TRIGGERnometry - Peter Hitchens：＂The Lockdown is a Catastrophe＂

00:00:00.000 hello and welcome to trigonometry i'm francis foster i'm constantin kitchen and this is

00:00:10.220 peter hitchens ruined our introduction but this is the show for you if you want honest

00:00:17.340 conversations with fascinating people and our brilliant returning guest is peter hitchens the

00:00:22.800 author and journalist peter welcome back to the show well so far it's okay yeah i have to say we've

00:00:29.360 never had a guest interrupt us mid-intro, but you've managed. So let's get straight into it.

00:00:34.300 One of the reasons that we were really keen to have you back on the show is that you have done

00:00:39.600 a lot of alternative coverage, shall we say, of the lockdown and the coronavirus situation. So

00:00:45.480 for anyone who has not been following your writing and opinions on this issue, just give us a brief

00:00:51.560 overview of what is your opinion of what's happened and the lockdown measures that have

00:00:55.740 been implemented? Okay, right from the start, I said that the response to the government was

00:01:00.300 completely out of proportion to the size of the menace. I didn't say there was no disease. I didn't

00:01:05.120 say nobody would die and say it wasn't horrible for a lot of people if they got it. But I said

00:01:10.460 that as an event, it simply didn't justify the measures being taken either to suppress

00:01:15.080 liberty or to suppress the economy. I think that the damage to both human liberty and to the

00:01:22.060 economy have been huge and probably permanent. And I think we will look back on this if we ever

00:01:27.280 have a chance to do so with an impartial inquiry and say, how on earth did we go mad to this extent?

00:01:33.700 It simply wasn't justified. And it still isn't justified. And until the government admits it

00:01:39.140 made a major mistake, we're never going to get out of it. Peter, and you say the damage has been

00:01:45.320 permanent. I mean, the economy surely will recover, will it not? Well, I don't know whether it will.

00:01:50.220 I mean, remember that we were on the verge of a major slump as this began, and remember

00:01:55.200 that the British economy is not actually in a very good state, despite all these boasts

00:01:58.400 about it being the sixth biggest in the world.

00:02:00.080 In fact, in real and more important terms of GDP and so forth, it's much lower down

00:02:05.760 the scale and falling.

00:02:07.700 The level of wages for many people has been falling.

00:02:11.940 The standards of living for many people have been stagnant for some time, and our ability

00:02:15.800 to recover, because we no longer manufacture very much, is pretty thin. And just at a time when

00:02:22.500 China is beginning really to take off, it never looked good for us. And we've now contracted a

00:02:29.060 debt of enormous size, bigger than anything ever done in peacetime before. Now, wartime debts are

00:02:36.680 terrible, and they do cause a great deal of trouble. But they are, of course, justified by

00:02:41.400 the fact that you're fighting for national survival.

00:02:44.360 Peacetime debts are just as terrible and take just as long to pay off and do just as much

00:02:48.480 damage.

00:02:49.600 But you have to ask yourself whether this was justified.

00:02:52.340 I think part of the problem is that people are living in this kind of dream time at the

00:02:56.560 moment, the beautiful weather, the furloughing, which means people get paid for not working,

00:03:01.820 the huge numbers of professionals in the Southeast who are spared from the daily grind of commuting

00:03:06.080 and so far have continued to be able to work from home.

00:03:08.620 There will come a moment of awakening where many of those people find they don't have any jobs, or if they do, they're much worse paid than they were before, and that an economy based incredibly heavily on services, particularly shops and restaurants and bars, will have suffered enormously for months and months during which people couldn't actually make a living, and they can't.

00:03:30.580 And a key feature of economics is not just the existence of money, but the speed in which it circulates.

00:03:37.620 And if your salary isn't paid, or if the rent that you're owed isn't paid for a quarter of the year,

00:03:43.220 then the damage it does to your personal economy and to the national economy is huge.

00:03:47.640 And people say it'll be a V-shaped recession, we'll leap out of it.

00:03:50.940 Well, I hope they're right.

00:03:52.560 But I have a strong feeling that they may be over-optimistic about that.

00:03:57.020 And Peter, what do you say about the argument?

00:03:58.620 there's lots of people who say look we need to protect our most vulnerable we've got you know

00:04:02.840 an aging population there's lots of people who've got uh you know uh health issues what we're doing

00:04:09.060 is we're protecting the most vulnerable people in society and you can't put a price on people's

00:04:13.400 lives well there are several points about that one we've been extremely bad at protecting the

00:04:17.980 most vulnerable people in society specifically those in care homes who in fact by accident

00:04:24.220 rather than by design but certainly beyond doubt have been exposed far far more than they should

00:04:30.240 have been to the virus and who are probably now the largest number of those people dying from it

00:04:36.040 they always were the most vulnerable and I think there was a strong reason to suppose this from

00:04:40.320 the beginning and they certainly have proved to be so if that's what we said we were doing we

00:04:44.340 failed to do it in practice the other thing is was this were these it's already well saying that's

00:04:50.140 what you want to do, but you're suffering from something must be done syndrome here.

00:04:55.720 You look at something, it's terrible. You say something must be done. Someone comes along with

00:04:59.960 a mad set of ideas. You say, well, this is something, we'll do that. The ideas which we

00:05:03.880 adopted for combating it had very little to do with the problem. And the last thing you need to

00:05:07.940 do is to put patients from hospitals into care homes. But this appears to be what we did. And

00:05:14.740 it was catastrophic. To quarantine the healthy is also an unprecedented action. And quarantining

00:05:23.120 the sick is a long, long procedure going back to centuries. And it's perfectly sensible. But 0.74

00:05:28.920 quarantining the healthy is an extraordinary thing to have done. And again, it's a question

00:05:33.720 of proportion. And then there is a third point, which is how many people have died or otherwise

00:05:38.820 suffered or will die otherwise suffer as a result of these methods the the healthy old have suffered

00:05:45.860 hugely in terms of being deprived of normal life and as a brilliant man professor sutrad bakhti

00:05:52.700 of the university of mainz in germany warned at the beginning of this and i did what i could to

00:05:56.800 publicize this morning it is precisely those people that are healthy old and active in society

00:06:02.000 who've suffered very very greatly from this by being cut off from social contact and the amount

00:06:07.300 of misery, which, of course, brings on death. That, of course, is the effect which I think

00:06:10.880 everybody acknowledges on the rest of the health service. While the health service is concentrating

00:06:14.640 entirely on COVID, all kinds of other things, particularly the detection and treatment of

00:06:20.540 major cancers, is put to one side. And I think there will be, when this is examined, a fair

00:06:26.540 number of excess deaths which have resulted from this policy, which have not been COVID

00:06:34.740 deaths or not even been remotely related to COVID, which are among people who were deprived

00:06:39.380 of treatments and checks they otherwise would have got because of the panic. So sure, we're all

00:06:45.580 concerned. I completely concede that my opponents in this argument are concerned with saving human

00:06:50.380 life and their motives are good. Well, actually, so am I. But I think not really are my motives good,

00:06:55.400 but I think my assessment of the situation is better than theirs. And I think if my policy

00:06:59.960 much more closely aligned to what Sweden has done had been followed fewer people would have died

00:07:06.380 in both cases there's an interesting paradox in the middle of this Sweden made exactly the same

00:07:10.600 mistake with care homes that we did and it's had catastrophic numbers of deaths in care homes and

00:07:15.160 it's still getting them for that reason and so oddly enough it's by no means can by no means

00:07:20.040 be advanced as a perfect example of how things should have been done but it's quite a good

00:07:24.300 example of how things should not have been done and it simply did not shut down the economy it

00:07:29.120 did not trespass on people's personal liberty in the way that we have done here.

