TRIGGERnometry - Is Mass Immigration Making Women Less Safe？ - Alex Phillips

00:00:01.000 You know, a lot of women increasingly feel very unsafe,

00:00:04.000 particularly in the centres of our cities.

00:00:06.000 A man is going to not see it 0.95

00:00:08.000 because if you're with a man, it's a blocking factor.

00:00:10.000 You don't get the street harassment.

00:00:12.000 There is a direct correlation

00:00:14.000 between migratory flows from certain nations

00:00:17.000 and the uptick in sexual harassment, rape and assault.

00:00:21.000 I'm listening to this and I'm thinking to myself,

00:00:24.000 right, well, why aren't the feminists on the case? 1.00

00:00:26.000 There just doesn't seem the willingness

00:00:28.000 to tackle very thorny issues anymore.

00:00:31.000 Is it a lack of willingness? Are they scared?

00:00:35.000 Alex, thanks for coming on.

00:00:36.000 It's great to have you on finally.

00:00:38.000 There's lots of stuff you've been talking about in recent days

00:00:41.000 and actually we had you booked before all of these riots have happened.

00:00:45.000 And what we wanted to talk to you about

00:00:47.000 is something that you've been talking about

00:00:49.000 which needs to be talked about,

00:00:50.000 which is the fact that, you know,

00:00:53.000 a lot of women increasingly feel very unsafe

00:00:56.000 and particularly in the centres of our cities.

00:00:58.000 Yeah, I feel like we've got a pre- and post-riot Britain, don't we?

00:01:02.000 It's almost like now I feel I've got to self-censor

00:01:04.000 and really monitor everything I'm saying

00:01:06.000 when it comes to this debate, which is kind of a sort of

00:01:09.000 horrible, anxiety-inducing, dystopian feeling.

00:01:12.000 Well, don't censor yourself because...

00:01:14.000 No, that's what this is all about.

00:01:16.000 No, I think, look, it's very obvious, OK?

00:01:20.000 When you look around the world at various other countries,

00:01:23.000 their cultural mores and normatives are different to ours.

00:01:26.000 I don't think we need to make a pretense of that

00:01:28.000 because that's part of the reason people would argue

00:01:30.000 that people flee these countries,

00:01:32.000 that people come to the UK for refuge.

00:01:36.000 And particularly when we look at North African,

00:01:38.000 Middle Eastern countries or countries across Africa, actually,

00:01:42.000 but parts of the world where you might have an Orthodox Muslim element to society,

00:01:47.000 women's rights aren't exactly top of their list. 1.00

00:01:50.000 And so men living in those cultures

00:01:54.000 have a very different idea of how women should behave, first of all, 1.00

00:01:58.000 and then how they should behave towards women.

00:02:01.000 I think, you know, this isn't just about you come from this country

00:02:05.000 and you're going to have views that are incompatible with our own.

00:02:08.000 There is built into this, I think, a class element as well.

00:02:12.000 If you get a sort of Afghan physicist, for example,

00:02:15.000 someone who's university educated,

00:02:17.000 who has probably had a lot of exposure to the Western world,

00:02:20.000 they're probably going to have a very different view of liberties and rights,

00:02:25.000 perhaps a far more progressive framework to their internalised morality

00:02:30.000 than someone who's lower down the pecking order.

00:02:33.000 And so when it comes to immigration, it's about both quality and quantity.

00:02:39.000 And I think what the West has seen a lot of over recent years

00:02:44.000 has been an influx of men coming from countries

00:02:47.000 where they have been brought up to have a very different viewpoint towards women.

00:02:52.000 And their exposure has been very different to that of a Western male,

00:02:57.000 both in terms of how women dress, whether or not women are visible in society.

00:03:02.000 But as well as those simple things, you've also got an underlying current

00:03:06.000 of the pornification of society.

00:03:08.000 So, you know, actually most Islamic countries have ways to ban, 0.99

00:03:14.000 especially user-generated porn content.

00:03:17.000 People have VPNs and so on and so forth.

00:03:20.000 But when this material does reach them, men from other cultures,

00:03:23.000 they're probably more likely to be seeing women in those videos who are Western. 0.52

00:03:28.000 And then, of course, we can start talking about the sort of content

00:03:31.000 that's in those videos.

00:03:33.000 And that affects all men who are sort of regular

00:03:36.000 and, you know, consumers of most online pornography today.

00:03:40.000 It isn't sort of shaped in the whole 1970s way.

00:03:43.000 Can I repair your washing machine and sort of, you know, filtered light?

00:03:49.000 That's not quite far away from the sort of content being mass produced today.

00:03:54.000 So you put all these factors together and then you put these men into a country 0.96

00:03:59.000 where there are women going out in miniskirts and getting drunk. 1.00

00:04:02.000 And then you add on top of that another layer of complexity,

00:04:06.000 which is women are being told that your body's your own to do what you want with. 1.00

00:04:10.000 And pop culture has itself been hyper-sexualized.

00:04:15.000 And you've created a cocktail where, you know, something's going to go very wrong.

00:04:22.000 And it is.

00:04:23.000 One of the things I found interesting is you are actually somebody who's incredibly well-traveled.

00:04:27.000 You've lived in many different parts of the world.

00:04:29.000 How does that inform your particular willingness to speak out about this?

00:04:33.000 Hugely, because, you know, one thing I find from living in not all countries,

00:04:38.000 but Ghana, for instance, and Kenya, is that this idea of woke,

00:04:43.000 this idea of taboo and you can't talk about the difficult subjects, doesn't exist.

00:04:46.000 No, it's not.

00:04:47.000 They are not constrained by some of the things, the straitjackets,

00:04:51.000 that we have self-imposed on our societies in the Western world.

00:04:54.000 But actually, it's not just the subject of this sort of huge cultural clash going on with the safety of women.

00:05:03.000 There are so many other subjects which are being not discussed fully or hidden from view or not taken seriously,

00:05:09.000 which are having devastating consequences.

00:05:12.000 And where taboos are in other cultures, the religious cultures, the religious taboos and cultural taboos,

00:05:21.000 ours are largely built around language and the sharing of information.

00:05:25.000 And that is something that I think is incredibly perilous if we want to progress a society

00:05:30.000 and deal with some of the massive issues we're facing.

00:05:33.000 Alex, there's going to be a lot of people who are watching this interview, blokes, shall we just call them, who...

00:05:40.000 I like to do that in the 21st century.

00:05:42.000 Yeah, yeah, blokes, blokes, men.

00:05:44.000 And they're not really aware of the challenges that a woman might face.

00:05:50.000 So, can you just explain to us the challenges that are facing women at the moment from this particular issue?

00:05:58.000 Okay.

00:05:59.000 And also, how has it got worse over the years?

00:06:02.000 Okay.

00:06:03.000 I mean, it's interesting because, you know, I often think a man is going to not see it.

00:06:06.000 Because if you're with a man, it's a blocking factor.

00:06:08.000 You don't get the street harassment.

00:06:10.000 When I'm walking down the street with my boyfriend, men aren't coming up to me trying to, you know,

00:06:15.000 get in my personal space, follow me, chat me up.

00:06:17.000 So that is weird.

00:06:18.000 It's sort of like, you know, doubles the potential for men not having this visible in front of them.

00:06:24.000 But, you know, I'm not the sort of woman who goes, oh, you know, someone who looks at me or tries to chat me up with wolf whistles.

00:06:32.000 That's awful.

00:06:33.000 You know, I think that's sort of hyper-feminism, if you want to call it that. 1.00

00:06:37.000 I don't think it's feminism at all, actually sort of breeds distrust between the sexes, which has a very sort of negative outcome. 1.00

00:06:44.000 But if a man is being persistent, if they're following you, if they're trying to touch you, if there's an element of sort of intimidation there,

00:06:54.000 then all of a sudden a situation that's an innocent conversation suddenly becomes extremely anxiety-inducing for a start.

