00:01:26.800now people may hate the results you've achieved,
00:01:28.620But you've been one of the most successful politicians in my lifetime, certainly.
00:01:33.900Now, I wanted to talk a little bit about where that comes from, because you've had to fight.
00:01:38.180You know, when you're standing there next to the candidate for the monster raving loony party and you're closer to him than you are to winning that election all those years ago.
00:01:49.000What is it that makes you tick and keep fighting and keep going?
00:01:52.780well I think once I was quite normal um because I I you know I left school I skipped university
00:01:59.680because the the boom in the city had started you know Thatcher had been elected uh there was the
00:02:05.340the development of something called the yuppie and I thought yeah I like the look of that I want to
00:02:10.060be a yuppie so I skipped university went to work in the city of London worked on a place called
00:02:15.120London Metal Exchange um which as I've always said to people we used to work very hard up until
00:02:20.520lunchtime every day to disintegrate pretty quickly and I played golf you know I was a
00:02:27.400four handicapped golfer I got married young had kids young and I was all set really you know to
00:02:36.020stay in the commodity business and the real ambition was to make money and live as high
00:02:41.740lifestyle as I possibly could politics current affairs what I'd always cared about those things
00:02:48.060passionately you know I mean growing up through the 1970s seeing the three-day week doing homework
00:02:55.180by candlelight because of the power strikes seeing inflation get to nearly 30 percent then seeing
00:03:02.420this woman Mrs Thatcher appear as if from nowhere become prime minister with a radical new agenda
00:03:10.060so I'd always cared about politics and current affairs and the funny thing was working in
00:03:16.080commodities you know very much a global business copper aluminium all these things you know
00:03:20.720politics and current affairs affected those prices politics and current affairs were what we talked
00:03:25.520about all day long and i was an avid free marketeer um you know a great believer in reaganomics um in
00:03:35.580much of what thatcher stood for i mean i could see the downside of it but i thought we have to have
00:03:40.420these radical reform we have to take this medicine so i always cared about all of these issues
00:03:46.620hugely followed you know what happened in parliament very closely but i'd never had the
00:03:53.020slightest intention even to stand for the local council i thought no no that's not for me you
00:03:59.880know politics is for the oxbridge set you know i'll let them get on with that i'll get on with
00:04:04.920what I do but what dawned on me in 1990 and we did a day on the exchange it was 5 5 30 in the evening
00:04:16.000we were you guessed it in the pub in the city and this of course is before almost anybody had a
00:04:22.680mobile phone um and you know one of the young lads ran into the bar from the office into the
00:04:28.980pub from the office and said we've just joined the exchange rate mechanism now that was the means by
00:04:34.520which we peg sterling against a basket of european currencies mainly of course the deutschmark
00:04:39.620and that was a precursor to us joining what we now know as the euro now i won't
00:04:46.160on trigonometry uh you tell you the anglo-saxon words that i used on hearing this news
00:04:52.300but i simply couldn't believe it and the next day going to london by train the conservative
00:04:59.080Party supported ERM. The Labour Party supported ERM. The Liberals supported ERM. The TUC supported
00:05:06.200ERM. The CBI supported ERM. And pretty much every single national newspaper supported ERM.
00:05:13.760And I looked at this and I thought this is going to be a disaster. We are at a completely different
00:05:20.480phase of the economic cycle to Germany and the Central European economies. We are very much a
00:05:26.540services economy they're much more a manufacturing economy um i could see that the 80s boom had come
00:05:35.160to an end and that you know negative equity was appearing in property prices i could see that a
00:05:40.180bust was coming uh and i just thought this is going to be a disaster well for the next two years
00:05:45.780i bored the life out of anybody that would listen you know in the office on the train coming home
00:05:52.560from London. I mean, wherever I was, I became an ERM bore. And of course, it was all bored out,
00:05:59.860because the madness of what happened in September 92, when interest rates doubled,
00:06:06.460just to keep the pound up, and stood inside the exchange rate mechanism. And that year
00:06:11.380was the year of record home repossessions. That year was the record year for small business
00:06:18.760bankruptcies and I thought to myself I don't know what it is but I could see something that the
00:06:26.620political class couldn't see and I realized that establishment status quos form around a set of
00:06:34.900ideas and this is true not just of politics it's true in science it's true in business
00:06:39.380a status quo forms around an idea and groupthink takes over or lack of proper thinking takes over
00:06:48.240So I'd seen that experience. I'd been right about it. And then, you know, hard on the heels of that, we had this thing called the Maastricht Treaty, which is when the European community became the European Union.