00:07:34.960 And what would you say, because Sweden are very much the anomaly, Peter,

00:07:39.460 if you look at practically every other Western country, they've all followed our model.

00:07:44.560 Why do you think Sweden adopted the correct tactic?

00:07:48.180 Well, I don't know.

00:07:49.800 Why in the old story of the emperor's new clothes,

00:07:54.200 there's only one person who will openly admit that the emperor is naked.

00:07:58.260 And that's the little boy. Now, in real life, as we know, if that happened, the little boy would be cutted off by the secret police.

00:08:05.160 His parents would be arrested again. And the state propaganda organs would all say that the emperor's clothes are absolutely magnificent.

00:08:12.880 But the point of the story is, of course, is, of course, otherwise.

00:08:16.960 Peter, let me just jump in briefly there. Peter, I'm not trying to cut you off.

00:08:21.080 Just I just I want to focus on the stuff about the shutting down of contrary opinions a little bit later.

00:08:27.380 And we will get to that.

00:08:29.220 Just tell us about Sweden.

00:08:30.260 My main point about that is simply that to call Sweden the outlier, 0.95

00:08:36.040 when Sweden's policy was actually the most rational and governed probably by the most qualified people in the world, is strange.

00:08:43.920 And also, we're very Eurocentric when we look at this.

00:08:46.380 We don't look particularly at Japan, which has just more or less come out of the whole thing, 0.84

00:08:51.000 with fewer than 1,000 deaths in a country of 126-odd million in several megacities,

00:08:58.840 which has also not followed the extreme procedures which we have done.

00:09:03.860 And Taiwan is similar.

00:09:05.120 They've not done that either, and they've come out reasonably well.

00:09:08.180 It simply isn't possible to say that Sweden is the only country

00:09:12.060 which has not followed the policies that we have.

00:09:14.960 Peter, but let me take you back all the way to the beginning,

00:09:18.300 Because it strikes me that one of the big difficulties for the government in this country in terms of not imposing a lockdown was actually the PR perspective of it all.

00:09:29.260 If they had failed to introduce a lockdown, which by that point the public seemingly were clamoring for, I think they would be crucified.

00:09:36.900 And I think that probably plays a huge part in their decision, don't you think?

00:09:40.640 Well, it may well be, but it's government's job to be crucified sometimes for doing the right thing.

00:09:44.920 It's interesting to note that the government, and we can come on to this as well if you want,

00:09:48.560 in its defence of Dominic Cummings, has been prepared to take quite a lot of crucifixion.

00:09:53.420 And in my view, oddly enough, though, I don't like Dominic Cummings and I don't approve of

00:09:59.620 the policies that he has. It was a reasonable thing for them to stand up against this. But

00:10:06.940 it shows that governments can, if they wish to do so, stand up to public opinion. I think a lot

00:10:11.820 of the public opinion in this case was created by government in the first place. I think some

00:10:15.780 of the advice to SAGE suggested was a desire from SAGE, just that there was a desire to create a

00:10:22.120 level of fear, which is actually often quite easy to do, especially with invisible threats,

00:10:27.720 such as a virus. The difficulty is having created fear. It's much, much harder to dispel it.

00:10:34.020 So what would you have done, Peter? The threat supposedly is coming. People are, well, you say

00:10:40.460 was created by government, but some people are clamoring for lockdown. Lots of other countries

00:10:45.200 are introducing a lockdown. And you would just, you would not have one at all? You would?

00:10:51.680 No, I wouldn't. I think the word is repulsive. The word refers to the disciplinary action taken

00:10:57.660 in American penitentiaries against rising convicts. And we're a free country of free

00:11:02.300 people. I think the very use of the word lockdown is an acceptance of a lower, more servile state

00:11:08.740 of life than the one that I personally have grown up with and wish to defend. So I won't use it,

00:11:12.920 except in inverted commas. What I would have done is more or less what I did. That is to say,

00:11:17.400 I stood out against this from the earliest point of which I began to write about it. I said I had

00:11:22.720 serious doubts about what was being proposed and that we were getting it out of proportion.

00:11:26.760 And I can demonstrate, and I can tell you that this was not pleasant. The initial response to

00:11:31.740 my saying this was an awful lot of derision and worse. And I thought I couldn't care less.

00:11:36.760 the fact is it looks to me as if we're making a grave mistake and we should stand out against it

00:11:41.840 and I felt that it was very important for the future of the country that those who did feel

00:11:45.740 this way should stand up for it now so it wouldn't later on be classified as hindsight

00:11:49.920 and reflecting any feeling at the time I found that there were quite a substantial minority

00:11:54.140 it was a minority of people who felt the same way and it is perfectly possible to stand out

00:11:58.380 if it's possible for me a scribbler on a on a on a newspaper to stand out against a wave of public

00:12:05.200 opinion, then surely it's possible for Her Majesty's government, with all the resources

00:12:08.700 at its command, and the huge authority given to it by the fact that it has a mandate from

00:12:13.240 the electorate, to stand out against it too.

00:12:15.880 So yes, of course, a lot of the really important decisions in life have to do with not doing

00:12:21.540 things.

00:12:26.240 Mikhail Kutuzov pretty much defeated Napoleon by not engaging him in battle over Moscow.

00:12:32.980 And almost anybody who knows anything about military tactics

00:12:35.560 knows that the crucial thing to do when you're being charged

00:12:37.780 is not to respond until the last minute.

00:12:39.940 You have to not do things a lot of the time.

00:12:42.780 And not doing something was important on this occasion.

00:12:44.780 Certainly, it's much, much harder, and the Swedes have made this point,

00:12:48.440 to get out of a shutdown of the economy and society

00:12:51.100 than it is to get into it.

00:12:52.840 And this is the great danger Britain now faces.

00:12:54.940 Who knows how long of shuffling around in muzzles 1.00

00:12:58.440 and standing seven feet away from each other,

00:13:00.540 But making all commerce and pleasure and everything else impossible, or if not impossible, immensely

00:13:08.340 inconvenient and expensive in a way which will cripple the country, not least its education

00:13:12.720 system, which has been dealt the most terrible blow, which I feel so much for all those students

00:13:19.200 whose finals year this is, and for all those school pupils whose A-level year this is.

00:13:24.680 Their lives have been completely blighted by this, and they'll never get back what they've

00:13:27.920 lost.

00:13:28.580 And for what?

00:13:31.160 Peter, what do you say to those people who say, look, this is a deadly virus,

00:13:36.020 you know, it has real health complications that we don't know the long-term effects of,

00:13:41.180 and we need to lock down in order to prevent inevitable deaths.

00:13:46.200 And this is the only way to stop people dying.

00:13:49.500 Well, I'm always very suspicious of people who say that their way is the only way.

00:13:53.160 This is the old Margaret Thatcher slogan, there is no alternative.

00:13:55.720 Whenever anybody says that, you know there is an alternative,

00:13:58.700 and they're trying to direct you away from it.

00:14:00.540 Of course, it's not so. Yes, it is deadly to some people. No, it is not deadly to all people. And all the information we now have suggested in the main, I know there are exceptions, but in the main, it is much more dangerous to those who are old. And I mean old, seriously old, and those who have a number of quite dangerous life-threatening conditions already.

