TRIGGERnometry - Why Britain's on Benefits - Fraser Nelson

00:00:00.000 What we're doing is basically writing them off and discharging ourselves as a society,

00:00:09.120 any sort of duty towards them beyond sending them a check. The problem is not those claiming,

00:00:14.240 the problem is the system. You actually get more money and you'll never get checked upon again,

00:00:18.720 and there's an 80% acceptance ratio. So is the system being abused? Of course it is,

00:00:24.400 but the fault lies with a system that's so wide open to abuse. Our system is robbing work of its

00:00:30.980 economic purpose and denying people the dignity and the ability to improve their lives. By the way,

00:00:36.820 no other country's got anything like this problem. Really? Yeah, yeah. We can't keep doing this, can we?

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00:01:14.240 Rosen Nelson, welcome to Trigonometry. It's a great honor to be here.

00:01:17.160 It's great to have you. We've been keen to speak to you for a long time. You had a very,

00:01:20.660 very, very busy job when you were editing The Spectator and never could make it, but you're

00:01:24.360 here now. And actually, there's several things we want to talk to you about, the media landscape,

00:01:28.700 demographic decline, all sorts of things. But you made an absolutely fantastic documentary about

00:01:33.620 the benefit system in this country, which we both really enjoyed. Really, really interesting.

00:01:39.580 So it's an issue you've been investigating for a long time, actually, from what you talked about.

00:01:44.080 What did you find in making the documentary and doing your investigation? What should people know?

00:01:48.500 Well, what I found was that we have now a country within a country. It's amazing how we've lost

00:01:55.080 sight of a system which absorbs the lives of something like three and a half million people

00:01:59.560 now, or a long-term sickness benefit. And as soon as you get put on that, you disappear from the

00:02:04.960 unemployment figures. So you become like an un-person, really. So you can have Boris Johnson on his last

00:02:10.240 day in office boasting about how unemployment was so low. It's only so low because so many guys have

00:02:14.940 been recategorised as sick. And then you go and you find out there are places in the country where

00:02:19.280 a third of the community are on long-term sickness benefit. It's really concentrated

00:02:25.120 in certain areas. And the lives of those around them are trapped in this kind of Orwellian system

00:02:31.860 that they'd like to break out of, but they can't. Now, they're hardly ever mentioned in debates.

00:02:38.160 That's because back in the day, about sort of 20, 30 years ago, to be too sick to work was a category

00:02:44.620 everybody acknowledged, but it would seem to be pretty niche. But now 2,000 people a day are being

00:02:50.200 added to this category. And that's set to continue. It's set to be 4.1 million in three years' time.

00:02:56.940 So right now, the trajectory we're on is to lose the equivalent of the working age population of

00:03:02.520 Birmingham to sickness benefits by the end of this parliament.

00:03:05.980 So we're looking at a system that is inflicting huge damage on communities, on the economy,

00:03:12.240 and most of all, on the lives of people who, once they get onto the system,

00:03:15.860 they find it very difficult to get out. Now, what I wanted to do was, because I've been writing

00:03:20.460 about this in the Spectator for a while, and my colleagues would tease me about it. 20% of

00:03:26.740 Manchester are on natural broke benefits, 20% of Birmingham. You know, they reeled off these figures,

00:03:31.360 which to me are shocking. They just come across as boring figures.

00:03:34.760 And when I left the Spectator, I had a great chance from Channel 4 to spend a long amount of time

00:03:41.400 producing something like this. And I thought to myself, right, how can you try to make this more

00:03:47.320 real? And the way you can make it more real is to find the people involved, and to get them to tell

00:03:52.080 their story. Now, finding them is pretty difficult, because not everybody in that position wants to go on

00:03:58.320 camera, talking about it. And also, you don't want to, there's a sort of genre of welfare porn,

00:04:05.840 if you like, like, look at these terrible poor people kind of thing, gawping at them. So to get

00:04:11.520 the tone right was really important. And I wanted to find people where the viewer saw them, they'd think,

00:04:18.080 hang on, if I was in that situation, I'd probably make the same decision, act in the same way.

00:04:22.420 And so what you find is that they feel isolated, they feel abandoned, because they have been.

