TRIGGERnometry - ＂We Live in the Age of Delusions＂ - Peter Hitchens

00:00:01.000 Hungry now.

00:00:04.000 Now.

00:00:07.000 What about now?

00:00:09.000 Whenever it hits you, wherever you are,

00:00:11.000 grab an O'Henry bar to satisfy your hunger.

00:00:15.000 With its delicious combination of big, crunchy, salty peanuts

00:00:19.000 covered in creamy caramel and chewy fudge with a chocolatey coating.

00:00:24.000 Swing by a gas station and get an O'Henry today.

00:00:27.000 O'Hungry O'Henry.

00:00:30.000 Don't you think part of the issue with our culture and our society as it is, and the politics as a result of that, is we live in the age of delusion?

00:00:40.780 Yes. And people have been encouraged to be deluded.

00:00:44.200 The problem that Andrew Burnham faces is that he's trying to do things which will fail because they're fundamentally unlikable.

00:00:51.260 The most likely thing has got to be the currency, which is losing value hand over fist as we speak through the great fear that I have.

00:01:00.000 that the money which we use simply ceases to exist.

00:01:03.700 I don't know how a country in our current state

00:01:06.200 would cope with that.

00:01:07.500 The country is obviously finished.

00:01:09.620 It's just a question of how and when

00:01:12.320 this will become evident to everybody.

00:01:13.940 I sort of laughed when you said the country is finished

00:01:16.080 because of the way you said it.

00:01:18.360 But actually, I'm afraid both Francis and I, over time,

00:01:22.100 come around to the idea that Peter Hitchens was right.

00:01:24.120 this episode is sponsored by our friends at hillsdale college right after this episode go

00:01:31.880 check out the incredible online courses which are absolutely free at hillsdale.edu slash trigger

00:01:38.740 peter it's always a pleasure to have you back on the show i always look forward to it immensely

00:01:44.380 um when you're looking at the uk at the moment what is your diagnosis where are we how far do

00:01:51.540 have to go till you know your predictions come true oh i couldn't predictions very easy to make

00:01:59.220 but it's not so easy to say exactly when they're going to happen and the country is obviously

00:02:03.300 finished it's just a question of of how and when this will become evident to everybody

00:02:09.140 the most likely thing is has got to be the currency which is losing value hand over fist

00:02:14.660 as we speak but at a sort of normal rate but it actually gets into a really serious inflationary

00:02:20.020 spiral, then that will make it evident. Because everything we do at the moment is based upon

00:02:25.600 an overestimate of how rich we are. And if the currency shrinks to the point where you can't

00:02:30.440 make that pretense anymore, then everything, all the things that people don't dare reform,

00:02:35.740 particularly the enormous amount of government spending, will shrivel away and will be blown

00:02:42.240 away in a wind of inflation. And I think it's quite possible that that will be the end of it,

00:02:45.600 but there might be other things.

00:02:47.400 There's a great determination in our elite

00:02:49.460 to get us embroiled in a European war.

00:02:52.060 And some people still want us, I think,

00:02:53.540 to get embroiled in a war with Iran.

00:02:55.000 So these also could tip us off the tracks.

00:02:59.500 There's a film, a very interesting film,

00:03:01.200 which was made by the four runners of the CIA, the OSS,

00:03:05.440 during the later years of the Second World War,

00:03:09.000 showing how to derail a train,

00:03:10.880 which was something they were then interested in doing

00:03:12.640 rather than stopping.

00:03:14.040 And it's quite difficult.

00:03:17.020 It's much harder than you think.

00:03:19.300 I won't give you any hints.

00:03:20.620 But as Alan Smith said, a country has a lot of ruin in it.

00:03:25.000 So it can take quite a while.

00:03:26.220 But definitely the direction is downwards at an accelerating pace.

00:03:32.120 What makes you say that?

00:03:33.740 So there's the currency element of it?

00:03:35.500 There's the economic element of it?

00:03:37.680 First simple fact, this is a country

00:03:40.480 which is where the government is borrowing money to pay the interest on its debts.

00:03:45.080 If you knew somebody who was doing that, you'd expect trouble.

00:03:49.100 Secondly, it's a country which has very little power of recovery

00:03:52.320 because we destroyed, largely in the Thatcher era at other times as well,

00:03:57.440 our industrial capacity.

00:03:58.620 So the ability to rebuild is very, very limited.

00:04:02.280 Then we have trashed our education system.

00:04:04.760 So the talent pool and the proper use of the talents of the country is almost impossible.

00:04:10.140 We haven't got the people who are trained either to do things or at the elite level to think rationally.

00:04:16.800 So there's an awful lot of irrationality and ignorance.

00:04:19.720 Then we have a criminal justice system, a police force, which might as well have been abducted by aliens and may well have been.

00:04:25.960 I don't know when did he last see one.

00:04:28.680 And a criminal justice system, which is obviously unable to cope.

00:04:32.860 The length of time people wait for trials and the quality of the trials when they get them is atrocious.

00:04:38.300 These all contribute to a general feeling that nothing works.

00:04:42.320 And then on top of that, of course, the transport system, which is utterly congested and falling to pieces.

00:04:49.920 What more would you ask?

00:04:51.620 If someone had cursed the country with a number of horrible things, which would happen to it?

00:04:57.140 Those things would be quite near the top of your list.

00:05:00.380 Didn't you find it quite strange when people were blaming?

00:05:04.260 It seemed to me, look, Keir Starmer was not the best of prime ministers.

00:05:07.460 I think we can all agree on that but he did seem to be blamed for every single thing that was

00:05:13.600 happening when if you look at it you just go if you're in any way objective you go our problems

00:05:19.240 preceded Keir Star. Yes but his claim that he made things better which he made the other day

00:05:25.840 in parliament is I think a bit a bit of a nerve. And I am confident that Britain is now stronger

00:05:33.660 and fairer than it was two years ago our economy is stronger our public services are on the up

00:05:41.220 with the biggest fall in waiting times for 17 years children are being lifted out of poverty

00:05:46.840 every single day immigration is down significantly our defense and security are on a far stronger

00:05:54.420 footing and our international reputation is greatly enhanced so no I think we sat and talked

00:06:02.460 about the problems of Keir Star and my problems

00:06:04.900 was that people thought that he was a sort of blank sheet

00:06:07.460 on which they could project their desires

00:06:08.940 when in fact he was and remains a dogmatic person

00:06:12.620 leading a dogmatic party

00:06:14.140 which is determined to do things which will fail.

00:06:16.720 That's the problem that Andrew Burnham faces

00:06:18.900 that he's trying to do things which will fail

00:06:21.940 because they're fundamentally unworkable.

00:06:24.360 You can't carry on behaving like that when there's no money.

00:06:27.700 Can you flesh it out?

00:06:28.700 Because I think it's a really important point

00:06:30.520 and it would be worth somebody who's as thoughtful about these issues as you are

00:06:35.240 to breaking it down in a little bit more detail.

00:06:38.200 When you say that the Labour Party and Andrew Burnham, as you call him,

00:06:43.260 are determined to do things...

00:06:44.340 What should I call him?

00:06:45.360 Well, Andy Burnham, he wears T-shirts for that very purpose.

00:06:47.760 Why must we do this?

00:06:49.880 I don't know him.

00:06:50.960 I realised the other day I had met him once, but had forgotten it.

00:06:55.540 But I don't claim to know why should I call him by his name?

00:06:59.160 What is Mr. Burnham likely to do, and why is it likely to fail?

00:07:03.380 He's likely to spend an awful lot of money he hasn't got.

00:07:05.980 He has to satisfy a new set of backers who will desire a different pattern of spending, but fundamentally similar.

00:07:13.900 But the real problem that besets this country is twofold.

00:07:17.760 The first is its extraordinary belief that it's much more important, much richer, and much more powerful than it is,

00:07:23.980 which causes us to, first of all, to engage in all kinds of foreign policy,

00:07:29.060 which is dangerous and expensive,

00:07:30.380 and also to spend money on defending our islands,

00:07:33.460 which is frankly misspent.

00:07:35.260 There's this call for us to spend more.

00:07:37.580 The question is not how much you spend, but what you spend it on.

00:07:41.300 You spend it on a Cold War superpower,

00:07:43.920 a submarine-launched intercontinental ballistic missile deterrent force,

00:07:48.740 then you will bankrupt yourself if you're a small country

00:07:50.980 country off the northwest coast of Europe without many resources. And it won't work. So that's

00:07:57.140 problem one. And most conservatives live in that deluge. The other thing which governments have

00:08:02.580 been trying to do really since the late 1950s, and particularly since the late 1960s, is to

00:08:08.640 substitute the state for the family. The two things have gone on together. I think very few

00:08:15.100 of the people involved have realized that they're even linked, but they are. The one is to enormously

00:08:19.800 weaken the married family as an institution so that it's almost ceased to exist in large parts

00:08:26.440 of the country. And the other to concentrate more and more and more on state provision for the

00:08:31.360 raising of children and indeed for looking after the old, which are things the state is not actually

00:08:36.820 very good at doing. And it's also fantastically expensive. End of life care is enormously expensive

00:08:43.540 as we see, and the schools and the nurseries and everything 1.00

00:08:50.120 which we provide to substitute for the mothers 1.00

00:08:53.280 who've now all been conscripted into the workforce 1.00

00:08:55.460 don't bring up children anything like as well

00:08:58.600 as a family and home used to do.

