TRIGGERnometry - Peter Hitchens on Crime, Immigration, Cannabis & the Left

00:00:00.000 I've often thought, by the way, that if Polish and Romanian and Bulgarian and other migrants to this country

00:00:06.020 could compete for the jobs of television commentators and Guardian leader writers,

00:00:12.280 there would be a lot more concern about this country than there is, but they don't.

00:00:22.020 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

00:00:25.360 I'm Constantine Kissin.

00:00:26.320 And this is the show for you if you're bored of people arguing on the internet over subjects

00:00:31.280 they know nothing about. At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts, we ask

00:00:36.320 the experts.

00:00:37.320 Our fantastic guest this week is a journalist, broadcaster, and author, Peter Hitchens. Welcome

00:00:41.940 to Trigonometry.

00:00:42.920 Well, so far, it's a pleasure to be here.

00:00:45.860 Well, it's great to have you, and thank you so much for coming on. We obviously know exactly

00:00:49.600 who you are, that's why we've invited you on. But for anyone who isn't familiar with

00:00:53.080 the work, tell us a little bit about how are you, where you are, what's been your journey

00:00:55.760 I'm a social and moral conservative. I write a weekly column for the Mail on Sunday. I've worked

00:01:01.440 in Fleet Street for more than 40 years, first of all, as a reporter in various subjects from

00:01:07.740 education, politics, industry, diplomacy, and defense. I spent two and a bit years working

00:01:13.780 as a resident correspondent in Moscow, another two years working as a resident correspondent in

00:01:18.420 Washington, D.C. I have traveled on the last count to 57 countries for work purposes, some of which

00:01:26.300 no longer exist. I'm the author of, I think, seven books, but I've changed the titles of several of

00:01:32.060 them, so I can't remember how many of them are. But they're all very good, whatever title they're

00:01:36.360 available. I hope that helps. Yeah, exactly. Of course it does. And one of the things we wanted

00:01:41.420 to start by talking about is you mentioned you're a social and moral conservative. And one of the

00:01:45.880 things you've always been most scathing about is the transformation of the conservative party in

00:01:50.540 this country. It's not transformation. The conservative party in this country was never

00:01:55.040 any good. It's always been a machine for obtaining office for the sons of gentlemen. That's been its

00:02:02.960 purpose. It's never been conservative. But for most people, I think, when they hear you talking

00:02:08.580 about, say, David Cameron is not a conservative or Theresa May may not be a... Statements of the

00:02:13.060 obvious. So what would a Peter Hitchens designed conservative party stand for?

00:02:19.360 Well, no, because my main purpose in life for several years, I've now given up politics,

00:02:23.920 but when I still tried, I made it my business to try and destroy the conservative party and

00:02:28.900 to ensure that it split and collapsed so that it could be fed in small pieces down the plumbing

00:02:32.980 and flushed away into the lavatory of history. But this project failed. People were far

00:02:43.040 more interested in voting tribally than they were in voting rationally. And so the Conservative

00:02:48.100 Party survived under David Cameron in 2010 when it should have been wiped from the map. And that's

00:02:53.020 when I decided that really it was futile to try and get involved in politics. It would only make

00:02:57.000 me unhappy. So I just laugh at it now. And so if someone else had been successful in flushing the

00:03:05.220 remains of the Conservative Party down the toilet, what are the principles that you talk,

00:03:09.080 the moral and social conservatism?

00:03:11.360 I've never understood why we divide,

00:03:13.420 particularly in modern Britain,

00:03:14.580 why we divide politics up the way we do.

00:03:16.580 It seems to me the fundamental division

00:03:18.240 in modern Western politics

00:03:19.960 is pretty much summed up in the division

00:03:22.320 between, say, the Daily Mail and the Guardian

00:03:24.120 or between Polly Toynbee and me.

00:03:26.480 It's in the moral and social areas

00:03:28.680 of sex, drugs, and rock and roll

00:03:30.520 that the main contentions are.

00:03:32.100 Nobody cares about the nationalization

00:03:34.160 of industry anymore.

00:03:35.520 I'm in favor of nationalizing the railways,

00:03:37.240 for instance, but I'm a conservative.

00:03:38.280 It's not an issue.

00:03:40.080 The far bigger issue is, for instance, whether you have comprehensive state schools or whether

00:03:44.880 you have academically selective state schools, which Polly is against, and I'm very much

00:03:49.880 in favor of reintroducing academic selection.

00:03:53.260 The question of whether we continue to support in law and custom the married family or whether

00:04:00.920 we just say any old family is fine is also important.

00:04:04.120 And the question of whether we hold people responsible for their actions or whether the criminal justice system basically treats crime as a disease caused by poverty, abuse, and all kinds of other external factors, so the crime isn't the responsibility of the criminal, is another crucial area of distinction.

00:04:20.740 And these are where the divisions lie.

00:04:23.560 But on the other hand, I've never seen why anybody couldn't be socially conservative on those issues and also in favor of a broadly social democratic approach to things like welfare.

00:04:33.700 Though, of course, where those two meet, it means that you have, in my view, a very strong

00:04:38.520 welfare state for those who need it, but one which is pretty stringent in not handing out

00:04:43.700 money to people who don't need it, specifically so that it can be effective in helping those

00:04:48.480 who really do need help.

00:04:49.460 And that would be my ideal political party, one which was both social democratic and socially

00:04:55.480 conservative, a bit like what the Labour Party used to be, really, until about the middle

00:05:00.840 50s.

00:05:01.380 And Peter, do you think that what is happening now with the Tory party, when they had, with

00:05:08.280 the referendum and David Cameron trying to keep the party together, do you think we're

00:05:12.780 going to see a new party rising out?

00:05:14.740 I have no idea.

00:05:15.740 I can't read politics anymore.

00:05:17.560 I used to have a pretty broad understanding of the technicalities of it, of how the parties

00:05:23.140 worked, how they split up and who was who.

00:05:25.260 There was a time when I could give the name of every member of parliament and his or her

00:05:29.420 constituency from memory, for instance. But now I've lost it all. I can't. And also, increasingly,

00:05:35.320 I no longer care. So if you want to ask me, I spent some time working in the parliamentary lobby

00:05:41.640 as a political reporter. And it was one of the greatest disappointments of my life. I had worked

00:05:46.600 for years to get in there. I really wanted to do it. I thought it would be some kind of kingdom of

00:05:50.400 the mind where intelligent people discuss the future of the country. It turned out to be a

00:05:54.900 gossip factory and increasingly a gossip factory manipulated by spin doctors so that what political

00:06:01.600 reporters were basically turning out was regurgitated party propaganda. There are exceptions to this

00:06:07.100 and they're noble and creditable. But in general, political journalism in this country is a pretty

00:06:14.320 poor thing. And I don't have much left to do with it. So you sound incredibly almost disillusioned

00:06:23.040 with it. Well, I was disillusioned by that. I mean, it was amazing to me to find just how dull

00:06:29.960 and apolitical the core of political journalism was to work in what was then, or what then seemed

00:06:38.340 to me to be the faded magnificence of the Palace of Westminster, rubbing shoulders with cabinet

00:06:43.420 ministers and all the rest of it. I had expected to be really, really thrilled and full of enjoyment

00:06:49.700 when I was doing this and it was nothing but disappointment. So most of what was discussed

00:06:53.500 was who's up and who's down, who's in and who's out. I now look at what happened during

00:06:58.980 those years and I realised that quite major acts of parliament passed through both houses

00:07:04.540 of parliament at that time without me even noticing they were going on because we weren't

00:07:08.460 interested in that. But we've also seen somewhat of a revolt via Brexit against the current

00:07:14.660 political establishment. Do you think that signals a new dawn?

