TRIGGERnometry - Tom Slater ＂A Second Lockdown Will Be Disastrous＂

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00:00:30.000 hello and welcome to trigonometry i'm francis foster i'm constantin kisson and this is a show

00:00:37.840 for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people our brilliant and returning

00:00:43.220 guest today is the deputy editor of spike tom slater welcome back to trigonometry thanks for

00:00:48.420 having me yeah it's good to have you uh we were just sitting here before the interview started

00:00:52.280 very relaxed talking and now we've all all three of us have gone really serious thanks so much for

00:00:56.920 but it's good to have you back man it's been a while it's been a couple of years since we first

00:01:01.280 had you on and as i was saying to you before we started we really didn't know very much about

00:01:05.760 anything at the time and we were kind of using guests like you who'd thought about the stuff we

00:01:10.900 were interested in in detail more carefully who had a history of writing about it and sort of

00:01:15.720 debating stuff like that and you you know the first time we had you on we were talking about

00:01:19.580 freedom of expression uh i think we talked about students banning sombreros and all that sort of

00:01:25.460 silly stuff two years have passed i think things have gone a little bit more sinister haven't they

00:01:31.300 particularly with stuff we've seen recently darren grimes obviously uh what do you make of the state

00:01:36.020 of the our ability to discuss ideas and issues and societal issues uh freely now i think it's

00:01:42.800 incredibly bleak because as you say a lot of the things that we're talking about previously a lot

00:01:46.180 of it's very similar to what we've seen explode in recent months but it almost feels quaint by

00:01:49.680 comparison the game we were talking about sombreros you know the biggest campus controversies were

00:01:53.820 about inappropriate fancy dress and all these kinds of ridiculous things what i think we've seen

00:01:58.180 recently it was already there but was this kind of attack on freedom of speech from all sides

00:02:03.600 almost it feels like there's state censorship which i'm sure we'll get onto in relation to

00:02:07.420 the darren grimes case again kind of ongoing issues with um locking up tweeters and offensive

00:02:13.380 facebook posters and all the rest of it we see those stories proliferate all the time

00:02:16.480 you've got the big tech censorship which again has exploded particularly in relation to the

00:02:20.500 COVID stuff. I know you've had a taste of that yourselves with the shadow banning of your Peter

00:02:23.820 Hitchens interview. And that's something which is becoming more and more alarming and being more and

00:02:28.060 more supported by a lot of people, strangely, on the left increasingly. And then also you've got

00:02:32.880 this cancel culture stuff, which is almost like the informal mob censorship, the way in which

00:02:37.960 that people, without necessarily using the state or using the power of big corporations, just

00:02:42.020 putting pressure on people's employers to, again, sack them if they've uttered a heretical thought.

00:02:47.840 So you put all of that together and you're in a pretty bleak place, I think.

00:02:51.340 And again, even though a lot of these issues have been going on for a long time,

00:02:54.020 we at Spikes have been writing about them, talking about them for a long time.

00:02:56.580 It's definitely accelerated in the last couple of months.

00:02:59.580 And why is it you still think that, I mean, I tweeted it yesterday about how, you know,

00:03:05.680 the BBC and their unwillingness to even discuss the Darren Grimes case.

00:03:11.960 Why is it people still think that freedom of speech isn't an important issue in the UK and the West in general?

00:03:17.840 I think they've just bought the consensus, which is basically that free speech isn't an unfettered right.

00:03:22.740 It's legitimate to restrict it. And therefore, these things aren't necessarily issues.

00:03:27.260 I mean, you see this refrain time and time again, whenever there's a big cancellation campaign, whenever there's one of these state censorship cases, where even in response to this, people still maintain this line.

00:03:35.760 There's no free speech crisis. It's something that us three made up, you know, just to give ourselves something to talk about.

00:03:41.460 I think a lot of that stems from the fact that they don't really support free speech.

00:03:45.020 They don't really understand what it is. And that's where you get in a situation where you've got people like Keir Starman, leader of the Labour Party, saying we should have tolerance for free speech, tolerate it in the way you tolerate an irritating relative or something like that.

00:03:55.980 But at the same time, there is a line. And in the case of the Darren Grimes interview, the line seems to be someone interviewing someone who says something that turns out to be quite offensive.

00:04:04.200 So I think, again, the reason that you've got the downgrinds case

00:04:08.740 not even being picked up by the BBC, etc.,

00:04:10.340 they kind of don't see it as an issue,

00:04:11.960 whereas people like us, I think, see it as one of the crucial issues of our time.

00:04:15.220 Because if you can't even talk about some of the problems going on in society today,

00:04:18.780 or if you treat a view that you dislike with an attempt to silence it

00:04:22.980 rather than an attempt to challenge it,

00:04:23.920 you can soar up a lot more problems for the future.

00:04:26.000 But I think a lot of people just don't even recognise that as an issue.

00:04:28.260 You see, I would maybe push back on that a little bit,

00:04:30.240 because when I turned down that safe space contract two years ago

00:04:33.920 or whatever it was, that was a major story on the BBC.

00:04:37.480 That was the day that Theresa May had nearly been removed from power 0.93

00:04:41.140 by her own party.

00:04:42.480 And the story about some unknown comedian turning down a contract

00:04:46.280 was the second story on the BBC News website.

00:04:49.880 So they clearly thought it was an issue then, or someone did at least.

00:04:54.540 So I find it very odd that the BBC News team have not covered

00:04:58.380 the Darren Grimes story at all.

00:04:59.920 But the point I would agree with you on is we've obviously done an interview with Darren.

00:05:06.060 We promoted it quite heavily. 1.00

00:05:07.680 And all of the pushback we've received has literally been as sort of moronic as, well, the guy's an idiot. 1.00

00:05:15.920 And it's like, well, you're entitled to that view. 0.99

00:05:18.780 That does not mean he shouldn't be allowed to interview people.

00:05:21.860 He should be investigated by the police.

00:05:24.100 Like, people are allowed to have opinions that you don't like.

00:05:27.580 So it seems like, as you say, the people who are saying there's no crisis for free speech, they don't actually believe that we need free speech.

00:05:36.300 Yeah.

00:05:37.920 How do we get there?

00:05:39.960 That's weird.

00:05:40.760 It's very, very strange.

00:05:41.600 I think on the one hand, the people who have the luxury of being able to say there's no free speech crisis, it's because they've either never uttered anything which could be remotely offensive.

00:05:49.100 They never had a particularly interesting thought in their head.

00:05:51.460 Or the other thing is that whether they realize it or not, they're part of the consensus.

00:05:55.780 a lot of the kind of identitarian politics which seems to rule the roost these days tends to have

00:06:00.060 a lot of sway at places like the bbc universities a lot of businesses increasingly that is the new

00:06:05.120 kind of orthodoxy that's the new kind of cultural elite values as it were and so when you glean to

00:06:11.060 those values when you're not really a threat to those values whatsoever it's very easy to think

00:06:15.300 that everything's just fine on the other hand they don't really understand freedom of speech

00:06:19.400 and they just play into what is the most basic kind of trap that you fall into which is that

00:06:23.840 you support free speech, but only for yourself and other people who agree with you. That's the

00:06:27.680 most basic, ridiculous kind of response to have to these things. It's me speech rather than free 0.95

00:06:32.080 speech. And so whilst they kind of dress it up as, oh, Darren Grimes is just a grifter, or he's just

00:06:36.740 an idiot, or he's just a whatever, again, that's just an evasion of the fact that they, the reason 0.99

00:06:41.480 they dismiss these issues is because they don't really want to admit that you're not in favour of 1.00

00:06:44.700 free speech. It's like admitting you're not in favour of democracy or, you know, apple pie. It's

00:06:49.020 just one of those things where they can't bring themselves to say it. But I think the evasiveness

00:06:52.220 proves the point that they just don't care about this stuff whatsoever, because they're not

00:06:55.340 threatened by censorship at this point in time. And going back to the BBC issue, do you think

00:06:59.900 their unwillingness to address it, to talk about it, shows a fundamental bias at the heart of the

00:07:06.440 BBC? Or do you think it was just an editorial decision? I mean, we don't know. I mean, it could

00:07:10.380 well just be, I mean, there's a lot going on in the world at the moment, of course. But if you

00:07:13.320 think about how significant that case was, obviously, we have had hate speech legislation

00:07:18.080 in this country for a very long time. These cases do flare up from time to time. This is involving

00:07:22.200 one of our most prominent historian now very much in disgrace i've given his own comments

00:07:27.120 you've got a young youtuber and commentator who again has been in the press a lot over recent years

00:07:31.940 this is not a marginal story so even if it's not necessarily a case of them going out of their way

00:07:37.440 to cover this up the fact that they don't think this is that big of an issue um at least if that's

00:07:41.780 the case that seems to me to be quite worrying at least to indicate some sort of whether it's bias

00:07:46.580 or whether it's groupthink or whether it's just you know not recognizing this thing is a big issue

00:07:50.200 There's got to be something like that at play, surely.

