TRIGGERnometry - The Warning Signs Britain Ignored - Colin Brazier

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00:00:16.740 ETF investing IQ. Growing up in Bradford, which I think shapes you, and growing up there has given

00:00:24.980 me an early warning clanging in my ears. It's massively segregated. There was a tolerance

00:00:32.260 because people didn't think it mattered. I think the British state dropped the ball by allowing

00:00:37.700 people we would later call Islamists to burn the satanic verses. We now have a sort of de facto

00:00:42.180 blasphemy laws. It was a scene of the biggest race riots involving British Asians this country's

00:00:46.840 ever seen. They were an expression of territoriality, in my opinion. I know you had some small attempts

00:00:52.380 to raise issues of this nature when you were at Sky.

00:00:55.560 What was your experience?

00:00:56.860 Organizations like Sky News can't tackle these subjects.

00:00:59.820 Why not?

00:01:00.480 Because they don't give a shit about their customers anymore.

00:01:03.720 I think Bradford is a very powerful and cautionary tale about the future.

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00:01:36.400 Colin Brazier, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:01:38.360 It's lovely to be here.

00:01:39.200 It's great to have you.

00:01:40.320 We've really both been enjoying your work of late,

00:01:42.400 particularly some of the monologues you're putting out.

00:01:44.660 Before we get into opinions and views and recent events and future events and so on,

00:01:49.580 tell us your story.

00:01:50.740 What's been your journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us?

00:01:55.160 It includes growing up in Bradford, which I think shapes you.

00:02:01.340 It's a really big city.

00:02:03.160 It's got the youngest demographics in Europe.

00:02:06.300 It was the place where I think the British state dropped the ball

00:02:10.000 by allowing people who we would later call Islamists to burn the satanic purses.

00:02:13.860 We should have jumped on them. We didn't.

00:02:15.880 We now have a sort of de facto blasphemy laws.

00:02:18.500 It was a scene of the biggest race riots involving British Asians

00:02:21.440 this country's ever seen.

00:02:23.120 It's the 25th anniversary this summer of the Bradford riots in 2001.

00:02:27.340 So a really important city.

00:02:28.400 And growing up there, it doesn't sound like I grew up there.

00:02:30.440 I did grow up there.

00:02:32.000 It's given me an early warning clanging in my ears

00:02:36.740 that something needs to be said and done

00:02:39.200 about the direction of Britain today.

00:02:41.060 What else has shaped me?

00:02:42.400 Being widowed 10 years ago, eight or nine years ago,

00:02:46.060 with six still quite young children.

00:02:47.720 shaped me a lot, because adversity is apt to concentrate the mind, and it certainly

00:02:52.720 concentrated the mind, but it also makes you a bit braver, because you've seen horror.

00:02:57.580 You've gazed into the abyss a little bit. So that was hugely shaping. My Catholic faith

00:03:02.420 shapes me a lot. I'll give you three. That'll do. And why don't you sound like you grew up in

00:03:08.200 Bradford? It's a really good question, and what I'm uncomfortable talking about. I didn't upgrade

00:03:11.860 deliberately i'll still say last and fast um uh was it alan bennett talked about when he was when

00:03:19.840 he was oxford he lived in fear of being ambushed by the letter u you know people i think people

00:03:25.260 are trying to put it on will get will come unstuck it's funny we we believe in uh flexibility

00:03:33.100 in in all things people can move in lots of different ways but actually when it comes to

00:03:39.980 transitioning to speaking a different way people are quite uncomfortable i i i aesthetically i like

00:03:45.340 to enunciate what i say uh i think it's inclusive i never get recognized by people with one exception

00:03:53.540 it happened to me last week uh at a hospital a tanzanian guy came out he i was there with my son

00:03:59.380 he said your dad he used to be on the number of african men who've come up with you because they

00:04:05.300 watched they used to watch sky news or i worked 25 years they would watch sky news as a way of

00:04:08.820 improve their English in the way that people just listen to the BBC World Service to improve

00:04:11.560 their English in the vernacular. And these are people who've learned English, people who come

00:04:16.240 to the UK from books very often. And I think the gap between how we speak English and how we write

00:04:21.940 English needs to be as close as possible. But actually, if you've come from Africa or Asia

00:04:26.920 or South America and you now live in London, you won't hear English spoken in the way, in the one

00:04:31.480 way, that RP way. I'm not RP, but I try and speak clearly because I think it aids clear communication.

00:04:38.120 I don't like glottal stops either.

00:04:39.640 I think it's ugly.

00:04:41.040 Well, I think one of the reasons

00:04:42.660 that sort of adjusting the way you speak

00:04:45.880 over time and over geographically...

00:04:48.060 I worked at the BBC.

00:04:48.880 That was where it started.

00:04:49.960 What I also think is there is a...

00:04:52.920 You talk about how it's very accepted now

00:04:55.920 for people to transition in all sorts of ways.

00:04:57.540 That's what I was looking for.

00:04:58.220 Thank you.

00:04:59.300 But I think the one thing

00:05:00.940 that people are always very suspicious about

00:05:03.580 in this country,

00:05:04.200 as someone who wasn't born here

00:05:05.200 and a sort of semi-outside observer,

00:05:06.700 Whereas transitioning class-wise is seen as the great...

00:05:10.340 You need to stay exactly.

00:05:11.980 You need to be Bradford, ride or die.

00:05:14.860 Roger Scruton, the great late Tory philosopher,

00:05:17.900 said the bravest thing that many people in Britain will do these days

00:05:20.520 is overcome class snobbery.

00:05:23.220 And I think he's...

00:05:24.020 I mean, that seems...

00:05:24.640 That's quite a claim, but I get it.

00:05:26.900 I guess what I'm getting at also is I think, in your case,

00:05:30.480 the background from which you've come, as you alluded to yourself,

00:05:33.580 gives you a perspective on the world

00:05:35.460 and this country in particular and the changes we've seen in this country

00:05:39.120 that is less represented in Westminster and the bubble and the media bubble.

00:05:45.700 We were just talking before we started actually about the late Rod Little

00:05:49.040 who passed away recently, which was a very sad event.

00:05:51.160 And we were talking about the fact that Rod Little used to edit the Today program

00:05:55.960 not that long ago in historical terms, 20 odd years ago, something like that.

00:06:00.460 And we're now at a position, and I know you have experiences with Sky News,

00:06:04.120 which perhaps we'll talk about, where you literally,

00:06:07.940 I don't think you could be a cleaner at the BBC

00:06:09.840 and hold publicly the opinions that Rod Little had,

00:06:13.620 who was an editor of the Today programme,

00:06:15.440 a flagship programme on the BBC 20 odd years ago.

00:06:18.180 It's funny you mention cleaners,

00:06:19.360 because cleaners for some reason always comes into my head

00:06:21.740 when I think about the people at Sky TV.

00:06:24.720 The crowning turd in the water pipe, for me,

00:06:27.860 the nail in the coffin, just before GB News launched

00:06:32.280 and gave me a lifeboat was an inclusive language guide

00:06:35.480 that the corporate high-ups at Sky issued.

00:06:37.540 It recommended you don't use words like mother, father, sister, brother.

00:06:41.400 And I thought, if they put this democratically to the shop floor,

00:06:45.200 if they put this to the Nigerian security guards

00:06:47.200 and the Filipina cleaners,

00:06:49.620 how do you feel about using this kind of language?

00:06:51.320 They fuck off.

00:06:52.760 But these organisations are not democratic.

00:06:55.500 They're straying into politics, increasingly, of course,

00:06:58.360 with no democratic mandate.

00:07:00.540 But just to answer your question,

00:07:01.660 original question. I've got a couple of sisters. One's a headmistress in Yorkshire. The other

00:07:09.920 still works. She left school at 16, went straight to work in the same textile mill that my mum

00:07:17.080 and some of her, mum was one of nine, her sisters worked in, her mother worked in. And

00:07:22.600 my sister still works 16 hours a week at the co-op checkout, you know, meeting people.

00:07:28.260 and she's my window on life as it really is, right?

00:07:32.260 She sees white flight.

00:07:34.380 She sees people in their increasingly shrinking enclaves.

00:07:39.540 She's on the receiving end, not often,

00:07:41.980 but sometimes of racial abuse

00:07:44.040 from an angry Pakistani heritage man

00:07:47.260 calling her a white bitch.

00:07:49.060 So this is my window on a world

00:07:50.880 that the people I used to work with at Sky and at the BBC

00:07:53.760 don't even know exists, by and large.

00:07:56.580 and that's such an important point because it's been said time and time again but i don't think

00:08:04.200 these people really understand what it's like to live in a city like bradford as it is now

00:08:10.580 so what is it like to live in bradford now what is bradford like i don't know because i don't want

00:08:18.420 to live there i mean i know for my sister i mean i don't i mean i've written about it uh and i'm

00:08:23.100 trying to write something longer about Bradford but I don't want to why would I want to I was

00:08:28.300 talking to somebody the other day who who was talking about going back to live in Twickenham

00:08:31.100 I said mate how lovely to be able to go back to the place that you grew up in and and I could go

00:08:37.580 back to live in Bradford I don't want to I'm you know people watching this we maybe come from

00:08:41.100 Bradford we're thinking mate it's got great things going on it's a it's a it's a city that's regressing

00:08:48.060 It's undeveloping as a city, it's massively segregated.

00:08:54.420 There are no-go areas.

00:08:56.140 You've got, as I used to tell it, you know, when I came back from university and I'd listen

00:09:01.100 to my rallies banging on about, you know, being quite racist, and I'd say, please don't,

00:09:06.300 please don't do that, you know, my sort of prissy way.

00:09:08.300 And I used to think, well, you know, it's sort of a broken business model, Bradford.

00:09:13.560 It has these massive textile mills.

00:09:15.400 It was one of the richest cities in Europe 150 years ago, incredibly.

00:09:19.460 All the textile bills closed.

