The State of Britain with Matt Goodwin
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Summary
Matt Goodwin returns to Trigonometry for the 100th time to discuss the Tory leadership crisis, including the sacking of Saje Braverman and the return of Rishi Sunak to frontline politics, and what it means for the future of the Conservative Party.
Transcript
00:00:00.660
Broadway's smash hit, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.
00:00:06.480
The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more, featuring all the songs you love,
00:00:11.740
including America, Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline.
00:00:15.740
Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise.
00:00:22.620
April 28th through June 7th, 2026, The Princess of Wales Theatre.
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Hello and welcome to a very special live interview of Trigonometry.
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And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
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Our brilliant guest today returns for the hundredth time.
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You're here, as I said, not for the first time, so you don't need much of an introduction.
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You are our go-to man for political analysis, particularly here in the UK, about everything
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And it has been rather an eventful couple of days, hasn't it, Matt?
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What have you made of everything that's happened over the last weekend and in the last two days
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We're witnessing the disintegration of the Conservative Party.
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We're witnessing a party that no longer knows what it is, what it's about, how to connect
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The departure of Suala Braverman, her resignation letter, which you will have seen this afternoon
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What this says to me, look, is you've got a party that was handed a unique historic
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We talked about it on this show the day after the election.
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And we said at the time, for the Conservative Party to hold this political realignment,
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it's got to deliver for working class voters, for older voters, for cultural conservatives.
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We have a Conservative Party that is basically retreating to the David Cameron liberal Cameroon
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tradition, social liberalism, cultural liberalism, which doesn't really know what it is.
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And I think Suala Braverman's departure and David Cameron's return to frontline politics
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really symbolizes this existential crisis for the Conservative Party.
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So what we're heading into now for the next 12 months, what we're heading into is an ideological,
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philosophical civil war for the soul of conservatism.
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And that is going to determine not just what kind of Conservative Party we have, but what
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kind of country we have over the next 10, 20 years.
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And obviously, it's a pivotal moment, I think, in the history of this country.
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Can we take a moment, though, to go back over the last few days and just try and understand
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Because a lot of people, myself included, have said that Suala Braverman's positions represent
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And yet, we also have to reconcile that with the fact that, according to some polling, 73%
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of the public supported her being sacked by the Prime Minister.
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Maybe we're wrong to say that she represents a popular view in this country.
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Suala does represent a majority of people in this country in terms of the positions that
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She thinks multiculturalism as a policy is broken.
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She wants to deport foreign nationals who glorify terrorism, as you discussed with Douglas Murray
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She says the institutions are ideologically biased.
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They're skewed towards liberal progressive causes.
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And she thinks that the government, our prevailing culture, is no longer prioritising the majority,
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that it's become obsessed with an identity-woke politics.
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Now, on all of those issues, and I've polled them, and I've written about it on Substack,
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I've written about it on Twitter, those are majority positions.
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Why you're seeing those numbers in terms of Rishi Singh that was right to dump Suala?
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If you look at the Conservative Party electorate, only a minority of them think Rishi Singh was
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And while we're here, only a very small minority of them think he was right to bring back David
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I mean, you've got the change candidate bringing back the Conservative Party leader from 2005 to
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But Suala speaks for a majority of this country who are looking at the Conservative Party, many
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people watching this show, looking at the Labour Party too, and realising what we are now living
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through is a restoration of an elite liberal consensus, which will tolerate no dissent, no
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And what worries me more than anything about what we've witnessed in recent days, it's another
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example of a radical alternative voice being purged from politics.
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To that, we might also say Jeremy Corbyn and the radical left, gone.
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Radical dissenting voices, people who question the social and economic consensus in this country
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are being purged from politics and the public square.
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That makes me very worried about where we're going as a society, because I don't think we
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And that is why I'm almost hoping that this civil war within the Conservative Party actually
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leads to much longer term structural change in British politics.
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Matt, do you think, and there are some people who will say this, my father in particular,
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who's a Conservative voter, that she sowed the seeds of her own demise with some of the
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It was unnecessarily inflammatory, is what social Conservatives and my father's ilk would
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And I think there's a criticism of Suala, which would say at times she wasn't necessarily
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behaving in a way that was what you would expect for somebody in high office.
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And Suala, in reply, would say that she was there with a specific brief, a specific mandate,
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and that as her resignation letter makes clear, she made a deal with Rishi Sunak that involved
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delivering on a number of things that were in the 2019 manifesto, lowering migration, strengthening
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the country's borders, dealing with the illegal migrants and the small votes and so on, and
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that the rest of the cabinet, including the Prime Minister, consistently failed to deliver
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So Suala would say it was her duty to speak out in the way that she did.
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And it was her duty to represent those voters who went with the Conservatives in 2019.
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And I know I read your substack too on this, and we ended up writing similar things.
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And I think Suala really understands where the average voter is on these issues.
