TRIGGERnometry - Douglas Murray： China Must Pay for COVID 19

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster and I'm Constantin Kissin and this is a

00:00:11.000 show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. And our guests do not

00:00:17.240 get more fascinating than the man we have back for the third time today is an author and journalist

00:00:22.420 Douglas Murray. Welcome back to Trigonometry. Well it's very good to be with you both again

00:00:26.340 or virtually virtually yes indeed well uh that is something that is uh obviously affecting

00:00:32.320 everybody what do you make first of all before we dive into lots of the other stuff that we want

00:00:36.440 to talk about about how you know our societies are coping and handling the the crisis and the

00:00:42.160 situation well i mean gosh there's a lot there um i mean it depends individually people uh you know

00:00:49.940 people's situations are varying enormously some people have almost seem to be regarding it as

00:00:55.020 being a sort of reset or some kind of vacation. Some people are being paid their salary without

00:01:03.200 the inconvenience of having to go into the office and enjoying some of the perks of that. But I

00:01:08.600 think for most of us, I mean, it's just an incredibly concerning time. Whether we're

00:01:13.960 through the worst of the virus or not, I don't know. But I know that in some ways,

00:01:19.240 It just all feels to me like the preface to something, as if this is a prelude, because every day you just see news about the economic consequences of this just wash past.

00:01:32.780 There would have been enough news for months, only a little while ago.

00:01:37.760 So I'm very concerned about it, like everyone is, and trying to see my way through this.

00:01:42.820 But yeah, I mean, it's like having to get used to an entirely new program, isn't it?

00:01:50.740 And do you think we're focusing, because you brought up the economic consequences,

00:01:55.600 and well, I continue to exist in a sort of woke liberal bubble,

00:01:59.560 although currently getting expelled at a prodigious rate.

00:02:03.360 But do you think we're talking enough about the economic consequences of this, Douglas?

00:02:07.580 Or do you think we're simply glossing over it underneath all the hysteria?

00:02:11.120 Well, the problem is that the first stage of this has been dictated rightly or wrongly by the experts in pandemics, the virologists and someone. And that's, of course, crucial. But there are other factors that are now clearly, unavoidably coming into play.

00:02:31.040 and uh you know we have this not easy question in our societies at the moment which if we had

00:02:39.040 good faith societies good faith discussions we could have a bit more openly in the general public

00:02:44.120 but but i think broadly speaking it comes down to it's already clear that it comes down to

00:02:50.000 what level of risk we're willing to take versus the economic hit that we're willing to put up with

00:02:57.480 And my worry is that for a lot of people, this moment we're in is like the moment of, you know, the cartoon character runs off the cliff.

00:03:07.020 The legs are still spinning and he remains in air for the time being.

00:03:13.720 But, you know, no society can keep going running up debt like this.

00:03:19.440 um the government can't be effectively employing half of the workforce or paying for half of

00:03:27.540 the workforce um so that's what i worry about and and and i i don't know it's an incredibly

00:03:35.400 fine judgment call on behalf of governments and others um i i'm just i'm just deeply alarmed by

00:03:42.280 you know i think there was a poll last week or the week before from yougov saying that

00:03:46.940 28% of the British public don't want lockdown to end, even if the five conditions that the

00:03:53.380 government has stipulated are met. And you think, well, how are we going to get back as a society?

00:04:01.700 How are we going to reacquaint ourselves with the concept of the risk, which we're almost

00:04:08.220 certainly going to have to reacquaint ourselves with? Some people just like to be confined and

00:04:14.080 dominated by the government i think uh the 28 perhaps uh but do you sense that uh just sorry 0.96

00:04:20.640 to interrupt there but and some people also like doing fuck all but anyway sorry yeah no that that 0.87

00:04:25.500 that isn't a small consideration of course as i say i mean if if your salary is basically being 0.95

00:04:30.200 paid for you you don't have to go into the office anymore and you've got you know a nice house or

00:04:36.460 the garden sort of thing these these could be seen by some people as being halcyon days

00:04:41.800 It's just that, as I say, we're off the cliff, you know, in economic terms.

00:04:47.360 But coming back to that very point, Douglas, one of the things that I was wondering about is,

00:04:52.000 do you think that this corona crisis has kind of exposed how human beings just,

00:04:57.960 we're not wired to think of trade-offs.

00:05:01.040 We just think, oh, I'm enjoying this now, therefore I won't necessarily look into the future,

00:05:05.560 or, you know, these people are dying now, but I'll not even be able to think about the people

00:05:10.600 who are going to die as a result of the measures we're taking now

00:05:14.060 to keep these people safe, which you don't seem to be able

00:05:17.400 to process this idea that there are no good decisions anymore.

00:05:21.620 No, that's certainly true.

00:05:23.580 There are no good decisions in this particular episode.

00:05:29.680 I mean, one of the things that struck me first on this,

00:05:31.780 I've not spent any part of my life thinking about pandemics before now,

00:05:37.120 So, you know, I'm wary of the people who present themselves as experts who also hadn't thought about pandemics until now.

00:05:45.560 But, you know, one of the things that struck me early on was, you know, I was thinking about that extraordinary moment in,

00:05:52.240 I've been reading a lot of Tolstoy in recent weeks, and I was thinking of one of the few works I'd read before all this,

00:05:58.520 The Death of Ivan Ilyich, where there's an extraordinary moment where he thinks that he's dying.

00:06:03.700 He thinks it reminds him of that time that he was on a train and thought the train was going in one direction and then realizes it wasn't.

00:06:14.200 It was always going in the other direction.

00:06:16.780 And I sort of felt something like that when this all began.

00:06:20.700 It was an uncanny feeling of how on earth could something like this happen, followed by, no, this is the sort of thing that happens.

00:06:29.060 This is history.

00:06:30.220 This is how history feels.

00:06:32.520 things you totally discounted because they happened in the past happen in your time

00:06:38.040 and you have to reacquaint yourself with the concept though this is this is this is the

00:06:42.540 direction in which we go and you talked you talk a lot in the board the your previous two books

00:06:49.840 that i've read about you know so it seems like the west is in crisis almost when it comes to

00:06:54.460 identity politics and also when you discuss it in the way in the death of europe and it seems to me

00:07:01.800 that people in the West, because I spent a lot of my time growing up in Venezuela, don't really

00:07:05.900 understand what it's like when a society is in crisis and when a society is very, very near to

00:07:12.880 the point of collapse. And I get quite anxious because you're looking around and you're thinking

00:07:18.400 this can't carry on forever, but it seems that we buried our heads in the sand. Do you think that's

00:07:24.380 the case? Well, there's something I wrote about actually in The Strange Death of Europe, celebrated 0.97

00:07:29.020 uh early 20th century spanish philosopher wrote a pretty famous book called the tragic sense of life

00:07:35.640 and uh i i speculated there that that it was western particularly western european you could

00:07:43.320 also say of course north american um men and women who basically in the last three quarters

00:07:50.220 of a century lost the tragic sense of life lost lost a particular understanding of how life can

00:07:56.000 go uh and we undoubtedly slipped into this you know somebody must be to blame somebody else

00:08:03.920 must be able to get me out of this this isn't fair all of these sorts of presumptions um you

00:08:11.880 know to which as we know from history and most people in the world still know the response the

00:08:16.420 universe is well well so what what makes you think you're special and i think we had had lost

00:08:25.720 that. By the way, I don't take any comfort, as some people seem to, that this virus, whatever

00:08:33.080 comes after it, in some way miraculously vindicates all of their thinking prior to the virus,

00:08:40.580 despite never having thought about the virus before. I keep a little notebook of the number

00:08:46.160 of people who have never written about this sort of thing, who find miraculously that the coronavirus

00:08:50.000 vindicates everything they said about everything else before.