00:07:00.320and I watched the Tory rebels in parliament you know do their best fight a rearguard action but
00:07:06.980in the end John Major put it down to a motion of confidence and of course like good little boys
00:07:13.200they all went and supported the party and voted for the very thing that they'd said would be an
00:07:18.240economic and political disaster for our nation and its independence and I thought this is really odd
00:07:24.920because in my village people don't support this in my village people want to be friendly with
00:07:32.000Europe and trade with Europe and not be governed by it and I just determined then in 93 I said
00:07:37.200you know what I don't care I really don't care even if I'm the only person that votes for me
00:07:43.960as a matter of principle I'm going to fight these so-and-sos so I put myself up for a by-election
00:07:50.860i did beat screaming lord such only by 148 votes i beat david such by a hundred what a lovely bloke
00:08:01.340he was um and all my friends and family said but surely this experience must put you off
00:08:09.720you know it's impossible to take on the establishment and i i suppose then what
00:08:15.360kicked in was an absolute belief that i was right and just sheer bloody mindedness and so i never
00:08:26.980stopped and i kept campaigning in 1994 95 96 97 i never stopped campaigning i never stopped you
00:08:35.060know going out speaking in village halls and if i got an audience of 30 or 40 i'd be thrilled
00:08:39.760in those days and I kept on battling away and then the big opportunity came for me
00:08:45.680and that was in 1999 when for the first time in the history of this country a national election
00:08:51.900was contested on the basis of proportional representation and so I got elected to the
00:08:57.400European Parliament in 1999 and as a result of that you know you start to get invited onto
00:09:03.740question time and these programs although i mean i mean i was treated you know i mean by the
00:09:09.340dimblebys and all these people as if i was on sort of day release from a lunatic asylum you know
00:09:13.960but so so really that's the story the story is the consensus establishment had decided
00:09:21.340this was our future for the for the next foreseeable decades or forever um and i just
00:09:28.080felt they were wrong i was right and i always in the bottom of my heart felt that actually
00:09:32.860middle england didn't agree with any of this so it's it's it's nice of you to say that i've been
00:09:37.920very successful in achieving my goals and i have i just wish it hadn't taken 27 years well i was
00:09:44.480going to ask you on a personal level you talk about the political conviction which i think
00:09:48.680everybody would recognize but is there a part of you just likes pissing people off nigel just a
00:09:53.340little bit just annoying winding people up a little bit is there a part of you that's that as
00:09:57.700well oh enormously enormously I mean I we were taught I was very lucky I really was lucky to go
00:10:08.320to a good school and and to be taught by some great people and you know the older guys that
00:10:14.700taught me who were all you know they'd all driven tanks or flown spitfires or whatever it was or
00:10:19.480they played cricket for England well an amazing group of people we had at Dulwich teaching us
00:10:24.020and you know the good ones taught us question everything don't accept anything at face value
00:10:30.360question everything debate everything i don't think you know during my teens i sort of took
00:10:35.320that to the nth degree um often of articulating positions i didn't believe in at all uh just
00:10:41.500because i enjoyed uh getting the reaction back although nothing could prepare me i suppose
00:10:47.020for becoming the pantomime villain of the european parliament i mean you know amazing you know when i
00:10:53.500got up to speak and sort of 500 people started booing um now most human beings would not want
00:11:00.240to live with that experience you know most human beings would temper their ideas because normally
00:11:07.180people like to fit in normally people like to feel a sense of belonging but it just didn't
00:11:14.200it just didn't matter to me uh and and in the in the latter years i mean in brussels particularly
00:11:22.260you know coffee shops wouldn't serve me pubs banned me restaurants wouldn't allow me and i
00:11:27.860mean that's how far it went and yet and yet i took it all as a compliment i thought i remember