00:07:18.620 Yeah, but new dawns often bring horrible days, don't they? I think that it did encapsulate some

00:07:27.700 of the things that I had for many years been saying, that the real discontents of the people

00:07:32.180 were not being reflected by the political parties. And the referendum released people from party

00:07:38.340 allegiance. So an awful lot of Labour voters who are socially conservative, who don't like the

00:07:43.420 effects, for instance, of mass immigration, who don't like the way in which their areas

00:07:48.300 have been pretty much allowed to become victim areas where crime and disorder flourish unchecked

00:07:56.780 by the police or the courts, there was an enormous great revulsion.

00:08:01.200 There were also people, a huge number of people, got really, really sick of being told that

00:08:05.300 George Osborne had cured the economy when he so plainly hadn't.

00:08:08.720 And anybody who didn't actually live in London knew that.

00:08:12.600 But almost nobody who writes or talks about politics lives outside London.

00:08:16.480 So they had no idea of just how sick people were of being told that the recession was

00:08:21.900 over and that everything was all right and wonderful, when the jobs that people could

00:08:27.180 get were miserably paid, when the cost of housing was appalling, and when almost everybody

00:08:32.120 was forced to get into debt simply to live the kind of lives which they had thought were

00:08:37.280 normal.

00:08:37.560 And that also caused it.

00:08:40.000 The referendum result was a portmanteau of discontents all expressed in one thing.

00:08:44.600 And, of course, I took no part in the referendum.

00:08:47.960 I didn't vote in it because I don't like referenda.

00:08:50.540 I think they're nasty, dangerous things.

00:08:52.880 And I predicted if you look for the words constitutional crisis in connection with this,

00:08:58.180 you'll probably find them expressed earliest by me in any index

00:09:02.320 because I thought there would be a contest

00:09:04.920 between the democratic mandate of parliament

00:09:08.400 and the democratic mandate of the referendum.

00:09:11.400 And how on earth do you sort out which is supreme?

00:09:15.400 Both of them have a similar mandate.

00:09:17.280 But let me challenge you just one second.

00:09:18.580 How do you decide which, if they come into conflict,

00:09:20.960 how do you decide who wins?

00:09:22.080 We have no mechanism in our constitution for deciding this at all.

00:09:25.000 This is very true.

00:09:25.860 But on the other hand, if you talk about the fact

00:09:27.800 that many people felt that they had no way of communicating

00:09:31.160 and having their concerns validated.

00:09:33.340 Yes, but if the way that they were given

00:09:34.700 was a bad way.

00:09:36.500 Is that not better than no way at all?

00:09:37.920 No, it isn't,

00:09:38.640 because one of the worst things about politics,

00:09:42.760 particularly cynical populist politics

00:09:45.260 designed by public relations men,

00:09:47.120 is that it raises hopes it can't fulfill.

00:09:49.400 You can do that only so many times

00:09:51.480 before you begin to create

00:09:53.960 really serious discontents.

00:09:56.060 And the election of Donald Trump

00:09:57.540 and the referendum in this country

00:09:59.540 are both warnings to anybody who cares to listen

00:10:02.940 that the age of universal suffrage democracy

00:10:05.460 is coming to a very dangerous point

00:10:07.600 where people are ceasing to vote on the basis of,

00:10:11.440 if I vote for this party, it'll improve my life,

00:10:14.020 to if I vote for this party or vote this way,

00:10:16.440 it will punish people I dislike.

00:10:18.480 And when you move into an area

00:10:19.920 when democracy is being used by people

00:10:22.160 to punish those they dislike and hate,

00:10:23.800 then you move into an area of grave danger.

00:10:25.780 And how have we come to this point, Peter?

00:10:27.440 Well, because of the ceaseless making of promises we couldn't keep, because of the delusional

00:10:32.800 attitudes fostered by both politicians and much of the media about how important, in

00:10:39.140 the case of this country, about how important and rich we are, which we're not, and the

00:10:44.620 inability to confront the real problems of this country and to do anything about them

00:10:48.120 and always, always to change the subject when they come up.

00:10:51.120 So you've said the real problems of this country, Peter.

00:10:53.320 What do you think are the real problems of this country?

00:10:55.140 Well, the fundamental problem has been, I don't know whether this could have been avoided.

00:10:59.180 I suspect it largely could have been.

00:11:00.720 The deindustrialization which took place, largely under Margaret Thatcher, unintentionally,

00:11:05.400 she never intended to do it as far as I know, but also I think probably impelled by membership

00:11:10.080 of the European Union in the 70s and 80s, has left huge numbers of people without adequate

00:11:16.740 employment, unable to do things that will actually reward them properly, let alone enable

00:11:23.120 them to raise a family in stable circumstances.

00:11:27.080 The education system was sabotaged by egalitarian dogma in the 1960s, the destruction of academic

00:11:35.200 selection in the state system, which lowered the standards of education for the whole of

00:11:39.580 the country.

00:11:40.580 It's terribly visible now.

00:11:41.580 The number of people, even who've gone through expensive private educations and have degrees

00:11:45.600 in PPE from Oxford, the number of people who know, in effect, almost nothing at all in

00:11:51.080 decision-making positions is horrifying.

00:11:53.340 Members of Parliament can stand up and say, for instance, that Britain didn't get any

00:11:56.560 martial aid, as a couple have done recently, one at the weekend.

00:12:01.200 And how can anybody become a member of Parliament not knowing that, in fact, Britain was the

00:12:06.100 principal recipient of martial aid, to say that we didn't get it?

00:12:09.640 How can such ignorance possibly not result in the very least incompetence and quite possibly

00:12:16.680 in disaster in the way the country

00:12:18.720 and its enterprises and its institutions

00:12:21.180 are run.

00:12:23.260 Lots of other things I could...

00:12:24.600 This is what I write books about because I think

00:12:26.940 this is odd.

00:12:28.880 I don't understand why this is so and so I go off

00:12:31.080 and I do the research and I've written a book

00:12:33.100 about the cultural revolution

00:12:35.400 which swept through the country in the 50s

00:12:37.080 and 60s for which

00:12:39.380 I was rewarded by being told that I

00:12:41.100 yearned for a return to the 1950s

00:12:43.180 which as anybody who lived through the 1950s

00:12:45.100 can tell you, I certainly do not do. It's an era of gristle, chill blades, cigarette smoke, and

00:12:53.500 extraordinary grimness. I wouldn't want to return to it for a moment. But nobody listens to what

00:12:57.580 you say. I wrote a book on what happened to crime and the police. Again, it's full of research facts,

00:13:03.020 which would be immensely useful to any minister trying to do something about the crime problem.

00:13:07.180 I pressed it into the hands of Home Secretaries and Chief Constables. They never read it.

00:13:11.820 So I've written a lot about the catastrophe that happened to the education system.

00:13:16.540 Nobody pays any attention at all.

00:13:19.920 And it is extraordinary how there is no interest in looking at these things.

00:13:24.900 And why do you think that is?

00:13:25.920 Because of the national illusion.

00:13:28.500 And that's the reason for my latest book, which has not been reviewed by any major publication,

00:13:33.980 The Phony Victory.

00:13:36.380 The national religion is of the finest hour in Winston Churchill,

00:13:39.820 of Britain's great role in saving the world.