00:07:04.000 And then, look, we know, don't we, from the grooming gangs that we have had across the United Kingdom,

00:07:11.000 that these are culturally dominated by men from the sort of countries and backgrounds with the same mores that I'm talking about.

00:07:19.000 So this isn't some sort of brand-new information.

00:07:22.000 It's something we all know, still feel afraid to talk about, and are still loathe to address.

00:07:27.000 But in the last week, the last week alone, okay, so I've had my friend call me up talking to me about how men who she believed to be Arabic men

00:07:38.000 were intimidating her, blocking her, pushing her towards the wall, you know, preventing her from passing.

00:07:46.000 She actually reported it to the police, and when the policeman came, she said to me that she had a sense that it wasn't being taken seriously,

00:07:55.000 and the policeman kept saying, do you know I'm a Muslim? I'm a Muslim.

00:07:58.000 And that kind of made her feel even sort of less able to talk about what had happened.

00:08:03.000 And just yesterday, I was told by a girl that I'm working with at present that she got off the tube to walk home after the show,

00:08:13.000 and she lives in the same neighbourhood as me, and there was a half-dressed man who was sort of kneeling, doing prayers on the side of the street,

00:08:21.000 with a Quran next to him, and people sort of walking past. This must have been about, let's say, half 10, 11 at night, people walking past.

00:08:29.000 And she walked and sort of, you know, looked across the other side, and he sort of caught her, I saw her,

00:08:35.000 and started running after her, brandishing a knife. And I was like, oh my gosh, that's terrifying.

00:08:42.000 And I said, what did you do? He said, well, you know, I reported to the police, and the police turned up,

00:08:45.000 and they said, you know, he's got mental health issues. And I was like, are you feeling fine?

00:08:49.000 And she was like, yeah, normal now, isn't it? I mean, how crazy is that, that these things have become so normalised?

00:08:56.000 I mean, I personally have had, sometimes, you know, just, it happens regularly.

00:09:01.000 I'd say almost every day that I walk down the street that I live, there will be groups of men who leer.

00:09:08.000 And there's a difference, I think, between men who sort of go, oi, oi, check her out.

00:09:14.000 And that feeling that you are being quietly and silently and sort of persistently tracked with eyes.

00:09:22.000 I've had people come up to me in the supermarket, you know, actually it's not the accent that they have.

00:09:28.000 But they're like, you know, I like you, you're beautiful, you're beautiful.

00:09:32.000 What is your name? I want to get to know you. Will you be my friend? What is your name?

00:09:36.000 I've been followed, this is in broad daylight, down to the front door of my house.

00:09:41.000 And I had to pretend that wasn't my street and sort of do a little U-turn.

00:09:45.000 And my next door neighbour's son happened to be walking down the road, thank goodness,

00:09:48.000 because I just sort of gave an imploring look and followed him into the house and hid in there.

00:09:53.000 And he went and checked and this guy was outside for like half an hour or something

00:09:57.000 before I felt safe to go into my home.

00:10:00.000 And he had sort of followed me down the street, this guy, very close quarters, chuntering away.

00:10:05.000 And he had, I think it's a coal pot, those ones from Afghanistan that fold up. 1.00

00:10:09.000 And I remember talking to someone about this and they said, well, he sounds like a nutter.

00:10:14.000 And I'm like, well, great, because, you know, the people most likely to act on impulses without any sort of, you know, 0.60

00:10:20.000 filter or any sort of blocking mechanism are likely to have mental health conditions.

00:10:25.000 I was walking up the street the other day and I had, oh, smile, love.

00:10:29.000 You know, that to me is a bit different.

00:10:33.000 So there is a, you know, the difference between our smile, love, as you walk past someone,

00:10:38.000 and then the following you to your front door, it's, you know, it's chilling.

00:10:44.000 It's chilling, quite frankly.

00:10:46.000 And I think if we look at statistics in other countries where they do keep a record of these things,

00:10:51.000 it is plain to see, if you look at the statistics in Denmark, if you look at the statistics in Sweden,

00:10:57.000 it is plain to see in those countries that there is a direct correlation between migratory flows from certain nations

00:11:06.000 and the uptick in sexual harassment, rape and assault.

00:11:09.000 I mean, you can have sort of league tables in these countries where they record by nationality 0.69

00:11:15.000 and the domination of predominantly Muslim countries in those statistics is eye-watering. 0.71

00:11:22.000 And I think we, you know, it's amazing, isn't it, how quick, quickly we allow ourselves to forget things

00:11:28.000 that made massive news headlines that should have been the trigger.

00:11:31.000 It should have been the catalyst for having a conversation about these things.

00:11:35.000 One that springs to mind is the mass sexual assaults and even rapes that happened New Year's Eve in Cologne.

00:11:43.000 I think it's 2016, when people had gathered in the main square.

00:11:48.000 And women were being surrounded by groups of men. 0.96

00:11:52.000 And within this structure, they protected each other and themselves to enable themselves to target women

00:11:58.000 and, you know, physically assault them.

00:12:01.000 And 1,250 assaults and rapes were recorded that night.

00:12:06.000 And all of them were perpetrated by men of North African or Middle Eastern origin.

00:12:12.000 I mean, that's been reported widely in the BBC.

00:12:17.000 You open news websites now.

00:12:19.000 You've had a couple of really horrific cases lately, one in Belgium, one in France,

00:12:25.000 of very young girls who have been gang raped.

00:12:29.000 There have been lots of reports lately of women who have been raped basically in broad daylight near the Eiffel Tower,

00:12:35.000 the Australian tourist, just before she was going to go home.

00:12:38.000 And every single time there is a pattern, there is a trend with who are the perpetrators.

00:12:43.000 Now, this is not to say that rape exclusively occurs within these scenarios of people from particular countries and cultures,

00:12:51.000 nor is it to say that people from these countries or cultures are predominantly that way inclined.

00:12:57.000 And this is the problem.

00:12:59.000 We've had such a sort of reductive argument about everything that we're not having a constructive argument.

00:13:05.000 When it's quite clear to me, if you put all of that together, we have a big problem.

00:13:10.000 And women, women right now, are really, really at risk.

00:13:14.000 And so I'm listening to this and I'm thinking to myself, right, well, why aren't the feminists on the case? 1.00

00:13:20.000 Because were you...

00:13:22.000 Where are they?

00:13:23.000 Do they exist?

00:13:25.000 Well, it's interesting, isn't it?

00:13:26.000 I don't understand.

00:13:27.000 Because we have spent...

00:13:28.000 Sorry to interrupt you.

00:13:29.000 I mean, such a good point.

00:13:30.000 Like, I remember when we started the show in 2018, the entire conversation about women's, women's safety,

00:13:37.000 it was about, like, sexist air conditioning in offices.

00:13:40.000 It was the pay gap.

00:13:42.000 Firefighters' uniforms.

00:13:43.000 Firefighters' uniforms.

00:13:44.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:13:45.000 All of that.

00:13:46.000 And I remember there were people adamant screaming on Good Morning Britain and everywhere about the need to improve. 0.75

00:13:52.000 And I'm going, now people are getting raped and you're nowhere.

00:13:55.000 Like, how did that happen?

00:13:56.000 We banned page three and then allowed to be watched by eight-year-olds.

00:14:00.000 Make it make sense.

00:14:01.000 Progress.

00:14:02.000 Yeah. 0.98

00:14:03.000 It's ridiculous. 0.96

00:14:05.000 And, you know, we can go on a really strange tangent here. 0.94

00:14:09.000 I'm sure you love a strange tangent.