00:09:21.980 And you had a fairly xenophobic Yorkshire indigenous people

00:09:25.820 and an equally, as it turned out, xenophobic Mapuri, Kashmiri community

00:09:31.360 who were very much led by the Baradari clan system, deeply regressive.

00:09:35.620 And you put those two people together and never the twain shall meet.

00:09:39.860 And that whole idea that, you know, but I went to school with people who were,

00:09:43.180 Actually, it's interesting, a school which was sort of 50-50% white, the school I went to, my non-white friends said he'd be Sikh.

00:09:50.860 I didn't really have, you know, I was a kid, I was an ingenue. Why did that happen? I don't know. I still can't answer that question.

00:09:56.960 But even then, you were starting to see some of the problems that would come through around grooming and a sort of self-segregating impulse not to integrate.

00:10:07.340 but at least there were people, you know, Pakistani heritage people

00:10:09.760 who were working with, you know, Indigenous white people.

00:10:13.180 Now they don't even, their paths never cross.

00:10:14.940 I think it's possible to grow up in parts of Bradford

00:10:17.020 and go days without seeing people who don't look like you.

00:10:21.260 And that's regression, isn't it?

00:10:23.700 Completely. And you said that there's no-go areas.

00:10:27.020 I mean...

00:10:27.620 I've never felt myself, but other people have said that.

00:10:31.300 I mean, clearly.

00:10:31.920 And my sister would say that there are parts of Bradford

00:10:34.520 she wouldn't go to or her children wouldn't go to.

00:10:36.960 And I take her on trust.

00:10:38.440 I mean, that sort of...

00:10:39.840 The 25th anniversary of the Bradford riots this summer,

00:10:44.440 happened in July 2001,

00:10:46.660 were an expression of territoriality, in my opinion.

00:10:49.780 You know, it was about young Pakistani heritage men

00:10:51.980 saying to the forces of the state,

00:10:54.880 in this case, the West Yorkshire Police,

00:10:56.940 our writ runs here, not yours.

00:10:59.380 So, and we shouldn't be surprised by that.

00:11:02.320 I mean, you've got a parallel society

00:11:04.080 which has its own de facto legal system,

00:11:06.040 which has imported customs and values

00:11:08.980 from a very different part of the world.

00:11:11.280 You know, and the level of naivety to think

00:11:14.160 that, for instance, you could import

00:11:16.500 a whole community from a country like Pakistan.

00:11:19.940 I've worked in Pakistan a few times over the years.

00:11:22.420 And, you know, how many people pay,

00:11:25.020 what's the proportion of people who pay income tax in Pakistan?

00:11:27.300 It's about one and a half percent.

00:11:29.220 Now, I'm not saying that the Pakistan heritage people

00:11:31.400 of Bradford have imported that laissez-faire attitude

00:11:34.200 towards paying tax into this country.

00:11:36.540 But on one level, it would be surprising

00:11:38.020 if they didn't bring a little bit of those values.

00:11:40.380 There's a sort of stunning incuriosity that we have

00:11:42.860 as the host community.

00:11:44.580 There's an assumption that people won't bring their values

00:11:46.600 with them en masse and that those values won't harden

00:11:49.000 when a point of critical mass is reached,

00:11:52.260 which is what you've got in places like Bradford

00:11:53.840 and Leicester and Manchester and parts of London.

00:11:57.240 A really good mate of mine is actually from Bradford.

00:12:00.220 Doesn't sound like me.

00:12:01.160 he kind of does a little bit but he's an academic but his uh his partner at the time

00:12:07.880 was when they were talking about things to do with race or Islam she was always kind of baffled

00:12:16.240 she was like but why are you talking like this and then you're catastrophizing yeah all of this

00:12:21.180 stuff but I don't understand you know immigration blah blah blah and but then when I was talking

00:12:26.540 to her the other day she went Francis and then I went to Bradford and I went oh I get it yeah

00:12:33.420 and that's someone uh from a Muslim country herself yeah yeah and I was talking to somebody

00:12:39.260 recently who uh I won't name the company but it's a company with lots of outlets across the country

00:12:43.900 and he's and his his brother sorry correction his brother runs a company which has lots of

00:12:48.620 different outlets across the country and he said that Bradford was the worst city he'd ever been

00:12:51.540 to. I mean, it's not a beauty contest that one city should lose. It's just that I think

00:12:57.920 Bradford is a very powerful and cautionary tale about the future. You know, I used to

00:13:02.800 think Bradford was just Detroit without the music. It was a one-off. It was an outlier.

00:13:05.740 It had this broken business model. But it was, you know, I used to salve my conscience

00:13:09.560 by thinking it's just Bradford. But it's not. You know, it's Bournemouth now. It's Belfast

00:13:14.640 now. You know, for Bradford, Reid, many, many parts of the country. And we've not even got

00:13:18.980 started yet because of the changing demographics of this country. And that's the problem is that

00:13:24.060 Bradford is no longer an outlier like you said. It has now become symbolic of the decline

00:13:30.080 of our country but also what happens when you have unfettered mass immigration into a particular

00:13:37.020 city. It changes everything and a lot of the time those changes aren't necessarily positive. No

00:13:43.160 they're not and I think it's what happens also when you don't when you don't grasp the nettle

00:13:46.620 and you keep kicking the can down the road.

00:13:48.280 And again, this is why I think Bradford imparts

00:13:49.620 lots of really important lessons.

00:13:52.220 1987, 8, 9, the Salman Rushdie, the fatwa,

00:13:58.140 was issued against the British author Salman Rushdie

00:13:59.940 for his book, The Satanic Verses.

00:14:04.780 A group of people we would later learn to call Islamists

00:14:07.100 gathered outside the City Hall,

00:14:08.660 the magnificent City Hall of Bradford,

00:14:11.040 which has this clock tower based on the clock tower in Florence,

00:14:16.360 You know, these Victorian burghers who had this incredible self-improving desire.

00:14:21.020 Nothing was too good for them.

00:14:22.300 We're as good as a renaissance, you know, in the lee of this magnificent building.

00:14:26.720 People who had learned, later learned to call Islamists, burned Salman Rushdie's satanic

00:14:31.080 verses publicly.

00:14:32.040 And the pictures were beamed all around the world.

00:14:34.000 The state at that point should have said, fuck you.

00:14:36.840 This is not how we do things in this country.

00:14:38.440 We don't burn books.

00:14:39.380 You want to do that somewhere else?

00:14:41.000 And mass arrests, sending out a really clear signal.

00:14:44.020 But at the time, Bradford, Labour on then, there was a policy that came down from the council level of multiculturalism, of all cultures being equal.

00:14:55.300 You know, leaflets go out in Urdu.

00:14:57.540 We don't mind if you take your kids off halfway through a term back to Pakistan for an arranged marriage.

00:15:01.920 There was a tolerance because people didn't think it mattered.

00:15:05.480 And of course, now we realise this stuff, like drawing a line against blasphemy or saying to people, you can't take your kids away to Pakistan halfway through a school term.

00:15:12.720 And we now realise it does matter, but it's too late.

00:15:14.660 That horse has bolted.

00:15:16.940 And what did you...

00:15:18.220 I know you tried to cover these issues when you were at Sky News.

00:15:23.440 Not hard enough.

00:15:24.960 I wasn't blowing smoke up your eyes.

00:15:27.120 I was more curious about why the media were not able

00:15:31.360 to give these issues the due attention and investigation.

00:15:34.480 Because I think one of the things...

00:15:36.120 We've had the horrific experience of having to sit across

00:15:41.180 from grooming gang survivors on a number of occasions to try and raise further awareness

00:15:46.500 of that issue, of course, along with lots of other people. And it's horrific to listen to

00:15:52.560 their stories, of course. What they went through is infinitely more horrific. But one of the things

00:15:58.320 that I think is really angering, not saddening, not you feel compassion, but angering, is that the

00:16:06.700 state, the officers of the state, the police, social services, in some cases, doctors within

00:16:13.240 the NHS, and media and politicians were afraid. They were not willing to address it. And people

00:16:22.800 in the media I know, and we know, who tried to talk about things that were not even that

00:16:27.860 controversial as that, were simply not able to do so. Why do you think that is based on your

00:16:34.300 Korea and New York experiences.

00:16:36.580 I'll come at it from a slightly different direction.

00:16:38.320 I think what's astonishing to me, sort of reassuring as well, is that individuals, when

00:16:43.500 it comes to something like grooming, individual journalists, individual former police officers

00:16:48.240 can make a huge difference.

00:16:51.120 I remember interviewing the Labour MP, Anne Cryer, a widow of Bob Cryer, Firebrand, left

00:16:56.860 wing MP in her home in Shipley outside Bradford.

00:16:59.920 She was the MP for Keithley.

00:17:01.360 She was the first parliamentarian to try and really draw attention

00:17:04.120 to what was happening in some of these northern mill towns

00:17:06.800 and cities like Bradford.

00:17:08.060 It's not a town, it's a city, it's a big place.

00:17:10.520 And, you know, she was routinely denounced by people like,

00:17:13.240 not Dawn Butler, Diane Abbott, as a racist.

00:17:18.120 You know, this was an MP doing what an MP should do,

00:17:20.520 which is drawing attention to a significant problem

00:17:22.540 in her constituency that was completely ignored

00:17:24.440 and invisible to many people,

00:17:26.020 and for which she was rubbished and denounced.

00:17:28.480 By people within her own party?

00:17:30.320 People in our own party, you know.

00:17:31.820 And they were consistently, the grooming story is a story

00:17:33.980 of individuals who made a difference, you know.

00:17:36.400 Individuals, and we should all take comfort from this,

00:17:38.320 individuals, whether it's Elon Musk at the most profound level,

00:17:41.020 individuals can still change history.

00:17:42.680 I know historians don't believe this.

00:17:43.940 I think there's massive sort of seismic changes.