00:13:42.080 And there's some truth in this.

00:13:43.960 But the trouble is there's an awful lot of flannel in it as well.

00:13:46.520 And we comfort ourselves for an episode

00:13:51.560 in which we actually became much poorer and much less powerful.

00:13:55.320 We comfort ourselves by telling ourselves stories

00:13:57.460 about how important we were when actually we weren't.

00:14:01.880 And we certainly aren't now.

00:14:04.000 And I think it's this stripping way of illusions.

00:14:05.860 Now, this is not in the way of business.

00:14:09.940 I'm a conservative Christian patriot.

00:14:12.340 For me to attack a sacred figure such as Winston Churchill seems to me to be a significant act and to be educational.

00:14:19.100 For the left to attack it, well, that's nothing.

00:14:20.720 They've been doing it for years.

00:14:22.160 But if somebody like me does it, then it would seem to me to be interesting.

00:14:25.680 But I can't get anybody to pay any attention.

00:14:27.440 But I don't see the connection between the phony victory, as you call it, and chief constables not wanting to read about crime statistics.

00:14:34.920 Well, the connection is that in both cases, I've said something important that nobody wants to know, but I'm not offering you a single cause for everything.

00:14:44.560 I'm just pointing out that I repeatedly try and look at things as they've actually happened to go into the archives and research what took place to see if what we're being told is true.

00:14:54.040 And again and again, I find what we're told is not true.

00:14:56.700 But the fundamental illusion in this country is an illusion that we are far more important and far richer than we are.

00:15:04.920 In fact, we're terribly in debt, both as a country and as a people.

00:15:08.620 And our military, diplomatic, and political power is pitiful compared with what it used to be.

00:15:16.700 And you're never going to solve the problems of a country or family or an individual

00:15:25.440 unless that country or that family or that individual or that institution

00:15:28.720 confronts, honestly, the difficulties with the country.

00:15:31.680 And this is a thing which is very much the case with the Soviet Union.

00:15:34.020 And it was partly living in the Soviet Union in its final convulsive months that made me

00:15:39.760 look more critically at my own country.

00:15:41.960 Here was an enormous empire completely deluding itself about how rich and strong and important

00:15:48.580 it was.

00:15:49.580 And when it fell, the fall was terrible.

00:15:52.920 And you must, because you were in Moscow, I think, as a child when I was living there,

00:15:56.740 you must remember, I remember people losing all their savings overnight, standing in the

00:16:02.840 street selling their possessions from little fake veneer tables near the markets so they

00:16:11.040 could afford to eat.

00:16:12.640 And these were middle-class professional people who, a couple of years before, had thought

00:16:16.280 their future was endless and uninterrupted, selling their possessions to live.

00:16:21.360 It made a very strong impression on me.

00:16:22.800 It always reminded me of the opening scenes of that great film, The Third Man, if you've

00:16:26.720 seen it, which is set in post-war Vienna, and the same thing is happening, the middle

00:16:31.260 classes of post-war Vienna

00:16:33.160 are reduced to selling their possessions on the streets

00:16:35.220 to live. A thing I thought I'd

00:16:37.160 never see anywhere, and I saw it in Moscow.

00:16:39.340 It's back! The payroll

00:16:41.220 payout $5,000

00:16:43.160 signing bonus. Yay!

00:16:47.500 Monday, March 2nd at 5pm,

00:16:50.000 you could be $5,000

00:16:52.280 richer.

00:16:53.220 You are my new best friend, are you

00:16:55.320 kidding me? Yeah, it's

00:16:57.280 crazy, isn't it?

00:16:58.840 Get your hands on some cash at

00:17:01.000 Boom973.com. Approved by Alpine Credits. Own your own home and eat alone. Alpine Credits can help.

00:17:07.120 Visit alpinecredits.ca. And you were talking about crime. Do you think that Britain's become a more

00:17:13.960 dangerous and lawless place? I think very much so. For a lot of people, the poorer you are,

00:17:17.800 the more dangerous it is. People live in places where they know perfectly well that there will

00:17:23.080 be no fair houses are robbed. No help will come. The best thing to do is to shut up. You don't want

00:17:29.180 to be known as a grass in these places because a terrible troll will come to you.

00:17:32.880 So you don't report the crime, which is why crime statistics bear so little relation to

00:17:37.320 crime as a fact.

00:17:38.420 For a lot of people, there is a great deal of misery.

00:17:40.900 They have predatory neighbors, and they have to nuggle under them to them.

00:17:45.480 And there is also a great deal more violence than there used to be.

00:17:48.940 And if people resort to violence much more readily than they used to, there's more danger

00:17:52.060 of it.

00:17:52.540 I am old enough to remember the 50s, and while they had many disadvantages, they were extraordinarily

00:17:57.460 peaceful.

00:17:58.360 Again, it was while I was in Moscow that I was alerted to this

00:18:01.200 because I used to live in a rather nice suburb of Portsmouth

00:18:04.600 called Elderstone, mainly favoured by retired admirals,

00:18:08.880 in a place of extraordinary peace and safety

00:18:12.480 where my brother and I used to roam the streets as children

00:18:14.620 in the way that children used to do on the sunny summer days.

00:18:20.460 And I read in a British newspaper which was delivered to me in Moscow

00:18:24.840 an account of how somebody had been, I think, kicked to death.

00:18:27.900 in some stupid, meaningless row in Alderstoke.

00:18:33.000 I thought, well, if it's happened there,

00:18:35.340 then we have problems.

00:18:37.220 And I knew already it happened elsewhere,

00:18:40.100 but for it to be happening in a place like that,

00:18:41.680 I thought we are in difficulty.

00:18:43.280 I've done a lot of work on the fiddling

00:18:45.700 of crime statistics by the police,

00:18:47.240 which was derided when I did it,

00:18:49.040 but was later vindicated by a House of Commons committee.

00:18:51.940 The ridiculous claims that people make

00:18:55.320 that violence is falling are simply not true.

00:18:57.880 What's happened is that recorded violence may be falling, but the thing itself is there.

00:19:01.740 And the menace of violence, which keeps people away from places which they once have felt safe in, is also very important.

00:19:07.400 I think the lack of reassurance as well is a big issue.

00:19:09.540 For example, I had my car broken into in London a few months ago, and I couldn't get through to the police on the phone.

00:19:16.880 I eventually had to report it online, and I got an email back the next day telling me that the crime couldn't be investigated because there was no evidence,

00:19:24.500 even though there was CCTV cameras everywhere.

00:19:26.280 That is standard. Hundreds of thousands of people will have had similar experiences.

00:19:32.080 The police, having become a reactive force which waits for crime to happen and then tries

00:19:38.280 to respond to it, are overwhelmed. It is a fundamentally mad way of trying to deal with

00:19:43.740 crime. But they are absolutely set on doing it. And it cannot possibly work. It simply

00:19:49.720 creates more and more demand for services which are not working. And that's why they

00:19:55.160 want to hear from you online. That's why they close all the police stations. They don't want

00:19:58.580 any contact with the public. It's going to bring them trouble. And so there you are. Presumably

00:20:04.240 you've got a crime number for your insurance. Yeah, I've got a crime number. That's all they

00:20:07.720 care about. But ironically, a few weeks later, there was this story that was in the news recently

00:20:12.180 of Humberside police who called up a man because he retweeted some offensive tweet. And they told

00:20:19.080 him that they needed to check that he was thinking correctly. Yes, but Twitter is very tightly

00:20:24.420 patrolled. Possibly because it doesn't involve going out in the rain. For saying these things,

00:20:33.080 you are attacking the police. I love the police when they are police. I think it's the most

00:20:39.040 fantastic idea to have big guys, let's not be sexist, big people in uniform walking along,

00:20:46.520 or even medium-sized people walking along the street visibly, providing a focus of law

00:20:53.900 and reassurance to everybody else who is law-abiding,

00:20:58.120 the effect of regular preventive foot patrolling is immense.