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And I think many people, as you will know on this show, are looking at the institutions,
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the BBC, the universities, the creative industries, the cultural institutions, and they are now seeing
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a consensus on the erosion of sex-based rights, support from mass migration, the imposition
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of woke ideology in schools, in the cultural institutions, the galleries, and museums, a
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cynicism of who we are, of our history, of our identity.
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This is a consensus that speaks to no more than 20% of the country.
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No more than 20% of Britain are strongly and significantly liberal.
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So 80% are out there saying, you know, what on earth is this?
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And of course, the answer is the elite want this consensus.
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And we can see what happens when you violate that.
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And but also as well, there was, when she wrote that article, there were people who were
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That was her stepping out of, that was her stepping out of line.
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That was her directly challenging the authority of the Conservative Party.
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Can you see why, if you put yourself in Rishi's shoes, she made her position untenable?
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She violated the assumption, the unwritten, well, the formal agreement that the police and
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Look, that piece also made a number of good substantive points.
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Why is it that COVID lockdown protesters were treated so badly relative to Black Lives Matter
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Why is it that visibly pro-Hamas supporters were given a free pass while far-right goons and thugs
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There is an imbalance, or at least there is a widespread perception of an imbalance.
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When police officers are taking the knee to express solidarity with BLM, or as we saw last weekend,
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having photographs taken with children dressed up as terrorists, Islamist terrorists,
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the police also have a duty to remain politically impartial, as to our schools, by the way.
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And what I think many voters are sick of is looking at these institutions and seeing an
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And, you know, I understand the criticism that, you know, she had a responsibility to
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maintain the independence of the police and so on, but we should still be able to have
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a national debate about the things we are actually seeing on the streets, on social media.
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And that's what worries me, Matt, is that what we have now is taboo subjects.
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When before, these subjects were in the mainstream of politics.
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The fact that if you come out and say, we need to stop the boats, that is then equated with
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a nascent Nazi party by one of our most prominent sports broadcasters is risable.
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Well, I think the idea that the Conservative Party is a far right party is amusing.
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When you consider that the Conservative Party is the most pro-immigration party we've ever
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had in British politics, the Conservative Party has presided over the biggest increase
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in both legal and illegal immigration that Britain has ever seen.
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Net migration was 300,000 when David Cameron came in in 2010.
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The new figures will come out in the next week and it will go even higher.
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So the idea that the Conservative Party is far right is a joke.
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What we are witnessing is the expansion of social norms.
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You notice everyone had a problem with hate march but not hate crime.
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And it happens because people want to silence and stigmatize views that undermine or challenge
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the dominant status quo, that challenge the zeitgeist, that challenge the consensus among
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And as you made, you made this point, I think, this week, Constantine, that you look at the
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I think for the first time, really, in recent history, those institutions, the legacy institutions
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are actually realizing that they cannot continue with that game because voters, citizens are
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They're going to explore other institutions, other avenues.
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Radio 4 Today, I have to listen to it every morning for work.
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Radio 4 Today has lost two, two and a half million listeners since Brexit.
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Trust in BBC journalists telling the truth has declined sharply over the last 20 years.
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And I think voters are just realizing that the way in which we have these conversations,
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for example, the pro-Palestine protests getting sort of sidetracked into a debate about Tommy
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Well, actually, the real debate there, what should have been on the front pages after Remembrance
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Day, were people dressed up as Hamas terrorists.
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That should have been on the front page of every national newspaper.
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Tommy Robinson, relative to radical Islamism, I'm sorry, Tommy Robinson is nowhere near as
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much of a threat as radical pro-Hamas Islamism in Western democracies.
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But what we are talking about is a revolutionary existential challenge to our way of life.
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Radical Islamists want to completely overthrow the institutions and our society, much like
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So we're seeing the toxic combination of the two feeding off one another.
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And somewhere along the way, we lost our perspective.
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And we lost our sense of what's important and what should be prioritized.
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And I think we saw that in recent weeks, actually.
00:12:53.380
Broadway's smash hit, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.
00:13:00.040
The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more, featuring all the songs
00:13:04.540
you love, including America, Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline.
00:13:09.300
Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here, The Neil Diamond Musical, A
00:13:15.160
Beautiful Noise, now through June 7, 2026 at the Princess of Wales Theatre.
00:13:23.660
We should probably clarify, Matt, that when you say that you used to work on the far right,
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what you mean is when you were an academic, you were researching the far right.
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But you do like a good tear up every now and again.
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So one of the things you touched on there, I want to come back to the Civil War and the
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Conservative Party and the future of the country in a second.
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But one of the things you touched on there is the media.
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And I have to be honest, and this may sound radical, but over the last few days, that
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meme that I keep seeing online, which is no matter how much you hate the media, you don't
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hate them enough, that has really come to the fore.
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Because my view is, you know, what is the definition of far right?
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To me, the definition of far right is people who are sexist and intolerant of other ethnic
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and religious groups, homophobic, think women are second class citizens and should be kept
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in the home, et cetera, and people who incite and use violence in the streets.
