00:03:22.620And the view of people on the left is that actually, as socialists, we're in favour of
00:03:28.800things like public ownership, whereas the EU is much more geared towards privatisation.
00:03:33.260we're in favour of investment even at times of recession and when the economy is flatlining
00:03:39.780whereas the EU particularly if you look at what it did to Greece is much more in favour of a kind
00:03:46.320of neoliberal approach to these sorts of things and from the point of view of socialists you've
00:03:54.680got to be able to elect and remove the people who govern you that's a fundamental principle
00:03:59.180It should be a fundamental principle for anybody on the left, that actually the people who are making your laws and the people who have a large say over your economy must be accountable to the people.
00:04:28.780And that's – and it's that – well, he became a national treasurer, of course, in the end, didn't he?
00:04:35.700But back in his A-day in the 70s and 80s, he was absolutely –
00:04:38.420It was brilliant, absolutely brilliant.
00:04:39.920And it's that fifth question, you know, how can we get rid of you, which goes to the heart, I think, of the debate about the European Union.
00:04:47.520You've got to have power over the people who ultimately are making your laws.
00:04:51.900And in many cases, directives and regulations come from the EU, which members of parliament have no say on and we as citizens of this country have to abide by.
00:05:03.000You can then get into the more technical details and talk about things like restrictions on state aid.
00:05:07.520So at the moment, for example, there's a huge debate around whether we should nationalise British still in light of the problems it's been experiencing over the last few days.
00:05:16.200And actually, if you look at EU regulations, we can't do that because they have, because it's so in favour of market forces, they have to have what they call this level playing field.
00:05:26.520So state aid from countries which give, in their view, an unfair leg up to particular companies is wrong.
00:05:32.620And in fact, in 2016, the EU fined the Italian and Belgian governments for trying to rescue failing steelmakers by baiting them out.
00:05:40.160You've got things like the Stability and Growth Pact, which says that member states cannot run a budget deficit of more than 3% of GDP.
00:05:48.280Now, anyone who sort of understands economics in terms of the right approach to tackling a flatline in economy and a recession,
00:05:56.380what Maynard Keynes taught us in the 1930s is that actually you need to maintain levels of investment during a recession.
00:06:02.600Because if the government cuts and slashes at a time when everybody else is doing it, no one's going to create a recovery.
00:06:09.380So it's the government's job to sort of hold the line.
00:06:12.760And that stability and growth pact makes it very, very difficult to do that.
00:06:15.780So in effect, they've ruled out Maynard Keynesian economics from the EU.
00:06:20.600And then you can look at the mass unemployment that's taking place across Europe.
00:06:25.860You can look at the renewed tensions that have appeared between particular countries,
00:06:58.480Why have the left fallen in love with it?
00:07:00.020Because I'm in the comedy industry where everybody's left and woke and all the rest of it
00:07:04.440and we're all great people and we all hold hands and all the rest of it.
00:07:07.640Number one. And number two, why is Brexit perceived as being a right-wing issue or a right-wing movement?
00:07:15.020My assessment of why they fell in love with it is I think if you look at the change in the Labour movement towards EU fanaticism,
00:07:23.640which it really is bordering on now and away from EU scepticism, that started to take place in about the late 80s.
00:07:30.480Before that, as I said, an anti-EU position was always very much a mainstream position on the left.
00:07:35.780but the left and particularly the trade unions in the late 80s had been battered by Margaret Thatcher
00:07:43.480to be perfectly blunt. Trade unions had been neutered as a result of restrictive trade union
00:07:49.440legislation. We'd seen the defeat of the miners. The Tories were looking like they could govern
00:07:54.640for a very long time and so because of that the left were looking for if you like any port in a
00:08:01.800storm. And over the hill rode the EU. And at that time, they had sort of left-leaning bureaucrats
00:08:07.980the like of Jacques Delors, who was an EU, I think, the president of the EU Commission.
00:08:12.360And in a very significant speech he delivered to the TUC, the Trade Union Congress, in the late
00:08:20.48080s, he sold the idea to them of a workers' Europe. And many people on the left thought,
00:08:25.460we need the EU's protection as some sort of bulwark against thatcherism. And the truth is,
00:08:32.460it was just a load of tosh because the EU has never been particularly in favour of workers'
00:08:36.500rights. If you look at most workers' rights that have come about in this country,
00:08:40.080they've come about as a result of trade union struggles through the UK Parliament following
00:08:44.160trade union struggles. Minimum wage, trade union recognition, health and safety law, equal pay,
00:08:49.180all of that stuff came about as a result of struggles by trade unions in this country.
00:08:53.980The question about why Brexit is perceived as a right-wing project, I think largely because of the things I touched on, because there are so few people on the left now who articulate an anti-EU position, it's almost like we've abandoned the field to the right.
00:09:11.080So it's not surprising that if you see so many people on the right who are arguing in favour of Brexit and so few people on the left, I think people will infer from that that actually it must be a right-wing project.
00:09:22.820But it really isn't. I mean, under the under the surface, there are trade unionists and people on the left who will put their head above the parapet sometimes and argue back.
00:09:33.620But, you know, one of the arguments that was made to me is that there's no such thing as a left wing exit from the EU because the Tories are in charge and there's no left wing exit.
00:09:42.640So we should remain to which my argument, well, there's no such thing as a left wing remain either.
00:09:46.860You know, if you look at the EU and the way that it's increasingly taking democratic powers away from national governments, it's heading now for, you know, possibly for fiscal union as well as monetary union.
00:10:00.240And if you look at the way that neoliberal economics are becoming more and more embedded within the EU's DNA, if you like, the very idea that by staying in the EU, you know, we're going to create socialism is a nonsense.
00:10:13.600Now, I don't describe myself as a lexateer. I don't think there is a left-wing exit. Clearly, there's not. It's the Tories who are negotiating it, the Tories who are going to remain in charge at least for some time after we leave the European Union.