00:08:53.100 you know i mean it's like people say to me you know i imagine that the identity politics people

00:08:58.740 will will learn from this they'll go away and think you want to bet um it everything plays

00:09:04.760 everything you know everyone is using the virus as a sort of megaphone for whatever their own

00:09:09.100 pre-existing ideas were but that's always the case well we were really wanted to get into that

00:09:14.780 a little bit later but do you not think maybe as a counterpoint to what france has said is actually

00:09:18.760 you know we had a guest on the show Jim Rickards the the U.S. finance and economics expert and he

00:09:25.180 said you know one of the things that we're not talking about is the veneer of civilization is

00:09:30.020 paper thin and it's it's already crumbling but actually I mean I look around I think people are

00:09:35.480 pulling together people are you know the level of compliance with what are extremely significant

00:09:41.320 restrictions on our freedom is very very high you know you don't see people on the streets protesting

00:09:46.680 about it um you know we're following the rules even as we find out that you know the data on

00:09:52.540 which they were based may or may not have been accurate like i kind of i don't feel that society

00:09:57.500 is crumbling around us you know what i mean i i don't especially either i think one point i made

00:10:02.660 very early in this was that it was striking to me that given that in a society like britain we'd

00:10:07.500 been said to have been living in a divided society in recent years it was you know unbelievably rent

00:10:13.160 and broken, and we trusted nobody in authority.

00:10:17.880 I was just very struck by the fact that it turned out

00:10:21.380 we had massive amounts of societal trust.

00:10:24.300 We had trust in our politicians,

00:10:27.300 who we may have had criticisms of,

00:10:29.660 but we broadly recognized were trying to do the best they could

00:10:32.140 in the circumstances that we were in.

00:10:33.660 We trusted the scientific advice experts.

00:10:38.120 In the UK, you know, the Queen's messages

00:10:42.540 have been of enormous importance, you know, and this just strikes me because, yes, we've been

00:10:48.320 said to have been one thing and then a crisis comes along and it shows it to have been a certain

00:10:53.280 amount of hot air. I do, however, think that we have had little flickers of reminders of what

00:11:00.580 societal chaos does look like. I mean, I think that the glimpse into chaos we saw at the very

00:11:08.000 beginning when people started stockpiling was one very I think that's something that people won't

00:11:15.500 forget once they've seen it and I think a second example by the way is that fascinating I mean I

00:11:23.620 say it sort of talking about it as a historian but I mean that just fascinating historical thing

00:11:28.820 of people starting to burn 5G masks now that I mean that is the sort of thing which just

00:11:36.360 when you read about pandemics and disasters in history, you know, the outbursts of irrationality,

00:11:44.840 the vulnerability to irrational ideas, the conspiracies, and to much more. Again, that's

00:11:51.700 the sort of thing you read about in history books. But to see it happening here and now,

00:11:55.980 to the extent that, you know, there's a really perhaps necessary attempt to shut down

00:12:00.360 the people spinning the stuff that causes people to go off and do that. It's fascinating. I mean,

00:12:05.700 It's outbreaks of the irrational mind, you know, and I think those are sort of useful for us because they provide a corrective to our presumption of our age, which is that sort of Whig interpretation of history presumption, which is that things just keep getting better and better. 0.98

00:12:21.280 You know, at some point soon, we can all properly put our feet up, you know.

00:12:25.720 5G masks are the new Jews is what you're saying of the epidemics. 1.00

00:12:29.860 They'll almost certainly be connected in the conspiratorial mind, I guarantee you.

00:12:35.700 I hope you're enjoying our brilliant conversation with Douglas Murray.

00:12:43.000 We wanted to take a moment to say a huge thank you to all of you who've been supporting the show during this lockdown.

00:12:49.180 One of the things we tried to do during the lockdown is to produce a lot more content.

00:12:53.700 So instead of just the one interview a week, what we're doing now is we're putting an interview on Wednesday and on Sunday.

00:12:59.680 And also we're streaming live every day except for Mondays as well.

00:13:03.200 So we're really taking it up a notch and you guys have responded.

00:13:07.500 Absolutely.

00:13:08.480 And thank you once again for tuning in, for listening, for commenting, for retweeting.

00:13:14.000 But there is something as well that you could do if you wouldn't mind.

00:13:18.800 Now, we know that we live in financially straightened times and things are tight.

00:13:22.880 But if you can afford to contribute to trigonometry,

00:13:26.060 maybe slip a little cheeky fiver into the PayPal or the Patreon or whatever else,

00:13:30.280 it would really help me to eat.

00:13:33.200 we don't want your fiver and Francis doesn't need to eat. Look at his fat face. What we want 0.94

00:13:37.800 is a monthly subscription if you can do it, because that helps us to plan ahead and keep

00:13:42.560 the show running. Lots of you have responded already and we really appreciate it. And with

00:13:46.800 that, enjoy the rest of our chat with Douglas Murray. But when you bring up the free speech

00:13:52.540 issue, and obviously we have seen some censorship by government and big tech companies of people

00:14:00.740 who have been putting out these conspiracy theories.

00:14:03.960 And I was curious what you make of that,

00:14:05.800 because while, as you know,

00:14:07.500 I'm very strongly opposed to restrictions

00:14:09.260 on what people can and can't say.

00:14:11.600 Equally, I don't think in a situation

00:14:13.800 where people are going out and burning things down,

00:14:17.340 allowing that to be fueled by people is a good thing.

00:14:21.320 So I'm genuinely uncertain where I stand.

00:14:23.920 Where do you stand on that?

00:14:25.020 Well, it is that very important issue, isn't it,

00:14:29.480 on the incitement question which we've all been sort of um badly playing around within recent

00:14:35.940 years primarily because certain people for short-term political advantage dishonestly

00:14:40.780 claim that anything they don't like is incitement um but incitement as a concept in law it does

00:14:47.920 exist and it's a very important concept it basically is um you know the limit is you know

00:14:53.020 that you you can say all sorts of things about people but you can't stand outside their house

00:14:57.340 with a mob pointing to the house and say, you know, attack.

00:15:02.200 So it's about the proximity of the threat as well as the words.

00:15:09.340 I think this is a really, really tricky one for the tech companies.