00:11:34.220in 2014 and that was the worst of it 2014 was the worst of it in terms of the press and it was just
00:11:40.540unbelievable i mean for standing up and saying that i thought the foreign aid budget was being
00:11:45.420badly spent for standing up and saying that i thought actually the untrammeled free movement
00:11:51.480of unskilled labour was really not helping working people in Britain pushing down their wages damaging
00:11:57.180their access to public services I mean I look back the other day at some of the interviews
00:12:01.340I was doing with Sky News and the BBC back in 2014 I mean you really would have thought for all the
00:12:07.760world that I was heralding you know 1930s German style fascism to come into Britain I mean that
00:12:15.180was the level of hostility to my ideas. And they've now become mainstream ideas. Anyway,
00:12:22.640it was difficult. And I remember one morning, one Sunday morning in 2014, the phone rang here at
00:12:27.960about 7am. And it was my lawyer. Oh, my God, the law is ringing on a Sunday morning. This can't be
00:12:34.260good. And he just said to me, Andrew, he said, you know what? Don't buy the newspapers. Don't
00:12:41.180have a look online just don't read any of it because it will damage your confidence and I
00:12:48.500took his advice and as the years went on I just didn't read any of it I certainly didn't look at
00:12:55.620Twitter and see what people were saying I stuck to what I believed in what I knew to be true
00:13:00.760I did my absolute best to be honest with people about what I thought Brexit meant and what some
00:13:07.520of the downsides might be. I did that all through the referendum campaign as well. But it was tough
00:13:12.000to withstand it. But I'll never forget in 14, getting a letter written in spidery handwriting.
00:13:19.720And the man said, I'm 93 years old. During the war, I served in bomber command. He said,
00:13:26.160and I can tell you, you only start taking heavy flack when you're getting near the target. And I
00:13:32.140never ever forgot that letter the establishment were literally terrified of me uh brussels perhaps
00:13:40.160even more so um and so i i learned um i learned to um enjoy my own company because nobody else
00:13:50.780wanted to be seen or talked to and even you know you go to the supermarket you know going around
00:13:56.220you know the local waitrose buying the essentials you know gin tonic lemons that sort of thing
00:14:02.140and you know and people would look like good luck with it all so god i hope the neighbors haven't
00:14:08.460seen i spoke to him it was as if this sort of mantle of being the devil was put upon me so
00:14:13.900so there must have been something slightly unusual in my makeup um to make me endure it
00:14:19.740and you know if i'm being honest i can laugh about it now some of it was pretty tough
00:14:23.860and nigel we talk about you know something you know experiences being very tough you've had
00:14:30.980a lot of epithets being hurled against you far-right racist etc etc in your own opinion
00:14:36.780why do you think it is that people have hurled these epithets at you oh I think that I think
00:14:43.680that when you challenge orthodoxy rather than examining whether the criticism of the orthodoxy
00:14:52.400is valid or not you seek to dismiss the other person with abuse and insults it was the great
00:14:59.740uh gandhi wasn't it who said about the campaign for indian independence from the british empire
00:15:05.340you know first they ignore you then they laugh at you then they attack you and then you win
00:15:13.680a complete refusal to deal with ideas and a belief that just by hurling abuse you can destroy the
00:15:20.940other side um and and i mean cameron tried it was quite funny actually cameron tried it
00:15:27.280uh cameron was on with nick ferrari on lbc he was asked about nigel farage and ukip
00:15:33.100oh he said a bunch of fruitcakes loonies and closet racist mostly now that was quite a wounding thing
00:15:40.460for a prime minister to say about a party that i led but actually it helped us because people
00:15:47.980could see how unreasonable he was being you know everyone said oh farage stands for this farage
00:15:54.300stands for that. Have you ever actually read what he's actually said? And it was as if people were
00:16:01.420choosing to interpret what I'd said, rather than actually reading the words. And, you know,
00:16:06.640the truth of it is that nation states make their own laws. Nation states have their own courts.
