TRIGGERnometry - Englishness Debate, Migrant Protest Leader Arrested & Burnham's Ministry of Truth - Off the Fence

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00:01:33.320 hello everybody and welcome to this week's off the fence with me constantin kissin francis foster

00:01:40.320 of course and winston marshall of the winston marshall show and tom slater from spiked

00:01:44.920 gentlemen welcome back what a show we have for you today we're going to argue about rishi sunak

00:01:50.760 who's been having a pop at me over the englishness comments i made last year or earlier this year i

00:01:56.120 don't remember it feels like it was a long time ago we will talk about the latest polling which

00:02:01.000 claims that reform would win fewer seats than labor and the tories but prediction markets

00:02:06.280 interestingly disagree we'll talk about that we will talk about the anti-migrant protests

00:02:13.080 happening on the south coast of the uk and we will touch on the government's plans to

00:02:18.680 effectively introduce a ministry of truth uh with that aside gentlemen uh welcome back uh let's talk

00:02:25.400 first and foremost uh about the englishness debate uh so let me set the scene uh in february i believe

00:02:32.840 we had freight journalist fraser nelson on trigonometry and we actually talked about the

00:02:36.920 welfare uh system in this country which isn't working and bankrupting the country but as part

00:02:42.200 of that we had a robust back and forth about uh the importance of ethnicity and cultural identity

00:02:49.480 during which i said the eternal phrase rishi sunak is not english i wasn't the one that brought him

00:02:55.640 up it was fraser nelson uh and i did say that it was because he's a brown hindu which is not

00:03:01.400 remotely what i meant but in the context of that back and forth it's it's what came out and this

00:03:07.320 week rishi sunak wrote an article in which he referenced this incident again and sort of

00:03:12.920 said that we you know we live in the most successful multi-ethnic multi uh religious

00:03:19.080 not multicultural importantly but multi-religious society uh and uh creating this kind of test of

00:03:25.960 who can be english uh is wrong and alienating and creates a two-tier society for ethnic minorities

00:03:32.680 i've written a response in order to lay out what i'm arguing and i've had lots of invitations from

00:03:39.740 various you know bbc and other mainstream media to talk about it i know that having experienced

00:03:45.020 that they don't want actual to have the actual conversation what they want is just to call

00:03:49.320 people names for example in this instance they want to call me racist for saying it even though

00:03:53.800 in that very same interview i said both of my children who this is a joke i pinched of francis

00:04:00.460 by the way but i think it's a very good joke both of my children are whiter than a michael buble

00:04:04.400 christmas album i also said that they can't be english because they are born in this country

00:04:09.680 to two parents who were born in another who are of a different ethnicity and born abroad even though

00:04:15.400 they're born in england to two british citizens so it's not about race and um so la braverman

00:04:22.140 the former home secretary rishi's former home secretary actually uh wrote several articles

00:04:27.680 saying she's not english lots of people say that they are english rishi sunak claims you know he

00:04:33.200 says he's english and it's a live debate and i want to explain why i actually think it's important

00:04:38.720 because a lot of these things become cul-de-sacs where people say what they think and there's no

00:04:45.200 actual point to the argument and so people are arguing about these finer points that offend

00:04:50.320 everybody for no actual gain but in my opinion this is actually a very important debate because

00:04:55.760 my argument is this after two decades of open door mass immigration with tens of thousands of

00:05:03.120 people streaming in illegally every year on top of that and after two decades at least of

00:05:10.240 this multicultural experiment dei uh identity politics for minorities we've created a society 0.97

00:05:17.600 that i was desperate to avoid and which is why i opposed the woke insanity in the first place 0.96

00:05:22.400 which it was obvious to me that if you racialize everything then eventually everyone will think of

00:05:27.280 themselves through the racial prism and in my view you're clearly seeing that on the ethno-nationalist

00:05:33.760 right at the moment the the sense the sense that white people need to think of themselves as a

00:05:38.960 collective and act accordingly and to me that's the that's not the way a multi-ethnic society can

00:05:44.160 function in the long term but it's an understandable reaction to what we've seen uh up to this point 0.94

00:05:51.200 and so my argument is we have to have an identity that is greater than the different ethnic groups 0.96

00:05:55.680 that make up our country and to me the english identity is not sufficient because there is a

00:06:00.720 sufficient minority it's a minority but nonetheless a sufficient minority of both white english people

00:06:06.880 who won't see it as anything other than ethnic identity and they will say rishi sunak can never

00:06:12.160 be english and there's also by the way a higher percentage of ethnic minorities who also agree

00:06:18.720 with me that this isn't a workable definition and so my view is what we should be doing is picking

00:06:24.800 an identity to unite around that will work for everybody and that to me is britishness which is

00:06:30.640 why that is the the identity i'm proposing for all of us to unite around and by the way we kind of

00:06:36.560 already do we already say the british jewish community the british muslim community the british

00:06:42.080 asian community if there's such a thing british indians british jews etc because i think

00:06:46.720 instinctively we understand this and just uh finally uh to absolve myself of the charge of 0.97

00:06:54.040 racism here's a black guy agreeing with me yo so some idiots on here are highlighting the fact that 0.97

00:07:00.820 oh you're not english or british or you're from this and that this is how i look at myself so i'm 0.98

00:07:06.480 black british i'm not an englishman because i think english people are white i think england's

00:07:12.920 white land and you've had black people come here through slavery and through after world war ii 0.66

00:07:19.160 helping rebuild the country after everyone got wrecked and they've been coming over here since

00:07:24.120 along with black faces brown faces wind rush and whatever i was born here as a part of that whole 0.58

00:07:30.840 stuff so i'm black british now that's okay to say that if i was born in china yes i have a chinese

00:07:39.080 passport but i'm not a chinese person if you look at my black face i could have been born in russia

00:07:45.140 and have a russian passport and speak russian and russia's the only place i've ever known

00:07:49.600 but if you look at my black face this isn't what you call a russian face so i am from where i'm

00:07:56.060 from which ain't england like my people are from elsewhere it's just i was born here you know a 0.98

00:08:02.860 dolphin can get born in an aquarium but where's a dolphin really from the fucking sea do you know 0.90

00:08:07.860 i mean so it is what it is i call myself black british and i'm okay not being english 0.93

00:08:14.400 and by the way just for context it's not a random guy we found on instagram i think he's a he's a

00:08:22.320 he's an influencer but he fought in the british army and suffered significant wounds so just just

00:08:27.700 for context this is someone who's clearly very patriotic right that's the context let's have the

00:08:32.880 debate. Who wants to jump in? There's a massive talent from everybody. You're all cucked and you

00:08:43.000 don't want to address the real problem. No, because we're English, we're unflatteringly polite. That's

00:08:48.160 the problem, to lean into the stereotypes here. But no, I mean, just to lay this out, because

00:08:53.760 one of the things I think is really interesting about this discussion is that in the wake of

00:08:58.280 your inflammatory comments constant him is that there has been this response from sort of liberals

00:09:04.680 or centrist types which is rather than getting into this discussion about what is the identity

00:09:08.940 that we can all unite around is it britishness is it englishness is to deny that the english as

00:09:13.220 an ethnic group exist at all i mean the kind of most extreme example of this i suppose being that

00:09:17.100 new labor apparatchik john mcturnan who's been running around suggesting that

00:09:21.380 the idea of an English ethnic group is an evil idea but as also in response this whole discussion

00:09:28.560 many people kind of doubling down on this idea that it's something which almost doesn't doesn't

00:09:33.120 bear talking about which I think certainly puts us onto a loser for the fact that how do you have

00:09:38.380 ethnic minorities if you don't have an ethnic majority is one thing and also how do you create 0.54

00:09:42.540 any kind of cohesive society if you have a level of sort of asymmetric multiculturalism which not

00:09:49.240 only says that all groups can be celebrated apart from the majority one but all groups exist apart

00:09:54.440 from the majority one that doesn't seem to me to be something that will bring people together if

00:09:59.240 anything i think it's going to encourage a level of sort of ethnic siloing that surely we all want

00:10:04.920 to avoid and so we're seeing that now it feels to me i mean yeah and i think that's what we're 0.55

00:10:11.320 seeing at the moment no exactly and that's something which clearly anyone who's got a

00:10:16.760 head screwing their shoulders should want to push back upon. I suppose the point where this gets

00:10:20.900 quite thorny is the notion of Englishness and the existence of English people as an ethnic group I

00:10:26.520 think is broadly speaking beyond question at least in terms in the terms that we generally

00:10:30.220 understand groups and nations or what have you. The thing which gets much more thorny is is there

00:10:34.780 a sort of cultural dimension to Englishness set aside from Britishness in which people can buy

00:10:40.660 into and it certainly seems like even if we're taking poor old Rishi Sunak out of the frame

00:10:45.060 who's been kind of thrust into this discussion it's clear that certainly when you poll people

00:10:51.100 in britain people in england you see large majorities in essentially every ethnic group

00:10:55.180 well there are differences which we could get into who say that it's not an exclusively ethnic

00:10:59.760 category that someone who is born and bred in the country who takes upon its values sensibilities

00:11:05.620 humor whatever is clearly of this nation in a way that someone who might share their direct

00:11:11.400 ancestry isn't to put it bluntly rishi sunak is culturally of england in a way that narendra

00:11:16.600 modi obviously isn't which is something not totally mentioning and i think in the same way

00:11:21.480 that there are many people who have popped up in this discussion people who are english by ancestry

00:11:27.480 who feel a sense of loss and theft and a sense of effrontery by being told that they do not exist

00:11:33.000 as a group there is also people who might be second generation who have only ever really

00:11:37.720 know in this country who have by any reasonable definitions integrated into it who also feel like

00:11:42.220 they're being denied something if they're told that they are not English in in some way shape

00:11:47.800 or form you know and and again to take I suppose Rishi out of the equation I think it's a sort of

00:11:51.720 figure like I know Morrissey who is someone who I think is a quintessentially English pop cultural

00:11:56.280 figure but is the child of Irish immigrants and I think there's something which there is clearly

00:12:00.720 kind of blurry lines here which definitely need to be addressed um and one example that I did

00:12:07.240 blow but they blow both ways though tom so yesterday we recorded an interview with your

00:12:11.640 spiked colleague brendan o'neill who is himself a virus stock and he was like i don't think i'm

00:12:16.360 english so like you can get people of the same ethnicity having a different opinion about this

00:12:21.400 issue that's a really good point and also i think that the kind of hang up about even acknowledging

00:12:26.120 ethnicity as a thing is something which predominates amongst well-to-do white english people

00:12:31.880 more so than it does ethnic minorities and actually if you look at that polling

00:12:36.200 reference more in common is one that i've seen most recently um out of british asians black

00:12:41.560 british and white british the group that is least likely to say um that ethnicity has nothing to do

00:12:47.080 with it is british asians still a majority but it's a reduced majority so that's something which

00:12:51.720 is clearly an indicator of the fact that ethnic minorities do not have the hang up about admitting

00:12:56.920 the existence of ethnicity than some members of the ethnic majority do um i suppose that the place

00:13:03.720 that I come to on all of this is that even if you are broadly speaking a civic nationalist someone

00:13:08.280 who recognizes that yes there is an English ethnicity but also there's a kind of cultural

00:13:11.960 identity that many people have clearly bought into and we shouldn't seek to exclude you still

00:13:17.140 need to take multiculturalism mass migration and the sort of demographic issues which flow from

00:13:22.240 that very seriously because if we keep going in the direction that we're going which is the level

00:13:27.060 of sort of hyper diversity that we see in certain areas and if that's met with a denial of even the 0.67

00:13:32.980 idea that we should have something to unite around you're really on to a loser and also i think in in

00:13:37.300 in a situation in which more and more areas do become hyper diverse i also would predict that 0.98

00:13:42.280 you're going to see fewer and fewer children of ethnic minority background or migrant ancestry

00:13:47.080 identifying as english or identifying as british because they're kind of in the absence of a sort

00:13:53.200 of population which is stable and there's some sort of continuity the gravitational pull of the

00:13:58.240 majority culture is just not going to exist well you know cat will could they possibly integrate

00:14:02.640 into english or british life if the english however defined are not there anymore if they've

00:14:09.320 kind of retreated to their ethnic enclaves in the way that we might potentially see so it's a really

00:14:14.540 knotty issue but i think that the fact that this is even being brought up as a discussion point is

00:14:19.140 precisely for the context you set out constantin is that particularly over the past couple of

00:14:22.980 decades society has changed in quite dramatic ways and it throws up these arguments in a way

00:14:27.120 that we've got to take seriously and can't just dismiss as something which is unimportant and

00:14:33.360 and nor can we pretend like the the way in which we think about identity is going to be unique

00:14:37.920 and different to the way in which we think about it in any other context so yeah it's a definitely

00:14:43.020 a knotty issue and i hope that doesn't sound like a bent sitting answer but no no you're totally

00:14:47.000 right speaking where i'm coming at it from no no you're totally right that it's a knotty issue

00:14:51.000 which is why i think it's really worth discussing the only thing i there's a few things i just want

00:14:55.660 to add before we we carry on the debate is one i do the one thing about this whole thing that i

00:15:02.080 regret is that i responded to fraser bringing up rishi sunak by engaging with a personalized debate

00:15:09.500 where it's like i'm saying this person isn't english look i don't go around telling people

00:15:13.980 who's english or who's not i'm more interested in the general i'm more interested in the general

00:15:22.900 conversation that we're having and so i've actually tried to reach out to rishi sunak directly and

00:15:28.020 apologize for making him the case that he hasn't replied maybe the number i have for him is wrong

00:15:32.660 or maybe he doesn't want to accept my apology which i understand i will say two things though

00:15:37.620 that i think are important to add to this yes it's true that polling in this country will show

00:15:43.860 that if you say to people is this well-liked and well-respected and fairly well-known