00:09:00.940 So it's both expensive and bad.

00:09:03.680 So those are the fundamental millstones grinding together

00:09:07.560 which make running this country impossible

00:09:09.860 until anybody turns around and says,

00:09:11.320 these things are mistakes we must stop doing them and also until there's somebody with the political

00:09:17.080 courage to say to the people in this country these things that we need to do will be difficult

00:09:25.060 they will mean that there is less a lot of things that you become used to and you will have to do

00:09:31.100 more and the state will have to do less and that is a hard thing for anybody to say and doesn't

00:09:37.020 tend to win elections. No. And this is why, you know, I sort of laughed when you said the country

00:09:41.900 is finished because of the way you said it. But actually, I'm afraid both Francis and I over time

00:09:48.380 sort of regularly as we're talking about something else eventually come around to the idea that Peter

00:09:53.280 Hitchens was right when he said, you know, people should leave. Most people do get it in the end,

00:09:59.080 but it often, as always, I can't communicate my experience of life in the world to other people.

00:10:04.220 I've had a uniquely privileged life, not in terms of being rolling in money, but in terms

00:10:09.440 of being able to see things, seeing how this country is run at close quarters when I used

00:10:13.440 to be a political reporter and other things, and seeing the country from outside when I

00:10:17.800 lived abroad.

00:10:18.760 And so I just happened, and also having a Marxist-Leninist training, so I'm just simply

00:10:24.360 not credulous in the face of propaganda.

00:10:27.060 So I see things differently from other people.

00:10:28.980 It takes them a while to realize that I'm not joking.

00:10:31.680 I'm not.

00:10:32.660 I'm just not joking.

00:10:34.220 Quite. And I suppose one of the challenges you described there is, and I think it was partly cultural but partly also technologically driven, you talk about the, I don't want to overstate the case, but I think it's definitely true if you look even at the opinion polling in terms of what women say they would prefer to do given the opportunity. 0.86

00:10:53.860 even in our society now which has this sort of girl boss feminist ideology lots and lots of

00:11:00.900 women nonetheless say that they would prefer to spend lots of time with their children if they

00:11:04.760 could the challenge is as you say rightly that even if you were at an i mean at an individual 0.89

00:11:11.720 level you literally have to be uh as a man in that situation earning way way above the average

00:11:17.720 income in this country to be able to provide that for most people i think that's true but even if

00:11:22.660 you were to find some way of doing that, you'd end up with, you know, your GDP would go down

00:11:26.860 rapidly and all the other problems that do it. I don't know whether it's even reversible. It was

00:11:32.700 the most cynical pact since the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1939 when the ultra-left feminists to 0.99

00:11:39.600 the sort of Betty Friedan type and big business got together and said, right, let's get every 1.00

00:11:44.380 woman in the country we can out of the home and into the workplace, turn them into wage slaves 1.00

00:11:49.500 and convince them, as was successfully done 1.00

00:11:53.660 by the whole array of women's magazines and television programs

00:11:57.420 and everybody else who preached on and on and on. 1.00

00:12:01.300 Work outside the home is the only respectable form of work.

00:12:06.060 Working inside the home is demeaning slavery tied, 0.65

00:12:09.200 chained to the kitchen sink.

00:12:11.100 And that idea has been so successful. 1.00

00:12:13.200 I think a lot of women have found in practice that it's not true. 0.99

00:12:17.160 But it's too late now because of the conscription of women, 0.93

00:12:20.920 and I regarded it as conscription of women, 0.83

00:12:22.960 into the workforce is now more or less complete.

00:12:24.600 And it's very hard to escape from that cycle.

00:12:27.640 Yeah, absolutely.

00:12:28.720 So I was agreeing.

00:12:30.120 It's also possible for men to discuss it.

00:12:32.580 Immediately you're accused of wanting to oppress women.

00:12:36.720 If women want to go out to work, that's fine by me.

00:12:40.020 None of my business if people want to. 1.00

00:12:42.140 But if they come under immense social and economic pressure to do so,

00:12:45.200 then that's different.

00:12:45.740 Well, that's exactly why I made the point. All the polling shows that when asked, women consistently say that many, many women, not all of course, but I think it's something like 80% say they would prefer more time with their children. And like you say, that seems to me difficult to reverse, particularly in the current economic climate.

00:13:05.380 I wish I could think of a way of making it possible to reverse it, but at the moment I just look at it and think, oh heck.

00:13:11.960 And the other point you make, which is something we've talked about a lot,

00:13:15.720 which I think is undeniable, is we're living way beyond our means.

00:13:19.360 People want to pretend this isn't true.

00:13:22.260 And yet, at the same time, for actually the reasons you also articulated so well,

00:13:26.760 you have a situation, because government is seen as the ultimate provider of all things,

00:13:33.100 if people feel poorer, or are poorer, it's then automatically assumed that,

00:13:38.940 well, that's the government's...

00:13:40.460 That's the government's fault, so they don't vote for them.

00:13:42.300 And the government should fix that.

00:13:43.700 So they don't vote for somebody else without checking very carefully what they're going to get.

00:13:49.020 Yes.

00:13:49.520 When we last discussed British politics, what I was trying to explain to people was that voting reform in large numbers was voting for the Labour Party, which turned out to be true, I think, in a fairly clear way.

00:14:01.200 It wasn't very difficult to work out, and it was absolutely the case.

00:14:03.920 And how could anybody have thought, especially those people who voted for reform, that putting the Labour Party in office was going to solve any of the economic or political, social, educational or law and order problems which the country faces?

00:14:17.700 I don't know.

00:14:19.300 Voting is so irrational.

00:14:21.560 I mean, those people would say to, would counter with, well, hang on a second, Pete.

00:14:26.240 We've had 14 years of Conservative government.

00:14:28.240 They've effectively led us to where we are.

00:14:30.200 Oh, sure.

00:14:31.120 So why would I vote for them again?

00:14:32.760 Tell me about it. I've been arguing against the Conservative Party since the early years of the 21st century, begging people to dump it. But the point came when the alternative was so bad that it was worth going down to the seashore and hauling the thing out of the sea where it had been dumped, because it was better than what was coming.

00:14:52.520 And I couldn't explain that to anybody either.

00:14:54.240 My fundamental principle now, which I put to people,

00:14:56.420 is if you understand what's going on,

00:14:58.100 you must learn the art of voting against what you don't want,

00:15:00.640 not try to vote for what you do.

00:15:02.700 You will never get what you want,

00:15:04.640 but you might stop what you don't want or some of it by voting cleverly.

00:15:08.940 And speaking of avoiding things you don't want,

00:15:11.280 you mentioned the potential currency crisis.

00:15:13.880 The fact that there's a looming fiscal crisis

00:15:16.880 is something people have talked a lot about on our show,

00:15:20.000 most recently, Nigel Farrars made that point in the interview we just did. We had lots of people

00:15:25.340 explain the mechanics of it. One of the hopes I know exists within some people is, and I sort of

00:15:33.780 am tempted by this idea without being an expert on it, is it feels to me like if there is a chance

00:15:39.440 to turn some things around, I know you'll say there isn't, and I'll probably eventually agree

00:15:42.960 with you 10 years from now, but nonetheless, humor me for now. If there is a chance to turn

00:15:47.340 things around. It's that moment when we are forced by the external circumstances of reality

00:15:53.260 to confront the massive spending that we can't afford because we have a fiscal crisis. And

00:15:59.120 basically the people who actually own this country, which is the people we borrow money from,

00:16:03.320 say, you can't do this anymore. You've got to do this. And then we're forced to confront that

00:16:07.880 reality. Do you think there's any chance of that? Well, I suppose it's possible. The sun might rise

00:16:12.660 in the West, but I don't see any likelihood of it.

00:16:16.180 I don't see anybody in British politics who's capable of, A, saying it, and B, winning an

00:16:21.180 election on that basis.

00:16:22.240 That's why cataclysms happen.

00:16:27.060 I saw in Moscow when I was living there in the 90s after the collapse of the Soviet Union,

00:16:33.440 the middle-class professional people standing by the roadside.

00:16:38.300 Do you remember those little fake wood veneer tables everybody had?

00:16:41.900 Only too well, Peter.

00:16:43.000 Exactly.

00:16:43.560 They were a characteristic of the whole of the Communist bloc.

00:16:45.940 And on them were displayed shoes, ornaments, cutlery, 0.72

00:16:50.740 all the stuff of ordinary life on sale by the roadside to pay for bread.

00:16:58.000 That's what people were selling their possessions to pay for bread.

00:17:00.780 And these were people who five years before thought themselves secure in their jobs,

00:17:06.280 their children secure in their education.

00:17:08.200 They thought they were secure in their accommodation.

00:17:09.980 They saw a life ahead of roughly what they previously enjoyed,

00:17:14.120 and it came to an end.

00:17:14.780 The problem with catastrophes is that rather than being like that amazing painter

00:17:19.240 who has his pictures in a tech gallery where the sky falls in

00:17:22.220 and everything turns red and the huge earthquakes and floods of lava

00:17:26.280 and everybody dies, the cataclysm happens.

00:17:29.720 You're still alive, but you're living in the ruins of your former life

00:17:33.760 as a ghost of your former self, and that's what happens.

00:17:36.900 And this is generally when money dies, which is the great fear that I have, that the money which we use simply ceases to exist, really.