00:10:28.180But my view has always been that Brexit clears the path, if you like, for a radical Labour government to come along at some point in the future, hopefully, and to be free from the straitjacket of EU regulations and directives and to actually be radical in some of its economic programs.
00:10:45.080So my view is that socialism before Brexit is impossible.
00:10:51.160Brexit itself isn't a panacea, but it has to be a step on the path for me.
00:10:55.020What I find interesting with this Jeremy Corbyn thing, him coming out, we're recording this the day after the European elections, and they'll probably go out a few weeks after.
00:11:05.080In which no doubt Labour have stormed it.
00:11:14.240But this narrative about Brexit being a right-wing thing, Jeremy Corbyn yesterday tweeted, and you criticized him for this, that the only way to stop the far right is to vote Labour.
00:11:26.300And I think what he was referring to was, you know, the Brexit Party, essentially.
00:11:31.820They are the far right, when in fact, I would argue, very many of the people who voted for the Brexit Party yesterday are precisely the kind of people that the Labour Party used to represent.
00:11:41.920It's completely and utterly insane and, in fact, dangerous to just dismiss anybody who you don't agree with as being some sort of fascist or being on the far right.
00:11:55.200And my view is the way in which the terms such as fascist and far-right and racist have been, frankly, completely debauched over recent years and devalued means that people who actually not that long ago whose views would be regarded as pretty mainstream, so for example, wanting to leave the European Union,
00:12:19.520and now being dismissed as, you know, people supporting fascism and the far right.
00:12:25.520And I find it genuinely disturbing that actually, you know, there are still people alive in this country
00:12:30.320who fought against real fascism and people who fought in the Second World War against real fascism.
00:12:35.300What real fascism is about is the total dominance of the state and the leadership over the people.
00:12:42.260It's about government dominating every area of activity, social and economic.
00:12:47.580And, you know, the idea of the supreme leader, no dissent, you know, no pluralism, no room for alternative parties to speak out and often tinged with the hardcore racism, as we saw with the with the Nazis.
00:13:04.640and it means white supremacism and it means Holocaust denial and it means jackboots
00:13:11.300and it means people with those sort of ultra-nationalist sentiments.
00:13:19.120The idea that people who are voting for the Brexit Party or even the leaders of the Brexit Party,
00:13:24.260the candidates of the Brexit Party, Anne Whittacombe, Claire Fox, Nigel Farage,
00:13:28.320I disagree with Nigel Farage on most things, disagree with Anne Whittacombe on most things.
00:13:32.160But the idea that these people are fascists in that sense or on the far right is completely bonkers. And I just think it debases our political debate. And it's dangerous because, you know, we saw just as an example, we saw yesterday when, as you say, the election, the European elections were taking place yesterday.
00:13:51.320We saw an old guy, 80 years of age or something, sitting outside a polling station in Hampshire wearing a Brexit party rosette.
00:14:00.620Turns out that this guy had served in the armed forces for 22 years, and he was attacked by someone throwing a milkshake or a yogurt, covering him with it, and allegedly, according to reports, screaming fascist and then cycling off.
00:14:17.120There would be a cyclist, wouldn't there?
00:14:18.480There would have to be a cyclist, wouldn't there?
00:15:33.880This is a man with links to the far-right.
00:15:36.080He's mobilising a wave of hatred, all the rest of it.
00:15:40.060I mean, my assessment of Farage is that he is a hard-line Thatcherite.
00:15:44.720That's my view of him. I suspect that he was perfectly comfortable inside the Conservative Party when Thatcher was in charge.
00:15:51.940In fact, I think he was a Conservative Party member probably around that time.
00:15:56.740And he is an old-fashioned Thatcherite libertarian who believes that private enterprise should pretty much run everything,
00:16:06.380believes that there should be low taxes for the rich, doesn't want trade unions to get above their station,
00:16:13.140believes in rolling back the frontiers of the state, believes in small government letting the
00:16:19.080free market rip, all of that kind of stuff. I oppose him on all of that stuff. Everything I've
00:16:23.800spoken about and written shows that I oppose him on all of that stuff. And in fact, just on that
00:16:29.180point, as I said, he's a libertarian, really. That's his political philosophy, which is about
00:16:36.000small government, government not intervening in the economy, getting out of the way and letting
00:16:40.340people run their own lives, letting private enterprise dominate, et cetera. In many respects,
00:16:45.180that's actually the opposite to fascism. That small state libertarianism, I don't agree with
00:16:49.860it and I don't like it, but don't tell me it's fascism because fascism is about the total
00:16:54.160domination of the state over every area of our lives. So no, I refuse to say that Farage is a
00:17:02.080fascist. I refuse to say that he's a racist. If you look at some of the stuff that's been going
00:17:08.380on with UKIP recently. Faraj, to his credit, it has to be said, left UKIP when it started going
00:17:15.220in a direction where it started straying into supporting Tommy Robinson and got Tommy Robinson
00:17:20.220on board as an advisor. Now, I've got no time for Tommy Robinson at all. I think he's a racist
00:17:26.700rabble rouser. Really? Why do you say that? Well, because I think his record shows that he is. And
00:17:32.480I'm someone who has argued, as you know, that actually you shouldn't fling the word around
00:17:37.240casually. If you make that accusation against someone, I think you need to be able to stand
00:17:41.880it up. I think if you look at Tommy Robinson, there's videos circulating of him online where
00:17:47.560he's particularly disparaging about Asian taxi drivers and uses the word Paki in relation to
00:17:54.660what he assumes is a Pakistani taxi driver. You don't use that sort of language as far as I'm
00:17:59.760concerned unless you harbour feelings of racism. I think he's pretty sinister in terms of his
00:18:06.760backstory uh he's been convicted of various stuff uh he's he's changed his name for whatever reason
00:18:12.540i think he genuinely does have dubious links so so i've no time for for tommy robinson and as i
00:18:18.300said nigel farage actually walked away from ukip because of his developing relationship with
00:18:23.100robinson so so you know yes he's he's on he's clearly a right-wing factor right farage um
00:18:30.280but i refuse to buy into the idea of fascism and racism and what and where do you stand on
00:18:35.160And I know, but I feel it's important to ask this question about the whole milkshaking thing, because I just thought it was pathetic and puro, but there is a large swathe of the left who go, no, that is a way to deal with these people.