00:17:47.460 They can, whether it's the former, you know, Maggie Oliver,

00:17:50.560 the former detective, whether it's the journalist at The Times,

00:17:54.820 forgive me, Andrew Norfolk, who used to work at the Yorkshire Post,

00:17:57.180 my old newspaper.

00:17:57.740 these individuals can actually make a difference and bring that story to light.

00:18:04.000 The news doesn't just tell you what's happening. It tells you what to make of it. And the real red

00:18:08.980 flag isn't what's said, it's what gets left out. That's why I use Ground News. Every day they gather

00:18:14.760 thousands of stories from across the political spectrum, compare how different outlets are

00:18:19.140 covering the same story side by side, and contextualize it, including specific differences

00:18:24.460 in how each side is reporting it.

00:18:26.760 That's how you see what whole audiences are not being told.

00:18:29.700 My favorite feature is their blind spot feed.

00:18:32.080 Every day, it flags upwards of 20 stories

00:18:34.680 that are being ignored by either the left or the right.

00:18:37.120 Let's look at some examples.

00:18:38.580 Follow along at ground.news slash trigonometry.

00:18:41.420 Take this story.

00:18:42.460 A Pew Research survey found that 56% of Americans

00:18:45.720 now support banning social media for anyone under 16

00:18:49.620 with a majority of Republicans

00:18:51.660 and a majority of Democrats behind it.

00:18:53.980 Genuine bipartisan agreement is rare enough to be newsworthy on its own.

00:18:58.100 And yet, coverage came almost entirely from the right.

00:19:01.440 The left barely touched on it.

00:19:02.800 On the other hand, look at this.

00:19:04.320 An AP poll found that 66% of Americans now say democracy is central to what it means to be American,

00:19:10.500 down from 80% five years ago.

00:19:13.140 That is a serious story about how the country sees itself, especially on its 250th anniversary.

00:19:19.240 And it got three times more coverage from the left than it did from the right.

00:19:22.300 Ground News puts all of this in one place, headline comparisons, bias breakdowns, ownership

00:19:28.300 insights, and context so you can actually understand what's going on, not just react

00:19:33.500 to what you're told. Go to ground.news slash trigonometry or click the link in the description

00:19:38.420 of this episode. Get 40% off their vantage plan, the same one that we use, and stop being managed

00:19:44.000 by the media yes but i think within you you put a good slant on it and i think that's a good thing

00:19:53.420 to do but on the other hand i think the story you just told is actually terrible i think that's a

00:20:00.720 horrific story of course it's a horrific story you're right it's absolutely horrific and and in

00:20:04.480 a small way i don't want to trivialize what happened to the victims of these grooming rape

00:20:09.420 gangs, it's a small reflection of exactly the thing I was pointing to, which is if you try to

00:20:16.460 challenge any of this, the full powers of the state will actually be applied to you, not to

00:20:22.420 the rapists, not to the traffickers, not to the people who are committing the crimes. And so come

00:20:29.940 back to the media with me, because I'm interested in, I know you had some small attempts to raise

00:20:34.520 issues of this nature when you were at Sky what was your experience well I was 2007 2006

00:20:41.720 I was doing some longer films at Sky so I wasn't yet in a studio and I was sort of off the road

00:20:47.100 and back and I'd been abroad for a while and came back and um I took a film crew to Brantford and

00:20:53.400 we went for instance to the church where I was baptized uh it it had been firebombed um the the

00:21:01.440 The priests there, you know, some local hotheads.

00:21:04.420 I said, Father, you know, really?

00:21:06.260 The firebombing happened on the night

00:21:08.380 that the American Air Force started bombing

00:21:10.220 the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001.

00:21:13.240 You don't think that was maybe a coincidence?

00:21:15.780 No, no, no, no.

00:21:17.720 So it was breaking fresh journalistic ground,

00:21:20.300 telling new stories.

00:21:21.120 That story, the report,

00:21:22.300 the firebombing against that church some years earlier

00:21:24.480 hadn't been reported in a way that I imagine

00:21:26.940 a firebombing against a mosque, for instance,

00:21:28.780 would have been reported.

00:21:29.600 So there was that disparity there.

00:21:31.000 I managed to get that into my story, but there were elements of the story that just, I did an interview with one guy, a former newspaper reporter on the local paper, and it was, I can't remember if it was taken out, but I was left with an impression, I can't remember this specifically at this distance, that the piece, through conversations and through the final edited version of the piece that went to air, was much less strong than I would have wished it.

00:21:54.380 It was still broaching some of the subjects, but it was much, much weaker.

00:21:58.520 um look we all this this organizations like sky news uh can't tackle these subjects why not um

00:22:06.140 because they don't give a shit about their customers anymore because they're not the

00:22:11.160 business their business model is broken nobody watches it what they want to do is impress their

00:22:15.840 friends at other media institutions and in particular they want to impress people who award

00:22:19.720 gongs awards baftas rts all television society awards because when you're viewing figures are in

00:22:26.080 terminal decline, because people

00:22:28.400 now get their news from phones, not from TV channels.

00:22:31.040 You need another metric to prove

00:22:32.560 your success, and that's my BAFTA.

00:22:35.320 You don't get that BAFTA

00:22:36.640 because you've done a report from Bradford

00:22:38.960 on how, you know, you get

00:22:40.720 your report, you know, you don't.

00:22:42.020 You get a knock on the door from the police, potentially.

00:22:44.340 Right.

00:22:45.280 And nothing sums this conversation up better than that

00:22:48.600 tweet that I think it was Kay Burley did.

00:22:51.100 Your former...

00:22:52.180 Since I can't.

00:22:54.360 Dan wouldn't ask me about Kay Burley.

00:22:56.080 No, go on, go on. I'll let you finish.

00:22:57.580 And it was, I can't remember the exact wording,

00:23:00.400 but it was talking about the illegal migrant crossings.

00:23:05.000 And there was that picture of that.

00:23:06.820 It wasn't a dinghy. It was a mega dinghy.

00:23:09.620 Coming over these people illegally.

00:23:11.980 And what her basic argument was,

00:23:14.120 oh, it's not that many people. What's the problem?

00:23:16.980 And I remember reading that and I go,

00:23:19.000 you couldn't come across more out of touch

00:23:22.380 if you actually were doing this on purpose.

00:23:26.920 My difficulty is that Kay was very good to me

00:23:31.720 when my late wife was dying

00:23:34.000 and we were struggling to get Sky

00:23:36.700 to pay for some of the medical bills.

00:23:38.940 And in that situation,

00:23:40.520 I'm sorry if this sounds melodramatic,

00:23:41.900 but it's true.

00:23:43.120 She was very good.

00:23:44.140 She shook down the sort of high ups at Sky

00:23:46.320 and some of those medical bills were paid.

00:23:48.240 It would be ignoble of me to respond to your question.

00:23:53.620 I'll leave it at that.

00:23:54.700 I mean, you know what my views are.

00:23:55.720 on the big boats.

00:23:58.260 It is an invasion, period.

00:24:00.920 We need to take much more robust action

00:24:02.780 to stop it happening.

00:24:04.120 It's a slow motion catastrophe.

00:24:05.780 The media have been complicit.

00:24:07.160 I've seen that myself in 2015.

00:24:09.320 One of the kind of red pill moments for me

00:24:10.860 was 2015, the migration crisis.

00:24:12.500 I was in Serbia, Hungary, Greece, these places.

00:24:15.360 And watching my colleagues from the media,

00:24:17.760 all TV media especially,

00:24:19.800 who would always single out the woman with the long hair,

00:24:22.980 speaks great English,

00:24:24.240 You know, she lives in a nice part of Damascus, but ignore the guys who didn't speak English and they were just out of prison or whatever.

00:24:30.940 So it was this determination then to see only good things from the future engineers and lawyers and doctors who were coming to the UK.

00:24:39.240 And why is that, Colin?

00:24:41.540 Because people, because the media has become more leftish because it's become, and we can talk about the reasons why that is.

00:24:51.500 But once you're more leftish, you believe in the perfectibility of human nature, you're naturally a fairly utopian bent.

00:24:57.800 You want to believe the best of all things at all times of all people.

00:25:02.760 You're constantly relativizing.

00:25:05.280 You don't want to make harsh judgments.

00:25:07.140 And it does loop back to where a lot of our journalists come from now, literally come from.

00:25:11.980 You know, I don't want to sort of, there was no golden era of newspaper journalism.

00:25:16.540 But it was true that the time was when newspapers in particular were filled with 60, you know, kids who left school at 16, they didn't go to university.

00:25:26.760 They certainly didn't do a media studies course.

00:25:29.540 They were hefted, their locality.

00:25:32.360 They had no ambitions even to go to Fleet Street.

00:25:34.100 They wanted to serve their community.

00:25:35.580 I mean, they were still, you know, in possession of rat-like cunning and scumbags because Germans are meant to be scumbags.

00:25:40.220 But they were scumbags who believed in their community and felt they weren't looking for the next job in London.

00:25:45.720 they wanted to tell the truth

00:25:47.620 about what was happening

00:25:48.340 in their local community.

00:25:49.720 That doesn't happen anymore.

00:25:51.180 Most of them,

00:25:51.560 a lot of newspapers,

00:25:52.300 local newspapers,

00:25:52.840 are closed down.

00:25:54.100 And the effect in terms of

00:25:55.380 who's going into,

00:25:56.560 you know,

00:25:56.760 who is staffing Sky News,

00:25:59.320 BBC, ITV,

00:26:00.520 Good Morning Britain,

00:26:01.180 all these places,

00:26:02.340 Channel 4 News,

00:26:03.700 it's self-replicating.

00:26:06.080 The people who do the hiring

00:26:07.060 are looking to replicate themselves

00:26:08.780 and the people they hire.

00:26:10.660 And also the other thing

00:26:11.420 that happened,

00:26:11.720 I saw it latterly at Sky,

00:26:12.800 is that you were starting

00:26:13.680 to get a degree

00:26:14.220 of newsroom activism as well

00:26:15.480 around things like trans issues.