00:21:04.420 But they won't do it.

00:21:06.140 They absolutely won't do it.

00:21:07.580 They go on about numbers.

00:21:08.540 It's nothing to do with numbers.

00:21:09.980 This is one of the things that I discovered.

00:21:11.960 In the days when they used to do regular preventive foot patrolling,

00:21:15.020 there were a lot fewer of them than there are now.

00:21:17.920 So this excuse of numbers, which they always bring out, is absolutely false.

00:21:23.140 It's not because they have the numbers. It's because they don't have the will. And so as is so often the case

00:21:29.380 And Peter if you were going to revolutionize a police force, what would you do? What what certain measures sell the cars sell the helicopters?

00:21:37.380 sell all that gear

00:21:39.380 Make sure everybody had decent

00:21:41.380 Well-fitting boots to walk in and say off you go on the street

00:21:45.320 One by one not two by two if you send police out two by two this they walk along chatting to each other about overtime

00:21:51.280 And you could commit a burglary and a mugging.

00:21:53.620 They wouldn't notice.

00:21:55.200 But an individual police officer patrolling has an enormous effect.

00:21:58.560 And just go back on the beat, which was abolished by Roy Jenkins in 1967, and do that.

00:22:05.740 And you'd be amazed at the effect that it will have.

00:22:07.920 I want to change tack a little bit, if you don't mind, Francis, just to go back to an issue that you briefly mentioned, which is mass immigration.

00:22:14.600 And the reason I want to bring it up is that I remember watching you on Question Time, and you called it a catastrophe.

00:22:20.900 and the four other panelists would essentially not let you speak.

00:22:25.620 So this is the opposite of what we do here.

00:22:27.800 So you've called it a catastrophe.

00:22:29.360 Why is it a catastrophe?

00:22:30.480 And you've got plenty of time to talk about it.

00:22:32.240 Because of the scale of it.

00:22:35.020 Immigration is good, generally, both for the people who do it

00:22:40.300 and for the countries which accept it,

00:22:42.660 provided that there's a chance to integrate.

00:22:44.800 When I began in politics long ago, when I was a revolutionary socialist,

00:22:49.920 The thing that we used to talk about was that we were really, really against was what we

00:22:55.120 called racialism in those days, racial discrimination.

00:22:58.040 It's distinct in an important way from the word racism that people use now.

00:23:03.780 And one of the things that we very much called for was integration.

00:23:07.640 Integration is perfectly possible.

00:23:09.240 If someone comes here as an individual and wants to bring up his children or start a

00:23:17.680 family and go to work and all the things that people do. They come from other countries usually

00:23:22.340 to improve themselves. Then in time, they will learn the language, they'll learn the customs,

00:23:28.120 they'll learn the law, they will become pretty much British. And no one will get in their way

00:23:37.000 in doing so. If huge numbers of people come simultaneously, then that process is impossible.

00:23:43.700 What will happen is that people will gather in areas they won't integrate.

00:23:47.780 They will form solitudes with their backs turned upon each other.

00:23:51.020 And you will get, especially if the state, as it does now, encourages multiculturalism,

00:23:55.900 you will get a society where large parts of, you take a city like Bradford, for instance,

00:24:02.200 large parts of the population never meet other parts of the population,

00:24:05.760 except maybe in the city center crossing the road or in shops,

00:24:10.620 but not in any realistically integratory way.

00:24:14.740 So mass immigration is damaging because it prevents integration.

00:24:19.800 It's also damaging because few immigrants are rich.

00:24:25.240 They will tend to come and live in the poorer areas of cities,

00:24:29.300 and they will therefore be experienced most of all by the poorest people

00:24:35.340 who are not terribly interested in the fact that there's a funky new restaurant around the corner

00:24:39.640 or that you can hire nannies cheaply.

00:24:41.600 What they see is they see, in some cases, competition for their jobs.

00:24:46.480 And I've often thought, by the way, that if Polish and Romanian and Bulgarian

00:24:51.560 and other migrants to this country could compete for the jobs of television commentators

00:24:57.420 and Guardian leader writers, there would be a lot more concerned about this country than there is.

00:25:02.740 But they don't.

00:25:03.860 It's in other areas of society where it happens.

00:25:07.140 And, of course, also they put pressure on the housing.

00:25:09.200 And on the schools and on the medical services, which means, and the transport, which means

00:25:15.000 that everybody is slightly worse off in a way which they resent.

00:25:19.920 And the other thing is, of course, that people don't feel at home in their own areas.

00:25:24.080 And it's all very well to laugh and mock at that.

00:25:26.860 But I really don't see how you can't view it as quite a big problem, especially if you're

00:25:32.120 an old person living alone or where your children have gone in a small house in a poor area

00:25:37.600 of town to find bit by bit that the area in which you grew up is no longer recognizable

00:25:42.540 to you. I think that's a serious problem. It hurts people. And it's not fascist to be

00:25:49.660 sympathetic towards it or to think that it would probably be wise to avoid it.

00:25:53.240 And would you blame globalization for this? Or is it, do you think, is there a particular

00:25:57.220 politician?

00:25:58.080 I think there are traces of a policy in the famous memorandum that Andrew Neither is associated with, which I haven't to hand, so I can't quote from it.

00:26:13.740 But there seemed to be a suggestion in what had come out of New Labour at that period, the height of Blairism, that they actually saw large-scale immigration as a way of...

00:26:27.060 To rub the rights nodes in diversity.

00:26:28.320 Rubbing the rights nodes in diversity.

00:26:30.240 But I think even more than that, I think they didn't,

00:26:32.280 the new Labour people, I regard them as Euro-communists,

00:26:35.400 revolutionaries, they didn't like Britain as it was

00:26:38.100 in the 1980s or before then.

00:26:40.960 And they wanted to change it irreversibly.

00:26:43.180 And I think they may well have seen large-scale immigration

00:26:45.560 as a way of doing that.

00:26:47.340 And that is, after all, what happened.

00:26:52.520 There's also another thing.

00:26:54.100 Governments of both major parties, I think,

00:26:56.160 have decided that they want to turn this into a low-wage economy.

00:26:59.700 It's a high levels of employment, but low levels of wages,

00:27:03.340 as opposed to what it was before in an economy

00:27:05.300 where there was comparatively high productivity

00:27:10.320 and comparatively high wages.

00:27:11.960 That's an economic decision.

00:27:13.120 That requires, if it's to work,

00:27:15.880 a large amount of extra labor coming into the country,

00:27:19.600 and that means immigration.

00:27:20.820 I think they've actually been, although they make speeches saying we're going to get it under control one day and bring it down to whatever level it is per year, I think actually what they've had in mind and what their economic advisors have told them is that they should, if not actually actively encouraged, certainly be perfectly happy to accept a fairly constantly high level of migration of young men and women who will fill these low-waste jobs, which they do.