00:18:48.560You mock them, you cover them in liquid, and then you make a fool of them.
00:18:53.080Before you answer, I just want to add, I saw a graph, I think it was from one of the polling groups in the UK, which showed what percentage of which voter group approved of milkshaking and at what level.
00:19:07.260And Lib Dem and Labour voters, 27% of those approved of it.
00:19:15.100And I think overall across the country was like 18%.
00:19:17.480So it's clearly a liberal Labour thing.
00:19:20.620It's interesting, isn't it? Because the very same people who, over the last year or two, have been lecturing us about the need to tone down our language, about the need to engage in more constructive political discourse, to be fairer in the way that we talk about our politicians.
00:19:42.060Don't use words like traitor or betrayal, because if you do that, you know, you're raising the temperature and leaving them exposed to vulnerable attacks.
00:19:52.300The people who condemned those on the street who heckled Anna Soubry outside parliament, the people who told us to moderate our behaviour and our language after the terrible murder of Joe Cox,
00:20:06.380seem in some cases to be the same people now
00:20:09.500who are saying, oh, it's only a milkshake, get over it.
00:21:02.280but but what it does is it drives people from the public square so you know with the example
00:21:08.080of Farage being being milkshaked he was immediately I was gonna say whisked away that's
00:21:14.660he was escorted away and you should use that he was escorted away and you know the opportunity
00:21:24.980to speak to hundreds of people in Newcastle was taken away from him because somebody had
00:21:29.460decided to throw a milkshake on him and that was it. He was gone. Actually, my view is if you're
00:21:35.880trying to do that sort of stuff, if you're trying to shut people up, if you're trying to close down
00:21:39.160public debate by physically assaulting people at the same time as attacking others for being
00:21:44.940fascist, then you probably need to look in the mirror. I'm all in favour of politicians getting
00:21:51.460it in the neck in terms of verbal debate. I'm disturbed at the snowflake tendency in our
00:21:58.420country which thinks actually you can't be offensive, you can't push the boundaries,
00:22:04.380you can't be too critical towards people, you mustn't upset people. Politicians hold public
00:22:08.980office. They've got to get out there. They should do it more. They've got to get in front of people.
00:22:13.040They've got to listen to people's concerns. I'd like politicians, frankly, some of the people
00:22:17.120in Westminster to go to the town square in places like Mansfield and Stoke-on-Trent South
00:22:21.160and listen to people and listen to people berating them. So I'm all in favour of politicians being
00:22:27.540exposed to the public but you draw the line at any sort of physical assault because it's wrong
00:22:31.460in principle and it shuts debate down and it's designed to shut debate down. Well it's a strange
00:22:35.980world we live in where the people who advocate the sort of political violence which I think is
00:22:40.320what it is are the ones that call themselves progressive. I don't see how it's progressive
00:22:45.080to stop people from talking. What I found scary about it to set aside the security issue where
00:22:51.180if someone can throw a milkshake on you they can throw acid on you or whatever else it might be.
00:22:55.080The thing I find really scary about it is that essentially we are now in a position where I can't ask this question.
00:23:05.780Well, you're saying were we starting to justify political violence? Is that the way you're going to go?
00:23:10.360Well, the thing is what I recognize out of what happened during the EU campaign and the milkshake and all this is the people who've been running around calling everyone Nazis and fascists,
00:23:22.300which I always thought they were doing as a kind of exaggeration, they actually believe that.
00:23:27.620They actually believe that they're milkshaking baby Hitler. That's what they think, which is why
00:23:33.500they feel it's justified. I think that's right. I think people, because the narrative has been
00:23:39.540allowed to develop that actually, if you're on the right wing of the Tory party, for example,
00:23:44.500you're a member of the ERG group or something, then by definition, you're a Nazi and a fascist,
00:23:49.020because this is what some people in the media and some people in parliament are calling you,
00:23:53.700then actually people will start to believe it.
00:23:56.860People who may not actually be aware of the real history of fascism and what it really means.
00:24:04.140I mean, I read a tweet a little while ago where someone said that they were living in Spain.
00:24:10.380They were a British citizen, but they were living in Spain.
00:24:14.260And there was a people's vote march in London.