00:04:30.980 I met one guy, he'd been, you know, he applied for sickness benefits, he had mental health issues,

00:04:35.380 he got the benefit very quickly. A year on, still no contact from the health services. So what they

00:04:40.640 expect is to be given coaching, to be given the support they need to get back to work. Instead,

00:04:45.580 they get given a check, and they are forgotten. So it's expensive. But what we're doing is basically

00:04:51.840 writing them off and discharging ourselves as a society, any sort of duty towards them beyond

00:04:58.240 sending them a check.

00:05:00.540 I want to delve into all of that, Fraser, but I think that you alluded to it, and I think it's right

00:05:05.540 to bring it up right at the beginning and just get it out there, which is that a lot of people who

00:05:11.680 are not familiar with all of this stuff, instinctive reaction, we keep hearing about scroungers and

00:05:17.560 people taking advantage of the system. And in fairness, in your film, you did speak to some

00:05:22.480 people who used to work in the system, who did feel that it was being taken advantage of. Do we

00:05:27.420 have a sense of what percentage that represents? How much benefit fraud is there going on? So we can

00:05:33.900 deal with it and then talk about why the system is...

00:05:35.520 Oh yeah, of course, it's really important to do this, because insofar as people do discuss it,

00:05:39.060 they seem to think, look at these scroungers, they're abusing the system.

00:05:43.280 Now, Labour and Tory politicians have found that when you go into a focus group of people who are

00:05:48.320 working, especially low-paid work, and you mentioned guys who are claiming benefits,

00:05:52.460 it's a very good whipping boy. You can say, look at these scroungers, look at this, I'm going to

00:05:56.540 crack down on them, it always pulls very, very well. So cracking down on welfare scroungers is

00:06:01.040 something that's always going to get a politician lots of easy points. Of course, the media tends to go

00:06:06.180 for it as well, because who in the media really knows anybody on sickness benefit? It's like

00:06:09.780 another country, you know? But when you look at the actual abuse of a system, fraud, fraud actually

00:06:17.240 means pretending you're somebody else, using a fake name, trying to get the money you shouldn't.

00:06:22.600 We're talking like criminality. That's really, really small. What most people mean by that is

00:06:27.920 something different. Somebody who basically is not too sick to work, but pretends that he is.

00:06:33.160 Now, that is a grey area. What does too sick? Now, these people, by the way, have not defrauded

00:06:38.300 the system. They've gone through it absolutely letter by letter. They might have exaggerated a

00:06:42.940 little bit. They might have made out what their worst day is, their average day, but they haven't

00:06:47.080 defrauded anybody. The problem is not those claiming. The problem is the system. Now, I spoke to people

00:06:53.240 who do the assessments. And so remember, 2,000 people a day are put new on the system. 1,000 people a day

00:07:00.820 are kept on it. So that's 3,000 in total via these assessments. Now, the assessors will say,

00:07:06.840 but they can't believe how shoddy it is. It's a basic 30, 40-minute telephone call. You don't see them

00:07:12.600 in person. And on that basis, how are you really supposed to tell if the person on the other end

00:07:16.860 of the phone is too sick to work or not? So you go for the safe option, and that's to write them off

00:07:21.660 as being too sick to work. Now, I spoke to a doctor who says that she speaks to, like, say you're an

00:07:27.360 alcoholic, for example. I'm too drunk to work. You know, that person needs help. They don't need

00:07:33.140 a big welfare check. But nonetheless, she wasn't able to give any help. All you can do is make them

00:07:38.040 tick the box. The worst thing she said was when you speak to young people, especially women, say 25 years

00:07:43.960 old who've never really worked and basically will probably never work when they get on the system,

00:07:50.340 but nonetheless say, I'm too anxious, I'm too depressed to work. But if you know that certain

00:07:55.180 phrases, you get an automatic payout. Not difficult to find these phrases. They're all online.