00:07:52.460 And in terms of civil liberties, which free speech would be only one of, you know, we seem to be in a position now where they're sort of disappearing quite quickly with majority consent, by the way.

00:08:04.180 You know, people are very much in favour of what's going on.

00:08:07.040 What's been your take about the impact of the coronavirus, the response to it on our basic freedoms?

00:08:14.120 I think it's been appalling. And it's really sped up, as I'm sure we'll talk about a lot of these kind of liberal trends that existed previously, the willingness to just throw fundamental freedoms under the bus at the first sign of trouble. And we've seen that with the coronavirus crisis time and again, you know, first of all, in relation to the question of the lockdown.

00:08:32.380 And in terms of the kind of suspension of civil liberties, it almost doesn't matter what you believe and what you think happens to be the truth about the efficacy of lockdown as a policy.

00:08:40.560 The way in which it was done, the way in which our freedom to move around, who we associate with, how many can gather, our ability to protest, the way in which that was suspended, the way in which it was done, I think should really raise alarm bells.

00:08:53.800 Because all of the lockdown restrictions that we've been suffering under for the past, what is it, seven months now, this was never passed with the approval of Parliament.

00:09:01.420 It was passed using the Public Health Act in 1984, funnily enough, which delegates huge powers to ministers, has very few of the safeguards that you get in other pieces of legislation which could easily have been used.

00:09:12.180 It's never really had explicit approval from Parliament.

00:09:15.540 Only recently have they been able to, rebels in the Tory benches in particular, been able to get the government to concede some votes on some measures so far.

00:09:23.940 And so you have this remarkable experiment in authoritarianism, which on the one hand hasn't really been openly debated.

00:09:29.320 It was just rushed straight into.

00:09:30.700 It was a crisis in the early days.

00:09:32.280 You could argue there was a justification for that.

00:09:34.280 But at the same time, it's been basically becoming definite

00:09:36.920 and yet with very little parliamentary scrutiny

00:09:39.100 and again without any of that support.

00:09:40.980 So whilst it's just been really, really shocking

00:09:43.380 how quickly that can happen

00:09:44.340 and again how little pushback it felt like there was that now.

00:09:46.940 Things seem to be changing a bit now.

00:09:48.760 But again, it feels like the die has been cast

00:09:50.320 at least for the next six months in relation to these restrictions.

00:09:53.500 But most people are still in favour of lockdown.

00:09:56.240 I've got my own particular thoughts about this.

00:09:58.240 why do you think people are still in favor of lockdown i think it's a bit of a complicated

00:10:01.980 picture i mean first of all is the fact that if you look at for instance some of the studies

00:10:06.240 king's college i believe did a study recently of what people actually do in practice even in

00:10:10.280 relation to things like quarantine rules which actually are quite important you know aside from

00:10:13.640 uh some of the other slightly more questionable restrictions shall we say i mean we should just

00:10:17.800 inject here that none of the three of us thinks the coronavirus is a hoax none of the three of

00:10:23.440 us thinks it's not infectious none of the three of us thinks it's not killing people obviously

00:10:28.140 Exactly. This isn't Bill Gates' master plan. So it's good to get that out of the way.

00:10:34.480 Unless you're offering Alex Jones money. In which case, no, joking.

00:10:39.000 Yeah. So what we're talking about is how do we deal with what is a public health emergency?

00:10:44.980 Exactly.

00:10:45.220 Which it is. I just wanted to put that in.

00:10:46.960 No, no. I think that's definitely worth noting. And again, so what you see people do in practice is obviously a little bit different.

00:10:52.840 And I think we all see that anecdotally in our lives anyway.

00:10:56.020 You know, again, you see these surveys suggesting that if anything, people think the restrictions should always be stronger, but people are bending the rules here and there because these rules are very inhuman.

00:11:05.120 The idea that you wouldn't necessarily go and see friends or family, particularly in the parts of the country which are already under stricter restrictions.

00:11:10.800 These are things people in practice find very difficult to uphold, even if they still normally support them.

00:11:16.340 I think we also live in the moment in a bubble of kind of consensus, which is quite stifling.

00:11:21.860 You know, if we've talked in previous years about, you know, the shy Tory phenomenon in relation to polling or the shy Trump voter, and if you think the shy lockdown sceptic, the pressure heats on them to when a pollster calls up or when their Vox popped on the street by a television journalist to say, yes, the restrictions, if anything, should be harder is quite intense.

00:11:40.380 All that being said, I think it's fair to say that even despite all of that, that wouldn't suggest that actually everyone's against it.

00:11:44.900 of course, that would be absurd to say. But nevertheless, I think after that initial very

00:11:48.900 fearful period, when a lot of us didn't know what this was, we didn't know where things are going,

00:11:52.760 opinion is starting to shift. I think the proportion of people who are concerned about

00:11:56.560 the economy over public health, that is increasing in relation to a lot of polls, because I think the

00:12:00.900 reality of a lot of this is dawning. So I would question the strength of that kind of public

00:12:04.960 support, because I think it is under pretty extreme circumstances, even where, you know,

00:12:09.220 public life has been shut down. We're not discussing these things in the pub in a freely

00:12:12.540 ways we would previously. But at the same time, I think that opinion is starting to shift. And I

00:12:18.020 think especially as the economic consequences of lockdown are really going to start to be felt,

00:12:21.740 you're going to see opinion shift more into that column than we have seen previously.

00:12:26.080 And what do you think are going to be the implications of a second lockdown?

00:12:30.140 Well, I think it's going to be disastrous. I mean, if you think about the impact it's going to have

00:12:33.960 on so many different sections of the economy, if you think about hospitality, I mean, there's

00:12:37.900 even something like pubs, which is not a trivial thing. First of all, because it employs a hell

00:12:41.680 of a lot of people, but also really important for community life. A lot of pubs are barely hanging

00:12:46.160 on even before coronavirus. In recent years, loads of them shutting down because of a combination of

00:12:50.940 factors. And again, coronavirus accelerating a lot of that, that's going to be a huge impact.

00:12:55.920 The impact on jobs is going to be huge. We are facing the biggest recession for 300 years. And

00:13:00.900 all of this is only going to have more of a damaging impact on all that stuff. From a civil

00:13:04.600 liberties point of view, what really concerns me is it's the, again, it's the prolongation of this

00:13:08.920 period that we have anyway, which is the idea that civil liberties can be indefinitely

00:13:12.260 suspended. And I think we really need to make the point quite strongly that things like

00:13:16.720 freedom, as well as democracy, our ability to have some impact on these rules, make sure

00:13:21.040 our representatives at least have an opportunity to scrutinise them. These values aren't just

00:13:25.400 for the good times. They're not just for when everything is nice and rosy and there's not

00:13:29.040 threats that are challenging us. If anything, if you're in a situation where the public are being

00:13:33.120 asked to give up their lives, to give up their liberties in that sort of way, you need more

00:13:38.800 open discussion, not less. And I think from a civil liberties perspective, the fact that lockdown is

00:13:44.280 continuing on, even as it's been failing in some respects, particularly in relation to the local

00:13:48.100 lockdowns, it's pretty much accepted that, if anything, case numbers have gone in the other

00:13:51.540 direction where that's been imposed. From the perspective of freedom, it's just continuing that

00:13:55.240 idea that basically these things can be suspended indefinitely for our own good. And if we say

00:13:59.620 anything about it, then we're just a troublemaker. That, to me, is a particularly concerning impact.

00:14:03.480 You mentioned our representatives, which I think is a big part of this whole picture.

00:14:08.200 First of all, it's quite clear that when it comes to lockdown, we're living in a one-party state, right?

00:14:13.380 There is no dissent from the opposition.

00:14:16.220 The opposition who should be challenging, criticizing, taking a different view, exploring different ideas, not doing any of that.

00:14:23.300 And so it almost doesn't – this is the thing that troubles me most about the lockdown versus even the culture war, which, you know, we care about a lot.

00:14:31.600 With the culture war stuff, there's some hope that, you know, right of center parties, which at the moment seem to be the repository of liberal values to some extent, they've got majorities, they're in power, they'll fix this, right? They'll start doing things.

00:14:48.020 On the lockdown, well, it doesn't matter what the three of us sit and talk about. The reality is the Conservative Party led by Boris Johnson with the Labour Party led by Keir Starmer are going to continue down this path as long as they want.

00:15:00.060 and there's nothing we can do about it.

00:15:02.280 That is what's really concerning about it.

00:15:03.600 Because again, talking about some of the issues

00:15:05.140 with Parliament and the lack of scrutiny there,

00:15:06.960 all of that is important, obviously,

00:15:08.440 but at the same time,

00:15:09.000 if there's no one willing to scrutinise,

00:15:10.900 if there's no one willing to oppose,

00:15:12.460 then that formal ability to oppose

00:15:15.520 almost just completely evaporates.