00:26:16.960 You know, I remember seeing a script.

00:26:20.480 I haven't thought about this for a while.

00:26:21.800 Let me try and dredge it up.

00:26:22.780 It was a script.

00:26:24.340 My co-presenter and I, who will remain nameless,

00:26:26.700 lived in terror of having to misgender somebody.

00:26:32.540 You know, it was the train coming down the track.

00:26:35.560 And we had various stratagems.

00:26:37.440 Let's just only use the name.

00:26:39.800 Let's not get into somebody's gender.

00:26:42.880 And then Sky News, the website,

00:26:44.300 did a story about Sam, who's the singer, Sam Smith.

00:26:47.600 Yes.

00:26:48.100 And how he was now...

00:26:49.980 They.

00:26:50.540 They.

00:26:51.880 And I read, I read, I read, I read the article,

00:26:54.180 I read, honest, honest, guys, I read the article in good faith.

00:26:56.720 I read it, and I read it in good faith.

00:26:58.720 And I got down, I got lost.

00:27:00.640 Because I didn't know, who's the fucking they they're talking about now?

00:27:03.520 Because, you know, maybe my kids would say to me,

00:27:06.060 Dad, you know, it's just because you're an old bastard

00:27:07.620 and you just need to be, you know,

00:27:09.440 now you're on the lookout for they, they would be fine.

00:27:11.100 but I'd read it, and it was an impediment to a lucid copy.

00:27:14.680 It was just opaque, it was obfuscating, it was confusing.

00:27:18.400 And I raised it with a senior figure at Sky

00:27:22.140 who just, in so many words, told me to fuck off.

00:27:26.040 Why?

00:27:27.640 I think at Sky in particular, there was a corporate impulse

00:27:30.360 that came down from a corporate place.

00:27:33.240 And this is why, in a sense, Sky was worse than the BBC,

00:27:35.440 because at least the BBC had on the shop floor

00:27:37.800 some dissenting voices.

00:27:38.980 I think at Sky, as it became the sort of paramilitary wing of Channel 4 News,

00:27:43.720 that it was from the corporate high-ups.

00:27:47.280 There was also a sense of embarrassment, I think, about the Murdoch connection.

00:27:51.320 They felt soiled by that Murdoch thing.

00:27:54.180 So there was a determination to wash him right out of their hair.

00:27:59.200 I just think Sky became woker than the BBC.

00:28:02.140 And that's been replicated right the way through the media.

00:28:06.720 And it's just accelerated the decline, hasn't it?

00:28:10.820 Yeah, and part of the problem is even...

00:28:13.380 I'm trying to think of some employer I haven't slanked off yet,

00:28:16.160 but even at GB News, which is a good thing,

00:28:21.100 I remember I was one of the largest presenters at GB News.

00:28:24.040 I was there for 18 months. They fired me.

00:28:26.700 My figures weren't good enough.

00:28:28.740 And I remember I used to watch Nigel Farage walk in

00:28:33.860 when his show was on.

00:28:35.140 and thinking, my God, mate,

00:28:38.620 a lot of the people here don't like you.

00:28:40.800 Not because they don't know you,

00:28:42.660 but they don't like what you stand for.

00:28:44.520 This is GB News,

00:28:45.860 because they've still got to put the shows out.

00:28:47.580 And there's a lot of, you know,

00:28:48.660 it's a lot of production.

00:28:50.500 And there aren't many people

00:28:52.640 who are ideologically aligned with GB News

00:28:54.820 who know which buttons to press

00:28:55.940 and which cameras to work

00:28:56.840 and all that sort of stuff.

00:28:57.660 So I would guess at least,

00:28:58.660 at least in the early days,

00:28:59.500 at least half of the people

00:29:00.180 who were working at GB News

00:29:01.020 were really not digging it ideologically.

00:29:03.800 And it made for a lonely setting for someone like Nigel, as he used to walk in.

00:29:08.020 So it's not just the usual suspect, even GB News.

00:29:11.560 And one of the themes that you actually talk about very eloquently on your monologues,

00:29:15.020 which I really recommend people to go and watch, because I think they're genuinely excellent,

00:29:18.980 is this idea of social engineering.

00:29:22.360 So let's talk about that, because media is part of that, but also government is as well.

00:29:27.100 So what do you mean by that, Colin?

00:29:28.560 It's such a massive catch-all. I scarcely know where to begin.

00:29:31.320 And it can be a nudging people to making certain decisions.

00:29:36.800 I mean, I was writing recently about the work of a shady civil service department, which tries to, it sounds conspiratorial, but it's true.

00:29:45.280 I mean, which tries to shape public opinion in the wake of, say, an Islamist atrocity by, I mean, we're not very far here from Westminster Bridge.

00:29:53.320 I remember covering that attempt to mow people down, successful attempt, if I can put it that way, to mow people down by an Islamist some years ago.

00:29:59.640 and within you know hours of that attack happening posters started to appear um saying you know

00:30:07.260 hashtag love will win and all this sort of stuff that you know there is a small small department

00:30:13.080 within government that seeks to massage public opinion to make sure that the family liaison

00:30:18.380 officers who have gone to talk to bereaved victims of an atrocity will as we've seen recently

00:30:24.260 following events in belfast and elsewhere you get these very anodyne statements stressing the

00:30:29.140 the benefits of mass immigration.

00:30:31.900 I don't know whether they're written

00:30:32.840 by the bereaved victims.

00:30:34.920 I suspect some of them aren't.

00:30:36.760 So that's social engineering.

00:30:39.480 That's engineering anger,

00:30:42.240 suppressing anger.

00:30:43.180 And you can argue

00:30:44.040 there's a very good case for that.

00:30:45.600 That's social engineering.

00:30:46.420 That's just one tiny example among many.

00:30:48.880 And that's the,

00:30:49.660 I think the department's called RICO, isn't it?

00:30:51.640 RICO, the Research and Information

00:30:53.460 Communications Unit.

00:30:54.940 I mean, it's made it sound

00:30:55.680 as drab and boring as it could be,

00:30:59.140 but actually when you think about what it's doing

00:31:00.920 and how freedom of information requests

00:31:03.900 have been routinely denied

00:31:05.380 and where a lot of its work remains classified.

00:31:09.220 And again, you know, I'm no fan of the Daily Mail,

00:31:12.700 but because of stuff, you know, stuff in my own history,

00:31:16.800 but the Daily Mail dug that story out.

00:31:19.220 So, you know, the mainstream media,

00:31:20.940 bits of the mainstream media, newspapers,

00:31:23.500 I think, I know it's fashionable to disdain what they do,

00:31:26.500 but they still matter.

00:31:27.520 Oh, the media is very important.

00:31:28.620 It's something we've always said on the show.

00:31:30.300 The new media is important, but so is legacy media,

00:31:34.420 and it just needs to be much better.

00:31:37.780 But yeah, I mean, in terms of the families of the victims

00:31:41.340 of horrific atrocities, it is surely not a coincidence

00:31:47.440 that they all basically come out with exactly the same state.

00:31:50.320 And by the way, in the case of the mother of Rhiannon White,

00:31:54.860 who came out and basically didn't say diversity is our greatest strength,

00:31:58.100 but actually said, can you please deal with this issue because our children are paying the price?

00:32:02.740 No one cares. And her words are not used to justify government policy, whereas the words

00:32:09.180 that we suspect are being coached out of the family members of victims of crime are being

00:32:14.960 used to justify the suppression of the debate. We'll get back to the interview in just a moment.

00:32:20.860 But first, let's talk about something that might change the way you see the world. Many of you

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00:33:43.960 And let's not forget, first principles here.

00:33:47.220 I'm not saying it doesn't matter what the family wants.

00:33:50.000 It just doesn't matter as much

00:33:51.080 as some people think it should do.

00:33:53.060 when Henry Novak's family stood on the steps of Southampton Crown Court

00:33:58.040 and said, you know, we're very critical of the police,

00:34:01.160 but then also said this case mustn't be used to stoke divisions.

00:34:03.960 I don't know to what extent they were coached to say that.

00:34:07.320 And Keir Starmer then used that against Nigel Farage.

00:34:10.240 Nigel Farage, don't stoke division because the family don't want you to,

00:34:14.180 as if it was some trump card to gag people.

00:34:16.780 It wasn't.

00:34:17.860 And people need to go back to first principles.

00:34:19.900 The case against Henry Novak's killer was brought by the Crown.

00:34:23.660 It was brought by the state, paid for by taxpayers on all our behalves.

00:34:28.200 It wasn't a civil suit.

00:34:30.220 It wasn't a private prosecution.

00:34:32.080 I remember, you know, people get confused about these things.

00:34:36.740 When I was at Sky, I used to regularly, fairly regularly,

00:34:39.840 interview a woman called Debbie Purdy, who's now dead.

00:34:42.600 She had multiple sclerosis.

00:34:44.420 And she would appear, and I would interview her,

00:34:45.920 She was an early and very good, very shrewd and compelling advocate for assisted suicide.

00:34:52.100 And I would never treat her like a victim because it was clear to me she was an advocate.

00:34:55.920 She was a campaigner.

00:34:56.660 But I had colleagues who would really soft-soap her because she was a victim.

00:34:59.980 She was dying.

00:35:00.380 She was in a wheelchair.

00:35:01.560 And I remember getting emails from people saying,

00:35:03.040 you can't treat this woman like you're treating her.

00:35:05.100 You can't talk to her that way.

00:35:06.260 And I was thinking, fuck you.

00:35:07.740 She's here to advocate for a major change in the law.

00:35:10.840 And she said, she was a campaigner.

00:35:12.000 I'm not going to patronize her by sort of being, you know, going easy on her.

00:35:16.160 So we're becoming more sentimental as a society.

00:35:20.120 We need to be really clear-eyed about where the threats are.

