00:01:21.880After that, I worked for the BBC and found the illusion between the two very easy indeed, as you can imagine.
00:01:31.120My point has always been to say what I think people believe but are too scared to say for reasons of either direct political correctness or indirect political correctness.
00:01:45.300There's a slight difference between the two.
00:01:46.780And also to make people laugh. I mean, most of my job is to amuse.
00:01:52.740For that, I usually get called a racist and a homophobe because I have made jokes about black people before and indeed gay people.
00:02:01.120But I like to think of myself in a very real sense as an equal opportunities cunt, as someone who will offend everybody,
00:02:09.380Including, you know, the people I come from up in the northeast of England and people who live in Brighton, especially maybe people who live in Brighton and French people.
00:09:50.480You know, in France's question, this is, I think, what he's getting at in terms of the backlash.
00:09:54.100Like, I did a show about that contract this year at Edinburgh, and it did very, very well.
00:09:59.960With the public and with a lot of reviews. I obviously got a lot of, you know, The Guardian and all these people slammed it, but I got a lot of...
00:10:06.700That twat, Brian. Brian, see him. One star.
00:10:13.000I wish he'd given me a one star. What he did is actually he went to see all the non-woke comedians, and instead of giving us a review,
00:10:19.880he did a whole write-up in which essentially he wouldn't actually give any of us a review, he just made a few comments about everybody.
00:10:26.160He's a man who knows nothing about comedy.
00:12:22.840But it's not, you know, get in the cattle vans, is it?
00:12:27.120You know, when that is broadcast as being something about which we should be viscerally outraged,
00:12:36.200I think the public listen to that and think, what?
00:12:40.740I don't think they are anywhere near where the BBC is on this issue.
00:12:45.440You know, I just don't think they, I think, and this is where it comes into Brexit, where Brexit comes into the picture, which is that there is such a disconnect between this liberal elite and the country, between parliament and the country, but also between the judiciary, the BBC, the civil service, and what we consider the rest of the country.
00:13:13.340There's just no shared common view of the world.
00:24:20.960Maybe the only time I'll mention the book, to be honest.
00:24:23.040But I think it's the most salient of the chapters, which is an awful lot of work was done after Brexit by the horrified, horrified liberal elite saying, who are these ghastly fucking people who voted to leave?
00:24:36.160And so there was demographies and everyone sort of came up with the same thing, which was that they were poorer, less well educated, which isn't true, nor is it totally true about the poorer stuff.
00:24:47.220They tend to be northern away from cities, which is true, and so on and so on.
00:24:52.060And yet, when you actually look more closely at the demographic which voted Leave, there's nothing really which pulls it together.
00:25:01.040It's, you know, an amalgamation of people with very, very different views in different parts of the country and different parts of the social strata.
00:25:10.960You know, I think it's 46% of the AB group, for example, you know, the top social group voted Leave.
00:32:39.900argue that trade deals, that are decent trade. But still, it still seems to me to have some force
00:32:45.520that, you know, we have had peace. And, you know, contrary to what people like Alistair Campbell
00:32:54.580and Peter Mandelson would say, I feel European, you know. I like Europe. I'm particularly
00:33:01.220Germanophile. Okay, I loathe France. You know, but we're not all perfect, are we, you know.
00:33:07.020But I adore Europe, and particularly the parts of Europe which have more latterly been enjoined to join the European Union, such as, you know, Poland, the Baltic States, Hungary, and so on.
00:33:50.020So it was a very, very difficult call.
00:33:52.140And I thought it was just about, it was just about the, in the end, the thing which won it for me was the European Union's increasingly authoritarian attitude towards countries under its dominion.
00:34:05.120particularly Poland and Hungary, but also Catalonia, and its ever-increasing expansionism,
00:34:12.480not geographically-wise, but policy-wise, that it wished control over all of us.
00:34:18.420And I think the nation-state kind of works.
00:37:17.540But isn't part of this, okay, and we are joking, of course,
00:37:20.400But doesn't the euro have to take responsibility in that that currency has been manufactured, created to suit the Germanic economy and everybody else who's got, you know, economy depends on agriculture and tourism.
00:38:07.360The rather horrible truth is that one of the reasons I voted leave reluctantly was in the hope that if we left, the European Union might be forced to reform itself a bit and might shift a little bit more along the axis, which I, and by the sound of it, you, would prefer.
00:38:32.880Now, I think I probably got that wrong, but there has been a change.
00:38:38.000You know, we have seen across Europe populists from both the left and right.
00:39:22.060But no, what I hoped was that we might get back to being a trading bloc.
00:39:27.560And if you look at the opinion polls in Europe, with the exception of a few countries, and bizarrely Luxembourg is counted as a country, why is it?
00:48:15.280There was a headmaster of a school in Dulwich who said that if any people in this school said anything similar to what Donald Trump had been saying about immigration, they would be expelled, excluded.
00:49:10.220And just get rid of this flaccid, self-serving and contradictory toss that the kids are taught at the moment.
00:49:20.460Because this is a great thing about, and it's why liberalism is falling apart, that these identity politics stuff, it's all mutually contradictory.
00:52:03.060We had one training session where we had a teacher training person come in, tell us how boys couldn't be expected to write at a desk for longer than 15 minutes.
00:59:49.600Because I was going to move on to talking about...
00:59:52.040I was just going to say, I'm curious still to prod you more on why you think that idea of victimhood has been so successful, because that is a huge transformation.
01:04:09.420I mean, it's just, and it's the fucking affluent who fall for it.
01:04:17.660That being said, I know quite a lot of people in London,
01:04:20.460and I've tried to work this out psychologically,
01:04:22.800who vote for Jeremy Corbyn and then pray he doesn't get in.
01:04:28.260You know, that is kind of the lefty virtue signaling writ large, isn't it?
01:04:35.320Well, on that happy note, Rod, we've got just one more question for you, which is what is the one thing that no one's talking about that we ought to be talking about?
01:05:55.900But my point is I think we need to remove identity politics as a thing.
01:05:59.860Sure. Of course you do. Of course you do. You do it on economics.
01:06:03.480Yeah. I just think one concern for me with identity politics is it pushes people who are not represented by it into their own identity.
01:06:11.200And then you suddenly get, you know, 10 million straight white men going, oh, yeah, well, we are discriminated against because we're straight white men.