00:08:00.320 So again, this is, now, can you accuse these people necessarily of being fraudsters of taking

00:08:05.940 advantage of the system? I'm not sure I'd go that far. Well, that last example you gave does sound

00:08:10.940 like fraud to me. Well, it depends. If fraud, you're sitting there saying, you know, because, I mean,

00:08:16.000 people who do go through mental health episodes, depression, anxiety, might genuinely think that

00:08:21.280 they can't hold down a job, they're too sick to work. It's very subjective. And this is the gray area

00:08:26.280 of mental health. So now, you and I might say, look, to be honest, I'm sure if this person didn't

00:08:32.280 have an option, put her in a job, she might work. But suffice to say, these people genuinely believe

00:08:37.600 that they can't work. Now, there, what they need, of course, is proper occupational health

00:08:42.740 support, proper assessment. We don't need a sort of cursory interview down the line. Yet,

00:08:47.100 that's what we're doing. Something like half a million under 35s now are in long-term sickness

00:08:51.900 benefit. You get guys who leave university who go straight on to long-term sickness benefit.

00:08:57.160 And we have a system that allows this in two shakes of a lamb's tail. It's a very cheap system,

00:09:02.440 but bizarrely, it's ended up with a massive bill. So here, what is corrupt? What is

00:09:07.280 rotten? What is outrageous? Isn't the people making the claims? It's a system which is giving

00:09:11.860 them every incentive to sign on to sickness benefit, and very little incentive to go to find

00:09:17.740 a job, or to actually even say you're a job seeker, because then you get sanctions, you get

00:09:22.920 a regime. It's quite tough. So in that environment, I think that you're going to have, of course,

00:09:31.960 people are going to play the hand that's dealt to them. And if the government says, look,

00:09:37.280 here's the option of work. It's pretty tough, minimum wage, not very much, but here you are.

00:09:42.400 However, here's the option of sickness benefit. You actually get more money,

00:09:45.820 and you'll never get checked upon again. And there's an 80% acceptance ratio,

00:09:49.760 and you can cite mental health. That is the option that we're putting in front of people right now.

00:09:55.280 Is it any surprise people, especially when the cost of living crisis strikes,

00:09:58.820 are taking the second option? So is the system being abused? Of course it is. But

00:10:03.460 the fault lies with a system that's so wide open to abuse. It's almost an invitation. They're almost

00:10:08.580 begging people to take this road and just disappear off the radar, never to be referred

00:10:14.100 to or spoken off again. And that is sucking in now. This equivalent of the working age population 1.00

00:10:19.440 of Scotland will be effectively living in this system. And it's a waste of money, of course.

00:10:26.120 A hundred billion pounds is going to cost when you take the widest definition of all this,

00:10:30.140 including all the carers. A hundred billion, way more than we spend on defence and things like that.

00:10:35.820 But to fix it is probably the toughest job in politics, because you get accused of

00:10:41.780 being heartless. You'll have a kind of Ken Loach film made about you. Do you remember the

00:10:46.060 I, Daniel Blake one? You know, politicians hate that. So when you look at what's the easiest

00:10:50.640 political thing to do, the easiest thing to do is do nothing about this. Let them be written off

00:10:55.560 and don't try to reform the system, because if you try to reform it, somebody's going to call you

00:11:00.260 cruel and heartless, and you absolutely will get some cases wrong. So it has been a conspiracy from

00:11:05.400 both the left and the right, from Labour and Tory, not to talk about this, because nobody wants to

00:11:10.440 embark upon the really hard job of fixing it.

00:11:13.620 The words that kept coming into my mind when I watched your documentary are learned helplessness.

00:11:18.600 And it seemed to me this is a system which takes away people's agency, people's ambition,

00:11:26.240 but most importantly of all, people's self-respect. I actually found it profoundly moving for that

00:11:31.900 reason.

00:11:32.800 Yeah, and it just absolutely breaks my heart to talk to these guys. I mean, there was one guy

00:11:39.500 spoken to, he'd been on sickness benefit for years, and he had worked out that if you train as a

00:11:43.900 plasterer, there's actually a big deficit of plasterers. You can be on serious money,

00:11:47.800 like 50, 60 grand, if you get the training. And he'd done a bit of cash in hand work

00:11:52.940 previously, and he thought, okay, here's a way out. Now, what he needed was a way of keeping the

00:11:58.020 wolf from the door when he did his training. Obviously, anybody would. But on day one,

00:12:03.020 when he did his course, he called up the job centre, just before I do this, can I check,

00:12:07.020 I'm going to be okay? And he was told, no, if you do this, you're going to lose all of your benefits.

