00:06:54.300And this is actually bigger, potentially, you know, you're talking, it started off with
00:06:59.380200,000 people, you had hundreds of thousands of people after that, still tens of thousands
00:07:03.600of people going out week in, week out. It's been going on for over five months. And what's
00:07:13.000extraordinary to me is the way that it just doesn't really get the kind of coverage you expect.
00:07:18.760You mentioned the BBC earlier. If this were Venezuela or something, it would be on television
00:07:25.560every day. And it's only happening across the channel. It's not difficult for a journalist to
00:07:31.340go over there like I did. I spent £35 to get on a coach to go to Paris to go talk to people. It's
00:07:36.580not hard, but that's not really happening. And it's quite funny because there are these kind of
00:07:41.880rumours going around the internet and people have asked me, you know, there's a rumour in Britain
00:07:45.760that there's a de-notice on the gilet jaune. The government has banned, you know, newspapers from
00:07:51.280reporting on it and people have asked me about that. Completely untrue. The truth is much sadder.
00:07:57.200people are just not interested. People in our establishment are not interested. People in the
00:08:01.440French establishment have to be interested because they're afraid of them and they're afraid of what
00:08:05.840might happen next. But there is a recognition that these are the wrong kind of people.
00:08:12.160These are the famous deplorables, the French deplorables, if you like. And so their needs,
00:08:19.600their interests, their demands do just sort of fall on deaf ears in a way.
00:08:25.040And what is it all about? Is it like a French Brexit where these are people who are against the EU or is it much more about, you know, as you said, the kind of people who've lost out through globalization, just wanting to, you know, have a job, have a house, have a secure, stable future for themselves and their children, maybe opposed to immigration. Just tell us a little bit about what is their kind of what is the core of their concerns?
00:08:48.000Yeah, I think it's, I mean, you know, the EU plays into it. And the EU has played a role in the diminishing of their living standards. And certainly the euro in the last, you know, 10 years has made it very difficult for, you know, the French economy and the French government to adapt to various changes. And that has had a real serious problem. You know, there are serious economic causes. Lots of people are, not only is there high unemployment, but people sort of know that if they lose their job now, that's it.
00:09:17.720These are people who have quite stagnant careers.
00:09:21.480Sorry, they don't even have careers at all.
00:13:32.040I mean, you know, but in fairness, you know, they want to make their voices heard because they don't think the issue's being taken seriously.
00:13:37.740but it's very strange that to be opposed to Islamists blowing children to bits in a pop concert
00:13:45.660is a far right position. I mean, it's bizarre. I think what it represents is the way that
00:13:53.740the working class, I mean, not only have they lost out economically over the last 30 years or
00:14:00.300whatever, but their status culturally has really been diminished. And I think this is very true
00:14:07.140this is true of the gilets jaunes, it's true of the brexiteers, it's like these people are
00:14:11.940these people are gammon, they're scum, they're uneducated, they don't understand the world,
00:14:17.220they don't understand how things should be. I think far right, the slur far right just
00:14:22.900embodies the way that these people are just not seen as important or worth listening to.
00:14:29.220What I find dangerous about that is that there are people who are far right.
00:14:32.260Of course, yeah. And then you get those two confused and suddenly no one knows what far
00:14:36.180right means anymore because we do need the label of far right for people who are far right yeah we
00:14:41.220have to be able to go no these people believe in white supremacy or killing jews or whatever
00:14:46.240and they're different but when you start to label massive groups of people yeah then that that's a
00:14:51.920problem oh it absolutely is a problem and the problem is i think with the gilets jaunes and
00:14:57.240with brexit in this country is a lot of it is like you said it's because people don't feel that
00:15:02.740they're represented nobody cares about them and that the only way that they've got in order to
00:15:07.400make their voices heard is to literally go out on the streets make themselves as visible as possible
00:15:12.920in order to have their voices heard and that's a really dangerous situation politically to be in
00:15:18.200that's right and it's true that you know across europe the mainstream parties have been getting
00:15:23.060becoming more and more distant from the from the public and in particular the people they're
00:15:28.180supposed to represent. So this is a particular problem for the left. It's emerging as a problem
00:15:35.080for the Labour Party. The centre-left parties in Europe have been absolutely massacred over the
00:15:41.420past couple of years. You see the Socialist Party in France goes from being in government to
00:15:47.500winning only around 10% or something in the elections. Similar things happening in Greece
00:15:53.180with their centre-left party. And in the Netherlands and in Italy, the Democratic Party,
00:15:57.580again, sort of center-left, Blairite party, completely massacred in the polls.