00:15:13.340 They are getting it wrong, but they get everything wrong

00:15:16.320 because they're trying to learn on their feet

00:15:19.400 and play with tools much more powerful than they expected them to be

00:15:23.700 and do it in super quick time.

00:15:27.340 I mean, I think that some of the stuff I've seen that has been read about has been censored is obviously material that should be out there and able to be thought about.

00:15:38.420 But I can't deny that.

00:15:40.280 I mean, when it comes to people spreading conspiracies that you could see easily or swiftly catching on among some people in a time of already considerable confusion.

00:15:54.380 I don't know. It's a tricky one.

00:15:55.540 I mean, my general belief is to leave everything up there,

00:15:59.540 leave everything out there.

00:16:01.300 But it must have crossed your mind as it has mine of, you know,

00:16:05.720 it's worrying when you see something like the David Icke controversy

00:16:10.620 at the almost beginning of this whole thing

00:16:13.380 with the program London Real, which I don't know.

00:16:18.900 I was interviewed on that when my last book came out,

00:16:22.100 and the interviewer was very nice uh and did quite a good interview and uh got on well but

00:16:28.120 you know at some point in the interview he mentioned yeah that's now this interesting

00:16:30.700 david ike was saying the other week and i sort of went you know and he says yeah you know i was

00:16:38.800 interviewing him and i just sort of thought well why were you interviewing him and um and then of

00:16:45.740 course but then there is the follow-on from that which is the thing as i say that must be on our

00:16:49.400 minds are in this, which is, well, when they interview him, millions of hits. And I mean,

00:16:58.280 what is that? Who are the people? What is the gap that is being addressed there? Are these people

00:17:04.040 who are just enjoying playing around with some crazy shit? Is there something about him that 1.00

00:17:11.560 they're enormously attracted to? I just don't know. You should ask Francis. He keeps demanding

00:17:16.840 that we get david ike on the show right the only reason i do it douglas is i just want him to

00:17:21.540 explain to constantine's face why he's a lizard yes i would pay to see that man i would i i tried

00:17:31.260 to explain that to a friend recently who's not from the uk and and no no knowledge of david ike

00:17:36.260 and uh i would say yeah no no no he was a guy like well you know he was a footballer and then

00:17:41.240 he said he was Jesus in a shell suit on live TV. And I realize it's extremely hard to explain.

00:17:49.080 It's extremely hard to explain. And then of course, you know, well,

00:17:51.640 the royal family were lizards and that's his argument. Yeah. And so no, it's a tricky one,

00:17:59.240 but I do think, as I say, that's one of the questions underneath all that, which is,

00:18:04.040 what is it that he's speaking to? What's everyone else missing? Or are we missing something?

00:18:10.840 i don't know it's but but yeah i'm worried about i'm worried about the fact that the tech companies

00:18:16.520 are at the very least going to be hoovering up and cancelling things that should be considered

00:18:23.100 because some people are doing that sort of thing i'm i'm and it's it's definitely i think it's

00:18:30.180 probably you know it's it's it's too close it's all of that stuff with internet censorship has

00:18:34.780 always come too close to comfort for some of us you know it just as you sort of think oh well

00:18:40.800 they're only going to get David Icke, you discover that they demonetize all your friends

00:18:48.080 and they've started putting watch things on people.

00:18:52.880 And yeah, it always comes closer to your boat than you hope.

00:18:56.860 Well, there's another thing that they have been doing as well, which troubles me tremendously,

00:19:00.540 which is they are playing around with the algorithms on YouTube.

00:19:04.380 So what they call authoritative content is seen by more people than unauthoritative content.

00:19:10.320 So if the two of us were to interview a coronavirus expert,

00:19:15.400 that would not get the same traction as CNN interviewing that same person.

00:19:19.820 So they've got their hand on the levers of information,

00:19:24.480 which is what I think is exposed, isn't it?

00:19:27.180 Yeah, they have far too much power.

00:19:30.560 They're playing around with stuff that's bigger than they can cope with.

00:19:34.840 They're having to relearn incredibly fast things

00:19:37.540 they ought to have known a long time ago about the nature of free discussion and free debate.

00:19:43.140 But by the way, one of the reasons why I said it's worth trying to think about why there's

00:19:49.460 an appetite for some of the craziest stuff is that I'm increasingly wondering, you just

00:19:57.180 alluded to it earlier, Konstantin, I'm increasingly wondering what happens if it is clearly shown

00:20:05.780 and seemed to be the case that the scientists overestimated or indeed got very wrong some of

00:20:13.200 the things that have caused us all to be in lockdown now for a couple of months. I mean,

00:20:19.660 so the point I made at the beginning, look at the societal trust we have, isn't that a rather

00:20:23.220 wonderful thing? You think, actually, I can easily foresee the circumstances where this

00:20:28.760 completely backfires uh let alone if if we had to do this again or asked to do this again

00:20:35.800 um i mean if if the scientists who we've been relying on and hoping are correct and trusting

00:20:42.980 are do turn out to have got this badly wrong then the conspiratorial mind will have had an awful

00:20:50.760 boost won't it no absolutely and moving on now somewhat have we touched on it earlier on in the

00:20:57.760 interview but you didn't seem surprised at all that people were trying to put their own spin on

00:21:03.200 the virus racialize the virus you know the fact that the virus is now fact-shaming people it's

00:21:08.380 also a racist you that didn't surprise you in any shape or form why not douglas well no because i 0.58

00:21:14.680 mean we all we all come to the world with the understanding that we've you know put on it um

00:21:21.140 And one of the fascinating things is that, you know, religious people put a religious bent on things. People who believe in sort of, you know, SJWism, that's the sort of religion to them. It's the lens through which they understand the world.

00:21:37.540 if you've approached everything up till now in the presumption that you live in a racist

00:21:42.420 patriarchal cis heteronormative society and that all of these things need to be pulled down in 0.51

00:21:47.720 order to get to some kind of justice then the coronavirus is simply the latest thing you can

00:21:53.340 use to prove that you're right and then you do this weird stuff that they've all been doing of

00:21:59.760 you know the virus is anti-women and then people point out that more men die and they say well 0.84

00:22:07.340 the men might be doing the dying but it's the women who are suffering from it or something 0.91

00:22:11.420 and then you have this awful outburst of debate about whether ethnic minorities are disproportionately

00:22:20.400 suffering from the virus and indeed dying from the virus and instead of being able to even begin

00:22:27.160 to have the discussion of if that is the case why might it be you have the this is yet more

00:22:35.420 evidence of the fact we live in a racist society a society so racist we can't even import a virus

00:22:40.500 from china without making it into a more racist virus and and and on and on it goes and of course

00:22:49.140 there's you know as i say the the amazing thing in a way living through this is is seeing something

00:22:56.320 as i say that that so few people have thought about and so many people just keep instead of

00:23:02.200 thinking, this is a new thing for me to consider. This is a new thing for our society to be

00:23:08.240 thinking about. Instead of thinking about that, thinking, how can I adapt this reality