00:12:12.260 And then he pulled out of the course. And there is somebody who'd been through a lot of mental

00:12:16.500 health problems. It's taken a lot for him to get to that stage, to apply for the course,

00:12:21.920 to get a place on it, to think, I'm finally going to pull myself out of this orbit.

00:12:25.360 But then the system said, no, if you try, we're going to slap you down. Now, when we looked into

00:12:31.340 this, technically, he was incorrect. He wouldn't have lost his benefits, but he would have been

00:12:35.640 liable to be reviewed for it. But it's so complicated, the system, that even the welfare

00:12:40.720 advisors were getting it wrong. And so that's the other thing about how they're trapped by

00:12:45.960 complexity as well, because it's not clear to them how they can get out. What they do know is

00:12:51.020 that this is a crazy system, set one foot wrong, and you might end up right at the bottom of the

00:12:55.600 snakes and ladders. And if you're, I spoke to a single mother with two kids that reckons that she 0.70

00:13:00.860 would have needed, sorry, one kid, she reckons she would have needed to earn something like 35

00:13:05.140 grand to replicate the benefits that she was on. Now, you might say, and a lot of people would,

00:13:10.480 that's outrageous, imagine getting so much money, etc. And I get that. But in her situation,

00:13:16.540 would you really come off all of these benefits if you've got a seven-year-old boy to support in a

00:13:21.300 pretty ropey council estate? She's able to give him stability. You know, I sat in her house seeing 0.99

00:13:26.400 she created this island of stability, which she'd never had growing up. Now, in her position,

00:13:32.160 would anybody really do that much different? But if she wanted to take a road to work,

00:13:37.100 it was incredibly hazardous for her. She might lose everything she wouldn't be able to provide

00:13:42.320 for her son. So, the learned helplessness is absolutely the case. So many people, when they

00:13:47.980 try to, when it worked out, yeah, financially, I can keep on going forever, but I don't want to,

00:13:52.360 I've got things to give. I've got, like the single mother I spoke to, she wanted to train as a 0.99

00:13:56.940 teaching assistant or a therapist, or she was a really smart person, but she found out she was in

00:14:02.200 a system where her skills would not be able to lead to a better life for her and her son.

00:14:08.660 And when we create a kind of sub-economy like that, we condemn everybody inside it to a kind of

00:14:17.440 system where they're permanently disconnected from society as well as from the rest of the economy.

00:14:24.360 And it's the sort of thing which I like to think the left should be angrier about than the right,

00:14:28.000 you know? Because you think this is, how is this progressive? You might say that money's going

00:14:32.420 from the rich and being given to those guys, so in a redistributive way, maybe it works. But is this

00:14:38.760 really what we call a good society? Surely social cohesion matters. And I just can't work out how

00:14:44.880 there's not more anger about this, how this isn't more of an issue, especially in these politicians who've

00:14:50.320 seen it absolutely surging in their constituencies. But these guys tend not to vote, that's the other

00:14:55.200 thing. And if you don't vote, you're quite easy to ignore. And as a result, we've ended up, by the

00:15:01.740 way, no other country's got anything like this problem. Really? Yeah, yeah. When you look across

00:15:05.920 the developed world, we see Sweden, it's gone down, and Austria. If only Denmark has gone up a little

00:15:12.740 bit. In the UK, it's soared. So other countries have managed to find a way out of this. So it's not

00:15:19.060 as if this is beyond the wit of man. It's certainly the case everywhere, the mental health, which is now

00:15:24.180 responsible for 70% of claims that they mention mental health. That is very difficult right around

00:15:29.560 the world to ascertain, to properly diagnose. Are you really so depressed to work? But other

00:15:34.660 countries manage it. We haven't really tried. Why is that? Why is it that they've managed it,

00:15:40.100 and it's such a huge problem in this country? I think it's just the way that our welfare system

00:15:44.380 works. We've got this stupid system where you go to the GP for a fit note. Now the GP will decide, 1.00

00:15:50.980 is this person sick or not? Now the GP isn't going to deny anybody a fit note. I think he gives them a

00:15:56.180 95% of cases. That's because if you don't, the person will keep on making appointments until you

00:16:00.960 give them one. The GPs don't regard themselves as a welfare police. They should never be put in that

00:16:05.780 position. But you do that, and then you've got this welfare assessment down the line, which is,

00:16:11.740 again, as we're saying, 80% success rate. Pretty good. No other country, are there fewer steps to

00:16:18.060 sickness benefit? No other country is the working road as hard as ours and the welfare road as easy.