00:24:19.020And someone tweeted, in all seriousness, it was a she, she tweeted that she was flying back to
00:24:24.560London to take part in this march because it was important for her to defeat fascism. And that's
00:24:31.680what this government in Britain was. And I thought, hold on a second. Once upon a time,
00:24:38.000people from Britain went out to Spain to fight real fascism. And now they're coming back to
00:24:42.960fight imaginary fascism. That's the level of hysteria that the debate has reached. And
00:24:48.400I just sort of try and say to people on the left, look, what you need to understand is when you use
00:24:53.480this language about people, because when Jeremy Corbyn, for example, says vote against the far
00:24:59.140right today, people take from that that he's not just talking about Nigel Farage. He's talking
00:25:04.920about the whole of the Brexit party and anyone who might vote for the Brexit party. So people who
00:25:11.660are inclined to vote for the Brexit party. In many cases, traditional Labour voters,
00:25:16.760and in fact, I think a recent poll showed that 47% of Leave supporting Labour voters,
00:25:24.180Labour voters normally, were going to vote for the Brexit party. So when you use language like
00:25:29.640that about people, do you really think you're going to win people back? Do you really think
00:25:33.240that actually you're going to win hearts and minds? When you show no inclination to understand
00:25:38.700what it is that has driven people to stop voting Labour, for example, and to start voting for the
00:25:43.820Brexit party. This is a party that is completely without any sort of political program, and people
00:25:51.000are prepared to vote for it in their millions on this particular issue. When you get a situation
00:25:55.900like you had during these big Brexit party rallies that have been taking place over the last few
00:26:00.980weeks, where Anne Whittacombe can go to a working men's club in Featherstone in West
00:26:08.620Yorkshire, which is about as typical a Labour heartland as you could ever wish to find,
00:26:15.560a former mining town, and get applauded to the rafters. Anne Whittacombe, a right-wing
00:26:24.180Tory, when she's going to places like that and being embraced, then people on the left have got
00:26:31.540to understand that they've got a serious problem. I tweeted it's the equivalent of Jeremy Corbyn
00:26:36.280going to the Henley on Thames branch of the Women's Institute and being cheered to the rafters. It
00:26:41.520just wouldn't happen. And if it did happen, it was probably something seriously wrong with the
00:26:45.680Conservative Party if that was happening. My fear is that there are actually some people in the
00:26:50.880Labour Party who don't want to win those hearts and minds, who frankly do believe that large
00:26:57.800parts of what you might call the traditional working class in this country in those sort of
00:27:01.900post-industrial areas are racist and reactionary and nasivist and old-fashioned and frankly we can
00:27:11.000do without them. And I think that attitude has probably been emboldened by the 2017 election,
00:27:17.740Even though Labour didn't win it, it picked up large swathes of that kind of middle class remain supporting constituency and won places that traditionally would never have won, places like Kensington and places like Canterbury.
00:27:34.500And what I say to people in the Labour Party, and I've been in the Labour Party for 25 years, what I say to people in the party, look, it's all very well.
00:27:39.780It's great to win places that you don't normally win.
00:27:42.100If you win in places like Kensington and Canterbury, great, but actually what you need to remember is we lost places like Mansfield to the Tories, an old mining town.
00:27:51.720We lost places like North East Derbyshire, an old mining constituency, Stoke-on-Trent South, Walsall North, traditional Labour heartlands,
00:27:59.120which have been Labour since time immemorial, who, after seven years as it was at the time of Tory austerity and cuts, are actually swinging to the Tories and away from Labour.
00:28:09.280And you saw a real swing to the Tories in some of those sort of post-industrial heartlands.
00:28:14.020The C2Ds, as they're known, which is the occupational working class, voted Tory.
00:28:21.700The middle classes flocked towards Labour.
00:28:23.400The working classes flocked towards the Tories.
00:28:26.24061% of Labour constituencies voted for Brexit.
00:28:30.140If you look at the 45 target seats in England and Wales that Labour needs to win in order to form the next government,
00:28:35.24035 of them voted for Brexit, as did 16 of Labour's 20 most vulnerable seats.
00:28:41.900So, you know, my view is the Labour Party, if it's going to be successful again, if it's going to win power again,
00:28:47.300needs very quickly to re-engage with those heartlands, which it has lost over recent years.
00:28:52.580And by demonising these people as racists and fascists, then you've got no chance of doing it.
00:28:58.240But, and just to make your point, I don't think the Labour Party are interested.
00:29:03.480And I talk to a lot of people, you know, the middle class, metropolitan elite, as they're known, who are Labour voters, and they don't seem particularly interested either.
00:29:12.840And to me, when we had Peter Hitchens on, he made the point that, you know, essentially this Labour Party, they don't represent them.
00:29:21.140So what you're leaving in those areas is a power vacuum, in my opinion, where you get someone like the Tommy Robinsons of the world who come in and go, look, they're not listening to you.
00:29:32.940I think actually that's broadly true. I think if you look at the membership now of the Labour Party, the data on the membership was released about a year or so ago, and it showed that 77% of Labour members fall into that occupational middle class ABC1 category.
00:29:52.180many of them are sort of university educated graduates many of them live in the south of
00:29:57.500England many of them in in London and the party and I think it's something that predates Corbyn
00:30:02.920by the way you know Corbyn's got his faults but you know I think he's right on a lot of stuff I
00:30:07.680think he's absolutely right to argue against the politics of austerity but in terms of you know
00:30:14.740cultural connection the Labour Party is is losing those communities and I think you're right there
00:30:19.440are some people in the party who would be prepared to sacrifice them. I think if you, you know, you
00:30:25.440look at the, the Gillian Duffy thing was a big thing for me. You know, the 2010 election,
00:30:32.120Corbyn Brown, the then prime minister, was out on the stump, went to a traditional Labour heartland,
00:30:37.240Rochdale, working class constituency, was confronted by this woman, Gillian Duffy, who had
00:30:43.540been a Labour Party supporter all of her life and buttonholed the Prime Minister and just
00:30:50.520expressed concern in not terribly aggressive terms by any stretch of the imagination, just
00:30:57.160expressed concern about what was happening in her community, about the impact of rapid
00:31:02.400and large-scale immigration and the pressure on services, etc. And Gordon Brown obviously
00:31:07.620was mic'd up and privately said to someone she was just a bigoted old woman. And in fact,
00:31:14.800that was what he did is he said publicly what many people in the upper echelons of the Labour
00:31:19.800Party feel privately about those old working class communities. I say that the Labour Party
00:31:25.280treats the working class now like some embarrassing elderly relative. It wants their votes at election
00:31:30.560time, but it doesn't want to be seen in public with them. And he's in many respects ashamed of
00:31:36.280them another example emily thornbury um mp for islington south where else and i mean i i know
00:31:46.020emily very vaguely and and i like her and i respect her but she she did the during i think 2014 the
00:31:53.060rochester and street by-election where she was out campaigning and she saw a sort of modest home and
00:32:00.520there was a white van parked outside and there was St. George's flag hanging from the roof or
00:32:06.740something. And she found this so noteworthy that she felt the need to tweet it with the caption
00:32:15.420image from Rochester. And again, it just showed a complete disconnect between the priorities of
00:32:22.320ordinary working class people, many of whom should be tribally Labour because that's how their
00:32:27.340parents voted. That's how their grandparents voted. And the sort of, as you said, the sort
00:32:32.020of metropolitan, liberal, university-educated elite who just find those people a different
00:32:41.140breed and can't relate to them at all. And I think there's a real debate beginning to break
00:32:46.840out now in British politics, not before time, between people, including people on the left
00:32:53.680like myself, who are arguing for a return, if you like, to a more communitarian style
00:33:01.360of politics, which respects people's affinity for place and for their sense of belonging
00:33:08.800and for the concept of community and family against this, what has become now the dominant
00:33:16.760ideology amongst large parts of our establishment, not just on the left, certainly on the left,
00:33:21.460but not just on the left, which is a much more sort of liberal, globalist, open borders, cosmopolitan worldview.