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And from that definition, we've had the far right on the streets of Britain for five weeks,
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every weekend, and the police have done absolutely nothing about it.
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And the moment, as you say, that a few football hooligans come out and they throw some bottles,
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And anyone who breaks the law should be condemned for it and the police should deal with them.
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But you can see, A, the double standards in the way that they're policed, and much more,
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much more than that, the double standards in the way that it's covered in the media,
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where they say nothing about people saying death to all the Jews, Hitler knew what to
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All of these incidents, which are as marginal as the Tommy Robinson thing is to the entire
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feeling in the country about it, but they don't get the attention at all.
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What happens instead is they just focus on that one incident because it feeds into the
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I wrote last week about the interplay between the rise of a very aggressive radical Islamism
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and the rise of the woke left and why the interaction of the two is so important.
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And we have lost sight of the scale of that threat.
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I mean, what is it that the woke left and radical Islamists have in common?
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They have no interest in individual rights and individual liberty.
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They seek a complete overthrow of the existing system and institutions.
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Both are cynical, if not hostile, towards Western ways of life.
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They view us fundamentally as racist, as prejudice towards minorities.
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Both cling to a very crude, binary view of who we are.
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There are believers or there are non-believers.
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There are the oppressed, there are the oppressors.
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It is shouting all of these slogans for the woke.
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It is saying, you know, no justice, no peace, et cetera, et cetera.
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And so what you're seeing, I think, is as the cultural left is taking control of institutions,
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is kind of pushing in this identitarian view of the world where there are oppressors and
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the oppressed, it's basically opening the door for radical Islamism.
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It's allowing radical Islamism to thrive in this model of multiculturalism, which is broken.
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Sowella said, look, the issue is not multicultural societies, right?
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I mean, I was amazed that serious national columnists didn't understand this.
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Well, she was saying there is no problem with multicultural societies per se,
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but there is a problem with multiculturalism, which prioritizes group difference over commonality.
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And that is what's enabled radical Islamists and terrorist sympathizers to flourish in communities
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up and down Britain, in highly segregated communities.
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And Sowella was absolutely right in saying, if you want to respond seriously to the challenges
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that we face as a country, we are going to have to dramatically reduce immigration, legal
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We're going to have to leave any institution or judicial convention that doesn't allow us
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We're going to have to have a new policy of integration, which ensures that no child,
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a family can grow up in a highly segregated community with no interaction with wider British
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And we're going to have to get a hell of a lot tougher when it comes to the rule of law
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and deporting foreign nationals who glorify terrorism.
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76% of voters said, yeah, if you're on the streets of Britain and you're a foreign national
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and you're glorifying Hamas or you're glorifying IS, you should leave Britain.
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And so the era of us being tolerant of people who do not tolerate our way of life is over.
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And I think it should come to an end as quickly as possible.
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And I certainly know that for a lot of people, the last few weeks have been eye-opening,
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Look, I've always, every day I'm fielding accusations, inverted commas, of being conservative.
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But if this is the choice, I know which side I'm going to play on, irrespective of what
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my overall beliefs about liberalisation of drugs and whatever is.
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So for a lot of people, it's an eye-opening moment.
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However, you say that moment that world is over, the next election is going to be a Labour
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But what I mean is, in terms of the wider zeitgeist, in terms of the public mood, you
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cannot come out of the last few weeks thinking immigration and multiculturalism has been good
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for Britain, has been an unalloyed success story.
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We have a major problem within our communities in Britain.
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We have people homegrown who are out on the streets calling for the murder and the rape
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Now, of course, you might say, well, we saw that after 9-11.
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I think it has become a much bigger problem now.
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It's on a different scale than what it was 20 years ago.
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And the other thing I would just say is, there is a widespread sense out there in the country,
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many viewers watching this, I think, will agree, 70% of people now say, neither left nor
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The space for a new radical challenger to this broken consensus is enormous.
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It will take money, it will take organisation, and it will take a charismatic leader.
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But the space is bigger than it was in 2013, 2014, because voters out there are utterly
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fed up of this broken status quo between left and right.
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I was in a focus group last week in Stoke-on-Trent.
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They're saying no one's got the answers to cost of living.
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No one's got the answers to productivity, the lack of productivity.
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It's almost as if our rulers are incapable of actually bringing about the changes that
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But, OK, so I take on board what you're saying.
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But doesn't that also mean we need to get rid of first-past-the-post then?
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I would support the shift of proportional representation because I think the majoritarian
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system no longer works for the myriad of concerns and groups that we have in British society.
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And I think so would many people who are disgruntled with left and right.
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It's very difficult to upend a big party in a majoritarian system.
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The Labour Party, of course, replaced the Liberals.
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Because it is possible it's very, very difficult.
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But there's another issue here which you guys directly tap into, which is there's fixing
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the politics of this and then there's fixing the culture of this.
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And I think the culture, the ecosystem that is emerging to give expression to people who no longer
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want to abide by this elite consensus is now much bigger than it was five years ago
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and is enormous compared to what it was ten years ago.