00:14:20.800 So it makes perfect sense for measures to be taken to protect them.

00:14:24.680 But it doesn't make perfect sense to close down your whole society,

00:14:27.760 nor if you're concerned about your ability to look after the population

00:14:30.960 through a state-run national health service.

00:14:33.580 It doesn't make sense to destroy your economy and ravage your tax base

00:14:37.180 so that for years to come you won't be able to afford

00:14:39.860 even the much-criticised health service you have already,

00:14:43.100 let alone the better one everybody says they want.

00:14:45.280 So none of that makes sense. It's a non-sequitur.

00:14:47.600 if what you want is to protect people then you need to be specific about it while general flailing

00:14:53.240 propagandist actions will not get you anywhere if you want to react to a crisis you react to it

00:14:58.120 in detail in ways which makes sense and this is what we did not do and what we are not doing

00:15:02.440 and where do you stand on because imperial college have come out for a lot of criticism

00:15:08.740 uh for the modeling that they have done i think at one point they said that if nothing was done

00:15:13.520 and no action was taken.

00:15:14.760 I think the number that was quoted was half a million dead.

00:15:17.920 Where do you stand on this?

00:15:19.280 Do you think they wildly overreacted

00:15:21.220 or was that a fair assessment of the situation?

00:15:24.500 Well, I recently republished a piece

00:15:26.000 which I first published on March the 22nd, I think,

00:15:29.980 in the mail on Sunday,

00:15:30.800 in which I noted at the time the many criticisms

00:15:33.340 that had been made of past advice given by Imperial College,

00:15:37.700 particularly on the foot and mouth epidemic,

00:15:39.920 which I was something of a personal witness

00:15:42.280 nearly 20 years ago now and quoting people as saying that it was not necessarily to be relied

00:15:47.620 upon. I'm sure that Professor Ferguson and his colleagues at Imperial College are motivated by

00:15:54.540 unselfish desire to help others and by genuine belief in their own scientific method. But the

00:16:01.380 fact is they're not the only epidemiologists on the block and there were others, notably

00:16:07.000 Sinatra Gupta of Oxford University, who very early on suggested alternative ideas. And I think that

00:16:13.900 the responsibility of government is to choose between scientists when they differ. And I think

00:16:20.540 the government didn't try hard enough to establish the world's science of views. They also didn't

00:16:25.220 look at the very important views expressed by both Sukrit Bhakti, who I mentioned earlier, of

00:16:32.000 minds, or of John Yornidis of Stanford University, who said that the levels of mortality which

00:16:42.640 were being proposed by the imperial model were absurd, and has been, I think, vindicated by

00:16:49.780 subsequent events. There were plenty of expert views available. It wasn't just a columnist for

00:16:54.620 the Mail on Sunday saying this. There were plenty of expert views available which conflicted with

00:16:58.780 the ones which the government chose to accept. So I don't doubt the sincerity or indeed the

00:17:04.160 competence of the people whose advice was taken and doesn't seem to me to turn out to have been

00:17:10.620 right. It's very difficult to predict things. And I'm not going to engage in personal attacks

00:17:14.920 on individuals who would undoubtedly be doing their best. The responsibility of government

00:17:19.860 was to work out whether they were looking at the right advice. It's my view that they took

00:17:24.260 the wrong advice and also they didn't try hard enough to seek for advice different from that

00:17:31.160 which they had pretty much already decided to follow. Do you think that, I mean, this idea of

00:17:35.580 following the science, do you think that's just a shield that the government decided to hide behind

00:17:40.080 instead of making difficult decisions? I think it's an expression which betrays

00:17:44.620 the misunderstanding of science. I'm not in any way a scientist. I'm obviously from the arts side

00:17:50.560 everything but I know enough to know about the scientific method and how it works and it's not

00:17:55.580 it doesn't require enormous amount of expertise to understand what the scientific method is and

00:18:00.580 one of the things about the scientific method is that it involves constant disputation every

00:18:05.600 every conclusion which has been reached by one generation is open to demolition by another

00:18:12.520 generation and their science is actually about dispute there is no such thing as the science

00:18:17.720 Science is an argument in progress.

00:18:20.640 And so to stand behind it as a shield and to use scientists as a human shield for your

00:18:25.660 policy failures seems to me to be wrong.

00:18:28.300 Scientists don't take that responsibility.

00:18:30.100 They don't come along to government and say, look, I am right.

00:18:32.520 You must do this.

00:18:33.320 Not in general.

00:18:34.440 Maybe some.

00:18:35.320 But in general, what they said, this is what we believe to be the case.

00:18:38.860 And you must act as you see fit as a result of it.

00:18:41.840 And to say that the thing is settled and there was never any argument is, in my view, an invasion of responsibility by the political class.

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00:20:49.640 well that's exactly it but because what i saw with it it just i mean it was obviously not

00:20:57.580 possible that the science was only one way there were there were going to be scientists and doctors

00:21:02.900 who saw it a different way,

00:21:04.080 but it seemed like politicians in many countries

00:21:07.240 essentially abrogated their responsibility

00:21:09.580 for making decisions based on...

00:21:11.620 I think that the political class in most modern countries

00:21:16.100 is extremely immature and ill-educated

00:21:19.020 and unfitted for its task 0.82

00:21:20.220 because politics has become a branch of show business

00:21:22.440 in which ambitious young people rise very rapidly to the top

00:21:26.700 on the basis of the ability to entertain.

00:21:30.280 Not the way I do it, Peter.

00:21:33.740 Sorry, Peter, carry on.

00:21:35.160 I missed that.

00:21:36.260 I said not the way I do it, unfortunately, Peter.

00:21:39.200 It doesn't bear repeating, Peter, carry on, please.

00:21:41.940 Part of the problem is they're not actually very entertaining in those cases either.

00:21:45.440 They're not even any good at that.

00:21:46.780 I mean, I just look on the current...

00:21:48.560 One has many criticisms of political classes in all ages and all times.

00:21:53.180 But when I was in my teens and 20s, at least one knew, for instance,

00:21:57.460 that the people who were governing the country had had serious experience with that.

00:22:01.400 I figured such as Dennis Healy, he'd been beachmaster at Anzio, he'd seen people die beside him, and Ted Heath on the other side, likewise, had fought in the war. People had seen great events and understood the importance of what they were doing. I don't think, I can think of anybody in modern politics who has anything remotely resembling that much experience of life, or that much wisdom to draw upon. These are teenagers, and they panicked.

00:22:30.040 and do you think and i think this is a criticism that has been leveled against johnson but i think

00:22:35.480 it's a particularly relevant criticism so for example if you take margaret thatcher whether

00:22:39.660 you agree whether you disagree with thatcher you cannot doubt that the woman had vision she had a

00:22:44.220 vision of what she wanted britain to be i yes but you look at johnson you i don't see a leader with

00:22:52.000 vision. I don't see Lee doing that. He's a very amusing company and can be entertaining to look

00:23:00.800 at. But again, I don't think there's any driving idea. I agree with you. And I think that one of

00:23:07.620 the things that's happened is that those who are driven by ideas and beliefs, the writers of books,

00:23:16.240 the thinkers of deep things, are by and large pushed to the margin by the show business and

00:23:23.780 gossip aspect of politics, which makes such people unattractive. If you don't look good

00:23:29.580 on TV, then who cares that you know a lot, you have a lot of experience, you won't rise to the

00:23:35.200 top in modern politics. It's a really fascinating point you make. And I think maybe our obsession

00:23:39.560 with youth is probably part of that as well, Peter. But, you know, we used to talk about

00:23:43.640 the big beasts of politics i'm not sure there's any i'm not sure there's any beasts left they're

00:23:48.620 all small feral creatures biting each other's tails there are no big beasts who are they name

00:23:57.740 me one and peter so we've talked about you know the the other uh the other people the other

00:24:05.140 epidemiologists the other virologists who put forward a different case which case do you think

00:24:10.820 was the most persuasive and the most scientifically valid?