00:23:14.500 to fit my pre-existing lenses? And, you know, I feel rather sorry for the people who are doing

00:23:22.160 that because, among other things, it massively limits their ability to comprehend the world

00:23:28.300 around them it limits their imagination it limits and the real problem though isn't it is that it

00:23:34.640 limits our societal capability to solve problems that's what i mind about it it's like i minded

00:23:40.760 this after the london riots in 2011 i minded the fact that the commission set up to look into it

00:23:47.560 and why they'd happened set up and decided in advance what the answers couldn't be

00:23:53.020 because it just means that well what's the point why not just not have an inquiry why not just

00:24:00.300 pretend it didn't happen or or just say whatever you want and and and that's the problem with this

00:24:07.320 is i'm just struck by the fact that we have some really complex issues ahead of us most obviously

00:24:13.360 this this um competing thing between being safe as much as we can from the virus and the economic

00:24:22.560 imperative but in that really difficult space in a discussion which we need to be able to have

00:24:29.020 we we so just disastrously limit ourselves i saw dawn butler um was on the television i think this

00:24:38.460 morning as we're speaking claiming that boris johnson's announcement last sunday about how

00:24:44.400 people should get back to work if they can was deliberately sending people out to get the virus 0.99

00:24:50.880 and you know you think oh god how can we be so stupid as a society to allow a discussion at that 0.99

00:24:59.620 level as if the debate is between the pro and anti-death parties or the you know pro-infecting 1.00

00:25:08.300 the elderly against the pro-defending the elderly groups like how are we going to solve 1.00

00:25:14.460 any problems when we've got stupidity at that level 0.99

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00:26:47.320 well the world has gone upside down i mean pierce morgan is retweeting ash sarkar

00:26:55.080 something is badly wrong here but um i you know i i see your last time we spoke uh we spoke about

00:27:03.460 your latest book uh which is to your left behind you and product placement yes well done the madness

00:27:10.880 of crowds where you talk about a lot of this stuff you know race gender uh the trans conversations

00:27:17.480 well are you not optimistic douglas because we have seen a few small steps in the right direction

00:27:23.760 i would say i mean for example the the review of the gender recognition act recently came out and

00:27:28.860 said that children shouldn't be allowed to transition until they become adults. Although

00:27:34.880 I do take your point about, we seem to have taken a very strange look at ethnic minorities

00:27:40.620 suffering from the virus. When if you speak to a doctor, they go, okay, well, obviously those

00:27:46.880 groups would be most affected because they're more likely to have diabetes, be overweight,

00:27:50.840 et cetera, et cetera, right? But are you not optimistic? Do you not feel like we may start

00:27:56.560 to see some people become less extreme about things as a result of this of course you know

00:28:02.460 the the tv people uh the pundits they're going to continue because that's their livelihood right

00:28:08.020 yeah they can't you know they're tv feminists or tv race baiters or whatever but broadly as a 1.00

00:28:14.000 society do you not feel that we are maybe starting to move in the right direction you know let me

00:28:19.220 just preface this by saying that of course i mean i just i'm deeply conscious all the time

00:28:23.540 of the need to avoid the tendency to have these things vindicate your own point of view.

00:28:30.940 So I have a natural predisposition to hoping that anything, something, anything does away 0.98

00:28:38.540 with the woke shit at some point. I've got a natural predisposition because I just don't 0.99

00:28:43.180 want to talk about it a moment longer than I have to. I don't want my brain cells to be clogged up

00:28:48.280 with this detritus um and and so of course i wish it was the case um i just see that you know the

00:28:57.940 same games being played i suppose my my my short my more my my my prediction such as i mean it's

00:29:05.380 obviously stupid to make predictions at any time particularly now my prediction in a way of that

00:29:08.940 at the moment is this i think that i think the people who do that are going to double down 0.98

00:29:13.760 but the rest of society is going to have less tolerance for it i i and i think that's because

00:29:20.960 and lionel shriver said this recently as well that you know the woke stuff was always a

00:29:27.140 a rich time and a rich people's obsession i mean it was a it it happened because of a society that

00:29:36.560 didn't have enough problems you know we didn't have enough of the things that were being complained

00:29:42.640 about you know it's only if you've got a society that doesn't tolerate aggression that you can

00:29:51.580 decide to go to the layer below that and decide to police microaggressions like no society in

00:29:58.900 history before ours would have given a damn about so-called microaggressions uh so it's it's a

00:30:05.720 product of wealth, boredom, bad education, illiteracy, and much more. But I'm pretty

00:30:16.720 confident that as, sadly, that as we already are suffering economically, many, many people

00:30:24.740 have lost their jobs, don't see how they're going to be able to keep their finances together.

00:30:32.480 i just expect that those people are going to care or even less than they already did

00:30:38.660 if sam smith claims that somebody misgendered him according to what he claims to be this fortnight

00:30:45.160 and uh and i think that's fine i think that'd be a healthy thing i think i think we have as i say

00:30:51.900 we've all had our minds clogged up by a lot too much nonsense and but as i say i mean you know

00:30:58.900 both of these things can happen simultaneously, people doubling down and the wider population

00:31:03.580 saying, no, we've had enough of that. We've got real problems now, so we don't have time for your

00:31:09.500 imaginary ones. And Douglas, we've spoken a lot about the negatives of this virus and its impact,

00:31:16.040 and of course, there are a lot of them. Are there going to be any positives, do you think?

00:31:20.100 Is there anything that's going to come out of this that might actually help society move forward?

00:31:24.360 uh well i know i'm i'm skeptical i'm skeptical i'm skeptical of the concept of forward

00:31:32.900 i don't like this view of history as i think we may have discussed before i i think this whole

00:31:40.900 idea that we're just always going forward is always getting better and even a virus can be

00:31:45.340 used to get to a better place and happier people and i i'm i just don't i don't see that as the

00:31:52.200 view of history knows it's it's famous most famous proponents you know highlight a load of things in

00:31:58.300 the 20th century and have to ignore two massive world wars um so i'm um i the one i think there

00:32:07.660 are things that that you could judge to be as it were good in certain ways to have come from this

00:32:13.760 i do it's a very small c conservative thing to say but i i i believe in community and uh

00:32:23.280 the importance of family and i believe that people's people find the most meaning in their lives

00:32:31.020 from genuinely meaningful relationships and that the world of sort of virtual um you know having

00:32:40.560 thousands of friends but nobody you can rely on um is something which actually is it's just had a

00:32:46.580 counter blast i mean people are relying on their networks of loved ones and i think that's probably

00:32:53.040 for a lot of people provided a kind of salutary note in their lives who are you know who are the

00:33:00.880 people who uh you do want to you know have whatever the household bonding arrangement is

00:33:07.260 that we're allowed to do at some point in the coming weeks or months,

00:33:10.320 who do you actually want to be close to and able to see?

00:33:14.680 I think there have been amazing outbursts in towns

00:33:17.720 as well as outside of towns and cities of communities working

00:33:22.060 in a way that they were fairly unsupported until now.