00:14:11.000 But one thing that I can't get my head around is the cultural phenomenon of the Kardashians.

00:14:17.000 What is going on there, okay?

00:14:20.000 This family sort of came out of nowhere via the medium of a sex tape and basically, you know, propagation on the internet.

00:14:28.000 They don't have discernible talents.

00:14:30.000 You know, they don't sing.

00:14:31.000 They don't act.

00:14:32.000 They're not sportswomen. 0.55

00:14:34.000 They have been made on a surgical table for the male gaze, right? 0.84

00:14:41.000 And from this one's family.

00:14:43.000 I don't know about the male gaze, but there's a very simple answer to your point.

00:14:47.000 The male gaze.

00:14:48.000 Yeah.

00:14:49.000 But when you look at the industry, right, that's come out of that brand, okay, all the pharmaceuticals and cosmetics, the lip fillers, the boob jobs, all the rest of it.

00:14:56.000 And when you look again at some of the other things connected to Silicon Valley that have come out of that one family, filters and all the rest of it.

00:15:04.000 When you look at how ubiquitous this is internationally, you know, you can go to an Arab nation and women have lip fillers. 1.00

00:15:11.000 You can go to, you know, they have a sort of almost racially ambiguousness about them, ambiguity.

00:15:17.000 But I'm like, what is this phenomenon?

00:15:21.000 You know, are they a phenomenon or is there something going on here?

00:15:24.000 I don't know.

00:15:25.000 Oh, it's very simple.

00:15:26.000 We spend a lot of time.

00:15:27.000 The reason is Americans don't have royals.

00:15:29.000 So they have to make ones.

00:15:31.000 The things you're talking about, no discernible talent.

00:15:34.000 Nobody knows what they're for.

00:15:35.000 Nobody knows how they got there.

00:15:36.000 Nobody knows what their purpose is.

00:15:38.000 That's royals.

00:15:39.000 Well, no.

00:15:40.000 They're like aristocracy.

00:15:41.000 I've often said that that is, you know, that is definitely a parallel to draw.

00:15:44.000 Yeah.

00:15:45.000 But it is to me, there's something sort of strangely cynical about this family.

00:15:49.000 There's something odd to me that, and sort of a lot of the cultural things that concern us now, whether it be pornification, as I call it, hypersexualization,

00:16:00.000 the various dysphorias that are going on.

00:16:04.000 Don't forget, of course, you know, on top of what you've got is the general sort of body and facial dysphoria coming from the avatarization of young girls wanting to look a certain way online.

00:16:14.000 Up pops Caitlyn Jenner.

00:16:17.000 Hurrah!

00:16:18.000 The first sort of trans person to be on the front of Time magazine.

00:16:20.000 Woman of the year, I think you'll find.

00:16:21.000 Exactly. 0.71

00:16:22.000 And then, oh, that's now a new cultural thing that is sort of, you know, riddling the world with mental illness. 0.87

00:16:27.000 So, you know, the Kardashian family conveniently seemed to start all sorts of trends that we're now finding, in retrospect, quite problematic.

00:16:37.000 I'm curious why you think it's the male gaze, though, that's driving some of this, because this is a conversation I've always wanted to have.

00:16:44.000 Because a lot of people say that, but then I'm going, well, who buys, like, I don't know many men who are saying to their missus, I think you should get some lip fillers.

00:16:54.000 It's not the male gaze that's driving it.

00:16:56.000 What I said is these people are made on a surgical table for the male gaze.

00:17:00.000 I'm not saying men are actually asking for that, because I think you're right. 0.93

00:17:03.000 Interestingly, a great number of men don't want a woman who looks like Picasso's made her in a fit of rage.

00:17:11.000 You know, but it's weird that with this is almost coming this sort of indoctrination that men should want that, that these are the sorts of things that they should desire in the opposite sex.

00:17:21.000 And actually standards of beauty are often driven by commercial elements.

00:17:26.000 So, you know, it wasn't fashionable to have a suntan because that means you worked in a farm and were, you know, part of the agricultural lower classes until Coco Chanel, you know, went on holiday and stepped off a yacht with a tan.

00:17:39.000 And all of a sudden that was a sign of wealth.

00:17:41.000 So, you know, the standards of beauty and aesthetics and sort of indoctrination culturally of what that should mean is often driven commercially.

00:17:50.000 So, no, I'm not saying men have gone like, we want big lips.

00:17:54.000 We want big lips.

00:17:55.000 But there is this phenomenon that that is definitely what's happening.

00:17:59.000 It's such a good point, because if you think back to the 90s when it was heroin chic, it was Kate Moss.

00:18:04.000 It was all of these other models who were horrifically thin and to the point that they looked unwell, hence the term heroin chic.

00:18:13.000 I don't know any man who would look at that bag of bones and go.

00:18:17.000 Right. And in the 90s, what was one of the biggest industries?

00:18:20.000 It was the weight loss industry.

00:18:21.000 It was have margarine, not butter.

00:18:23.000 It was slim fast.

00:18:24.000 It was Weight Watchers.

00:18:26.000 You know, like I said, the sort of relationship between commerce and cultural aesthetics is really closely bound.

00:18:35.000 And in both directions, you know, there's a causal factor in both directions, I'd imagine.

00:18:40.000 But in the 21st century, the Kardashians are the pinnacle of this relationship.

00:18:45.000 And I think that's being incredibly destructive to women's mental health and frankly to just, you know, it feeds into as well the concept of reducing people down to the components of their body rather than having a whole relationship on an emotional basis or valuing people by the content of their character.

00:19:06.000 Which again, it's sort of stripping people of humanity and adds to that avatarisation we're finding in society.

00:19:13.000 Is that where the big ass spirits are? Sorry, Frances. I've been talking about this for a long time. Where did these big asses come from? When did that become a thing? 1.00

00:19:20.000 The Kardashians. And also, like I said, you know, the interesting thing about this and a commercial, if you were someone commercial going, OK, we need to make an aesthetic that's going to appeal to as many people as possible.

00:19:31.000 We've now got a far more obese society for a start. So a lot more white women have bigger bums than they might have done a while ago. 1.00

00:19:36.000 But also, like I said, there's a sort of racial ambiguity. It's sort of flattening out what are the most attractive aesthetic elements that anyone from any race can say, I've got some of that.

00:19:48.460 I've got, you know, a particular shape of body, a particular frame of body, or I don't have that, but I can have some boobs put on and some, you know, lips done.

00:19:56.620 And it is sort of homogenizing, let's say, across all races. The sort of what used to be aesthetic variation when it came to beauty is now sort of being churned into something that can be a one size fits all.

00:20:10.400 And again, that's represented by the Kardashians.

00:20:12.680 Yeah, it's because if you look at, for instance, hip-hop culture, the girls who appeared in those kind of hip-hop magazines and hip-hop videos look very different to the girls who appeared or the women that appeared in Vogue in the 90s and the same with Latin magazines.

00:20:27.380 Whereas now, because all of these cultures have come together, and you actually see it really interestingly in models, there is a thing for all models now.

00:20:37.340 Like you just see, the ones that are really successful look racially ambiguous.

00:20:41.720 Yeah, of course. Well, no, actually, what's increasingly happened is the ones that are really successful look gender ambiguous, don't they?

00:20:49.580 And like I said, it's sort of driving us forward increasingly into a world which is strips of identity and humanity.

00:20:56.700 We're made to recognize ourselves through the prisms of identity, not through what we are in reality.

00:21:04.240 And it's sort of creating this sort of virtual plane upon which everyone's being increasingly driven.

00:21:09.860 And that's having so many effects on people's psychology across the board, particularly young people.