00:24:14.760 Was there one particular one?

00:24:16.200 Well, I'm not qualified to say that.

00:24:18.560 What I can say is that what we have seen since this happened

00:24:22.260 has tended to show that the imperial model was mistaken.

00:24:28.140 I think it was much harder to say this, obviously, at the beginning,

00:24:31.980 that it's possible to end it.

00:24:33.260 But I think there was a great jump into conclusions,

00:24:38.400 and people wanted to do something big.

00:24:42.140 And here is the real difficulty.

00:24:45.120 What has happened here?

00:24:46.540 Why have we become, in the course of really three months,

00:24:51.480 a much, much more regimented country,

00:24:54.420 full of much, much more government interference,

00:24:56.820 with the police telling us to do things

00:24:58.700 which they've never previously had the nerve to do?

00:25:00.900 What's happened here?

00:25:02.920 I think there is an enthusiasm in the modern state

00:25:06.680 for expanding its powers.

00:25:08.400 I think they saw in the Imperial College modelling an opportunity to do so.

00:25:14.660 I think for many years, gestating in the midst of this, like a cuckoo in the nest, has been a strong state.

00:25:26.340 And I think this is its opportunity to gain a great deal of extra strength, which I think is going to be very, very unwilling to give up.

00:25:33.500 And talking about the misuse of power and strength, Peter, and kind of moving on to the other part of this conversation, there has been a lot of big tech censorship around this issue, interviews with prominent scientists, some of whom you mentioned being taken down from YouTube.

00:25:48.440 Sometimes they've reinstated and sometimes not.

00:25:51.600 What do you make of the response in terms of managing information that has happened?

00:25:57.720 YouTube saying they take down any unauthoritative content.

00:26:01.240 And who knows, maybe this video will be taken down

00:26:03.200 simply because you dare to criticise the lockdown.

00:26:05.680 Who is there to say, once you set yourself up as the person saying this,

00:26:10.760 then you give yourself an enormous amount of power,

00:26:12.900 which I don't think anybody actually deserves to have.

00:26:15.840 And this is one of the principal objections to censorship.

00:26:19.840 And people will say it's not censorship because it's not done by the government.

00:26:23.300 But I would say there's not much difference really, is there,

00:26:26.020 between actions taken by a monopoly provider of platforms

00:26:30.740 actions taken by a government. I don't really care. It's not censorship. Well, it looks terribly

00:26:37.160 like it. And it has, in many cases, the same effect. If you do that, you're saying this idea

00:26:43.960 is too dangerous to be allowed to circulate. People are not to be trusted to be able to work

00:26:51.240 out for themselves, whether it's garbage or dangerous or whatever it is. And you're giving

00:26:57.320 yourself more power it seems to me that any authority should have in any free society

00:27:02.440 we all know about our free societies we can look now at the people's republic of china which

00:27:09.620 i think even even the most reluctant critics have now begun to concede is a terrible despotic

00:27:15.820 police state and so like that's one way of running a society and it has its efficiencies

00:27:20.840 and its advantages which no doubt appeal to some people but it doesn't appeal to me and i think

00:27:25.020 most of what makes life good in the part of the world in which we live is due to the fact that

00:27:29.920 we aren't like that. So I think we have to look at anybody who tends towards the Chinese model and 0.96

00:27:34.920 say, well, what gives you? Who gave you? Who died and made you king? Who gave you the power to be

00:27:41.980 like this? That's just wrong. I'm glad that YouTube have on at least one occasion known to me

00:27:46.860 withdrawn from doing so. But I think there should be more protest against it when it happens.

00:27:52.640 and I think that YouTube should reconsider very strongly its policy of imagining that it has the

00:27:57.700 right to decide what people are allowed to see who do they think they are and Peter where do you

00:28:02.900 stand on this argument so let's take the example of David Icke David Icke has done a number of

00:28:07.020 interviews some of which I think one was taken down and then 5G masks were then burnt down where

00:28:13.960 do you stand on the argument that what we're in is an exceptional time and as a result we need to

00:28:20.260 make sure that the public is not exposed to ideas that may be dangerous that could then lead to an

00:28:25.780 outbreak of hysteria 5g mass burning etc i'm very i've always stuck i know in in britain we can't

00:28:33.160 have a first amendment because we don't because we have a sovereign parliament and therefore you

00:28:37.780 cannot have a constitutional clause saying parliament shall make no law but in general

00:28:43.980 I think the First Amendment is a good model for free speech law. And it has exceptions.

00:28:50.300 It's always said, for instance, that incitement to crime is straightforwardly wrong. So anybody

00:28:55.320 who incites the burning down of 5G masks or anything of that kind is plainly breaking

00:29:00.160 the law against incitement. And it's not a free speech issue. But if they're not doing

00:29:04.720 that, and if they're not inciting violence, and if they're not, in the classic old cliche,

00:29:10.280 they're not shouting fire in a crowded theatre where there is no fire,

00:29:14.060 then I think that's a different matter.

00:29:16.520 And it's also, there's a very grave tendency to attempt guilt by association shutdowns

00:29:22.820 by saying, well, what you're saying will lead to deaths

00:29:25.580 because people will die unnecessarily of COVID-19

00:29:28.300 because you've argued against measures which would save their lives.

00:29:31.520 That kind of thing, being advanced against me, for instance,

00:29:36.200 that is just censorship dressed up as morality.

00:29:40.280 There has to be a straightforward line. There's a lot of jurisprudence on the First Amendment. And I always recommend to anybody who's interested, there's a fascinating book called The Shadow University about the long battle to try and maintain some sort of free speech on American campuses during the rise of the speech code.

00:29:58.640 And an awful lot of work has been done to try and streamline and explain and make clear the full effects of the First Amendment.

00:30:07.300 And people should really see where these borders run.

00:30:09.860 But they do run and they never, ever prevent the free expression of opinion or the free expression of criticism of government as such.

00:30:18.480 And to be honest with you, I agree with you, Peter.

00:30:22.400 And what I'm really worried about at the moment is this outbreak of hysteria.

00:30:28.040 And I think we've seen it with the Dominic Cummings incident.

00:30:31.280 Now, I don't particularly agree with what Cummings did.

00:30:35.020 I think it was irresponsible and all the rest of it.

00:30:38.840 But I think the reaction to it has been really, really worrying.

00:30:43.540 We've just seen members of the press, either on Twitter or wherever it may be,

00:30:49.040 just behave as if, you know, they're losing their mind.

00:30:53.740 What about losing their minds?

00:30:54.980 I think a lot of people, I think we have to recognise this

00:30:57.760 in all our dealings with everybody at the moment, I notice it.

00:31:00.520 After all these weeks of confinement at home

00:31:03.020 and being deprived of normal routines, a lot of people are on edge.