00:16:02.380And there is this enormous distance between, you know, especially the center-left parties
00:16:07.580who are now sort of representing a more middle-class urban intelligentsia rather than a kind of
00:16:15.240working-class base. And it's really interesting that they almost, they wish that they didn't
00:16:22.160have to represent these working-class people, actually. It's not that they're fretting about
00:16:26.400losing them particularly. Maybe some people are. But they almost feel morally tainted by having to
00:16:33.620represent these horrible working class people who are far right and hate immigrants and are
00:16:38.300homophobic, whatever, which they're not, of course. And you can really see that actually,
00:16:42.740it's really crystal clear in America with the Democrats. And if you listen to Democratic
00:16:48.520pollsters, there's this big argument between them as to whether they should even bother to
00:16:54.160represent the white working class. And there are people that say, we don't need them to win.
00:17:00.480We should just focus on these people. And there are obviously other more sensible people who say,
00:17:05.660you know, well, we should be represented in any way because they're working class people. That's
00:17:08.880what we're for, by the way. But they're genuinely people making arguments that the demographics are
00:17:14.820going to deliver us, you know, election victory after election victory anyway. Why do we need to
00:17:19.400bother with these deplorable people. And it's like they don't want their votes. It's like if
00:17:24.320those people vote for them, they're evil and tainted. It's completely bizarre.
00:17:30.000It's weird in this country as well, isn't it? Because Jeremy Corbyn, that's exactly the direction
00:17:34.240that Labour has gone under Corbyn. And Corbyn is an old trade unionist.
00:17:37.320Yeah. Well, the acceleration of Labour becoming a bourgeois party has happened faster under Corbyn
00:17:45.860than under Blair, which is extraordinary.
00:20:29.040And the police have been, on the whole, incredibly aggressive.
00:20:32.500they have been you know they have they've caused a number of injuries they're firing tear gas
00:20:39.220grenades they have these weapons called flashballs which are banned everywhere in europe apart from
00:20:44.400france and these are kind of um rubber bullets and they're supposed to be fired you know almost
00:20:51.720below the waist kind of thing just that they're supposed to stun people but the police have been
00:20:56.180firing them at people's heads and people have been losing their eyes you know scores of people
00:21:00.320have lost their eyes and, you know, will never recover from that. People have been losing their
00:21:05.040hands. There's a really good journalist called David Defresney on Twitter, and he has been
00:21:11.700collating all of the police aggressions that he can verify. And when I last checked, it was over
00:21:19.840780 incidents of, you know, police aggression that could be verified. And I mean, this is
00:21:26.360extraordinary. You know, if this were happening in some dictatorship, it would be roundly condemned.
00:21:32.920It wouldn't be off the television screens. But because it's Macron, you know, who is well liked
00:21:38.440by, you know, the British establishment, by the establishments in other countries,
00:21:43.880it's not really talked about. And it's certainly, you know, I'm not aware of the British government
00:21:50.480having issued any kind of condemnation in a way that they would if it were, you know,
00:21:54.780some far-flung part of the world. And it's also important to recognise it's not just the physical
00:22:01.540authoritarianism. It's not just that people are being beaten up in the streets by police.
00:22:06.300There has also been crackdowns on social media. There's new laws against so-called fake news.
00:22:13.840Fake news just means news that the government doesn't like. It's quite interesting that
00:22:18.680within weeks of that law coming out, a campaign by the French government was banned by Twitter
00:22:26.100as fake news. So the subjective nature of fake news is obviously there for all to see.
00:22:35.200Twitter, for instance, have been under pressure from the government, been banning certain
00:22:39.020activists. The government have also raided the offices of a newspaper called Mediapar.
00:22:45.800It's a left-wing newspaper, one of the few to stand up for the Gilets Jaunes, and they've been issued with a court order to raid their offices to basically retrieve the sources of all of these journalists, which is a big no-no in the supposedly free world.
00:23:06.780Marine Le Pen could go to jail for tweeting about ISIS.
00:23:41.300So there is an extreme authoritarianism coming over France under the rule of Emmanuel Macron, supposedly the liberal strongman, the person who we were promised was going to stand up against populism and authoritarianism and save Europe and European values.