00:33:30.280And I think it's a debate that's been encapsulated very well by David Goodhart, who's...
00:33:38.340Right. Okay. Well, I think David has captured the debate really well.
00:33:41.340And he's talked about how he was disowned by his North London tribe himself because he came from this sort of very liberal background.
00:33:47.400And he wrote some years ago about the impacts of mass immigration in working class communities and how the liberal establishment just didn't understand that people's concern about it wasn't driven by racism or hostility to migrants, but was just driven by the disruption and the violation that, you know, very large movements of people were causing to their sort of sense of place and their sense of belonging.
00:34:11.760And he's written about how we've got, in a book particularly called The Road to Somewhere, how we've got a governing class in this country, which is part of what he calls the anywhere breed, which comes from this very liberal, globalist, cosmopolitan, university-educated background,
00:34:28.620who make up about 25% of the population
00:34:32.220but actually exert a much greater influence
00:34:36.360well beyond their numbers across the political debate,
00:34:39.600across political discourse, across our institutions,
00:34:43.920And the somewheres who make up about 50% of the country,
00:34:47.700the rest are in between, calls them in between us,
00:34:49.400but the somewheres who make up 50% of the country
00:34:52.100who are on lower wages, who are often in poorer housing,
00:34:56.240who have fewer skills, less opportunity in life, who are much more likely to be impacted by things
00:35:05.020such as free movement in terms of the impact on their wages and local services, etc.
00:35:10.040And it's these people who increasingly feel disenfranchised and disconnected from the
00:35:16.960political system. And those people are crying out for a much more communitarian approach to society.
00:35:23.280And these are generally people, as I say, who are not opposed to immigration.
00:35:29.580And in fact, you know, my view is that we are still in this country, despite what some people say, we are still one of the most tolerant countries in the world.
00:35:37.440Most people are open to the idea of immigration and rightly so.
00:35:42.260They just want the thing to be managed properly.
00:35:44.360They don't want a situation where you have open borders where a government says, you know, we've got free movement and invariably newcomers will gravitate largely to already hard pressed working class communities where the property might be cheaper, etc.
00:36:00.700And just the governing class says to people, well, it's great.
00:36:13.040actually, I think it shows a profound misunderstanding of the priorities of working
00:36:17.440class people. The idea that they are prepared to see a fundamental change and rupture to their
00:36:25.560local community as a result of globalisation and open borders, simply because they might be a
00:36:30.700tenner a week better off. It's almost a Thatcherite argument, saying the economy comes before
00:36:36.180everything. The economy comes before your sense of belonging, before your sense of place. And what
00:36:41.300they've done through doing this is they've toxified the entire argument about immigration.
00:36:46.920So, you know, whereas most people, I think, are happy to have immigration, just want the thing
00:36:52.960managed properly and are tolerant and say, look, once migrants are in the country, they should be
00:36:57.860treated equally. They should be given fair access to jobs. They shouldn't be exploited.
00:37:02.160We should oppose any sort of racism. The debate has now gone to the extreme where if you say
00:37:07.560you're opposed to open borders. People on the left here, oh, you're anti-migrant. You're some
00:37:14.340reactionary, some nativist. That's the level. And I deal with these people every day. I deal with
00:37:18.660them in my union. I deal with them through social media. They are not open to a serious, nuanced
00:37:23.480debate around this issue. They see things, dare I say, entirely in black and white.
00:37:28.380And as an immigrant, let me just add this. I completely agree with everything that you said.
00:37:34.380The one thing we were talking before we started the interview that really pissed me off, actually, during the Brexit campaign was this country and the people of this country being smeared as racist xenophobes.
00:37:47.000When I know for a fact in my own experience and many people that I know who are immigrants in this country would tell you, as I told you, this is one of the best places in the world to be an immigrant.
00:37:57.320But you're right, I think, that there is a section of the left that has gone so far off the deep end.
00:38:02.040I mean, you look at America, someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talking about how if you don't want open borders, that makes you racist or having an immigration system is racist.
00:38:13.140And you just go, these people are insane.
00:38:15.160I mean, and you must be tearing your hair out because, I mean, I don't really see how with that trend that you're talking about happening within labor, I don't see how labor is ever going to win back the working class vote ever again.
00:38:28.880It's going to be very difficult, frankly.
00:38:32.040And I mean, just on your point about tolerance, one thing that struck me is after just after the EU referendum in 2016, the Sunday Times, I think it was, ran a poll where they asked people whether EU nationals who were in the country before the referendum should be allowed to stay post-referendum.
00:38:51.300And what that poll showed is that 77% of Leave voters said, yes, people who were here before the referendum from the EU should be allowed to stay.
00:39:03.320And that's my experience of speaking to Leave voters, that they're motivated by a fundamental sense of fair play and not by racism.