00:35:24.260 We need to be coherent and logical as well.

00:35:27.220 And the problem is, though, this is the real problem with this,

00:35:31.980 is that you can continue softening the statements,

00:35:36.180 but all the while there is this well of anger and it's building

00:35:40.320 and it's building and it's building.

00:35:42.840 And you can keep using this tactic,

00:35:44.520 But very rapidly, we're getting to a point where that tactic simply ain't going to wash.

00:35:50.740 And if anything, that tactic is just simply going to inflame tensions even more.

00:35:56.340 Because people know what's happening.

00:35:57.800 They're not stupid.

00:35:58.760 I agree.

00:35:59.640 I agree.

00:36:00.200 And the extent to which, I mean, I did a monologue recently on David Betts,

00:36:03.780 the war historian, no, sociologist.

00:36:07.780 What is David?

00:36:08.300 How would you describe David Betts, the King's College?

00:36:10.640 Inaccurately, probably, if I did it from memory.

00:36:12.460 but he's a guest on the show

00:36:13.620 and he's someone for people who may not remember.

00:36:16.420 There was a very popular interview we did with him

00:36:17.960 who talks about the probability of civil war in Britain

00:36:22.720 from an academic expert.

00:36:25.360 There are certain tests that need to be met

00:36:26.980 and we've met four out of five of them or whatever it is.

00:36:29.340 And I did a monologue about it

00:36:32.360 partly because of what David Betts has said

00:36:33.740 but also just because, as I'm sure you found as well,

00:36:36.940 people whose judgment you trust, they're not cranks,

00:36:39.380 they're not nutters.

00:36:40.500 I can think of one friend in particular, you know, amateur historian, read history at university, not a headbanger, saying to me, you know, in hushed tones at the end of an evening, oh, it's going to be a civil war, isn't it?

00:36:53.160 And, you know, and I don't think it's catastrophizing. I don't think it's just somebody pissed at the end of a long night trying to be interesting.

00:37:00.120 I think it's people with children and a stake in the future looking rationally at what's happening to the country and thinking this is where this ends up, right?

00:37:08.680 And see, in a country where these things were terrible but were likely to be solved, you would have political leaders emerging who were willing to, number one, just for starters, acknowledge the problem.

00:37:23.540 That'd be nice.

00:37:24.760 Then they might want to address the problem.

00:37:27.420 Then they might have the caliber to be able to do so and perhaps the wherewithal to withstand the inevitable criticism that would come.

00:37:34.460 And I thought one of your best recent monologues was about the caliber of the politicians.

00:37:39.940 And it's a challenging one to talk about, because on the one hand, I think we've all seen it with our own eyes, the decline in that.

00:37:47.360 On the other hand, I guess it's the eternal complaint of the sort of, you know, the disgusted of Tunbridge Wells and all the rest of it.

00:37:55.300 I say this as someone who lives in Tunbridge Wells, increasingly disgusted, of course.

00:38:00.660 It's the eternal complaint through the ages, you might say.

00:38:08.300 So make the case for us

00:38:11.240 that the decline in the standards and calibre of politicians

00:38:14.400 is part of the reason we're here.

00:38:15.660 I'll try to, but let me just finish that point about civil war.

00:38:19.660 Sure.

00:38:20.020 Kemi Badnock, who implicitly authorised me

00:38:24.560 to write a monologue about civil war

00:38:26.400 because she raised it in an interview.

00:38:29.100 She said it's not impossible.

00:38:30.500 It's the leader of the opposition saying

00:38:31.720 civil war is not impossible.

00:38:33.860 We mentioned Rod Liddle earlier.

00:38:35.500 Rod Liddle's final column said that

00:38:37.380 Kemi gives me hope.

00:38:39.120 She gives me hope, actually.

00:38:40.180 But anyway, the rest of her party are shit.

00:38:43.120 She, I think, is formidable

00:38:44.560 and increasingly impressive.

00:38:45.860 Separate story.

00:38:47.360 But she is an MP,

00:38:48.780 and the people she's surrounded by

00:38:50.320 increasingly are woeful.

00:38:53.160 They lack a hinterland.

00:38:55.380 If you look at this particular intake,

00:38:57.880 there's a particular,

00:38:58.500 I think there's a special problem

00:38:59.660 with the fact that so many of those 232 MPs,

00:39:03.020 new Labour MPs who came in,

00:39:06.160 had very little experience of what any of us

00:39:08.060 would consider to be real life.

00:39:11.400 72 of them, I think, have backgrounds in the charity sector,

00:39:15.000 learning how to spend other people's money.

00:39:17.160 It's very good training for government.

00:39:19.720 But it's demonstrable on some levels.

00:39:21.420 I mean, the US networks used to take prime minister's questions live.

00:39:25.600 You know, such was the standard of the back and forth rhetorically.

00:39:29.220 I don't think they would now.

00:39:32.100 MPs read their questions.

00:39:34.380 And look, the ability to memorise or extemporise

00:39:37.220 is not necessarily the only guide to somebody's intelligence

00:39:39.640 or competence as a parliamentarian, but it's not that guide.

00:39:42.860 And now MPs who used to be shouted down, howled down,

00:39:46.760 reading, reading, you know, if you were reading a question

00:39:49.160 or a point of order or anything, and now they just routinely read.

00:39:53.620 They lack the confidence of self-assurance

00:39:55.500 to be a presence in that chamber.

00:39:58.700 There were instances I mentioned in my monologue where, you know, literally within days of the American attack on Iran and the Middle East is in flames and Brits are cowering in bunkers in Dubai.

00:40:11.340 And just over the road from where we are here, in Portcullis House, the overflow building for the Palace of Westminster, 40 plus MPs, Lib Dems, Labour, Tories, were doing a raising awareness session for obesity.

00:40:26.260 they were having fun because they are essentially increasingly frivolous it's not their fault

00:40:32.840 we're all increasingly frivolous we've lost a tragic sense of life to a great degree and

00:40:38.980 that's wonderful because you know you know my mum was one of nine two two were dead before they

00:40:44.380 reached adulthood times was hard it's one of the reasons it strikes me absurd when people say i

00:40:49.220 can't possibly have children these are such awful times they ain't and the mps that used to fill

00:40:54.260 that place. You know, Margaret Thatcher's first cabinet had three war veterans who'd

00:41:00.820 won the military cross. But they also had these, you know, I think about Starmer, I

00:41:07.860 think I said in that monologue, A Fish Rocks from the Head, his statement when he stood

00:41:12.540 down was particularly egregious. You know, I'm leaving with good grace. You know, it's

00:41:20.460 clever.

00:41:20.860 Having improved the country, I think.

00:41:21.860 He's a clever guy. He's a lawyer.

00:41:25.500 He understands that words are freighted with semantic meaning.

00:41:28.920 Keir, it's for everybody else to judge whether you left with good grace.

00:41:32.180 It's not for you to say whether you left with good grace.

00:41:34.820 It's just a mark on how he didn't get it and was so conceited.

00:41:39.760 And people thought he was a sort of managerial type.

00:41:41.500 No, it was fucking vain.

00:41:43.000 The vanity of the man to tell us all after those two hideous years,

00:41:47.940 comically inept years, that history would be kind to him.

00:41:51.080 no you fucker you're about the worst prime minister we've ever had and compared to some of

00:41:56.300 his predecessors labor predecessors every bit as much as you know other parties um that that absence

00:42:02.280 of the hinterland is particularly strong he went on the bbc's desert island discs keir starmer and

00:42:06.880 at the end of it they say you know what's the book you take to the desert island he says i'll take an

00:42:09.920 atlas and i thought you know my my michael michael foot you know very left-wing labor leader maybe

00:42:16.040 even a KGB stooge who knows uh wrote you know wrote books Dennis Healy had a huge library um

00:42:23.120 you know this this is a you know Ted Heath concert pianist sailed around the world um

00:42:29.840 you know we we had and we had and we had we had leaders of this country who had real

00:42:34.360 hinterlands um you know they were intellects and they'd done stuff and that that's a real issue

00:42:42.520 they'd done stuff you looked at previous cabinet ministers they were accomplished people like

00:42:49.820 they wrote they were they were academics or they'd run businesses or even you know on the left they'd

00:42:56.180 be they they would have worked in mines they come from a really poor background worked their way up

00:43:01.480 joined the trade union done this done that you look at these lot you go what have you done i know

00:43:06.620 i mean i mentioned in the monologue that i mean i'm not sure how many people are even aware of

00:43:10.040 this. Ernest Bevan, who was orphaned at eight, and then was a farm labourer at 13 in Somerset,

00:43:20.020 Ernest Bevan. Nye Bevan went down the pit, a coal pit, like his father, at 13. Ernest

00:43:29.320 Bevan founded NATO, and Nye Bevan founded the National Health Service. This idea that

00:43:33.860 you get from, I've heard it's particularly true of some Labour MPs, that the world's

00:43:37.520 Guinness, you know, Angela Rayner, you're having a crack at me because I'm a poor, I'm from the

00:43:41.660 wrong side of the tracks. No, I'm having a crack at you because you're shit, you know, and this

00:43:46.020 poverty of low expectations that somehow because you came from a poor background, you can't possibly

00:43:50.320 achieve as much as the person who came from a good background. It's belied by the history of

00:43:54.200 your own bloody party, Bevan and Bevin. Well, I think what it speaks to is we now live in the

00:43:59.760 age of victimhood and it's not left or right. There's plenty of people on the right now who

00:44:04.160 really want to be victims as well. But with politicians, in a society that thinks a victim

00:44:10.700 is the greatest sanctity that's available to all of us, victimhood, it's a very good tactic

00:44:19.960 to deflect criticism and to say, well, you're only criticising me because I'm a victim of life,

00:44:24.940 I've been underprivileged, or whatever, rather than criticising you because what you're doing

00:44:29.080 is not good. We've got to call it out, though. We've got to call it out. And that's really,

00:44:33.120 really hard. I mean, I think that one of the jobs that somebody's, I mean, this is big

00:44:36.700 stuff now. I mean, one of the jobs that somebody, maybe it's Nigel Farage, maybe it's Kevin

00:44:40.960 Van Gogh, but somebody, for instance, has to, when dealing with welfare, level with

00:44:46.820 the country. And I'm sorry if this is what I'm about to say is going to offend some people,

00:44:50.420 but that message would be something like this. Our welfare is now completely under control.