00:33:27.400 And that's, of course, that's the sort of view of how a nation

00:33:30.240 like Britain works.

00:33:31.260 It's Burke's small platoons.

00:33:33.420 you know not people being told by government you must do this and you should organize like this

00:33:40.440 but just that the small platoons of society self-organize self-regulate and go out there

00:33:47.100 and deal with with problems that they can solve um and i think that's definitely been a boost for

00:33:53.800 that and that's no bad thing but um other than that it's quite hard to put a positive spin on

00:34:00.820 a pandemic. It was quite a big ask from Francis, but I think one of the positives, which I want to

00:34:07.320 talk about in a second is China and potentially reviewing our relationship with that country.

00:34:13.240 But before we get onto that, Douglas, you're obviously someone who not only writes books,

00:34:16.560 but articles as well. And I wanted to ask you what you make of the journalistic response and how

00:34:24.880 that sector of our media is coming out of all of this? Because a lot of people, including myself,

00:34:31.380 have criticized many journalists for the reporters, not the journalists, but the reporters in the

00:34:36.360 press conferences for what I felt were endless, pointless, gotcha questions and things like that.

00:34:42.200 Do you think journalists overall have done themselves proud in this episode?

00:34:47.460 No, I don't think so. But I mean, that's because so few were prepared for it. I mean, I say it

00:34:53.440 myself but as being guilty of this than a member of the tribe but uh you know most people in the

00:34:59.740 media and journalism did um you know know nothing humanities courses at university

00:35:04.880 they are very ill prepared for discussions about virology or science or hard maths or anything like

00:35:14.900 that and so i think that the reason why journalism's had a bad virus as it were is because

00:35:22.480 we were programmed to do a certain type of game which was totally insufficient for the

00:35:33.180 era we find ourselves in and and the games are ones like gotcha games which is why i think the

00:35:39.660 public opinion trust the opinion polls will show the trust in journalism gone so low because people

00:35:46.040 didn't really feel that was adequate to the task um and then you've got the you know the i've said

00:35:53.900 it before but you know the u-turn game the one of you know well you said this last sunday but now

00:35:59.500 you're saying this isn't this a u-turn by the government and as i pointed out the other week

00:36:03.980 in a piece somewhere you know as any driver knows u-turns are morally neutral thing i mean it's quite

00:36:09.100 useful maneuver at times if you're going straight into a wall your u-turn ought to be deployed

00:36:16.240 and uh you wouldn't want somebody to say oh you've just done a u-turn hmm um it's not it's not you

00:36:25.080 know as i say if the advice changes or something then of course you might change your change your

00:36:30.240 view but it's that sort of thing it's like the game of trying to expose differences between

00:36:35.680 people at the top of government that sort of that sort of thing well of course this this this guided

00:36:41.260 the journalistic community in recent years it wasn't fit for purpose then it's definitely not

00:36:47.960 fit for purpose now so no i don't think it's i don't think i don't think the journalists have

00:36:53.380 had a great war um at all what about the police douglas because this is another part of our

00:37:01.100 institutions i suppose that that seem to have struggled with particularly initially with how 0.99

00:37:07.440 to deal with this we saw a lot of police forces around the country doing seemingly very stupid 0.78

00:37:12.700 things uh and taking liberties if you like and they're quite literally no they certainly have i 0.85

00:37:18.980 mean they well this this isn't terribly surprising by the way i mean there are quite a lot of

00:37:24.680 examples we could point to across recent decades that show that the police among other things

00:37:31.300 there's always a problem they operate in a way like a gang i mean i'm saying internally they

00:37:37.120 always try to protect their own they always try to cover up for each other often with catastrophic

00:37:42.980 consequences um and and and they can't concede when they get things wrong they don't do anything

00:37:49.540 meaningful about it um so the police overreacted and undoubtedly in certain cases went beyond what

00:37:58.780 the government would allow them to do in terms of policing and i mean this you know these

00:38:04.280 preposterous things like the police um you know dying a lake to prevent people swimming in it and

00:38:11.900 and sending drones out to photograph dog walkers in the complete wilderness and and much more well

00:38:21.700 but in a way i that's sort of what i'm afraid that's what i expect the the police which is

00:38:27.560 you know not been operating very well as a force for a long time it's not terrible but it just has

00:38:33.940 definitely has terrible moments um and in a way that's i'd expect the police to be vaguely

00:38:41.540 incompetent and for some of them to massively overreach because they can't believe their luck

00:38:46.540 that they can go and you know tell off a sunbaver because after all it's much easier telling off a

00:38:53.280 sunbaver than it is actually going to somebody's house and they've been robbed and actually

00:38:56.600 investigating the robbery and finding the robber you know i mean when you think of what the police

00:39:02.240 have not bothered to investigate in recent years um you know crime that goes on which is on cctv

00:39:11.200 which is why the CCTV is meant to be there. And the police don't even bother to investigate it.

00:39:16.260 I mean, it's happened, you know, everyone has stories of this. And of course, they just can't

00:39:21.420 believe their luck when they can walk around and tell people you're killing people by lying there

00:39:26.680 on the grass. I'm less surprised by that than I am by the public reaction, which again, now this

00:39:34.040 is a minority, admittedly, but I think we get quite an interesting insight into, again, what

00:39:38.820 history is like look at the people i mean we all have stories of it and sometimes we read about

00:39:43.640 them in the press look at the people willing to inform on their neighbors you know uh i've spoken

00:39:50.140 to a lot of people how this you know people who you know people they know who say to them you know

00:39:55.000 are you aware this is the second time you've been out today you know and when you hear stories like

00:40:01.500 that you you know i i didn't think gosh you know it's that's how things like east germany the

00:40:09.020 soviet union that's that's that's partly how it worked isn't it because there's always a portion

00:40:14.600 of the population that loves the opportunity to play this sort of combination of comets are and

00:40:24.720 and and and policemen and purity police and you know cleric and curtain twitcher and all of that

00:40:34.660 there is a proportion of us maybe we've all got a bit of it in us who loves that look at the

00:40:40.880 shaming that goes on on social media when anyone can get a photo and by the way quite often the

00:40:45.100 photos are from years ago or months ago of people meant to be in a public place so everyone online

00:40:50.940 and say, how can these people, and they can all pile on, they feel so great about themselves

00:40:54.680 that they wouldn't do this. And, you know, that stuff is really interesting to see come out.

00:41:02.740 So I'm much more surprised at that in a way than I am at the police overreaching.