00:15:18.800 I think the Keir Starmer point

00:15:20.520 is actually quite important

00:15:21.240 in the position that the Labour Party are taking

00:15:22.800 because it's just become intuitive at this point

00:15:25.060 in the kind of culture war over coronavirus

00:15:27.100 that has erupted,

00:15:27.800 that it's a kind of mad, uncaring, right-wing libertarian thing

00:15:31.240 to be concerned about lockdown.

00:15:33.020 And the caring people basically want us to batten down the hatches 0.95

00:15:35.580 until we get a vaccine and just pump everyone up with money

00:15:39.000 in between times and hope for the best.

00:15:41.200 And that seems to me to be a really strange state of affairs.

00:15:44.700 First of all, I don't think it perfectly reflects it

00:15:45.960 because, as you say, there's a very firm consensus in party politics

00:15:49.060 on a lot of these restrictions.

00:15:50.380 But also you've got a Labour Party, led by a human rights lawyer, no less,

00:15:54.520 who has said nothing about the suspension of our civil liberties,

00:15:57.200 It said nothing about the suspension of parliamentary scrutiny and is, if anything, demanding that the government go further in a policy which already has and is very much likely to deepen further the inequalities in society that already exist.

00:16:11.360 That's the thing about lockdown. It does disproportionately impact working class people. And the fact that we find ourselves in a situation where it's the Labour Party, if anything, are the more enthusiastic backers of this policy, I find very, very strange.

00:16:22.700 why the Conservatives have completely given up on freedom in the midst of this, I'm not entirely

00:16:26.760 sure. I think there's a bit of a problem with the Johnson administration, full stop. It's never been

00:16:30.420 entirely clear that he ever believed in anything. I mean, he was often kind of written up as this

00:16:33.920 libertarian, but the evidence for that I've never seen. I mean, the first thing he didn't remember

00:16:38.400 when he was mayor of London was ban people from drinking on the tube. You know, I feel like he

00:16:42.480 likes to sense where the wind is blowing on a lot of these issues. There's not necessarily a lot of

00:16:45.940 grip. Luckily, there are a few people, particularly in the Tory party, some elsewhere, who are pushing

00:16:50.020 back against this stuff but as you say that consensus is incredibly stifling because there's

00:16:54.560 just no real opposition to this political opposition to this that it feels like can

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00:18:20.560 Tom, you're on the left.

00:18:22.280 Were you hopeful when Magic Grandpa was eventually replaced with Keir Starmer?

00:18:28.700 Did you think, I don't imagine you were,

00:18:30.700 but did you think, well, at least it's not that bad?

00:18:33.260 Or were you hopeful in any way for his leadership?

00:18:36.460 Well, the thing is, I'm a left-way, but also I'm a Brexiteer.

00:18:38.480 So the thing about Keir Starmer, I think, was that he is the man basically responsible, at least in large part, for that huge election loss in 2019 back in December.

00:18:47.440 Because obviously the last election was lost on the grounds of Corbyn himself, his dodgy associations, the anti-Semitism he seemed to have an incredibly high tolerance for, as well as the kind of sense that he wasn't sticking up.

00:18:57.560 He's an open-minded man. Come on. He's a very open-minded man, in particular, in relation to Islamism and anti-Semitism in the absence of anything else.

00:19:04.820 But the other part of that was the Brexit issue, which Keir Starmer was the architect of that policy.

00:19:10.060 And I think was, again, the other half of that question, the thing that really drove that wedge finally between particularly the northern working class and the Labour Party,

00:19:18.680 was the fact that the party in Parliament was supposed to be the voice of working people was actively campaigning to overturn millions of their votes.

00:19:26.780 And again, that was the thing which I think has been be interesting to see whether or not Keir Starmer can make up for that.

00:19:32.880 I mean, coronavirus has scrambled everything in relation to the previous kind of political realities.

00:19:38.000 But again, I don't think in many respects Keir Starmer was much better.

00:19:41.220 And I think especially as we're seeing with his responses to some of the Darren Grimes stuff,

00:19:44.420 as a liberal as well as anyone on the far left, it would seem,

00:19:48.080 which is, again, a huge problem with the left these days,

00:19:50.700 you know, that is something that they share across the board.

00:19:53.220 They are very sceptical of freedom.

00:19:55.260 And that's something which I do care a lot about.

00:19:56.900 Well, were you not sort of enthused by his,

00:19:59.660 He was obviously picking fights with the far left of his own party.

00:20:03.220 He was clearly trying to get rid of the anti-Semites.

00:20:06.120 He was clearly trying to get the Don Butler to say something typically far left

00:20:11.780 and then smack her down for it. 1.00

00:20:13.940 He was trying to clean up his party's act.

00:20:18.300 Did you see any promise in that at all?

00:20:20.880 Well, I think on the issues in relation to anti-Semitism,

00:20:24.040 obviously someone needs to get a firm grip on that

00:20:25.740 because that was a horrendous thing which was dogging the party.

00:20:27.460 and obviously the extent to which he was effective in that is a good thing.

00:20:31.140 You need to make a very firm line about that.

00:20:33.320 The fact that the Labour Party became synonymous with being light on anti-Semitism

00:20:36.340 is a historically terrible thing.

00:20:38.800 It's fascinating that they went down that road.

00:20:41.000 But in relation to the culture war stuff, I think it's quite interesting

00:20:43.300 because he's really just trying to triangulate on the question of the culture war.

00:20:46.020 It's kind of a very Blairite way of trying to put himself

00:20:48.220 between what perceived to be the two extremes.

00:20:51.060 He takes the knee one day, but then he gives a speech about patriotism in the other.

00:20:54.020 He's just kind of trying to talk out of both sides of his mouth at this point.

00:20:57.460 For me in particular, I've long given up on the Labour Party in various different kinds of its iterations.

00:21:02.060 I think the extent to which it could claim to be a progressive, positive movement for working people has long since passed.

00:21:09.340 I think, if anything, Corbyn was kind of just dancing on the grave.

00:21:13.320 I mean, respects, he kind of was able to take control because its legitimacy was so worn away.

00:21:17.740 But whilst I think a lot of people are talking about how canny Keir Starmer is being, a lot of it feels like PR, feels like triangulation.

00:21:24.540 And all the while, I think, actually, the extent to which the Labour Party remains a kind of repository for a lot of these identitarian, divisive kinds of ideas that we're all concerned about, I think it's still going to go on despite that.

00:21:36.840 And do you think it's got any long-term future?

00:21:39.020 Well, again, the coronavirus has just scrambled everything.

00:21:42.300 And I think what Keir Starmer has effectively been able to repose the argument as, quite effectively, at least in the media sphere, is the fact that it's on questions of competence, it's on questions of delivery.

00:21:52.820 on that basis he could well have a decent next election who knows a lot of the um again the kind

00:21:59.180 of things that went on in the past couple of years that really annoyed people in relation to

00:22:03.880 brexit in relation to any of these other issues maybe that will start to fade a little bit but i

00:22:08.280 just don't think it's a firm basis on which to on which to hold a political party we're back to that

00:22:12.220 kind of dry technocratic kind of approach of the kind of blair years which again was can be effective

00:22:18.800 for a time, especially when, as we saw in the 90s,

00:22:21.480 the Conservative Party just collapses.

00:22:23.640 And the economy is booming.

00:22:25.120 Exactly. These things are fine at that sort of point,

00:22:27.960 but it's not the sort of thing that sets pulses racing.

00:22:30.220 So again, who knows in the near term, but I think in the longer term,

00:22:33.240 the Labour Party in terms of working out what it is and who it's for,

00:22:36.360 I think all of that remains to be seen.

00:22:38.060 And we've seen the culture war go into hyperdrive

00:22:41.260 as a result of the coronavirus.

00:22:44.280 First of all, why do you think things have got so tense at the moment

00:22:48.080 and so polarised?

00:22:49.580 It's a difficult one

00:22:50.540 because I think

00:22:50.860 there was some

00:22:52.360 kind of people

00:22:53.520 who were hoping

00:22:54.360 that the onset

00:22:55.700 of coronavirus,

00:22:57.160 that the onset

00:22:57.560 of the pandemic,

00:22:58.920 Constantine included.

00:23:00.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:23:00.500 Naive and stupid. 1.00

00:23:02.120 When in doubt, 1.00

00:23:03.140 go with the

00:23:03.640 depressive pessimism.

00:23:05.360 That's what the last year

00:23:06.380 has shown us.

00:23:06.940 Yeah.

00:23:07.800 That it would put a break

00:23:08.900 on all this stuff

00:23:09.360 because a lot of this stuff,

00:23:10.340 even though it is very important

00:23:11.440 and because these ideas

00:23:12.580 are so divisive,

00:23:13.460 they're so toxic

00:23:13.980 and they're everywhere,

00:23:15.000 a lot of it is arguments

00:23:15.880 about nothing

00:23:16.520 a lot of the time.

