinking, what would you need to cut? What would you need? What would
00:28:24.100
be a long term plan to get to the optimum point of spending and taxation? And it's a really,
00:28:29.900
really good document. And I'd encourage anyone who is unsure about what we stand for to actually
00:28:34.700
read that because they're very practical measures. And we actually had a thing on our website where
00:28:38.620
you could go through and test how much you would cut. So a list of things of spending you could
00:28:44.360
cut. So like state funded art or foreign aid or HS2. And it would show you how much spending
00:28:49.820
decreased. So it showed you how much you could afford to cut taxes by or how much money you'd
00:28:54.220
be saving. And that was very cool. But I don't think it would be as simple as just clicking
00:29:00.560
your fingers, get rid of some waste and lower taxes, I think it would be difficult and have
00:29:04.640
to be gradual, but it would make people's lives, living standards, a lot better. Because
00:29:09.800
I think when you put money in people's and businesses' hands, they spend it a lot better
00:29:14.400
than the government. And actually, when you leave it to people to solve problems, they're
00:29:18.540
pretty good at it. So you have the government failing in some areas, so the rollout of universal
00:29:22.820
credits, and then the community, food banks, a Trussell Trust, a charity set up by individuals
00:29:28.780
in the community come in and solve that problem and i think that's a really good thing it's
00:29:33.720
interesting so you you've you've talked about some of the kind of i mean all the things you're saying
00:29:38.500
you may or may not agree with them but they're reasonable things right these are conversations
00:29:43.240
that can be had reasonably right i think this is what taxes should be no i disagree i think this
00:29:48.020
is what taxes should be i want to go to birmingham 20 minutes faster i don't do you no of course i
00:29:55.460
But anyway, see, okay, we've lost all our San Hampton and Birmingham audience.
00:30:02.760
So these are conversations that you can have as two reasonable people
00:30:07.040
and have a reasonable disagreement about, right?
00:30:09.380
So where does the vitriol come from that you've kind of referenced,
00:30:13.540
that people push back on it, people call you Nazis and whatever.
00:30:20.520
I wish I knew because then maybe I could stop it.
00:30:23.540
I wish any of my people were so negative towards us
00:30:28.000
and as a spokesperson a lot of it's just directed at me
00:30:30.660
so I'm used as a bit of a punching bag sometimes.
00:30:34.800
We have a lot of activists who are afraid of putting themselves out there
00:30:40.840
I think I'm not sure if it's just a left problem
00:30:50.560
that descend on you if you publicly say things that I'm saying and even if you are perfectly
00:30:55.800
reasonable in your arguments and you do try to explain yourself I think there's a barrier to
00:31:00.220
accepting that any reasonable person could not be a socialist so as soon as you are to the right of
00:31:07.000
Jeremy Corbyn it's assumed that you're an evil person and what I've found is you're dehumanized
00:31:14.880
and so I think they think you don't really deserve the respect
00:31:24.080
So I don't need to engage in your arguments or your ideas
0.99
00:31:27.400
and so it's okay for me to send you nasty messages
1.00
00:31:29.920
and tell you to go back to where you came from
1.00
00:31:34.160
I think as well the internet has a big part to play in this.
00:31:39.300
I don't know if people would say the things I say on Twitter
00:31:48.620
well, this person's probably just having a bad day
00:32:00.320
so it's going to feel good to have a go at you.