00:17:47.300 It just becomes paper and binary code, and it doesn't pay for anything.

00:17:52.260 And when money dies, then that's what happens.

00:17:56.140 But the problem is this is also accompanied by social disorder and is very hard to control.

00:18:02.660 And I don't know how a country in our current state would cope with that.

00:18:05.920 It's not something I look forward to, but if a modern Jeremiah was saying this is what's going to happen, 0.59

00:18:12.540 we're not all going to be carried off by the Babylonians for servitude,

00:18:16.820 but we might well find ourselves in a state of severe hyperinflation and imposed poverty of a sort we simply never thought we'd see. 0.64

00:18:26.440 And also what we'll see in that kind of instance is the rise of political extremism.

00:18:30.580 Well, it's already rising, isn't it?

00:18:32.200 are you the people are willing to listen now to people they ought never to listen to

00:18:36.000 who are you talking about you can spend three hours in a cinema watching christopher nolan's

00:18:41.900 movie adaptation of the odyssey or you can spend that same three hours understanding the actual

00:18:46.620 poem for free guided by a hillsdale college professor hillsdale college runs free online

00:18:52.420 courses on the books that shape the western tradition taught by their own faculty using

00:18:57.260 the same material their students study on campus the newest course covers home is the odyssey

00:19:01.840 Professor Benedict Wayland walks through it.

00:19:04.360 Courage, loyalty, leadership, temptation, family,

00:19:07.000 and what it actually means to go home.

00:19:08.900 It has held an audience for close to 3,000 years.

00:19:12.120 That doesn't happen by accident.

00:19:13.740 The scene that changes how you read the whole thing

00:19:16.320 is Calypso offering Odysseus immortality

00:19:18.760 if he stays with her and he turns it down.

00:19:21.360 He picks a mortal life, an aging wife,

00:19:23.760 a home that might not even want him back anymore.

00:19:26.320 That's the entire argument of the book in one scene.

00:19:28.880 There are more than 40 of these courses

00:19:30.520 and I couldn't recommend them more highly.

00:19:32.660 Go to hillsdale.edu slash trigger to enrol.

00:19:35.600 It's totally free.

00:19:36.660 Read the classics, study the West.

00:19:38.640 That's hillsdale.edu slash trigger.

00:19:42.200 And also what we'll see in that kind of instance

00:19:44.740 is the rise of political extremism.

00:19:46.640 Well, it's already rising, isn't it?

00:19:48.540 The people are willing to listen now

00:19:50.480 to people they ought never to listen to.

00:19:52.460 Who are you talking about?

00:19:57.060 You can care.

00:19:58.000 I mean, it's not even worth raising names.

00:20:00.980 I mean, there are people now becoming, I won't say prominent,

00:20:04.620 but influential on the edges of politics who are very worrying indeed.

00:20:09.560 I don't want to help them at all even by naming them.

00:20:12.300 You're talking about both the far left and the far right, I'm guessing.

00:20:15.580 I don't think the far left has much to say, frankly.

00:20:18.460 What about Zach Polanski, for example?

00:20:21.200 Well, he sort of imploded, didn't he?

00:20:23.600 I mean, there's still, look, I mean, this is a relatively small sample size, 0.99

00:20:27.380 But where I live, which is a she-she borough of North London, it's covered in green placards. 1.00

00:20:34.580 Well, the enthusiasm for the Green Party has been, really since official communism collapsed, 1.00

00:20:41.720 has been the resort of the left all over Europe.

00:20:45.400 And that's what they do.

00:20:46.900 And when you see that the Labour Party is in government, they're no longer able to deliver because it can't.

00:20:53.560 if you still want to pretend that someday there might be a government

00:20:56.720 that would do what the left want governments to do,

00:20:59.920 then Green's your party, isn't it?

00:21:02.940 Can I just come back to something, which is, you know,

00:21:06.520 you talked about the collapse of the Soviet Union.

00:21:09.180 You and I both witnessed it with our own eyes, 0.78

00:21:11.180 and those scenes are very memorable.

00:21:12.900 And Francis, you know, his family background being from Venezuela, 1.00

00:21:16.860 I think it's one of the things that separates us from many people 1.00

00:21:19.660 because we know that the status quo is not remotely permanent

00:21:26.200 and can only be maintained by good policy.

00:21:29.900 And if good policy ceases to be practiced, then cataclysm is what will follow.

00:21:34.540 Most of the things which happened, happened to people who five years beforehand

00:21:38.440 would never have imagined that they could possibly have.

00:21:40.240 University professors.

00:21:41.400 They were university professors three days ago,

00:21:43.520 and now they were selling their belongings in the street.

00:21:45.520 Yeah, that's what happened.

00:21:46.080 That's it, that's what happened.

00:21:46.920 And it also happened, interestingly, not so much in Britain,

00:21:50.340 but it happened in the United States during the Great Depression.

00:21:52.440 Yes.

00:21:53.020 The highly qualified professional people were begging from door to door.

00:21:55.880 Yes.

00:21:56.440 And they had no conception of this lay ahead. 0.64

00:22:00.980 But the reason I bring this up is Russia is not the best example

00:22:06.620 because, you know, with Putin in charge,

00:22:09.380 it pollutes people thinking about this. 0.78

00:22:11.040 And, you know, he's obviously, in my opinion, a terrible person.

00:22:14.820 Well, in mine too, so I agree on that.

00:22:16.680 Good. But if you take a country like Poland, or indeed, like you say, the United States after the Great Depression, there is the possibility for recovery.

00:22:26.660 There is the possibility to fundamentally change course and to let go of the terrible policies that have taken you to the place you've ended up,

00:22:36.320 to accept the pain and the suffering that comes, and out of that to have clarity about how to move forward in a different way.

00:22:43.040 Sure, but you don't know how, and it might turn out badly.

00:22:45.780 What I wish people would do would be to see the possibility of catastrophe and act accordingly.

00:22:50.760 Me too. It's not going to happen.

00:22:52.240 It's not going to happen.

00:22:52.880 Well, that's my fear.

00:22:53.560 We know it's not going to happen.

00:22:54.400 That's my fear.

00:22:57.020 If I had some way of entering the minds of people with speech and thought and writing, then I would.

00:23:10.920 Look, I'm in my mid-70s.

00:23:14.000 I have nothing particular to gain left in life.

00:23:17.600 I haven't got all that much longer to live.

00:23:20.220 If it were possible for me to do anything to prevent this from happening,

00:23:25.000 then I would do it, but I've tried.

00:23:28.120 And people don't listen. 0.63

00:23:30.140 They prefer to listen to more seductive voices.

00:23:33.140 And I don't offer seduction at all.

00:23:38.020 I can't.

00:23:38.620 It would be dishonest.

00:23:39.700 but people would prefer to be seduced

00:23:41.520 than to be told the truth.

00:23:44.000 And it's only after catastrophes happen

00:23:46.440 that it's possible.

00:23:47.540 So there are other people, I'm sure,

00:23:49.520 in this country who feel the same way,

00:23:50.820 that things are going very badly

00:23:51.880 and something ought to be done to stop it.

00:23:54.040 But where are they?

00:23:55.820 Where are they?

00:23:56.480 They're not in the civil service.

00:23:57.660 They're not in senior posts in the universities.

00:23:59.780 They're not leading the political parties.

00:24:01.260 They're not, by and large,

00:24:02.480 prominent in the media,

00:24:03.400 particularly the broadcast media,

00:24:05.600 which is, to anybody remotely informed

00:24:09.120 or with any historical knowledge, listening to our broadcast media is torture.

00:24:13.400 Yes. Yes, it absolutely is.

00:24:16.080 I guess what I'm trying to ask you is, and look, I completely appreciate your perspective.

00:24:21.340 And I think if you're looking at it in a 10-year time frame, I don't see this country being better in 10 years.

00:24:29.080 No, but I can't. It might in 10 years still have managed to teeter along like the train in the USS film.

00:24:38.020 that no one will actually manage to get it off the rails.

00:24:40.520 It might still survive.

00:24:42.240 You can't tell.

00:24:43.680 What I'm getting at is something else.

00:24:45.040 Predictions are easy in general,

00:24:47.080 but they're hard in terms of how long it's going to take.

00:24:50.080 What I'm getting at is something else,

00:24:51.760 which is my hope,

00:24:55.620 and I only express it as a hope,

00:24:57.500 not as a belief about what's likely to happen,

00:24:59.340 is that the inevitable cataclysm

00:25:01.720 can produce the conditions for recovery.

00:25:04.620 Not necessarily recovery,

00:25:05.720 but the conditions from which recovery is possible.

00:25:07.700 Very Marxist.

00:25:10.360 Tell me more.

00:25:11.020 All my comrades in the late 60s and early 70s were rather hoping for a collapse

00:25:16.180 out of which might arise the longed-for revolution with the leading role of the party

00:25:20.860 and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

00:25:23.520 That was the theory.

00:25:24.680 It was all going to go wrong.

00:25:25.840 And I have to say, Ted Heath in the early 70s made it look very much as if we were right.

00:25:32.460 Kept trying to shut the country down, pick huge fights with industrial unions,

00:25:36.660 and so nothing worked.

00:25:37.700 blackouts. Fantastic.

00:25:40.700 He was a great... I remember the recruits

00:25:42.560 pouring into the International Socialists

00:25:44.380 in the early 70s

00:25:46.920 about that time. 0.92

00:25:49.060 Ted Heath was a great recruiter for Marxism

00:25:50.880 and Leninism.