00:23:17.180 It's about triviality

00:23:18.060 it's about someone use the wrong turn of phrase it's about someone allegedly culturally appropriated 0.97

00:23:22.580 jerk rice or whatever it is it's ridiculous things a lot of the time and so the the being 0.97

00:23:27.140 faced with a genuine public health threat would not only clear away a lot of that rubbish but 0.92

00:23:30.840 remind us that basically we are you know one group of people that we don't need to be splintered down

00:23:35.960 these identitarian lines we're all there to look out for each other but then very quickly it was

00:23:40.440 clear that that wasn't the case these ideas were very bedded in and then in the wake of obviously

00:23:44.320 The killing of George Floyd, the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement, I think just proved that those ideas definitely weren't going away.

00:23:50.940 And just, I think, proved that you can't kind of just hope these things will be defeated by events, that it really is a case of trying to take on these ideas in society, but more importantly in these institutions, which is where they're really hardwired in, it feels like, at this point.

00:24:02.800 And with the Black Lives Matter movement, because Constance and I have this discussion about it,

00:24:07.220 do you think that the George Floyd incident would have had the same resonance if it happened in another period of time?

00:24:14.820 Or do you think that what had happened because of lockdown was there was just emotional tinder just waiting to be lit,

00:24:21.580 and George Floyd was the perfect flame for it?

00:24:23.760 I think there's definitely a big element of that.

00:24:25.620 Because if you think about when the Black Lives Matter movement first kicked off,

00:24:27.740 in relation to the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson,

00:24:31.940 various other shootings which went on over those couple of years.

00:24:34.560 That was kind of the original kind of high watermark of it.

00:24:37.000 And it was a big story, obviously.

00:24:38.760 It was a big discussion, particularly for America.

00:24:40.780 But it didn't go global. It didn't explode.

00:24:43.180 It didn't lead to people toppling statues in Bristol

00:24:45.760 and Netflix pulling down the mighty bush.

00:24:47.640 It's kind of an absurd cultural revolution that unfurled in its wake.

00:24:51.580 And I guess it's a combination of, on the one hand, lockdown,

00:24:54.300 people being locked in their homes for a very long period,

00:24:57.020 Again, tempers starting to fray. I'm sure that played a bit of a role in it. I think the other factor, of course, is Donald Trump, because the last time the Black Lives Matter movement really erupted, when it really started, was under the Obama years, which I think reminds us that a lot of these issues were not created by Donald Trump.

00:25:11.220 But at the same time, his presence, I think, unfortunately, has lent credence in some people's minds to the more extreme claims of this movement, the idea that this is that America and Western society in general is kind of irredeemably racist.

00:25:24.880 Trump is held up as an example of why that's true, because this horrendous fascist, as they would put it, I don't think he is one, but still, is allowed to be in power.

00:25:32.080 So I think, again, the combination of Trump, the combination of a horrendous killing, which there was no, you know, we all knew what that was when we saw it. 0.57

00:25:38.980 And the coronavirus, I think, just led all of this to explode.

00:25:42.140 But why it suddenly became a discussion about speech and statues and all the rest of it, I have no clue whatsoever why I so quickly went to that spot.

00:25:48.840 But on that, actually, let me ask you this, because when you had me on the Spike podcast a couple of months back or whenever it was, we were talking about BLM.

00:25:55.760 And I think you and I were about to get into a disagreement, which is always fun, about whether I was saying to what I'm seeing in this is there's a neo-Marxist agenda, which is a term that got bandied about quite a lot.

00:26:08.900 I think Spike sort of pushed back against that.

00:26:11.040 And I think you were keen to take issue with that, but you didn't have the space to do so then.

00:26:16.720 So here it is.

00:26:17.400 Yes. So this is obviously, I've heard you make the argument, many people point out that if you look at, for instance, Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter, if you go on their website, if you look at some of the policies they're advocating for, they do talk about, you know, they do talk about overturning capitalism.

00:26:31.740 They also talk about kind of various things, which I wouldn't say are traditionally Marxist, but certainly some of that kind of nouveau Marxist identitarian tinged obsessions in relation to decolonisation or in relation to the nuclear family or in relation to all these types of things.

00:26:46.360 So there's things like that where if you take them at their word, as it were, you could see that they're calling themselves Marxists, if nothing else.

00:26:53.240 I think the two points of the same response to that is, first of all, there is a big difference between the movement such as it is and the organisation, if we can call it that.

00:27:01.280 Because I don't think anyone would really be taking to the streets in the numbers that they have if they were paid up members of this organisation, if they were 100% signed up to the toppling of capital.

00:27:11.480 There's just not the electrical support for this sort of thing.

00:27:13.620 You don't think so? With the housing crisis, with the fact that young people increasingly feel like they can't participate in this capitalist utopia, they're squeezed out of the future, the coronavirus has come along, they're definitely, definitely, definitely going to have a worse time than their parents.

00:27:29.740 You don't feel that there is a sort of feeling that, quote unquote, capitalism is not working?

00:27:33.560 I think there is a strong feeling that capitalism is not working.

00:27:36.060 And as you say, a lot of these issues kind of pre-exist the coronavirus even

00:27:38.620 in terms of the failure of it to actually produce the kind of growth

00:27:43.040 and the kind of better life for people that people actually wanted.

00:27:45.820 But at the same time, I feel like the issue that really animated people

00:27:48.820 was the question of racial injustice, full stop.

00:27:51.360 I think all of the baggage that came with it was kind of an afterthought.

00:27:54.140 I'm sure you had this experience either talking to friends

00:27:55.940 or going and observing some of these demonstrations.

00:27:59.600 People weren't really talking about that manifesto.

00:28:01.740 There is a big group. And I actually think particularly in relation to the UK, where as far as I can tell, it's kind of old SWP stand up to racism types who have claimed the mantle of the Black Lives Matter organization here.

00:28:10.700 They just kind of latched onto it. It's good for them. They get to go on the radio. They get to talk about the things they've always cared about.

00:28:15.460 But in terms of the average person who is inspired by the movement, I don't think it's from this kind of red blooded, old fashioned Marxism.

00:28:21.960 At the same time, I think it also gets into this question about what these people say when they say that they're Marxist.

00:28:26.680 Because fundamentally, I think they're identitarians, which I think is, again, the antithesis of Marxism, again, putting the question very much on the issue of class and also not wanting to ossify society.

00:28:38.400 Because that's the thing about identity politics is it wants to put us into all these individual boxes, whereas the point of Marxism and its focus on class was that it could be transcended, that you could abolish the working class.

00:28:47.880 Whereas these people in their obsession of identity, not only are they increasingly uninterested in the class question, you bring it up and they actually think it's like a kind of racist dog whistle and you only want to talk about the white working class or whatever.

00:28:59.100 But also they fundamentally want to keep those distinctions intact.

00:29:02.480 They genuinely buy into the idea that society can be broken up along these lines, that we can't really overcome them, that all we can do is come to terms with them in that kind of sense.

00:29:10.640 So whilst it's certainly true that a lot of these people think of themselves as terribly radical, left-wing Marxist even,

00:29:16.600 I think that at best it's wearing that label but actually means something very different.

00:29:21.280 And what was really interesting as well with that Black Lives Matter movement is they were talking about race

00:29:25.400 and when they were going on their marches, it was the third anniversary of Grenfell Tower and no one seemed to mention that.

00:29:32.220 Yeah, I mean it was interesting because there were some attempts, you saw it some marches,

00:29:35.800 I guess an attempt to kind of bring things like Grenfell in as well as attempts to kind of bring issues like that in.

00:29:40.360 But it's interesting that it just became kind of just more ethereal very quickly.

00:29:45.320 It wasn't because of the fact that this is something that went on in America.

00:29:47.980 People had to almost go grasping around for things to make it relevant,

00:29:51.200 which is why I think we got into this bizarre situation

00:29:53.320 that it quickly became about inanimate objects.

00:29:57.120 It became about statues. It became about history,

00:30:00.300 this desire to reckon with history in some sort of weird, abstract,

00:30:04.540 almost spiritual sense.

00:30:05.760 But I think a lot of the time, as you say, it's a general feeling

00:30:08.560 And it's often decoupled from more concrete things that we should be talking about,

00:30:12.340 often in the British context, because those things were a lot better, actually,

00:30:15.360 in relation to race relations in particular than a lot of these people would like to make it.

00:30:19.400 And why do you think it seems that we have imported wholesale American politics,

00:30:24.740 especially American identity politics, to these shores,

00:30:27.880 when in the case of things like Black Lives Matter,

00:30:30.720 of course, George Floyd's death was awful,

00:30:33.820 but it doesn't seem to be particularly relevant at all to this country.