00:15:49.860 a member of an ethnic minority group who was born here who says he's english who sounds english

00:15:56.180 who's culturally english are they english a significant majority of both white people and

00:16:01.460 ethnic minorities will say yes however i have discovered by talking to people about this

00:16:08.180 individually that those very same people will deny for example that axel ruder cubana is welsh

00:16:14.580 or indeed that he's british right because he's not a well-liked person he's a mass murderer

00:16:19.540 so people's opinions about this this stuff is kind of partly depending on whether they like

00:16:23.780 the person we're talking about that's number one number two this is another really important thing

00:16:28.900 is you can say in isolation rishi sunak is english you might say well i i would argue i am as english

00:16:35.780 culturally as rishi sunak and i am culturally english i may have other elements to to my

00:16:41.540 personal background that inform my my views but i'm yeah i've got an english sense of humor blah

00:16:46.260 blah blah blah blah blah we could say right okay the vast majority not not the vast majority but

00:16:53.180 polling will show that individually people will agree that rishi sunak is english if i was born

00:16:57.520 here instead of coming here as a young child they might say constantin kitchen is english blah blah

00:17:02.240 blah okay would they then say that a country that is filled only with people who look and sound and

00:17:10.700 have the names like rishi sunak and constantin kitchen and only those and as you alluded to tom

00:17:16.280 the actual english ethnic group is no longer there in other words when we've replaced everybody who

00:17:21.060 was native to these islands with constantin kissings and rishi sunaks and their children

00:17:26.920 would people then say that is england because i suspect if you do polling on that you're going

00:17:32.120 to get a very different set of answers and that is what we're actually talking about when we talk

00:17:36.940 about mass immigration which is why i come back to my original thesis the only way in my opinion

00:17:42.940 to save this country from civil strife is to find something that we unite around and that's where

00:17:48.380 i maybe disagree with you tom perhaps i'm not sure when you say well even if you if you don't

00:17:54.540 if you accept people can be culturally english blah blah blah we've just got to deal with mass

00:17:57.980 immigration and all this other stuff and then unite well what do we unite around this is my

00:18:03.340 argument because if you've denigrated both english and british identity to the point that people

00:18:08.940 aren't even allowed to say one exists anymore how do we unite how do we unite and that's why i say

00:18:15.420 we have got to think about what british british now means and it's almost an alfred the great

00:18:22.860 type of project to create a new identity from the remnants of what was there before because

00:18:28.860 of what's been done to this country through mass immigration and dei and identity politics

00:18:35.020 for the last 25 years that's my argument let's carry on the debate and i also think optics plays

00:18:41.180 a part in this so you had um that influencer who kept referring to the color of his skin

00:18:46.940 and saying my black face etc etc etc but i remember so everybody knows i'm not gonna actually

00:18:53.500 everybody drink obviously my mother is not from this country from a completely different culture

00:18:57.260 a different country, different continent, South America. My grandmother is Irish. So 0.59

00:19:03.680 effectively, I am one quarter English. I remember we were doing an interview on trigonometry with

00:19:09.460 a right wing commentator. And he said to me, he referenced me and said to me that you are an

00:19:14.520 Englishman. Now, here's the question. Would he have said that if I looked more like my mum and

00:19:20.480 I didn't have my father's rather beautiful pasty Irish skin? Probably not. So there's also this

00:19:28.180 unpicking that we have to do of people who come from numerous different backgrounds and numerous

00:19:33.040 cultures. When I tell people, for instance, and I start speaking Spanish in America particularly,

00:19:40.080 their heads drop off because they go, I can't understand whether a man with a face as English

00:19:44.240 as yours, is able to speak Spanish in that way with that accent. So also optics plays a part.

00:19:51.920 Some people will be perceived to be more English than others because if they come from a mixed

00:19:56.320 background, they take from one particular side of genetics, not the other. If I have a sister,

00:20:02.220 if I had a sister and she took from my Latin American side of the family, would that mean

00:20:06.940 she is less English than me? Or maybe if my mother gave her a South American name or a Spanish name,

00:20:12.860 would that mean that she would be perceived as somehow more of a foreigner in her own land than

00:20:18.260 I am? And these are the very thorny questions that we then have to grip because it's not just

00:20:22.980 as simple as black or white or brown. There's a lot of people who are like me who are in that kind

00:20:28.660 of, shall we say, a no man's land. And I have always felt incredibly English. I've always felt

00:20:36.280 and I'm very proud to be from England. And if I'll be honest, I associate far more with England

00:20:41.900 than I do with Venezuela or Ireland. I've always thought of myself as culturally English. And I

00:20:49.900 think one of the things that mass immigration has really, really done a great deal of damage, 1.00

00:20:54.860 I'll tell this story. There were two footballers in the 1990s called Ian Wright and Paul Ince. 1.00

00:21:01.020 And Paul Ince, and this was in 1997, was given the captaincy of England in a very important

00:21:07.680 qualifying match for the World Cup against Italy. It was a hugely significant match,

00:21:12.980 very important. And Ian Wright tells this story of how when he found out that Paul Ince was going

00:21:20.360 to be captain, they were so happy that they literally jumped up and down on their hotel

00:21:27.960 beds for joy. And one of the things that I'm worried about is this with what has happened

00:21:34.560 with mass immigration what has happened with this racializing of society is those are going 0.95

00:21:41.620 to be the knock-on effects would a young black or ethnic minority footballer react in that manner 0.98

00:21:49.560 in 2026 i hope they would but with the way things are going maybe not

00:21:54.780 i've got to say some things about sunak because i've got very triggered by some of the things

00:22:02.660 he said in this little debacle first of all before you do that we should say winston that as my friend

00:22:08.060 and a dear friend you actually disagreed with me about this privately and we had a chat at the time

00:22:13.180 so whatever you're about however you're about to slag off i do i have we have class on this to my

00:22:18.720 face yeah we have classed on this a lot and i'm going to attempt to clean this up now but you

00:22:24.500 have said a couple of things that make me think i might have pulled you towards my side but i'll

00:22:29.400 have to explain that first of all though there's some absolutely insane things that have been said

00:22:35.840 in this this week in this conversation firstly Rishi Sunak he has said and this is this is the

00:22:42.600 kind of like boomer wet version of diversity is our greatest tank he says Britain we've created

00:22:49.560 the world's most successful multi-faith multi-ethnic democracy now obviously it's a

00:22:55.440 multi-faith and multi-ethnic democracy but to say that it is only a multi-faith or to imply that it

00:23:01.940 is only a multi-faith a multi-ethnic democracy completely misses the point we are centered

00:23:08.260 around a majority as tom spelled out earlier you have to have some sort of majority to tie the 0.92

00:23:14.800 nation together so that pissed me off but what pissed me off more in his ridiculous article yeah 0.92

00:23:20.060 and he didn't have the courage to and it is ridiculous and i'm going to this seems like 0.93

00:23:24.300 strong words but but uh it's because he makes loads he criticizes you without actually being

00:23:29.360 clear what he's saying and i think he's very unfair unfair because there's a lot of implicit

00:23:35.020 accusations towards you constantin he says that it's values and cricket that makes us english

00:23:42.740 cricket sorry no it's not cricket that makes us english cricket is one of the great things we've

00:23:49.980 given the world i'm very proud of that and and but it's not the thing that you're not it's not

00:23:54.580 sport that unites us this is an inane as saying that sort of indian curry is the kind of the food

00:24:00.200 that unites us that's not that's not the point it's so it shows that he hasn't thought about

00:24:04.780 this at all the other thing he says is values and you hear this all the time oh it's fair play

00:24:12.000 that's what it is to be english sorry that just means you're not argentinian i don't understand

00:24:17.600 what like this idea idea that people say oh it's values but they never say what those values are

00:24:23.060 and then if you actually push them on them they'll just say a bunch of values that loads of other

00:24:26.140 nations have so that it's not values i'm afraid it's it's something more complicated than that

00:24:30.940 or deeper it's more profound rather now i'm going to try and explain why i think the ethnats

00:24:37.280 and the civ nats get wrong what happened at the end of the second world war was that there was a

00:24:44.200 lot of philosophers trying to work out never again how to deal with what had happened uh the the

00:24:50.420 horrors of the holocaust and and try and deal with the most famous philosopher was Karl Popper

00:24:54.500 and he had his open society dichotomy good societies are liberal democratic free bad ones

00:25:02.640 are fascist nazis so far so good I mean I agree I mean but he then lumps in nationalism and

00:25:10.680 religion into the fascist and nazi side of things so that's one false dichotomy he's he's made that's 0.82

00:25:17.380 the famous one but the another one was by a man called hans cohn who was published a book on

00:25:22.920 nationalism in 1944 and he creates the ethnic the ethno-nationalist civna civic nationalist dichotomy

00:25:31.260 and he puts in the civic side it's a sort of political acceptance of institutions and

00:25:39.640 almost a sort of geographical administrative alignment of people and in the ethnic side it's

00:25:46.380 not just blood and soil it's also culture so he puts the culture on that side of things now a lot

00:25:52.840 of people have conflated those things and i think in your argument with fraser and it seems also in

00:25:58.720 your argument with rishi now is that culture is doing a kind of yo-yoing side to side depending

00:26:04.700 don't know who you talk about it and tom you you actually didn't put it in the ethnic side when you

00:26:09.700 were speaking there you put it in the civic side but i actually don't think it's a dichotomy i think

00:26:14.800 it's a trichotomy uh but that might be over complicated but there is an english culture

00:26:19.780 it is obviously the case that rishi is not ethnically english you were right uh constantin

00:26:25.040 to say that it's obviously the case constantin that you're not ethnically english but i might

00:26:29.860 argue you as you pointed at the end i was a bit surprised for you to say that because you haven't

00:26:33.640 said that to me privately is that you say you are culturally english you say you're culturally

00:26:37.380 british and the other aspect which you've all been alluding to all three of you but

00:26:43.280 i'll spread it out there's a metaphysical component to being of a tribe and so it's not

00:26:51.720 just that you yourself have to feel part of it so for example the americans i'm in the states

00:26:58.820 at the moment a lot of them are ethnically English but they're not they're not English

00:27:03.960 they wouldn't call themselves they're Americans because they don't accept that they're part of 0.50

00:27:09.120 this tribe and nor do we accept them that they're part of ours it's also the case that not only do

00:27:15.160 you have to have that metaphysical feeling within you the the tribe itself does so for example I had

00:27:21.480 on the show Ibn Warak who was I think he's originally from Pakistan and North India and he

00:27:26.740 loved Britain he was sort of an Anglophile moved to Scotland or somewhere in Britain in his late

00:27:34.060 teens for university and came there thinking finally I'm with my people and he was completely

00:27:38.220 rejected so the tribe himself didn't accept him as you Constantine pointed out when you talk about

00:27:45.140 certain individuals people will change their mind depending on the deed it's a there's a

00:27:50.480 metaphysical thing and it changes and it changes across time and will change again and that's one

00:27:56.560 the reasons why there's been this whole argument around it is because it's it has got this metaphysical

00:28:02.240 thing and it changes through time you mentioned alfred the great constantine he united the english

00:28:08.720 with four things well but just let me just pause you hold on he didn't unite the english he united

00:28:15.040 four separate tribes and told them you are now english and effectively created this identity

00:28:20.240 kind of out of nothing right which is my point he didn't unite the english he took four separate

00:28:25.680 tribes oh well oh yeah that's yeah okay fine that's a that's a good clarification so it's more

00:28:31.920 than just four it's i mean there were anglo-saxons jutes latins celts there were just so many

00:28:38.620 different tribes in different languages and he united them against the great heathen army against

00:28:43.880 the vikings and he did four things to give a a unity to them which was he created a common religion 0.78

00:28:50.260 he made christianity the common religion he created a common language because they were not

00:28:54.540 all speak in the same language he created a common language he created a common history

00:28:58.280 where he by translating bead and not bead would have already been in english but he

00:29:02.920 important text and said this is our history that's really important and he created a common law he

00:29:11.620 started our legal um tradition with his donbark which starts with the 10 commandments now all of

00:29:17.960 this is pretty horrifying if you bring up alfred because when we don't have any of those things

00:29:22.360 anymore we don't have a common religion we don't have a common language even i mean there's a i

00:29:27.400 think there's something like a million people who don't in england who don't speak english as a

00:29:30.660 first language we don't have common law as we've seen the sharia courts going up so there's sort

00:29:35.540 of different legal practices going on around the country depending on where you are and we

00:29:41.800 certainly don't have a common concept of what our shared history is but i think that's the key if

00:29:46.940 going to talk about how we can unite us it is that shared history in which you're invited

00:29:54.940 to participate in and contribute to and contribute to but you have to take it on as your own so i

00:30:01.100 have friends who are zero not ethnically english or british and actually first generation so they

00:30:07.740 they uh they they were i guess second generation so born here but neither the parents like you

00:30:12.620 not like you concert him but uh they are more english than that than english people i know

00:30:19.260 they just love this country and they don't even look wait hold on a second loving a country

00:30:23.740 doesn't make you english it's a it's an important component sure sure well actually no it's not

00:30:30.940 there's english people who hate england you you wouldn't deny that's true but that's true uh but

00:30:36.940 there but there's this is why it gets complicated this is my point there's a tradition of hating it

00:30:43.020 as well there's a there's an english tradition of yeah yeah exactly well exactly so you you saying

00:30:49.180 your ethnic minority friends love england doesn't make them english it makes them culturally they

00:30:55.980 are culturally english because and their loyalty their their patriotic loyalty is to england over

00:31:01.180 any other nation. And so that's another component to it. There's a couple of things that the

00:31:08.800 conservatives have been getting wrong on this side, which is, this debate has been very interesting

00:31:13.180 to me. So a famous one is Roger Scruton, who's tied it to the land. A lot of his concepts of

00:31:19.580 English is tied to the land. And as you just said there, Constantine, if the land of England was