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The sub-stacks, the YouTube shows, the new media, GB News, Talk TV, whatever.
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And I think what makes the new elite the kind of dominant class so nervous is they can now sense that.
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Well, yeah, that's why Private Eye are writing hit pieces about us and all of that stuff.
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But let's come back to this idea that the next election will be a Labour landslide.
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Because we all know it will be, especially after the last couple of days.
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I mean, there's no way of rescuing this, right?
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No, I would give Rishi Sunak a 1% chance, 2% chance.
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So that means the next five years, we've got a year or so until the next election.
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Then you've got four years of a Labour government.
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And my understanding is part of Suella's move was that that defeat next year for the Conservative Party
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is her opportunity to be the knight in shining armour.
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The Conservative Party will never allow that to happen.
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The Conservative Parliamentary Party and the donor class will never allow the Tory party to be reshaped.
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I'm increasingly of the view that Peter Hitchens was right all along.
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If you want to save Britain, we need to basically destroy the Conservative Party.
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Now, the reason I say that is because look at Suella.
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The fact that she has attracted so much heat from her own colleagues tells you all you need to know about the state of conservatism.
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If you care about the country, I would argue we need to rebuild a new national conservatism,
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which is very different from what we've got with the British Tories.
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A national conservatism would prioritise a number of things which today's Conservative Party simply do not do.
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It would prioritise dramatic reductions in legal immigration,
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potentially a five-year freeze so we can absorb the migration of the last 20 years.
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It would prioritise a robust and radical policy for integration.
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No more multiculturalism which allows communities to remain distinct from the wider British community.
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It would focus on cultivating a story about who we are.
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The economy should work for the national community, not globalised offshore interests.
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It should be fundamentally about promoting and preserving the national interest.
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A tough approach on law and order, including the deportation of foreign nationals who glorify terrorism or who commit crime.
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Redistributing power, not just government departments, but power outside of London and university towns to other parts of the country.
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Having a robust pro-family policy, which is not just about giving people tax breaks, but encouraging people to have children.
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There are about 10, 12 principles that should define national conservatism.
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A national conservatism which also reaches into sections of the Labour Party, which Francis you know very well.
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And also reaches into the conservatives, but also reaches into the apathetic masses.
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You say, none of these parties actually represent me anymore.
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Now, the Republicans are beginning to understand the difference between national conservatism and what we might call Chinos, conservatives in name only.
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If you want to stand up to China, you want to stand up to Russia, you want to stand up to woke ideas and whatever.
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You need a strong nation state with strong families and a robust economy that works for the national interest.
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And you want power concentrated in the principle of popular sovereignty, in the people.
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You do not want power diluted and transferred to institutions outside of the nation state or to institutions which are not directly accountable to the people, which is what Rwanda is about.
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The only people making that decision should be people directly elected by ordinary citizens.
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So what I would argue is we need a reassertion of popular sovereignty in British politics.
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We need a movement for the people which transcends left and right.
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And whoever gets there first, whoever presses that button, whoever speaks for the masses on those issues, will find themselves being catapulted to the very forefront of British politics.
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And you mentioned the need for a charismatic leader.
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I put it to you that the one person that I think could unite that coalition because he's done it before.
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He's currently eating kangaroo balls in Australia or whatever it is Nigel Farage is up to.
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Is that who you think is the man or do you think it's time for someone fresh?
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I think Nigel would definitely need to be part of that movement because Nigel has consistently been the most impactful but also underestimated politician of our time.
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Let's say Nigel Farage goes in the jungle and it isn't a disaster.
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Let's say his brand actually comes out a bit stronger.
00:27:05.340
Let's say a load of 2019 Conservative MPs from the Red Wall lose their seats and they're milling around.
00:27:11.240
I care about the country, but I've lost my seat.
00:27:13.480
I understand these Red Wallers, but why is David Cameron now back in the Cabinet?
1.00
00:27:16.900
Let's add to that the ranks of reform, the Reform Party, maybe the Social Democratic Party, the SDP, influential commentators and columnists from the new media,
00:27:33.420
from the YouTube channels and the Substacks and the Twittersphere and the new magazines and the online platforms.
00:27:40.640
Everybody who is basically united in understanding what's gone wrong and where we need to go.
00:27:50.700
That is the basis for something that will attract funding, people, energy, and will have an impact.
00:27:58.440
And if you look at all Western democracies over the last 20 years, one of the key stories is that now is the time for renegades and radical challengers and insurgents who are willing to take on the dinosaur parties.
00:28:12.160
Emmanuel Macron, Georgia Maloney, Donald Trump, Sweden Democrats could go on and on and on.
00:28:18.940
Now is the time for new people to stand up and say, we're not going to do this anymore.
00:28:23.440
We're not going to give another four, five-year term to a party that is exactly the same as the other party.
00:28:30.900
If Labour win the next election, Constantine, you know this, the consensus doesn't change.