00:30:38.560 I mean, it's fascinating. In many ways, Black Lives Matter is like America's great export of recent years.

00:30:43.520 It's gone completely international. You know, you're seeing marches in every nation across Europe, all across the world.

00:30:48.380 And yet this is a movement not only started in America, but it's addressing a very specific issue in relation to police killings, particularly of unarmed black people.

00:30:55.820 There's a lot of discussion in the US to the extent of that, but it's still a very distinct issue, which a lot of people have been concerned about for a long time.

00:31:02.560 To try and apply that to the UK context makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

00:31:06.140 we have our issues with inequality as any other nation does but it's not at all the same and I

00:31:11.940 think it kind of in a way if we're being slightly uncharitable about it I think with so much kind

00:31:17.480 of identitarian politics it's about claiming the oppression first and waking working out the kind

00:31:21.780 of justification for it later and I think that's why again we saw the conversation shift so quickly

00:31:26.280 onto cultural grounds because all of that you can just speculate about you don't have to prove

00:31:29.460 anything you don't have to show any data you can just claim that this is a this particular sitcom

00:31:33.940 is a resonance of some sort of horrendous oppression

00:31:36.240 that we need to tackle it.

00:31:37.640 So yes, the exporting of it has been very strange,

00:31:40.760 very fascinating.

00:31:41.760 I think a lot of it,

00:31:42.320 I'm sure a lot of it's got to do with social media

00:31:44.300 and the kind of internationalization

00:31:46.620 of a lot of these campaigns.

00:31:48.220 But at the same time,

00:31:49.040 I think there was just a desire to kind of latch onto it

00:31:51.760 because it felt like it gave fuel

00:31:53.640 to a lot of the previous concerns

00:31:55.420 and campaigns that these people had.

00:31:56.920 Well, we gave you the opportunity

00:31:58.040 to put the boot into Labour a little bit.

00:31:59.820 I think Black Lives Matter is a good example

00:32:02.260 of somewhere where you could certainly look at the Tory party

00:32:05.720 with a bit of scepticism as well in terms of the response

00:32:09.180 to what we saw in terms of police being attacked,

00:32:11.960 police being chased around the streets, etc.

00:32:14.680 Do we have a Conservative government, Tom?

00:32:17.420 It's hard to see any evidence of that at this point.

00:32:21.160 On the one hand, because as you say,

00:32:22.560 it's not as if the Conservative party has had a neat relationship

00:32:24.880 or an always strong relationship with, say,

00:32:27.380 a lot of the values around freedom, full stop.

00:32:29.000 That's something which has not always existed in their midst

00:32:32.100 Well, there are two schools of thought within Conservatives.

00:32:35.180 There's a sort of more classical liberal,

00:32:36.860 and then there's a sort of, just to characterize it,

00:32:39.920 sort of caricature, so hang him and flog him type.

00:32:43.380 And those are always in conflict, aren't they?

00:32:44.880 And we were told Boris Johnson was very much

00:32:46.940 on the classical liberal side of things.

00:32:48.400 Completely.

00:32:48.960 And yet we've seen no evidence of that.

00:32:50.200 I think actually one thing that's worth pointing out

00:32:52.000 is that a lot of this cultural war stuff,

00:32:53.460 and Andrew Doyle, who writes for Spite,

00:32:55.240 has obviously been on your show a number of times,

00:32:57.400 a comedian, the guy behind Titania McGrath,

00:32:58.820 he makes this point that a lot of the cultural war stuff

00:33:01.440 is really a battle between kind of liberalism

00:33:03.040 and authoritarianism, really.

00:33:04.500 That's what a lot of it boils down to.

00:33:05.720 So on those standards, it seems like the Tory party

00:33:07.960 have been very incapable of kind of sticking up

00:33:09.940 for a lot of those values, it feels like.

00:33:11.720 But if, you know, given the fact that, as I say,

00:33:14.120 they've got this conflicted relationship

00:33:15.380 with liberalism and freedom,

00:33:16.740 what they shouldn't surely have a conflicted relationship with

00:33:19.520 is kind of conservatism in so far as culture,

00:33:22.700 in so far as conserving historical memory,

00:33:25.560 in so far as saying that this country

00:33:26.820 has good things about it in its past,

00:33:28.820 that there are certain national heroes

00:33:30.300 that you can stand up for and whilst the government did make some noises about that Boris Johnson made

00:33:35.580 his little intervention about statues particularly after the statue of Churchill was targeted and

00:33:40.640 spray-painted it was very partial it was very cautious and I can't quite work out what that is

00:33:45.880 is it just the case that there as so many other previous recent conservative leaderships have

00:33:51.680 been have been terrified of the kind of liberal media set feel like if you mention utter any kind

00:33:56.120 a genuinely conservative thought that you'll be set upon for doing that, or whether or not they

00:34:01.060 just aren't that bothered. It's hard to tell. But as you say, they have been oddly absent from a lot

00:34:05.100 of these issues, even though I suspect they would have a big proportion of the public with them if

00:34:09.740 they took a firmer stance against all this stuff. And do you think there's an element of cowardice

00:34:13.820 to it, that they're worried about the media backlash and what the people in charge of the

00:34:18.600 institutions would say? I think there's a huge element of that, definitely. I think you saw

00:34:22.440 that actually with the kind of oscillation on the question of the Gender Recognition Act because of

00:34:26.960 course this was something that was originally mooted by Theresa May's administration again

00:34:31.980 kind of loosening up the rules around how you could basically change your gender identity doing

00:34:36.540 it by self-definition the Tories originally coming in under Boris Johnson saying we were going to look

00:34:41.160 at that it now seems like they are going down that point but there was a point in the middle where

00:34:44.160 they were concerned about stirring up the cultural that was something like the kind of briefed quote 0.72

00:34:48.360 that was doing the rounds, and I think it does speak to the fact that they are very cowardly on 0.56

00:34:53.220 a lot of these issues. It might be the fact that some of them, particularly in the kind of higher

00:34:56.540 echelons in the party, maybe do glean to some of these precepts, but I think it actually speaks to

00:35:00.480 the cowardice of them, but also the strength of this ideology, the fact that it does very much

00:35:06.860 inform the media, the fact that it will enrage a lot of different sections of the kind of great

00:35:13.860 and good, and I think that cowardice, whilst it doesn't justify it, I think it's definitely a

00:35:17.520 response to it. They know the kind of pearl clutching that is met with even the mildest

00:35:21.320 kind of criticism of a lot of these trends. And do you think that weakness and cowardice

00:35:24.880 is perhaps why you're starting to see a couple of new parties emerging, which are trying

00:35:29.680 to sort of do to the Tories on culture what UKIP did to them on the EU and on other things?

00:35:38.240 Do you think that there's a connection there? Oh, definitely. I think if you take Lawrence

00:35:41.800 Foxy's reclaim party, which obviously launched recently, it's definitely an attempt to try

00:35:46.040 and put that back on the table and to be realistic is to put it back on the table with the conservatives

00:35:50.080 the Labour Party are broadly speaking lost on a lot of these issues I'm sceptical I've got to say

00:35:55.620 about how a kind of political party can really be that effective on just kind of cultural issues

00:36:00.520 full stop I also think it's important that we don't just frame this as a question around kind

00:36:05.000 of tradition because I think again a lot of this boils down to the way you can build a broader

00:36:08.640 kind of coalitions around questions of freedom which is what a lot of it boils down to you know

00:36:13.000 people shouldn't be able to topple a statue

00:36:14.320 because that shouldn't just be outsourced

00:36:16.060 to a small group of campaigners

00:36:17.500 who shout the loudest

00:36:18.680 and have brought their kit with them that day

00:36:20.140 and pull it over.

00:36:21.320 All of that, I think, can bring people together on.

00:36:23.120 But I think, again, the reason that you're seeing

00:36:24.580 movements like that pop up

00:36:26.580 is in response to a very real lack in party politics,

00:36:29.780 in the same way that Euroscepticism

00:36:31.120 was something which just wasn't really allowed,

00:36:33.880 it felt like, in mainstream politics for a long time.

00:36:36.640 Very full-throated defence,

00:36:39.360 not only of liberal values,

00:36:40.300 but also of some aspects of tradition,

00:36:42.020 which people are concerned about, is entirely lacking.

00:36:44.660 And it'd be interesting to see if they can kind of exert some pressure on the Tories in that respect.

00:36:48.900 And do you think there should be, because they've got sort of reclaim,

00:36:52.120 which you could argue is the new UKIP in many ways,

00:36:55.220 do you think that we need something else on the left,

00:36:57.480 so a socially conservative left-leaning party?

00:36:59.600 I know there's the SDP, but something with more presence in order to really challenge Labour?