00:27:47.400 But there's a very easy way to shut down that debate in that somebody voices your opinions

00:27:51.760 and I'm here listening to it and I'm going, well, this is all perfectly reasonable, is

00:27:55.020 from the other person to shout, well, you're racist, you're a xenophobic.

00:27:57.240 Well, they couldn't do it, and they do.

00:27:59.500 But I can't, the only answer I can give you to that is that you'd have to provide some

00:28:04.580 sort of justification for making the claim.

00:28:08.360 As I say, I used to be a revolutionary socialist.

00:28:10.960 The best thing about the far left in this country always was its absolute opposition to racial bigotry.

00:28:19.000 It's a point that I've never diverged from.

00:28:22.500 In all my changes of political position since then, I've never changed my view that racial bigotry is disgusting.

00:28:28.700 And I'm against it.

00:28:30.040 If you don't like it, I think one of the things you might need to do is to consider whether large-scale immigration actually makes racial bigotry more or less likely.

00:28:38.400 I suspect that it can make it more likely.

00:28:40.960 And Peter, moving on, one thing I've always found very interesting in reading your columns

00:28:44.960 is your absolute opposition to the legalization of marijuana.

00:28:49.280 Because at the moment, there's a bit of a movement combined with the pharmaceutical companies

00:28:54.440 with medicinal marijuana to legalize it.

00:28:57.780 Why are you so opposed to it?

00:28:59.680 Well, let's put it at its lowest level.

00:29:04.480 The legalization of a drug is irreversible.

00:29:07.340 Once you legalize anything and it becomes legal and then goes into mass use, you will not be able to prohibit it again after this.

00:29:20.060 I'll give you an example of the Iranian Islamic Republic's attempt to suppress alcohol.

00:29:27.460 Now, the Islamic Republic is a pretty despotic state.

00:29:31.260 It could throw you into prison, as happened to my friend Jason Rezaian, on no pretext

00:29:36.000 at all and call you what it likes and you have no protection.

00:29:39.180 It has huge resources and no doubt plenty of people who can inform and spy.

00:29:43.820 And since 1979, it's tried to ban alcohol in the Islamic Republic of Iran, and it has

00:29:49.360 completely and utterly failed.

00:29:51.320 I didn't do it when I was on a visit there, but I believe my brother, when he was on a

00:29:55.960 visit there, did.

00:29:56.620 You can order alcohol in Tehran, and within half an hour, it will be delivered to your

00:30:04.000 door.

00:30:05.000 There's no difficulty.

00:30:06.000 But you can't, once you've legalized something, you can't then de-legalize.

00:30:10.000 So it's an irreversible step.

00:30:11.920 Just at the moment, when more and more information is coming out that the use of marijuana is

00:30:18.780 correlated with, and I stress the correlation, is correlated with a quite severe mental illness,

00:30:24.860 I would cite particularly the Swedish Army study and the Dunedin study, which suggests this,

00:30:30.960 and also the work of Professor Sir Robin Murray.

00:30:33.260 At that moment, when the information is just beginning to come out,

00:30:35.980 would seem to be the worst possible name to take an irreversible step.

00:30:38.860 That's putting it at its absolute gentlest.

00:30:41.640 I would say that you could go a lot further.

00:30:46.620 There is a website called Attacker Smoked Cannabis, which I would commend to anybody,

00:30:52.100 which just lists the astonishing number of cases

00:30:56.320 in which people have committed acts of savage violence

00:31:00.200 after smoking cannabis or people with a cannabis habit.

00:31:04.120 I myself have looked into,

00:31:06.040 and this is not about terrorism.

00:31:07.460 Everybody says, oh, Hitchens is trying to excuse Islam.

00:31:10.020 Hitchens says that there's no jihad.

00:31:11.920 This is round objects.

00:31:13.560 I mean, it's such rubbish, but people will say it.

00:31:16.460 So I have to put in that caveat.

00:31:17.960 I looked into the, because the information was there, I looked into all the major terrorist incidents in Europe and all the major rampage killings in North America and indeed Japan in recent years.

00:31:32.860 And the reason I could look into them was because unlike most crime, these episodes are still thoroughly covered by the media.

00:31:40.540 People actually do look into the antecedents of the perpetrators in a way which in lots of cases they simply don't.

00:31:47.160 And what I found was that in almost every single case, the perpetrators of these rampage killings, whether in North America or Europe or Britain, from the killers of Lee Rigby to Jared Lochner, the man who massacred people in Arizona, to the killers of two Canadian soldiers, to the Bataclan killers, to the guy who killed people on the beach in Tunisia at Seuss, to the man who pulled a gun on the passengers in the Talis train.

00:32:16.700 And every single one of them was a marijuana user.

00:32:21.700 There are other drugs involved as well.

00:32:23.600 Anders Breivik, for instance, through his own testimony, we know this.

00:32:27.680 Anders Breivik was on steroids, as was Omar Mateen, the culprit of the Orlando nightclub

00:32:34.260 killing, and indeed the culprits of the Westminster knife attack and the London Bridge murder.

00:32:41.620 So steroids are important as well.

00:32:44.060 And so are antidepressants.

00:32:45.960 But marijuana plays a very, very large role in these things.

00:32:49.960 And in the backgrounds of many, many people who commit serious acts of violence, it is there.

00:32:54.060 And it's not there because they were necessarily stoned at the time.

00:32:57.260 It's there because of its long-term effects on people.

00:33:00.040 If you look at the behavior of Adebolagio and Adebowale, the two killers of Lee Rigby in court,

00:33:07.540 you can see that these were people who were not wholly, how shall I say, not wholly reasonable.

00:33:15.960 And Peter, would you therefore have it upgraded to a class A from a class B?

00:33:19.800 I think these distinctions are more or less meaningless.

00:33:22.780 The distinction, the A, B, and C distinctions were invented for the 1971 Issues for Drugs Act.

00:33:28.220 I've written about this in detail in my book, The War We Never Fought.

00:33:33.220 The two things the marijuana legalization campaign has wanted.

00:33:38.420 One was to separate marijuana from the other bogeyman drugs at the time.

00:33:42.720 And at the time, they were LSD and heroin.

00:33:45.080 And so the classification of A and B separated that.

00:33:49.460 The other thing they wanted to do

00:33:50.720 was to separate the crime of possession

00:33:52.240 from the crime of sale and trafficking

00:33:56.440 to make possession a minor crime

00:33:59.600 and trafficking a major crime.

00:34:01.240 There's no logic in this if you think about it.

00:34:03.240 And they achieved both of those things.

00:34:05.060 It's nothing to do with class A or class B.

00:34:06.720 You can classify it as class XXZH.

00:34:09.580 Like, if you don't actually prosecute, which is what we don't do, then you will have no effect.

00:34:17.560 And what happens at the moment is we have a law, because we're obliged by an international treaty to have that law, but we don't operate it.

00:34:23.540 So the act, the very serious crime, which attracts a prison sentence of five years and an unlimited fine of possession of cannabis, is pretty much unprosecuted.

00:34:34.980 The police will, as far as they possibly can, avoid arresting anybody for it.

00:34:38.560 If they do arrest them for it, they'll probably give them something called the cannabis warning, which is meaningless.

00:34:42.580 If they ever are prosecuted, the courts will hand down the tiniest conceivable sentence.

00:34:50.080 It's a law we don't enforce.

00:34:52.400 Changing from A to B is a meaningless gesture policy.

00:34:55.320 What about the kind of Portuguese model where you decriminalize and treat it as a health issue rather than as a crime issue?