00:28:35.000
High tax, big state, mass immigration, low growth, high debt.
00:28:41.220
There is no radical shaking up of the status quo.
00:28:44.440
Yeah, but trans people are going to have more rights, mate.
1.00
00:28:47.740
And we'll be giving government contracts out on the basis of race and ethnicity with the Racial Equality Act.
00:28:52.700
So what we have is a more divided, woke-ified society along the lines of America.
00:28:57.360
And the things that make us unique as British, having a unifying story, we're proud of our history, we're proud of our identity, we're proud of our values, you know, we're proud of free enterprise.
00:29:09.540
All of those things gradually get weakened and undermined.
00:29:13.540
Matt, one of the things that I'm worried about, and I don't think people are talking about this enough, is that if Labour get in with a significant majority, which I'm not sure they will, if they're honest, because every left-wing person I've ever spoken to is dubious about Starmer, to put it mildly.
00:29:33.300
Yeah, I'm sure they'll all vote for Sunak, mate.
00:29:34.940
But my point, my worry is this, it's blasphemy laws.
0.94
00:29:42.260
I can see a Labour government bringing in blasphemy laws.
0.98
00:29:51.140
We've had, you know, you go on the London Tube, you're lectured by billboard posters about, you know, hate speech and hate language.
00:29:57.840
And that's, by the way, another similarity between the woke left and radical Islamists.
00:30:01.760
They're both very supportive of blasphemy.
1.00
00:30:03.600
And they're both very supportive of limiting free speech and free expression in the name of their ideological mission.
00:30:10.360
This is why I've always had a problem with the cultural left, because the first thing to go in their project is free speech and free expression.
00:30:17.540
They will sacrifice free speech on the altar of social justice every time.
00:30:22.700
They will cancel, they will silence, they will purge every time.
00:30:29.140
And it's, you know, when we first started talking about the woke, you remember everyone would say, this thing doesn't exist.
0.99
00:30:43.240
There is now an acceptance on the centre-left that they have a major problem.
00:30:49.820
But even the left now understand, actually, this thing that we've allowed to kind of get out the bottle is now destroying wider society.
00:31:01.200
And I have to say, I'm with the National Conservatives on this.
00:31:04.680
Because the only thing that is capable of standing up and meeting these threats from wokeism, from radical Islamism, will ultimately be national conservatism.
0.81
00:31:17.040
Liberalism, liberal parties, centrist dads are not strong enough to deal with this threat.
00:31:25.400
They don't have the appeals to group belonging.
00:31:27.240
They don't have the kind of anchor in our history, in our identity.
00:31:38.360
And I think that's why, if the Conservatives are smart, they will reinvent around national conservative principles.
00:31:44.040
If they're not smart, they will rally behind somebody like Penny Morden and they will say the future is David Cameron 2.0.
00:31:52.460
Well, we've got David Cameron 1.0 at the moment.
00:31:56.720
Rishi Sunak presents himself as the change candidate and then brings back David Cameron.
00:32:01.900
I just don't understand the politics behind it at all.
00:32:05.080
I don't think he understands the politics behind it.
00:32:07.580
I don't think there is anybody left, centre or on the right, apart from Ian Dale, who thought this was a good idea.
00:32:15.920
And when Ian Dale says something's good, you know it's not.
00:32:22.380
But why is it that when I was in Manchester for the Conservative Party conference,
00:32:26.040
and Rishi Sunak's speech, the top three things voters want to talk about today?
00:32:31.220
Cost of living crisis, state of the NHS, immigration.
1.00
00:32:37.220
Rishi Sunak talked about banning smoking, reforming A-levels, and stopping a high-speed train line.
00:32:43.320
I mean, they're completely different conversations, utterly different.
00:32:47.700
And I think sometimes when you get people, as you know, in SW1 and politics, they're very clever people and they're bright.
00:32:54.980
But sometimes they're too clever and they overthink things to such an extent that they leave everybody else wondering what on earth this project is really all about.
00:33:03.840
And I think, you know, I know the people around Rishi Sunak.
00:33:07.000
But I think privately, they've now concluded that they've got a year and they're just going to do what they're personally interested in doing.
00:33:20.960
And they're not really that bothered about winning the next election.
00:33:24.100
I think they're just now focusing on pet projects.
00:33:28.000
And I think, you know, David Cameron's appointment, jobs for the boys, put him in the House of Lords, you rub my back, I'll rub yours.
00:33:34.740
I don't think this is a party, as Tim Stanley said, a journalist who I respect a lot.
00:33:40.340
He said, this party is philosophically non-existent.
00:33:48.760
It is simply about jobs for the boys, patrician liberalism, let's just keep the establishment happy and basically F everybody else.
00:33:58.540
And I think that's unfortunately what we can see from a prime minister who we should remember doesn't have a democratic mandate.
00:34:05.960
I mean, Rishi Sunak does not have a mandate from voters, right?
00:34:10.000
And that's why I think the defeat will be particularly bruising.