00:16:15.540Nation states control their own borders and choose who they think are fit and proper people
00:16:19.540to come and settle in their country i mean these were all perfectly reasonable sensible points of
00:16:26.440view but were demonized because they challenged the establishment and i you know i would say this
00:16:33.220to anybody that tries to you know paint out ukip and and what it stood for in in that racist way
00:16:42.580you know i was the only party leader who banned anybody who'd ever been a member of the british
00:16:49.200National Party from even becoming a member of UKIP you know I drew that line within my own
00:16:56.140party and you know something in 2006 Nick Griffin had quite a big tailwind behind him you know a lot
00:17:04.180of dispossessed white working class who were very unhappy what was happening in their communities
00:17:09.220had started to vote for Nick Griffin once I'd drawn that line that we wouldn't accept BNP members and
00:17:16.180supporters but if you were holding your nose and voting bmp as a protest but didn't agree
00:17:23.180with their outright racist policies you could come and vote for me and they did i think i did more
00:17:29.960i mean here we are here's the funny thing about my critics i i honestly believe i did more to stop
00:17:36.940the rise of the far right in this country than any other individual and i really mean that
00:17:41.560and Nigel do you not do you ever look back on the campaign with UKIP and also with Brexit and go
00:17:48.520I made a misstep here I gave ammunition to the people criticizing me
00:17:52.960do you know something on those days you know during election campaigns on those days out in
00:18:01.140the road um on the road you know I'd go to a market town in Staffordshire all right for
00:18:06.420argument's sake you know i do a street walk about go in the betting shop go in the pub uh you know
00:18:13.220meet people in the town square and i would then probably spend the next three to four hours
00:18:19.120being interviewed by local newspapers local radio stations you know local broadcasters on
00:18:25.860you know youtube or whatever else it would be i mean i i gave more interviews than anybody ever
00:18:31.660because I had to do that to propel this party
00:19:00.440But what I would say, and what I do think came through to people, whether they agreed with what I was saying or not, I like to think that I put the message across in a very clear, succinct way so that people could understand what the message is.
00:19:21.320And I think I managed to get that through.
00:19:23.540And I also think that people felt, again, whether they agreed or not,
00:19:29.360that what I was saying, I genuinely and sincerely believed in.
00:19:33.620Yeah, and the other thing I think people felt,
00:19:35.920and this included people like me who were at the time
00:19:38.460on a completely different side of the argument,
00:19:40.960was that you were being subject to different standards than everybody else.
00:19:45.900You were being unfairly treated by large sections of the media.
00:19:49.440and you know frankly maybe if they if they'd not done that you might not have been as successful
00:19:54.620do you think that's possible if they just let you on the shows and didn't treat you as this sort of
00:19:59.160weirdo do you know it's very interesting i was talking yesterday to a political commentator who
00:20:04.640made the point to me that in the 2015 general election when ukip got four million votes and
00:20:11.180one seat you know UKIP got more votes than the SNP and the Lib Dems and Plaid all added up together
00:20:19.620and one seat almost that sense of injustice what had happened within our system I think propelled
00:20:29.120even more people to vote leave in the referendum of 2016 than would have done before so yes I think
00:20:35.620there are a lot of very fair-minded people out there uh who don't like bullying who don't like
00:20:41.480unfairness and ironically i think you're right i think the worse they behave the more unreasonable
00:20:47.320they were i think in many ways the more it galvanized support behind me yes
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00:22:29.900Nigel, to my mind, you were one of the first mainstream political figures
00:22:33.820when I became politically aware that was talking about immigration.
00:22:37.580Why is it that immigration is such a taboo subject in this country?
00:22:41.740And if you come out in favour of limiting immigration,
00:22:44.520that immediately paints you as being far right and all the rest of it.
00:27:10.660I mean, countries like Bulgaria and Romania,
00:27:15.460which are so much in the grip of organized crime,
00:27:18.200You know, we, the sensible thing to do would have been to be cautious, but we weren't.
00:27:23.980And of course, I was called all sorts of things for daring to say this, but that was how ordinary
00:27:29.840folk felt. And you know yourself, having come here in 1995, that, you know, you would not find
00:27:36.000a country in the European time zone more welcoming and more open than this.
00:27:41.640In the world, Nigel, in the world. I make this point to people all the time, all the time.
00:27:46.660Britain is one of the most tolerant and welcoming places in the entire history of the human race.
00:27:51.040And that really was what shifted my thoughts on a lot of this stuff, because I saw after the referendum, in which I was a very strong Remains supporter at the time, suddenly the explanation for why Brexit happened was that everybody in this country was racist.