00:35:01.520 Well, again, I have to direct you, because we could spend hours on this, to a long blog

00:35:05.780 posting, which I wrote on the Portuguese drug paradise.

00:35:08.900 Portugal had a very serious drug problem before these changes were made.

00:35:16.840 It didn't actually, the enforcement of drug law in Portugal before then had been extremely

00:35:23.980 weak.

00:35:25.220 The changes claimed are perhaps a little exaggerated and may be wrongly attributed.

00:35:31.120 For instance, Portugal's needle exchange program

00:35:34.400 and various other things go back a long time

00:35:36.240 before the depenalization.

00:35:38.360 And some things have got worse,

00:35:40.580 particularly lifetime use of certain drugs.

00:35:42.580 And I would say this is a correlation and not a causation,

00:35:46.340 that homicide and petty crime also increased.

00:35:48.880 There are many aspects to drug abuse,

00:35:51.560 apart from the deaths of drug users,

00:35:53.460 which we have to worry about.

00:35:54.820 One of them is the mental health,

00:35:56.500 particularly of users of cannabis,

00:35:57.800 which is seldom recorded

00:35:59.140 because most modern Western countries try as hard as they possibly can

00:36:03.120 not to get involved in treating the mentally ill because it's so expensive,

00:36:06.300 so they just shove them to one side.

00:36:08.580 Then you have the difficulty of crime committed by people who have been taking drugs,

00:36:12.280 which, by and large, police don't record or pay any attention to.

00:36:16.120 And then you have the general level of other crime,

00:36:24.020 which tends to follow where drugs come first.

00:36:27.960 And I think a serious examination of Portugal,

00:36:30.420 I've tried to examine both sides of the case in this long article I've written about it,

00:36:36.640 a serious examination of it shows that it's by no means the paradise that's claimed.

00:36:40.660 And people should look at it more carefully before imagining that somehow or other

00:36:44.760 they've solved the problem in Lisbon, because they have not.

00:36:47.820 And Peter, where do you stand on the issue of addiction?

00:36:50.240 Do you believe that it's a mental health condition, or do you think it's an indulgence?

00:36:53.880 It's a fantasy. There is no such thing.

00:36:56.180 The word has no definable meaning.

00:36:58.780 It's a shape-shifter.

00:37:00.540 And this is the problem with it.

00:37:01.980 People will use it in two distinct ways.

00:37:03.960 They will use it as if it excuses the drug user from taking the drug, as if it totally

00:37:09.000 overwhelms his or her will, so that he has no choice but to take it.

00:37:13.660 And they will use it in another way, to suggest the opposite.

00:37:16.520 It cannot be both.

00:37:18.140 Either you can stop or you cannot stop.

00:37:21.760 In my view, you can, and many people do.

00:37:23.800 And I think the treating of what is effectively a crime as an illness is very dangerous.

00:37:30.560 It's also rather insulting to people who are genuinely ill.

00:37:33.680 No one voluntarily gets cancer.

00:37:37.120 No one voluntarily gets leukemia.

00:37:39.000 No one voluntarily gets tuberculosis.

00:37:41.400 These are illnesses.

00:37:42.980 These can be treated.

00:37:44.180 People who start taking powerful, psychotropic, illegal drugs do it as an act of voluntary will.

00:37:51.640 And also, they don't become habituated, which is as far as I'm prepared to go.

00:37:55.500 They don't become habituated immediately.

00:37:57.060 It could take quite an effort to get habituated to any drug.

00:37:59.800 These people should not be treated as if they were ill.

00:38:02.420 They should be treated as if they were voluntary criminals.

00:38:04.820 And if we did that, I promise you we'd have a lot fewer of them.

00:38:08.500 And if you really are seriously concerned about the suffering which is caused by these drugs,

00:38:11.960 both to the people who take them and to their families and to their neighbors and to their workmates

00:38:16.400 and to the taxpayers who get mugged to give them their methadone,

00:38:21.600 if you're seriously concerned about all these things,

00:38:24.020 then you should be trying to prevent people becoming habitual drug users.

00:38:29.140 And I think a judicious application of the criminal law

00:38:32.300 would be a much better way of doing that than any amount of so-called treatment.

00:38:36.140 And there are people who would say that the fact that we decide to make marijuana illegal,

00:38:43.100 but alcohol legal, is incredibly hypocritical.

00:38:46.400 when actually alcohol is incredibly dangerous.

00:38:48.880 Of course it's dangerous.

00:38:50.420 But again, we have the problem.

00:38:52.380 It is already legal and in mass use.

00:38:54.500 An attempt to ban it would not work.

00:38:58.340 In a free country such as this one,

00:39:01.280 the measures that you would have to take even to try would be politically impossible.

00:39:06.240 That doesn't mean that alcohol shouldn't be more tightly controlled.

00:39:09.640 I very much regret the repeal of the very effective alcohol licensing laws

00:39:14.760 which were in place in my childhood and in my teens,

00:39:17.920 which were abolished mainly by the Conservative Party in the 1980s

00:39:21.500 when pubs were open only for limited parts of the day

00:39:26.660 and when you couldn't buy alcohol in supermarkets, for instance,

00:39:31.080 you'd only buy it in off-licenses.

00:39:32.980 And in general, it was much harder to get.

00:39:35.280 Not impossible, but much harder.

00:39:36.560 And there was, as a result, much less drinking.

00:39:38.480 I would bring that back like a shot.

00:39:40.720 But I can't see how the existence of one disastrous legal poison in our society

00:39:46.400 and the existence of another disastrous legal poison in the shape of cigarettes

00:39:50.340 could possibly be an argument for introducing a third legal poison into our society.

00:39:54.500 It doesn't seem to me that there's any logic in that

00:39:56.180 that could be advanced by anybody who wasn't a moron.

00:40:00.760 Well, on that happy note, let's move on.

00:40:03.080 We wanted to talk to you as we were talking before we started recording

00:40:06.720 about me being from the Soviet Union, France's mother from Venezuela.

00:40:11.360 Are you troubled as a former revolutionary socialist by the seeming resurgence of some

00:40:17.800 of those ideas in our society?

00:40:19.960 I'm never troubled by ideas.

00:40:21.960 I don't think people are entitled to have ideas.

00:40:24.280 It's right for people.

00:40:25.280 I would much rather for someone to be profoundly discontented about our society than for him

00:40:30.220 to stupify himself with drugs, for instance.

00:40:33.280 At least there's some thought and some energy, some revulsion against injustice.

00:40:38.400 And this is an unjust world, and anybody who doesn't notice that is incredibly unobservant

00:40:43.840 and flaccid and passive.

00:40:46.020 I'd never object to strongly held, genuinely held political opinions critical of things

00:40:53.360 as they are.

00:40:54.120 It would be wrong if people didn't hold them.

00:40:56.680 I would also be betraying my own self if I said, oh, well, I was allowed to be a revolutionary

00:41:01.300 me when I was in my teens and 20s and you're not. So I don't have no objection to people

00:41:05.080 holding ideas. No. But I think they should test them against practice. And I think they

00:41:09.420 should also test them against history. And they might find that some of them have very

00:41:14.220 dangerous consequences. My fundamental rule about this is the problem with utopia is that

00:41:21.560 it can only ever be approached across a sea of blood and you never get there. And that

00:41:26.700 is my warning to anybody who thinks that he can create utopia.

00:41:29.400 Well, I agree with you in that it's great that people are exploring ideas, but some

00:41:33.760 ideas are very bad ideas, right?