00:34:13.460
But you say that, and look, I agree with you on the majority of it.
00:34:18.940
But if you think about a bruising defeat, think about Labour in 2019.
00:34:24.480
Now, we can have all the criticisms in the world about Johnson, but he was a fantastic campaigner.
00:34:32.380
When we look at the destruction of the Conservative Party, I think it was in 92, not in 92, with Blair.
00:34:51.400
But he's doing what he needs to do to win the election.
00:35:07.960
We've not really had a serious Conservative leader for a long time.
00:35:22.140
That gives you a kind of, gives you a relative, a benchmark.
00:35:27.980
Now the question is, what happens when he wins?
00:35:30.240
Here's, here's a few, here are a few predictions.
00:35:31.900
Number one, Labour break their manifesto pledges.
00:35:38.380
They can't afford all the things we need to pay for without raising taxes.
00:35:47.860
Guess how much we are spending every month servicing our national debt on our country's credit card.
00:35:54.880
Not, not paying off the debt, just paying the interest.
00:36:13.820
We're paying 13 billion a month on our national debt.
00:36:17.560
So no one's talking about how to reduce national debt.
00:36:20.440
So when Labour come in, they're going to have no real room for manoeuvre on fiscal policy, on the economy.
00:36:26.560
They're going to have still the worst living standards for 50 years.
00:36:30.380
They're going to have immigration probably at somewhere between 600,000 and 800,000.
00:36:33.880
We're going to have a housing crisis which is going to escalate dramatically.
00:36:40.960
We need to build 600,000 every year just to keep up with migration, okay?
00:36:48.480
We're going to need to build 600,000 every year just to keep up with migration.
00:36:52.780
Not to mention then we've got no serious growth strategy.
00:36:56.400
We've got no serious strategy for boosting productivity.
00:36:59.680
We're not talking about integration and cohesion.
00:37:05.260
And much of the migration, by the way, is low-skill migration from sub-Saharan Africa,
00:37:17.180
Before we get into private rental rates going up, before we get into school places, before we get into the NHS.
00:37:24.080
And as we know, Robert Putnam and others have shown this, highly diverse societies have lower levels of trust and lower levels of support for welfare.
00:37:34.580
So if you look at where Britain is going over the next 20, 30, 40 years, with parties that seem incapable of even discussing these issues,
00:37:45.420
I'm actually quite nervous about where we're going as a society because you cannot sustain this pace of change and churn without a serious political response that is going to manage it.
00:37:58.280
And it doesn't seem to be any attempt to manage this on any serious level.
00:38:02.440
Well, Matt, while we're on that black pill moment, you mentioned Peter Hitchens.
00:38:08.220
And Peter Hitchens, when asked on Question Time, I think, 15 or 20 years ago, he was pressed by the host at the time, David Dimbleby, I think,
00:38:23.640
And you laugh, and I have to say, I'm not laughing at that at all because I speak to my Jewish friends in London.
00:38:32.340
Everyone who has the ability to leave is thinking of leaving.
00:38:39.920
I also don't blame people who are aspirational, driven, talented, who are business people, who are creative, who see a bright future for themselves.
00:38:51.420
I don't blame them looking around at what you are projecting, which is no offence to you.
00:38:58.260
But it's a statement of the bleeding obvious at this point that the country is not going in the right direction.
00:39:11.600
For the first time in my life, I'm thinking of leaving the country.
00:39:18.100
I don't think Britain, in many respects, is a serious country anymore.
00:39:23.180
I think our national conversation has sharply deteriorated the quality of our national conversation over the last 20 years.
00:39:30.600
There's the ruling class, the inability to discuss the serious issues, the short-termism in the media, the refusal to entertain any challenge to the prevailing ideas or the orthodoxy, the stifling of free speech, the imposition of political correctness, the politicization of our institutions, the blatant bias that we can see in schools, universities, policing.
00:39:57.240
And also, I think what worries me most is the general disinterest in preserving and passing on who we are.
00:40:09.220
It's almost like Roger Scruton used to talk about the politics of repudiation, the culture of repudiation.
00:40:15.480
We're more interested now in repudiating than respecting our shared history, our shared identity, and our culture.
00:40:28.760
The campaign to defend women's sex-based rights, I think, is scoring real victories.
00:40:33.680
You can see that in Labour's backtracking and Keir Starmer's changes.
00:40:37.280
Scotland was interesting, the gender recognition reform bill being overturned, but the victories are few and far between.
00:40:46.440
Amid all of that, between all of that, is the relentless onslaught of this cultural revolution, which is what we're living in.
00:40:53.860
It is a cultural revolution being imposed by the institutions on everybody else.
00:41:00.600
So I am thinking of, for the first time in my life, leaving the country.
00:41:05.940
And as I said to you earlier on, sometimes you realise that Peter Hitchens was right all along.
00:41:12.480
Well, this is an argument that will make Peter obviously very happy.
00:41:16.780
I don't think there's anything that would make Peter happy.