00:39:09.200And the picture that's been painted of them as people who just want closed borders and people who, I mean, Vince Cable said the Leave vote was driven by people with a hankering for nostalgia and empire and they don't like non-white faces around the place and they want to see blue passports.
00:39:25.520a complete caricature. The Leave vote was driven by people who wanted self-government and sovereignty
00:39:32.940and a return to the spirit of community and democracy and belonging and those sorts of
00:39:39.840things. And the interesting thing, actually, is that since the referendum, those things have
00:39:44.660hardly been discussed in a lot of the public debate. The things that actually drove the vote,
00:39:49.440including control over immigration, much of that has just been dismissed. And what we've had in
00:39:55.500is a very kind of dry technical debate about the customs union and the single market and the
00:40:02.500Irish border. All of that stuff's important, of course it is, but the idea that people went into
00:40:07.820the polling booth and said, you know, I'm against the customs union, I'm going to vote leave,
00:40:12.540fundamentally misunderstands why people voted so many in such large numbers in the way they did.
00:40:17.960And in fact, in many ways, in many cases, people voted for the first time in their lives because I think people would sense that in general elections, they felt they couldn't get fundamental change in general elections.
00:40:32.320That actually on some of the key issues, such as EU membership, for example, the parties, the mainstream parties were all over peace.
00:40:40.740And what's the point in voting in general elections?
00:40:44.340We're going to get the same sort of government, whatever happens.
00:40:46.420I think with the EU referendum, actually what they saw was here was an opportunity to put a missile through the political and economic system to really disrupt the status quo and to say to the establishment, look, you forgot about us and this is the punishment that you are now going to get for forgetting about us.
00:41:06.000And in many respects, you know, I've argued that in many ways it wasn't necessarily just an anti-EU vote.
00:41:14.380It certainly was an anti-EU vote, but it wasn't driven just by opposition to the European Union.
00:41:19.800Less still was it driven by opposition to the continent of Europe.
00:41:23.160And people often conflate the two, don't they?
00:41:24.900They say if you're against the EU, you're against Europe.
00:41:29.760What it was in many respects was a vote against the political establishment in this country.
00:41:34.580You know, the people saw all of these people lining up, the mainstream political parties, Cameron, Osborne, arguing, you know, the banking industry and, you know, the CBI and people like that, big business, who they felt had actually made their lives difficult over recent years and were in many respects responsible for their predicament and were now desperate for their vote.
00:41:57.600And people thought, actually, no, I'm not going to vote the way that you want.
00:42:01.840I'm going to do this because you've forgotten about me and this is the lesson that you're going to get.
00:42:07.100And I've likened it in some ways to a general strike.
00:42:12.500We haven't had one in this country since 1926.
00:42:14.880Not that some of us haven't been trying to work to work.
00:42:18.340But we haven't had a general strike since 1926.
00:42:20.440But it was like a general strike in the sense that people, I think people knew that if they voted leave, it would create some turbulence in the country, certainly in the short term, and probably accepted that it might hit them in the pocket a bit again in the short term.
00:42:36.480There's a debate about whether Brexit will be better economically in the long term.
00:42:40.840But I think people felt that, you know, some of the disruption to the money markets, whatever, might make us poorer in the short term.
00:42:47.040but it was a price they were prepared to pay because they knew it was the only weapon that
00:42:51.960they had and possibly might ever get in their lifetime to make their political masters sit up
00:42:56.520and take notice. Very similar to workers going on strike. And I say that as a trade unionist,
00:43:01.040you know, you know, if you go on strike, you're not going to get paid. You're going to get hit
00:43:03.560in the pocket. You know, it's going to disrupt operations. You know, you're going to be
00:43:07.980attacked for it, but you sometimes feel that actually that's a price worth paying because
00:43:12.820in the long term, it might lead to a better working environment. It might lead to better
00:43:18.020conditions inside the workplace. And that's what people felt. They knew that it was going
00:43:23.420to create disruption, but equally they knew they had to make their political masters sit
00:43:27.900up and take notice. And the really interesting thing is they still aren't sitting up and
00:43:31.400taking notice. The political establishment in this country, in large parts, is doing
00:43:37.880everything it can to subvert the vote. And actually people voted Leave because they felt
00:43:41.860the political establishment had stopped listening to them. And that political establishment has
00:43:45.880spent the last three years proving them right and trying to undermine the vote. And my fear is that
00:43:51.460actually if you do block Brexit or if you have a second referendum, the forces it would unleash
00:43:56.580in this country from people who say, right, you've shut off any democratic mechanism I've got
00:44:02.060for expressing my view or for affecting change. You're now leaving me with no other option but
00:45:01.860Well, it's really interesting because if you look at the data from the referendum,
00:45:05.720I mean, if you listen to the media and to liberal commentators and some of the mainstream politicians, you would think that every person from a minority ethnic background voted Remain.
00:45:16.540And in fact, the data shows that about a third of BME voters voted Leave.
00:45:21.100And in some cases, if you drill down a bit more, you see that some of their motivation was opposition to free movement.
00:45:27.420And because many of them had come from the Commonwealth in the 50s and 60s and felt that actually EU free movement was unfair because it gave a leg up to predominantly white people who were European, whereas if you're a nurse from India or something or the West Indies, you have to jump through more hoops.
00:45:45.860So there was this sense that there was a profound unfairness about EU free movement amongst that section of the BME community.
00:45:53.340And if you look at some of the data, if you look at some of the towns and cities with high BME populations, places like Slough and Bradford and Birmingham, they all voted by a majority leave.
00:46:08.920So the idea that – and again, it's totally patronising to suggest that black and minority ethnic people can only vote Remain because obviously Brexit voters are all racist and they couldn't line up with them.
00:46:21.560I mean, my own in-laws are Anglo-Indian.