00:31:24.980 conquered or invaded or taken over by people who are entirely from the asian subcontinent or

00:31:32.160 something like that and the english were all moved to i don't know where brazil is england's england

00:31:40.060 or did england move to brazil and by the way this happened with armenia and my you'll know this one

00:31:45.020 but armenia as a nation has moved all over the place over the last two millennia because the

00:31:50.080 people the tribe moved all over the place or the more famous example the Israelites Israel is

00:31:55.760 referred to as Israel as a noun even when they're not in Israel when they're roaming around the

00:32:01.260 desert the Israel is roaming around the desert because it is the tribe it is a people and and

00:32:06.600 and I think that that and Israel is another interesting example because it's not that there

00:32:12.320 are people brought into that tribe who aren't necessarily ethnically Jewish as they move along

00:32:16.960 it's like Moses's wife is a is a Ethiopian or Abyssinian so anyway the point is it's complicated

00:32:23.440 it's metaphysical not all tribes have the same concept so that when people like this guy you

00:32:31.500 the video you played said well if I'm Chinese clearly I'm not Chinese well obviously he's not

00:32:35.280 ethnically Chinese but if the Chinese decided that he was like the Americans have decided that

00:32:41.240 African Americans are American then the tribe decides that they are American and they are

00:32:45.820 american but i have some issues with bringing up america canada and other new world nations 0.99

00:32:51.180 because they didn't have well they did and they basically found a way to get rid of them but they

00:32:56.900 didn't have a native people the difference with england with ireland with france with germany is

00:33:02.740 that there is a long established in this country for a thousand years effectively native population

00:33:09.540 that has existed here and by the way the interesting example you give about you know

00:33:13.560 talked about afrid the great but also the formation of a nation i didn't know this until i started

00:33:18.040 traveling around italy a country that i'd really love do you know what the greatest problem the

00:33:22.600 italian army faced in was that the italian army faced in world war one they didn't have a common

00:33:28.600 language because there was no italy it was a collection of tiny city states that spoke their

00:33:33.880 own languages that came together the case and that the italians only come together for football

00:33:38.760 they they well that's the only time they they have but no they have a common language they

00:33:44.200 have a country with foreign borders there is an italian identity they hate each other

00:33:50.040 sure in the same way that northerners hate southerners and southerners hate northerners

00:33:54.840 and working class people hate the middle classes and vice versa but they they formed an identity

00:34:01.320 in a place in which there wasn't one and what i'm saying is people are not going to like this

00:34:07.240 on both the ethno-nationalist right and elsewhere but we have now put ourselves in a position

00:34:12.840 people will talk about re-migration on the ethno-nationalist right you just you're going 0.82

00:34:16.680 to round up millions of ethnic minorities and get rid of them because that's the way to but if it's 0.98

00:34:21.880 never going to happen it's just not going to happen we're going to have to deal with the reality 1.00

00:34:27.640 that what's happened to this country has happened now we were all against it but that is what's

00:34:32.360 happened we have to find a way sorry let me just do a thought experiment for you sure to use your 0.98

00:34:39.960 scenario earlier let's say that south asians took over all of the island of britain yeah would you

00:34:46.980 still be against remigration then well i wouldn't because we wouldn't have any power to deal with

00:34:52.900 i'm not saying i'm against remigration sorry you mentioned alfred the great alfred the great

00:34:57.820 re-migrated the vikings he said either you assimilate into being english or off you trot

00:35:02.780 and that's what he did he it was so right now it's not no you're comparing a military invasion

00:35:10.380 we our government has brought in this difference right this is actually why it's in some ways more

00:35:15.500 difficult to deal with if we had a enemy army on the doorstep actually it'd be pretty easy to get

00:35:20.700 people of this country to get together and go and fight it the reason we're having these debates is

00:35:25.660 what's happened to this country has happened as a result of the actions of its politicians who

00:35:31.340 officially lead us by consent these are people that we elected who did this to the country 0.59

00:35:38.220 and so it's not the same as a military invasion but my point about remigration is i am all in 0.99

00:35:44.220 favor of deporting all the up to a million illegal immigrants who are in this country and by the way

00:35:49.340 i'm very much in favor of creating the conditions where people who've come from elsewhere who are 0.97

00:35:54.540 are not contributing who are net takers uh are uh that we effectively there is no welfare for them

00:36:01.100 here and so they're forced to either up their game or to go back to uh the country from which they've

00:36:06.860 come these are all reasonable measures and they're workable measures hard as they will be for any

00:36:11.260 incoming government to do but the idea that you're that some people on the right believe

00:36:18.300 it boggles the mind for me that you're simply going to deal with the consequence of mass

00:36:23.020 immigration by what stripping nationality from millions of people because of their skin color

00:36:28.380 and shipping them back to where they came from are you telling me that that's what the british

00:36:32.620 public are going to get behind it wouldn't get through the british public as well which is

00:36:36.460 something that maybe some of the more honest people on that side of the argument would at least

00:36:39.740 accept which is why they tend to flirt with authoritarianism of all kind of different

00:36:43.660 but you know the diversity of this country such as it is um is a is a fact that needs to be

00:36:50.060 reckon with and whilst there's been certainly a lot of discomfort about the speed of change over

00:36:54.600 the past 20 or 30 years there are also people across britain white english people if we're

00:37:00.380 going to go back to that category who are were up to a point very comfortable with the level of

00:37:05.580 quote-unquote diversity that we had the problem is it's sustainable at a certain level it's not

00:37:09.220 sustainable at another level and it's certainly not sustainable when you have a policy of state

00:37:13.340 multiculturalism combined with that level of mass immigration and i think going back to the kind of

00:37:18.780 ethnicity and culture and culture and ethnicity question this is something which is really

00:37:22.520 fundamental because clearly there is a relationship between those two things people of one discernible

00:37:27.280 ethnic group will bring with them and will transmit to future generations a certain set

00:37:32.400 of cultural values religious denominations outlook sensibility and it's important to note

00:37:38.240 and it's just a again historical fact that the institutions of this country that broadly speaking

00:37:43.120 in the sense of self of this country, has been born out of the pretty stable English

00:37:48.780 ethnic majority that has existed for, as you say, constantly in a thousand years.

00:37:52.640 So to completely deny that seems to me to be a denial of just fact aside from anything

00:37:56.940 else.

00:37:57.940 But also I kind of return to this point, which is that if you want to maintain a notion

00:38:01.600 of national identity, whether we're talking about British or whether we're talking about

00:38:04.460 English, which is not purely ethnically exclusive, which will allow people to buy into being

00:38:10.660 a member of this society however defined provided that they do subscribe to the culture that they

00:38:16.840 love the culture they are part of it they're almost shaped by even without realizing it this

00:38:20.700 is not about them being given a powerpoint presentation or told to go off and read

00:38:24.480 shakespeare it's something that they live and breathe almost without realizing um then you

00:38:29.600 need to be concerned about hyper diversity and you need to be concerned about mass immigration

00:38:33.780 multiculturalism and the sort of demographic challenges i say which sort of flow from it

00:38:37.780 it's almost like to to uh rescue civic nationalism you need to recognize that um these issues matter

00:38:44.980 i suppose is where i'm coming from in this particular question and something that gets lost

00:38:49.060 i think a lot of the time um and also i think people on the people are just trying to pretend

00:38:54.660 that these issues aren't really a problem or want to refight the arguments over migration and um

00:39:00.340 racism that we might have had in previous generations you're precisely fueling the more

00:39:06.020 explicitly hardline racist tendencies that you claim you want to combat you are surrendering

00:39:11.220 the territory to them you're giving them a script and i just wish more and more people would recognize

00:39:16.080 that i suppose is that if you see your ex mentions and think where the hell are these people come

00:39:21.500 from where the hell are these arguments come from it's not representative of the british public but

00:39:25.260 it's clearly a growing tendency you should take these matters seriously and want to focus on how

00:39:30.200 we remedy them but at the moment there's a kind of doubling down into as i say a denialism of the

00:39:35.160 fact of English ethnicity on the one hand or a crude um simplistic and quite authoritarian

00:39:42.080 measures to combat it on the more ethno-nationalist hardcore ethno-nationalist side so yeah surely

00:39:46.460 without sounding too centrist about it we've got to plot a course between those two particular

00:39:49.840 options I think one of the major challenges when we're talking about this debate is that we've

00:39:54.700 never had to encounter it before we're all feeling our way through we don't know because none of us

00:40:00.880 are completely certain. We think we might know. But the reason we're having this debate is that

00:40:05.600 we're simply not 100% certain on this topic because we've never had to confront it. Because

00:40:11.960 the reality is, as a result of successive government immigration policies, we've been 0.57

00:40:17.200 forced to confront it. If you look at Spain, I mean, people were talking about Italy. I think 0.57

00:40:21.640 Spain is actually a far better example of this. Spain isn't really a country. If you ask a Catalan

00:40:28.360 If he's Spanish, the answer would be no. That would be reflected on in its football team, Barcelona, famously hating Real Madrid, who is seen as the team of the royalty, Royal Madrid, and the same with the Basques, etc., etc.

00:40:46.520 And I think one of the real challenges that we're going to have to come to grips with is how are we going to move forward? Because not having this conversation is simply not an option anymore.

00:41:00.000 We have been forced into this and we are going to have to come to a consensus because if we don't come to a consensus pretty soon, then what we're going to see and what I really fear is a balkanization of our country where people go, I'm not English, I'm this.

00:41:18.880 I'm not English, I'm that.

00:41:21.380 But that's already happened.

00:41:24.000 No, no, no, no.

00:41:24.600 But it's going to happen on a mass scale, Winston.

00:41:27.720 It's already happening on a mass scale.

00:41:30.000 I disagree. It hasn't happened on a mass scale. It hasn't happened on a mass scale because the

00:41:34.400 average person that I talk to, right, it hasn't happened on a mass scale because the people that

00:41:40.080 I talk to and I go around in London and other places, it is happening and it's happening at

00:41:45.440 a rapid scale, but I don't think it's happened on a mass scale. Okay, so what exactly is the

00:41:51.920 inflection point that it's suddenly a mass scale? I mean, London, Birmingham, Manchester, or the

00:41:56.800 English, ethnic English, ethnic British, whatever that means, are a minority, albeit the biggest

00:42:03.240 minority. You've got enclaves in London where people don't speak English. You've got towns in

00:42:07.840 the north, like Bradford, where people are completely sort of different loyalties. You've

00:42:12.780 got parts, you see videos, is it Manchester, where people are hoisting the Pakistan flag?

00:42:17.400 Likewise, in Birmingham, they've got these allegiances to other countries. Even in Parliament,

00:42:23.600 you've got five or six uh islamo commie independent mps that sort of it's as far as i can see that's

00:42:35.080 it's already we're in ready in the middle of it and that's not going i don't think we're in the

00:42:40.320 middle of it i think if when you're in the middle of it it's when these things as when it openly

00:42:46.240 starts breaking apart and i think we're on the trajectory that's where i agree with you but we

00:42:51.880 haven't reached where it's the peak and the peak is where it gets really dangerous yeah but those

00:42:59.220 are two things the peak and when it openly starts breaking apart we don't know we won't know where

00:43:03.020 the peak is until we're looking back at this all but it's openly it's definitely openly breaking

00:43:07.460 apart look at what's going on in the streets it's not just what's happened since october 7th and

00:43:12.160 we're seeing all the sort of violent far left stuff and and uh politicians being assassinated

00:43:17.800 by the far left literally this year but it's also which a topic we're going to discuss here is now

00:43:24.600 the patriot side are engaged in direct action not just protest direct action trying to do stuff

00:43:29.780 as far as i'm concerned it's already falling apart well i think what francis is saying there's levels

00:43:35.480 to this game and if if we don't deal with this which is why actually we're having this discussion

00:43:41.320 because my contention if you remember from the very beginning is if you want to save britain

00:43:46.000 from serious civil unrest you have to change everything we're doing and part of the thing

00:43:52.640 that tom is talking about is uh addressing the demographic concerns because what people feel

00:44:00.400 about identity is determined by what else is going on when i came to britain 1995 we weren't having

00:44:07.040 you know these debates because we didn't need to because you had a country that was overwhelmingly

00:44:12.320 confident in itself still had an idea of what it was still the english scottish welsh and northern

00:44:21.100 irish ethnic groups were not being treated as some sort of lepers whose history is evil and

00:44:26.940 and to be denigrated and they were overwhelmingly the majority of the country and when you walked

00:44:33.440 around london it was an english city in a way that it simply is not visually today and you can

00:44:41.000 people can cringe and argue and say that's racist and whatever the fact of the matter is i have

00:44:46.200 people who are friends of mine coming from the middle east coming from africa coming from eastern

00:44:50.600 europe who all arrive in heathrow and all say the same thing what happened that's what they all say

00:44:56.600 right so this thing has changed and my view is the only way to avoid continued balkanization and

00:45:05.880 getting to a yugoslavian type of situation is to find the way to to say what is an identity that

00:45:13.880 is not controversial by virtue of being inclusive enough for everyone can we can a you know other

00:45:22.840 than the very fringe of the ethno-nationalist right and the very fringe of the far left

00:45:27.880 can we all agree that everyone on this call is british yes can we all agree that almost

00:45:36.040 everybody in this country go ahead but okay what exactly is it to be british i mean you've not

00:45:43.800 offered something i have actually read my article more nebulous than englishness well this is where

00:45:50.360 i was going to argue with you about the values argument because i know people struggle to define

00:45:54.600 but actually it's only difficult for people who have not lived in other countries you talk about

00:45:59.160 fair play being this vacuous thing i don't think it's vacuous at all i mean one of the things that

00:46:04.360 francis and i have talked about since the very early days of trigonometry we miraculously

00:46:09.000 discovered that the culture in venezuela where his family are from is exactly like the culture

00:46:14.440 in lots of the countries i've lived in like russia ukraine and armenia where if i screw you over 1.00