00:28:05.660And that's when I went, no, that isn't true. That's not my experience as a dark-skinned immigrant in this country.
00:28:11.680Yeah, that was disgusting. I mean, let's be honest about it.
00:28:14.300You know, talking to you guys, you're Remainers, but you're Democrats, you accept the result. That's great. Of course, you know, that's how it should be.
00:28:22.380But frankly, the behaviour of large sections of our elected politicians in Westminster to completely refuse to accept the result of the of the referendum,
00:28:34.660to denigrate, as you've just pointed out,
00:28:37.880those who dared to vote against the establishment view.
00:28:41.160And then every attempt to prevent it from happening
00:30:19.800when the immigration debate will be back on.
00:30:23.000um for the moment for the moment uh the conservatives are able to get away with
00:30:31.800something which is the public perception is that because of brexit we've dealt with the issue
00:30:36.380the truth is we haven't the truth is we haven't and look you know you asked me that question i
00:30:41.300mean the truth is that you never ever get everything you want in victory sometimes
00:30:48.860losing is easier it's a bit like trading the markets you know you've got a position on the
00:30:53.940markets it's going wrong you can't sleep for a week you get rid of the position you take your
00:31:00.600loss you feel almost a sense of relief that it's over when you've got a winning trade you always
00:31:07.040say oh i should have done it in a bigger size i should have gone out a bit earlier victory is
00:31:12.380never perfect but look when i see what's happened with our withdrawal from the european medicines
00:31:20.820agency and the fact we've been able to act in the interest of our own people with the vaccine roll
00:31:27.240out compared to the absolute shambles in brussels uh that i think that i think will be the lasting
00:31:36.300testament as to why being in control of national decisions and having those decisions made by
00:31:43.080people directly accountable to us is a better way of doing things so look i'm not happy about the
00:31:49.380fishing deal i'm very unhappy about northern ireland being cast out there are some ridiculous
00:31:54.080things going on um you know with goods at our borders but overall overall we're in a good place
00:32:01.420And, you know, it's interesting, isn't it? Just a few days ago, we've learned that the 25 percent tariff on Scotch whisky, something that really hurts.
00:32:10.920You know, Scotland's got enough economic problems without that industry, with nearly 50,000 people working in and around Scotch whisky,
00:32:18.660that because we've left the European Union, we've been able to negotiate that tariff being suspended.
00:32:24.440So I think there are lots of arguments and lots of reasons that will say to us as the years go by that Brexit was the right thing to do.
00:32:32.560And I think those debates and those questions will now be asked in European capitals as well.
00:32:37.520And what do you think is going to be the future, Nigel, of the European Union?
00:32:40.700Do you think that they were going to go on and become this federation of European states, which is what they want?
00:32:47.500or do you think that the kibosh has been placed on it
00:33:13.980Because we've left the European Union.
00:33:15.600We're now free to choose our own limits.
00:33:17.180I mean, the extent to which already the EU governs people's lives is pretty extraordinary.
00:33:25.140I've always taken the view that the greatness of Europe as a continent is the incredible linguistic and cultural diversity that exists within it.
00:33:38.080You know, drive a thousand miles across the Midwest of America.
00:33:42.000I mean, every gas station is the same.
00:33:48.560You meet completely different people eating different types of cheese.
00:33:52.560I mean, that's the beauty of Europe is that it is so diverse.
00:33:56.500And provided that it's democratic, it'll be a peaceful Europe too.
00:34:03.180And I think in many ways, post-1945, and I mean, don't forget, we weren't occupied, were we?
00:34:10.460We didn't live through what many of these people lived through in two world wars. Occupation, massacre of tens of millions of people. And the conclusion that was drawn was that the existence of nation states had led to these terrible wars.