00:21:16.040 But it's affecting all of humanity right now.

00:21:18.640 So let's go back to the feminism point, because I actually think this is really important.

00:21:22.880 And I think it talks about hypocrisy from that particular movement where they would want to talk about things like rape culture, for instance.

00:21:32.580 And they say, you know, society, you know, a male society is a society that has rape culture within it, etc., etc., etc.

00:21:39.940 But then you think that they would be the ones talking about this.

00:21:45.020 Why do you think that they haven't and they won't?

00:21:49.360 Well, look, it's very easy, isn't it?

00:21:50.760 If you just look at the sort of language taboos surrounding our culture and the prisms through which we're supposed to see things, there is a hierarchy.

00:21:58.460 There is a hierarchy when it comes to victimhood.

00:22:01.720 There's a hierarchy when it comes to protected characteristics.

00:22:06.220 And at the top of all of this is somebody's race.

00:22:10.140 Skin color comes top. 0.93

00:22:12.580 And then second is the concept of oppressor, oppressee.

00:22:19.060 And when you put that into a religious context over in the West, it's religious minorities, but at the moment, particularly Islam, I think, because it would be the religion which would suffer the most backlash from the native population just due to events that have taken place over the course of, well, not just even recent history, but history in general.

00:22:39.760 And so there is this layering system.

00:22:42.860 And so, you know, what do you do when you have a middle class white girl who has been sexually assaulted by a 14 year old male refugee from a Middle Eastern country that the West had happened to invade?

00:22:57.340 You know, who gets to win in that?

00:22:59.340 Who gets the most amount of sympathy?

00:23:02.300 You know, this is it's so cynical and it's so distorting.

00:23:07.460 And increasingly, like I said, my feeling is that when you look at all these cultural phenomenons taken as one, that the end user who is at the highest risk of all of them, of all of them, are girls.

00:23:23.560 Even if you look at gender dysphoria, that was a largely a very rare male psychological condition, which is why when you see most of the trans activists out there of a certain generation, it's men who want to wear dresses.

00:23:36.000 Actually, what you've seen now is complete flip reverse of that.

00:23:40.400 And 75% of people presenting at gender clinics are girls.

00:23:44.580 There's multiple reasons for that.

00:23:46.400 OK, there's the hypersexualization element where they feel like they cannot live up to standards and therefore they feel ostracized and depressed.

00:23:53.400 They are also more likely biologically, the way they're wired, to have a sort of mass hysteria, to be influenced by peer groups.

00:24:04.380 And they are increasingly the ones, I think, being targeted with algorithms saying, have mastectomies, get breast binders.

00:24:13.120 You know, so, like I said, it's not a condition that's ever been prevalent in women. 1.00

00:24:20.300 You know, tomboys, by all means, not saying women can't sort of enjoy masculine things or connecting with a sort of what might be defined as a masculine side to themselves.

00:24:31.560 But the idea that women suffer from the actual psychological condition of gender dysphoria in history, it's been almost non-existent.

00:24:42.440 And yet it's the dominant part now.

00:24:45.200 Yeah. And it's what some of the points you're making are very interesting because if I think we can all agree in 2017, when the Me Too movement first started,

00:24:54.260 a lot of the people who they target at the beginning were wrong-uns, the Weinsteins, etc.

00:25:00.680 Yeah.

00:25:00.960 And then it reached a point of overreach where it said, believe all women, and then the movement became discredited, and then there was a backlash.

00:25:09.240 And now it just feels that the things that we actually should talk about when it comes to women, we're not having these conversations.

00:25:18.100 Yeah.

00:25:18.200 And it's created a vacuum which needs to be filled, really.

00:25:24.200 And you look at these, like, you know, big-name feminists, and there just doesn't seem the willingness to tackle very thorny issues anymore. 1.00

00:25:34.760 Is it a lack of willingness? Are they scared?

00:25:37.320 I think something else that has happened in society.

00:25:40.840 I don't like singling out individuals when I talk about things, but I think in the context of Jess Phillips, it's quite an interesting one.

00:25:47.040 Because she actually, right now, holds that portfolio in cabinet, okay?

00:25:52.120 And she has suffered enormously during her election campaign of, you know, threatening behaviour, intimidation, to the point it looks at on election night that she looks harrowed by it all.

00:26:05.880 And I think everyone has an idea of who would probably have been behind that, given a lot of Labour MPs suffered, and Conservative MPs, suffered a backlash about, or baseline Gaza.

00:26:22.200 And yet, she blamed it on men.

00:26:24.800 It's the fault of men. 0.85

00:26:26.780 Well, that, it's not men doing this.

00:26:30.780 This is a cultural decision based upon a foreign war, okay? 0.64

00:26:34.280 This isn't men at large.

00:26:37.200 And you ask yourself, well, why are people like her, who have campaigned so hard when it comes to domestic violence, why are they not really grabbing this issue?

00:26:45.240 Because we know that, you know, within certain communities, there are things like child marriages and FGM and Sharia law preventing people getting divorces and so on and so forth.

00:26:54.000 There are radical clerics out there who will be preaching to the people who turn up in the mosque that a man can have concubines and multiple wives, and a woman must always give her body to the man and so on and so forth.

00:27:05.620 So, why is she lily livid about talking to it?

00:27:09.500 Well, one can only assume it is for political expediency, because she'd worry about losing her seat. 1.00

00:27:16.600 The other element is that, you know, a genuine concern about a backlash, right?

00:27:21.640 That, you know, there is this problem we have in society, but if we talk about it, it's actually going to make it worse.

00:27:26.820 Or the other thing, which I'm beginning to realise with certain people, and I don't know, I don't want to sort of say about Jess, I don't know.

00:27:32.940 And I don't want to criticise her particularly personally, but she is a sort of an interesting subject matter in this instance.

00:27:40.560 I think something else that's happened within the middle classes is because they have known the rules of the game to get to where they wanted to get to, right?

00:27:48.320 If you wanted to go to editorial level at the BBC, if you want to become the, you know, on the executive board of a particular company,

00:27:57.360 and actually those thresholds have come lower where these expectations are in place, you've had to do your mandatory unconscious bias training.

00:28:06.720 Whatever you do, don't tell anyone you voted for Brexit, because they're not going to talk to you in the staff room.

00:28:11.620 You know, all of these things have been drummed into people so much to get to where they've gotten to,

00:28:17.520 that I think that they've actually got to the point that they gaslight themselves, that they genuinely believe that they can't take those glasses off now.

00:28:27.520 And it's funny, because the middle, the lower classes, the working classes have far less exposure to that sort of nonsense that's built into corporations,

00:28:36.040 and they're less likely to read, you know, things like the Guardian newspaper.

00:28:41.040 They've been far less exposed to that sort of the dominant cultural narratives, which I think really need to be unpicked and thrown in the bin.

00:28:48.680 They've been far less exposed to it.

00:28:50.300 They have this sort of, they've been inoculated against it because they've not really had to encounter that much of that.

00:28:56.760 And at the same time, they're also more likely to be living in the communities at the sharp end of the impacts of all the things we're not allowed to talk about.

00:29:03.860 So, I guess the question is, where do we go from here?

00:29:10.040 How do we make this situation better?

00:29:12.460 Because from what you're saying, it sounds unsustainable.

00:29:17.340 Of course it is.

00:29:18.300 Do you know, there's another, just this morning, okay, I was listening to Radio 4, listening to the news of the day,

00:29:24.440 and there's a big discussion about psychosis.

00:29:28.220 Of course, having, we've seen in recent years, we've seen Valdo Calacaine, that was the issue particularly being discussed,

00:29:35.320 that this young man had psychosis, had schizophrenia,

00:29:39.480 and there were no checks and balances when it comes to making sure he was being treated properly,

00:29:45.560 making sure that he was protected against himself, and society was protected against him.