00:31:07.120 They're much ready to go off the rails than they would normally be.

00:31:11.300 My wife especially, yeah.

00:31:14.120 She will have to speak to you about that.

00:31:19.040 my point we are all we are all a lot of people are doing things which i think

00:31:23.540 when they look back on their behavior they'll say how on earth did i get into that state of

00:31:28.660 mind i think this is such an unnatural state of life in which we find ourselves that people are

00:31:34.080 doing things they wouldn't normally do and it's mass hysteria always a much bigger problem than

00:31:38.820 individual hysteria is definitely about i think the the problem that dominic cummings may i say

00:31:44.320 this the first time i met dominic cummings nearly 20 years ago i loathed him on site nothing that

00:31:51.900 i've ever heard or seen since has ever caused me to to doubt or regret that decision i don't like

00:31:57.120 him i don't like the government he works for i'm not his spokesman but i agree with you that this

00:32:02.860 has been a ludicrous event and what the things that he did were perfectly normal actions which

00:32:07.640 are not a matter for the criminal law disapproval. I also strongly disapprove of the network of

00:32:15.380 informers, which we seem to have developed in this country, of people who are prepared to inform on

00:32:19.700 their neighbours for doing things which are not actually illegal, or in my view, necessarily

00:32:23.940 wrong. What's wrong in this country is the imposition of some almost completely insane

00:32:28.540 rules of life, which Dominic Cummings didn't follow. There are two points here. One, the reason

00:32:35.820 why Dominic Cummings should be in trouble of any kind

00:32:38.000 is quite simply that he demonstrated

00:32:41.500 that he himself didn't believe in the rules

00:32:45.600 which he was urging everybody else to do.

00:32:47.380 And the government, I don't think the government,

00:32:49.080 the same happened with Professor Ferguson

00:32:50.560 when he was caught being visited by his,

00:32:54.520 how should I put it?

00:32:57.040 Paramel.

00:32:58.700 I'm trying to be as polite and measured as possible here.

00:33:02.140 Again, if he'd really believed the stuff that he was saying,

00:33:05.360 how could he have done that?

00:33:07.500 And here we were.

00:33:08.580 He was a good-looking woman, Peter.

00:33:10.140 She was a good-looking woman. 0.80

00:33:11.540 If Dominic Cummings really believed the stuff

00:33:13.900 the government was telling the public,

00:33:15.200 how could he have done what he did?

00:33:16.860 He couldn't have.

00:33:17.780 So obviously he didn't believe it.

00:33:19.100 But the thing was, the public ought to be angry 1.00

00:33:21.440 with the stupid rules 1.00

00:33:23.220 and with the stupid governments imposing them. 1.00

00:33:25.460 But instead, it was diverted into a scalp hunt 1.00

00:33:27.820 against an individual.

00:33:29.300 This has become a feature of politics in recent years,

00:33:31.340 and the media go along with it

00:33:32.540 because they can often win.

00:33:33.940 They get a scalp at the end of it.

00:33:35.360 which makes them look more powerful than they actually are.

00:33:37.680 And governments get away with it because they can toss somebody off the sledge

00:33:41.240 and watch the wolves rend them to pieces

00:33:43.860 while they carry on doing what they were doing in the first place.

00:33:46.360 So no real politics takes place.

00:33:48.080 I'm against it really because it's not about politics.

00:33:51.800 But it is amazing that people who apparently submitted without protests

00:33:57.140 to mass house arrests and to the destruction of their livelihoods

00:34:01.440 by the government are prepared to get angry about an individual

00:34:05.080 who drives his family to Castle, to Barnard Castle.

00:34:09.460 It seems to me to be a failure of proportion on the ground scale.

00:34:12.680 And do you think that Cummings has served essentially as a lightning rod

00:34:15.960 for the disenchantment of the people, of the British public,

00:34:19.620 and where they find themselves?

00:34:21.280 Well, I hope not.

00:34:22.380 That's one of the reasons why I very much hope they keep him on.

00:34:25.280 My own theory is that the best thing to do with John Cummings

00:34:27.500 is to make him attend all the future government briefings on COVID-19,

00:34:32.120 only prominently displayed,

00:34:34.340 but only wearing one of those muzzle things.

00:34:36.700 The government seems to think it's such a good idea.

00:34:38.600 Always, always there to remind everybody

00:34:41.600 that while it drones on about testing and tracking

00:34:46.320 and all this, that the government doesn't believe

00:34:47.680 a word of what it's saying.

00:34:49.400 That, I believe, would be an appropriate punishment

00:34:51.420 for Donald Cummings.

00:34:52.500 But if he's fired, then he will be a lightning rod

00:34:55.680 or lightning conductor, as I say.

00:34:58.820 But if he's kept on,

00:35:01.540 And then, no, he won't be, because people might begin to be angry with the government rather than with Dominic Cummings and angry with the rules rather than with Dominic Cummings, which is what I would like to see.

00:35:10.640 It's fascinating, the kind of transformation that has happened in our political debate and our cultural space, isn't it?

00:35:16.140 Because we now take moral guidance from Piers Morgan and Alastair Campbell.

00:35:20.420 It's interesting, isn't it? But given this, when you look at the Archbishop of Canterbury, it's hardly surprising that people are searching elsewhere.

00:35:28.220 Oh, God.

00:35:28.980 and

00:35:31.300 Constantine there

00:35:32.860 touched on the press

00:35:33.840 I might say

00:35:35.060 I have to say

00:35:35.660 getting moral guidance

00:35:36.520 from Alistair Campbell

00:35:37.220 is

00:35:37.640 well

00:35:38.380 not something

00:35:39.880 that I would

00:35:40.280 personally seek

00:35:41.080 I mean that's a very

00:35:43.080 diplomatic way

00:35:43.940 of putting it

00:35:44.420 and I'm sure

00:35:44.860 I always thought

00:35:45.700 all the people involved

00:35:47.020 you know that when

00:35:47.900 someone is given

00:35:48.660 an honour

00:35:49.300 a long citizen government

00:35:51.320 a KGB 0.79

00:35:53.200 or an MBE

00:35:54.040 or whatever it is

00:35:54.740 I think all the people

00:35:56.040 involved

00:35:56.580 in the Iraq war

00:35:57.600 should have

00:35:58.080 wmd permanently after their names should always be whenever he comes up on television should be

00:36:03.440 alistair campbell wmd that's a fantastic idea although i would take it one step further every

00:36:09.600 time never ever to be forgotten tattooed into their foreheads people if anybody wants to take

00:36:14.020 anything they say seriously after that then that's their look at

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00:38:28.160 and so we talked in constantin very uh touched on the press with piers morgan

00:38:36.000 how do you think the british press have conducted themselves in this

00:38:40.080 national crisis do you reckon they've covered themselves in glory or

00:38:43.400 well no um i think that the the number of of organs and um and television stations and

00:38:54.520 that everybody who's been prepared to actually give a voice to dissent has been too small.

00:39:03.060 Nonetheless, here I am. I have been able to say prominently what I have said for all this time.