00:32:10.820
and it is very tribal because i have friends who are very left-wing and they're really good people
00:32:15.940
and i think we just disagree yeah it's true there are exceptions
00:32:19.300
francis himself probably more left more left than anything yeah and we we don't take that kind of
00:32:26.220
we're not right wing i'm probably more centrist francis brought slightly left but what troubles
00:32:31.800
us is this tribalism because it prevents genuine conversation you know that that's the issue for
00:32:37.620
us so whether i agree with you or not to me is much less important than whether we actually have
00:32:42.060
a genuine conversation and have that ability to exchange ideas and exchange information
00:32:47.720
and i think that's much more important and like you say i think online you know like we we actually
00:32:51.800
did a whole video of all the comments that people send us yeah whether they're just like straight
00:32:58.140
up racist comments all kinds of stuff and it is quite funny you know as comedians we're used to
00:33:02.500
dealing with it so we don't take it personally but i can totally see that if you're trying to
00:33:07.420
do something uh you're trying to make change in society and whatever and you just get hundreds
00:33:12.420
of messages of people just being nasty to you that's a different thing you know uh and it's
00:33:18.280
very it's very unfortunate that that happens and like you said i think it happens on both sides
00:33:21.840
it's not a right or a left thing um but it ties into another thing that we wanted to just have a
00:33:26.820
chat about as well which is the free speech thing uh which is is um you know you you mentioned that
00:33:33.140
you were concerned about free speech on campus and things like that what is what did you want to
00:33:37.220
say on that issue yeah I'm just really concerned that fear of offense and fear of what people will
00:33:46.120
say about you is stopping genuine authentic conversation and expression so I'm concerned
00:33:53.020
that at particularly universities young people are told that they've got to be you know really
00:33:59.480
careful about what they say or they'll get no platformed or banned or I'm just I'm concerned
00:34:06.240
about that I don't know what the solution is I don't know if you know this is something that
00:34:12.060
is as prevalent as perhaps the media make it out to be maybe there's a bit of hype around it but
00:34:17.240
I really hope that in our education system we can teach people to have authentic conversations like
00:34:23.620
I was very blessed to go to a philosophy college where the whole point was that you discuss ideas
00:34:28.640
and not, you know, identities or take sides or anything.
00:34:32.020
And you were trained to be able to see 12 different sides of an argument.
00:34:40.960
I think there is a lot of good versus evil rhetoric going on
00:34:44.700
where it's, you know, you've got to have your beliefs
00:34:50.720
Although it's been a little while since I've been to university,
00:34:57.760
But it's just something that I'm concerned about because I'm seeing all these stories about people being, you know, platformed or someone going to do a talk at a university about something very non-controversial, but that a bunch of protesters show up and it's shut down.
00:35:12.140
And I'm just, I'm concerned if that's the future, if these are the people that are going to go into the world of work next, if that's a healthy way to have society.
00:35:22.480
And I see it happening in politics as well, actually.
00:35:25.600
um it's a lot of good versus evil you know the kind of debates on tv where you have six minutes
00:35:31.960
to discuss an issue and you've got a righty and a lefty and someone's got to win and they both put
00:35:36.600
out a video saying i owned the other person and it's not about maybe we can have a discussion
00:35:41.400
and learn something about each other or maybe the viewers can learn something new it's i need to beat
0.92
00:35:45.760
you because you're evil and i'm good i think the worrying thing that i find is ultimately
0.78
00:35:50.780
why i have a discussion is to listen to somebody's point of view and then go
00:35:54.940
oh yeah i never thought about it like that yeah i kind of agree with that and then what it becomes
00:36:00.920
is adversarial and ultimately it's just about a display of ego and that's what you see a lot of
00:36:06.200
the time whether it's question time or anything else and that's why you know like we said before
00:36:11.000
i think when we started this show is that's why we set this up well why we set this up because it
00:36:15.020
once you get to that point then it's not about the shared the expression of ideas and it's not
00:36:20.340
about sharing ideas and it's not about learning and it's just about you know the glorification
00:36:25.700
of one's own ego then that's where we end up unfortunately yeah you've been on question time
00:36:32.360
actually how did you find that i have oh i was so nervous the whole week i was so scared and then i
00:36:39.220
called my mom on the train i said mom i don't know if i can do this and she said oh yeah you're from
00:36:43.120
queensland you can do it you've dealt with scorpions exactly you've killed spiders you can
00:36:54.180
Anything involving the words your country in your accent.