00:16:28.040 It's that juxtaposition. And people, whether they're rich or poor, are going to act in their

00:16:33.380 economic self-interest. That kind of sounds cruel and heartless, but it's as true for the millionaire

00:16:38.360 as it is for the, I spoke to a window cleaner out there whose son was on way more than him because

00:16:44.420 he was on sickness benefit. And he thought to himself, well, why shouldn't I claim? And I

00:16:48.960 completely get it. If you're busting yourself work doing, cleaning windows for 20 hours a week,

00:16:55.460 and you see your son significantly better off, you think, I'm a mug to work. So you basically,

00:17:01.980 our system is robbing work of its economic purpose and denying people the dignity and the ability to

00:17:08.380 improve their lives through work. That's why I think this is more of a moral scandal than an

00:17:12.900 economic scandal, but it's certainly a scandal.

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00:19:13.100 trigger. Because when it comes to your wealth, preparing for the future is always the smartest

00:19:19.100 investment. When I was watching it, another word that kept popping into my head was methadone.

00:19:25.580 And it just seems that you're just giving these people methadone for people who don't know as a

00:19:29.800 substitute that you give to people when they're trying to recover from a heroin addiction. But it

00:19:34.860 is the methadone of, here you go, here's your money, and that's it. Don't worry, don't come back to us in

00:19:41.900 any shape or form. And you look at the guy, the poor guy who was an alcoholic, and he also, I think he had

00:19:48.000 other issues with addiction, talked about his mum passing away, losing five siblings. And you're

00:19:54.800 going, this guy needs help. He needs help. What he doesn't need is somebody fueling his addiction.

00:20:01.640 And when I spoke to him, I was really sort of shook by that. Of all the people I saw in the

00:20:08.840 documentary, that was the one that shook me up the most. Because I then went to look up the figures

00:20:12.680 for alcohol-related deaths. Because thinking to myself, if that's the way we treat alcoholics,

00:20:16.760 right, okay, terribly sorry, here's some money. What do we think that alcoholics are going to do

00:20:21.020 with that money, right? So where's the help? Where's the intervention? Nothing, just the money.

00:20:25.440 And then I looked for the alcohol-related deaths that are absolutely surging in Britain, pretty

00:20:29.240 much double what they were 10 to 12 years ago. And that is not a sign of a society that cares

00:20:35.640 about those at the bottom. That's a sign of a society. We're just giving them conscience money, 0.73

00:20:40.120 so we can just forget it. And the conversation about mental health is interesting to me because

00:20:46.300 it's the conventional wisdom that mental health is getting worse and blah, blah, blah. And actually,

00:20:51.960 in your conversations, I think it certainly comes across that that isn't necessarily the case.

00:20:57.980 And the thing that struck me was there was a couple of people who said they had PTSD,

00:21:02.620 PTSD, which it's a very serious condition, and I'm sure they do. It just occurred to me that,

00:21:08.520 say, in the wake of World War II, for example, this country would have been filled with people who

00:21:12.200 had what we now call PTSD. But perhaps the routes that are now available weren't there. Do you see

00:21:19.060 what I'm getting at? Yeah, yeah, of course. I mean, there's been a massive escalation of mental

00:21:22.740 health. When you look at the number of antidepressants handed out by GPS in Britain, it's soaring.

00:21:26.660 When you look at the reported mental health amongst young people and, indeed, older people,

00:21:31.260 again, rapid deterioration. But that's if you look at sort of self-reported and also people going to

00:21:37.360 the GP referred. There are some other metrics. If you talk to psychologists like Simon Wesley,

00:21:43.480 they will say to you that there are other studies that show, objectively, no, it's been pretty standard.