00:46:25.960My wife's Anglo-Indian family came from Calcutta back in the 1960s, and many of them voted
00:46:32.660leave because actually they look at the country.
00:46:35.500I mean, I was speaking to my mother-in-law about this recently.
00:46:37.660She looks at the country she arrived in in the 1960s, and of course, there was lots of
00:46:41.700racism around, much more so than today.
00:46:44.580But actually, they developed a fondness for the country and they became settled in the country and they established their home in the country.
00:46:56.420And in her case, she didn't like the way that the country is being managed and didn't like any more than other working class people the way that the country has been thrown to the four winds around globalization and the way that it's now dominated by people with this sort of liberal globalist worldview.
00:47:12.840So she was very much in favor of voting leave.
00:47:15.460So we do need to challenge this myth that people from a minority ethnic background by default must remain voters.
00:47:24.120It's an interesting thing on the economy as well because I remember I host things every year at an economics and comedy festival where they get comedians to host discussions between economists, politicians, etc.
00:47:34.420And I remember this, Don, your point about everything being about money, everything being about the economy.
00:47:38.980there was an economist there who kept talking about the fact that the communities that will
00:47:43.120be hardest hit by the economic impact of leaving the EU will be precisely the ones that voted for
00:47:48.880it. And I kept saying to him, I hear what you're saying, but they know that. And they voted to
00:47:55.100leave anyway. People quite often prepare to accept an economic hit if they get something else that's
00:48:00.880more important to them. And he just kept ignoring that question. I kept putting to him over and
00:48:05.780over and eventually just threw his hands up and, well, I'm an economist, so that's what I'm going
00:48:09.280to talk about. It's a very sort of dry scientific way of looking at what is in many respects a much
00:48:15.900more human debate around what drove people to vote leave. And yes, as I said earlier,
00:48:22.640it's a fundamental misunderstanding of working class people. The idea that they are driven
00:48:28.240just by this Thatcherite philosophy that it's all about the economy. It's all about whether we can
00:48:34.420make a fast buck out of something. Just because people at the top might see things that way,
00:48:38.620it doesn't mean that people at the bottom do. And I despair sometimes when I hear Labour
00:48:42.340MPs say, well, nobody voted to be poorer. Well, as I said, first of all, there's a debate around
00:48:49.620whether Brexit will make people poorer or not. I think it's an opportunity actually to be a lot
00:48:53.740more radical with the economy when we're free from the EU and actually to weight the economy
00:48:58.760much more in favour of working class people. But actually, aside from that, how do they know
00:49:04.020that people didn't vote to be poorer. As I said before, people going on strike. I've been on
00:49:08.560strike three times in my career as a firefighter. I knew that certainly in the short term, I was
00:49:13.880going to be poorer every time. I was going to not be paid. It was going to be harder that month to
00:49:18.960pay the mortgage. But it was absolutely right in my heart what I was doing because I was fighting
00:49:25.420for better pay or I was trying to defend my pension or I was challenging the government
00:49:29.840trying to make cuts in the fire service. And all of those things outweighed the short-term
00:49:35.520impact on my pocket. And for the vast majority of firefighters who went on strike on those
00:49:39.680occasions, they had exactly the same sentiment. So I say to people, just be careful about saying
00:49:45.180that nobody voted to be poorer, because if you believe that, then effectively what you're doing
00:49:49.160is just dismissing working class people as being motivated entirely by money. And that was why
00:49:56.580Thatcher approached the economy in the way that she did, because she thought that was all that
00:49:59.820people were interested in. Of course, having money takes this thing out of being poor,
00:50:04.920as someone once said. But actually, for many working class people, that sense of place,
00:50:10.200that sense of belonging, that sense of community, the principle of self-government,
00:50:14.400the principle of sovereignty, the principle of being able to control your own borders
00:50:18.780and being able to resist the onslaught of globalisation and de-industrialisation,
00:50:25.000that actually means a hell of a lot to people. And it's something that money can't buy.
00:50:30.460Paul, I'm going to ask you quite a difficult question now, and I apologise for this. We had
00:50:33.940Dr. Steve Davis on, a brilliant interview, if you haven't seen it, check it out,
00:50:37.960from the Institute of Economic Affairs. And he said that what Brexit is, is a catalyst for the
00:50:45.180death of two-party politics. Do you think what we're witnessing now with Corbyn and the way
00:50:50.700They're abandoning their working class heartlands as a slow death of the Labour Party.
00:50:56.360In a sense, there might be a new movement or a new party like the SDP coming forward
00:51:17.880It looks like the death of two-party politics.
00:51:20.200You could think, for example, in the early 80s when the sort of old SDP broke away from the Labour Party and there was a surge in the polls and they did really well in by-elections.
00:51:29.900And then before too long, everything kind of went back to normal.
00:51:34.080but I do think there's probably more chance of it now simply because I think there is and I think
00:51:40.900this has probably been a consequence of the referendum that tribal loyalties as they were
00:51:48.220are breaking down more and more I think if you look back to the 1980s you know working class
00:51:54.120people by and large voted Labour because they knew that the Labour Party represented them
00:51:58.720spoke for them even if they didn't always agree with it even if they didn't always like its leader
00:52:03.680The Labour Party speaks for the working class.
00:52:05.720The Tories speak for the rich and the bosses, and we have to be Labour.
00:52:08.980You know, my dad was Labour, my grandparents were Labour.
00:52:14.780I think now that tribalism is wearing away, and because of the referendum, people felt
00:52:19.200able to vote Leave, for example, whilst knowing that they weren't helping the enemy, the Tories,
00:52:26.120because, you know, there were Tories who were lining up for Remain and Leave.
00:52:28.940There were Labour people lining up for Remain and Leave, probably less so Leave.
00:52:32.920But they felt able to vote that way without thinking, I've betrayed my class, I've betrayed my parents, you know, they've always voted Labour.