1.00
00:37:18.720
So you were nervous and your mum kind of gave you that talk.
00:37:22.040
And then backstage they have lots of snacks and drinks,
00:37:25.440
but no one really touches it because you're all so nervous.
00:37:32.600
As soon as I sat down and looked at the audience,
00:37:38.520
OK, I'm just going to answer some questions now.
00:37:45.580
It was really exciting because it was a show I'd watched so much
00:37:47.800
and shouted at and said, oh, if only I was, you know, up there.
00:37:55.460
but I remembered there was a question on Corbyn,
00:37:58.220
and I froze and I didn't say authentically what I really thought.
00:38:08.540
It's live and you've got to be really quick on your feet.
00:38:13.020
and yeah you get all the people afterwards saying nasty things about you but what was
00:38:18.680
really exciting was people getting in touch and saying oh you made me think about this a little
00:38:24.220
bit differently or hi I'm also a young person and I hadn't really thought about the fact that
00:38:28.480
I'm getting taxed so much you know that sucks I looked at my paycheck and there's a lot of it
00:38:32.020
going to the government and that was why I wanted to go on I wanted to change some minds or offer a
00:38:37.120
bit of a new perspective. And what do you think of Corbyn because you sort of alluded to it before
00:38:44.780
because, I mean, there's a very healthy chance.
00:38:47.920
I mean, they were talking that we're going to have a...
00:38:56.740
Why do you think that would not be a good thing
00:39:11.600
I'm not going to make any statements about his character, but his ideas and his plans are very wrong.
00:39:16.680
And I think they'd cause a lot of misery, actually, for people here.
00:39:19.940
And it would be a very, very bad thing for the country.
00:39:23.500
And in a way that I don't think I can articulate well enough.
00:39:29.120
The idea of central planning and centralised control and the state seizing control of everything, it's very, very dangerous.
00:39:36.940
And it's not just dangerous because you're disempowering people of their liberty.
00:39:40.080
because you can say, well, yes, I lose my freedom and my ability to choose,
00:39:47.400
When things are run centrally from a government or it would be from Whitehall,
00:39:52.260
you get shortages and things don't run very smoothly.
00:39:58.440
And I know that it's kind of used as an example of socialism gone wrong
00:40:03.540
and then socialists say, well, that's not real socialism.
00:40:06.420
But every single time central planning has been tried
00:40:09.720
and the state seizing control of industry has been tried,
00:40:15.180
And I think it comes from a place of compassion initially.
00:40:18.060
You want to help people, and it sounds so simple
00:40:25.640
because the people distributing them are just people.
00:40:30.860
so free markets and people making money and getting further up,
00:40:33.980
with another hierarchy where it's the bureaucrats at the top,
0.60
00:40:37.080
and there's always corruption, and it's always a bad thing.
00:40:39.720
And in the UK, there was a little bit of central planning in the 70s
00:40:47.280
And Margaret Thatcher came in and really she taught,
00:40:52.500
Yeah, yeah, she really just shook it up and she said,
00:41:02.740
the people that opposed a lot of her free market reforms the most
00:41:07.040
because suddenly it was going to be a little playing field.
00:41:10.240
Working class kids were going to start competing with them for jobs
1.00
00:41:15.880
And suddenly, you know, wealth was something that you didn't just get
00:41:20.360
It was something you could earn and be a part of.
00:41:22.360
And I think what you did for this country was fantastic.
00:41:24.240
And I would hate to see all of that go to waste,
00:41:29.540
to go back in time to that bad, failed experiment
00:41:35.100
I think free markets are the best thing to a meritocratic hierarchy that we have, and that's a very good thing for people.
00:41:44.100
And I'm not sure how far Corbyn and McDonnell would go with what they really want to do,
00:41:48.300
because we know that the Labour manifesto, and they are hardcore socialists, but the manifesto was a bit less radical, right?
00:41:55.580
I don't know if they would just implement that or if they would go all the way, but I know that they want to go all the way.