00:21:48.480 What's happened is that people are talking about it a lot more now, maybe. That's a good thing,

00:21:52.280 certainly. But because they're talking about it a lot more, you're a lot more likely to medicalize

00:21:58.340 the kind of ups and downs of human existence, a lot more likely to go to the doctor and ask for

00:22:03.040 a happy pill, basically, if you're feeling miserable. And so there is a big debate at the

00:22:11.100 moment about how exactly you manage to medicalize or put any sort of scientific label on something

00:22:19.300 which is usually just verbally expressed. Obviously, you can't physically diagnose somebody

00:22:24.560 with mental health or depression. There are some cases where you absolutely can, but a lot of the

00:22:28.320 cases, how can you really tell the difference? So that is a problem all of society is grappling

00:22:34.140 with. Now, you might say, okay, is this really a problem right now? And if you also, I looked at

00:22:40.120 some of the, what you might call the hard metrics for this, how many people are killing themselves

00:22:44.720 coming in the hospital with self-harm, that hasn't particularly been rising. So that's,

00:22:49.900 now, that doesn't need to say there's no real mental health crisis. But I think what there is,

00:22:55.140 is a far bigger willingness in people to save their struggle with mental health. But then again,

00:23:01.320 perhaps people have always done this throughout history. The guys coming back from the war wouldn't

00:23:06.080 really have said, I'm struggling with mental health. They said, I've got shell shock, perhaps.

00:23:09.840 They wouldn't really call themselves mentally ill, even if just by today's standards,

00:23:13.320 they would have been. So I think that what we're going through is a strange combination

00:23:18.320 of a good trend. People are more likely to open up about how they're feeling, more likely

00:23:23.440 to seek help. And then a bad trend, where doctors are more likely to say, quite often to the children,

00:23:29.720 okay, you're sick. Here is a medicine. And it's a medicine you're unlikely to ever get off.

00:23:34.820 Yeah, I think that's a really important point, Fraser, because I think, I don't know about you,

00:23:38.560 but I've been depressed at times. I'm sure Francis has likewise addiction, etc. All of these things

00:23:44.340 are part of the human experience. And what worries me about this is that, like, if you think that

00:23:51.400 everyone who has a job is not depressed, that's just factually incorrect, right? There are lots

00:23:56.280 of people who deal with all sorts of challenges that do then go to work, right? And on the other hand,

00:24:03.180 it worries me that people who are going through really difficult things, there are answers to

00:24:08.240 anxiety, there are answers to depression, there's CBT, there's all kinds of interventions that are

00:24:12.680 available that are not that expensive. I imagine 10 sessions with a CBT professional is a lot cheaper

00:24:20.160 than putting someone on permanent sickness.

00:24:22.760 Yeah, or there's lots of apps now, like Headspace and stuff like that, which can, and basic meditation,

00:24:29.520 it may sound silly, but it has been demonstrated to, if you just change the way you perceive the

00:24:33.760 problem, to cover that word using earlier on, agency, that you do have agency over this.

00:24:38.960 And there have been lots of studies looking at, for example, even CBT for insomnia can be a lot

00:24:44.500 more effective than putting people on sleeping pills that might not work. So there are, but then that

00:24:49.400 comes into how healthcare treats it, because the GP under our system is more likely to think,

00:24:53.980 okay, you've come to me, I'm going to give you a pill. It's like that sort of, this is what I do,

00:24:59.220 I'm a doctor, rather than say, I'm going to put you in a course of CBT. So I think that's an

00:25:05.400 interesting healthcare question, but I think the medical profession hasn't really caught up

00:25:09.580 with the huge increase in likelihood of people to identify as anxious or depressed.

00:25:17.340 So I think that there will be a sort of a reckoning in that, I think, because I do think

00:25:23.100 antidepressant usage is going to hit crisis levels in Britain, not so much for cost, but

00:25:28.440 in terms of efficacy. Like you might be giving somebody a pill, a medicalization, if it never

00:25:33.860 needed to be on that pill in the first place. And I suspect further down the road, that's

00:25:39.460 another difficult question that will be grasped. But right now, the terrible thing is, it's more

00:25:43.560 likely to be the upper middle class people with depression and anxiety who are told about

00:25:48.560 the CBT and can afford the sessions. Because CBT is not expensive. Well, it depends, it's

00:25:53.840 not expensive if you're a middle class person. If you're a minimum wage, then there's no way

00:25:58.640 you could afford these sessions and good luck to you ever getting it on the NHS.