00:37:05.360 Well, that'll be interesting because it felt,

00:37:07.040 this is something that obviously Matt Goodwin has made this point many times on your show, I'm sure,

00:37:10.440 about how the missing demographic for a very long time

00:37:13.400 in electoral politics was that mix of social conservatism

00:37:15.920 but also left on economic issues,

00:37:18.380 which is where a lot of the country are.

00:37:19.660 It's where a lot of the Red Wall are.

00:37:21.040 And what the Tories very effectively did at the last election

00:37:23.780 was to occupy that space in one way or another.

00:37:26.660 We can talk about how genuine that was.

00:37:29.100 We can talk about whether or not that's actually going to transform their lives.

00:37:32.340 But they've very clearly sent a signal

00:37:34.140 that they were standing up for those kinds of voters

00:37:35.740 and those kinds of concerns.

00:37:38.120 But I do wonder, given all that's happened,

00:37:39.920 And whether or not in many people's eyes, particularly in the Red Wall, who also hold a lot of these socially conservative views or also very concerned about a lot of this woke politics stuff, whether or not they're going to feel like the Tory party has actually gone away from them on those kinds of issues.

00:37:52.100 So the question about whether or not there's a socially conservative, more left wing, kind of blue Labour type movement, which could emerge, which could actually put pressure on Labour.

00:38:02.120 On the one hand, as I say, that territory has kind of already been occupied a little bit.

00:38:05.580 But also, I just don't think Labour can change in relation to that kind of thing.

00:38:09.140 And it doesn't necessarily come down to a question of being socially conservative necessarily.

00:38:13.860 They've basically vacated actually representing the working class people who tend to be quite socially conservative on those issues.

00:38:20.040 They are the party of the metropolitan middle class. That was confirmed by the last two elections.

00:38:24.680 Those are their values. Those are the people that they really speak to.

00:38:27.780 Those are the people who staff their party and who are their representatives.

00:38:31.100 The idea that you can kind of shift the dial on that, I'm very, very sceptical about because it just feels like now they recognise that is their constituency.

00:38:39.140 And those are the values that they have to uphold.

00:38:41.520 And, you know, how do you shake that?

00:38:42.780 All right. 1.00

00:38:43.060 So in summary, then, the Tories are useless. 1.00

00:38:45.880 The Labour are useless. 1.00

00:38:47.680 Neither of them can be changed. 0.97

00:38:49.000 They're challenged from now to now.

00:38:50.660 And we have an election in four years.

00:38:53.040 Yeah. 1.00

00:38:53.860 I'd say we're pretty fucked, aren't we? 1.00

00:38:55.380 Feels like that. 0.99

00:38:56.580 One tries to be more positive about these things.

00:38:59.720 I don't.

00:39:01.280 No, thanks.

00:39:01.720 Look how happy he's been for years.

00:39:04.040 I've been proved.

00:39:04.980 Everything I've said has been proved to be correct.

00:39:07.180 I'm genuinely thrilled.

00:39:09.140 It's a bleak picture. I don't think any of us can say that. I mean, even, for instance, at the last election, I didn't vote for the Conservatives. I've been very sceptical of Boris Johnson. I'm also just not a Conservative on a lot of these issues. So therefore, I didn't back them. But at the same time, I was kind of cheered by what it felt like they represented when they won that election, not only because it felt like it drove a wedge between the working class and the Labour Party, which I think had to happen because they'd taken for granted for too long. They didn't really deserve their support. They'd been ignoring them.

00:39:37.100 And also because obviously it meant that Brexit in one form or another would be implemented.

00:39:41.380 The toxin of that vote not being implemented would be removed from our politics.

00:39:46.180 We could talk about again what kind of society we'd like after all of that.

00:39:49.800 And my concern is that the society we've ended up with, particularly in the midst of lockdown, it just feels increasingly bleak.

00:39:56.340 So where this new movement comes from, what new kind of political alignments pop up, all of that, again, has been scrambled by the crazy last seven months.

00:40:04.180 But I'm sure something eventually will happen.

00:40:05.980 And it just feels like we're in a particularly strange period at the moment, I guess.

00:40:09.540 And don't you think a major issue is, and we've talked about it with other people,

00:40:13.080 we've talked about it with George Galloway, we've talked about it with Peter Hitchens,

00:40:15.840 isn't it due to the fact as well that we've got just an absolute dearth of talent

00:40:19.480 at the top level of politics?

00:40:21.200 I mean, it certainly feels that way.

00:40:22.700 If you think even on the question of competence,

00:40:25.000 which I don't think competence is everything in politics.

00:40:27.300 Obviously, it's important, but you shouldn't fetishise it.

00:40:29.200 You know, they're not just technicians.

00:40:30.660 They are supposed to have some principles.

00:40:32.100 They are supposed to have some ideas.

00:40:33.620 But if you think about the mishandling of this crisis,

00:40:36.320 and again, aside from the lockdown question,

00:40:37.840 like again, the myriad mistakes of Matt Hancock,

00:40:41.060 the fact that he's still in post

00:40:42.200 despite the crisis in care homes

00:40:43.920 and the mishandling of all those issues,

00:40:46.120 I think there's just a fundamental,

00:40:48.040 first of all, just an inability of the state

00:40:49.500 to be able to actually deal with these crises.

00:40:51.520 I think there's obviously been a lot of fraying there

00:40:52.900 over many years,

00:40:53.940 but also just the dearth of talent there.

00:40:56.240 I think the bigger thing that does concern me though

00:40:58.080 on that flip side is the fact that the lack of principle

00:41:00.840 is more worrying than anything else.

00:41:02.400 the fact that it took so long for anyone in Parliament to be concerned about this mass

00:41:06.740 suspension of civil liberties, because no one really, it felt like, had strong enough of a

00:41:11.700 principled basis in those ideas in the first place. That feels almost more concerning to me at this

00:41:16.360 point anyway, because despite the fact that the Tory party, particularly in recent years, as the

00:41:19.620 left has become more liberal, were talking a good game on freedom of speech or on any of these other

00:41:23.880 issues, on tolerance, a lot of that civil libertarian bent just went completely out the

00:41:29.360 windows. And particularly on the left, actually, this is something that surprised me. Well,

00:41:33.300 why do I say it surprised me? Of course, it didn't surprise me. But you just saw so many

00:41:37.900 people on the left go, oh, what? Lockdown? Absolutely. Yes, we should be spying on each

00:41:43.560 other. Yes, if your neighbour does manage to meet up with someone for an illicit cough

00:41:48.020 leak, we should put them in a straight jacket. In the Soviet Union, that's exactly what we 0.89

00:41:52.180 do. It's a very left-wing policy. Yeah. But why is it the left seems to have embraced

00:41:58.860 this authoritarianism it's really really strange and as you say as we were talking about earlier

00:42:03.520 it's really strange because the obvious consequence of these policies is going to be more poverty

00:42:07.100 right in relation to the lockdown itself that's obvious to anyone there was this kind of line

00:42:11.100 that was coming out from kind of corbynistas at the beginning which is that they don't you know

00:42:14.400 it's only the it's only the billionaires that want you that don't want lockdown which is absurd

00:42:18.500 because the people have done the best out of lockdown if you look at the amount of money that

00:42:21.840 amazon and all these different companies have made has been the billionaire class it has not been

00:42:25.080 working people on the one hand i think it speaks to a kind of level of opportunism and just kind

00:42:30.180 of cultural positioning for whatever reason in a lot of western countries it's fallen into this

00:42:35.080 um dynamic which is that to be skeptical of lockdown is to be some mad right winger and to

00:42:39.960 want to be kind of zero covid and just batten down the hatches for months on end is the responsible

00:42:43.960 left-wing thing to do you don't see that in every country places like sweden quite interestingly

00:42:47.520 it's actually from the kind of populist right who are who were at least at one point agitating for

00:42:51.620 far more authoritarian policy so how that fell in relation to it just being partisan could be

00:42:57.200 one factor of it but i think and you pick up on this point as well is the fact that what passes

00:43:02.380 for the left these days is completely authoritarian you know there was always that authoritarian bit

00:43:06.520 of the left of course um there and of course um there has been you know authoritarian left-wing

00:43:11.660 governments throughout history and even remaining today but there was always a tendency within it

00:43:15.160 which rejected a lot of those kind of principles which did believe in freedom of speech um which

00:43:19.520 didn't believe in this kind of unending state authoritarianism, state control of everything.

00:43:23.800 I think the problem is, and the reason that Spite found itself increasingly isolated and people don't

00:43:28.520 even want to take us seriously when we say that we come from a left-wing tradition, is because

00:43:32.560 the left has completely jettisoned that part of the tradition, shall we say. The bit that was

00:43:36.600 concerned about freedom, the bit that was concerned about liberty, the bit that was concerned about

00:43:40.500 freedom of speech, that is almost nowhere to be seen at this point. And I think that's part of

00:43:44.840 part of the reason to explain why they all went into lockdown so quickly. That and the fact,

00:43:49.520 if we're being, again, slightly uncharitable, a lot of these people, when we talk about prominent

00:43:53.160 left-wingers, we're talking about middle-class, quite well-paid broadsheet columnists. We're not

00:43:57.640 talking about people who are organising workers in factories. We're not talking about people who

00:44:01.480 are really experiencing and seeing the impacts of a lot of these policies in their day-to-day lives.