00:41:35.280 They are.

00:41:36.280 Lots of ideas.

00:41:37.280 Most ideas are pretty bad and almost all of them need to be tempered and moderated by

00:41:43.880 experience and restraint, which is why sensible societies make sure that the power is surrounded

00:41:50.400 by a bodyguard of muttering pessimists saying, well, I don't know about that.

00:41:55.380 The law which Parliament passes every day is the law of unintended consequences.

00:41:59.640 And if I were reordering Parliament, I would set up a select committee on unintended consequences

00:42:04.180 to be given the job of evaluating every major piece of legislation to look for unintended

00:42:08.900 consequences, because there are so many of them, and they are actually often avoidable.

00:42:12.980 Imagine if we had that before Brexit.

00:42:15.580 Well, that wasn't legislation.

00:42:18.860 Here's the whole point.

00:42:19.820 That was direct democracy.

00:42:20.740 and that's one of the reasons

00:42:22.960 there is one country

00:42:24.980 in continental Europe which absolutely does not

00:42:27.160 hold referenda

00:42:28.560 which is it?

00:42:30.500 In Europe?

00:42:31.560 It doesn't hold referenda

00:42:33.700 it's the Federal Republic of Germany

00:42:37.020 and that's because of hard

00:42:39.020 historical experience

00:42:40.000 they know how these things

00:42:42.680 they know how these things

00:42:43.980 it's a living memory

00:42:46.480 of how this

00:42:48.020 can be misused and they don't

00:42:50.680 They don't hold with it.

00:42:51.760 I'm with them.

00:42:52.740 If you have a parliamentary democracy,

00:42:55.080 you don't want to mix it up with direct democracy,

00:42:58.660 which, apart from anything else,

00:43:00.320 removes all the mediating factors.

00:43:03.420 So that's why I was against the referendum.

00:43:05.540 That's why I didn't vote in it.

00:43:07.060 And I'm increasingly regarded as a sort of remain a traitor

00:43:10.480 by people who, in the long, lonely years,

00:43:14.180 when I was a near-solitary believer in secession

00:43:17.980 from the European Union, were nowhere to be seen.

00:43:19.920 And they now shout and scream at me as if I'm some kind of traitor because I'm not keen on what's going on now.

00:43:25.960 I want to stick with the left just for a moment, though, because the reason I ask about it is it seems to me that there's a, you know, in your days when you were a radical revolutionary, the left talked about workers and oppressors from above, right?

00:43:40.420 Well, we got past that. My lot would have thought of ourselves as reasonably literate and educated. We wouldn't have talked that kind of language.

00:43:49.920 We did believe that the main engine of revolution would come from what then still existed in this country, which is an industrial working class.

00:44:00.240 And we spent an awful lot of our time trying to recruit from the industrial working class and in the trade union movement.

00:44:07.480 It was the prime activity that we had and some of it quite successful.

00:44:13.600 But of course, that's gone there.

00:44:14.480 Yeah. So that's my point, which is the left has now gone to this identity politics thing,

00:44:19.400 where it's created a whole different structure of oppressors and the oppressed. And it's actually,

00:44:24.000 you talked about racial discrimination. It seems to be putting some of those elements almost in

00:44:29.400 reverse. Well, it gets into terrible messes, particularly over Islam, that the left will

00:44:36.180 sometimes identify with Islamic causes. This is a great deal of the Labour Party's problem with

00:44:40.640 what is called anti-Semitism. It's more complicated than that. But there is a great

00:44:45.440 deal of shyness about criticizing some of the more virulent attitudes of some Muslims,

00:44:57.340 and particularly towards the state of Israel. And that's one of the reasons for that. And also,

00:45:03.580 of course, the almost ridiculous alliance which the Socialist Workers' Party, the successor of

00:45:10.300 the organization to which I belonged, got into over Islam, Islam being fantastically

00:45:16.420 morally conservative, and the SWP not being, and yet they managed to hold hands for some

00:45:21.580 time. This is unprincipled stuff. But there is a, the turn away from trying to achieve

00:45:31.580 a working class revolution, which is fundamentally a 19th century idea, came a lot earlier than

00:45:36.580 And the 1990s, it goes back to Antonio Gramsci in the 1920s, the first of the European communists

00:45:42.500 to realize that the Soviet experiment was already a disaster, that the Soviet seizure of power

00:45:49.240 would never be replicated in advanced European countries where you had an educated, largely

00:45:53.980 Christian working class, that a cultural revolution, that a change in hegemony was a thing that

00:45:58.820 needed to be achieved, and that the issues where the battle would have to be held would

00:46:03.520 would not necessarily be economic, cultural, and moral.

00:46:07.440 The destruction particularly of the power

00:46:10.280 of the Christian church has been part of it,

00:46:11.900 and there is an inevitable hostility

00:46:14.980 between revolution and Christianity,

00:46:17.920 which shows all the time.

00:46:20.620 And that switch begun by Gramsci,

00:46:23.820 more or less discovered by us

00:46:26.460 when we were student revolutionaries

00:46:28.240 in the late 60s and early 70s,

00:46:30.280 and then brought into practice

00:46:32.680 by the long march to the institutions

00:46:34.420 of the university generation, which then rose.

00:46:38.500 The immense number of people in Blair's cabinet

00:46:42.220 who had been revolutionary socialists

00:46:44.900 of one kind or another, including Blair himself,

00:46:47.440 who recently confessed it, a fact which almost nobody knows

00:46:50.620 because nobody understands its significance.

00:46:53.720 But if it had come out in 1995, it would have destroyed him.

00:46:57.740 But these people are not like me.

00:47:00.140 I was a Trotskyist.

00:47:01.340 I openly say I was a Trotskyist.

00:47:02.760 Most people know I was a Trotskyist because I've told them.

00:47:05.880 The members of Blair's cabinet who were Trotskyists don't publicize it, don't talk about it, don't

00:47:13.220 like discussing it because it's still important to them.

00:47:15.400 It's still an important part of their political formation.

00:47:18.000 And they are modern, intelligent revolutionaries who realize that seizing the post office and

00:47:23.340 the barracks and the railway station isn't the thing anymore.

00:47:25.760 What you seize now is the television studio and the university and the school and the

00:47:30.820 newspaper, and indeed the courts.

00:47:35.440 And that's what they did.

00:47:37.100 They came out of university at the end of the 60s, and they fanned out into all these

00:47:42.340 things, and they simply became the layer of professional people who were doing all the

00:47:50.520 things, and they became immensely influential.

00:47:52.200 And by 1997, they really couldn't understand why they weren't also the government, which

00:47:56.700 is why there's a sort of explosion of righteous joy among them when the Blair government was

00:48:02.800 elected. Finally, we're not just in power in the universities and the courts and the BBC,

00:48:09.280 we're in power in the government. We've got Downing Street too. And it was an immense

00:48:12.420 revolutionary moment, probably the most revolutionary moment since Cromwell. And people

00:48:16.800 still don't get it. And with regards to Corbyn, do you think he's going to be seen as a successful

00:48:22.780 or do you think he's going to be seen as someone who's blown a major opportunity?

00:48:26.460 I don't know. It depends what happens. It was always said of John Major that he became everything he became by not being somebody.

00:48:34.740 He became Prime Minister by not being Margaret Thatcher. He stayed Prime Minister by not being Neil Kirk.

00:48:40.640 And then he lost his job by not being Tony Blair.

00:48:43.740 But in Jeremy Corbyn's case, all his advantages are negative.