00:29:49.080 And he went out and stabbed three people.

00:29:51.520 And one of the questions that Justin Webb asked, who of course is a, you know, highly reputable journalist,

00:29:57.600 is, you know, is it true that there's been a lot of finger wagging in the profession,

00:30:02.440 that when reports have been made about the fact that when it comes to care with people,

00:30:08.000 for people with these conditions, that there's been a lot of, you can't say that because of stigma.

00:30:12.960 And, and the answer was, well, yes, especially, you know, a lot of people in profession said,

00:30:18.180 you can't say this because it could be considered racist.

00:30:21.820 Now, I went on to the UK government's own website this morning, okay,

00:30:25.780 so while I'm putting on my makeup, I'm doing my Googling,

00:30:27.900 and it's the UK government's own website with statistics.

00:30:31.140 And the prevalence of schizophrenia as a condition within the white society is 0.3%.

00:30:38.900 That's both white Brits and Caucasian foreigners. 0.82

00:30:43.260 The prevalence of schizophrenia within the Afro-Caribbean black society is 3%.

00:30:48.860 So this is a huge factor, right?

00:30:51.200 3% is not, you know, loads of people, but it's a huge factor.

00:30:55.520 You're talking about a factor of a thousand, I think, a thousand times more.

00:31:00.420 And at the same time, when we've got a huge influx of drugs on our streets,

00:31:05.100 you know, drugs that actually compound problems if someone has a predisposure to something like

00:31:11.860 schizophrenia and then they're smoking cannabis or spice or whatever.

00:31:16.200 And, and yet what I'm hearing is why has that not been dealt with?

00:31:22.100 Because it's racist.

00:31:24.540 I mean, we can't go on like this.

00:31:27.520 We cannot go on trying desperately not to offend.

00:31:31.420 And on one hand, blocking conversations we need to be, need to be had for the protection

00:31:36.320 of all in society, those who suffer schizophrenia and those who've ended up on the very wrong

00:31:41.380 side of what a, you know, a schizophrenic attack might look like.

00:31:45.980 But also the sort of fetishization of race on the other hand.

00:31:51.160 So it's one thing we're not allowed to talk about when it's necessary to talk about.

00:31:55.060 And when it's completely unnecessary to talk about, we have to see everything through its

00:31:59.320 prism, at which point you end up with, you know, everything being based on color of skin,

00:32:04.900 which to me sort of engenders racism.

00:32:07.980 It's so bizarre.

00:32:09.740 It's so bizarre that when we need to talk about it, we're not allowed to.

00:32:13.060 And when we really don't need to talk about it and it shouldn't come into anything, we're

00:32:16.940 being forced to.

00:32:18.500 That's a really good point.

00:32:19.380 And I think the thread that runs through everything you're talking about is because of how sensitive

00:32:26.360 we've become about race as an issue, it means that we're essentially unable to recognize

00:32:34.240 that cultures, religions have their own differences.

00:32:39.840 People are not the same.

00:32:41.980 Of course that's true.

00:32:43.320 Because otherwise, the whole basis upon which people claim asylum no longer makes sense anymore,

00:32:47.720 does it?

00:32:48.560 You know, I can't be a gay man in the country where I come from.

00:32:52.300 So this is the thing.

00:32:53.380 Nothing makes sense anymore.

00:32:55.000 If you look at social media, for example, there's now a huge outcry to, you know, censor,

00:32:59.780 to ban, to regulate Twitter, X.

00:33:03.580 If you imagine social media is the real world, not the virtual world, then that is conversation.

00:33:09.200 That is the thing they're worried about, conversation.

00:33:11.560 The one they're going after is the platform.

00:33:13.260 It's the fora.

00:33:14.300 It's the marketplace.

00:33:15.180 It's where, and actually, by and large, it's where people like us get together, okay?

00:33:19.260 It's not, it's largely, not always, but that's where journalists, politicians, intellectuals,

00:33:25.440 commentators get together and share their information and discuss things in the open.

00:33:30.040 That's the thing that they're worried about right now.

00:33:32.620 Meanwhile, the websites that have the algorithms that are making kids self-harm, you know, making

00:33:39.220 them do daring videos to commit suicide or radicalizing people online to join cults or selling weapons

00:33:48.720 or selling drugs or advertising, putting people in dinghies to cross the channel, all of that,

00:33:54.320 which is like the sort of nefarious high street of criminal intent.

00:33:58.780 That's fine.

00:33:59.620 No need to talk about that.

00:34:01.140 But, I mean, surely that's where you begin.

00:34:04.500 You begin with your TikToks and your Instagrams.

00:34:06.580 If you're trying to solve the problem.

00:34:07.900 You're trying to solve the problem.

00:34:08.740 You don't actually shut down the conversation about it.

00:34:11.020 Yeah.

00:34:11.260 If you're trying to solve the problem, that's where you begin.

00:34:13.840 Whereas if what you're trying to do, and I may sound cynical here, but if what you're

00:34:18.440 trying to do is narrative control, if what you're trying to do is virtue signal, if what

00:34:23.240 you're trying to do is say something that gets you a lot of positive attention but doesn't

00:34:28.400 cost you anything, then it's very easy if you're a Guardian columnist to write articles 0.98

00:34:33.500 like this moron did about how the person who should be held responsible for riots is actually 0.99

00:34:38.720 Elon Musk, right? 1.00

00:34:41.340 And because it costs you nothing.

00:34:43.060 Yeah.

00:34:43.360 And it gives you everything within your peer group.

00:34:45.840 If you are in that clique, you write that article, everyone's going to give you a round

00:34:50.360 of applause and that's it.

00:34:52.460 Whereas if you start talking about crime in certain areas, if you start talking about the

00:34:57.620 fact that not all cultures are the same, if you start talking about those issues, then

00:35:01.820 you become evil, racist, you know, and all the rest of it.

00:35:04.800 And that costs you something.

00:35:07.040 Is it because humanity or Western societies have realized that we can't ever put anything

00:35:10.900 back in the box?

00:35:11.680 There are no solving of the problems at this point.

00:35:14.080 I mean, I don't know.

00:35:15.360 Is it that we've suddenly gone, we're going to have a huge change with a demographic time

00:35:19.400 bomb when we look at birth rates and things like that, that this is now a runaway train

00:35:23.620 that we haven't got answers to.

00:35:25.680 And so best we just actually stop talking about it because that might make it worse.

00:35:31.020 You know, I...

00:35:31.680 Are we in sort of like the hospice right now, if you will, the Western world's hospice and

00:35:37.020 we're just waiting for our demise and being, you know, mopped on the brow and fed grapes

00:35:41.660 instead?

00:35:42.160 I think that is one option.

00:35:47.360 That is definitely one option.

00:35:48.720 And I worry that that's the direction that we're heading in.

00:35:51.160 I also at the same time think that actually many of the problems that we face are quite

00:35:55.540 solvable if we're prepared to be honest.

00:35:57.180 This is why we do the show.

00:35:58.260 This is why it says honest conversation.

00:36:00.020 But how long are you going to get to do your show for?

00:36:02.020 There's something funny going on, isn't there?

00:36:03.940 That you think, like I said, they're not dealing with actual criminality.

00:36:08.000 They're dealing more with the conversations about what's happening.

00:36:11.360 Look, you're making very cogent points and I don't disagree with those points.

00:36:15.560 But I think you have to take it in the round.

00:36:17.580 And what I would say on the other flip side of this is our show is bigger than it's ever

00:36:22.180 been.

00:36:22.460 There are many other channels who are doing similar things.