00:42:06.260
I think a lot of the criticism about Corbyn is a bit misguided
00:42:12.040
There are all these stories about his character
00:42:21.760
And I think the conservatives attacking Corbyn at the moment,
00:42:25.880
they're all focusing on this thing he did or that thing he did.
00:42:29.560
And people switch off to that because all they know is, whatever, he could be a terrible person, but he's promising change.
00:42:36.860
And at the moment, I don't think the Conservative Party are promising real solutions to people's problems right now.
00:42:44.820
And I think that the free market solution is better, but it's not being advocated very well right now.
00:42:51.260
And that's why the kind of left-wing socialist ideas are coming back into fashion.
00:42:55.360
It's funny, when you said Jeremy Corbyn is like Trump, I thought we had an exclusive on that.
00:43:00.140
I thought you were going to tell us something completely different.
00:43:05.980
No, but actually your point, I think, is exactly right, which is that whatever someone's ideas,
00:43:12.160
in the absence of a compelling, competing narrative, change will always trump the status quo
00:43:21.540
And what I really liked about what you said there as well is that whether you like Jeremy Corbyn or not, you're quite happy to go, well, I don't know him.
00:43:30.520
He might be a really nice guy, but I don't agree with his ideas.
00:43:33.880
And so much of our politics now seems to be about attacking the person, attacking the man.
00:43:39.580
We've seen this with, you know, this judicial appointment in America with Brett Kavanaugh.
00:43:44.740
It's been all about like his judicial record pretty much didn't get talked about at all.
00:43:49.360
And it's all about certain allegations, which may or may not be true.
00:43:53.620
You know, when we think about Donald Trump, we don't think about policy.
00:43:56.420
I think most people would struggle to name a single policy other than build a wall.
00:44:11.940
I understand why people want to vote for people that they like.
00:44:14.760
So I don't have anything against politicians being charismatic or likeable or fine.
00:44:47.000
But I think the issue in politics now is that people are basing their political beliefs on identity.
00:44:54.700
So I identify as this kind of person, therefore I've got to vote this way.
00:44:58.560
And it's less about the manifestos and the policies.
00:45:05.300
I think that gets in the way of proper discussion.
00:45:08.300
So even though maybe if people didn't know the organisation that I work for, for example,
00:45:16.460
and I said, you know, we should change this policy,
00:45:19.860
maybe they'd listen more than if I was introduced as
00:45:22.320
this is Chloe from a right-wing think tank.
0.96
00:45:25.680
a certain amount of people just switch off and go,
00:45:33.680
I was actually going to ask you in terms of identity,
00:45:52.380
I think I'm more of a liberal, but not in the left-wing sense.
00:46:04.180
But, yeah, I'm a right-wing conservative woman.
00:46:07.760
It's difficult because you kind of don't really always get the approval of your side.