00:24:04.320And it makes me incredibly sad to see what's going on over there.
00:24:07.420Do you think this is the death throes of the EU project?
00:28:12.280Well, the point I guess you're making is that it was much easier to have these working class voices that were often concerned about immigration, let's say, rather than have the debate about immigration.
00:28:24.640You just go, no, no, you're all a bunch of racists.
00:28:28.880And I think that the liberal establishment have found this fantastic way of preserving their interests.
00:28:36.040You know, it's absolutely genius because you only have to criticize any aspect of the setup and immediately you're derided as far-right, racist, whatever.
00:28:44.680You know, the gilet genre is a pertinent example of that.
00:28:47.960You know, there's nothing to do with immigration, but it has to be about immigration in order to, you know, silence it, I guess.
00:28:55.220If you are, if you criticize the European Union, you know, this is a classic example, you're a racist.
00:29:02.500But the European Union is, in my view, quite a racist construct.
00:29:07.260The fact is that if you look at the external borders of Europe, they're some of the strongest
00:29:14.780in the world, some of the longest fences and things like that.
00:29:19.620It's much worse than Trump's war, what is happening in Europe.
00:29:23.600Thousands and thousands of people have died trying to get into Europe because the border
00:29:30.660In North Africa, the European Union is paying militia to put people in camps or to basically round them up and some people are being sold into slavery.
00:29:44.180That seems pretty racist to me. But if you do that and you support the European Union, you're immune from the charge of racism, whereas a working class person who's concerned about immigration is a racist.
00:29:57.280or Nigel Farage puts up a poster with a load of refugees on it,
00:30:02.240that's racist and that needs to be outright condemned.
00:30:05.600But if you either support or preside over one of the most brutal borders
00:30:11.800in the entire world, well, you're not racist
00:30:14.640because you're supporting this wonderful project.
00:30:17.640So there's an entirely selective use of words like racist and far right.
00:30:24.380And I think it's to the benefit of basically, yeah, the liberal elites.
00:30:29.820They've created a moral force shield for their ideas and for their way of life and for their set up.
00:30:38.480Reading that article you wrote in Spite, what actually I found quite affecting was you talking about the poverty the Gilets Jeans live in and then how much money Macron spent at this time, I think, in order to refurbish his offices.
00:30:53.420That was what everyone was annoyed about. One of the weeks that I went, Macron had spent
00:31:00.200hundreds and hundreds of thousands of euros refitting his carpet. And it played into this
00:31:06.780image of Macron, which I think is quite real, of him as a kind of almost monarchical figure.
00:31:11.480They call him the president for the rich, which I think is quite true. But he doesn't help himself
00:31:18.080because he has this haughty attitude and he thinks that he deserves to be able to refit
00:31:23.840his carpet for hundreds of thousands of euros at the taxpayer's expense. He thinks that
00:31:28.800he basically wants to transform France into a kind of nation of startups where we're all just
00:31:36.520sitting in Paris on our laptops. I mean, it has no connection to real people's lives. He's very
00:31:43.240rude to poor people. You know, he can't even have a normal conversation with an ordinary person. He,
00:31:49.540you know, he slagged off a bunch of factory workers as illiterate. He was talking to a young
00:31:56.520unemployed farmer and just says, well, I can get you a job. Why don't you just walk down the street?
00:32:00.600He once described the people that are left behind, so to speak, as people who are nothing.
00:32:07.300and that was when he was trying to be nice about them.
00:32:12.140So it's good to see some of the Gilles Jeans saying,
00:33:17.800And before, I think there's been a little bit of a sea change now
00:33:21.640in that more and more people are seeing the way certain posts get censored.
00:33:26.040How big of this is a problem at the moment?
00:33:29.400And is it going to get worse, do you think?
00:33:31.180I think it's a massive problem at the moment.
00:33:32.800I mean, we've already seen Facebook in the week that we're recording this, or maybe it was the week before, have banned a number of people who they've called dangerous individuals.
00:33:44.340People like Paul Joseph Watson, Louis Farrakhan, the preacher, and who else?
00:33:52.160I mean, Alex Jones is already banned, but now you can't even praise Alex Jones.
00:33:57.140I don't know who'd want to praise Alex Jones, but you're not allowed to do it.