00:39:10.960 A lot of people have heard it. Not my own newspaper, but the very creditable intervention

00:39:18.220 of Mike Graham on Talk Radio, who disagrees with me, but who has each week allowed me a weekly

00:39:23.580 half hour in which I'd dispute with him the whole nature of virus panic uh even Piers Morgan I

00:39:30.180 Piers and I are not exactly made for each other but he did at the beginning of this invite me

00:39:37.300 onto his program and of course he had given the nature of what he's been saying he had to give

00:39:41.500 me a hard time but the fact was there it was on on a major television uh news and current affairs

00:39:47.020 program there was i able to put the contrary case so all credit appears on that so there it's not

00:39:53.760 um it's not totally bad it just could have been a heck of a lot better it's getting better

00:40:00.040 more and more people who didn't have all that much courage to begin with are finding their

00:40:04.400 courage to criticize this and more and more people are realizing that it may well have been a mistake

00:40:09.040 but they're going to need to be an awful lot more if we're to get out of it because as i say the

00:40:13.600 only way we will ever get out of it is the government actually openly admits, which would

00:40:18.640 be very good for them as well as for us, that it made a mistake and that it overestimated the

00:40:23.420 danger. And these precautions are absurd and won't work. And that to save the country is what remains

00:40:30.480 of the country's economy. And to restore our liberties, they simply have to accept that they

00:40:34.640 did it wrong. Oddly enough, I think there would be a great deal of rejoicing in the public if any

00:40:39.280 government ever actually admitted to have made a mistake. On this occasion, the mistake is so large

00:40:44.500 that the opportunity is so great that I do very, very sincerely hope that something of the kind

00:40:52.820 will happen for the sake of all of this. And I suppose actually that's an issue where the

00:40:56.260 opposition wouldn't really be able to make much hay out of it because they're on record as having

00:41:01.380 endorsed and supported the lockdown as well. So for them to say that, and I'm very much in that

00:41:06.700 can, Peter. I initially thought that it was the right decision, but I think, on reflection,

00:41:11.100 I do feel like it was an overreaction. I think the opposition have

00:41:15.560 discredited themselves. Parliament has discredited itself. During, of course, the Cromwellian

00:41:24.000 period, Parliament said lots of names, like the Bare Bones Parliament and the Rump Parliament

00:41:27.400 and the whatever it else was Parliament. I think this Parliament should go down in history

00:41:30.900 either as the supine Parliament or the plastic Parliament. It has been so completely useless. 0.98

00:41:37.260 They have not in any way earned their rations.

00:41:40.500 There's been hardly a voice of criticism.

00:41:42.500 There wasn't even a vote over the passage of the coronavirus act.

00:41:47.280 The Her Majesty's opposition has never at any stage opposed fundamentally the policy

00:41:53.080 or thought it was even its duty to examine it.

00:41:55.900 The same, to some extent, must be said of a lot of other areas of civil society.

00:42:01.100 A lot of the media, as I say.

00:42:02.440 the academy. The civil service, I think, might have been tougher in offering contrary advice.

00:42:11.500 I don't know where the courts have been. I know that Simon Dolan has been trying for some time

00:42:15.540 to get the courts to look at it, but it's taken him an awful lot of time to get not anywhere very

00:42:20.920 far. So when you compare that with what happened with Gina Miller and with the other great Supreme

00:42:26.400 Court case over the proroguing at Parliament, it's an interesting contrast. You could see that

00:42:30.980 the Supreme Court in that case was itching to get involved. Now the courts seem to me to have

00:42:37.300 stayed out. Almost every one of the safety devices built into our constitution against this kind of

00:42:43.180 silly panic has failed to function. The thing I'm trying to get at is in terms of, you obviously

00:42:49.220 think the lockdown was a mistake, right? And I guess what I'm asking is, will we ever know?

00:42:54.680 Because we've had a lot of excess deaths. The question is, have they come from the coronavirus

00:42:59.420 or have they come from the impact of the lockdown?

00:43:02.880 And that effect will continue, as you say,

00:43:05.300 because if people aren't attending cancer screenings,

00:43:08.140 if cancer screenings are not being done

00:43:09.860 in the same quantity as they were before, et cetera, et cetera,

00:43:13.200 we will have this long-running impact,

00:43:15.620 which anyone who wants to say the lockdown was right

00:43:18.840 will say, well, look, these excess deaths happened.

00:43:21.940 If we hadn't locked down, it would have been worse.

00:43:24.340 And equally, people on your side of the argument would say,

00:43:26.600 well, look at all these deaths from the lockdown.

00:43:28.400 that was a mistake.

00:43:29.780 So will we even ever know?

00:43:31.400 I won't just say that.

00:43:33.620 I would say that if the government needs to establish

00:43:36.880 that any of the actions that it took actually saved a single life

00:43:40.280 or reduced any real pressure on the National Health Service,

00:43:44.880 at the moment the government is like a druid

00:43:47.300 going to the villages of some benighted village near a river

00:43:52.460 and saying, look, if you don't sacrifice your herd of cows,

00:43:56.600 there's going to be a terrible flood and you'll all drown and so the villagers

00:44:00.140 believing the druids as they do sacrifice their cattle and mournfully eat them and the river 0.62

00:44:06.880 doesn't flood and the druids are there you see you sacrificed your cattle it's been their flood 0.98

00:44:12.080 and how can anyone then prove that it wasn't because the villagers sacrificed their cattle

00:44:17.720 the river didn't flood in a primitive society but in an advanced society such as ours we can have an

00:44:24.700 inquiry you know but hold on are you saying that keeping people physically separate it doesn't

00:44:30.300 doesn't help are you saying that keeping people physically separate doesn't prevent the spread of

00:44:34.660 the coronavirus well i don't see any reason i mean it's fascinating fact and it's it hasn't

00:44:40.520 had anything like as much coverage as it should but governor andrew cuomo of new york state

00:44:45.700 commissioned a survey of those people who've been hospitalized since he shut down the state

00:44:49.840 for coronavirus.

00:44:52.080 And 66% of those who've been hospitalized

00:44:54.400 stayed immediately at home.

00:44:57.740 So you tell me.

00:44:59.440 We actually know surprisingly little

00:45:01.020 about the transmission of this virus.

00:45:02.460 We also know surprisingly little

00:45:03.560 about when it arrived.

00:45:05.500 So for instance,

00:45:06.260 there is definitely a case of coronavirus

00:45:08.000 which has now been uncovered in France

00:45:09.600 in December of 2019.

00:45:11.760 Many people that I know

00:45:12.980 suspect that they had it

00:45:14.700 long before the panic began.

00:45:17.720 We're also now getting information

00:45:19.120 about its ability to spread, which seems to suggest that it may not be much above 20%.

00:45:24.520 So we don't know.

00:45:26.680 One other thing I might point out to you, and I think this every time I see somebody,

00:45:31.240 when I'm out on my bicycle, somebody veers 20 feet away to avoid passing too close to me.

00:45:37.400 And they're often wearing a muzzle as well.

00:45:40.380 It's actually far easier to spread a virus when you're in close contact with somebody

00:45:45.380 in a house than when you're out walking.

00:45:48.040 And so confining people to their homes may actually spread it.

00:45:50.460 I don't know.

00:45:51.180 Here is the fact.

00:45:52.480 What is clear is that no one can demonstrate that this mass confinement of the population

00:46:01.120 has actually achieved anything.

00:46:03.460 The virus, if you look at its behavior, although there are variations in different parts of

00:46:08.940 the world, which are quite possibly to do wholly different things, follows a pretty

00:46:14.860 straightforward bell girth pattern.

00:46:16.320 It begins, it rises to a peak, it comes to an end.

00:46:20.460 And there's very little evidence that any human action has any effect on that.