00:46:20.120 because you left the door open for me to screw you over i'm the good guy and you're the idiot 0.93

00:46:27.000 right the fact that in britain we don't see things like that is actually extremely unusual 0.99

00:46:33.240 by world standards the the civility with which this country conduct itself when i think about

00:46:38.440 england and britain i kind of think of it as the shire it's a place of calm uh comfort where people

00:46:45.880 get on with their lives and they're able to enjoy things because it's a safe place it's a high trust

00:46:51.720 society and the reason it's a high trust society is that people generally act kindly and respectfully

00:46:57.400 towards each other with a level of respect and understanding and and mutual kind of respect and

00:47:04.320 interest sorry you're just falling around values this is rishi values ism no no no no no what i'm

00:47:10.680 saying is there are what my prescription for all of this is is is what i wrote in my article which

00:47:16.360 is this uh britain uh is a country that recognizes the different ethnic groups that make it up the

00:47:22.760 english welsh scottish and northern irish ethnic groups exist they are the founding ethnic groups

00:47:29.400 of this society uh and they are the most central part of its beautiful diversity that is the

00:47:36.760 starting point after that we have to do what katherine burblesing does with her kids at her

00:47:41.800 school which is we have to inculcate ourselves and our children with the idea that they all belong

00:47:46.920 to the nation of britain right we don't have an english passport we don't have a welsh passport

00:47:51.640 we don't have an irish passport we don't have a scottish passport we all have a british passport

00:47:56.200 and it's up to us the citizens of this country to feel our way towards towards what that means

00:48:01.880 resting on the shoulders of the giants who came before us which you alluded to which is our

00:48:07.540 history and what it means to be British throughout the ages and that's why we're having this debate

00:48:12.980 isn't it yes it is but unfortunately it's the Britishness is a harder history it's a it's

00:48:21.880 firstly it's a much shorter history secondly it's a it's a harder history to define Jacob

00:48:26.960 Maurice Mogg bizarrely on this week said that Englishness that there's no such thing as an

00:48:32.600 ethnicity of Englishness and Scottishness it's like what on earth are you talking about like

00:48:36.420 he's obviously not looked into it at all and he then says that through time uh that Englishness

00:48:42.740 and Britishness have been conflated and they mean the same thing which I think is just his Victorian

00:48:46.440 bias because if you actually go any any way further back you can see like we've talked about

00:48:50.900 Alfred it was Rex Angolorum so it's Englishness is a thing Britishness actually technically is

00:48:56.860 older than even alfred because i think the word the first word to describe uh ireland was was

00:49:02.560 britain some well actually the angles displaced the brits believe it or not so the the the english

00:49:09.300 displaced the original brits but these are all historical and fairly boring arguments that won't

00:49:14.980 be that of interest to people well the reason i bring it up sorry is because i think history is

00:49:19.500 what unites us i loved what that uh black lad you had on the at the beginning saying uh you know he

00:49:25.740 fought in the armed forces he actually said that the black people came after the war to rebuild

00:49:31.100 britain actually they came during the war and fought with the british against the nazis and

00:49:36.120 actually that's quite that's maybe a quite the indian starting point well the indians a million

00:49:41.220 million people army fought for the british empire yeah exactly and maybe and maybe that's a kind of

00:49:46.880 history we can latch on to a unifying that whilst whilst we are sort of correcting people on the

00:49:53.440 other side of this argument is also you have to become some sort of bleeding heart liberal to

00:49:56.880 recognize those contributions to recognize a sense of cultural buying and also to recognize that

00:50:02.240 when we're having this discussion about the demographics of a country and what that might

00:50:06.100 mean for its social cohesion whatever going forward that is not necessarily to make an

00:50:10.040 entirely exclusionary or at all exclusionary argument because of course ethnicity and culture

00:50:14.840 are connected for reasons that are pretty obvious but it's not mutually exclusive i mean one example

00:50:20.200 that i've seen many people on the more ethnic nationalists i get tripped up by is the question

00:50:24.920 of who is more english bob marley or king charles because if you're going by sheer ancestry it would

00:50:29.080 have to be bob marley because one of his parents was of entirely british ancestry whereas charles

00:50:33.720 primarily german bit of danish in there and scottish and what have you so it's one of those

00:50:38.680 things where clearly this is something that people should and should be encouraged to

00:50:42.920 buy into and the more kind of hard line we get that you remove any incentive towards integration

00:50:47.720 at all you know which is something that surely no one should want to support um but at the same time

00:50:53.720 these these are big problems which have been foisted upon us and need to be dealt with precisely

00:50:57.480 to to rescue the kind of cohesive society that everyone at least uh claims towards our all right

00:51:03.640 guys we budgeted half an hour for this thinking that's what it would take and we would overrun

00:51:08.280 uh we've actually done an hour just on this debate itself so let's move on i'm i'm really

00:51:13.480 grateful we had this conversation i think it's it's worth carrying on uh carrying it on over

00:51:18.360 time and thinking about what it means actually to to unite in our country which i think is is the

00:51:23.480 most important thing uh before we move to our next story uh a load of people in the comments were

00:51:28.520 asking uh when i was in my previous uh home studio about the map behind me uh that map uh is uh by a

00:51:38.040 fan of the show uh called jg fox and if you want to buy a copy he's offered uh for because so many

00:51:45.640 people were asking he's offered a 10 discount using the link in the description of this video

00:51:51.720 if you want to get yourself a map they come in different sizes it is a map of the culture war

00:51:56.040 and it i believe it has all our faces in it um my my son funnily enough uh who's four years old he

00:52:02.920 looks around it and uh uh he he could he uh he picks out all the different people that he's met

00:52:09.080 on it anyway uh moving on to our second story and actually not entirely unrelated since we're

00:52:15.480 talking about uh the demographics and and immigration and so on is a poll has come out

00:52:22.040 this week showing that reform uh would get fewer seats than both labor and the tories but it's more

00:52:28.040 complicated than that isn't it francis well it is more complicated than that so yougov which are

00:52:34.120 one of our most most respective pollsters have done a large scale seat by seat poll and what

00:52:40.760 that means is they've gone to every seat in the country they've polled people and then they've

00:52:44.920 collated the results and they've published them so uh we're going to go through it it says with

00:52:51.400 the number one there we're heading for a hung parliament labor are going to get 241 seats

00:52:59.000 tories 130 reform 123 so what that would mean is we have a hung parliament so labor would need

00:53:10.920 the lib dems and the greens lib dems by the way got 71 seats greens got nine seats to declare an

00:53:19.080 overall majority and be able to rule so what will we get is a left-wing coalition this is also where

00:53:27.700 it gets really interesting because last year reform were on 27 percent of the vote and they're

00:53:34.080 now on 22 percent now this is possibly due to restore and the financial scandals restore is

00:53:42.760 taken more than 3% from reforms votes which is a massive blow to reform

00:53:49.840 particularly in those marginal seats where it's neck and neck and people are

00:53:55.420 unsure whether to vote conservative reform restore and the split on the

00:54:00.400 right means that those marginal seats reform are simply not getting across the

00:54:07.660 line and those seats are either going to conservative or they're going to

00:54:12.400 Labour. Labour, Lib Dems, Greens, SNP, Plaid Cymru, which is the Welsh party, and SNP's

00:54:21.060 obviously Scottish nationalists, and those are broadly left-wing in their outlook, win 60%

00:54:27.260 of seats. Right-wing parties, which are obviously reform, conservators, restore, win 47% of the vote.

00:54:39.000 so as it stands and bear in mind this is a snapshot of how things are at the moment this

00:54:46.320 is not a prediction I'm going to come on to Calci which is a prediction market which has a slightly

00:54:51.680 different picture and in the immortal words of the late great Scott Adams if nothing changes

00:54:58.140 and it will then that's where we are at the moment now if you could bring up the prediction markets

00:55:04.580 please, Dino. And just for clarity, the Conservatives are the orange, Labour are the blue,

00:55:16.260 navy blue, and Reform are the turquoise. And we can see that Reform, and this is a prediction

00:55:22.320 market, so this is what Cauchy predicts will happen at a general election, which is the Reform

00:55:30.420 party have a 37% chance of winning a general election. Labour have a 33% and Conservatives

00:55:42.160 have a 27%. But where they do agree is that the vote for reform is going down and the vote for

00:55:52.560 Labour is going up in that Burnham bounce. And as well, we can see the Conservative party are

00:55:59.640 starting to get momentum so as well it changed overnight so over last night it was saying that

00:56:09.560 labor were more likely to win overnight it has changed and it's now saying reform so where we

00:56:16.280 are is this i think is really really really tight and it shows some of the damage that the recent

00:56:24.120 financial scandals have made on reform. It has shown the impact Restore is having on the chances

00:56:33.040 of reform getting elected. And it also shows that in a purely tactical sense, maybe the Labour MPs

00:56:41.400 were correct in ousting Keir Starmer and getting Andy Burnham in as they start. But as we all know,

00:56:48.480 a week is a long time in politics. And I'm just putting it out there to the people, what they

00:56:53.640 think do they agree do they disagree do they think this is a moment in time or do we think

00:56:58.600 this is more representative of a broader trend over to you gentlemen and what worth correcting

00:57:04.380 one thing as well it's the calci prediction markets is not what calci predict it's what

00:57:10.040 the cumulative sum of the bets that are placed and one thing that's worth pointing out actually

00:57:14.700 is that one of the possible reasons for the discrepancy between polling and prediction

00:57:19.960 markets is the prediction markets uh don't give you the option for a hung parliament and so people

00:57:25.800 are choosing a party that will win it's very possible that no party will win um and so that's

00:57:33.120 that's another feature of it as well um yeah i just thought i'd throw that in before people

00:57:38.460 yeah exactly i also think before we go on we should apologize to the welsh viewers for

00:57:42.360 france's horrific pronunciation applied cymru which um would no less raise hackles in that

00:57:47.520 part of the country um this is really fascinating i think it's been clear for some time that we were

00:57:51.760 we were potentially heading towards a hung parliament but there's a few things that we

00:57:55.320 always need to take into account in the new political era that we find ourselves in

00:57:58.440 one of which is that volatility in political preference is a higher scale than we've seen

00:58:04.560 for about 100 years so the willingness of people to switch parties to shop around to tactically

00:58:09.760 vote which is something which is increasingly going to come to the detriment of reform it seems

00:58:13.620 like is is higher than we've previously come to expect it plus we're in this very strange situation

00:58:19.540 where we have multi-party almost european style politics but within a two-party first-past-the-post

00:58:24.980 system and what that means is is that making predictions and even really doing mrp polls is a

00:58:29.860 bit of a mugs game because in the run-up to an election small percentage changes in voting

00:58:34.900 intention could have vastly different effects across the country uh the willingness again to

00:58:39.860 vote tactically could have vastly different effects to the detriment of one party and to

00:58:43.820 the benefit of another. So without wanting to just dismiss any of this, because obviously I think it

00:58:49.100 is an indication of certainly where Labour are now relative to a year ago and where reform are now

00:58:53.620 relative to a year ago, it's hard to make kind of hard and fast predictions off of it. One thing

00:58:58.460 is absolutely clear is that Keir Starmer was a gift to reform that maybe they didn't fully

00:59:02.640 appreciate at the time, as well as to the Green Party. It was a bit of a sort of truism about a

00:59:08.760 year or so ago but i think it more or less held which is that if the next election was whether

00:59:11.800 or not you wanted keir sama to be prime minister reform could quite definitively win that but

00:59:16.320 whether or not the next election was one about do you want nigel farash to be prime minister by

00:59:20.320 the fact that he does remain a quite polarizing figure in the country whether that's fair or

00:59:24.000 unfair that could well be reform's uh campaign to lose and with the rise of um the an appetite for

00:59:32.380 tactical voting on the left of british politics meanwhile you have the breakdown of um the right

00:59:38.740 wing votes in british politics between the conservatives reform and to a lesser extent

00:59:43.060 restore that just builds in a kind of advantage to the labour party which is sort of unthinkable

00:59:48.480 the only thing i would say um suppose which is slightly in in um in reform's corner and all of

00:59:54.680 this is that expectations were risen for them to such a stratospheric level there was always going

01:00:00.720 to be difficult for them a stratospheric level i should say it was always going to be difficult

01:00:04.660 for them to measure up to it even if reform went from you know what was it five MPs at the last

01:00:09.480 election to north of a hundred at the next election that would have been a political

01:00:15.060 achievement the the likes of which arguably we've never seen it I mean it took the Labour Party 22

01:00:19.500 years to get to over 100 MPs in the 1922 election so partly because you saw this collapse of the

01:00:27.280 Labour Party you saw this collapse of the Conservative Party this kind of unique opportunity

01:00:31.140 that was lent to the reform party and also the sense amongst right of centre voters reform

01:00:37.040 supporters that the country was in such a mess that really reform needed to take the reins of

01:00:41.960 power as soon as possible the country's finished it created a situation of what might in retrospect

01:00:46.140 look like kind of slightly unreasonable expectations placed on any political party

01:00:49.920 um and i generally have the view that if you want to even if you want to be quite radical that

01:00:54.380 requires a combination of urgency and patience which is not always easy to square but no it has

01:01:01.660 shown that Andy Burnham he's not single-handedly revived the Labour Party's fortunes the Burnham

01:01:07.060 bounce has been pretty modest I think it's fair to say and in whatever MRP poll we're looking at

01:01:12.220 or what a projection we're looking at it seems to me pretty nailed on that the Labour Party at the

01:01:16.760 very least will lose a significant amount of seats at the next general election which is

01:01:20.200 worth bearing in mind they're still kind of from a relative position of weakness in light of 2024

01:01:25.540 but yeah everything is still to play for to be frank so in the same way that it would be absurd

01:01:30.100 to write off um the labor party given that the fact that their fortunes have recovered um similarly