00:34:29.180so what we have to do is to abolish nation states but at no point to tell the public
00:34:34.700that's what the plan is i mean that's where the eu started and it's not the existence of nation
00:34:40.480states that causes war in fact you're actually more likely to have wars if you have a if you
00:34:46.200have a remote you know bureaucracy that you can't vote for and can't remove provided nation states
00:34:53.400are democratic, you will have peace. I can't think of a single example of two mature functioning
00:35:01.240democracies going to war with each other. And that is something I think we should be thinking about
00:35:06.500very, very hard when it comes to the future of Europe. Nigel, and moving on now, talking about
00:35:12.480mature functioning democracies, one of the things that I think we'll probably disagree most on is
00:35:17.100your mate, Donald Trump. Now, no one here on the show has this sort of instinctive aversion to him
00:35:24.700where he's the devil incarnate and whatever. But I have to say, and there's plenty of people who
00:35:29.920are fans of Trump who watch our show, and we have the same respect for them as we do for the rest
00:35:34.000of our audience. But were you not troubled, Nigel? You just talked about how the establishment in
00:35:40.240this country refused to accept the results of the referendum. Were you not troubled by Donald
00:35:44.920trump's rhetoric about the fake news election uh the election was stolen it was all a fraud
00:35:51.420resulting in people being in washington resulting in people storming the capital poor woman got shot
00:35:57.840over it for really nothing they were never going to change anything did you not regret in any way
00:36:02.920your support for him in that moment so let's talk about double standards shall we yeah let's let's
00:36:09.320talk about double standards, beginning on November the 8th, 2016. And for the next four years,
00:36:18.600the Democrats, CNN, and the New York Times did everything they could to delegitimize
00:36:25.480Trump's election victory. I agree with you completely. I agree with you.
00:36:29.960I agree. It was endless. Let me just pause you there just for one reason, which is we've covered
00:36:35.860all of that on the show a lot. We've talked about BLM and Antifa violence a lot. This is all things
00:36:42.440on which we can agree, actually. But Trump, what he did after the last election, do you not think
00:36:49.500that was also responsible? Look, I said in mid-August, all right, in mid-August, I was on
00:37:02.380Steve Bannon's show in Washington he said what's going to happen with the election I said well
00:37:07.560before the virus I thought Trump would win by a landslide I said but now what I can see for the
00:37:13.860first time in American history is the mass transfer to postal voting to absentee postal voting I said
00:37:23.520I'll tell you what I think will happen Trump will win on the day comfortably but lose as we get the
00:37:29.700count back over the next few days. I have witnessed at first hand how the postal voting system
00:37:38.900is wide open to fraud and abuse in this country. I've seen it. I've complained about it for 20
00:37:46.420years. It is not a safe system. It's why France effectively has just stopped it completely.
00:37:52.980Was Trump right to question the integrity of postal ballots? Yes. Was he right to point out
00:38:04.420that somehow the Republican Party had won seats across the state legislatures, had won seats
00:38:13.180in the House of Representatives, and that somehow this mass vote for Biden in the big cities
00:38:20.500looked anomalous yes of course he was quite right to do it was it given the febrile atmosphere that
00:38:29.380was that was around was it wise to do a rally on the 6th of january in washington dc no i don't
00:38:39.460think it was but i again i mean the way that that speech he gave that day was twisted and manipulated
00:38:47.520but the media was quite something you know he said to them go in peace some of them chose not to
00:38:52.240um so i yeah i do think the 6th of january rally was a mistake just given how febrile it was
00:38:59.960but i think he is in in many ways uh the most misquoted the most misinterpreted political
00:39:06.960figure that i've ever seen and i'll tell you what right now if you live in london right now
00:39:12.920you are getting letters almost bullying you to go onto a postal vote register. And I think this
00:39:19.240election integrity is going to become a massive issue in both British and American politics.
00:39:25.880But do you not think, Nigel, that some of Donald Trump's rhetoric was inflammatory,
00:39:31.740and as a result that riled people up? And in a way, you could argue that type of backlash
00:39:36.520was inevitable after you spent months questioning the veracity of the election.
00:39:41.600I think if you look at his words, if you look at his words on the day, they weren't. However,
00:39:47.960however, I think Rudy Giuliani's words were very questionable. Yeah, very questionable indeed.
00:39:54.600The thing that troubled me about it as well, Nigel, you know, we've had plenty of pro-Trump
00:40:00.060guests on the show and we give everybody a fair hearing as we've given you. But with Trump,
00:40:06.480When that happened, I started to get a sort of cult of personality vibe off the whole thing, how some people were reacting.