00:46:25.960 And I'd wait for anyone to provide any.

00:46:29.560 And if all they'd done was, say, declared an extra bank holiday

00:46:34.460 or changed supermarket opening hours or something of that kind,

00:46:43.600 then you wouldn't mind too much.

00:46:45.400 these people have crashed the economy of an advanced country and confined millions of people

00:46:51.080 to their homes and prevented them from working for weeks and they require much more of a

00:46:56.220 justification of having done that than any that they can provide so far and the thing that i'm

00:47:01.560 worried about peter and look my worries are selfish of course they are because we're all

00:47:05.460 inherently selfish however i can't see an end to this i was thinking about this the other day and

00:47:11.640 And, you know, people are talking about a vaccine.

00:47:14.720 From what I've read, there's never been a vaccine that has ever been created against the coronavirus.

00:47:19.220 If you think about the last great pandemic that we have endured, it's the HIV-AIDS virus.

00:47:24.780 There is still no vaccine against HIV-AIDS.

00:47:29.260 And you think to yourself, well, if that being the case, how are we going to get out of this?

00:47:33.720 And what is society going to be like if we have this, inverted commas, new normal?

00:47:38.540 Well, I completely agree.

00:47:39.320 That's why I say the government must admit it made a mistake.

00:47:41.640 because this will never work.

00:47:44.500 And we were talking earlier on about excess deaths.

00:47:48.800 Yes, there are, but there have been previous occasions of excess deaths,

00:47:52.560 usually involving influenza.

00:47:54.520 And I now have to say, because if I don't say it, I will be slandered.

00:48:01.400 I have to say, yes, I know coronavirus is not influenza, okay?

00:48:05.240 I know it's not.

00:48:06.420 I'm not saying that it is.

00:48:07.700 What I am saying is that there have been previous outbreaks of a disease which have had very similar effects on excess deaths.

00:48:17.140 There's an interesting website called In Proportion, which I urge people to study, which makes these comparisons, making allowances for the change in the population.

00:48:25.060 and there are two occasions in recent years and one in 1968-69 the famous as it then was

00:48:34.080 Hong Kong flu or Mao flu as it was sometimes known. Sounds very problematic. A number of the number of

00:48:41.580 excess deaths was either as great as or in 68-69 considerably greater than this. There's also

00:48:49.600 um interesting article i think the virus came too late uh pointing out that the main distinction

00:48:55.380 between coronavirus and and the other previous epidemics of this kind is that it comes later in

00:49:00.560 the year uh but if it had come in january march february uh it would have seemed much less

00:49:07.420 surprising most western european hospital systems are used to these quite large outbreaks quite

00:49:13.680 frequently happening and they are often not significantly greater than what we've undergone

00:49:18.620 So it isn't as exceptional as it's been made out to be.

00:49:21.800 And the completely false equation of it with the 1918 so-called Spanish influenza, which had nothing to do with Spain, is to be avoided.

00:49:32.260 The 1918 outbreak killed the young and healthy in terrifyingly large numbers.

00:49:38.680 And COVID-19 does not do that.

00:49:41.340 But you're right about the difficulties of creating a vaccination for a virus of this kind.

00:49:46.960 and that one of the difficulties is there's a decreasing number of people

00:49:50.100 who can actually be found in got it,

00:49:52.060 which is causing research of some great practical difficulties.

00:49:56.720 And unless and until we recognise that we overreacted to it,

00:50:01.040 then we are stuck with these endless measures of track and trace on our phones

00:50:05.660 and scary messages from the government and face muzzles 0.89

00:50:09.680 and keeping children sitting miles apart from each other in school

00:50:13.760 and not being able to go to the pub without plastic screens dangling from the ceiling, 0.51

00:50:19.460 all kinds of useless, expensive rubbish, which will make life unpleasant and will also destroy 0.87

00:50:24.800 commerce. And people say, oh, well, commerce, who cares about that set against life? Well, 0.98

00:50:30.480 A, you're not saving lives. And B, the economy is what sustains life. If there's no economy,

00:50:37.400 where is the money to come from for the food and for the clean water and for the decent housing,

00:50:42.700 which are the basis of good health.

00:50:45.640 And where is it to come from for the health service,

00:50:48.060 which we claim to value so much?

00:50:49.900 We've devastated our tax base.

00:50:52.460 So the ability of this country to pay for a health service

00:50:56.300 of the kind we want in the years to come

00:50:59.540 is going to be greatly damaged by this.

00:51:01.760 And people will suffer as a result.

00:51:03.420 People are already suffering.

00:51:04.320 Anybody who tries to do anything with the health service at the moment

00:51:07.240 knows that it's not working in Bahamian.

00:51:08.900 at the level of working out before

00:51:10.920 for anything other than COVID.

00:51:12.920 The thing has been a great diversion.

00:51:14.380 And that's for the madness of dentistry.

00:51:18.140 It is said that one of the worst pains in the world

00:51:20.540 comes if you have serious teeth problems.

00:51:23.140 But you try, if you've got an emergency dental problem,

00:51:26.320 getting anybody to do anything about it in this country.

00:51:28.040 It's a madness.

00:51:32.000 It's being trivialized.

00:51:33.200 It's really, really important

00:51:34.300 for the numbers of people who are suffering from it.

00:51:35.840 And the government is just letting it go on and on and on.

00:51:38.900 because they won't admit that they made a mistake.

00:51:41.440 Do you think the health consequences of the way we've reacted

00:51:45.060 are going to run for years and years?

00:51:48.220 You can't tell exactly how bad the damage is.

00:51:52.140 The enormous load in which Maynard Keynes negotiated

00:51:55.860 for this country from the United States

00:51:57.680 at the end of the Second World War when Len Lee stopped

00:51:59.760 was negotiated in, I think, July of 1945

00:52:04.780 and wasn't paid off until December 2006.

00:52:07.860 my entire childhood was spent in a country which was constantly weighed down by the paying off of

00:52:15.780 and the paying of interest on that enormous level our lives were greyer and more pinched and our

00:52:21.100 public services worse uh you look at look at things like council house building in the early 1.00

00:52:26.080 50s look at the low standards of the architecture and the building the country was poor and it was

00:52:31.800 poor because it was in debt, but that was a debt honorably contracted as a result of war.

00:52:38.680 On this occasion, it's going to be poor because of a debt contracted because of a government mistake.

00:52:45.500 And Peter...

00:52:46.740 For how long, I don't know.

00:52:49.200 Yeah, I mean, it's a very, very good point.

00:52:51.440 I mean, we interviewed a comedian and an expert on the economy called Dominic Frisbee,

00:52:59.220 And he made the point, he did a book on the history of tax, which is very interesting.

00:53:03.140 And he said that in wartime, every wartime, that every government uses it as an opportunity to introduce new tax, to raise taxes.

00:53:12.360 Do you think after this, the government and Rishi Sunak are going to turn around and go, look, we furloughed a lot of you and we paid your wages.

00:53:21.120 Unfortunately, now is payback time and we are going to be taxed up to the hill in an effort to get, you know, to repay the debt.

00:53:28.320 No, it's not an opportunity.

00:53:32.000 It's certainly true that there must have been some people

00:53:34.780 who wanted a bigger state who were glad of the excuse

00:53:38.720 of wartime to make the state bigger,

00:53:41.580 particularly the 1914 to 1918 to begin with,

00:53:44.140 but 1939 to 1945 as well.