01:01:36.440 those who are willing to say you know it's just over for reform now and they are just doomed to

01:01:40.580 kind of entropy i think doesn't take into account just how volatile things are out there and also

01:01:46.160 how let's face it the issues that animate the reform vote are roaring back into focus once

01:01:50.660 again because they can't not whether it's illegal or mass migration so yeah all remains on the table

01:01:55.520 i would say there's two things that interest me here one is that if you look at polling since the

01:02:05.560 last election and you group the left-wing parties labour lib dem greens as one block and you group

01:02:12.320 the right-wing parties reform conservative restore as one block basically it is 47 47

01:02:19.440 and that hasn't changed and when reform had that massive spike after it was just after southport

01:02:27.740 i don't think they were getting left-wing voters particularly they might have had a few 0.57

01:02:32.260 red wallers but what's astonishing to me is everything that we've seen everything we've 0.99

01:02:40.620 seen on the south coast of illegal migration everything we've seen even after axel rudocobana 0.90

01:02:46.020 those horrors all of the the downsides of migration is so abundantly clear that actually

01:02:54.900 people don't move across that that divide and so either it's because we're in completely different

01:03:00.940 information ecosystems now and we're just we're not even hearing each other or we're not sort of

01:03:06.120 getting each other's information or maybe there's something else going on and uh you know maybe

01:03:11.520 ideological capture or maybe you guys have got insight here but that shift is not actually

01:03:18.760 happening it's very marginal of at all when it does happen then the other thing which is which

01:03:23.840 is the conversation in westminster where my studio is is like is there going to be an election is

01:03:28.260 there going to be election and so this polling comes out comes up from the times who by the way

01:03:32.240 it's basically the anti-reform paper at this point they're the ones who've they they barely

01:03:37.320 criticize the tories it's they barely criticize burnham it's almost entirely directed at reform

01:03:42.660 um so i i know i take what they say of a pinch of salt but there is serious questions about

01:03:49.800 is there going to be an election and whoever it is that mentioned that the hung parliament

01:03:54.620 is the most likely hung parliament with labor winning i think is what looks more likely and

01:04:01.240 given that I don't think Burnham would give up three years of being in parliament as prime

01:04:08.060 minister in a majority and he would probably back himself think he's so he probably thinks he's

01:04:12.920 likable that he's brilliant and he's smart he's got a vision and I mean I don't think he has got

01:04:16.760 a vision but he goes so back himself he's like let's do this for three years he'll look back

01:04:20.840 at Theresa May and be like well that was a mistake because remember she wanted a mandate and then she

01:04:25.520 got a hung parliament and it was a nightmare for her she'll look back he'll look maybe back at

01:04:29.680 gordon brown who also decided not to to run and and not to call an election i'd rather keep the

01:04:35.440 majority i think he's i i think he's going to back himself and and uh stay we've got him for

01:04:41.320 three years that that that's that that's the things that pop out of this story for me all right

01:04:45.640 well one thing i would hypothesize about why the country has basically stayed exactly where it is

01:04:50.740 politically even though we've been having these debates is because all of these issues the key

01:04:55.000 issues are so well ventilated at this point like who is undecided about illegal immigration you

01:05:02.800 either think it's a terrible problem or you think no human is illegal right you the same with

01:05:09.020 everything else the same with net zero you either think you're saving the planet or you think you're

01:05:12.860 destroying the economy at this point those issues have been sufficiently debated that everyone kind

01:05:17.680 of has a position on it uh and we could carry on down the list you know do the rich need to pay

01:05:23.300 their fair share quote unquote or or do we have an unproductive economy that you can't make

01:05:28.580 productive if you don't create jobs and to create jobs you need to take the boot off the neck of

01:05:33.460 of business and job creators you know what all of these things have been talked about so much

01:05:39.360 you kind of know where you stand number one number two because we have the constituency system

01:05:43.960 it 10 people or 100 people even a thousand people changing their mind within a safe

01:05:49.640 uh safe constituency makes absolutely no impact on election outcomes so um that's also another

01:05:56.400 reality to contend with uh the one thing i would say about this is i think we've got to keep in

01:06:01.220 mind that polling and prediction markets as well are very very good measures of very short-term

01:06:06.640 things and the reality is that there probably is a long time until the next election even if

01:06:12.880 of course an old one and here's where i think i actually disagree with both tom and winston's

01:06:18.500 analysis here because the fact of the matter is andy burnham's popularity right now is a temporary

01:06:25.860 blip on a long-term decline in the fortunes of the labor party as long as it remains in government

01:06:31.060 and i don't even think that it's necessarily a huge amount to do with the labor party per se

01:06:36.260 because this decline was going on just the same under the conservatives the reality is we're

01:06:41.060 poorer today than we were in 2008 on a per capita basis the country's economy uh is miraculously

01:06:48.260 outstripping our european uh competitors france germany and italy but it's sort of you know um

01:06:56.660 an intellectual quiz in in a care home type of thing you know no one no one's at their best

01:07:02.420 whereas there are countries that are pulling ahead because they have a totally different

01:07:08.180 approach to the one technology that is actually going to generate pretty much all of the growth

01:07:12.740 of the future which is of course ai so we've got the highest industrial electricity prices in the

01:07:18.020 world while in the meantime america is allowing individual people to build power stations of

01:07:24.260 their own something that like you know uh not people but companies right so um our economic

01:07:31.700 stagnation is is much of the reason we are where we are he's not going to fix illegal immigration

01:07:37.220 he's not going to fix the cultural issues that we're talking about the economy is going to

01:07:40.740 continue to tank over time the war in iran i know you're a big fan win but the rest of us

01:07:46.260 not so much and the reality is it's having an economic impact which will continue as long as

01:07:51.460 it's going so the economy is going to get worse the welfare system which he can't reform is going

01:07:58.020 to carry on being a massive drain on on on on the on the bit on the uk plc if you like and then on

01:08:04.900 top of that you've got all these cultural issues that they just can't fix because they're ideologically

01:08:09.060 opposed to doing the things that necessary my point being andy burnham will never be as popular

01:08:14.660 as he is again is my prediction and so if i were him i would think you know what i actually

01:08:22.580 i'm going to be in charge of a lib lib lab green coalition that it's going to allow me to go further

01:08:29.860 left and i actually am allowed to tell you why you're wrong i'm gonna tell you why you're wrong

01:08:33.220 straight away tell me because he won't see it like that he thinks he's brilliant you don't run for

01:08:39.460 part of for prime minister if you don't think you're brilliant and backing yourself he's not

01:08:42.740 going to think oh like i'm going to get less popular as it goes on no he's actually going to

01:08:47.220 think i wait till the british public find out what i'm going to do about this yeah he's going to think

01:08:53.700 he's going to yeah no we don't disagree i no no we don't disagree i was saying what the sensible

01:08:58.660 thing for him to do would be i don't think he will do it i agree there's a very strong probability

01:09:03.380 he follows the path that you're following what i mean is if he was smart and playing purely the

01:09:09.620 percentages the smart thing might be to go well i'm going to get the greens and the lip dams and

01:09:14.900 then i can take the country to beautiful socialism that i've always wanted to um whereas now i've got

01:09:20.500 this sort of right-wing labor party which is a thing people in the labor party always you know

01:09:24.580 the right of the labor party certainly but i actually don't disagree with you constantin

01:09:30.340 about the fact that um the idea that andy burnham is you know going to sort of conquer before him is

01:09:35.540 obviously a nonsense i think it's just quite clear that he is a obvious improvement on kia

01:09:40.100 starmer who led them to sort of dole drums which were such a gift not just to reform but hold on

01:09:45.220 tom but but is that really true though is he an obvious improvement or is it more like for now

01:09:49.940 yes not longer term but you're absolutely right about that yeah i mean for the moment absolutely

01:09:56.500 because i think you're right insofar as um this is a blip primarily and it's also a smaller blip

01:10:02.180 than they were hoping for i mean they were hoping that this would single-handedly kind of transform

01:10:05.940 their fortunes make a majority at the next election more likely uh it's been much the burn

01:10:11.580 and bounce has been much more modest and also if you just look at the kind of structural issues

01:10:15.100 affecting the country uh the labor party to say that it doesn't have an answer is an understatement

01:10:19.860 it wants to do things that will make all of those matters worse it wants to soften it's already

01:10:23.860 quite soft position on migration and asylum it wants to double down on debt and spending it wants

01:10:30.500 to yeah maybe kind of moderate the net zero policy around the edges but i don't think that the labor

01:10:36.820 party the parliamentary labor party certainly is constitutionally incapable of doing things that

01:10:40.900 would be necessary to get the country on the right track and also to win over a significant amount of

01:10:45.940 voters and it's almost resigned itself to just being one party amongst many in a multi-party

01:10:51.780 system the the sorts of um you know potentially reaching up to 40 of the vote that is not something

01:10:56.900 that the labour party is realistically expecting to do anytime soon um and i wouldn't be surprised

01:11:01.860 on this yeah it's just it's just not going to happen um but the difficulty is partly because

01:11:07.620 of our system is the fact that depending on when you call that election depending on how

01:11:12.180 disorganized your opposition is depending on how split the vote is on the other side of politics

01:11:17.220 on the right versus how potentially unified it might be on the left of british politics under

01:11:21.620 the right conditions you can still ride that high 20s to maybe percentage of the vote to a higher

01:11:27.620 seat share than you otherwise might have and i think the only thing burnham doesn't strike me

01:11:31.160 as like a gambler necessarily he's actually a bit of a prevaricator we've seen that on various

01:11:35.080 positions that he's taken over his time and also the everything from the kind of prison release

01:11:39.820 scandal to what have you just sort of flip-flops from one thing to the other but you know various

01:11:43.880 politicians particularly unelected prime ministers get to a point where they get a bit high on their

01:11:47.580 own supply and they think that they can just go for it saw that with Theresa May and we all know

01:11:53.400 how that panned out so I don't know if he's going to call an early election is a simple answer but

01:11:57.700 sometimes there can be these things maybe a win in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election that

01:12:01.860 makes him think screw it we'll probably be in a worse position but this is the bet this is there's

01:12:06.420 no better time than now that could easily be the calculus I guess. On the contrary if he wins

01:12:11.380 sorry Hoban and St Pancras 1.00

01:12:14.920 they're running this hijabi girl 1.00

01:12:18.220 Somali 1.00

01:12:19.600 it's completely playing

01:12:22.200 and placating the Green Party side

01:12:24.080 and this is what happened

01:12:24.900 he showed he could do it in Maker Field

01:12:26.320 he swallowed up the Green Party vote

01:12:27.840 Green's got absolutely quashed

01:12:29.140 if he beats Polanski

01:12:30.420 in Hoban and St Pancras 1.00

01:12:32.440 with an unknown Somali refugee

01:12:35.340 he is winning the Green Party vote 0.86

01:12:38.060 he's shown that he can take back that

01:12:41.200 and create another majority of the left with the far left.

01:12:45.620 He's won back the far left.

01:12:46.780 And if he can do that, he won't worry about coalition

01:12:49.360 with these other parties.

01:12:50.260 He's like, oh, look, I've proved it.

01:12:51.760 I can actually bring that.

01:12:52.920 He would use that as proof to think I should go to the country

01:12:55.580 because I've dealt with that threat to my left.

01:12:58.180 Yeah, I can just talk to them about Nigel Farage being evil

01:13:00.900 and then I get all the left-wing vote for me.

01:13:03.780 But that's been their strategy, right?

01:13:06.980 Guys, Francis, unless you want to jump in before we move on,

01:13:09.840 there's one point final point i want to make very quickly to me this will eventually come

01:13:15.580 down to personality politics who are the people who are most likely to want to form alliances

01:13:21.840 and the ones that do will eventually i think be the ones that win and will be the ones that be

01:13:28.660 able to form a coalition government my concern is is that i look at relationships on the right now

01:13:34.360 Now, Kemi doesn't particularly like Nigel. I believe the feeling is mutual. You look at Restore, you look at Rupert Lowe. We don't need to go into that because I think everybody knows where that stands.

01:13:48.420 so at the moment the right is so divided that unless unless they're prepared to overlook their

01:13:54.760 differences and work together and form a coalition as things stand and look going back to Scott Adams

01:14:02.300 you know if nothing changes and it will I think we're looking at a left-wing coalition

01:14:06.980 yep it's hard to argue with that at the moment I mean the the I remember Francis and I were

01:14:14.920 walking around london after some interviews yesterday and he was like you know what i think

01:14:18.900 this you know this uh you know this woke thing might be kind of you know moving i was like what

01:14:23.720 are you what are you talking about like look at our politics uh my sense is the the left is much

01:14:29.640 more likely to be elected now which is interesting because the the right of the country is clearly

01:14:34.560 moving to the right and the center feels like it's moving to the right but when it comes to election

01:14:39.380 time you're not necessarily going to see that in election results and then the country will carry

01:14:45.740 on on the trajectory that it will and it makes you wonder and in fact very much ties into our

01:14:50.960 next story Winston which is the anti-migrant protest that we are now seeing and you called

01:14:55.940 it direct action and it is because you're now having people slashing boats and things like

01:15:01.680 this so tell us what's been going on so Danny Tomo has been arrested and charged in Basingstote

01:15:07.880 and his supporters i think most of whom are the black clad black clad balaclava lads of the

01:15:15.420 patriot platform uh were protesting outside the station last night but this comes after a big

01:15:21.320 week for him so presumably this is the you can see the videos here of them outside the station

01:15:26.780 presumably you will have seen he was in the channel and he was this is amazing image actually

01:15:36.300 of a clipper taking over from a french shadow vessel escorting a migrant boat over to britain

01:15:46.120 now earlier this month we had this kind of shocking news that migrants are now coming up

01:15:53.280 shadowed by the french from normandy so much further further down uh further west down the

01:15:58.400 coast the french coast and taken across and then danny tomo having done his dover protests rushed

01:16:04.500 across to east knee this is so you have along with him standing trying to literally block the boats

01:16:11.040 you have then the protesters trying to block the coaches the british government it seems have

01:16:15.820 organized all of this in advance because the coaches were there so there's some coordination

01:16:19.540 with the french then they're then coached over back to kent to the processing um uh plant whatever

01:16:26.480 whatever they go through the processing uh uh building and uh so the the significance of this

01:16:33.980 escalation though is is the propaganda win for don danny tomo so whilst what's happening on the

01:16:42.040 coast isn't necessarily something that's new there's definitely new things that are happening

01:16:46.440 like the rnli are turning off the transmitters so they can't be tracked it's it's the case that

01:16:51.840 there's different locations being tried by the british state to land these people it's seemingly

01:16:57.620 like they're trying to test which towns are going to react and which towns are going to react badly

01:17:02.980 And, you know, I imagine if they dump them in Brighton, they might get a different response to dumping them in Easton.