00:25:52.460 But in the end, he let us all down.

00:25:55.680 Sadly.

00:25:56.840 Losing an election. Harold Wilson.

00:25:59.300 I mean, I am not

00:26:00.920 hoping for...

00:26:02.600 I, like you... No, no, no. I'm just

00:26:04.740 telling you, this is the formula.

00:26:06.320 I don't myself believe that catastrophe is justifiable.

00:26:13.340 No, I'm not saying it's justifiable.

00:26:15.240 Or desirable or even conscionable.

00:26:19.480 I think you have to say, if it looks as if there's going to be a catastrophe,

00:26:23.460 do whatever you can to prevent it and warn against it.

00:26:27.280 But Peter, you and I have to be honest.

00:26:28.920 We have all been making these arguments.

00:26:31.280 We've been trying to say we're heading towards a cliff.

00:26:33.360 No one wants to listen, because they're much more comfortable spending money we don't have.

00:26:37.600 So they're not going to listen to us.

00:26:38.920 Okay, so we'll go and build a shelter in New Zealand.

00:26:42.600 We are going off the cliff.

00:26:43.380 I don't know what you're supposed to do, really.

00:26:44.920 We're going off the cliff.

00:26:45.560 We'll go up and find a monastery in a high mountain, Shangri-La.

00:26:51.900 I don't know.

00:26:54.680 If you can't influence it, but I very much doubt whether catastrophe will produce at the end of it,

00:27:01.000 by some kind of baptism of fire, a better world than the one that was before.

00:27:05.640 So, but the examples you gave, like we said, the collapse of communism,

00:27:09.540 it had been very beneficial to many, many countries in Eastern Europe.

00:27:13.000 The collapse of communism has, but on the other hand...

00:27:16.520 They've had a recovery.

00:27:17.720 The US after the Great Depression had a recovery.

00:27:20.200 They have had a recovery.

00:27:21.200 Even World War II, terrible as it was, there was a recovery after that.

00:27:24.460 Well, that's true.

00:27:24.960 All these things are true, but this is a different thing.

00:27:29.060 Why?

00:27:29.460 Well, first of all, everybody knows when you start wars

00:27:34.400 that there will be terrible destruction

00:27:36.860 and everything will change as a result. 0.58

00:27:38.380 And there is an opportunity for Reconstruction.

00:27:40.040 Though I have to say that there were quite a lot of peoples

00:27:43.040 in the world who'd been affected by World War II

00:27:45.340 who didn't get all that much Reconstruction afterwards. 0.95

00:27:48.060 Lucky old Western Europe did quite well.

00:27:50.080 A lot of other people didn't.

00:27:53.460 Everybody knew.

00:27:54.900 I've just been reading Robert Service's book about the August 1991

00:27:59.460 which everybody knew in the Soviet Union it could not go on.

00:28:03.760 They knew it had to be fixed in some way politically and economically.

00:28:07.660 Gorbachev, alas, was not an economist or even runnily skilled in economy.

00:28:13.040 He tried to do what he could in ignorance.

00:28:15.620 And also, he was faced with Western leaders

00:28:19.140 who continued to have a profound mistrust of him as a Soviet leader

00:28:23.600 and so would not help. 1.00

00:28:25.320 He would repeat it.

00:28:26.100 It comes up very much in the Soviet book.

00:28:27.880 And the number of times he goes to Western leaders and says, look, we're on the verge of economic catastrophe.

00:28:33.640 What we need is some sort of new Marshall Plan.

00:28:35.840 And I'm saying, well, not until you've denationalized the sugar industry or some such.

00:28:40.160 And they kept making conditions.

00:28:41.880 They never did. 0.55

00:28:43.220 And one of the reasons for the piratical rate of what was left for the Soviet economy

00:28:49.940 was the unwillingness of the West to enter into a proper, serious reform program.

00:28:55.880 I think you won't find that in Poland.

00:28:58.240 I think a lot of effort was made.

00:29:00.000 It has been a fantastic success, I might say,

00:29:02.360 to turn Poland into a modern, well-off, civilized, law-governed country,

00:29:06.980 which I think the world should be really pleased about.

00:29:09.320 But I do often wonder why the same thing wasn't done in Russia.

00:29:13.060 Could have been, I think. 0.54

00:29:14.580 Well, but this is my point.

00:29:15.860 Fantastic resources, incredibly well-educated people.

00:29:18.360 Of course. 0.99

00:29:18.680 But thrown away, and the place turned into a declining slum and a dictatorship. 0.99

00:29:27.820 Very good point, but a bit of a side point. 0.93

00:29:29.840 Well, you mentioned it.

00:29:32.560 My point is something else.

00:29:33.640 Material things have, to some extent, recovered.

00:29:35.980 They're not by any means for everybody, I don't think.

00:29:37.660 I think there's still people living very badly in Russia.

00:29:40.660 Yes, there are.

00:29:41.280 What I'm saying is, in a cataclysm, which you and I, well, I think the three of us think

00:29:47.700 is kind of inevitable uh there is the opportunity for recovery the opportunity for recovery um i

00:29:54.020 accept that you do yeah of course you can't you can't be you can't be certain about the future

00:29:59.540 there you go not a sunshine from peter hitchens we got there no you can't be certain i would think

00:30:04.260 it's unlikely but it's possible but never no you can rule things out which are plainly impossible

00:30:09.460 but what you can't rule out is something which is theoretically possible why do that don't you think

00:30:15.220 part of the issue with our culture and our society as it is and the politics as a result

00:30:20.920 of that is we live in the world in the age of delusion yes and people have been encouraged to

00:30:27.200 be deluded it's been going on for a very long time this is this is part of part of the point

00:30:32.600 that i harp on about my my bolshevik training i mean the fundamental thing that we were told

00:30:37.720 apart from some basic machiavellianism and how many people in modern world have read

00:30:42.060 Machiavelli's The Prince.

00:30:43.780 It's very short.

00:30:44.820 It didn't take long.

00:30:45.620 But they think they know, but they haven't read it.

00:30:49.320 There's so many books of that kind.

00:30:51.320 But the other thing we were told was how to tell pretexts from motive

00:30:58.540 and distinguish pretexts from reality.

00:31:01.800 And we're constantly bombarded with politicians giving us pretexts for actions

00:31:05.860 that are taking, which is fundamentally unbelievable, particularly in foreign policy.

00:31:09.660 People don't see through them.

00:31:10.680 Then again, we have an education system, which is, instead of challenging the intelligent of all classes to understand more and know more, encourage them in a child-centered myth of unknowing.

00:31:29.040 They're never actually compelled to learn things they didn't know, to find out that the books they've heard of contain things they didn't realize were in there.

00:31:36.280 And so we have a huge number of untrained minds among us.

00:31:41.780 That's one of the reasons why it's so easy.

00:31:44.940 It's one of the reasons why it's so easy to fool people into doing absurd things.

00:31:49.640 The COVID panic was such a warning of the general level of skepticism and trained minds in our society.

00:32:01.500 If the government had decreed that to reduce the spread of the disease, everybody had to wear a five inch long pink extension on their nose.

00:32:10.800 People would have done it. They very nearly did.

00:32:14.280 I mean, those masks that they wore, which, how should I put it, were of doubtful use, were also the other thing about them.

00:32:23.760 was that, to me, it was forced conformism.

00:32:32.580 If you instructed everybody in the country

00:32:34.600 to wear a Make America Great Again red baseball cap,

00:32:37.380 they'd say, well, I can't do that.

00:32:38.300 I don't agree with it.

00:32:39.680 By wearing one of those masks,

00:32:41.520 you were, especially under pressure,

00:32:43.360 you were endorsing an attitude towards the COVID panic,

00:32:48.940 which a lot of people didn't share.

00:32:50.360 One of the reasons I objected to it so much

00:32:53.020 It was forced conformism to an opinion, not just a silly action.

00:32:59.640 But the level, I mean, there were people, I mean, a lot of them got in touch with me,

00:33:04.180 and some people still do come up to me in the street about it.

00:33:06.660 There were people who resisted it, but enormous.

00:33:10.840 A majority of people were happy to accept it.

00:33:15.120 I'm going to be honest with you.

00:33:16.680 I used to think grilling was simple.

00:33:19.020 Meat goes on, meat comes off.

00:33:20.760 You look vaguely competent in front of your mates.

00:33:23.760 Jobs are good'un.

00:33:24.620 Then I tried to grill anything that wasn't a burger or a steak.

00:33:28.240 My frustration before Hexclad was that while the actual meat takes 20 minutes,

00:33:33.560 scraping the grill afterwards takes 45.

00:33:36.500 At some point, I stopped inviting people over for barbecues

00:33:39.740 because I couldn't face the cleanup.

00:33:42.180 Turns out the problem isn't you, it's the grill.

00:33:44.960 Standard grates were never designed for anything smaller than a steak,

00:33:49.080 Which is why your prawns end up in the coals and your salmon ends up in three pieces.

00:33:53.800 Hexclad solved this with their barbecue collection.

00:33:56.720 The grill pan combines the searing power of stainless steel,

00:34:00.120 the durability of cast iron and non-stick underneath,

00:34:03.340 so nothing wields itself to the surface.

00:34:06.140 It's perforated so heat and smoke still get to the food

00:34:09.200 and you still get that proper grilled flavor.