00:40:15.040People were claiming that it was actually BLM infiltrators who'd stormed all of this sort of crazy stuff.
00:40:21.520And that's when I went, hold on a second.
00:40:23.660These really these people, some of these people really believe all this crazy nonsense.
00:40:27.960And that troubled me. Did that trouble you?
00:40:31.220Yeah, I never bought into any of that. And you wouldn't expect me to.
00:40:35.800You know, I said two days after the election, I said, however hard the Trump team try to overturn this result, they will not succeed.
00:40:44.240Knowing the abuses that take place for postal voting and proving them are two different things.
00:40:50.000You're talking to somebody that lost a court case in 2019 over postal voting in Peterborough.
00:40:55.940So I always thought I always thought that he would lose and it wouldn't be possible to prove it.
00:41:01.840Look, you say cult of personality. He's brought together the Republican Party in a way that no other human being could have done. He's broadened the appeal of the Republican Party in a way that no other leader has been able to do.
00:41:24.540and you know you look at the rising share of black and hispanic voters now turning up voting for trump
00:41:30.760and the republican party you look at the class base there are many more working class people
00:41:37.580voting republican than they did before now i know that i know that in the middle class suburbs they
00:41:43.120find him a little bit rich for their for their diet but whichever way you cut this
00:41:49.140you know i've seen it i've seen it on the ground this guy has a level of personal support that is
00:41:56.300phenomenal and we're now moving into a new phase and this is i think this is interesting guys
00:42:01.500so when hillary lost in 2016 the democrats effectively did not have a leader for the
00:42:07.620next few years you know schumer and pelosi would speak for the democrats cnn and the new york times
00:42:15.720effectively became the opposition. What you've now got is a leader of the Republican Party
00:42:23.340in place as an opposition leader. And I think, you know, you saw his opening speech at CPAC,
00:42:31.440and I think he's going to prove to be a very, very effective opposition leader. I really do.
00:42:37.440Do you think he's going to run again in 2024?
00:42:40.080Do you know something? Every US president that goes into the White House, when they leave after
00:42:44.760four years or eight years they've aged about 30 years they're virtually stretched out after the
00:42:51.140experience trump looks fitter and more energized uh you know now that he did in 2016 when he went
00:43:00.360there um he i mean he will face a choice won't he he will certainly lead the party up to the
00:43:10.560midterms in 2022 all right i'm i'm absolutely certain of that he will then have to decide
00:43:16.580whether he wants to do it again or whether he wants to become the kingmaker um my my sense of
00:43:23.940him and who he is and the and they love him or hate him the phenomenal drive i mean this this
00:43:32.100guy is just amazing i mean you know i know a lot of people that work for him i mean none of them
00:43:37.060could even keep up with him. He's just extraordinary. My sense is that he intends to run again, yeah.
00:43:46.720Francis, how is your cyber security? I've got a virus from an unnamed website. Of course you do.
00:43:52.720You're not alone, Francis. During the pandemic, British online infrastructure has faced an
00:43:57.800astronomical rise in targeted cyber attacks, which is what I'm sure happened to you. That is dreadful.
00:52:17.940no idea what he stands for none absolutely no idea what he stands for he certainly isn't
00:52:26.860conservative in any way he pretends to be an election time but he's sort of a metro liberal
00:52:33.360really isn't it yeah and that's kind of where the conservative party has gone um it was exactly that
00:52:41.680under cameron and osborne and i always think when you look at the sort of coterie of people
00:52:48.900i mean cummings was an exception but but perhaps but when you look at the coterie of people
00:52:53.940um you know around boris uh you know we kind of are back to the oxbridge posh set running the
00:53:01.580country and i think they're really very very disconnected but hey they said they'd get brexit
00:53:08.040done it's imperfect but they have they've got everything wrong with the pandemic everything
00:53:15.240wrong and yet the vaccine is saving them um but boris's boris's greatest attribute
00:53:23.260and it's really back to it's really back to napoleon not wanting good generals but wanting
00:53:30.200lucky generals is that first Boris Johnson had to face Jeremy Corbyn and now he's got some bloke
00:53:38.780called Starmer who most of the electorate couldn't pick out of a lineup so there is so there is no
00:53:45.900real effective opposition so I suspect I suspect that he'll be prime minister as long as he wants
00:53:52.140to be. And Nigel does that mean we're in political crisis then if we've got no effective opposition?