01:17:09.760 But there's a propaganda win here for Danny Tomo, which is that you have had these images this week, some of which we're going to see, 0.97

01:17:17.940 of the British state police forces, a motorcade, escorting these illegal immigrants. 0.98

01:17:24.140 So they're all criminals by dint of the fact that they came here illegally. 0.97

01:17:26.840 And there's a huge amount of protection and taxpayer money going to protect them from the British public who are ostensibly or claiming to protect the British state.

01:17:41.840 If I put it more cleanly, the British state's main responsibility is to protect the British people, territorially and otherwise.

01:17:50.800 here they have failed the british people are now trying to protect british territory and the british 0.54

01:17:58.300 state is protecting the invaders the illegal criminals who are coming here from the british

01:18:03.820 people so it's a complete moral inversion and these images that are coming i mean i don't think

01:18:08.720 it's actually anything that that's new but these images are huge propaganda wins for for um danny

01:18:15.560 tomo and the sort of patriot direct action side of things so that that for me marks well it's

01:18:21.940 probably worth mentioning he's been arrested for uh slashing this bow and has been charged with

01:18:28.480 a bunch of offenses that's why the men are in basingstoke yeah yeah yeah so um propaganda

01:18:35.620 win maybe but he he may be convicted of these criminal offenses now which uh you know obviously

01:18:42.380 is is going to be an issue for him and his group uh but we'll find out i've seen different

01:18:47.480 commentary some people say that the things he's been charged with are uh going to be thrown out

01:18:52.240 and others say not we will see yes we will see i guess the the question is and this is what i put

01:19:01.300 to you guys this is the difficult moral question i think i certainly have been saying stop the boats

01:19:06.760 for a long time and i think it's an absolute moral imperative for us to stop the boats

01:19:11.620 there's a lot of people on the right who are saying you've got to do it at the ballot box

01:19:16.860 the question is if the state aren't doing it and there is not going to be a vote for three years

01:19:24.840 are you guys prepared to accept three more years of illegal boat crossings across the country and

01:19:31.000 so those people who are condemning danny tomo

01:19:34.580 are they prepared to accept more illegal immigration because that's that seems to be

01:19:40.740 the alternative i mean i don't think he's actually going to literally be able to stop

01:19:47.120 the boats but he is forced these propaganda winds are hopefully going to force the state

01:19:53.420 towards something and so this is the this is the difficult question for those of us who want to

01:19:58.180 stop illegal migration legal entrance what what position are we really into in how we condemn

01:20:08.140 dammitomo we can we might be able to criticize aspects of what he's doing and say maybe this

01:20:12.820 and that is sloppy but are you guys against what he's doing i think it sets a very dangerous

01:20:19.200 precedent winston because what it effectively means is that if you believe an injustice is

01:20:26.560 being created it is and you feel that it is not being dealt with now we can all agree that illegal

01:20:34.580 immigration is happening. I mean, that's indisputable. We can agree that the government 0.87

01:20:39.200 is not doing what it should be doing. Do we really want a position where essentially people

01:20:48.740 then feel that it is incumbent upon them to take it into their own hands? Because once you do that

01:20:54.860 with one issue, once you open that proverbial Pandora's box, you are going to be opening it

01:21:00.620 for a number of other issues because people are going, well, hang on a second. If you can do this

01:21:05.080 when it comes to illegal immigration, why can't I do this with X, Y and Z? Why can't I? So for 0.98

01:21:11.640 instance, the Me Too movement, which was exposing, you know, which was exposing men who had behaved

01:21:17.180 badly, badly, some of them indisputably so, some of them, I mean, who got thrown on the proverbial

01:21:25.280 Bonfire, who hadn't really done a lot wrong, as in the case of Aziz Ansari, for example,

01:21:31.060 who had behaved worse in an ungentlemanly fashion with a woman that he had a one-night

01:21:36.700 stand with, would we then feel, would certain people will then go, well, actually, Aziz

01:21:43.340 or somebody like that needs to have some justice happen or foisted upon him because the legal

01:21:50.720 and the courts aren't going to do

01:21:52.880 anything. This is where I

01:21:54.860 become really uncomfortable because

01:21:56.800 of the precedent that it sets.

01:21:59.500 I understand people's anger. 0.96

01:22:00.860 Your position is more boats, more illegals. 0.96

01:22:03.200 What about Tom then? 0.98

01:22:05.800 Well, I think this is

01:22:06.360 the... Sorry, Francis, if you wanted to...

01:22:09.020 That's very unfair.

01:22:11.080 That is very unfair. Francis is

01:22:12.860 therefore pro-boats, which is obviously not the case.

01:22:15.320 But in a way, I think that the experience

01:22:17.140 of sort of just stop oil and insulate 0.85

01:22:18.820 Britain, those irritating

01:22:20.360 quite militant direct action groups

01:22:22.440 has almost led us to a situation where it almost was suggesting

01:22:24.600 that any form of disruptive protest is

01:22:26.300 by definition illegitimate and that's just obviously not

01:22:28.520 the case. The calculation

01:22:30.600 one is always making is are the

01:22:32.360 tactics proportionate to the goal

01:22:34.400 is there public support for what is

01:22:36.460 taking place, do we

01:22:38.540 support their cause and do we think that

01:22:40.420 their tactics are ultimately legitimate

01:22:42.560 so it's not as if, in an environment

01:22:44.480 in which people tried to vote for the

01:22:46.440 borders to be controlled and that was just ignored

01:22:48.340 if anything legal and legal migration soared in the other direction in an environment in which

01:22:52.560 people have been arrested for raging against illegal migration online and in which a a very

01:22:58.880 rough hand is shown towards anti-migrant protesters to a to a degree that is genuinely radicalizing

01:23:04.520 a section of the population then in some way shape or form protest is going to be the inevitable

01:23:08.920 consequence and in some circumstances ultimately supportable and this goes before patriot platform

01:23:13.720 or Patrick platform, I should say,

01:23:15.300 the Pink Ladies protests of last summer,

01:23:18.680 which I know are being talked about 0.78

01:23:20.700 in kind of right-wing activist circles

01:23:22.840 as not going nearly far enough now,

01:23:24.520 had a significant impact on government policy.

01:23:26.920 It led to this absurd sort of literal-minded response,

01:23:29.880 which was, oh, you don't like the migrant hotels, do you? 0.99

01:23:32.420 We'll take them out of the hotels. 1.00

01:23:34.140 But nevertheless, it really,

01:23:35.740 what happened in Epping

01:23:36.420 and what happened in other parts of the country

01:23:37.860 put down a marker in a way that simply hadn't happened

01:23:41.280 purely by epping returning Conservative MPs

01:23:44.280 or people voting for Brexit or what have you.

01:23:46.700 So clearly there is a role for protest.

01:23:48.500 Does that necessarily mean we have to row in behind one individual

01:23:51.180 who for many of us has crept on the scene relatively recently

01:23:54.060 and kind of uncritically endorsed him or his group

01:23:56.240 and everything that they're doing?

01:23:57.360 Of course not.

01:23:58.440 So that's the kind of position that we find ourselves in.

01:24:01.160 And it's one of those issues where I think

01:24:04.700 clearly there is a role for protest.

01:24:06.700 Clearly that is going to change things.

01:24:08.680 And if nothing else, the government needs to take,

01:24:10.620 as a message from all of this which is that if you want to stop these protests there's a very

01:24:15.700 simple solution to that it's not locking them all up it's not another crackdown on social media

01:24:19.600 it's not a new ministry of misinformation as we've been talking about a little bit later on

01:24:23.440 if we've got time it's stopping the boats and hopefully at some point the penny will drop but

01:24:28.440 as i said i don't think it requires us to whilst we might recognize the legitimacy of protests of

01:24:32.760 direct action in certain circumstances um and in even lead us to endorse some of those groups does

01:24:37.920 mean we need to uncritically support some of these individuals no i suppose is where i'm coming at

01:24:42.800 on this particular and also i wonder whether the the idea that their behavior is likely to

01:24:49.600 produce the outcomes that you want uh is true as well i think it's inevitably true that the

01:24:55.520 government will be forced to respond but i suspect what you will find winston is far from stopping

01:25:01.040 the boats which they all believe you can't they would much rather stop the protest and they

01:25:05.360 believe they can and will and so what you're likely to see as as a response to this is people

01:25:11.360 being arrested being prosecuted uh and then the entire opposition to illegal immigration being

01:25:18.800 tarnished with the brush of these are the sorts of people that will stab migrant boats as they're

01:25:23.440 coming in to the country these are thugs these are people with a criminal record which this guy has

01:25:28.880 etc etc um and the the reality is i mean you say there's a moral inversion going on i completely

01:25:36.400 agree with you of course but i also think you have to be looking at the reality of the situation 0.63

01:25:42.080 yes it's true that the government is currently protecting illegal migrants as it buses them

01:25:47.360 from wherever they've landed on the shores of britain to their migrant you know detention

01:25:52.480 facility if you can even call it that what would you write would you rather they just

01:25:57.840 landed them on the on the beaches and then let see who wins against british people i mean like

01:26:03.200 what what are they supposed to do this is why tom is entirely right you have to stop these

01:26:08.480 people from ever landing here because once they do in the current environment we're in

01:26:14.240 it's just an impossible problem to solve we can't seem to deport them but we also don't want you

01:26:20.000 know people being dumped on the shores of britain and people smashing their heads in with bats do we

01:26:25.120 So, you know, this is where the conundrum you have once you allow them in. 0.98

01:26:29.540 And that's why we've got to not allow them in.

01:26:31.240 The conundrum is for Burnham because Burnham, in his ideology and trying to pander to the Green Party, he cannot not accept them.

01:26:39.660 It's so against them.

01:26:41.300 You know, the idea of repeating the Human Rights Act is just so fundamental to their ideology that they can't actually do anything.

01:26:47.200 So they're not going to do anything about it.

01:26:49.800 Now, these people should never touch British soil.

01:26:51.960 I think I've said this now on every episode we've done.

01:26:54.540 they should never touch English soil and seeing as we started talking about English history and

01:27:00.100 British history you say that this is going to look bad for people on the bad representative

01:27:05.540 of people on this side of the argument but people who love their country and who know their country's

01:27:10.100 history they see what's happening and they know exactly how to place it in its historical place

01:27:15.000 this sort of invasion they see it exactly the same way as you know bringing up Alfred isn't crazy

01:27:20.240 talking about the vikings you might think i sound uh crazy bringing up here but what do you think

01:27:25.760 they were doing these people coming up the vikings were coming over pillaging raping that so are you

01:27:30.340 saying we should all get our shields and swords and march down to the cliffs of dover like what

01:27:34.380 are you saying at a certain point i'm saying yes that if the state there if the state aren't going

01:27:42.760 to do anything we have to protect we protect britain if the state completely fun look we might

01:27:48.780 agree about when that time is but let's say we have a situation where it's like it's not just

01:27:54.940 6 000 people have come uh since burnham's been prime minister and it's something like 200 000

01:28:00.060 since 2018 across the channel alone that doesn't include legal uh entrance but over uh illegal

01:28:06.200 overstaying their visas or lorry entrance um but if if you say take the money take the thought

01:28:12.680 experiment experiment up to uh let's say a million there's a million illegal coming across the the

01:28:18.440 channel every year just to kind of kind of to give a big number just for the sake of the thought

01:28:24.560 experiment and the government did nothing would you then say yeah well no we've got to just let 0.96

01:28:29.920 let the millions in let them it's a ridiculous it's a ridiculous example winston which is why 0.65

01:28:35.000 you're using it's not a ridiculous example at some point we've got to say enough i completely 0.81

01:28:39.620 agree with you but we would never have a million people coming in illegally every year just wouldn't

01:28:43.720 okay but i'm trying to say to you at what point would you i'm asking you at what point would you

01:28:47.160 actually i will go down and try and protect the country i i don't know but but my point to you is

01:28:52.280 if you're calling for people to pick up weapons and head down to the cliffs of dover you're certainly

01:28:56.680 outside of my overton window at this point well i'd like the navy to go down and they would have

01:29:02.520 weapons yes well we totally agree then he just sort of said when i said so we should pick up

01:29:08.520 our shields and swords and head down when you talk about the viking these guys have already got there

01:29:14.200 these guys have already got there and obviously i'm not doing that i'm not going down there and

01:29:18.280 doing that but i'm i'm saying at a certain point we would i i don't know what that point is i'm

01:29:23.560 trying to get it out of you but we would try and protect our country and the fact that we're even

01:29:27.720 having this conversation is proof of what catastrophic state failure has taken place

01:29:32.600 you know because it's one of those things where going back to that image of that motorcade of the

01:29:36.760 police cars and the ambulances escorting those coaches like such a kind of perfect example of how

01:29:43.400 British state, which has become a kind of byword for incompetence

01:29:46.780 and inability to dispatch even its most basic responsibilities

01:29:51.160 towards the life and limb of people in this country,

01:29:53.620 leaping into action at a moment's notice 1.00

01:29:55.680 in order to try and escort illegal migrants

01:29:57.960 from their illegal landing to the migrant processing centre.