00:53:47.900 Rishi Sunak has no choice.

00:53:50.300 It is really a question of how soon he has to announce

00:53:54.640 the emergency budget, the first, I think,

00:53:56.540 of many emergency budgets which you will have to introduce which I will be one of the few people

00:54:01.260 who will not be shocked by and the these budgets will be very serious and people who think that it

00:54:08.680 can all be loaded on the way off are very much mistaken the things VAT the duties on all kinds

00:54:17.300 of things uh duties particularly on travel I wonder how many people who long to go back on

00:54:21.680 holiday are going to feel about how much more expensive it's going to be. Quite possibly there's

00:54:27.560 going to be something called the capital levy, a raid on the savings. That means, amongst other

00:54:32.060 things, quite possibly on the value of houses which people have bought is unprecedented in a

00:54:38.200 free country such as this, which people will find, particularly since it's levied on the savings

00:54:43.120 they've made from already taxed money, they'll find very oppressive. But the government will

00:54:46.420 probably call it something like an NHS surcharge. It'll be very hard to resist politically. And I

00:54:51.660 I doubt very much whether the Labour opposition will resist it

00:54:54.080 because they will know, their own economists know,

00:54:57.800 that there is no choice.

00:54:58.840 The government is going to have to increase tax.

00:55:00.540 The other thing that's going to happen is, as a country,

00:55:02.920 we are going to be so much in debt

00:55:04.500 that the levels of interest

00:55:10.140 which we are going to be willing to pay

00:55:13.160 to the pension funds and the insurance companies

00:55:15.820 which loan so much of the money to the government

00:55:17.980 are going to be fantastically low.

00:55:19.620 So that means a raid on the pensions and savings of millions of people whose old ages will

00:55:25.860 be under threat.

00:55:26.860 That also happens.

00:55:27.860 And the other thing is that the world will look at us and see an economy much weaker

00:55:31.800 than most.

00:55:32.800 And it may be less and less willing to lend us money on the terms which we've been willing

00:55:37.400 to do so.

00:55:38.400 And one of the results of this will certainly be a decline in the international value of

00:55:41.400 the pound sterling.

00:55:42.400 So again, that has many, many effects, particularly on the cost of imported goods and on our ability

00:55:49.300 to travel abroad

00:55:50.040 which people will feel

00:55:51.060 there's going to be

00:55:51.600 a lot of things going on

00:55:53.000 and all of them

00:55:55.440 are going to hurt

00:55:56.080 and as I say

00:55:57.840 this is a dream time

00:55:58.720 this long long period

00:56:01.040 of sunny weather

00:56:01.640 during which

00:56:02.060 the chattering glasses

00:56:02.840 have lazed in their gardens

00:56:04.060 drinking glasses

00:56:05.680 of misted

00:56:07.520 misted glasses

00:56:10.160 of Waitrose Shabli

00:56:11.140 thinking it's all

00:56:13.400 going to be great

00:56:14.100 but it isn't

00:56:15.560 they'll be lucky

00:56:17.140 to be able to afford

00:56:18.460 the Shabli 0.82

00:56:18.900 when this is over.

00:56:19.680 And I guess it's going to be really hard.

00:56:22.240 It can't be anything else.

00:56:23.820 No one, no government's ever spent

00:56:25.380 this much money in peacetime.

00:56:27.340 Horrifying prophecy there from Peter Hitchens.

00:56:29.760 The middle classes will have to go 1.00

00:56:31.400 without Shabli.

00:56:32.440 Indeed, it's a terrifying prospect,

00:56:34.360 is it not?

00:56:34.960 But there you are.

00:56:36.360 It may go home in a way

00:56:37.820 that other warnings don't.

00:56:39.980 Peter, we're coming to the end

00:56:41.720 of the interview.

00:56:42.280 So we have one more question.

00:56:43.860 But before I ask our question,

00:56:45.000 just summarize it in one word for us.

00:56:47.500 the lockdown has been finished the sentence a catastrophe there you go all right one more

00:56:55.920 question uh okay peter and obviously the last question that we always finish our interviews

00:57:01.580 with is what is the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that we really should

00:57:06.400 be the one thing we're not talking about as a society oh dear um

00:57:14.900 i i i can't reduce it to one thing you i i i knew you're going to ask me this and i was thinking

00:57:23.140 i can't do it because there are now currently so many uh i think um

00:57:29.240 i think we really have to be more more realistic about our position as a nation

00:57:36.400 I think we live in a world of illusion about how important and how rich we are.

00:57:41.320 And I think that this illusion is about to come to a very, very brutal end.

00:57:47.440 I think we're going to have to worry, finally, in a way that we haven't done,

00:57:52.160 even since the Second World War and all the other great events in the past century.

00:57:57.040 We're going to have to worry very much, what sort of country is this?

00:57:59.800 How important are we? How rich are we?

00:58:01.560 What is it that we really, really are concerned about becoming?

00:58:05.440 How can we cope with our diminished status?

00:58:09.680 What are we going to have to give up?

00:58:12.920 You've been talking about this for some time, Peter,

00:58:16.340 and talking about our overestimation of Britain's role in the world.

00:58:20.480 What do you think our approach should be?

00:58:23.160 How should we see ourselves going forward?

00:58:27.420 I think we should have an outbreak of modesty.

00:58:29.980 I think a very good symbolic action for us to take

00:58:32.600 would be to abandon the modernization

00:58:34.520 of the trying nuclear weapons system.

00:58:38.200 Having spent all the blood and treasure

00:58:40.780 we have done on becoming a nuclear power,

00:58:43.140 I don't think we should give it up entirely.

00:58:44.400 We should keep a few bombs for old time's sake.

00:58:47.340 But the maintenance of a vast Cold War

00:58:51.040 superpower nuclear weapons system

00:58:53.540 is an absurdity given our lack of wealth and importance.

00:58:57.220 It should go.

00:58:58.580 And in the abandoning of it,

00:59:01.060 we should recognize our change status and begin to consider what we really want to spend our

00:59:07.600 wealth on and what sort of country we really want to be. It would be a good thing to do anyway

00:59:12.080 at a good psychological moment. And I say this as a very pro-defense, a highly conservative person

00:59:18.340 who comes from a service family. So don't accuse me of being some kind of peacenik. It's just

00:59:25.280 something that has to go so you haven't embraced hippie being a hippie in your later years peter

00:59:30.940 then i'm sorry i said you haven't embraced being a hippie in peace and love no it doesn't appeal

00:59:36.760 i only i've always either been a reactionary patriot or a droskiist they both actually

00:59:42.600 seem to me to be remarkably similar positions when when you strip away the the externals but

00:59:48.100 no the hippies never appeal well on that happy note uh peter hitchens thank you so much for

00:59:54.580 coming back on the show everybody uh thank you for watching make sure you go follow peter on

00:59:58.500 twitter at clark micah is that right it is yep the explanation of this curious handle is to be found

01:00:05.500 on peter hitchens faqs which really does exist and you can google it fantastic well peter thank you

01:00:11.080 so much for coming back and we'll see you again soon my pleasure thank you for having me

01:00:24.580 We'll be right back.

TRIGGERnometry - May 31, 2020

Peter Hitchens：＂The Lockdown is a Catastrophe＂

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

TRIGGERnometry - May 31, 2020

Peter Hitchens： ＂The Lockdown is a Catastrophe＂

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

Peter Hitchens：＂The Lockdown is a Catastrophe＂