00:41:21.260
But I think the interesting thing perhaps to explore is we interviewed Neil Ferguson, the historian.
00:41:27.060
And that episode has gone out this Sunday, I think, from memory.
00:41:33.260
And he said, well, look, the one thing that we maybe could look at for inspiration is the 1970s,
00:41:39.100
when Israel had just been attacked in the Yom Kippur War.
00:41:43.280
The state of the economy and the state of the country in the UK was probably even worse than it is now.
00:41:48.920
Can we look to that for inspiration, Matt, or were the circumstances different?
00:41:52.260
I'm not convinced by that for a couple of reasons.
00:41:54.300
The one is, how did the 70s end with the arrival of radical leaders willing to take on the consensus?
00:42:03.280
We are no longer capable of tolerating leaders who challenge the consensus.
00:42:09.640
Well, they'll be silenced and shut down in five minutes.
00:42:14.040
As Liz Truss and Boris Johnson showed, whatever you think of them, as their experiment showed,
00:42:19.220
we cannot tolerate dissent or a change of course.
00:42:24.100
Even Brexit was a sort of national trauma, a kind of a breakdown in our collective cycle.
00:42:30.260
And the other thing about the 70s, just briefly, just before you do,
00:42:32.440
the other thing about the 70s is the dominant issues in the 70s were economic.
00:42:37.540
And today, culture matters as much as the economy.
00:42:41.120
And so the dividing lines in our society are much more complex in many regards than they were in the 70s.
00:42:48.320
And that's what makes it so difficult to actually find a way through.
00:42:51.120
As someone put it, we're not one people anymore.
00:42:54.220
No, and we don't have a unifying story anymore.
00:42:56.780
There is no sense of, there's not even a willingness.
00:43:01.120
You know, if you go back and you read, say, Who Are We? by Samuel Huntington,
00:43:05.600
which is a good book on American national identity.
00:43:08.260
You know, and he argues that essentially the national unifying story in America
00:43:14.480
was undermined by large-scale migration and by the rise of an elite class
00:43:18.860
that no longer believed and invested in the nation.
00:43:22.560
And in many respects, we are now seeing that play out here,
00:43:33.380
and to expose the national community to such change at such a pace
00:43:39.400
that everybody is left feeling bewildered, not really sure who they are, what they think.
00:43:44.640
The counter-argument I was going to put to you was the possibility of
00:43:48.120
you get a Labour landslide or certainly a Labour win, at least,
00:43:51.560
as you made a good point that it might not be a landslide.
00:43:55.700
Things don't get better, things get worse, which they certainly will.
00:43:59.860
And then at that point, the public have just had enough
00:44:02.540
and there is actually the room for a Thatcher-like figure to come out
1.00
00:44:11.260
But that's premised on the notion that our political parties would allow that to happen.
00:44:15.660
And the problem we have is both left and right were products of the Industrial Revolution.
00:44:21.460
So the two main political parties that we have were built for another era.
00:44:25.500
What I think we need is the creation of new vessels, of new vehicles,
00:44:29.800
and surrounding that, a new culture, you know, a new prevailing culture,
00:44:33.960
which is much more in tune with ordinary people.
00:44:37.300
And I think that that is one of the things we need to do.
00:44:42.920
We need to make them more representative of a wide array of voices.
00:44:49.260
The other thing, by the way, a national conservatism movement would do
00:44:51.860
is take on institutions which are taxpayer-funded
00:44:54.260
but do not represent the interests of the nation.
00:45:00.440
You know, we have to start drawing lines in the sand.
00:45:03.080
We have to start saying, these are the things that made us who we are,
00:45:06.060
and this is what we're going to defend, and this is what we're going to promote.
00:45:09.240
I mean, faith schools would be another example.
00:45:10.940
I don't think, personally, we should have faith schools now.
00:45:17.980
Well, I think some faith schools I think we should be open to,
00:45:22.180
but I think we need to start really assertively going,
00:45:27.380
drawing some lines in the sand about what our civilisation is,
00:45:30.660
what our values are, and how we're going to defend those values.
00:45:33.500
And Conservatives have completely given up on that argument.
00:45:36.440
At ARC recently, one of the refreshing things at the ARC conference,
00:45:39.520
which I think Constantine mentioned in his speech, you know,
00:45:42.200
these cultural issues which are so important to people,
00:45:44.820
women's sex-based rights, the rights of children,
00:45:47.020
our identity, our history, our culture, our values, all those things.
00:45:50.980
What the left does now, and I would say also many people on the right,
00:45:54.280
what they do now is they package all of that up and they say,
00:46:02.800
And so Conservatives have allowed the foundations of our civilisation
00:46:06.300
to be completely discredited, taken off the table of political debate.
00:46:10.700
So if you say, I think kids should be taught what Britain got right,
00:46:15.920
or women's sex-based rights should be protected and enshrined in law
1.00
00:46:22.500
or, you know, we should have a radically different approach to migration
00:46:26.120
because over time, mass migration, uncontrolled migration dilutes who we are.