00:26:02.200 But as a taxpayer, I would gladly pay twice the amount that we spend giving people money

00:26:08.720 to live off, to get them on their feet. I'd love nothing more than for people to have

00:26:13.220 that opportunity. As someone who's, I haven't done a CBT, but I've done other stuff like it

00:26:17.320 at times in my life when I've really needed that support. And actually, it just takes you

00:26:21.320 to the next level of capability. You're literally better at the things that you do and at living

00:26:27.500 life. That's what I'd want to see. But this is where I was going to ask you about how much

00:26:32.180 this is about the stultified bureaucracy that we now have, where really, you know, if you

00:26:39.300 talk to people who have dealt with the civil service, and we've had numerous of these people

00:26:42.940 on the show, as you know, what you get is that there is no innovation, there is no creativity,

00:26:48.680 there's no risk taking, it's just about, you know, keeping the current system ticking over.

00:26:54.160 And of course, then you're not going to get the intervention approach coming in, where you're

00:26:58.900 teaching people skills, you're helping them with their mental health, etc. How much of it

00:27:02.680 is to do with the fact that we just have a government bureaucracy that isn't able to deal

00:27:07.080 with the challenges of the 21st century?

00:27:08.600 I think in Britain, it's especially acute, because the way we nationalise healthcare.

00:27:12.700 I mean, the NHS is the slowest moving vehicle in government. I mean, they're still using

00:27:17.380 fax machines in places.

00:27:19.080 Really?

00:27:19.420 Yeah, they are. I had a situation recently where, yeah, they are.

00:27:23.000 They use Windows XP, I think, as well.

00:27:24.960 What?

00:27:25.700 Yeah, I had a situation recently where I was staying in holiday, my mum came to join me,

00:27:29.240 and she needed medication, and she went to the pharmacy, and she said, no, we need to get

00:27:33.300 in the fax. I'm like, how can you, sorry.

00:27:36.500 Jesus Christ.

00:27:37.260 I hadn't heard the word fax for 15 years, but there are still places. I think NHS is

00:27:41.680 Britain's number one possessor of fax machines. But suffice to say, if you're talking about

00:27:45.820 something with a workforce bigger than any organisation in the world, apart from the

00:27:51.500 Chinese Red Army, then reform is going to come slow. Now, here's the thing. This is changing

00:27:58.320 for the rich, but not for the poor. A lot of these private schools now are teaching mindfulness

00:28:02.720 and CBT as a basic tool. So these kids can go into the world. Okay, kids, you're going

00:28:07.340 to encounter difficulties. And when you do, here are some tools that you can do. So getting

00:28:11.520 in the education system. Now, again, when you look at the, I would call it, perhaps it's a privileged

00:28:17.820 thing to say, but the affordable private healthcare system, when you, I don't know, 100, 120 pounds a

00:28:23.940 session, you can easily get all the CBT you want there. There is lots of evolution of what people

00:28:30.120 call medicine 2.0, which is more preventative. So you can see a trend there for those with the money,

00:28:36.140 spending a lot more on their own mental health and non-medical interventions to help it, is those

00:28:41.060 who don't have that, who are stuck with the system, which is very much still, let's give them a

00:28:46.600 painkiller, let's give them antidepressants, let's prescribe whatever they want. So I think we're going

00:28:52.840 to see a sort of rich versus poor way of approaching mental health. And as you say, it's not the cost,

00:28:58.960 but the NHS takes a long, long time to turn around. I mean, in Scotland, I think the NHS there,

00:29:05.880 did start using CBT for insomnia. And I think there's talk of doing the same thing in England.

00:29:11.160 I mean, that's not good of cost, simply because it's got a better record. And also these sleeping

00:29:17.080 pills, as any insomniac knows, are not a solution for insomnia, not long term anyway.

00:29:22.280 But for the rest of it, it's so anti-innovation, the NHS. And at a time where medicine is changing

00:29:29.700 quite a lot, that means effectively we'll have a two-tier system. I think a lot of people who can

00:29:34.280 afford to opt out of the NHS are already doing so. And they will be getting the next generation.