00:36:25.160 There are many other TV stations now, radio stations, et cetera, who are presenting a different

00:36:30.400 point of view.

00:36:31.820 And for example, last week I was on The Moral Maze, right?

00:36:36.020 Putting these points across and that's something that will continue.

00:36:40.280 So as the voice, look, in the end of the day, capitalism always wins, right?

00:36:46.240 Numbers talk.

00:36:47.240 If people who make the points that we make get bigger, have a bigger audience, in some

00:36:51.840 cases bigger than the mainstream media, I think over time that will have its impact.

00:36:56.560 And that's where the opportunity lies.

00:36:58.560 I'm not saying it's going to happen.

00:36:59.840 I'm personally very optimistic, generally very pessimistic for the direction of our society.

00:37:06.120 But the hope is that if enough people are saying things without being shouted down, which

00:37:12.720 is now no longer possible, right?

00:37:14.540 This conversation didn't happen five years ago and could not have happened.

00:37:17.720 But what we do know is you're right.

00:37:19.880 And actually, you are a very interesting symptom, if you don't mind me saying, to look at, because

00:37:24.100 one of the reasons you are...

00:37:24.920 Thanks, Matt.

00:37:25.560 We're like the wart you get when you have the...

00:37:29.660 Yeah, you're like a fungal infection.

00:37:32.140 Yeah, you're like the boil.

00:37:33.800 The immune system has broken down and that's why you've emerged.

00:37:37.000 Yeah, and you're thrush.

00:37:38.160 Thanks, Alex.

00:37:38.980 Yeah, I appreciate it.

00:37:39.680 Cheers.

00:37:40.020 Actually, kind of, yeah.

00:37:41.060 I love you guys.

00:37:42.060 But yeah, because actually, one of the reasons you're so important and why you're going from

00:37:45.880 strength to strength is because this has not been allowed.

00:37:49.620 You know, this is sort of like, wow, this is needed, okay?

00:37:53.740 Right.

00:37:54.860 So, and I just hope that in that respect, if it's needed and you are also the medicine

00:37:58.640 that we're allowed to take it, because you talk about capitalism winning out.

00:38:02.240 Well, that's okay, but there are huge supranational structures to control capitalism, right?

00:38:08.020 It's everything from how you, you know, trade deals and all the rest of it.

00:38:11.980 And I'm afraid the digital sphere now lives within a marketplace.

00:38:16.180 I don't know if you saw the communique from Thierry Breton, the information commissioner

00:38:20.480 of the European Union, to Elon Musk, because Elon Musk had Donald Trump on his channel.

00:38:24.960 And they're like, well, we don't like that.

00:38:26.780 We might pull the plug on you.

00:38:29.000 So, yes, capitalism in theory should out.

00:38:31.980 That's the way it's always been.

00:38:33.500 But actually, I mean, we saw during COVID, where people were locked up and businesses

00:38:38.000 ceased to function, that when governments and supranational organizations want to step

00:38:45.140 in, when they want to intervene, they can.

00:38:48.900 You know what?

00:38:49.740 I want them to.

00:38:50.860 I would love to see them try.

00:38:52.640 I would like to see the European Union and the Labour government of this country try to

00:38:57.460 prevent people in this country and in Europe from using the voices in the public discussion.

00:39:05.040 I'd like to see them try.

00:39:06.300 I would like to see how that works out for them, because I don't think it will work out

00:39:09.600 very well.

00:39:10.140 I really don't.

00:39:10.980 Well, we know prohibition of alcohol didn't really end well.

00:39:13.380 So, you know, I don't even think we're going to get to the point of prohibition.

00:39:16.780 I just I don't think that is a viable option.

00:39:18.940 And I think they will find quite quickly if they try to censor things at that level.

00:39:23.820 Yeah, I think you're right.

00:39:25.940 And look, I'm not a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist.

00:39:28.780 What I do is look at situations objectively and try and look at patterns and trends based

00:39:34.160 upon empirical evidence and things that I've seen happen.

00:39:37.180 So when I see the communique from the EU to Elon Musk, that goes straight into the evidence

00:39:41.740 file, you know, and therefore, when you say, well, I think the EU wants to censor X,

00:39:46.340 people are mad, aren't you?

00:39:47.520 Well, no, they've just said that they do.

00:39:49.720 So, you know, I think that we've just got to be alive and alert.

00:39:53.260 And I think all of us at the moment have a feeling that, you know, something that was

00:39:57.740 building over the past few decades when it comes to the sort of concretization of taboo

00:40:03.340 seems to me to be increasing now at a faster pace, perhaps because the information landscape

00:40:12.760 is hugely diverse where it's been technologized.

00:40:16.200 And so that's increased to the, you know, at an incredible rate.

00:40:20.420 I don't know.

00:40:21.180 But there is definitely something going on or you wouldn't have this show and I wouldn't

00:40:24.860 be talking to you about things that aren't being spoken about.

00:40:27.280 I also think there's another part of the issue, which I think we have a bravery crisis in the

00:40:31.880 West.

00:40:32.320 And you see it time and time again.

00:40:34.460 The example I always use is the murder of Sir David Amos.

00:40:37.060 And then literally the day afterwards, people are talking about the problem of online hate.

00:40:41.720 And I'm like, really?

00:40:42.660 Because people think their jobs depend on it.

00:40:44.520 This is what I'm saying.

00:40:46.140 People think it, but they think they can't say it because they think what will happen

00:40:49.460 to me personally?

00:40:50.540 I might lose my livelihood and my income.

00:40:52.560 People might stop wanting to come over to my house for a dinner party.

00:40:55.960 But there comes a point where you, courage is a muscle.

00:41:00.440 I don't really believe in courageous people, but I believe in people who do courageous things.

00:41:06.300 And the more you exercise that muscle, the more courageous you will become and the braver

00:41:10.200 you will be.

00:41:10.800 The problem is, is that we've let the muscle grow weak and atrophy to the point we no longer

00:41:16.100 use it so that we feel that we can't do it, when actually you can do it.

00:41:20.620 Okay.

00:41:20.800 And what happens to those who try?

00:41:22.720 Okay.

00:41:23.340 Let's look at France as an example, politically, because when you need courageous voices,

00:41:28.000 you need them to be your political leaders.

00:41:29.900 Because at the end of the day, they're the ones who can affect policy and real world change.

00:41:33.840 Are they?

00:41:36.640 Sorry to derail it.

00:41:38.220 Are they?

00:41:38.680 Well, no.

00:41:39.200 Actually, it's interesting.

00:41:40.200 If you look at the sort of...

00:41:41.840 You ran for...

00:41:43.780 You stood, right?

00:41:44.580 We don't run in this country.

00:41:45.580 You stood.

00:41:46.260 You were in politics at one point.

00:41:48.720 Do you have more influence being on your show?

00:41:52.060 Right.

00:41:52.240 So actually, you're about to sort of make the point that I was going to make.

00:41:54.840 Apologize.

00:41:55.260 I do that all the time.

00:41:56.740 Sorry for the man's eruption.

00:41:57.940 In theory.

00:41:58.460 So I said, look at what happened in France.

00:41:59.900 In theory, you do get the courageous types come to try and lead us, to try and make a

00:42:04.480 breakthrough.

00:42:05.700 And look at what happened in France.

00:42:08.340 Look at what happened in the Netherlands.

00:42:10.140 Netherlands is a slightly different situation.

00:42:12.200 But look at what happened in France, where all of a sudden that snap election is called

00:42:15.420 and the Front National are going to be the biggest party.

00:42:18.360 Not have a majority necessarily, but the biggest party.

00:42:21.620 Every effort was made to prevent that from happening.

00:42:25.380 Like every effort was made to stop it.