00:41:07.720 And Douglas, you talked about the police. And do you think that the government,

00:41:12.980 because in times of crisis, governments always introduce new taxes, they always introduce new

00:41:17.180 laws do you think with the introduction of this app that what we're going to see is an infringement

00:41:22.360 of our civil liberties we're going to now be tracked far more than ever and then we're just

00:41:26.880 going to have to accept it I actually don't think so particularly I'm I think there's itself there's

00:41:32.560 an overreaction to the overreaction which is to claim that therefore we are slipping into being

00:41:38.960 a police state I don't know the people who say that apart from anything else are the people who

00:41:42.340 always claim that we're slipping into a police state. And I'd be very surprised if after all

00:41:51.380 of this, the British public are eager to have this sort of thing going on more in their lives

00:41:57.400 all of the time. But there will be a proportion of people who will, like that 28% we're talking

00:42:03.500 about who would like to remain at home, whatever happens, you know, for the end of time. There

00:42:10.880 will be a portion of people who will who will you know claim well look how well we took that

00:42:17.600 maybe you know it doesn't matter if we have more detection and following and and all that sort of

00:42:24.260 thing i just i think that'll be pushed back against i i think that i don't think they'll

00:42:29.740 get an easy ride with that i don't i don't think we're going to slip into some totalitarian

00:42:33.600 nightmare well see i was quite reassured by how reluctantly boris johnson introduced some of the

00:42:39.260 restrictions. There seemed a very strong reluctance from him to do that. It's against all of his

00:42:43.980 political instincts. You could see it in his eyes. It was something he never, ever dreamt he would

00:42:48.440 have to do. But equally, I am also somewhat persuaded by the argument that after 9-11,

00:42:54.980 a lot of laws come in in America. None of them have been rolled back. The counter-terrorism

00:43:01.500 legislation in this country introduced in the wake of 7-7, then it's used to remove a pensioner 0.99

00:43:08.660 who's heckling Tony Blair at the Labour Party conference, right?

00:43:12.540 There is a sense that, I mean, most of these laws are grandfathered, I think.

00:43:17.500 So I guess they should be removed automatically.

00:43:21.680 But there is a thing there that sometimes things don't get rolled back

00:43:26.940 the way that you'd hope, even if...

00:43:28.840 Yes, there is.

00:43:29.920 But I've always said there has to be incredibly...

00:43:33.040 I think with the example you give, the counterterrorism legislation,

00:43:36.200 I always thought that the answer to it is quite straightforward.

00:43:39.160 You come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who misuses

00:43:41.800 and misapplies the law.

00:43:43.320 So, you know, the first councillor who, you know,

00:43:46.820 allows anti-terrorism legislation to be used to spy on somebody

00:43:50.820 who's putting out the wrong colour bin,

00:43:54.220 that person should never be near public life again,

00:43:57.180 nobody who cooperated with it ever should be.

00:44:00.600 You know, there does just have to be a better understanding

00:44:03.960 and a better punishment of people.

00:44:06.200 who misuse legislation intended for very serious and specific purposes

00:44:11.040 and misuse it for their own weird short-term political convenience

00:44:15.380 or to pursue a vendetta or whatever.

00:44:18.580 So, yes, I mean, I just think that needs a very close eye kept on it.

00:44:22.480 But I'm pretty confident we have a lot of close eyes

00:44:25.580 on that sort of thing in the UK.

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00:46:40.920 And we've been talking about a slide into totalitarianism,

00:46:44.660 which is a lovely way to introduce China. How much responsibility do you think the Chinese, 0.98

00:46:52.540 or rather the CCP, should take for this particular virus?

00:46:57.320 Well, it all comes to their door. Whichever explanation we end up settling on as to how

00:47:06.280 this virus came about, whether it's the wet market one or the laboratory one,

00:47:12.300 and whether it's seen to be entirely accidental,

00:47:16.900 partly accidental, or entirely deliberate,

00:47:19.880 every single one of these options,

00:47:22.820 the Chinese Communist Party has to pay for it.

00:47:25.900 Because in every single one of these scenarios,

00:47:29.160 the central thing remains,

00:47:31.660 not just that this happened in their country,

00:47:35.460 possibly in one of the laboratories,

00:47:37.560 but that they managed to,

00:47:40.020 they successfully deceived the world for months and did what totalitarian regimes always managed

00:47:47.380 to do, which is to turn a local disaster into an absolutely global one. And I think that we have

00:47:58.360 a very complex but necessary process ahead of us of disentangling ourselves from this country,

00:48:07.100 which we've, this regime, I say,

00:48:09.460 which has just burnt down the world economy.

00:48:12.860 And do you think it should pay reparations?

00:48:16.980 Oh, I'm for absolutely everything.

00:48:18.780 I think everything should be on the table.

00:48:20.420 Absolutely everything.

00:48:21.980 And look, by the way, at the disgraceful way

00:48:25.300 that the CCP has treated our allies and friends.

00:48:28.940 It's bullying of the Australian government.

00:48:31.880 I mean, you know...

00:48:32.720 Tell people about that, Douglas,

00:48:33.720 because many people won't know about this.

00:48:35.280 So the Australian, I've written about this a bit recently

00:48:38.020 because I take a certain interest in this corner of things.

00:48:42.680 I think that, I've written this in the past,

00:48:44.880 I think this country has been very naive,

00:48:47.620 the UK has been very naive about the Chinese Communist Party.

00:48:51.180 I think we've seen it solely as a sort of gold tap

00:48:54.440 and ignored the downsides that always come with it.

00:48:58.860 And by the way, I told this story in The Spectator last week in my column,

00:49:01.700 But I heard this story, very, very good source, seven years ago, that after the Dalai Lama affair, which was when David Cameron, the then Prime Minister, saw the Dalai Lama, who, of course, the Chinese Communist Party loathed for obvious reasons to do with Tibet.

00:49:19.700 after david cameron met the dalai lama the chinese communist party cut off

00:49:24.780 trade relations with new investment deals with the uk until david cameron announced that he was

00:49:32.560 going to socially distance himself from the dalai lama and then announced he would actually never

00:49:37.220 meet him again and after issuing an incredibly groveling apology the next time that british

00:49:44.040 representatives met with their Chinese counterparts in Beijing. A copy of the

00:49:50.100 British government's apology was pushed across the desk at the British officials,

00:49:53.580 who asked to stand up and read it out. And they did. And when they sat down,

00:49:58.960 the Chinese Communist Party officials said, with a smile, we just wanted to know that you meant it.

00:50:04.520 Now, wow, when I heard that then, I was pretty bowled over anyone being so supine on my behalf

00:50:11.800 or on the behalf of the British people.

00:50:13.840 But that's the deal.

00:50:15.600 That's the deal we've been willing to put up with,

00:50:17.540 which is you get the money, you get the investment.

00:50:19.820 That isn't nothing, but it means that you also have to play on their terms

00:50:26.640 and there are caveats involved.

00:50:30.020 And some of them are very serious.

