TRIGGERnometry - June 02, 2026


The Great British Delusion - Konstantin Kisin

Hosted by
Francis Foster Konstantin Kisin
Guests
Konstantin Kisin
Mentioned
Victoria Sovereigns Charlie Munger Safer Ontario Andrew Nether Zach Polanski David Frost Motherhood Labour
People Have No Idea What Is About To Happen - Dwarkesh Patel ＂We’re Regressing Into The Unknown＂ - Dr Jared Cooney Horvath

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

179.56

Word count

1,629

Sentence count

89

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The Great British Delusion: Why is there so much concern about mass immigration in the UK, and why is it so bad? In this episode, I explain why both sides of the immigration debate are wrong about what's happening, and how to fix it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 A Safer Ontario means more police and prosecutors making sure my car doesn't get stolen.
00:00:05.000 It means building new jails to keep criminals behind bars.
00:00:09.000 And it means there's no need to worry when I play at the park.
00:00:12.000 We're making every corner of Ontario safer to make all of Ontario safer.
00:00:17.000 That's how we protect Ontario.
00:00:19.000 For all of us.
00:00:21.000 Learn how at Ontario.ca slash Safer Ontario. Paid for by the Government of Ontario.
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00:00:58.800 Little Bellies. Do what's natural.
00:01:01.260 The Great British Delusion.
00:01:07.380 As regular viewers will know, for several years now, I've been trying to persuade anyone who will listen
00:01:12.720 that if you want to address the widely shared concern about the pace and scale of mass immigration,
00:01:18.600 Britain's most salient political issue, it might be helpful to understand what's actually causing the problem in the first place.
00:01:25.140 The conventional explanation of mass immigration among critical commentators is that woke ideologues in the civil service and the political halls of power believe that bringing more people into Britain is an unquestionable moral good.
00:01:38.240 On the fringes of the right, some even murmur of the various theories of the so-called Great
00:01:42.840 Replacement, which range in emphasis from elites bringing in compliant and desperate foreign workers
00:01:47.860 to avoid providing good working conditions and fair wages to native workers, all the way through 0.80
00:01:53.120 to Jews conspiring to replace white people with third-word immigration. Whatever the exact flavor 0.98
00:01:58.580 this perspective comes in, the idea is that mass immigration is happening for primarily
00:02:03.320 ideological reasons. Likewise, advocates of mass immigration believe that anti-immigration
00:02:08.760 sentiment is also motivated by ideology, hating immigrants or being racist, etc., rather than
00:02:15.600 reality. What has been clear to me for some time, however, is that both of these claims are only
00:02:20.560 partially true. Yes, some, as New Labour advisor Andrew Nether explained, wanted to, quote,
00:02:25.500 rub the right's nose in diversity. Yes, many in Britain as a whole and in Westminster in
00:02:30.580 particular think that immigration is an axiomatic moral good. The problem is, however, that this does
00:02:35.380 not explain why a series of conservative governments elected on increasingly vociferous
00:02:39.740 promises to bring immigration down to the tens of thousands continued to ramp it up. Facing the
00:02:45.260 threat of Farage, who tore chunks out of the Tory vote year after year, they instead proceeded to set
00:02:50.560 new immigration records culminating in 2023 when net annual immigration exceeded 900,000. It's also
00:02:57.500 true that some people don't like immigrants. But the idea that this motivates a significant
00:03:02.120 portion of the opposition to mass immigration in a country like Britain is absurd. According to
00:03:07.720 that infamous far-right anti-immigrant rag, The Guardian, British people are statistically some
00:03:12.960 of the most welcoming towards immigrants in the world. Put simply, both sides are misunderstanding
00:03:17.800 what's happening, often on purpose. My view is that much of the concern about immigration comes
00:03:23.120 from two practical realities.
00:03:25.100 First, mass immigration on this scale
00:03:27.280 is necessarily displacing. 0.99
00:03:29.340 I've only lived in Britain for 30 years
00:03:31.180 and no one can tell me that the country
00:03:33.360 and especially its major cities
00:03:34.820 have not been completely transformed in that time.
00:03:37.880 Many of the people who live in London today
00:03:39.760 are either unconcerned by
00:03:41.340 or actively in favor of these changes.
00:03:43.740 But that's partly because most of the people
00:03:45.340 who were concerned have left these cities.
00:03:47.860 Now multiply across every city in the country
00:03:50.240 and many of their suburbs.
00:03:51.560 You don't have to dislike people to not want the area where generations of your family were born, lived and died
00:03:57.180 to become alien to you within the space of two decades.
00:04:00.660 In that same time span, the British people have been getting poorer.
00:04:03.880 As I keep saying over and over, Britain's GDP per capita is lower today than it was in 2007 before the great financial crisis.
00:04:11.480 Ironically, this is also why parties of every stripe have brought in millions of people into the country.
00:04:16.640 We don't evaluate economic performance on GDP per capita.
00:04:19.820 Instead, we measure GDP itself and itself alone.
00:04:23.100 That is the equivalent of measuring how prosperous your household is