00:34:12.280 But your veggies, your seafood, your fish,

00:34:14.680 none of it is falling through the grates anymore.

00:34:17.020 If you want more control over delicate stuff, there's a grill topper, which gives you a full

00:34:21.760 flat surface for things like fish or thin cuts that fall apart the second you try and flip them.

00:34:27.500 And if you want the whole setup at once, there's the barbecue bundle, the grill pan,

00:34:32.060 plus a hybrid cutting board and carving set, so you're not running back into the kitchen every

00:34:36.820 five minutes. Over a million customers, more than 50,000 five-star reviews, Gordon Ramsay uses this

00:34:44.080 at home and in his own restaurants. And that man is not easily impressed. Every piece comes with a

00:34:50.700 lifetime warranty, so you're not replacing this next summer. Don't spend another season fighting

00:34:55.840 your grill. For a limited time, our audience gets 10% off with our exclusive link. Head to

00:35:02.020 hexclad.com slash trig. That's H-E-X-C-L-A-D.com forward slash trig. Tell them Trigonometry sent

00:35:12.200 you the thing that covid and more broadly all of these hysterias that have inflicted you know

00:35:19.080 inflicted our society impacted upon it the thing that i found most shocking above all was the

00:35:27.660 british public's desire for big government and to be looked after yeah i thought that was

00:35:33.180 fundamentally un-british well it used to be but the the um the paul convent who was the french

00:35:41.180 ambassador in London before, during, and after the First World War, said after it was over

00:35:48.380 that he believed that between 1914 and 1918, this country had undergone a revolution as

00:35:54.740 profound and significant as the one France had undergone in the 1780s and 1790s. And that

00:36:01.480 was the moment at which government became big and interfered in everybody's lives in

00:36:06.300 in almost every conceivable way.

00:36:08.360 The second dose, 39 to 45,

00:36:10.540 of course the third dose of the anti-government

00:36:12.580 has completely changed that.

00:36:14.440 The idea that the British are fundamentally independent-minded,

00:36:17.360 stand up on your own two feet quite like the Americans,

00:36:19.360 is actually not true. 0.86

00:36:20.840 And that's a very dangerous place to be

00:36:23.040 because we've seen that big government simply doesn't work

00:36:28.100 and what we have now is we're going broke,

00:36:30.620 but yet people have been indoctrinated

00:36:33.140 to believe that big government is what is needed

00:36:35.780 and they need to be looked after.

00:36:37.900 And ultimately, we're going to come in for a pretty rude awakening, aren't we?

00:36:41.500 Big government isn't always wrong.

00:36:43.640 In wartime, you need big government to be effective for a start.

00:36:47.120 There's some things, when I used to argue about nationalisation

00:36:50.120 and privatisation with conservatives,

00:36:53.020 I said, well, you say you don't want state control of anything.

00:36:56.100 Do you actually think you can privatise the Royal Navy?

00:36:59.180 Do you think that could run?

00:37:01.840 Some of them, to my amazement, said, well, yes, of course,

00:37:04.540 all you need to do is hire a lot of people with privateers.

00:37:06.640 I said, OK, well, then we're in the realm of madness here.

00:37:09.260 But they resisted the idea that anything

00:37:12.540 was better run by the state, although some things are.

00:37:15.680 So I'm not a let the free market rip person.

00:37:20.400 I mean, for instance, I would really

00:37:21.780 like it if they properly re-nationalized the railways 0.58

00:37:24.300 rather than the ridiculous porridge 0.58

00:37:27.000 they're making over at the moment,

00:37:28.360 because I think there are some things

00:37:29.980 which are just better run that way.

00:37:31.340 So, yeah, but there's no point yearning for British people to be as they were before 1914, because amongst other things you have to remember, until 1916, the British army, which went to France and was mown down in the mud, was composed of volunteers.

00:37:53.820 And these volunteers were people who'd been persuaded that this was a vital war for civilization in which every man and spirit had to take part as a matter of conscience.

00:38:04.700 So what did you do?

00:38:05.460 You lost the best people in the country, in many cases, before they could get children.

00:38:11.140 So it didn't just change the way that people behaved.

00:38:14.140 It actually changed the nature of the whole British population.

00:38:17.820 hundreds of thousands of men

00:38:20.840 who were the best of their generations of every class

00:38:24.120 were just mown down by a German machine on fire

00:38:27.360 and eaten by rats

00:38:28.220 before they could marry and have children.

00:38:31.120 And this affects the country.

00:38:32.660 I mean, you have similar catastrophic effects, of course,

00:38:35.640 in the European countries.

00:38:38.040 They're not quite the same

00:38:39.280 because of the volunteer nature of the British army.

00:38:41.220 I'm absolutely sure that the post-1917 civil war in Russia

00:38:49.440 either drove out of the country or killed huge numbers of the best people

00:38:55.020 and it made it very, very difficult.

00:38:57.040 And then the great purges of Stalin by their nature also selected the best people.

00:39:01.820 So you do make it difficult for a country to recover

00:39:05.140 when you kill so many of your best.

00:39:08.180 And that's a real concern.

00:39:10.540 and that was a shocking for me from COVID and, like I said, everything else,

00:39:15.020 is I expected more people to stand up and challenge and push back.

00:39:21.120 I remember being a kid in the classroom and being taught about Nazism

00:39:24.700 and going, look, I understand the chronology of events.

00:39:26.980 I don't understand how so many people could fall for this.

00:39:31.620 And then you see, I mean, the trans hysteria was one example.

00:39:35.560 You know, people saying, you know, you can change your sex

00:39:37.940 we both know that is palpably and scientifically false. And I just, and I saw this happen. I was

00:39:44.500 like, oh, I get it now. I get it how you could deny a fundamental reality. Yeah, but propaganda

00:39:50.020 can be very effective if it's well aimed and if it targets the right discontent. A lot of German 1.00

00:39:56.100 people were simply told that this is this period of unemployment and chaos and fighting in the

00:40:01.340 streets must come to an end. And they were told this, we are the people who will do it. And in

00:40:06.900 In many cases, they didn't ask too many questions about how it would be done in many cases.

00:40:11.700 You can easily understand how people you know could have done that, I think.

00:40:16.320 People pretend now that they would all have seen it coming, but from what we know, I'm

00:40:20.840 fairly sure quite a lot would not.

00:40:22.640 And it's also as well, with all of these things, there's always an element of self-interest.

00:40:28.140 There's nothing wrong with self-interest.

00:40:30.600 People have to be interested in themselves to some extent.

00:40:32.580 It's just it can be taken too far.

00:40:36.900 Peter, you touched on something very important about which you wrote a book, actually,

00:40:41.220 I think.

00:40:41.780 Was it called The War We Should Never Fought?

00:40:44.300 Well, The War We Never Fought is the one about drugs.

00:40:48.100 No, that's right.

00:40:49.160 I meant the one about World War. 0.83

00:40:50.140 The phony victory. 0.80

00:40:51.080 Yes.

00:40:51.640 Which people keep telling me is called the phony war, which absolutely is not.

00:40:55.880 That's a different subject.

00:40:57.440 The phony victory is, I was trying to be too clever, it does, if you think about it, explain

00:41:02.460 what's going on.

00:41:03.160 We came, everybody's heard of the phony war, and we sat around doing nothing for the first, what was it, nine months of war, and then suddenly we were engulfed in blitzkrieg, and the next thing you know, we're the victors at Potsdam.

00:41:16.820 And I thought, how do you get from the phony war, a defeated country, Dunkirk, bankruptcy, how do you get from there to being one of the victor countries?

00:41:26.420 And you don't, the truth is. 0.52

00:41:28.540 And we and France began the Second World War by declaring war on Hitler.

00:41:36.860 You could say he began it by invading Poland, 0.97

00:41:38.720 but it was a positive decision on our side to make that the issue. 0.97

00:41:45.160 But we weren't prepared for the war that we declared, particularly France.

00:41:50.780 We would all rely, people don't realize now just how much people believed

00:41:54.480 in the strength, the military strength of France in 1939.

00:41:57.360 They thought that it was colossal and unchallengeable,

00:42:00.660 this vast army which had been victorious in 1918

00:42:05.420 and was the army of a great and valorous country.

00:42:09.120 They were amazed that it collapsed.

00:42:12.220 It was like some great cathedral being wiped off the map.

00:42:14.840 People had no idea this could conceivably happen.

00:42:17.260 And we certainly didn't.

00:42:18.260 We were left with a war which we were not equipped to fight.

00:42:21.740 And so we ended up handing over the war to other people. 0.56

00:42:26.380 We handed over the war to the Soviet Union and the United States. 0.53

00:42:29.080 And we were on the winning side, but in my view, we were not the victors.

00:42:33.560 Well, I was going to ask you to go broader than that.

00:42:36.680 And you've written so much and spoken so much and thought so much about Britain and its history, particularly in the 20th century.

00:42:44.660 What is Peter Hitchens' take on the 20th century for this country and the trajectory of it?

00:42:50.660 Oh, the gravest mistake ever made by any British government was to enter the First World War in 1914.

00:42:56.820 We should never have done that.

00:42:59.060 There was no reason why we needed to, and many, many reasons why we should not have done it.

00:43:05.760 It cost us almost everything we had, and we continue to pay the price for it.

00:43:11.720 But flesh that out for people who may be less familiar with the argument.