00:33:59.880I find him so funny. He's hilarious. I don't know. Who could find him dangerous? Who could
00:34:06.220find a man that rants about, you know, water turning the frogs gay and say, that man is
00:34:11.520dangerous. I think it's funny. So there's that. I mean, Twitter's banned a number of people from
00:34:17.840Tommy Robinson to Carl Benjamin and all these. And you might say, oh, we don't like these people,
00:34:22.620whatever. Who cares? But what I find really worrying is that these mega companies in Silicon
00:34:30.380Valley now seem to have taken on the role of the censor. And they can now decide what is acceptable
00:34:39.180speech and what is unacceptable speech. And they have absolutely no accountability to us. We can
00:34:45.840put pressure on them, I guess. We can write lots of tweets about it.
00:34:56.480And what is most bizarre is that actually people have been arguing for this to happen for a very long time.
00:35:04.340You know, lots of people from across the political spectrum have said the problem with Facebook and Twitter is that there's so much fake news.
00:35:12.700There's so many, you know, there's too many Russian trolls.
00:45:33.020Yeah. And you need to be able to expose wrongness in order to tackle it. You can't just assert that something is bad and shunt it away. The Nick Griffith episode is exactly that, I think.
00:45:50.120But I'm curious about your point about not needing regulation and being worried about it, because obviously I understand the mistrust of government 100 percent on the one hand.
00:45:59.480On the other hand, I think this idea that, you know, trigonometry and spike and, you know, a few other people who care about free speech are just going to get together and put pressure on Twitter and Facebook and Google.
00:46:11.480Well, we've got to meet with Zuckerberg on Friday, haven't we?
00:46:13.440Yes, we have about our future upcoming bans, about how we're going to get banned from everything.
00:46:22.000But I think this idea that there's going to be enough of us putting that pressure, I don't see that as a credible way to deal with.
00:46:32.080I mean, look at, as you know, I'm not a big fan of Donald Trump, but if you look at that leaked Google meeting video, did you ever see that?
00:46:40.220Was that the kindly sent someone or something like that?
00:46:42.720I don't remember, but basically the day after, they had a massive meeting after Trump's election in 2016.
00:46:48.040And they were all in tears crying and going on about how we must never let this happen again.
00:47:06.660So I don't, but my point is, I don't think that people respond to incentives, right?
00:47:10.700I don't think you and me and a few other people complaining about the need for free speech is ever going to be a strong enough incentive for a huge tech company to allow people the freedom to speak, which is why I think we will eventually have to have some kind of First Amendment for the Internet of some kind.
00:47:28.980Well, I think what we need is, you know, you're right, a few of us talking about it is not going to change the world.
00:47:36.280But what we need is a broader cultural shift.
00:47:38.620You know, the problem is that culturally free speech is not valued and there's no reason why it couldn't be in the future.
00:47:47.360I mean, the thing, you know, the First Amendment is a good example because, you know, obviously there is a First Amendment in America.
00:47:53.480But it's not as if, you know, you go on a college campus or whatever, and they have free speech. Far from it. There's a hostility to free speech among a lot of young politically active people. And, you know, you can't tackle that through legal means. That requires a cultural change. And, you know, it's going to be a hell of a lot of work. It's not going to come easy at all.
00:48:18.680Well, I'm not sure I agree with you there, because we had Jeffrey Miller on the show, who you may know, and he was talking about free speech on campuses in America. And one of the things he was talking about is actually Donald Trump has put in, he's put in threats and he's made threats that universities or colleges that don't uphold the First Amendment principles will lose funding and stuff like that.
00:48:38.580So the law, if it's correctly calibrated, can be used to mandate freedom.
00:50:13.860I don't think there's anything right-wing about it.
00:50:15.480I mean, it's an incredibly, it's actually a really radical idea.
00:50:19.560You know, the idea that everyone should be allowed to speak,
00:50:23.800that should be permitted to speak, and should be trusted to listen to everyone.
00:50:29.740Right. I mean, it's traditionally it has been the right that has sought to clamp down on free speech, you know, whether that's through censorship of the theater or, you know, we had Mary Whitehouse in the 80s complaining about sex and all that stuff.
00:50:42.960It's only, I suppose, there's always been censorious elements in the left. Of course, I mean, we had Stalinism, for Christ's sake.
00:50:48.440It's not, you know. But it's interesting that in the 60s in America, you know, you had a lot of radicals and kind of hippie types who were very pro-free speech.