00:46:13.040
be your side because sometimes I speak about you know inequality or you know
00:46:18.280
unconscious bias and it's difficult sometimes in certain industries being a
00:46:21.740
woman or there's discrimination and then I'm said oh you know get over it and but
00:46:27.680
then I don't get the defense of the feminist because I'm right-wing so I'm
0.93
00:46:31.880
not really a person so when people are sending me very sexist comments you know
00:46:36.440
there's there's very little outrage or sympathy because all she deserves it
00:46:40.100
because she's evil because she wants to lower taxes um so it's it's it's all right i don't think
00:46:46.540
it dominates um my career though the fact that i am a conservative woman or that i'm a woman
00:46:52.320
most of my days spent talking about taxes which is not gendered right tax payers both men and
00:46:59.820
women pay taxes yeah so i'm curious you mentioned about kind of annoying your side yeah i don't like
1.00
00:47:06.060
to call it that yeah but yeah well I know what you mean people who would otherwise be aligned
00:47:11.240
with what you're saying yes they get annoyed by you talking about inequality or so what is it that
00:47:17.200
you that where you differ from the kind of mainstream narrative on that side of things
00:47:21.960
in terms of when you talk about women's issues or whatever what is it that you say that annoys them
00:47:26.080
yeah I'm not sure if it annoys them but I'm definitely definitely honest about what I think
00:47:32.300
about things and predominantly on twitter i'll say what i really think and sometimes people think
00:47:38.600
it's a bit strange so you know i'll talk about why you know it's it's not fair that sometimes
00:47:43.220
women in politics are judged unfairly for how they look or how they dress and um i'll be told
0.99
00:47:48.920
to you know grow up by um some people and told well you'd stop complaining um you're a right-wing
00:47:55.360
woman so you support the patriarchy and so i can't really have an opinion on social issues without
00:48:00.560
people bringing my economic beliefs into it if that makes sense and I'd say that I'm probably
00:48:08.800
aligned with a lot of young people on most issues I'm you know pretty libertarian I think I'm coming
00:48:15.140
around to drug legalization I think gay marriage is a great thing you know I'm pro-choice and these
00:48:22.920
are a lot of issues that I think it's lots of young people agree with me but because I think
00:48:28.360
taxes should be lower there's a perception that i'm supposed to be really conservative and social
00:48:32.980
issues too so but one place one way you differ from a lot of young people statistically is brexit
00:48:40.380
yeah and that you are pro-brexit you believe it's a good idea um i think i'm statistically a
00:48:46.900
majority of young people are anti-brexit can you just explain in a nutshell why you think it will
00:48:52.780
be a positive thing for this country? I think it'd be a great thing. I still really, really do.
00:48:58.160
At the moment, a lot of the conversations are about how we leave and the technicalities of
00:49:02.900
the deal. But the reason people voted leave was what could be achieved outside of the EU. And it
00:49:08.940
was really about who makes decisions in this country. Is it going to be the EU that makes
00:49:13.780
decisions about policy or elected politicians in the UK? And that is essentially what it came down
00:49:19.560
whether you're left or right-wing, the decisions have been made in Westminster now.
00:49:23.560
And so you have more power and more influence over decision-making
00:49:27.560
than when those decisions were made in the European Commission.
00:49:34.560
But I appreciate not all young people agree with me.
0.65
00:49:37.560
What's interesting, though, is when you break it down by social class,
00:49:41.560
working-class young people, about 45% voted leave.
00:49:44.560
So in the referendum, yes, age was a big determining factor,
00:49:48.560
factor but also geography um and income was also it was another big factor wealthier people voted
00:49:54.120
remain um less well-off people tended to to vote leave more it's actually we had a guest on the
00:49:59.640
show whose episode may or may not release before or after yours eric kaffman is a professor of
00:50:03.960
politics at birkbeck university and he's just really he's just publishing a book now where he
00:50:08.740
talks about his analysis of the individual level of the reasons that people vote for brexit
00:50:13.460
and actually he shows that income was not a big factor
00:50:16.440
and the biggest factor was attitudes to immigration essentially
00:50:23.360
that everyone who voted Leave is a racist at all
00:50:26.060
but that was the biggest predictor of voting to Leave
00:50:30.040
so I think the intellectual elites might have been concerned
00:50:34.340
about getting our powers back from Brussels or whatever
00:50:38.240
but actually I think this is what I was going to put to you
00:50:40.900
The main predictor of voting to leave was social attitudes, particularly to immigration, right?
00:50:51.880
Well, I can only go based on anecdotal evidence and people that I spoke to on the campaign.
00:50:57.560
And it was more of a gut instinct that decisions should be made here.
00:51:01.860
Now, I want my government to be in control of that, whether it's immigration or trade or whatever.
00:51:06.860
But I know that immigration played a really huge part in that.
00:51:09.920
What was interesting is after the referendum, Open Europe did a really big extensive report into attitudes and immigration in the UK, what people really think.