01:30:02.380 I mean, it's just...

01:30:03.480 It's one of those things about this issue is that

01:30:05.100 we often talk about it, understandably so,

01:30:07.220 as an issue of national security,

01:30:09.440 the safety of women and children,

01:30:11.360 uh social cohesion all of those things totally legitimate to talk about that it's also something

01:30:16.580 a bit more fundamental it's raised this question about who the british state is actually for who

01:30:20.620 it actually serves and the problem to winston's point about the human rights mindset that exists

01:30:26.460 amongst the labor party in particular but the political class in general is that um they can

01:30:31.480 bang on about their legal obligations to these people as in the illegal migrants as much as they

01:30:35.780 like yes on paper they do have a responsibility to help vessels in distress in the channel yes

01:30:41.840 on paper they do have a legal responsibility to allow them to apply for asylum yes on paper they

01:30:47.360 do have a legal responsibility to prevent them from falling into destitution whilst they're

01:30:51.300 applying for asylum but first we can change those laws number one number two certainly the domestic

01:30:56.880 ones and number two is that to all intents and purposes you are still facilitating illegal

01:31:02.420 migration at the expense of british citizens whether that's in terms of cost or the democratic

01:31:06.020 wishes they need to recognize that this is a certain point the public are just not going to

01:31:11.340 wear this um and so far that has manifested in them defecting to other political parties making

01:31:17.180 their preferences shown at the ballot box now we're seeing this new wave of protest which even

01:31:21.600 if we're taking out these sort of direct action forms of it we you know whether it was the flag

01:31:26.800 raising or whether it was the pink ladies or whether it was the unite the kingdom demonstrations

01:31:30.240 you're seeing a whole new form of like largely working class protest on the scale which we

01:31:34.920 haven't seen for a very long time so at some point the penny's got to drop but i understand

01:31:40.580 the frustration of you know having to basically just wait for someone within government to finally

01:31:46.460 realize that they cannot carry on as they have but um the extremists are the government

01:31:51.040 yeah extremists are the government for letting this continue and it's harder for a lot of people

01:31:57.080 to see that because it takes a bit of a mind shift but if you actually look at their behavior

01:32:02.360 what the government doing is unforgivable absolutely unforgivable and it's destroying

01:32:07.560 our country and we wouldn't even have conversations about what it is to be english and what it is to 0.72

01:32:10.840 be british if this kind of crap hadn't been going on so i all of this the condemnation of danny

01:32:17.240 tomo and everyone on question time was was slagging him off but ultimately it's burnham it's 0.96

01:32:22.920 labor it's the 14 years of tory government it's blair before him they created this mess and then

01:32:28.760 yeah yeah yeah that's fine we all agree on that but the problem is that two two things can be

01:32:34.760 true at once you're saying the extremists of the government well you can have more than one set of

01:32:39.560 extremists and sure and so you can it's perfectly possible to recognize that you for example would

01:32:50.120 have condemned direct action of this type by extinction rebellion but you you because it's

01:32:55.560 based on a lie because it's based right and okay so then all that all there is no truth and there's

01:33:01.080 only power what right because we get to decide whether there's no principle about do we accept

01:33:10.680 this kind of behavior or do we not we accept this type of behavior when it's in a cause that you

01:33:15.640 support but we reject this type of behavior when it's on a cause that you reject right so we would

01:33:20.280 say extinction rebellion blocking roads is illegal and therefore the police are correct to take them

01:33:25.160 away when they block roads right it's illegal but it's also based on a lie but i know it's based on

01:33:33.480 a lie what i'm saying is it's also illegal when it's based on the truth right and so we have to

01:33:43.000 have some consistency about how we treat people who protest or engage in direct action when it

01:33:49.240 comes to causes that we agree with and also causes that we disagree with right which is why i opened

01:33:54.360 up this dialogue by saying at what point do you guys break with that principle that you have of

01:34:01.720 of that like at what point is this situation so serious that you go actually okay i'll give you

01:34:07.320 you another example outside my house in london i've had drug dealers going on on my front door

01:34:14.460 and i've called the police and this has happened a few times over the last couple weeks i've called

01:34:17.860 the police several times they've never come to deal with it and then i bumped into a policeman

01:34:22.400 police woman i should say and explained the situation and i said i've got to protect my 0.94

01:34:26.940 family and if you guys won't do it i don't give a shit i'm going to take things into my own hands 0.55

01:34:31.380 she said i totally understand fair enough the police get it there is a there is a more like 0.84

01:34:39.700 it's morally my responsibility to protect my family over obeying the law like i i have to do

01:34:45.440 that and at some point it's morally our responsibility to protect our country

01:34:49.360 when this it's been recklessly vandalized like this well then there is no rule of law anymore

01:34:56.640 sure but this has been done by the government i i know we all agree with you on that winston but

01:35:03.900 what we're discussing is how to respond to it and what you are saying is do you want to live

01:35:07.720 in a society where we don't obey the law if we don't like it no i'm not saying that i'm saying

01:35:13.820 the government are the ones who have betrayed the their duty their moral duty and i think we all

01:35:23.660 agree on that at certain point and obviously i'm not on the south coast do anything about it but

01:35:28.400 at certain point i would be as if example if there were literally hundreds of thousands coming every

01:35:34.120 single day the english people would come together and go like now if the government are not going

01:35:38.640 to do anything about this we're going to do something about this well we'd all have to work

01:35:42.080 out who's english and who's not and then get down there together yeah uh yeah all right uh it's it's

01:35:48.960 an interesting debate and i think tom is right it shows you the the point to which the country

01:35:53.660 has come when we're having to discuss these things which i think all of us would prefer

01:35:56.920 not to have to discuss because we prefer not to have the problems that we do uh let's move

01:36:01.860 on to our final story which is actually making the point that i made earlier which is i'm not

01:36:06.900 remotely convinced that the response to protests and direct action from people like the ones you're

01:36:13.420 describing winston will be to address the issue it may well be to create a system of restricting

01:36:20.920 people from being able to talk about it tom yes exactly so this was andy burnham's excuse me andy

01:36:27.240 burnham's big announcement at the un general assembly which is that he wanted to set up this

01:36:30.960 new national center for information defense to combat what he saw as the scourge of disinformation

01:36:36.620 he was talking primarily or explicitly about the threat posed by russia um particularly noting that

01:36:44.880 russia and hostile foreign states were interesting in pushing notions of national decline in britain

01:36:50.880 of course that everything is absolutely fine here and it's purely because we've been brainwashed

01:36:54.680 by bot farms that we even countenance that particular view but that seems to be the

01:36:58.960 the drive of it but really i think seems to fit this established playbook we now have with

01:37:03.760 anti-disinformation efforts which is it's presented as dealing with some kind of hostile

01:37:07.920 foreign threat threats such as they are which do exist there are attempts to you know influence

01:37:14.160 the information space that have always gone on and particularly in the social media range

01:37:18.160 but really i think it's just a kind of code for trying to police discussions domestically so whilst

01:37:24.760 we haven't got a lot of um meat on the bonus what this new organization what this new institution

01:37:29.780 would do i think from very recent experience we can work under the assumption that this is going

01:37:35.440 to be as much about policing the opinions of citizens of this country as much as it is trying

01:37:40.000 to keep the fake news of foreign states at bay during covid i think we saw this pretty clearly

01:37:45.300 a big brother watched some great reports on this pointing out that these these organizations within

01:37:48.960 government the counter disinformation unit the rapid response unit were drawing up reports on

01:37:54.680 just critics of the lockdown people like carl hennigan and also seem to have this kind of

01:37:58.580 hand-in-glove relationship with the social media companies where they had trusted flagger status to

01:38:03.220 flag up their posts so that in the end they might be in some ways squashed de-boosted or ultimately

01:38:08.780 de-platformed there's also been a lot of discussion in recent years about the

01:38:13.160 quite shady role that an organization called the it's called Riku which is within the home office

01:38:20.200 has been playing in terms of trying to shape public discussion in and around terrorist attacks

01:38:24.560 trying to push certain narratives liaising with families and family liaison offices in the wake

01:38:29.680 of high profile terror murders or racially aggravated murders and kind of feeding into

01:38:34.960 what the the family statement should be trying to kind of calm tempers and what have you so the

01:38:40.220 kind of very recent track record of these organizations has been not with the threat

01:38:45.740 posed by russia in mind or iran or whoever but the threat posed by people in the country

01:38:51.040 able to voice opinions that the establishment disagrees with and one thing that is fascinating

01:38:55.900 is that is a really a just whilst that's potentially always been the case that is a

01:39:00.160 very distinct trend you see over the past 10 years to the extent people can report on this

01:39:03.520 you have anti-disinformation capabilities within government which previously might have primarily

01:39:09.180 concerned themselves with external actors found themselves in the wake of about 2016 and there's

01:39:13.940 probably some reason for that shifting their attention towards their own populations um and

01:39:19.960 i think it's become clear now that it's almost impossible to disaggregate this war on disinformation

01:39:23.880 with just a war on political positions that the establishment happens to dislike so yeah there's

01:39:29.260 not much we know at this point but prior experience would suggest that we'd be pretty alarmed and

01:39:33.720 skeptical about this new organization if people don't mind this go ahead mate oh yeah uh if people

01:39:39.740 don't mind i want to pose a question and it's related to this and it's also related to what

01:39:44.780 we've been talking about before does everybody know the term anarcho tyranny yeah so for those

01:39:50.640 people who don't it's where we have a tyrannical government in charge who is oppressive to its

01:39:57.140 citizens but on the on the day-to-day level there's the people living in anarchy there is no

01:40:03.320 there's very little rule of law it's chaotic there's um there's you know there's a lot of

01:40:09.040 crimes will go unpunished low-level crimes etc etc and i remember talking to a lot of people about

01:40:14.720 this and people have come up and talked to me and wanting to discuss this topic with me and

01:40:19.280 originally i thought well this is a bit far this is a bit extreme but looking at a lot of what

01:40:24.980 we've talked about and talking about this is this are we not entering a state of anarcho tyranny or

01:40:31.060 is that hyperbolic well no clearly i mean the government's response as we were talking about

01:40:38.120 with the previous story the government's response it's easier to solve the problem of a few hundred

01:40:45.720 balaclava protesters down in dover than it is to solve the problem of tens of thousands of

01:40:51.160 illegal immigrants on small boats so if you are the government the rational thing for you to do

01:40:56.280 is to say these people are all bad they're all racist and what we've got to do is uh crack down

01:41:01.880 with the full force of the law as they've said uh arrest the people who commit any sort of criminal

01:41:06.680 offense uh and then try to decapitate those protests that's a much easier fix than solving

01:41:13.640 the actual problem likewise dealing with public sentiment and the way that it's shifting and

01:41:20.440 the strength of feeling particularly on the center and center right and now that you know further on

01:41:25.480 the right uh about these issues that's a very hard fix because even if you stopped all illegal

01:41:31.240 immigration tomorrow the sentiment would remain because you still have illegally a million illegal

01:41:36.200 immigrants in the country and the consequences of two decades of mass immigration which people

01:41:40.760 are obviously also angry about much easier to just say you're not allowed to have these opinions

01:41:46.600 anymore uh you know we're going to be in the words of the great jacinda adern we're going to be your

01:41:51.560 single source of truth as she famously said during covid uh and all the rest of it uh because we we

01:41:58.440 good people like andy burnham and others can obviously all agree that asylum seekers are

01:42:04.600 poor people fleeing you know war uh abroad and anyone who seeks to you know damage their boats

01:42:10.840 well that's obviously quote-unquote thuggery and that's obviously racism and that's obviously

01:42:14.920 obviously obviously obviously what do we do with thugs and racists well we'd all agree with the

01:42:20.280 thugs and people who you know break the law need to be cracked down on and before you know it the

01:42:24.920 opinions uh you know i've thought for example the debates we've had today are really important and

01:42:30.200 healthy but you know you winston may be considered to have strayed over the line in in the course of

01:42:35.720 this and and it will be people like that who are seen as giving some sort of tacit approval to

01:42:42.600 these things which people are perfectly entitled to do if that's what they believe but it will be

01:42:46.840 opinions like that that are prevented from being expressed in public because if you have two

01:42:53.560 decades of mass immigration illegal immigration through open borders and the ideology of diversity

01:42:59.960 equity inclusion multiculturalism and identity politics then this is all the natural government

01:43:06.840 reaction to this situation and so to me it almost feels inevitable and by the way toby young of the

01:43:12.280 free speech union pointed out that far from being some sort of breakthrough new thing there's like

01:43:17.240 eight of or nine of these types of units in government already that are trying to manipulate

01:43:23.000 and restrict public conversation in order to shape the narrative out there about all of these issues

01:43:30.040 because the government and i think in probably all of our opinions i won't speak for everyone but i

01:43:35.540 certainly speak for myself the government rightly understands that if you simply step back at this

01:43:42.200 point you actually open up the door to hell because the reason they're having to escort illegal

01:43:47.840 migrants in buses with dozens of police cars is let's be honest there is the possibility that if

01:43:54.740 they didn't do that violence could erupt that's why they're doing and they know that because that's 0.99

01:44:01.000 the situation they've created and so if you are concerned about protecting british people from

01:44:06.580 violence at this point if you're the government you have every reason to jump in and say people

01:44:11.180 shouldn't be able to discuss things because we've we have messed things up so badly that even

01:44:17.320 saying out loud how much we've messed them up has the potential to cause violence that's where we are

01:44:23.000 yeah i mean uh yeah i don't seeing as you've you you've pointed at me and sort of straying

01:44:33.080 out of the overton i i if if loving my country i think that britain and england is a gift