00:43:15.460 You mentioned, obviously, losing hundreds of thousands of the best people.

00:43:19.700 We did, yeah.

00:43:21.140 But beyond that, how did we get from World War I to where we are today?

00:43:24.420 Well, at the beginning of World War I, we were a creditor country.

00:43:28.360 We had huge foreign investments.

00:43:30.540 We spent what we earned and we had, as it were, savings as a nation.

00:43:37.480 We were also a stable, more or less contented country.

00:43:41.720 I mean, there were problems, problems with Ireland and a number of other things,

00:43:44.040 but we were a solid society likely to last.

00:43:49.740 We were a Christian country.

00:43:51.280 Whether you like that or not, it was important to the existence of a shared morality.

00:43:56.020 We were a country in which people were monoculturally one.

00:44:04.360 Everybody knew the same things.

00:44:07.060 Everybody had read the same Bible and prayed the same prayers, sang the same hymns,

00:44:13.520 read the same novels, the works of Charles Dickens from a university.

00:44:18.740 knowing people could quote them to each other.

00:44:20.600 And we were a society of people holding together.

00:44:24.880 So economically and culturally, we were also a very peaceful society

00:44:28.660 because of the huge success of Robert Peel's policing reforms of the 19th century

00:44:34.980 and also because of the huge success of the Sunday schools,

00:44:38.520 which had spread morality right through society.

00:44:43.200 So we had all these enormous advantages.

00:44:45.100 We were also militarily strong in the only way it was counted, that is to say, no one could attack our islands because we have the strongest navy in the world.

00:44:53.760 And we then entered, for reasons which remain baffling, a Russo-German war, which was basically about Ukraine.

00:45:03.240 Hang on a minute. Sounds familiar.

00:45:06.280 Why did we do that? It's very difficult to find out.

00:45:09.700 And there was a strong war faction,

00:45:13.100 but it was quite a few people,

00:45:14.680 these people like Sir Henry Wilson,

00:45:16.540 who were trying pretty much to get us into war.

00:45:21.800 But most politicians were unaware

00:45:24.040 of the planning that had taken place.

00:45:26.700 Most of the cabinet, most of Asquith's cabinet,

00:45:28.760 didn't know how much military planning had taken place.

00:45:32.340 Joint military planning between Britain and France,

00:45:34.280 for instance, before 1914,

00:45:36.100 had been kept from them. 0.99

00:45:37.040 As for Parliament, it was completely ignorant. 0.93

00:45:39.740 And then the thing advanced with immense speed. 0.90

00:45:42.140 And people will say, well, what about Belgium?

00:45:43.940 Well, that's just very sad about Belgium.

00:45:45.240 But the truth is that Britain, when confronted with the conflict

00:45:48.320 between its own interests and morality,

00:45:51.680 has in the past dumped other people in the mud.

00:45:54.860 And most particularly, we did so in 1864,

00:45:57.320 when Prussia attacked Denmark and we promised to go to their aid.

00:46:02.060 And Parnston said, oh, actually, sorry, we're busy at the moment.

00:46:04.460 We're not coming.

00:46:06.200 And it's a horrible thing to do, but it was a very wise decision.

00:46:09.700 Because there's nothing we could have done, actually, to save Denver.

00:46:13.480 Most people in 1914 believed when war was declared that it would be a naval war,

00:46:18.020 that we would just enter it as we would send the Navy to help the French in various ways,

00:46:23.160 and that would be that.

00:46:25.020 No one had any idea we were going to create a huge continental-sized army

00:46:28.540 and lose hundreds of thousands of people and have conscription and rationing.

00:46:31.520 It never crossed their minds.

00:46:32.960 Doesn't it speak to also the arrogance of the political class at the time?

00:46:36.940 Because the, I can see you're going to disagree with this,

00:46:39.940 but wasn't the narrative that...

00:46:41.900 I don't think we've ever said anything that people have disagreed with.

00:46:44.560 Political classes are always arrogant. 0.64

00:46:46.100 That's why they do it.

00:46:48.580 Who should know better than I? 0.98

00:46:50.640 One of the most arrogant people I know. 0.56

00:46:52.240 So that's not in itself necessarily a criticism. 0.60

00:46:55.500 You have to be a bit arrogant if you want to do some things.

00:46:58.320 And the politics is one of them, I think.

00:46:59.980 But then there's a fundamental disconnect from reality

00:47:03.900 or getting a decision so disastrously wrong

00:47:06.260 that hundreds of thousands of people die

00:47:07.940 because the narrative at the time was,

00:47:10.500 well, this is all going to be done and dusted by Krimbo.

00:47:12.760 Well, some people said that.

00:47:14.020 I think there were three people in the cabinet

00:47:17.640 who were worried about it.

00:47:19.980 Two of them were John Burns and John Morley.

00:47:22.680 John Morley, probably the most intelligent person

00:47:25.580 in British politics at the time,

00:47:27.320 who actually resigned secretly,

00:47:30.440 Asquith asked him to keep it secret

00:47:31.800 over preparations for war,

00:47:35.460 trying to prevent it.

00:47:36.600 But Asquith, I think,

00:47:37.660 has serious doubts about it himself

00:47:39.420 because, again, he was a clever man.

00:47:41.820 But he was afraid that if he didn't declare war,

00:47:44.820 then his government would fall

00:47:45.880 and a pro-war coalition would form

00:47:48.200 between the pro-war elements of his own party

00:47:50.480 and the Tories,

00:47:52.340 and that he was panicked into it.

00:47:53.880 It wasn't a rational decision.

00:47:55.380 It was largely a panic.

00:47:56.720 and made partly on the grounds that things had got out of control,

00:48:02.220 which they did very rapidly.

00:48:04.140 Barbara Zuckman's The Guns of August

00:48:05.960 is probably the best description of how this happened.

00:48:09.580 It wasn't, no one sleepwalked into war, absolutely not at all. 0.90

00:48:13.620 The Germans quite deliberately encouraged Austria 0.52

00:48:19.200 into a confrontation with Russia in the hope that it would lead to war.

00:48:23.180 And that was, it was an accident, it was untrue.

00:48:26.200 But the diplomatic events which follow, particularly between Britain and Germany,

00:48:33.060 basically matters getting increasingly out of control because we didn't realize

00:48:37.180 that we were talking to a Germany which was absolutely set on war.

00:48:43.260 Fritz Fischer's great book makes this quite plain, there's no doubt in my mind, 0.56

00:48:47.200 Germany wanted a war, but they wanted a war with Russia.

00:48:50.840 They felt they would have to knock out France.

00:48:54.080 France was also frantic for war. 0.61

00:48:56.200 They wanted revenge for 1870, and they conducted the war

00:49:01.700 in the initial months of war, almost insanely,

00:49:04.000 sending waves of men in bright red trousers

00:49:06.320 to get straight into German gunfire.

00:49:09.220 The casualties were colossal and the military effect disastrous.

00:49:12.980 It was a crazy war, and we got involved in it.

00:49:18.120 And for what? 0.88

00:49:19.520 What was our interest if Russia and Germany

00:49:23.380 and Austria-Hungary have a conflict?

00:49:25.080 What was the conflict between those three nations?

00:49:55.080 and also it transferred all the the the baltic states from russian to german control and and

00:50:01.720 shifted poland that's that is the crucial people think of it being belgium and france but that's

00:50:07.640 gone the actual cockpit of war in 20th century europe but now in 21st century remains ukraine

00:50:14.200 this is a hugely important piece of territory and that's what they were worried about you know where

00:50:18.440 lenin is when do you know when lenin was when the war broke out no paris wasn't it no he was in

00:50:25.080 He was in Austro-Hungarian-controlled Poland, where he was quite valued, as it turned out,

00:50:32.860 by the Austro-Hungarians because of his role in fomenting anti-Moscow sentiment in what was to

00:50:39.160 become Ukraine. He was arrested by the local policeman because he was obviously Russian and

00:50:44.340 an alien. He looked sinister anyway. But within a couple of days of him being arrested in this 0.99

00:50:49.100 small country town. He was hoiked out of prison by the Austrian government, intervention I think

00:50:55.980 of the army high command and put on a train to Ziri. So Peter... From which eventually he went

00:51:03.900 as you know with huge tons of German gold to overthrow the Russian government. This is what

00:51:11.260 was really going on. This is what we bizarrely got ourselves involved in. Let me say this because

00:51:18.640 I know I'm not alone. At some point, your body just stops bouncing back the way it used to.

00:51:23.920 You train hard, you travel, you push yourself, and suddenly recovery takes longer. You wake up

00:51:28.760 stiff, joints complain, skin, hair, nails, things don't look or feel quite right anymore. So many

00:51:34.500 people listening to this know exactly what I'm talking about. What surprised me is that this

00:51:39.260 isn't just getting older in some vague sense. A huge part of it is collagen. Your body starts

00:51:44.700 producing less of it from your mid-20s onwards. Collagen is basically the glue that holds

00:51:49.780 everything together. So when your levels drop, you feel it everywhere. That's why I started using

00:51:55.280 Bub's Naturals Collagen Peptides. And I've stuck with it. Since I've added it to my routine,

00:52:00.560 recovery is noticeably better, joints feel stronger, and my skin and hair have improved.

00:52:04.960 I genuinely feel better now than I did a few years ago, and that's not a placebo effect.

00:52:09.840 It's fixing something fundamental.

00:52:12.500 It's also effortless.