00:44:05.900 They are cushioned from it. And I think that is something as well that's worth bearing in mind

00:44:09.660 when you see them being so willing to put us into lockdown again, as we've seen in the last couple

00:44:14.040 It's a good point. And as someone who's extremely promiscuous when it comes to voting, I've been a floating voter all my life.

00:44:20.140 I thought I was going to go another way, mate.

00:44:21.620 No. 0.62

00:44:22.760 As somebody who loves shagging, let me tell you. 0.85

00:44:27.120 Yeah. Well, if we weren't going to have that conversation, Francis, we would not be having it on camera.

00:44:31.440 Now, happily married. Thank you very much.

00:44:35.180 But I should reiterate that.

00:44:37.840 But you've completely thrown me here.

00:44:39.680 But I was going to say that as someone who's voted for everyone from all the way from the Lib Dems to even voting respect at one time, Labour a couple of times, eventually voting Tory for the first time in my life, very reluctantly at the last election.

00:44:55.060 The one thing I think a lot of people feel now is you sort of you're getting a cat in a sack, whoever you vote for, because you vote for Boris Johnson.

00:45:03.680 He's supposed to be a liberal Tory.

00:45:05.320 He locks the country down.

00:45:06.960 Right.

00:45:07.860 And there's very little pushback from him, certainly,

00:45:11.160 in terms of other civil liberties, Darren Grimes being a prime example of that.

00:45:15.420 You vote for the Labour Party, it's supposed to be the party of the worker.

00:45:19.280 They're not standing up.

00:45:20.260 Look at their recent intake of MPs.

00:45:22.360 These are all sort of critical race theorists in their 20s, right?

00:45:26.840 Picked, it seems, primarily based on who they are, not what they think.

00:45:29.980 And so you're not really, whoever you vote,

00:45:33.380 the Liberal Democrats are neither Liberal or Democratic anymore.

00:45:35.980 and just you go down the list there's actually nobody where you go i know what i hate that

00:45:41.760 person but at least i know what they stand for you don't you don't seem to have any of that anymore

00:45:45.780 and the the main issue that you bring up and i i think whether you're left right center up down

00:45:51.600 whatever the problem that is the most toxic issue for our society when you strip away covid when

00:45:57.120 you strip away free speech when you strip away all of that is rising inequality and that is an

00:46:02.260 issue that no one seems to have a solution for. And I don't see how it gets better with the

00:46:07.240 recession that's coming. So what do we do about that? Well, that's the million dollar question,

00:46:12.900 because why is this not kind of front and center? Because again, we've had issues with the failure

00:46:17.160 of the economy for many, many years. You know, it has been kind of dwindling. There has been

00:46:20.900 an inability to actually solve what was often called the productivity puzzle, the fact that

00:46:24.300 we can't actually seemingly produce the kind of, again, the quality of life that people expect

00:46:29.540 and to grow into the future.

00:46:31.320 This is something that we've all known about.

00:46:32.720 We've kind of been insulated from it.

00:46:33.820 Coronavirus has obviously accelerated all of that

00:46:35.720 and made it impossible to ignore,

00:46:37.280 not least because we've made it a million times worse

00:46:39.620 by the kind of policies that we've ended up pursuing rightly or wrongly.

00:46:42.800 The fact that that is so distant from the conversation,

00:46:44.800 I think is really strange.

00:46:45.920 The thing is, going into next year, you won't be able to ignore it.

00:46:49.180 You know, we're looking at the worst recession for 300 years.

00:46:52.700 Jim Rickards will be happy.

00:46:55.240 But unemployment we haven't seen since the 1980s.

00:46:57.280 These are things that are really impossible to ignore.

00:46:59.860 And yet, for the moment, it's off the agenda.

00:47:01.560 It won't be off the agenda for too long.

00:47:02.880 But I think you raise an important point about the failure of political labels in all of this stuff.

00:47:07.200 And I think the Labour Party are getting a very good example of that.

00:47:09.620 Because again, even during the Corbyn years, they were kind of talked up as being deeply radical.

00:47:13.820 And this party that was very much more for the workers.

00:47:16.360 But this was a time in which workers were abandoning them in unprecedented numbers.

00:47:20.280 But also they were fighting to stay in a European Union that would make a lot of their policies completely inert.

00:47:24.460 So a lot of this stuff feels like it is, again, just kind of performance.

00:47:28.940 A lot of it is kind of pantomime.

00:47:30.260 And it's using labels which long since seems to have kind of exhausted themselves.

00:47:36.120 And I think the struggle right now, especially given the political stasis it feels like we're in,

00:47:40.620 the kind of deadening consensus around a lot of these lockdown policies,

00:47:43.700 is where we were at beforehand, which is trying to find a new language in which to take up a lot of these issues,

00:47:48.320 partly to deal with the economic issues, which are very considerable.

00:47:51.700 How we get out of that is going to be the big question in the next few years.

00:47:54.460 Also, a lot of these issues of freedom and a lot of these issues of identity, which have crept up into the scene.

00:48:00.640 And for the moment, it feels like there's no one, particularly in mainstream politics, who are able to deal with that.

00:48:05.600 But that's why I think it's going to come from outside at this point, whether that's political movements or whatever,

00:48:09.560 but also just people talking about these things more, just trying to kindle a little bit more pushback against these kinds of things.

00:48:14.800 And are we in crisis as a country?

00:48:17.040 100%. I mean, you can't overstate it, can you?

00:48:19.620 On every single front, we do have an ongoing public health crisis.

00:48:23.160 We have this huge economic crisis looming, which is going to have a huge impact, not just in this country, by the way, but in terms of the lockdown pursued as a kind of global policy, it's going to have a horrendous impact, particularly on the developing world.

00:48:34.340 This is something that isn't talked about at all in this discussion. We're quite kind of parochial when we talk about these policies, understandably.

00:48:40.600 But, you know, Oxfam had a report out in July, I think it was, talking about 120 million people could be pushed into really extreme poverty because of all of this stuff.

00:48:48.100 and then you ladle on top of that all this identitarian bollocks which we know is really 0.84

00:48:52.580 toxic we know is really divisive and yet over the past few months as a consequence partly of

00:48:57.840 lockdown but also the explosion of this black lives matter movement has completely cemented 1.00

00:49:02.740 itself within all of our institutions it feels like to the extent they weren't cemented already 0.94

00:49:06.820 so it's hard not to be bleak at this point because things are just really quite shit on many

00:49:12.820 different factors but at the same time i feel like it's just all the more reason to you know

00:49:16.980 redouble efforts to push back against this stuff because these things aren't just going to magically

00:49:20.720 go away as a result of coronavirus or anything else as we've seen you you mentioned the identitarian 0.99

00:49:25.860 bollocks quote it does seem to have gone to a different level now i mean when covid hit off

00:49:33.280 it was sort of like no one really talked about it but we kept being told like the

00:49:37.440 black and other minority people are more affected by code which is fair enough of course they would 1.00

00:49:42.840 be but but that was almost presented as like a racism issue yeah like the coronavirus is racist

00:49:49.380 what i don't even understand that and and now people are going into work and being told that

00:49:55.180 you know they need to do training which tells them how racist they are and everybody's racist and

00:50:00.540 and like it seems to have gone to a different level and as someone who as we talked about at

00:50:05.260 the very beginning naively hoped that that we might actually dial some of that back as a result

00:50:10.500 of having some kind of external threat to unite us all.

00:50:14.280 It's very worrying.

00:50:15.480 Do you see any sort of unwinding of that path?

00:50:20.920 Because, I mean, the long-term trend is not good.

00:50:24.700 And I think people are starting to wake up to the end game

00:50:28.440 of where that takes you.

00:50:30.000 No, completely.

00:50:30.700 And I think, as you say, it is difficult to see

00:50:32.900 how you can push back against this at this point

00:50:34.840 because it has become so much more powerful.

00:50:36.860 You know, every institution it feels like.

00:50:38.180 And again, in response to the George Floyd killing, and in the weeks after that, the fact that you even saw huge corporations really getting in line to pledge their allegiance, basically, to not the Black Lives Matter movement, or the goals of trying to tackle police brutality, but this broader kind of identitarian idea, the idea that Western societies are white supremacists.

00:50:58.040 Not that they have problems with racial inequality and racism, but they are fundamentally hardwired, historically almost, to be these horrendous places. 0.58

00:51:06.160 This is a very extreme and bonkers and ahistorical view of the world.