00:42:29.020 Okay.

00:42:29.660 So what is interesting is when you have got these leaders who, regardless of what one

00:42:34.560 might think of Marine Le Pen and the entire policies of Front National, their origin,

00:42:38.400 her uncle and all the rest of it.

00:42:39.720 I'm not going to go down that ridiculous wormhole and tie myself in the Gordian knot of political 0.98

00:42:44.240 correctness.

00:42:45.120 But just as a sort of phenomena, there are very few countries where these people who a lot

00:42:49.840 of people are now listening to and wanting to vote for, who are flexing their sort of courage

00:42:54.440 muscle, are being allowed to do so.

00:42:56.680 The system that moves against them, the might of the machine that then tries to block them.

00:43:02.920 So yeah, you are right.

00:43:04.560 Okay.

00:43:04.900 My voice probably is stronger and more cut through and more influential doing this than sitting

00:43:12.200 on a green bench, actually.

00:43:13.960 So, and that's kind of sad because that's, you know, that's an erosion of democracy.

00:43:20.020 But it's also as well, I was talking about ordinary people, the everyday person, because

00:43:25.200 that's how change is enacted.

00:43:27.620 You know, politicians might think that they have power, but the moment when, you know,

00:43:32.540 the moment when push comes to shove and if it goes against what people really want,

00:43:37.880 then they have to wake up because they know that they don't have that power.

00:43:42.980 And I believe that, look, I'm going to give you an example.

00:43:45.760 My grandfather, my grandfather was born in the 1920s.

00:43:50.140 1930s, he left school to a Great Depression.

00:43:52.920 He was working in a factory making mosquitoes because he was a master joiner up in Wigan in

00:43:58.260 the north of England.

00:43:59.560 A part of the United Kingdom that was so deprived that George Orwell wrote a book about it called

00:44:04.980 The Road to Wigan Pier.

00:44:06.160 One of my favourite books.

00:44:07.420 Yeah.

00:44:07.980 He then volunteered to join the army.

00:44:12.380 He didn't have to because he was already a significant part of the war effort, but he

00:44:16.220 volunteered to join the army, kissed his baby daughter and his wife goodbye to go and fight

00:44:20.720 in the Battle of El Alamein as a desert rat in the deserts of North Africa to fight Nazis

00:44:26.100 in the heat of summer.

00:44:27.860 And, you know, when we talk about bravery, it's not quite that level.

00:44:31.800 It's not quite Jack Foster level.

00:44:33.660 Do you know what I mean?

00:44:34.320 If you're saying that, you know, at some point, people themselves, ordinary people, I mean,

00:44:39.060 that's insurrection, isn't it?

00:44:40.700 But if you're saying, if you're saying, what do people do?

00:44:43.720 Write a petition?

00:44:44.700 Send a letter to their MPs?

00:44:47.080 I mean, what?

00:44:48.960 Take to the streets?

00:44:50.320 Well, people have sort of started to do it.

00:44:51.800 No, no, no, it's not what Francis is saying.

00:44:53.080 Look, Solzhenitsyn wrote about this.

00:44:54.840 Everything begins with truth.

00:44:56.900 The first step is just being honest.

00:44:59.240 And it doesn't mean being angry.

00:45:00.520 It doesn't mean being upset.

00:45:01.760 The first step is truth.

00:45:02.820 We were two comedians in a woke comedy industry.

00:45:07.060 And then we were just like, we don't like this.

00:45:09.200 We're going to start saying something.

00:45:10.520 And it cost us quite a lot at the time.

00:45:12.520 So there you go.

00:45:13.120 This is the thing for other people.

00:45:14.960 That is, like we said earlier, that is the difficulty.

00:45:17.780 Even if people, I think, like I said, there's two categories.

00:45:20.140 Those who have just swallowed the whole lot full on and cannot see the wood from the trees.

00:45:24.000 They're wearing their woke goggles and they just can't take them off right now.

00:45:26.540 Those things are sort of surgically spliced to their corneas.

00:45:29.180 And even if when you try and say to these people, but hold on, not all immigration is good.

00:45:34.100 They just go, oh, they have a meltdown because they have been so programmed to not understand that that's even a possibility.

00:45:40.840 Then you've got the people who get that, but they do want to speak words of truth.

00:45:47.140 And yet they think that there's the sacrifice for doing so is too great to them personally.

00:45:52.320 It's so difficult.

00:45:53.520 You know, it is like it is a straitjacket.

00:45:56.040 It's a societal straitjacket.

00:45:58.120 But you have a duty, to be honest.

00:45:59.440 I mean, I'm looking over your shoulder.

00:46:00.920 There's a book by Hannah Barnes, which is about the transition.

00:46:04.320 She used to be a Newsnight editor, right?

00:46:07.480 It cost her quite a lot, I think, to write that book.

00:46:09.420 I don't know.

00:46:09.780 She never said that to us, but that's what I assume.

00:46:13.620 People are just going to have to start being honest.

00:46:16.560 And if they don't, then that won't be reflected in the political parties we have.

00:46:21.060 And then that means that when it comes to election time, you don't have a choice to vote for the thing that you actually believe in.

00:46:26.700 Because nobody is informed, that whole body, that this is actually where the country is at.

00:46:32.380 So, yes, it's going to cost people something.

00:46:34.840 It's going to cost everybody something.

00:46:36.520 But ultimately, people have to start being truthful.

00:46:38.860 Yeah.

00:46:39.300 That's what you're doing.

00:46:40.200 That's why you're on the show.

00:46:41.080 Yeah.

00:46:41.400 No, I agree.

00:46:42.400 And I think people, especially, look, frankly, I think one of the biggest letdowns of the 21st century in this country is our journalism industry.

00:46:49.380 To me, they're of the worst when it comes to actually investigating the things that need to be investigated, speaking to the people that really do know what they're talking about and addressing the issues that are being forgotten.

00:47:01.900 That is what journalism is supposed to be about.

00:47:03.840 That was the light we were supposed to shine into the darkness.

00:47:07.100 And journalism doesn't do that at all.

00:47:09.060 Journalism actually is the shroud around reality these days.

00:47:12.920 And that is a huge tragedy.

00:47:16.240 It's one of the reasons I actually respect, like, Aaron Bastani from Navarra.

00:47:20.780 We had him on the show a while ago.

00:47:22.240 Or Ash Sarkar, who I just did the moral maze with.

00:47:24.320 I don't agree with their views.

00:47:26.080 But you can tell they believe what they're saying.

00:47:28.340 And there's nothing more, well, disgusting, frankly, is when you talk to someone and you know that they think something other than what they're saying.

00:47:37.920 I agree.

00:47:38.260 But also, they have an inbuilt advantage, don't they?

00:47:41.240 Aaron Bastani and Ash Sarkar.

00:47:42.860 They totally believe what they're saying.

00:47:44.440 Because what they're saying is still acceptable to public ears.

00:47:47.120 True.

00:47:47.660 It's not the taboo-breaking stuff.

00:47:51.040 They have conviction.

00:47:52.060 I'm not denying that they don't.

00:47:53.820 But they're not putting themselves in danger by doing this.

00:47:56.600 I don't know about Ash.

00:47:57.860 I reckon she probably is putting herself in more physical danger than you or not, frankly.

00:48:01.660 Perhaps.

00:48:01.860 You know.

00:48:03.520 Again, I don't agree with many of the things that she says.

00:48:05.820 But I guess what I'm saying is I would, the question is, if the choice we have is to live in a society where everyone tells comforting lies or everybody says what they actually believe and we disagree about the things we actually believe, I feel like that would be a lot better place for us to live in.

00:48:22.460 Do you know what I mean?

00:48:22.840 Oh, my gosh.