00:52:14.280 I put it in my tea, coffee, or any drink.

00:52:16.900 No taste, no smell, no clumps.

00:52:18.960 You forget it's even there.

00:52:20.620 And Bubz isn't just another supplement brand.

00:52:23.320 It was created in honor of Glenn Bub Doherty,

00:52:26.780 a former Navy SEAL who was killed saving Americans in Benghazi.

00:52:30.380 The brand is built around discipline, self-improvement, and doing things properly.

00:52:34.520 They also donate 10% of all profits to charity

00:52:37.560 through the Glenn Doherty Memorial Foundation.

00:52:40.220 The product itself is clean.

00:52:42.340 No sugar, no fillers, third-party tested,

00:52:45.440 NSF certified for sport,

00:52:47.640 Whole30 approved,

00:52:49.300 sustainably sourced from grass-fed pasture-raised cattle.

00:52:52.380 Over 100,000 people use it

00:52:55.040 and it was named Best Collagen of 2024 by Health.com.

00:52:59.740 If you recognize yourself in what I've just described,

00:53:03.040 this is worth trying.

00:53:04.580 Live better, longer.

00:53:05.900 For a limited time, get 20% off your entire order

00:53:09.460 at bubsnaturals.com with code TRIG

00:53:12.780 or click the link in the description of this episode.

00:53:16.180 That's B-U-B-S naturals.com, code TRIG.

00:53:21.120 And when they ask where you heard about them,

00:53:23.480 tell them Trigonometry sent you.

00:53:25.440 Once more for 20% off, use code TRIG at bubsnaturals.com.

00:53:31.720 And you described Britain, the British Empire,

00:53:35.380 in the terms that you did, solid, economically stable?

00:53:39.120 I was talking about Britain.

00:53:40.080 The empire is a different question.

00:53:41.640 How much longer the empire could have survived?

00:53:43.880 The empire had weakened itself quite badly 1.00

00:53:45.840 with the great folly of particularly the Second Boer War,

00:53:49.200 in which we'd hugely lowered our international standing

00:53:51.900 by behaving extremely brutally towards a small country. 1.00

00:53:57.960 I mean, no one has any sympathy for the Boers now, 1.00

00:54:00.240 because obviously they were the people 1.00

00:54:01.140 who brought the world apartheid.

00:54:02.300 But at the time, quite a lot of people did.

00:54:04.600 and also we established the famous concentration camps in South Africa,

00:54:10.140 which were not, I mean, the phrase is the same.

00:54:12.820 The reality is not by any means identical, but they were horrible.

00:54:17.420 And Emily Hobhouse exposed their horror,

00:54:20.020 and the world knew that we'd done a terrible thing.

00:54:21.920 We'd done enormous damage.

00:54:23.800 It was, in some ways, the Second World War was Britain's Iraq War,

00:54:27.480 the moment at which our world power began to decline. 0.58

00:54:32.580 Empires come and go.

00:54:33.840 But it would have been perfectly possible for this country to quietly relinquish most of its empire,

00:54:39.280 much of which was expensive to maintain and brought us no benefit,

00:54:42.600 and become a major country in its own right.

00:54:46.000 We were still a huge manufacturer and exporter with enormous foreign investments,

00:54:50.820 especially in South America.

00:54:52.460 And all that went.

00:54:55.440 We could have managed the transition to being a secondary power much more readily and successfully 1.00

00:55:01.940 if we'd stayed out of that stupid war. 0.96

00:55:03.840 And what happens, this is why we started this portion of the conversation with, Britain, as you describe it, is very solid economically, culturally, etc. 0.99

00:55:14.520 You have this war that takes the lives of hundreds of thousands of the best men.

00:55:19.360 It also cost us all our money.

00:55:20.840 And it cost us all our money.

00:55:21.880 By, I think, late 1915, we were in severe debt to the United States.

00:55:28.160 War is fantastically expensive.

00:55:30.220 The same thing was true in 1939-1940.

00:55:32.080 It took no time at all for us to be in debt.

00:55:34.680 And do you know we've never paid off our debt to the United States

00:55:36.840 in the First World War?

00:55:38.480 I did not know that.

00:55:39.600 Most people don't.

00:55:40.600 In fact, when I tell them, they say, no, it can't be true,

00:55:42.640 we paid it off the other day.

00:55:43.900 What we paid off the other day was actually our Second World War debt.

00:55:48.800 The First World War debt, we stopped payments in 1934

00:55:51.960 and we haven't paid a penny since or any interest.

00:55:54.520 We actually defaulted on it.

00:55:57.340 It's one of the most undiscussed scandals of modern history.

00:56:00.360 the Americans absolutely remember. You can get the Treasury to admit it if you try.

00:56:06.880 And there has actually been a book about it, a rather good book, called The Long Shadow of

00:56:10.600 Default, which I recommend to anybody. But we actually remain in debt to the United States

00:56:15.660 for the First World War, a hundred and more years later.

00:56:18.880 Soon after, fairly soon after, you get into World War II, which we've already talked about.

00:56:24.300 And what happens in your assessment in the post-war period

00:56:29.000 that contributes to where we've arrived at today?

00:56:31.700 Well, it's all one road, isn't it?

00:56:34.500 Once you go to war in 1914 and you cease to be rich,

00:56:40.160 you cease to be powerful.

00:56:41.720 And again, look at, there's another tremendous book,

00:56:44.100 I can't recommend it highly enough,

00:56:45.160 called The Deluge by Adam Tooze,

00:56:47.460 which describes amongst,

00:56:49.020 it's full of stuff about the First World War,

00:56:51.300 which most people don't write about.

00:56:52.780 But it describes what happened between Britain and the United States over naval power, which

00:56:59.280 was this was our power.

00:57:00.580 And it was the equivalent of nuclear power at the time. 0.87

00:57:03.020 And the Americans forced us to limit our naval forces.

00:57:07.020 They forced us to both limit the size of our navy and the size of our ships.

00:57:11.700 They forced us to break our crucial alliance with Japan, which enabled us to remain secure 0.53

00:57:16.660 in the Pacific.

00:57:17.220 and the arguments between the admirals of the US Navy

00:57:22.540 and the British Navy grew so tense

00:57:23.920 at the point of fistfights nearly broke out between them over this

00:57:26.760 and that was again an aftermath

00:57:29.620 and you see from this

00:57:30.920 the long slope lying ahead of decline

00:57:35.240 which was dictated to us

00:57:37.960 by our voluntary bankruptcy of 1914

00:57:41.080 and I think part of the problem as well

00:57:44.860 is that we still, going back to the idea of delusion,

00:57:48.460 we still have this idea of us being this kind of great nation

00:57:52.120 which has a huge impact across the globe.

00:57:54.520 And the reality is there are much bigger nations

00:57:58.020 who are much more powerful,

00:57:59.740 who have a far more significant impact,

00:58:01.920 who don't necessarily care what we say or do.

00:58:04.600 Oh, lots.

00:58:05.060 And one of the first things you discover

00:58:06.540 if you're going to live in the United States,

00:58:08.340 of course, you think you expect to find a special relationship

00:58:10.900 and everybody loves us.

00:58:12.100 um but i found myself being accused of being australian what's that accent and also i found

00:58:19.860 that you you would read the american newspapers and watch the american newspapers and our country

00:58:24.420 usually wasn't mentioned well no other country it was it might as well have been the falkland

00:58:28.660 islands it just wasn't yeah it just wasn't nobody cared and and i searched washington dc for two

00:58:35.460 years for any sign of the special relationship and not really was the nun i actually watched

00:58:40.660 this country being ruthlessly squashed on the Irish issue by the US government. They just

00:58:46.980 crushed us like a beetle over that. And if there is a special relationship, it's an especially

00:58:55.700 nasty one. It was amazing to watch. But this is a fantasy. So we're neither important nor much

00:59:03.920 likes. And it's important for people to realize this. But they won't. They want to believe.

00:59:07.700 It's the great compensation, actually, for having made,

00:59:12.500 and it was the colossal sacrifice of the Second World War as a country,

00:59:15.840 years of rationing, privation, the deaths of many of the bombing of our cities.

00:59:21.280 Surely we had to have something as a result of all that sacrifice and pain.

00:59:26.740 And people really wanted to believe that it was our finest hour

00:59:29.840 and that we had emerged from this as a great and powerful nation.

00:59:33.140 Well, it was our finest hour. I don't dispute that.

00:59:35.740 And we fought very bravely and movingly against very large and dangerous forces.

00:59:41.800 And we suffered a great deal.

00:59:43.420 And my parents went through it.

00:59:44.680 But we didn't emerge from this as a great path.

00:59:48.140 But people don't...

00:59:49.380 It's like your own manhood.

00:59:51.720 People don't like admitting that.

00:59:54.140 And it's also like you see it with the policy on net zero,

00:59:57.580 where people go, well, you know, we're going to set an example to the rest of the world.

01:00:01.720 Britain should lead the world by blowing up all its coal-fired power stations.

01:00:04.560 China is building about 10 a month. Yes, I know. It's a insanity.

01:00:09.300 We blow them up, too. We don't cautiously say, oh, this might be a mistake in Mothball.

01:00:14.100 We blow them up. Millions of pounds worth of valuable plant, blown up, dismantled.

01:00:21.780 So no possibility that anybody might admit it was a mistake ever.

01:00:25.200 Peter, when you started making some of these points initially, were you more optimistic than you are now?