00:44:55.920 It means that the means we have to defend ourselves as a country, you know, welfare

00:44:59.500 over warfare means that we can't defend ourselves. The welfare budget is so massive. And that

00:45:04.700 means people who have striven and been brilliant citizens all their life will not, will die.

00:45:10.340 Their children will die because we can't defend ourselves because the welfare bill is so bloated.

00:45:14.360 So what we're going to do is we're going to really crack down on welfare dependency. And I've got to

00:45:19.940 level with you, the British people, that there will be people with depression and autism and

00:45:25.720 the people who are saying that

00:45:27.880 if you cut my budget, if you cut my

00:45:29.840 funding, I will, my mental health

00:45:31.980 will suffer, and the charities will say

00:45:33.960 and people might kill themselves. I'm

00:45:35.960 saying to you, the British people, that this is a

00:45:37.880 price we may have to pay. There will be victims.

00:45:40.440 There will be victims.

00:45:42.060 Similarly, we're going to stop the boats.

00:45:44.760 There may be victims.

00:45:46.240 But I'm going to give you loads of warning,

00:45:47.900 I'm going to give you months of warning, but if you try

00:45:49.880 and come across the channel and you're a very large

00:45:51.900 dinghy, we're going to push you back, and you

00:45:53.880 might drown.

00:45:55.720 I'm not. It's horrifying. I'm a Christian. I don't want to say that.

00:45:59.100 You know, all men are my brothers.

00:46:00.860 But we are not, there's such a mismatch between our willingness to really grasp the nettle.

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00:47:58.400 I completely agree.

00:48:00.040 And I think this Christian point to me is very interesting because I think a lot of

00:48:04.600 the Christian ethics are so valuable and so important.

00:48:07.480 Let's say this as someone who's sort of semi-practicing and semi-believing, I guess.

00:48:11.940 You know, a religious person would probably scoff at that,

00:48:15.080 but it's how I feel.

00:48:17.220 I would never scoff at it.

00:48:19.100 But all men are my brothers must apply to your brothers first.

00:48:25.640 They must.

00:48:26.400 They must apply to your own people first.

00:48:29.280 If you privilege foreign citizens,

00:48:33.740 and I say this as someone who lived in this country

00:48:35.480 as a foreign citizen for many, many years,

00:48:37.100 at the expense of your own brothers,

00:48:40.360 you're not doing right and you're not actually practicing or implementing the claim you make

00:48:47.200 when you say all men are my brothers because you are acting in against the interest of your own

00:48:54.540 actual brothers by privileging people who are in as you said it's a controversial term but i think

00:49:00.640 after particularly after we saw in how do you pronounce it you're the spanish speaker here

00:49:05.180 After you see those scenes and you just go, look, I don't like when people call what's

00:49:17.080 happening an invasion.

00:49:18.180 I don't know that it's an accurate term.

00:49:20.640 To me, an invasion is people storming the beaches with swords and guns and whatever.

00:49:25.840 But what you saw in Sueta was an invasion.

00:49:29.760 It was.

00:49:30.760 It's a fact.

00:49:31.760 pretend you can say oh most of them have gone home as if the fact that people have you know

00:49:35.920 come into your house without your permission and then most of them have left that somehow makes it

00:49:41.380 okay well you can't place the interest of those people against and above the interest of your own

00:49:47.700 citizens there's nothing christian about that i would argue yeah well i have doubts about whether

00:49:53.220 25 years in tv was worth it i do i do remind myself that footage and video and images are

00:49:59.020 to what really changes minds.

00:50:00.860 And it was, I agree,

00:50:01.860 those images from Suta have kick-started

00:50:04.360 a conversation in Brussels even about this.

00:50:07.980 All men are my brothers,

00:50:09.180 and some are more my brothers than others.

00:50:11.600 There's a brilliant book,

00:50:13.520 and a brilliant article actually,

00:50:14.820 written by an amazing Anglo-Iranian guy

00:50:18.340 called Bidja Manrani.

00:50:19.500 I don't know if you've come across Bidja Manrani.

00:50:20.920 He wrote an amazing book called

00:50:22.080 God is an Englishman.

00:50:23.820 And he wrote a piece for the Salisbury Review,

00:50:26.320 which is a quarterly conservative magazine.

00:50:27.920 and I'm one of the volunteers who works on that magazine.

00:50:31.520 And in his article, very learned scholarly erudite article,

00:50:34.880 he's a church, he's Oxford educated,

00:50:36.800 but works as a church warden in Exminster,

00:50:38.980 very improbable character.

00:50:40.940 And he gives, he takes you through the Bible verses

00:50:46.120 that explain why your first recourse is to your neighbor.

00:50:51.100 You know, and it's not, it's not controversial.

00:50:53.200 You know, there is a brotherhood, brotherhood of man.

00:50:55.100 And, you know, someone like Tom Holland's amazing book, Dominion, reminded all of us

00:51:00.360 10 years ago that so much of what we take for granted around human rights and individual

00:51:04.140 autonomy is lifted directly from Christianity.

00:51:07.280 And we just take so much for granted in our lives today that cut springs from Christianity.

00:51:13.180 Tom Holland paints a very dark picture about what happens when you take those struts away.

00:51:16.980 I agree with him.

00:51:19.040 So, yeah, people misunderstand that.

00:51:21.000 And particularly, I remember this brilliant David Goodhart,

00:51:24.100 who you may have interviewed.

00:51:25.340 Yeah, we have, several times.

00:51:26.800 And, you know, he recounts a conversation

00:51:29.680 in his groundbreaking book,

00:51:31.480 The Road to Somewhere, Somewhere to Anywhere.

00:51:33.420 He was at a dinner, he may have told you this story,

00:51:35.440 he was at a dinner and there's Mark Thompson,

00:51:37.040 then the head of the BBC, and Gus O'Donnell,

00:51:39.120 Cabinet Secretary, head of the Civil Service.

00:51:40.840 And they're, and coincidentally, they're both Catholics, as am I.

00:51:43.440 And they were basically saying that their first,

00:51:46.440 their first duty as they felt it was to um everybody to to the global welfare not national

00:51:55.700 welfare and i think that that that view amongst our elites is is pretty common and the other the

00:52:03.260 problem is is this prioritization of the global the elite the everywheres but that is also mixed

00:52:11.500 with an outright contempt for white working-class people in particular.

00:52:17.760 I agree.

00:52:18.640 And that's a very dangerous combination

00:52:20.740 because white working-class people in this country are the majority.

00:52:25.220 And if you are openly contemptuous of them,

00:52:28.320 that's only going to raise the temperatures even further in our country.

00:52:32.660 And the issue is that when people from those communities

00:52:37.140 then start to air grievances,

00:52:39.080 particularly around things to do with race, with immigration, it doesn't go anywhere. And if not,

00:52:47.340 it's met with actual contempt. And we've seen that for so long now. And my concern is we've

00:52:53.280 got to a point where you're looking at the rise of certain individuals and certain organisations

00:53:00.300 and you're going, this is going to get ugly pretty quickly. We're very lucky in this country.

00:53:07.080 The average Brit is quite temperate.

00:53:10.500 We're not prone to extremism.

00:53:13.260 But what I'm seeing,

00:53:14.560 and maybe it's spending too long on Twitter or whatever else,

00:53:17.760 things are febrile at the moment.

00:53:19.220 My late wife, who was an ardent Brexiteer,

00:53:23.340 but actually started out on the left.

00:53:25.340 I mean, at Bristol Uni,

00:53:26.540 she was a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party.

00:53:29.000 She used to say to me,

00:53:30.380 we'll be all right in this country because we take the piss.

00:53:33.160 It's what we do best.

00:53:33.980 We take the piss.

00:53:34.560 And, you know, you recognise this more than anybody.

00:53:37.080 And I used to believe that was true.

00:53:39.460 I think it's less and less true that I parked that.

00:53:44.580 One thing that's coming across to me really strongly at the moment,

00:53:47.340 and, you know, when we zoom back, if I live another 25 years,

00:53:53.700 I think we'll care far less about COVID.

00:53:57.000 We'll care far more in terms of it being a punctuation mark in history.

00:54:01.040 And we'll care far more and we'll see much more damage

00:54:03.440 that should be laid at the door of the George Floyd terror.

00:54:09.100 You know, when I go back to Sky,

00:54:11.380 seeing the reaction of big organizations like that

00:54:13.300 to the George Floyd killing.

00:54:16.040 By the way, it was footage again.

00:54:17.160 It was TV footage that did the persuading.

00:54:20.000 And if you look at what's happened in the education sector,

00:54:22.700 the charity sector,

00:54:24.300 and this idea that people could stop taking responsibility

00:54:27.020 for their own shortcomings, their own lack of persistence,

00:54:29.120 and blame it on, you know, whiteness.

00:54:31.400 or, you know, just blaming other things

00:54:34.080 rather than maybe looking at yourself and thinking,

00:54:35.820 do we have a problem here with fatherlessness?

00:54:38.340 You know, is there a cultural problem here?

00:54:42.580 And Francis obviously is alluding to the civil war on the right,

00:54:48.880 you might say, politically in this country to some extent.

00:54:51.620 What do you make of that as someone who I assume

00:54:53.880 wants the right to succeed?

00:54:55.140 I do, I really do.

00:54:56.380 And because if they don't, we're really, where do we go?

00:54:59.880 I didn't know this was happening.