00:48:48.480 He's faced by a Conservative Party in a terrible mess with a pretty disastrous leader.

00:48:52.780 He might.

00:48:53.400 I wouldn't rule out the possibility, certainly, of, for instance, a Corbynite Labour Scottish

00:49:00.220 nationalist arrangement of government and majority in Parliament at some time in the

00:49:04.440 future.

00:49:04.640 It's perfectly possible that he could become Prime Minister.

00:49:07.160 It would be very interesting to watch and see how that works out and who the important

00:49:11.640 people are in that government.

00:49:13.140 Corbyn probably won't be one of them.

00:49:15.060 Corbyn is fundamentally like Theresa May, a local government person.

00:49:19.040 That's where he comes from, from the back stairs of town halls.

00:49:25.120 Theresa May spent a lot of time in local government

00:49:31.240 before she rose without trace to where she is now.

00:49:35.260 And he's a narrow, poorly educated, not particularly articulate person.

00:49:43.340 I believe he reads books, for instance.

00:49:44.900 I don't think that he's really capable of the breadth of understanding which would make him a particularly effective prime minister, whether you like what he did or not.

00:49:54.920 But maybe people like John McDonnell might be rather more important in his government than he is, if there is such a government.

00:50:03.600 But I don't know. I can't tell.

00:50:05.000 but in political terms

00:50:07.820 Jeremy Corbyn's museum piece

00:50:09.520 he's a relic

00:50:12.160 of a kind of left wing politics

00:50:13.780 which I remember still existing

00:50:15.620 when I was in the London Labour Parties

00:50:17.140 in the late 1970s

00:50:19.840 early 1980s

00:50:20.980 which long ago was superseded

00:50:23.940 by the new Labour

00:50:25.640 Gramscian cultural revolutionaries

00:50:28.340 and

00:50:29.500 they're almost

00:50:31.900 touchingly honest

00:50:33.660 They're obviously on the far left, and they're open about it,

00:50:39.240 whereas the Blairites pretended to be conservatives, and they still do.

00:50:43.460 And in some ways, I would rather have my enemy in plain sight saying what he actually is

00:50:47.780 than, as the Blairites do, pretending to be something they aren't.

00:50:50.980 Well, that's the curious thing, as you talk about this being one of the greatest revolutionary months, 1997.

00:50:55.580 1997 was a huge revolution.

00:50:57.820 But the Labour Party under Corbyn has gone further to the left.

00:51:01.340 No, it's a different left.

00:51:02.320 He's a sort of Edwardian leftist.

00:51:06.340 He still thinks in all those categories.

00:51:09.140 It's one of the reasons why he's against the European Union.

00:51:12.560 Because the European Union is, of course, a cultural revolutionary project.

00:51:17.380 It's very secular.

00:51:20.400 It's very opposed to national sovereignty.

00:51:21.940 It's supranational.

00:51:23.780 All its social attitudes are liberal and politically correct to an extreme, almost extreme level.

00:51:35.060 Many of the big major social and moral changes that have been imposed on this country by law in the past 10 years actually started life as European Union directives.

00:51:43.800 And it's a revolutionary move.

00:51:45.460 One of the founders of Europeanism as we know it now is Altiero Spinelli, another Italian

00:51:50.460 communist who I absolutely knew that was very familiar with the work of Antonio Gramsci.

00:51:56.460 So to be against the European Union is to be a very old-fashioned, almost sort of pre-1917

00:52:01.700 type of leftist.

00:52:02.700 I say he's a museum piece, but museum pieces can be got out of museums and made to work.

00:52:08.460 Well, we're running out of time, and Peter, normally we ask our guests what's the one

00:52:14.040 thing no one's talking about that we ought to be talking about. I have a sense that with

00:52:16.980 you there might be a couple of things, so why don't you...

00:52:18.980 Well, there are lots of things. I would certainly have talked about the cannabis issue if we

00:52:23.740 hadn't already done so, but it isn't talked about anything like enough. And the correlation

00:52:29.140 between cannabis use and mental health cannot be talked about enough, and the correlation

00:52:33.920 between cannabis use and crime cannot be talked about enough because they are major problems.

00:52:38.200 I'm pursuing a petition on this matter at the moment to try and get the government to

00:52:42.180 to inquire into the link to see if it is not just a correlation, but a genuine causal connection.

00:52:47.460 But the other thing that always preoccupies me and has preoccupied me since my childhood

00:52:52.620 is the horrible way in which we allow the car to dominate our civilization.

00:52:59.440 Have chosen to make it the dominant means of transport and will not turn away from this.

00:53:05.900 So even now, near where I live in Oxford, there's a plan for yet another motorway called the Oxford-Cambridge Expressway,

00:53:11.900 which will be a horrible scar across the face of the country, will solve no problems,

00:53:17.260 but is based upon this love of and obsession with the car as the only modern means of transport

00:53:23.440 we're prepared to give serious support to, which does so much damage to health, to the beauty of

00:53:29.520 the country, to town planning, to the way in which people live, and indeed to the freedom of children

00:53:33.520 to roam about the countryside. It's the car. It's not pedophile killers. They exist, and when they

00:53:41.780 happen, they're terrible things. And I'm not laughing about that. They do exist, but it's

00:53:46.220 very rare. But the real danger, the real reason why children can't roam about it as they did when

00:53:50.300 I was young is because the roads are just too dangerous. And we just tolerate this. And the

00:53:55.500 large numbers of deaths and terrible injuries every year, wholly innocent people, and nobody

00:53:59.300 cares. I really do wish people cared more about it. It's done a great deal of damage, and we could

00:54:05.840 do a lot more to restrain it than we do. And do you think that would be the case? We could do more

00:54:11.140 to restrain if the public transport system was better and more efficient?

00:54:14.500 Well, in Zurich, Switzerland is a paradise of railways and public transport.

00:54:18.960 You can get anywhere in Switzerland without a car.

00:54:21.340 In Zurich, they made the tram system so good that people gave up driving their Mercedes.

00:54:26.240 I want that to happen here.

00:54:28.500 I want the public transport system to be so good that people no longer want to use cars.

00:54:31.880 I think it would be a huge improvement in our way of life if it were done.

00:54:37.660 And on that note, thank you very much, Peter.

00:54:39.220 If people want to find you on Twitter, where can they find you?

00:54:42.260 Well, I can't explain this, but my Twitter handle is Clark Micah, which is the name of a favorite novel backwards.

00:54:52.200 I can't really explain why it is that I can't simply use my own name.

00:54:56.040 But believe me, I haven't deliberately confused you.

00:54:58.180 But if you search for Peter Hitchens, you'll find me.

00:54:59.460 We'll put it in the video.

00:55:01.360 We'll put it in the video.

00:55:02.120 Peter, thank you so much for coming on.

00:55:03.700 It's been a pleasure speaking with you.

00:55:05.900 And as always, follow us at TriggerPod on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram.

00:55:10.640 And obviously subscribe to the YouTube channel, as many of you already have.

00:55:14.060 Click that bell button next to the subscribe button.

00:55:16.240 And we will see you in a week from now.

00:55:17.880 And also, if you're enjoying the podcast, please share it.

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00:55:26.760 So please leave us a nice review.

00:55:28.400 And we will see you next week.

00:55:29.880 Thank you very much.

00:55:35.440 We'll be right back.

TRIGGERnometry - March 10, 2019

Peter Hitchens on Crime, Immigration, Cannabis & the Left

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