00:51:10.680 And yet it's become something which is just the kind of orthodoxy,

00:51:13.640 at least in polite society.

00:51:15.060 And as you say, the way in which it's trickling down into workplaces,

00:51:17.760 I'm sure you guys get emails all the time, I certainly do,

00:51:20.580 about people being put through these training classes,

00:51:23.420 microaggression training.

00:51:24.540 I got one telling me they went through allyship training the other day.

00:51:27.400 What the hell that supposed to be?

00:51:28.220 You should go on that, mate. 0.97

00:51:29.800 Mate, speaking of allyship, you're the one that's very keen to go out brown women. 1.00

00:51:33.620 so you're doing all the allying you possibly can.

00:51:36.760 Absolutely.

00:51:37.320 Primarily in the bedroom.

00:51:38.260 Doing buffer all the stuff.

00:51:40.740 In a way, I tend to think because it's overreached,

00:51:43.720 that has to engineer a kind of response.

00:51:46.240 And this is why I think people do need to be braver

00:51:48.520 in relation to a lot of this stuff,

00:51:50.060 which is not an easy thing to say.

00:51:51.600 And that's one thing which I think is important to point out

00:51:53.820 is that a lot of this stuff, you know, council culture.

00:51:56.180 It's an easy thing to say.

00:51:57.180 It's not an easy thing to do.

00:51:58.080 No, exactly.

00:51:58.480 Especially when you work at somewhere like Spite

00:51:59.840 where it's my job to be anti-woke,

00:52:01.200 let alone something which could actually risk my employment

00:52:03.400 via those kinds of opinions.

00:52:04.860 So it's a very easy thing to do.

00:52:07.580 It's also important to underline,

00:52:08.700 which is something that gets lost in the identity politics

00:52:10.920 and council culture debate,

00:52:12.040 because the people who criticise, again,

00:52:14.380 the atmosphere of intolerance and censorship,

00:52:17.800 who say that you can't speak out,

00:52:19.100 they're often dismissed as,

00:52:20.260 oh, they're just people with a platform or powerful people

00:52:22.760 who are just complaining about being criticised.

00:52:25.860 But the people who are most badly hit by this stuff

00:52:28.080 are the people without those platforms,

00:52:29.340 People like Brian Leach, the guy who worked in Asda, who lost his job because he shared a Billy Connolly routine and took the mick out of it.

00:52:35.000 From a DVD they sell in Asda.

00:52:36.600 Exactly, which is insane when you think about it.

00:52:38.700 Or it's people like, again, J.K. Rowling became this big focus for a lot of the campaigns, saying it's absurd for her to talk about council culture.

00:52:44.480 She's got 40 million Twitter followers and more money than all of us combined.

00:52:47.740 But then you see a couple of weeks later, Gillian Phillips, who's a Scottish author, just said she supported J.K. Rowling on Twitter and she got dumped by a publisher.

00:52:54.420 It's people further down the pecking order.

00:52:55.760 Yeah. So on the one hand, that reminds us that it's easy for us to say, be brave, as it were.

00:53:00.340 But it's also, I think, demonstrates this stuff is reaching into ordinary people's lives now.

00:53:04.540 This isn't an academic discussion about what trends are going on in intellectual thought on universities and how nuts it is and how XYZ newspaper columnist wasn't allowed to speak at some Oxford college.

00:53:15.320 This is in people's lives now. And I think on the one hand, that makes it more serious and more pressing that we do something about it.

00:53:20.820 but I think hopefully will also engineer some kind of response to it

00:53:24.680 because it's not an academic discussion.

00:53:26.580 Well, I had a hilarious example of this when I did BBC Sunday Morning Live.

00:53:30.660 It was me and three other panelists, and they asked me, you know,

00:53:34.360 why I'm concerned about cancel culture.

00:53:36.100 And I went to give examples, and I made this very point

00:53:39.440 that it's not about necessarily J.K. Rowling,

00:53:41.960 although that's obviously a good example.

00:53:43.620 There are people like, and I started to go into examples of ordinary people

00:53:46.560 like Nick Buckley, who we had on the show,

00:53:48.220 and i got immediately interrupted by the presenter who said we don't have time for examples

00:53:52.400 uh so i sort of made the best of it and then the very next speaker went well cancel culture only

00:53:59.620 affects the rich and famous i was like i just tried to give you examples and i'm not allowed

00:54:04.440 to and then the next person is unchallenged either in in arguing this point now we get emails all the

00:54:09.980 time from people talking about this very thing and you know there are people who send us money

00:54:16.180 by post with anonymous letters saying i'm so terrified of even in any way leaving any digital

00:54:26.820 footprint of supporting your show a show that is very much middle of the road in my opinion we

00:54:31.660 talk to people from all over the spectrum about these issues and they are so terrified they won't

00:54:37.120 even give us their name or they won't even risk having their name in a letter in an envelope

00:54:41.800 uh that they sent to us because that's how terrified many people feel about uh about what's

00:54:47.880 going on the idea that this is some kind of elite obsession yeah uh is a joke and it's maintained

00:54:54.460 as i say by people like the bbc who don't actually allow people to make the point you've just met

00:54:59.160 which is it's about ordinary people not being able to speak their mind which is why i think

00:55:03.340 every time something like this happens it creates a big social stir not necessarily one in the elite

00:55:08.640 institutions, but it affects a lot of people because they go, I see myself in that story of

00:55:14.400 JK Rowling. I see myself in that story of this guy or that guy who's getting cancelled. And I

00:55:20.420 think it's a really important point that you've made there. No, definitely. And I think that's

00:55:23.560 one of the things which is, again, not to just use any opportunity to put the boot in the left,

00:55:27.640 but I think it's so fascinating that they've just hitched their wagon to cancel culture.

00:55:30.940 What cancel culture effectively is, is believing in the rights of bosses to sack people for their

00:55:35.080 opinions is bosses rights they used to go on about workers rights and they go on about bosses right

00:55:39.220 and it fascinates me that they've been so willing to not only just claim that cancer culture isn't

00:55:44.280 a thing but actually let's say to be active participants in it all the way through so yeah

00:55:48.340 the shamefulness of that is pretty striking and tom thank you so much for coming on the show it's

00:55:53.420 been an absolutely brilliant interview uh we always finish with the same question every time

00:55:57.960 which is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society but we really should be i think

00:56:03.820 I would say the kind of social impacts of lockdown which we do talk about a bit but I think just

00:56:08.380 needs underlying a little bit more because we talked a lot about the economic effects of lockdown

00:56:12.540 we talked a lot about civil liberties effects of lockdown we talk a lot about the mental health

00:56:16.200 impacts again which I think is serious but just the kind of broader way in which society could

00:56:20.380 fray during this period I think is really quite important I mean there was a ONS Office for

00:56:24.680 National Statistics bulletin put out in February I think so a month before this crisis here

00:56:28.600 pointing out the issue with kind of again kind of social atomization people were spending far

00:56:33.580 much more time online but much less likely to know their neighbours I think a line in it was

00:56:37.300 they feel safer walking around their neighbourhoods but they feel less likely to feel like they belong

00:56:41.560 to their own neighbourhoods a lot of these kind of long-standing issues with again communities

00:56:45.720 feeling like they were fraying a little bit people living more kind of atomised and separate lives

00:56:49.300 and I think in a situation where we'll spend what looks like the best part of a year if not more

00:56:53.420 being encouraged to be apart from one another being encouraged to be more suspicious of one

00:56:57.920 another being encouraged even to snitch on one another really concerned me so obviously I think

00:57:02.820 as I was saying earlier, I think the economic impact of all of this has got to be everyone's

00:57:06.260 mind front and centre. But I do worry, as we were talking about lockdown and coronavirus

00:57:10.400 accelerating various trends, again, that kind of coming apart of civil society and coming apart

00:57:15.260 of communities, I think could definitely be a quite awful long term consequence of this period

00:57:20.500 if we're not careful. Great stuff. Very positive show today. Thank you for watching, Tom. Where

00:57:25.480 can people follow you? So I'm on Twitter at Tom underscore Slater underscore and Spikes publishes

00:57:31.680 every day i've also got a bunch of podcasts spike podcasts every week um which i do my colleagues

00:57:35.960 fraser meyers and ella wheeler as well as well as a bunch of us both former guests of the show

00:57:40.480 both great and the podcast is brilliant uh tom thanks for coming back thank you for watching

00:57:44.760 we will see you at 7 p.m uh with a live stream or an interview the very next day after today

00:57:50.200 unless it's monday when we have a day off take care and see you soon guys

00:58:01.680 We'll be right back.

00:58:31.680 April 28th through June 7th, 2026, the Princess of Wales Theatre.

00:58:36.860 Get tickets at Mirvish.com.

TRIGGERnometry - November 01, 2020

Tom Slater ＂A Second Lockdown Will Be Disastrous＂

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