01:44:38.900 literally from god it is it has done unfathomable good and spread it in the world and it is precious

01:44:46.620 and must be protected and frankly that is what that's why i even do media i do media not because

01:44:54.820 i want to do media i do media because i love my country and i think it must be protected and

01:45:01.640 bestow to the next generation and media is just a means for me to to to do that goal and so if

01:45:09.940 protecting our borders which is is now within it's or is now without outside of the uh Overton

01:45:18.720 window even if it means you know the methods we've been just discussing right fine so be it

01:45:25.080 i don't care i love my country and it must be protected and uh it's just i actually quite like

01:45:32.460 um what tom was saying about this sort of history in the context of this but i would stretch even

01:45:37.020 further back this is something trigonometry been fantastic of covering not just through covid but

01:45:42.520 before but a lot of what we're going through the last few years is sort of against the post-war

01:45:46.880 consensus and it's there's been these elites since 1945 and it's been various issues that they've

01:45:54.760 been trying to push the west in a certain direction and all of it really starts with obama like he is

01:46:01.080 using a lot of infrastructure that was originally set up to fight islamism he then turned it on

01:46:07.340 populism in around 2014-15 and so it's the same sort of all of this stuff is exactly how both of

01:46:13.440 you have been describing it's it's taking this old infrastructure and turning it against the people

01:46:18.280 and uh i suspect we're going to see a lot lot more of this kind of stuff it's not going to stop

01:46:23.580 anytime soon because they're not going to go out without a fight unfortunately for them those of

01:46:28.160 us who don't have their worldview are also not going to give up without a fight um i think one

01:46:35.840 of the really dangerous things that we we need to address is to talk about relationships uh the

01:46:40.940 number one predictor for a marriage breaking up as some of you may know some of you may not is

01:46:46.120 contempt. It's contempt. The number one foundation for any relationship is not love, affection. I'm

01:46:54.220 talking about respect. I'm talking about all relationships, whether it's a colleague, whether

01:46:58.080 it's a partner, whether it's a friendship. I'm also talking about the relationship between a

01:47:03.980 government and its people. And for a long time now, it feels like the government holds its people

01:47:11.020 in contempt. And by that, I mean, they simply have lied to them, gaslit them, whatever way

01:47:17.820 you want to talk about it. And it's gone on for a long time. And I think what we're facing now

01:47:24.480 is the breakdown of trust and respect between a government and its people. And if there is no

01:47:32.900 relationship, what you're effectively seeing is the breakdown of a society. And that to me is

01:47:40.980 where we are rapidly heading towards. It's where we're on the path to something absolutely

01:47:49.560 disastrous. And I think we've been covering it and we've been talking around it in this particular

01:47:56.640 episode but what fundamentally we're talking about is the death of a people giving believing

01:48:06.960 that its government can represent them and serve its best interests and where we go from here is

01:48:13.360 quite frankly terrifying well look i i actually think we have to be honest and maybe we have to

01:48:21.240 recognize that we live in a left-wing woke country populated by left-wing woke people i mean

01:48:27.480 the day the election results bear that out right i mean is that the case though when we separate out

01:48:33.980 the political system and the results in elections from what people actually believe because the

01:48:38.280 elections unfortunately maybe get boiled down to maybe one question or maybe two questions what do

01:48:43.540 you want to do about cost of living what do you want to do about immigration and really that's

01:48:46.760 going to be the story of the next election is which one of those framings wins um which could

01:48:51.280 also lead to a violently different outcome but i do think that so many of the issues that animate

01:48:55.900 us that animate our audiences that are clearly going absolutely wrong illegal migration there's

01:49:02.760 a basically a super majority in the country who is against what is going on currently uh the

01:49:07.200 nonsense around gender again you poll even labor voters they know that a lot of this is complete

01:49:12.180 you know woo and the fact that it's going back to our disinformation discussion the fact that

01:49:16.840 you've got a Labour Party which has just been flatly either lying about what it believes to

01:49:21.740 be the reality about gender for the sake of trying to look good or actually believe in complete

01:49:25.680 nonsense um the fact that these are the people trying to police our speech is absolutely

01:49:29.100 fascinating but you know you keep going down the list um what the story of the past 10 years is

01:49:33.660 that our elites have gone insane whilst the public have remained remarkably commonsensical

01:49:37.800 and also remarkably patient that's not going to help the latter half of that is certainly not

01:49:42.560 going to hold for much longer and it just feels like the gap that exists is how is that going to

01:49:46.620 get proper political representation that common sense majority which i think still does just about

01:49:51.260 exist on a lot of these questions even if i think that's a lot of extreme is becoming more extreme

01:49:55.880 that's certainly true i do think that's true on a lot of these questions but if we come back to

01:49:59.520 the idea that the economy is central to to the next election for example uh i don't know your

01:50:05.000 views on tax stone but i imagine winston francis and myself are not in favor of pushing taxes up

01:50:10.120 further but that is overwhelmingly a minority position in this country and again it's one of

01:50:17.240 those things which is depending on how you frame it because people obviously don't want their own

01:50:20.520 tax to go up but the idea of you know squeaking the pips out of people who make a hell of a lot

01:50:25.240 of money is something that when you poll is quite um broadly speaking as public support so there

01:50:29.560 there is there is of course nuance in all of this and maybe the economy is the one that is the sort

01:50:33.720 of elephant in the room but even there i mean you can still see the people are persuadable on these

01:50:39.080 matters i think they're just also in a situation where they have economically and cost living wise

01:50:43.720 been suffering for quite a long time so any argument which sounds like more harsh medicine

01:50:48.440 is one that isn't going to land but this is exactly what i'm saying though this is what i'm

01:50:52.920 saying though because to me all of these issues are important all the cultural issues we've discussed

01:50:58.360 are really important but i don't believe they would have remotely the salience that they do

01:51:03.320 if it was not for the continuous decline of britain's economy and people's living standards

01:51:07.880 for the last 20 years i just don't and that's the reality because you take if you take the most

01:51:13.320 extreme far-right position that you can think of which is uh you need to make britain white again

01:51:20.520 let's say that you take that position and you click your fingers and that happens is this 0.69

01:51:26.600 country going to is our living standards in this country going to improve tomorrow as a result

01:51:31.960 they're not they're not and in fact in the short term things would get a lot worse economically 1.00

01:51:38.360 right so addressing the immigration part of this is very important uh in dealing with illegal

01:51:44.760 immigration in making sure that the the mass immigration we have is people who are benefiting

01:51:49.640 this country rather than and taking things from it but the reality is until you address the

01:51:54.200 economic piece of this uh all of these other issues will continue to have salience simply

01:52:00.360 because people are really really frustrated about what's happening to the living standards

01:52:04.360 and on the whole british people believe that the solution to their plummeting living standards

01:52:10.280 is a mansion tax is inheritance tax is higher taxes on business is higher taxing on the super

01:52:17.240 rich which you know dan hodges when we interviewed talked about private jets while talking about

01:52:21.400 top rate of tax which is like 55 grand so plumbers and electricians and you know people running

01:52:27.800 small businesses are paying it right but but most people in this country when polled feel

01:52:34.520 that the reason they are poor is quote the rich the rich the rich which is the way to more poverty

01:52:41.640 and the way to more lack of productivity to fewer jobs and so i i question those of us who are in

01:52:49.720 this part of the public debate how in touch we actually are with the average british person

01:52:55.720 when it comes to a lot of these issues and i worry when we sit here and say you know the british

01:53:00.920 people want this ah the british people are very split you know uh francis and i were at a at

01:53:07.000 someone's wedding a friend of ours wedding which was kind of split down the middle in these two

01:53:10.680 different directions you talk to people who don't have our views they have very different views and

01:53:15.720 they hold them just as strongly as we do and there's a hell of a lot of them too so and by

01:53:20.120 the way they don't like me no no and so what did you do with my face mate yeah with his evil right

01:53:30.680 wing face yeah my point being is this is why we were talking about you know extinction rebellion

01:53:35.880 versus anti-immigrant protests i don't think either side has the right to say we speak for

01:53:43.560 the country therefore we are entitled to behave an x-way x-way we all have to obey the law we

01:53:49.000 we all have to engage in the democratic process and ultimately

01:53:52.520 you have to win at the ballot box you have to win at the ballot box

01:53:58.040 oh yeah it's obviously the case we have to win about just on the economics though

01:54:01.640 if you look what happened on the continent with rassemble national rassemblement national and

01:54:06.120 alternative for deutschland they are both left-wing economically they're actually both

01:54:11.320 rassemblement national certainly are national socialists here i i it hasn't the right hasn't

01:54:19.460 gone that way exactly although reform want to keep flirting with the nationalization of steel

01:54:25.060 and they have talked about nationalizing water so there is a left-leaning side to reform and

01:54:31.520 they've got the red wall base which is kind of represented by lee anderson somewhat um but i i

01:54:38.060 think that whether it's on the continent or here the politics is no longer economically split like

01:54:46.100 it used to be it's it's now it's more about identity i think and that's the new paradigm

01:54:51.040 and so yeah of course you know yeah yeah what's that numpty uh gary's economics you know he can

01:54:57.480 he can go and talk about wealth tax for all day long and get loads of air time and he's very

01:55:01.080 popular amongst sort of uh gen zed uh people it's also the case that wealth tax will be popular

01:55:06.940 even bizarrely amongst wealth uh conservative voters i've seen statistics so i think you're

01:55:12.320 right constantin that even on the right in britain there is a a popular feeling towards more tax in

01:55:18.820 certain domains uh but i i think that that's not the overarching i think i think politics now is

01:55:25.120 now a sort of a battle for the not for economics but for the soul of of our nation and that's a

01:55:32.140 little bit of a cliched statement to to make but it's not quite the paradigm it used to be

01:55:38.780 what if our country was growing at five percent a year and jobs were abundant and salaries were

01:55:46.540 increasing all the time do you think we'd be having all these same debates about immigration

01:55:50.060 in this way i don't think so yes i'll tell you why we will sorry of course we would because of the 0.94

01:55:55.820 the uh pakistani rape gang scandal because of the uh various people murdered by illegal entrants

01:56:02.860 because of the the the two-tier system that you have or it's not just that there's different

01:56:10.060 policing standards depending on on your identity it's different justice standards someone from the

01:56:15.500 the protest this week has been given a two-month uh prison sentence for throwing a bottle compare

01:56:22.060 that to uh some of the the kind of in crimes that you've been getting it's just not comparable

01:56:29.840 there's definitely a two tiers a sense of two tier in this country so yes i agree on all of this

01:56:34.780 we wouldn't be at the fever pitch that we have it now it just wouldn't well i suppose people

01:56:41.940 wouldn't people wouldn't be quite as scratchy and infuriated as they might otherwise be but

01:56:45.800 nevertheless a man in the women's toilet is going to be a problem in good times or in bad an illegal 0.99

01:56:50.440 migrant rapists being allowed to run amok is going to be a problem in good times or in bad 0.95

01:56:55.380 and also i think these things are just sort of interconnected um and also i think the general 0.85

01:57:00.000 drift over the past 10 years is that there has been a chunk of the british electorate to some

01:57:04.060 extent a sort of silent majority who has felt pushed out of the democratic process which has

01:57:08.620 been in various different ways reasserting itself brexit defecting to the conservative party whether

01:57:13.640 it might have been reform of course now um and i think that i think people start by a more

01:57:20.780 democratic politics we can also get to the heart a lot of these economic issues as well because

01:57:24.140 whilst of course if you look at some of these individual policy measures things like a mansion

01:57:28.120 tax things like a wealth tax poll particularly well that's in the absence of a proper debate

01:57:31.860 about them i think it's fair to say but you know other things like one of the core issues that this

01:57:35.800 country faces both in terms of spending but also in terms of the drag anchor on growth it represents

01:57:40.080 the welfare bill there is a very sensible majority who say that this is at hand and actually if you

01:57:45.720 go further down the income scale working class people in particular are very aware of the issue

01:57:50.060 of welfare dependency i think it should be dealt with similarly net zero is starting to go in that

01:57:53.820 direction as well so yes i mean it's one of those things where at the very least we can probably

01:57:57.720 agree on the fact that we need more discussion about all these issues more aeration of them

01:58:02.200 because whilst we might have spent a lot of time focusing on the cultural side there is also this

01:58:05.340 economic side which can occasionally be neglected in the midst of all this no absolutely i think

01:58:11.580 constantin posed the question which is do we live in a left-wing woke country and i think

01:58:17.740 to everybody here and to constantin i think next general election we're going to find out if we do

01:58:23.580 because if we continue down this same trajectory if we're seeing the problems that we talk about

01:58:30.220 if we're seeing these threats, which I consider to be existential, and they still vote for Labour,

01:58:36.380 and they still want a left wing government, then that will show where the public ultimately stand

01:58:42.780 as a whole. And even if it's a coalition, it shows that yes, we do. And I think at that point,

01:58:50.620 it will become undeniable. We're right. We've done two hours,

01:58:55.260 and we've got to wrap up. But I will just say, if you come back to our earlier conversation,

01:58:59.340 pretty much all of us predicted that the next election could well be a labor and possibly

01:59:05.800 left-wing coalition um so that would say that we maybe do live in a country that at least with

01:59:12.100 you know the way democracy works the constituency system etc um this is this is the reality so uh

01:59:19.360 get get get ready to pay more tax uh and uh love your uh new neighbor

01:59:25.320 get ready to learn arabic yeah fantastic and we will all be happy you know gentlemen uh it's been

01:59:35.980 uh off the fence has been extra spicy and long this week uh thank you for watching thanks for

01:59:41.340 being here everybody of course thanks for watching and listening make sure you like subscribe and

01:59:46.080 tell us what you think about the show we love hearing from you and we'll see you again next week

TRIGGERnometry - September 25, 2026

Englishness Debate, Migrant Protest Leader Arrested & Burnham's Ministry of Truth - Off the Fence

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