00:53:57.160um i think politics is permanently in crisis in many ways um yeah i mean look the labor party
00:54:07.320needs to decide what it is uh and and you can see that starmer tries to ride both horses at once
00:54:15.660they've got to work out what they actually are um you could argue you could argue
00:54:24.180that far from being in crisis we're in a period of relative stability you know we had crisis
00:54:32.400didn't we perpetual crisis really from 2016 to the end of 2019 it went on and on and on and on
00:54:39.140and on we're now in a period of stability that doesn't mean we'll get good government it doesn't
00:54:44.680mean we'll get good scrutiny but the odd thing is that large sections of the electorate just don't
00:54:50.940care anymore. They've lived through the emotional trauma of Brexit. And frankly, what do they want
00:54:57.360to do? They want to get out of lockdown, get into the sunshine and enjoy their lives. Politics has
00:55:03.060slipped way down people's agendas from where it was. So we are in for a period of relatively quiet
00:55:09.780politics. Well, it's possibly no bad thing, to be honest with you, given how heated it has got.
00:55:16.180But Nigel, thank you for coming on the show. We've got one final question for you, which is
00:55:20.240always the same, which is what is the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that
00:55:25.600we really should be? The indoctrination in our schools. And it's not just in universities. It's
00:55:31.440not just at secondary level. Actually, from the ages of seven or eight, there are all sorts of
00:55:38.120very pernicious ideas being fed into the minds of young children about this country, their identity.
00:55:45.600And I think we need to have a good, honest, open debate about it, because I'm very disturbed by some of it.
00:55:51.760Well, let's talk about that a little bit. Francis and I will have a lot to say and a lot of questions to ask you.
00:55:56.900That's an issue we cover a lot. And what you're really referring to is the culture war, the battle over gender identity, the battle over our history, the battle over the heritage,
00:56:08.020the way we should think about Britain and the rest of the West is in a sort of balanced way, or do we only focus on the negatives?
00:56:15.600uh why do you think that is such an important issue uh because i think we're poisoning the
00:56:20.940minds of our young children uh i i think we're we're not just poisoning them but we're also
00:56:27.500as a direct result of all of this dividing everybody up you know martin luther king
00:56:34.380who i think we all admire not just for his oratory which was my goodness me extraordinary
00:56:39.920but for his message you know i want my four children to be judged not by the color of their
00:56:46.380skin but by the content of their character and now we're saying ah you're black you're in that
00:56:52.940group you're asian you're in that group you're transgender you're in that group we're dividing
00:56:57.820everybody up we're not bringing people together and to to try and tell white people that somehow
00:57:05.660they are guilty and on some of the wilder fringes of academia but somehow the united kingdom
00:57:12.880great britain i mean you know we're as bad as nazi germany according to some of these people
00:57:19.620this is marxist poison that is being fed into the minds of young people and of course it you know
00:57:27.280its goal is to bring down the state entirely to bring down capitalism completely and yet
00:57:33.760it's not being opposed because we don't have people in politics robust enough to stand up to
00:57:40.280this stuff and you know you've seen it you've covered it you know i mean when i mean it goes
00:57:45.640beyond schools for goodness sake when senior police officers take the knee to an organization
00:57:50.680that wants to defund them i think we've got a bit of a problem so yeah i do think the whole culture
00:57:55.800war stuff uh i i think it is desperately important that we fight this and if we don't
00:58:02.320we'll finish up with a society bitterly divided and with more enmity than we've ever seen before
00:58:09.180and on that upbeat note thank you very much nigel for coming on the show um if people want to follow
00:58:17.320you where's the best place to do you have a youtube channel now as well don't you they can
00:58:21.220get me on youtube they can get me wherever they like i'm everywhere twitter youtube facebook
00:58:25.620websites google me i'm there okay fun nigel thank you very much for coming on it's been a great
00:58:31.040pleasure chatting with you and thank you all for watching we will see you very soon with another
00:58:35.340episode uh or a live stream all of them at 7 p.m uk time take care see you soon guys