00:04:26.140 without accounting for the number of people living in it.
00:04:28.980 A household income of £100,000 per year is high by British standards at least,
00:04:33.420 but what matters a lot more than that is how many people are in your household.
00:04:37.920 A single person living on £100,000 is in a very different position to a family of five
00:04:43.000 who are effectively getting £20,000 each.
00:04:45.460 The explanation for why Labour and the Tories let immigration run rampant 0.56
00:04:48.960 was best summed up by legendary investor Charlie Munger
00:04:51.640 when he said, show me the incentive
00:04:53.980 and I'll show you the outcome.
00:04:55.840 If all you care about is the headline figure, 0.51
00:04:58.560 why not hand a bedroom to your in-laws
00:05:00.460 to top up your prosperity with their pension?
00:05:03.580 When described like this, it sounds frankly insane.
00:05:06.540 Yet that is precisely what our politicians
00:05:08.280 are incentivized to do.
00:05:10.160 They are judged on the country's total GDP.
00:05:13.100 The easiest way to increase it
00:05:14.580 when you're busy strangling your economy
00:05:16.320 with net zero, high taxes and endless regulation
00:05:19.460 Bring in more bodies.
00:05:20.640 This really isn't complicated to understand.
00:05:23.120 So why do so many people in Britain who clearly feel the economic pain nonetheless refuse to see it?
00:05:29.020 To see that mass immigration is an attempt by badly incentivized politicians to deceive them about what's actually happening.
00:05:35.980 Instead, they cling to their support for mass immigration and the seductive but false idea that they are struggling because the rich aren't paying their fair share.
00:05:43.960 A report last month, however, has opened my eyes to another reason, one I had never considered.
00:05:49.820 It turns out many British people think that the decline in their living standards
00:05:53.620 is personal to them, while the rest of Britain is somehow thriving.
00:05:58.380 A big new poll and focus group studies conducted by Freshwater Strategy,
00:06:02.460 with the support of the John Templeton Foundation,
00:06:05.080 asked participants where they thought Britain stood economically compared to our main competitors.
00:06:09.360 As David Frost put it in his excellent article,
00:06:12.000 voters are living in a dream world. Specifically, nearly half of British voters think that we are
00:06:17.480 as rich or richer than Switzerland. Over half think we're as rich or richer than Australia,
00:06:23.180 Singapore, or Germany. And incredibly, over half of Brits think that our country is as rich as
00:06:29.320 or richer than the United States. Imagine their shock when they were told the truth.
00:06:34.240 We're 10% poorer than Germany, 20% poorer than Australia, 40% poorer than America and Singapore,
00:06:40.840 and only half as rich as the Swiss.
00:06:43.360 Not only are the voters unaware that mass immigration
00:06:46.240 is a deceptive tool deployed by politicians
00:06:48.940 to disguise our poverty,
00:06:50.780 they don't even know we're poor in the first place.
00:06:53.200 If you thought that Britain was a rich country 0.97
00:06:55.340 instead of one that will soon be overtaken by Poland,
00:06:58.540 but also experienced a continual fall
00:07:00.740 in your living standards,
00:07:02.020 would it not be logical to think 0.92
00:07:03.600 that you're deliberately being screwed
00:07:05.300 by the people who are thriving?
00:07:06.660 The British economy is not stagnant
00:07:08.700 because we've produced too much of our own oil and gas.
00:07:11.480 It's not struggling because taxes are too low.
00:07:14.300 Our economic woes are not the product
00:07:16.080 of insufficient regulation.
00:07:17.800 But until the public makes the connection,
00:07:20.240 the rapid rise of Zach Polanski
00:07:21.860 and other redistribution enthusiasts is inevitable,
00:07:25.360 even if it means more of the policies
00:07:27.140 that made us poor in the first place.
00:07:29.020 Our poverty is the direct result of net zero lunacy,
00:07:32.580 welfarism, and chasing out anyone
00:07:34.260 who wants to start a business and make it successful.
00:07:36.500 But it turns out many people don't realize that it's not them that's poor, it's the entire country.
00:07:42.720 And if we don't persuade them otherwise, they'll vote for people who'll make things worse again and again.
00:07:48.140 If you enjoy these monologues, remember that they're available as articles on my sub stack at constantinkission.com
00:07:54.460 weeks and sometimes months ahead of time.
00:07:56.960 So head on over there now and subscribe.
00:07:59.400 As you know, I've been concerned about both the economic and political direction of travel of Western countries in recent years.
00:08:06.160 That being the case, I'm keen to protect my family in case things continue to get worse.
00:08:11.420 That's why I'm making sure to keep a portion of my savings in gold.
00:08:15.340 The reason the price of everything continues to go up is that governments keep printing money.
00:08:19.980 When they do, inflation is inevitable.
00:08:22.460 What does inflation mean?
00:08:23.940 It's just a fancy word for the value of your money being diluted over time.
00:08:27.980 This is what's happened to the value of the dollar in our lifetimes.
00:08:31.320 Gold is a great way to preserve the fruits of your hard work,
00:08:34.220 while the value of your dollars, pounds, and euros is continually being eroded.
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00:08:44.600 I recently bought some of these Victoria Sovereigns.
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