00:55:01.400 until a friend of mine who used to edit the Jewish Chronicle

00:55:04.980 said to me,

00:55:05.980 Colin, you need to be aware that, you know,

00:55:08.200 that anti-Semitism is coming back in a big way.

00:55:10.740 So, you know, look at this guy, Nick Fuentes.

00:55:13.320 And I didn't really believe him.

00:55:14.820 And then a couple of things made me realize it is a new fissure.

00:55:21.560 And I think, for me, that will become totemic in my...

00:55:26.760 You know, there will be people watching this thinking,

00:55:28.620 I liked you until you said that. I'm going to say it.

00:55:31.100 I love the idea of Israel. I've worked in Jerusalem for months on end. I think that what happened on October the 7th is a stain on humanity. And if people feel it was, you know, start saying it's a false flag operation, I just can't go there with you guys. I just can't go there with you, you know.

00:55:51.500 So these are where these divisions are creeping in. I don't see how you heal those divisions once you've created them or allowed them to be created.

00:55:59.940 And the problem is, is these divisions are then creeping into politics quite significantly.

00:56:05.920 I found it very interesting.

00:56:07.080 One of the first things that Wes Streeting did when he came to power was talk about the way that Keir Starmer in particular had handled that situation October 7th incredibly badly.

00:56:17.520 Wes Streeting or Andy Burnham?

00:56:19.220 Oh, Andy Burnham.

00:56:19.980 Andy Burnham.

00:56:20.580 Sorry.

00:56:21.040 I misspoke.

00:56:21.860 You skipped ahead two years into the future, mate.

00:56:25.000 I don't think so.

00:56:25.740 Well, but you go, I don't remember.

00:56:29.920 I thought Keir Starmer was actually quite measured.

00:56:32.300 I thought he was strong on a very important issue,

00:56:36.060 which was the slaughter of Jewish people.

00:56:38.880 Yeah.

00:56:39.460 But this is a party now which is so in hock

00:56:41.440 to its Muslim voting bloc,

00:56:45.020 which is terrified of them deserting

00:56:47.640 their traditional blind allegiance to the Labour Party,

00:56:51.000 which isn't perturbed as it should be

00:56:53.300 by the fact that there are people willing to be much more preoccupied

00:56:57.380 with what's happening to their co-religionists 3,000 miles away

00:57:00.820 than what's happening to their neighbours

00:57:01.960 whose religion they don't share down the road.

00:57:04.540 That's nuts. That's really nuts.

00:57:07.140 You know, MPs saying, I've got voted on a Gaza ticket.

00:57:09.820 What? What?

00:57:11.620 And, you know, it's certainly happening in Bradford.

00:57:16.000 You know, I've seen, you know, the last time I was there

00:57:17.940 and it is a couple of Palestinian flags.

00:57:19.640 The flags matter, by the way,

00:57:20.980 because the white working class have decided they matter.

00:57:22.780 How do we express our frustration, our anger?

00:57:25.480 Put some flags up.

00:57:27.640 It's, that's such a, don't you think,

00:57:29.180 such a test of how people,

00:57:30.320 I see St. Crosses of St. George on a lamppost

00:57:33.680 and I think Freedom Fighter put that there.

00:57:35.720 A lot of people I used to work with

00:57:37.300 would just look at it as, you know,

00:57:39.260 a completely unpalatable act of civil disobedience

00:57:42.360 by people who are trying to wreck the country.

00:57:44.040 Well, it's interesting because you bring that up

00:57:46.180 because the last time I saw Rod Little

00:57:48.160 was at a private dinner where he was a speaker

00:57:50.040 and he talked about the fact

00:57:53.360 that he actually saw flags

00:57:56.500 and he talked about his experiences

00:57:58.800 in many other countries around the world

00:58:00.560 when people are putting up flags en masse

00:58:04.040 he saw it as a symptom of insecurity.

00:58:07.740 I agree, that's exactly what it is.

00:58:09.180 And when he saw the flag of St George going up

00:58:12.540 and the numbers that it did

00:58:13.520 he was not offended or horrified

00:58:15.120 by the way that people in the media were

00:58:17.640 neither was I by the way.

00:58:18.900 But I think what it signals is that these are the reasons...

00:58:25.260 It's a cri de coeur.

00:58:27.180 That is a term that's far too sophisticated for a peasant.

00:58:30.840 It's a cri de coeur. It's a cri from the heart.

00:58:31.180 A Russian peasant like me.

00:58:33.300 It's a cri from the heart.

00:58:34.220 It's a cri from the heart.

00:58:35.740 But I think it's a cri from the heart that is signaling for something rather specific,

00:58:40.480 which is the destruction of identity and also the demographic situation.

00:58:46.380 people talk about demographic replacement of the native population. Replacement hasn't happened

00:58:50.800 because you haven't replaced the existing population. But what has happened is you've

00:58:55.880 added masses of new population, which is diluted. So you haven't replaced these people. Those people

00:59:01.820 are still here, but you've changed the nature of the country and the face of the country.

00:59:06.300 And as you may know, I've got into trouble for talking about ethnicity and all of these things,

00:59:10.900 trying to work my way through thinking about these issues. But as a foreigner, perhaps,

00:59:17.060 and someone who's, you know, olive skinned or whatever, I'm sometimes allowed and sometimes

00:59:20.460 not allowed to say this. There are parts of Britain today, including in this city in London

00:59:25.360 and in other places, where visitors from other countries that I show around, simply walking

00:59:32.340 through London, say, what has happened here? And I think those flags going up across the country,

00:59:39.320 in posh parts of the country, as well as in poor parts of the country, are a symptom of people

00:59:45.300 saying, like, we want to have our country, in some way at least, look like the country that it is,

00:59:53.280 or that it's supposed to be, or that it was when I was 20 years younger than I am today.

00:59:58.340 And I think, you know, you talked about Israel, which to me, you know, I think anti-Semitism

01:00:05.700 is obviously a terrible thing, like all forms of racism are. And, you know, given the history of

01:00:11.880 the Jewish people, I think we're naturally extra sensitive about it. But that's not actually what

01:00:16.060 I meant. I really do care much more about Britain than I do about any other country. And I think,

01:00:21.100 as you talked about the Gaza ticket, I think all British people should care more about this

01:00:25.780 country than others, including Jews about Israel, by the way. I think it applies to everybody.

01:00:29.900 But when I was talking about the civil war on the right, I'm actually talking about

01:00:32.860 the fact that I think you see the success of parties

01:00:39.180 like Restore and Rupert Lowe is about the fact

01:00:42.680 that they are articulating something

01:00:44.340 that no one has been allowed to say in public

01:00:46.360 for a very long time, which is...

01:00:49.480 And, you know, you get people who talk about this crudely

01:00:52.380 and inarticulately and badly and in a racist way.

01:00:55.340 It doesn't mean their voices are inauthentic.

01:00:56.740 But it doesn't mean that they are not raising something

01:00:59.500 that's important.

01:01:00.780 Britain has changed you know I came here in 1995 the country does not look like the Britain that

01:01:08.800 it was it just doesn't and it pains me to say because and uh you know I say that as someone

01:01:14.400 who came from another but I didn't come here to live in Pakistan or in Bangladesh or in or in

01:01:20.080 Russia from where I came if millions of Russian people were coming here and making it more like

01:01:24.800 Russia I would be on the front line saying this is wrong right but but what we've had is the

01:01:30.180 changing of the country and that's where i think a lot of these concerns are now rising

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01:03:27.240 um a couple of things i get spooked occasionally by what i see on the right i i'm delighted the

01:03:34.540 energy is there i worry sometimes whether energy has been directed i i'm a sort of berkey and

01:03:40.740 conservative at heart, I believe in institutions, because otherwise spasms, you know, if you're

01:03:46.320 if you're if you're gobbing off, I don't mean gobbing off, it's one thing to have a popular

01:03:52.360 social media presence like Rupert Lowe has achieved this amazing presence and voice,

01:03:58.640 but you've got to, for it to endure, it's got to be within an institution, he would say,

01:04:02.940 Restore Britain is that institution. But there is a there is a discomfort with institutions now on

01:04:09.480 the right which does spook me you know uh i get why people think the monarchy is woke i get why

01:04:15.780 people think the cops are woke i get why people think the army's woke because they all are um but

01:04:21.580 you don't blow them up you rebuild you reform them right so there's so there's so there's there's

01:04:25.260 that aspect changing britain i i did a monologue recently which you know people don't watch because

01:04:32.000 it's so dull as a subject but it's like all dull something like some dull things it's really

01:04:36.120 important about demography I think people for one thing we're only in the foothills at the moment

01:04:42.860 I think there was a tide there was a tsunami of childlessness not inadvertent childlessness I'm

01:04:49.040 talking about childness childlessness by choice a tsunami coming at us it's not even started yet

01:04:54.920 but people of you know people of my generation now who are maybe I'm 58 uh people who are just

01:05:01.940 entering that phase in life where they're thinking,

01:05:04.060 you know, are my kids going to have kids?

01:05:07.340 And you

01:05:07.860 know, you talk to people, and nobody's

01:05:09.980 kids are having kids.

01:05:12.860 And there's

01:05:13.920 never been a time in human history

01:05:15.240 and people say, you don't know what the answer

01:05:17.980 to this is. Well, let me pose the question.

01:05:20.500 Has there ever been a time in history

01:05:21.820 where whole communities of people

01:05:23.940 have aided and abetted

01:05:25.880 by the likes of science, had families

01:05:27.840 as big as they wanted to have,

01:05:30.080 whilst other people voluntarily

01:05:31.380 have decided to stop having children.

01:05:33.160 This amazing asymmetry between different communities

01:05:35.280 has to create tensions that have never existed before.

01:05:38.800 You know, we've been able to manage waves of immigration before.