00:46:30.100
All of those things should be on the table, up for discussion.
00:46:35.060
And in a very short space of time, they've been taken off the table.
00:46:38.940
And that, I think, is why so many voters feel very anxious.
00:46:42.500
For a group of MPs recently who will remain nameless,
00:46:45.240
but they are very influential within the Conservative Party,
00:46:48.980
They said, what are the issues that voters feel most concerned about,
00:46:58.320
I want to be able to preserve and promote Britain's distinctive identity
00:47:10.600
We could have policies with a movement that delivered on all those things.
00:47:17.460
I put it to you, Matt, that the problem actually is the politicians,
00:47:21.820
and it's because a lot of them are career politicians.
00:47:25.860
They've just gone straight, a lot of them have gone straight from university
00:47:29.040
to become political advisors, assistants to MPs, blah, blah, blah.
00:47:40.540
They've never experienced a lot of the struggles of what ordinary people do.
00:47:44.640
And these are the people on the left as well, not just on the right.
00:47:47.400
So what we've got is an entire strata of people who don't understand the people they're ruling
00:47:53.780
or the people they've been, essentially, they've been asked to govern
00:48:01.840
That the biggest single tribe in Westminster are careerists,
00:48:05.460
people who have only ever spent their lives in politics.
00:48:08.280
There have never been more university graduates in the House of Commons as there are today.
00:48:12.200
The Labour Party has more university graduates than the Conservative Party on the green benches.
00:48:17.640
So everything has become ideologically uniform.
00:48:23.820
Some friends of mine in academia, they did a survey of MPs on the right and the left,
00:48:27.720
and they found that both Conservative and Labour MPs lean much further to the cultural left
00:48:33.540
So when voters are looking at Westminster saying,
00:48:37.160
you know, why don't they just do the Rwanda scheme?
0.52
00:48:43.620
Because our MPs don't really have any interest in doing that.
00:48:46.340
They are no longer representative of the country that surrounds them.
00:48:51.540
You need to build a movement that is representative of the country,
00:48:55.860
that is actually speaking on behalf of a forgotten majority.
00:49:04.020
But there comes a point where you have to also translate culture into action.
00:49:10.680
You have to translate culture into political action.
00:49:15.900
If you don't have your hands on the levers of power,
00:49:18.360
if you cannot influence the decisions that are affecting our daily lives,
00:49:21.680
right, you're not in the end going to change anything.
00:49:30.160
There are people, I'm sure, who are big fans of the SDP.
00:49:33.540
I always vote for the SDP because they have the best policies
00:49:46.920
Well, if you look at, there's a literature on how to build a party
00:49:49.160
and break through, and it suggests certain things are very important.
00:49:54.380
Secondly, you need a charismatic leader who can genuinely cut through,
00:49:58.680
Third, you need a laser-like focus on a single issue
00:50:02.260
which really matters to a large majority of people.
00:50:06.260
I mean, I've had these conversations with reform people and SDP people.
00:50:16.480
But I think probably, given the scale of the problems facing Britain,
00:50:22.980
where everybody is going to have to start to work together
00:50:26.280
and going to have to start to prioritise the issues that they really care about.
00:50:30.980
To be blunt, net zero, tax, those sorts of issues.
00:50:35.800
But the real pressing issues for people are not those issues.
00:50:39.340
The real pressing issues for people now is about
00:50:47.100
And that is going to mean shifting the Overton window,
00:50:51.200
dragging the Overton window into a very different place,
00:50:57.520
which are completely different from the policies
00:51:03.920
I mean, we've obviously talked about the difficulties
00:51:08.740
within a two-party system like the one that we have.
00:51:15.080
has delivered many of the things that people hoped it would,
00:51:18.380
it nonetheless gave voice to the hidden concerns
00:51:29.300
or something along those lines where, like you said,
00:51:33.820
it's a single issue that many people feel very strongly about
00:51:43.240
Is that something that would be advisable even?
00:51:54.680
And by the way, I'm not as apologetic about Brexit
00:52:00.800
I actually think, on balance, I still think Brexit now,
00:52:05.420
but I think now that it's happened, it's a good thing
00:52:16.920
in a way that was consistent with Brexit voters.
00:52:25.720
not revitalise manufacturing and heavy industry,
00:52:41.640
fundamentally, we have to build a political economy
00:52:50.120
where the salary thresholds are as low as £20,000, £23,000.
00:53:15.900
that's coming out of British politics at the moment.
00:53:36.860
and we're going to go a little bit black pill again,
00:53:48.460
that would support a far right political party.
00:54:04.400
And the idea that we have generations of kids
0.98
00:55:31.580
a little bit less to the elites in Westminster.
00:55:53.360
is actually utterly different from the far right.
00:56:25.880
I don't personally fear the far right in Britain.
00:56:33.180
if we don't actually start to change our politics.
00:57:04.520
The United Kingdom is, I think, generally safe.