00:50:32.340 Now, in recent days and weeks, the Australian government has come across this

00:50:36.500 because the Australian government, Australia, I should stress,

00:50:39.660 has been learning what we are just learning now faster and ahead of time because of their

00:50:45.020 location and their own trade relations in recent decades with China. And I've just noticed on

00:50:50.700 visits to Australia that the public there are much more aware than they are in the UK or America,

00:50:57.120 I'd say, about the fact that there are things attached to this relationship. And the Australian

00:51:04.720 government a couple of weeks ago suggested there should be an official inquiry, independent,

00:51:12.180 international, into how this all happened, how the virus originated, and how it came to spread

00:51:17.720 across the world. And after the Australian government did that, the Chinese Communist Party

00:51:23.720 reacted in the way it always does. It threatened Australia. Its diplomats, its ambassador to

00:51:32.040 australia uh said that the chinese might stop buying australian products australian beef australian

00:51:38.600 wine and uh that this was seen as a racist thing uh incidentally i mean one of the most prominent

00:51:44.920 government mouthpiece journalists in china took to uh weibo the uh um chinese equivalent of twitter

00:51:51.480 um and if you if you if you think that twitter is a totalitarian censorious monolith you should

00:51:58.640 see their Chinese counterpart. But this very prominent Chinese, basically government stooge,

00:52:07.580 took to the Chinese equivalent of Twitter to say that Australia was a piece of chewing gum stuck 0.89

00:52:14.020 to the shoe of China, and it needs to scrape them off. And that's quite normal rhetoric from 0.99

00:52:19.560 the Chinese Communist Party's officials, representatives.

00:52:23.420 I dare say that does sound a little bit racist, Douglas.

00:52:25.740 Yeah, I know. You would have thought that. Well, you know, isn't it interesting? Isn't it interesting

00:52:30.300 that whilst Nancy Pelosi and co are worrying about whether or not saying where the virus

00:52:37.820 came from is racist. And let's not forget, it was only in late February, early March,

00:52:42.860 that Nancy Pelosi was still encouraging people in America to go to their local Chinatown

00:52:48.060 in order to show solidarity. And the mayor of Florence at the same time was urging

00:52:53.020 the people of his city to find a Chinese person and hug them in order to defeat racism and

00:53:00.800 coronavirus simultaneously, which turns out to have been the sort of reason perhaps why Florence

00:53:05.700 was in lockdown faster than anyone else. But whilst we were all obsessing with this,

00:53:11.860 you know, is it racist to say that it comes from China? The Chinese are perfectly willing to be as

00:53:17.280 racist as they like about everyone else in the world, as if we needed reminders of that after 0.90

00:53:21.320 what they've been doing to the Uyghur people, among others, in recent years. So this is a 0.94

00:53:27.440 classic example of where the real world meets our stupidities. The real world of China doesn't give 1.00

00:53:35.160 a damn about racism, doesn't give a damn about it, but knows that we do, and is willing to say

00:53:40.840 anything it likes about us and manipulate our fears. And so anyway, but to get back to his 0.98

00:53:47.680 point, yeah, the Australians are now in this situation where China is stopping boycotting

00:53:55.080 certain Australian products. They're basically trying to teach the Australian government a lesson

00:53:59.260 for daring to stand up to them and daring to suggest an independent international inquiry

00:54:05.940 into the origins of this virus. Well, you know, I think now is a time for solidarity. I'm pleased

00:54:12.100 to see that New Zealand government has very much backed up our Australian friends and allies. But

00:54:16.680 I just think, I think that this is a fine moment for some democratic solidarity. And to say, you don't get to, you don't get to, if you're a Chinese Communist Party, bully our allies, and expect us to distance ourselves from them. 0.78

00:54:35.920 You know, and I think everything's on the table with China after this. Nothing I'm not open to. 1.00

00:54:46.680 And Douglas, do you think this is the end of globalisation as we knew it?

00:54:54.120 That's a really tricky one. Globalisation means several different things.

00:55:00.680 In some people's mouths, it's a description of just the world we live in. In other people's

00:55:04.680 mouths, it's a particular concept of how we should live, and how international trade and

00:55:12.280 travel is organized. One version, I suppose the version you sort of mean it in is what?

00:55:20.280 I mean, the idea that we're in this interconnected world, and that's a universal positive,

00:55:26.280 and the fact that you can buy goods from Beijing or wherever it is, and that has no impact whatsoever.

00:55:35.160 Oh, yeah. No, I think that this virus will have one particularly clear effect, which is that we will be much more conscious in each of our countries of supply chains and the need to, I mean, if we'd have had a conversation in January and we'd have been sitting here and I just said, or you just said, look, you know, I think we've got to have British medicines in order never to have to rely on Chinese medicine, you know.

00:56:05.160 or anything like that.

00:56:07.020 I think we would have all felt it was a little bit,

00:56:10.620 there would be something on the edge of it

00:56:12.740 which wouldn't have sounded quite right.

00:56:15.140 Especially in my accent.

00:56:17.680 You know, and it'd be like, well, what's the problem with,

00:56:20.360 I mean, you know, if it's cheaper and we get it and it's,

00:56:23.740 my point is that even now, just a few months later,

00:56:27.220 it's a perfectly reasonable, very sensible thing

00:56:29.680 to argue that, that we shouldn't be reliant

00:56:32.840 on china china in um crucial um products um and i think a lot of countries not least the

00:56:40.840 mediterranean countries that saw the northern european countries uh going incredibly protectionist

00:56:46.980 with certain items early on in this virus will obviously be addressing themselves to that

00:56:51.740 in the coming years um on the wider thing of the globalization yes i i who knows we

00:56:59.200 globalization is an extraordinary thing which we all rely on and we get so much good from

00:57:07.340 um it's it's given us all an incredible boost in our standards of living the ability to

00:57:16.200 enjoy products we wouldn't be able to enjoy as well as much more but there is always a downside

00:57:22.280 and the downside of this is is i think clearer to us now so i don't think it's an end to

00:57:28.640 globalization, I think this will be seen to have been a kind of corrective to the most

00:57:36.360 glossy-eyed, panglossian vision of globalization. And I wonder, I would have thought that there

00:57:47.960 will be an increase in the attraction of that critique of globalization, which was already

00:57:53.300 going on, particularly from America, particularly from the Trump administration, which is basically

00:57:58.100 that the benefit does not accrue

00:58:05.480 in the same proportion as the negative.

00:58:09.780 That is that the benefit you and I accrue

00:58:13.980 by being able to buy certain products cheaply

00:58:17.620 does not actually counterbalance, for instance,

00:58:21.960 the loss of manufacturing jobs in our own countries.

00:58:25.560 now that argument was already going on it was quite advanced so a lot of people including

00:58:32.680 american president who um obviously in favor of that or at least sympathetic to that

00:58:39.280 critique i just i think that will that was already growing and i think it will continue to grow

00:58:46.940 it definitely was it definitely was but i think it goes in terms of you know you make the point

00:58:51.580 about supply chains i think it goes slightly beyond concern about medicine and wherever else

00:58:57.320 it might be because people are you know in economics they talk about externalities and this

00:59:02.940 is what you're really talking about is people are now becoming aware that when you buy a widget for

00:59:08.900 one dollar from china you do that because there's nine dollars of hidden cost in the back end of it

00:59:16.400 some of which is manifested in a global pandemic that causes a global depression and that that

00:59:23.460 is the price of doing business with china in the way that we've been doing and if people understand

00:59:28.500 that i think our relationship with china is going to be very different to the way that it's been up

00:59:32.580 to this point yeah i i i agree i i it's it's i would not feel enormously rosy about the future

00:59:39.300 if i was a chinese communist party which is bad news for them but good news for us well we found 0.99

00:59:44.920 a positive note after all. By the way, it is remarkable when you think about it, isn't it?