00:52:40.980And I think increasingly with the way that Labour is becoming this kind of bourgeois, metropolitan, liberal, very sort of youth-obsessed London-centric party, there are people in the country who are looking at the Labour Party now and thinking, that party just does not want me.
00:53:02.060That party is ashamed of me. That party speaks for a different type of person now and wants a different type of person, you know, someone with any sort of traditional views around, you know, if you like, small C conservative views, which many working class people have got.
00:53:20.220But, you know, this small C conservative thread runs through working class communities in terms of their approach to issues like the family and their affinity for their country, patriotism, their approach to things like crime and immigration, things that are completely dismissed as reactionary and right wing.
00:53:36.520But these people who have these traditional views, there was never any inconsistency between holding those views and being a proud Labour Party supporter.
00:53:45.800And the Labour Party once upon a time wanted those people.
00:53:48.920Nowadays, we talked about Duffy, we talked about Rochester.
00:53:52.080Nowadays, the Labour Party is embarrassed by people like them.
00:53:55.340And I think the danger, which comes back to your question, is that actually you do leave
00:53:59.260those people open to the forces of the right.
00:54:02.420You leave those people open to the forces of populism.
00:54:06.160And I've got to say, I think it's something that isn't just happening in Britain.
00:54:09.160You can look at the Rust Belt in America, where they voted for Trump in such large numbers.
00:54:14.560You look at the Gillet-Jean movement in France, where people have got together and said, actually, we want to fight for great democracy, for economic justice, for national sovereignty.
00:54:24.520They've been completely ignored by the left in Britain, by the way.
00:54:26.860The internationalist left in Britain, which will support every international struggle by workers elsewhere, because it's the right kind of struggle.
00:54:34.200But the Gillet-Jean, you know, don't quite tick the right box.
00:54:37.740And you see throughout Europe the rise of, you know, what some people would dismiss of nationalist movements.
00:54:43.660But I think actually if you just dismiss them as populist nationalist movements, you know, reminiscent of the 1930s, you're making a grave mistake.
00:54:51.680Because in the 1930s, that kind of ultra-nationalism was a very expansive, aggressive nationalism.
00:54:58.900It was about dominating other countries, about invading other countries.
00:55:02.300Nowadays, the nationalist movements in Europe are just about defending their own space.
00:55:06.760They're not interested in going elsewhere.
00:55:08.500They just want to defend their community and their culture and their democracy, et cetera.
00:55:13.660and that's why unless we try and win the hearts and minds of those people
00:55:18.060then they are going to be potentially drawn by forces of the right
00:59:38.000There we go, so I'm in the right place to say it.
00:59:40.280I think what I would describe as the abolition of womanhood, to be perfectly honest,
00:59:46.840I think we are seeing an attack on womanhood and women's rights through an approach which seeks to abolish the sexes in some way by saying that people now can effectively just self-identify as whatever sex they want and that society has to accept that and the law has to accept that.
01:00:16.840and that if you don't accept that then you're some sort of bigot and some sort of reactionary
01:00:22.580and I find it extremely sinister I have to say and I'm very much in favour of people living the
01:00:30.360lives that they want you know if they're not hurting other people I'm perfectly happy for
01:00:34.960people to identify as they want to dress as they want to worship who they want to eat what they
01:00:39.460want but when the government intervenes and says that someone for example who is a man has the
01:00:48.840anatomy of a man can wake up one morning and identify as a woman and potentially have access
01:00:56.660to women's safe spaces because the law interprets that person as a woman and anyone who doesn't
01:01:03.180accept that interpretation, could be arrested and prosecuted. I find it pretty Orwellian,
01:01:11.140to be honest. And it's almost like we're now saying that there isn't a definition
01:01:15.080of woman. And I say to people who challenge me on this, define woman for me. And they get into
01:01:19.520all sorts of muddles because they can't, because they know if they did, they would have to accept
01:01:23.660that actually, you know, the sexes are different. And I know many decent women who have been on the
01:01:30.560right side of equality struggles throughout their entire lives who are really seriously concerned
01:01:36.040at this and have said, well, hold on a second. We didn't fight for years to, you know, get advances
01:01:43.340in terms of women's privacy and dignity and security in public spaces and workplaces, et cetera,
01:01:49.520only for you to effectively come along now and say, well, there's no difference between the
01:01:52.840genders and you're entitled to use each other's facilities and you have to treat this person as
01:01:57.160a woman even though he's got the anatomy of a man. I find it disturbing. I find it sinister.
01:02:01.640I find people try to close down the debate on it just by shouting accusations at you when you try
01:02:06.240to discuss it. And it's not, for those reasons in many respects, it's not being spoken about as much
01:02:12.180as it ought to be. And it's a debate that needs to be had. Well, it's a good point. And let's dig
01:02:17.320into it for a couple of minutes, Francis, because I don't want to just leave it hanging. We've had
01:02:20.540a few people on the show and talked to them about it. And we've also had a transgender woman on the
01:02:24.900I had India Willoughby on the show to talk about this.
01:02:28.680So let's dig into it, because I hear that argument a lot.
01:02:31.200And I have to say instinctively, I agree with it.
01:02:34.440But the argument about women's rights being taken away by having this, the one safe space
01:02:41.060that people often talk about is bathrooms, right?
01:02:44.120And there are two issues I would kind of pick up.
01:02:47.460Number one, the easy solution is just to have cubicles for everybody, then it's not an issue.
01:02:51.740Another thing is if you were a male sex offender who wanted to get into a woman's bathroom, you can do that without self-identifying as a woman now anyway, right?
01:03:03.880So I don't really – give us a bit more on where you think this is something that has an impact on women's rights.
01:03:12.000Well, I think in terms of the example you use, if someone tried to do it now, they could walk through the women's – into a women's bathroom.
01:03:18.220I've done it a couple of times by complete action.