00:51:20.600
And what they found was that most people just wanted immigration to be controlled and fair, and they didn't really have a problem.
00:51:27.640
It wasn't about numbers. It was more about the fact that Britain didn't have control over immigration.
00:51:34.720
And what's interesting is that the most popular replacement immigration system is the Australian
00:51:42.880
And we have higher levels of immigration per capita, but immigration isn't really an election
00:51:49.840
It's not as much of a political issue because people have trust in the system.
00:51:53.620
The government controls it and we know it's fair.
00:51:56.160
And I think if you had that system in the UK where people knew, OK, well, the government's
00:52:01.160
regulating this and you know it's it's based on on visas and and work and it's not based on
00:52:06.700
whether someone's european or not i think there'd be a lot more positive towards immigration i also
00:52:12.000
think infrastructure is a huge problem so housing um people became i think they felt like britain
00:52:19.340
was becoming not too full but public services were getting very busy and there's enough houses
00:52:25.760
and what's interesting this has been pointed out to me by free market people who are very pro-free
00:52:32.260
movement and they say to me well the market is able to respond to changes in population so
00:52:37.500
tesco always has enough food for people um private services always do it's the public services the
00:52:43.740
government services that don't really keep up with changes to population um so you know free
00:52:49.440
movement isn't a bad thing chloe it's just that the government hasn't been able to you know get
00:52:53.860
the NHS to speed up and creating more, you know, hospitals and infrastructure and the like.
00:53:00.400
And I think that's probably the case, but just because there is, in a perfect world,
00:53:09.620
a free market way of having free movement, I don't think that's an argument for it to happen now,
00:53:13.920
because we live in the real world, in the UK, where actually infrastructure isn't keeping up
00:53:17.960
with demand. We don't have a government that is keeping up with demand, and people are really
00:53:21.980
struggling and suffering now under the weight of that but what was interesting during the
00:53:28.840
referendum is that I was an immigrant campaigning for Brexit and a lot of people found that very
00:53:33.220
interesting and I think yeah I moved here I want to live here permanently as my country and for me
00:53:40.740
it was a lot more about the future of Britain than immigration policy but I personally found it very
00:53:47.120
unfair that people from non-EU countries were discriminated against in favor of those from EU
00:53:52.360
countries. So you had an open-door policy with some people based on where they're born and a
00:53:57.620
closed policy on others based on where they're born. I think it's actually very discriminatory
00:54:01.580
and xenophobic and it's not the best way to have an immigration system. But why do people vote
0.74
00:54:08.500
leave? I mean that is the question that everyone asks and it's a million dollar question and I'd
00:54:13.280
interested in reading that report oh yeah it's a book i'll give you the details and i know
00:54:17.540
immigration was it was a big thing but it wasn't the only thing and what i found out internally and
00:54:23.920
you know since after a friend and speak for the leave activists it was just about control it was
00:54:29.000
just about i want the british government to be in control of these things these are things that
00:54:32.500
should be done by a national government not a multinational organization that i have no
00:54:37.260
access or power to lobby or change things all right well uh listen our time's almost up it's
00:54:44.240
been so great to have you on thanks for coming to talk to us uh the question we always like to ask
00:54:48.560
at the end is what is the one thing that we're not talking about that we ought to be talking about
00:54:53.100
oh automation i think yeah it's shocking i think automation is going to change society it's going
00:55:04.200
to change the world. It's going to change how we live our lives. And it's going to, if we don't
00:55:08.680
plan for it, I mean, it could be a really, really good thing, but it's going to completely change
00:55:14.100
everything, automated cars, jobs becoming automated. And we should be talking about
00:55:18.860
and planning for that now. Excellent. All right. Listen, thanks very much for coming on. It's been
00:55:23.860
an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. As always, if you enjoyed it this week, click that
00:55:28.640
bell button next to subscribe button. Once you've clicked the subscribe button, of course,
00:55:48.980
listening, whatever else, and we'll see you next week
00:56:01.940
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