01:05:41.280 Other countries have been able to manage waves of immigration before

01:05:44.040 because the people who, generally speaking,

01:05:45.640 moved to that country were having families

01:05:47.740 and replicating themselves broadly in line,

01:05:50.080 broadly in line with a few differences with the host community.

01:05:53.100 That's not how it is anymore, you know.

01:05:56.000 So we are in really uncharted territory,

01:05:58.820 really, really uncharted territory.

01:06:00.780 And I don't even think we're in the foothills.

01:06:02.820 I think that that demographic change hasn't even started yet.

01:06:07.680 And the worrying thing is that we just don't talk about these things

01:06:12.940 as plainly and as honestly as we should,

01:06:15.020 and that goes back to the politicians as well.

01:06:17.980 And not only does it go back to the politicians,

01:06:19.820 it also goes back to us as a public,

01:06:22.380 where the moment you are honest with us about a particular issue,

01:06:26.080 we have a meltdown and the toys come out of the proverbial plan.

01:06:28.780 Well, so I agree. And the best example for me is the monologue I did recently about demography. I mean, I wrote a book about demography 15 years ago. I've done programmes about it. I tried to set up a think tank about pronatalism, encouraging people to have all the children they want.

01:06:46.900 And I knew, because I've noticed before,

01:06:49.640 that people on our side of the aisle, if I can call it that,

01:06:52.080 people who are not parts of the liberal establishment,

01:06:56.580 I knew that this was not a message, as I framed it,

01:06:59.760 that would go down well.

01:07:00.620 And sure enough, people take it personally,

01:07:04.260 because it's the most personal decision lots of people ever make.

01:07:07.180 For one thing, very often it's a tragedy,

01:07:09.400 and I always try and preface anything I say about demography

01:07:12.700 with, you know, it's a tragedy.

01:07:15.380 If you want children, you can't have them.

01:07:16.880 You know, I'm not talking about you.

01:07:17.980 I'm not talking about you.

01:07:19.340 I'm talking about a society which is making it,

01:07:24.980 you know, as Mary Wakefield,

01:07:26.560 the deputy editor of The Spectator,

01:07:28.040 put it recently,

01:07:29.120 a society which has now created conditions

01:07:30.860 where people can say,

01:07:33.440 I'm now child-free by choice

01:07:35.420 in the way they used to say,

01:07:37.380 I'm fucking dairy-free by choice.

01:07:39.440 You know, that's where we're getting to.

01:07:41.100 That is, and the catastrophizing about the environment,

01:07:44.520 this lack of confidence in their ability to become parents,

01:07:47.760 this unfocused sense of threat for the future.

01:07:51.300 Every generation, mine, grew up with four-minute warnings

01:07:53.840 and nuclear missiles.

01:07:55.100 A thousand years ago, it was the plague.

01:07:56.900 Don't pull the, it's never been harder than this,

01:07:58.940 can't possibly bring children into the world.

01:08:00.780 So it remains the most important message.

01:08:05.700 If your next question is going to be,

01:08:06.920 what the fuck do we do about it?

01:08:09.040 I fear, I don't think money works, really.

01:08:12.260 and this is why I'm a little bit obsessed with Israel

01:08:14.260 because Israel do seem to have cracked it

01:08:15.660 but only demography

01:08:16.560 but only because they're under huge historical pressure

01:08:19.100 the holocaust

01:08:19.760 and today in a very naughty bad neighbourhood

01:08:22.120 so you know as Paul Morland

01:08:24.140 I've had a friend of mine Paul Morland

01:08:25.760 the demographer says

01:08:26.520 in Tel Aviv you're at a dinner party

01:08:29.100 or on the beach

01:08:29.880 and you haven't got three kids

01:08:31.120 people want to know why

01:08:32.000 you know these are not Haredi Jews

01:08:34.000 these are you know ordinary easygoing

01:08:35.800 freewheeling types

01:08:36.940 so in terms of what you do

01:08:39.920 the great question for me is do you stigmatize? Do you anathematize? Do you say to somebody

01:08:47.900 pushing a dog in a pram, it's not a baby, stop you? Do we stigmatize? Do politicians stigmatize

01:08:56.100 it? Do you signal to people that they're not pulling their weight? You say if you don't have

01:09:00.360 children, you can have children, we're going to tax you more because you're not providing for

01:09:03.960 the future like people who are bothering to have tomorrow's soldiers, nurses and taxpayers? I don't

01:09:08.300 know I just know these are really sticky questions that nobody wants to address and look I mean it

01:09:12.460 was only a couple of days ago uh AOC the uh the American senator she showed congresswoman sorry

01:09:20.940 she shared on her social media she's 36 years old her injecting herself because she's freezing her

01:09:28.420 eggs and you know one of the things we haven't yet had a chance to address her properly because

01:09:33.820 we're we're working on the right person and there are a few people we want to bring on

01:09:37.680 do you know the one conversation francis and i meet people for dinner we go to events whatever

01:09:43.400 the one conversation that's no one that no one's having in public but everyone is having in private

01:09:48.780 is women in their 30s mid to late 30s early 40s who are talking about doing ivf yeah trying to

01:09:58.740 have kids and having miscarriage after miscarriage etc etc and they're going we were all lied to

01:10:06.100 we were all feminism lied to us technology lied to us science lied to us society lied to us and

01:10:14.840 told us we can have everything we can wait we can defer we can delay and we really want children

01:10:21.660 and now we can't and coming out of the mouth of a man it's the most grotesque and offensive thing

01:10:28.580 and everyone gets upset but a lot of women are now privately saying this and it's there's no

01:10:34.500 getting away from it. Society lied. We lied to women. It's a fact. And the education system as

01:10:40.640 well. I agree. And when Dorothy Byrne, formerly, I mean, I hate to say it, but she was formerly

01:10:45.180 the boss at Channel 4 News. She's now a head of an Oxford college. She got in a lot of trouble

01:10:50.660 three or four years ago when she lectured her young female students and said, don't forget

01:10:55.080 the graphs. Don't forget to have children. The fertility graphs are against you. My late wife

01:11:01.240 was a freak she we had uh she yes she can't she can't sue me she's dead she um we had our first

01:11:09.880 child she was 36 on the cusp of turning 37 don't try this at home she had five children in her 40s

01:11:16.520 yeah yeah and unfortunately my i have five daughter we had five daughters and a boy

01:11:21.960 uh i think i fear that my my daughters will look at that and think that's relatively normal it's so

01:11:27.000 freakishly abnormal. So my job, one of my jobs in life is to say to my daughters,

01:11:31.160 you need to be, you need to have your ducks in a row by 27, 28, because, and it's, it's awful,

01:11:37.720 isn't it? I mean, we don't, I didn't worry about it. And, um, but if you're, you know,

01:11:42.360 if you haven't got that mortgage in place, you haven't got a bloke in place and you're 33,

01:11:45.560 you're clock, clock, clock, clock, clock, clock. It's a nightmare.

01:11:48.200 But we need to have the conversation because what's the alternative that we live in a fantasy

01:11:55.480 world which is currently what we're doing in more ways than one and then unfortunately you've got

01:12:02.060 to wake up at some time and by the way you know if you're concerned about the changing nature of

01:12:06.160 the country of all the tools available to you personally other than the pencil and the voting

01:12:12.580 booth which doesn't strike me as particularly effective these days you only have one other

01:12:16.980 option i agree um and and by the way that as you hinted there are communities that have absolutely

01:12:23.260 no problem with this they have no problem having children they are having them and uh you know if

01:12:28.920 you play that movie forward it's the most passionate most the most patriotic thing you can do is to

01:12:33.620 have children you give yourself a stake in the future you answer the question you you you balance

01:12:38.880 the equation which is you you don't want to rely on immigration to make this country work so what

01:12:44.580 are you going to do you there's got to be people feeding into hospitals and shops and schools and

01:12:52.400 and all that wiping the arses of the elderly.

01:12:54.940 Who's going to do it?

01:12:55.760 Zach Polanski isn't.

01:12:56.800 He's not going to do it.

01:13:01.880 Colin, on that happy note,

01:13:03.700 it's been a genuine pleasure for us speaking with you.

01:13:06.580 For me too.

01:13:07.020 We really appreciate it.

01:13:08.160 And it's a proper conversation.

01:13:09.060 Yeah, we really, really appreciate you coming on the show.

01:13:12.160 Before we ask you our final question,

01:13:14.240 and before we go to questions from our supporters on Substack,

01:13:16.480 tell everybody where they can find your way.

01:13:18.500 On Outpost, please have a look at it on Substack,

01:13:21.180 because we get paid on Substack.

01:13:22.820 Please subscribe if you're willing to do that.

01:13:24.460 It will be hugely generous and appreciated.

01:13:26.960 YouTube is building nicely, as is Facebook and Twitter.

01:13:30.640 They follow me, but follow Outpost Studios is a place to go.

01:13:33.520 Outpost Pictures.

01:13:34.460 We keep changing our name, but you'll find it.

01:13:36.600 That's not helpful.

01:13:38.920 And final question is always the same.

01:13:40.540 What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?

01:13:43.220 We're not talking about demography.

01:13:44.500 We're not talking about tomorrow's people.

01:13:46.720 We're not talking about how the country looks

01:13:48.240 if you can't be bothered to have children.

01:13:50.600 stop carping about the state of the country

01:13:53.100 if you're not prepared to take a stake in its future

01:13:55.060 there you go

01:13:55.980 right guys

01:13:57.780 join us over on Substack

01:13:59.840 where we carry on the conversation

01:14:01.300 and you get to ask Colin your questions

01:14:03.480 when people say

01:14:06.380 do not want kids

01:14:07.780 or they don't have them

01:14:08.600 is it because of reasons like the economy or climate change

01:14:11.920 do you think they're being honest with themselves

01:14:13.580 or do they simply not want the responsibility

01:14:15.980 of parenting

01:14:16.780 Thank you.

TRIGGERnometry - August 19, 2026

The Warning Signs Britain Ignored - Colin Brazier

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