00:50:58.480And they recognized that free speech was a tool for them to affect social change and to, you know, make the changes that they wanted.
00:51:07.700There would be no civil rights movement without free speech. There'd be no feminist movement without free speech because...
00:52:09.020And you're right, yeah, why shouldn't they say what they like?
00:52:10.500but they wouldn't defend free speech in any other circumstance.
00:52:13.900So, you know, free speech is not so much a left-right issue,
00:52:22.300but I think who supports it, who's against it,
00:52:25.260depends very much on where we are, you know, in a period of time.
00:52:29.060And at the moment, you know, culturally the right are on the back foot
00:52:31.920and so it's their speech that's being suppressed
00:52:35.960and we need to defend their free speech.
00:52:38.160and that's what happens is uh we seem to be in this world now where we play this
00:52:42.660association game all the time yeah it's like oh you believe in free speech who else believes in
00:52:47.940free speech let's ignore the people in the middle let's go to the far right oh you and this guy
00:52:53.060believes in free and and it's always about like who can you associate with this particular view
00:52:58.260we're constantly playing this like six degrees of white supremacy like how do you connect this
00:53:02.640person that'd be a great board game six degrees of white supremacy but what I particularly wanted
00:53:10.580to ask you about is this culture of fear that has now started which I've seen a lot and you know I
00:53:17.820work in comedy where it's ultra liberal and then you do the classic over the shoulder blah blah blah
00:53:22.120I was in uh last week I was in a burger restaurant with my girlfriend and a chap sat down next to me
00:53:28.940he recognised me from trigonometry, looked over his shoulder and said,
00:53:34.280thank you for what you're doing, and then went, almost whispered,
00:53:38.160but you know you're going to get banned like everyone else.
00:53:40.940And we do live in this culture of fear where we worry about things being said
00:53:46.460or misinterpreted and saying things which aren't controversial in any shape
00:53:50.600or form, but worrying that it's going to get overheard and people are going
00:53:53.700to lose jobs, our careers, our reputations are going to get damaged.
00:53:57.240Yeah, I think that's absolutely right.
00:53:58.640And I think that what is really interesting, what's been really interesting over the last few years is that free speech did seem a bit of, you know, I've always been a fan of free speech, but it was once a bit of a niche issue.
00:54:09.220It's like what people would say to me, you know, when I'm actually a bit bored about talking about college campuses now because it's like, no, this is the real world now.
00:54:18.380But when I was talking, when I was talking about that years ago, people said, why do you care?
00:54:21.540I was like, well, because there are going to be real consequences if we let this happen.
00:54:24.780And now ordinary people who have very normal, average opinions, sometimes in the majority opinion, feel as if they cannot speak, feel as if they cannot speak their minds normally and just say what they think. And that's really, really scary. And that's really, really troubling.
00:54:43.760I was doing some research for my Edinburgh show, which I'm doing about this whole SOAS, behavioral agreement form, contract.
00:54:50.760And last year in Russia, because I want to contrast what's happening in the UK with what's happening in Russia,
00:54:56.760400 people were arrested for things they said online.
00:56:22.480But is it, hold on, the counter-argument might be, well, look, you're free to express your opinion about Brexit.
00:56:27.940And the fact that your neighbor might not like you and throw dog poo over the garden wall doesn't mean that you're being censored.
00:56:35.100Well, I think if there, A, it is possible to be censored. I mean, censorship doesn't just come from, you know, the state slamming its boot on your face. There are many ways that people can be, you know, silenced, whether it's just through, you know, through fear, through, you know, feeling that you can't express a certain view.
00:56:59.820There is also, you know, low level kind of low level policing of these things as well with around hate incidents.
00:57:06.760So technically, someone has been reported to the police for voting for Brexit and the police have recorded that as a hate incident.
00:57:13.860So it can happen. There's no consequences to that for you legally, but that's pretty scary.
00:57:19.780Right. Or, you know, there was a guy who posted a a limerick about transgenderism on his Twitter.
00:57:26.880and he gets a phone call from the police.
00:59:20.840The one thing that people aren't talking about is, I think, class. And it's interesting that in an age of identity where we are and of intersectionality, I suppose, we're obsessed with dividing people into these little boxes of race, sexuality, gender.
00:59:43.220We'll even invent new boxes for, you know, people who fancy it.