00:59:49.000 I mean, this hangover from the last century that's still going on,

00:59:57.480 that we've talked about very little in our lifetimes. We just, you know, I often wonder,

01:00:05.880 I mean, that game that you can play of, you know, swapping communist for fascist or fascist

01:00:11.800 for communists and seeing how tolerant you are of the other totalitarian. If there was a massive

01:00:19.680 fascist state still in existence run by a fascist party with more than a billion people under its

01:00:27.540 complete and totalitarian control, I wonder if we would have been quite as gleeful about getting

01:00:31.980 cheap t-shirts. Douglas, have you not heard Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are both fascists? 0.94

01:00:37.620 yes that's um yeah i know so everyone everyone uh is all right and everyone's um yeah yeah no of

01:00:47.440 course i'd heard that no no i i get your point i of course i do as someone who comes from the

01:00:52.200 soviet union i totally to me it's a bit weird it's no it's abhorrent it's abhorrent that you 0.90

01:00:56.480 can have someone go on national tv in this country and go i'm literally a communist and that person

01:01:01.380 is treated as as just another person commenting you know if someone went on tv and said i'm

01:01:06.700 literally a fascist i think they might be treated slightly differently yeah i know it's true i mean 0.78

01:01:11.320 her counterpart nick griffin actually denies being a fascist uh but uh you know if if he was to come

01:01:19.040 out full fascist i'm literally a fascist you're trying to pretend i'm just some other kind of

01:01:23.140 crazy guy yeah it wouldn't have been career making for him in the way that it was for our friend

01:01:28.520 well we have found some positive douglas before we let you go as usual we have a question for you

01:01:36.140 But actually, before Francis asked you that question, give us a scoop.

01:01:39.380 Are you working on another book at the moment?

01:01:42.020 I am.

01:01:43.340 I'm in the earliest stages.

01:01:46.060 I'm quite lucky as an author.

01:01:47.500 I have a backlog of books in my head that I know I need to write,

01:01:51.800 and it's a question of what order to do them in.

01:01:55.240 So the state that we've all been thrown into in recent weeks and months

01:02:01.800 is um both very uncomfortable for me and also something which uh is useful because i've had

01:02:08.880 an awful lot of reading and things to do and um and i am sketching out at the moment uh two books

01:02:16.600 which i've been wanting to oh people are going to be excited give us a little bit what are they

01:02:22.240 going to be about i have a i have a total uh uh rule on this that i never talk about books that

01:02:28.800 I'm writing or haven't yet written. No, because what happens is you become like one of these

01:02:33.480 people in a Paris cafe who talks about their books and never writes them. Talking about books

01:02:40.760 is the death of actually ever getting around to writing them. And I did in the past once talk

01:02:44.900 out a book. There was one book I should have written, which I never got around to because

01:02:48.980 I talked about it so much. So I know whereof I speak on this and my incredible rudeness in

01:02:53.920 refusing to even play with your question is totally justified well the sad fact is douglas is uh the

01:03:01.240 cafes aren't open so the metaphor doesn't work really but also douglas think of all those

01:03:05.780 parisians who are writing their books finally yeah exactly but also you've got to understand

01:03:11.300 douglas i'm russian it's my job to push to push boundaries that's what i do so uh there we go but

01:03:17.160 we've got one more question for you and the question we always ask which is what what is

01:03:21.660 one thing that people aren't talking about but we really should be oh god um it's kind of unfair

01:03:28.300 on you because you've been on the show a couple of times now and the more you come on trigonometry

01:03:31.980 the more difficult that question is to answer before you run out of things yeah i'm um the

01:03:38.720 thing that i really sort of where we started and it may sound like i'm dodging it but

01:03:42.880 i do think we're not talking enough about how the hell we pay for this um i just i'm filled with

01:03:52.020 filled with worry about this i've been saying for a long time i think one of the reasons why people

01:03:57.760 have been playing with crazy ideas that are not worthy of them is because very basic things had

01:04:07.100 already gone wrong in the economy you know i said this after the 2008 crash that you know the

01:04:11.460 when the finances go bad other things happen we know this from history and yet we didn't think

01:04:16.640 it would happen in our own time well the finances went bad in 2008 and we still hadn't got our way

01:04:21.800 out of that and now we're in this and i i the one i'm really worried for i have to say is people i'm

01:04:28.020 now 40 uh but uh people 20 years younger than me uh and 15 years younger than me who are you know

01:04:36.280 starting out i just i i really do think they've got a very legitimate set of concerns that need

01:04:44.660 to be addressed i just don't know how it was hard enough for my generation to you know do things

01:04:49.780 like getting on the housing ladder and all that sort of thing it was never easy but i just don't

01:04:53.340 know how this generation is going to accumulate capital and if you can't accumulate capital

01:04:59.740 it's not clear why you should have any instinctive love for capitalism

01:05:03.680 and from that a whole set of problems can flow so that's that's that's that's really

01:05:11.360 what preoccupies me at the moment the thing i wish we would think about is

01:05:15.060 this is an almighty going wrong of the economy and what will happen as a consequence of that

01:05:22.360 what might we be vulnerable to you know we already discussed at the beginning you know

01:05:26.300 this small but considerable you know small percentage but a considerable number of people

01:05:30.860 who are vulnerable to Ikeism.

01:05:33.280 Didn't see that coming in the recent past.

01:05:36.320 So what else can we be vulnerable to

01:05:38.420 when things go this wrong?

01:05:40.260 Well, I hope to explain why communism

01:05:41.700 is becoming popular among young people.

01:05:44.460 I know, and the tragedy of that, as you know,

01:05:47.940 is just because one thing isn't working

01:05:50.700 as well as it should do

01:05:51.820 doesn't mean you should try again

01:05:53.560 the worst thing in history.

01:05:56.060 Yeah, absolutely.

01:05:58.560 well that is a is a good note on which to leave the interview douglas we uh ask you on behalf of

01:06:04.160 all our viewers not to do any more interviews so you can focus solely on writing the two books

01:06:08.900 that you've got coming because i think everybody's going to be very excited about seeing those come

01:06:13.400 out and thank you as always uh i we encourage people to follow you on twitter it's douglas k

01:06:17.960 murray that's right yes yes somebody else has taken douglas murray i don't know who that is

01:06:23.800 Yeah, they're relevant and should be banned from history entirely.

01:06:29.360 But you've got the two brilliant books, your most recent books behind you,

01:06:32.480 The Madness of Crowds and The Strange Death of Europe.

01:06:35.120 And we obviously recommend for anyone who hasn't read them yet to go and read them.

01:06:53.800 Thank you.

TRIGGERnometry - May 17, 2020

Douglas Murray： China Must Pay for COVID 19

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