00:48:23.340 Of course.

00:48:24.180 I'd live for that.

00:48:25.280 Yeah.

00:48:25.600 But you're also seeing it with the political parties.

00:48:29.060 So what we have are these two political parties, red and blue, and they're trying to hold these broad coalitions of people together.

00:48:36.760 And they can't do that anymore.

00:48:38.940 The conservatives can't do it.

00:48:40.420 And Labor can't do it. 1.00

00:48:41.860 And it's all starting to crumble because people's voices are now becoming stronger.

00:48:47.260 And you've seen that, for instance, with the rise of the independent candidates, whether it's independent candidates who are overtly Muslim and their main issue is Gaza.

00:48:57.680 And they broke away from the Labour Party for that reason is reform broke away from the Conservative Party because they felt, and I agree with them, the Conservative Party aren't conservative and they failed in their duty.

00:49:10.640 And I think what we're looking at with the Labour Party, especially getting to power, they've gotten to how many people actually voted for Labour?

00:49:19.020 And how interesting, actually, that one of his first acts as Prime Minister is that Sir Keir Starmer has decided to define what he considers to be the extremes by saying far right.

00:49:30.160 After basically saying, I've gotten rid of the far left and the party, I'm now going to deal with all of this, this stuff is far right.

00:49:36.660 He's thrown a grenade into right-wingery because the Conservatives are having a leadership debate and they've been fighting over how conservative they should be for the past two decades.

00:49:44.120 And this is like peak fights for them right now when they have to define themselves.

00:49:47.800 And the right wing, if it's going to democratically beat the left wing, needs to sort itself out and get back together.

00:49:54.800 And so by going like, I'm going to bowl this term far right into the middle of all of you, that's going to be very difficult to do.

00:50:02.500 And what he did, it was a spectacular misstep because what you did is you just antagonised a lot of people.

00:50:10.720 It wasn't a misstep. I think he knows that. Was it a misstep or was it genius?

00:50:13.820 I totally agree with you. He's a complete genius. Starmer has handled this incredibly well.

00:50:18.460 Oh, yeah. He's actually basically said that, you know, the riots are happening in Labour constituencies.

00:50:23.620 Does he care? No, he's got a massive majority in four years.

00:50:26.460 OK, and those people are never going to go back and vote for him.

00:50:28.640 He knows that. They've gone. He lost and they didn't vote for him anyway.

00:50:31.840 So he doesn't care if they're antagonised.

00:50:34.760 He doesn't. What he's done is called them all far right and made them feel even worse about themselves,

00:50:38.680 but also made it less likely that they are going to go and do anything about it.

00:50:41.680 I completely disagree with both of you. It is the stupid. 1.00

00:50:45.000 It's a great short term strategy. 1.00

00:50:47.660 But here's the thing. You can only play that card once.

00:50:50.880 Well, that's yeah. You can only play that card once.

00:50:54.600 He's like all politicians. He's thinking about three days ahead.

00:50:57.480 That's his planning horizon.

00:50:58.400 Yeah, but if there's something else happens, because we saw about the stabbing in Leicester Square

00:51:03.660 that happened earlier this week.

00:51:05.140 And I just felt a sense of panic because if he can only do that once,

00:51:12.460 he's played that card and that card can only be used once.

00:51:15.120 And if it happens again and it's going to be bigger and it's going to be worse,

00:51:18.600 what you're going to say that again, that could be real civil disorder.

00:51:22.860 He is absolutely smashed this. Sorry, Alex.

00:51:26.280 I love the best part. I feel fancy. He's like gunning for insurrection.

00:51:29.580 He's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

00:51:33.280 I'm joking. I'm joking.

00:51:34.860 Starmer, he's suppressed this outbreak of violence, which he had to do.

00:51:40.020 Any prime minister of a country in which there are riots has to crack down.

00:51:42.840 Right. So the fact that they're giving people jail terms for standing

00:51:47.700 and watching one of these riots.

00:51:49.560 Right.

00:51:50.120 It means that people are going to be terrified of going any.

00:51:52.580 Yeah. So actually all hell can break loose

00:51:54.580 and no one's going to open their front door and go onto the street at all

00:51:57.460 because they're going to be like, I'm going to end up in clink if I do.

00:52:00.020 And politically what he's done is he's very cleverly associated,

00:52:04.700 as you say, riots in labour areas for some reason with the right,

00:52:09.500 just because there was basically some yogs and hooligans. 1.00

00:52:12.900 And actually any discussion about immigration,

00:52:15.040 all the things we've been discussing today,

00:52:16.520 that is now also in the category of far right.

00:52:20.000 I don't know about that.

00:52:21.000 I think, you know, I think actually the way people are talking about it

00:52:25.880 in the mainstream now, I'm finding actually quite...

00:52:28.840 I think what is kind of interesting is how many people on Twitter

00:52:31.940 sort of adopted the term and did that whole sort of hashtag

00:52:34.980 I am a far right thug or whatever it was.

00:52:37.260 You know, people have just gone, fine, call me far right.

00:52:39.160 I'll just say, fine.

00:52:40.200 You know, it's no skin off my teeth, just whatever.

00:52:43.220 It's a term.

00:52:44.420 So in that regard, but what actually, in terms of debate politically,

00:52:48.480 I think he's thrown a grenade into the middle of the Conservative Party right now.

00:52:51.780 And I think, as you said, as the deterrent, let's say,

00:52:55.560 to go out and protest with the sort of judge judification

00:52:58.820 of the legal system, the show trials, if you will,

00:53:03.540 he has, I mean, that's not just a deterrent, that's a threat, isn't it?

00:53:08.380 So, you know, it's, yeah.

00:53:11.880 Alex, great to have you on the show.

00:53:13.180 Thank you so much for coming.

00:53:14.500 We're going to ask you some questions from our supporters in a second.

00:53:17.820 Before we do, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be?

00:53:22.060 Before Alex answers a final question, at the end of the interview,

00:53:26.300 make sure to head over to our locals where you'll be able to see this.

00:53:30.500 What threats do you see coming out of the illegal migration 0.93

00:53:33.580 coming across the channel into Britain?

00:53:35.800 I identify as transgender and worry about the ideologies

00:53:39.280 these migrants may bring with them.

00:53:41.720 Many of these problems seem to stem from the attitudes towards women 0.89

00:53:45.060 held by some migrant cultures.

00:53:47.060 How likely is that after being in the West for a while,

00:53:49.920 these cultures will eventually change their views?

00:53:52.360 Is that a reasonable hope?

00:53:54.140 Explain to us Americans why an entire continent needs a parliament.

00:53:59.080 I think we need to be talking about, just basically talking.

00:54:06.360 I know that sounds crazy.

00:54:07.520 We need to actually have an adult conversation now about censorship.

00:54:10.960 And we are talking about it, but actually it's not being spoken about

00:54:14.500 really by the political classes.

00:54:16.180 We had the effort to ensure free speech on campus.

00:54:19.300 This government's ripped it up.

00:54:20.480 But that's the only thing we've had.

00:54:22.300 And like I said, there's a rich seam of censorship

00:54:24.940 that weaves in through our society at every single level,

00:54:28.040 causing problems at every single level.

00:54:30.900 And not just our society, the whole of the West, the European Union.

00:54:34.860 You know, it's a problem.

00:54:36.240 So we need to talk about censorship.

00:54:37.560 How do we explain to Keir Starmer and Sadiq Khan

00:54:42.140 that establishing Islamophobia laws will mean suppressing,

00:54:45.900 denying the rights of women and undermining the government? 0.99

TRIGGERnometry - August 18, 2024

Is Mass Immigration Making Women Less Safe？ - Alex Phillips

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