01:00:31.260 Yes.

01:00:31.500 You've been ground down by the reality that no one listens to your warnings.

01:00:35.780 When I wrote my first book, The Abolition of Britain, in 1999, I did so in the belief that it was possible.

01:00:42.020 What I began to think was writing, I then wrote for the Daily Express, writing a weekly column, frankly, in the Daily Express was not going to have much influence.

01:00:49.880 What I really wanted to do particularly was to get into a national broadcasting war.

01:00:56.920 I was advised by a friend that you can't get anywhere very much in national broadcasting.

01:01:01.500 if you haven't written a book and so i wrote the book with the purpose of extending my

01:01:06.780 the reach of my ideas and in fact it was quite interesting the uh some of the initial reviews of

01:01:12.540 it although um although uncomplimentary accepted that something serious was being said uh in

01:01:19.820 general it was very hard to get published had to struggle very hard to get plus most publishers

01:01:24.220 refused to have anything to do with me and a major agent who i approached wouldn't wouldn't touch me

01:01:29.020 let alone the book.

01:01:29.860 And eventually I got it published.

01:01:31.240 And actually, it published so small

01:01:33.660 that my family had to do all the work

01:01:36.340 of getting into bookshops.

01:01:37.620 And it ended up, it still sells even now,

01:01:40.620 what is it, 27 years later.

01:01:43.220 But it was a real struggle to get it out.

01:01:44.900 But some of the reviews understood

01:01:46.100 that something was being said.

01:01:47.120 And I thought, wow.

01:01:47.880 And I did begin to get a certain amount

01:01:49.740 of opportunity in broadcasting.

01:01:53.360 At one point, I'm in Channel 4,

01:01:54.620 let me make documentaries.

01:01:56.700 and I would get on the big opinion programs.

01:02:03.900 And I thought there is some point at which there might be

01:02:07.940 the sprockets of what I think and of what is talked about in politics

01:02:13.200 will mesh with each other and we'll get somewhere.

01:02:16.100 And then it became more and more obvious that this wasn't so.

01:02:21.440 And the time went by and the crucial moment for me remains

01:02:26.500 when David Cameron took over the Conservative Party

01:02:31.340 on behalf of the Blairites.

01:02:33.620 I can put this more clearly now than I could then,

01:02:36.060 but I was quite clear about it at the time.

01:02:38.940 If people allow this to happen,

01:02:40.720 if people endorse this Blairite takeover

01:02:43.000 of the only major opposition party,

01:02:45.020 then it is the end.

01:02:46.580 You mustn't do it.

01:02:48.500 Don't just vote Tory because you want a Tory government,

01:02:50.760 because you won't get a Tory government.

01:02:52.080 One of the points I can make now more clearly than then

01:02:54.980 was actually Gordon Brown was probably more conservative

01:02:57.380 than David Cameron, particularly on things

01:02:59.680 like the European single currency.

01:03:02.040 And he was, it was and is a more conservative person.

01:03:06.080 But I was just trying to say, no, it's vital

01:03:09.680 that this doesn't succeed.

01:03:12.920 And I couldn't get anybody to listen to me.

01:03:15.720 And I remember going around some other supposedly

01:03:18.700 right-wing columnists and saying,

01:03:20.200 if I keep saying this alone, I'll get nowhere.

01:03:22.000 If anybody else joins in, it might actually make some impact, and they wouldn't.

01:03:28.120 And it was at that point that I despaired.

01:03:31.820 And once the Cameron government came into office and everybody imagined that the Tories had won the election,

01:03:37.220 which they hadn't even done, and the coalition settled in, I thought, that's it.

01:03:42.500 Isn't that quite dementing in many ways?

01:03:45.080 I mean, it's a hack comparison.

01:03:46.660 That's not the word I choose.

01:03:49.480 It's dispiriting.

01:03:51.700 But for me, what it is above all, because I have that kind of temperament,

01:03:56.340 is it's furiating.

01:03:58.020 And there are two ways of reacting to it if you're furious.

01:04:01.600 And one is just to have total contempt ever afterwards for everything,

01:04:06.300 everybody involved in what resulted from what I tried to prevent.

01:04:11.260 So I do.

01:04:13.780 But it's also because what you're fundamentally talking about is it's a tragedy.

01:04:19.400 I think so.

01:04:19.880 I think it might have been avoidable.

01:04:22.240 It would have been worth trying.

01:04:24.160 I think 2010 was the last moment at which it might have been doable.

01:04:30.240 But it's just got me nothing except abuse.

01:04:36.640 Well, and plenty of appearances of trigonometry, of course.

01:04:39.280 Well, that, of course, is a great compensation.

01:04:43.740 Your sarcasm is much appreciated.

01:04:45.980 No, no, no, no, no.

01:04:47.240 You should hear me being sarcastic.

01:04:48.660 It doesn't sound like that at all.

01:04:52.980 Peter, it's always wonderful to talk to you.

01:04:56.860 We're going to ask you some questions from our supporters in a second,

01:04:59.460 but the last question, as you know, is always the same.

01:05:01.820 It's on the mug that you were looking at earlier.

01:05:03.320 What's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be?

01:05:05.240 We haven't really talked about the attempts to create war.

01:05:08.940 When I wrote The Phony Victory, my purpose was actually to make a strong case

01:05:15.020 against what seemed to me at the time a drive for war,

01:05:19.100 which I thought would emerge either in Iran or in Russia.

01:05:22.700 And I thought these countries were both being prepared to become enemies.

01:05:28.920 And I thought if I could only spread the idea in some way,

01:05:34.360 a mature idea that as a country,

01:05:39.500 we shouldn't be beguiled into war by this constant repetition of the idea

01:05:44.860 that every single world conflict is a repeat of 1938.

01:05:49.120 Therefore, that anybody who opposes it is Neville Chamberlain.

01:05:53.420 Anybody who continues to oppose it after it's started is Lord Haw-Haw.

01:05:57.820 That everybody who's in favor of it is Winston Churchill.

01:06:01.140 This is, I thought, first of all, I'd show that what we thought about Neville Chamberlain

01:06:05.680 was not absolutely true.

01:06:07.860 and also that the whole development of war in late 1930s Europe

01:06:14.780 had no parallels with what's going on in the Europe of today.

01:06:21.580 And for all the good it did, I might as well have stayed at home.

01:06:25.800 But it does alarm me.

01:06:28.740 We're constantly telling people, we're constantly coming,

01:06:31.400 intelligence chiefs come out and say, 0.58

01:06:33.000 we have to prepare for war, Russia is a great threat. 1.00

01:06:35.480 Well, you can believe that if you want. 1.00

01:06:37.860 though I find it a struggle.

01:06:40.360 I always remember going to Moscow.

01:06:43.260 Was it in 2008?

01:06:44.640 I know it was the first big parade of the new Russian army.

01:06:50.220 They decided they're going to restart the Red Square

01:06:52.240 parades.

01:06:53.460 And I'd watched the last one in November 1990.

01:06:59.520 And so my officer said, why don't you go out and watch it.

01:07:01.860 And I watched it with my old friend, Igor Monachov,

01:07:05.880 whose father had been a Soviet nuclear submarine commander

01:07:09.540 and he knew his military staff.

01:07:11.840 And we stood on the balcony of the hotel

01:07:14.740 watching it as close as we could get.

01:07:18.120 And I enjoyed the parade as much as the rest.

01:07:21.080 And at the end of it, Igor turned to me and said,

01:07:23.940 what did you think of our great display of strategic scrap metal?

01:07:28.640 And he was quite right.

01:07:29.840 I mean, it was the big new weapons.

01:07:32.040 They probably had two or three of.

01:07:33.600 Most of the stuff they were able to put out was probably old,

01:07:37.320 much of its Soviet era.

01:07:38.820 We knew, we still know, the Russian military is fantastically corrupt 0.96

01:07:42.640 and incompetent, and the training of soldiers is a disgrace. 0.81

01:07:47.900 It's a terrible army, and it can't, after four years,

01:07:52.900 they haven't managed to take Kharkov 20 miles from the border. 1.00

01:07:56.480 So to turn this into a great bogeyman, 0.85

01:08:00.500 which is about to turn up at Dunkirk with its tanks pointed at the British coast,

01:08:06.900 just doesn't seem to me to be realistic.

01:08:09.420 But the intelligence people, retired generals, ex-defense ministers, NATO chiefs,

01:08:16.420 are constantly trying to prepare us for war.

01:08:19.200 And the last thing I noticed was some suggestion that we might as well start hoarding food and medicines in case there was a war.

01:08:26.680 It was a real attempt to try and get the British people to become war-minded.

01:08:30.500 which I think can only end sadly.

01:08:34.800 Peter, it's been an absolute pleasure.

01:08:37.040 Thank you so much for coming on the show.

01:08:39.280 Make sure to join us over on Substack

01:08:41.340 where we carry on the conversation

01:08:42.640 and you get to ask Peter your questions.

01:08:46.040 I've always greatly admired Peter's books,

01:08:48.540 but on finishing them,

01:08:49.840 I always end up feeling rather hopeless

01:08:51.240 about Britain's future.

01:08:52.240 Is Britain doomed to disintegrate?

01:09:00.500 We'll be right back.

TRIGGERnometry - July 25, 2026

＂We Live in the Age of Delusions＂ - Peter Hitchens

Episode Stats

Transcript