00:29:40.640 I think what that will lead to will be differing, like a life expectancy gap as well for the rich

00:29:45.640 and the poorer quality of life gap, all because of innovation. And I think, you know, it's so funny

00:29:52.180 seeing the Labour government now talking about innovation of the NHS. I mean, Matt Hancock was

00:29:57.440 doing exactly the same when he was here.

00:29:58.940 Now, there's a man you can trust.

00:30:01.240 Yeah. But the funny thing is that all of them talk about it like they've just discovered

00:30:04.300 something amazing. And it's not. It's basic modernisation, which isn't going to happen

00:30:08.920 if you run your whole health service in one massive top-down bureaucracy and don't give

00:30:14.560 agency to the doctors, don't let the doctors innovate. Any GP that innovates is more likely

00:30:19.760 to be struck off than they are to actually to be rewarded.

00:30:23.660 And I think the way that the, certainly the innovative doctors are treated quite a lot.

00:30:31.580 You can see some of them are like, given disciplinary hearings quite often. I forget the names now,

00:30:38.260 but there is a guy called Michael Muse, a dentist who'd been disciplined. There's a guy Justin

00:30:45.420 Strebbing, a cancer doctor as well. I mean, you can get people who,

00:30:50.400 and it makes me think, what other sort of field of work would somebody be struck off for innovating

00:30:57.340 rather than, you know, rather than awarded? I'm not saying they should get rich on it,

00:31:02.900 but, you know, innovation involves trial and error. And say these guys got something wrong,

00:31:08.420 or I don't know the cases in detail, so I perhaps shouldn't have invoked them here,

00:31:11.620 but say they did. That should be seen as just part of the innovation process,

00:31:15.060 as long as there's no abuse of patients going on. But so the system in our healthcare does seem to be

00:31:21.920 biased against innovation. And we do see places like South Africa, actually, where you do get

00:31:27.360 more innovative techniques. But it's a problem because if we're medicalising so much of human

00:31:32.740 emotions, if we're putting such a huge chunk of our children on antidepressants,

00:31:37.960 then I think there's a case for finding better ways of helping them.

00:31:41.260 And Fraser, we've talked about the human cost, and that's obviously highly important.

00:31:46.500 But there's also the other part of this equation, which is the financial cost.

00:31:50.380 So let's get actually...

00:31:51.120 That was left versus right, in one sense.

00:31:54.220 Yeah, it is.

00:31:54.900 The people matter, but really, it's about the money.

00:31:58.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:32:01.420 Thank you. Everybody already thinks I'm right-wing, so you might as well.

00:32:05.440 But let's look at the financial element of it, which is because we can't keep doing this, can we?

00:32:14.000 Of course we can. We will be... Look, even if you couldn't care less about the lives of those

00:32:19.680 involved, if you couldn't care about the morality, if you couldn't care about these communities,

00:32:23.920 we cannot afford £100 billion for sickness benefits and all of the associated costs. It will bankrupt

00:32:29.920 the country the way it's going. So that's why I think the Office for Budget Responsibility is doing

00:32:35.860 a great service at the moment in making these forecasts. Because if it wasn't for the OBR,

00:32:40.040 you can guarantee the Department for Work and Pensions would not admit the trajectory that

00:32:43.740 they're going on. So the OBR here is the kind of ghost of Christmas future here. It's saying,

00:32:47.960 look, as things are standing, your bill right now, it's like £60 billion now, it's going to be

00:32:53.100 hundreds in a few years' time. Now that forces them to think, OK, if we're going to spend...

00:32:57.920 Either we reform welfare or we need to find an extra £40 billion. So how are we going to do that

00:33:02.180 versus the tax situation? So I think that will be focusing minds right now. I think Liz Kendall

00:33:08.840 has got a big job as DWP Secretary, because she will have to embark on something that even

00:33:14.840 Ian Duncan Smith didn't dare to do. IDS didn't really go for sickness benefit, it was more unemployment.

00:33:19.200 So she will have to think of basically reassessing all 3.3 million people, more than this, for what

00:33:28.200 work they can do and what help they need. And it is like glasnost. This isn't your normal reform. This

00:33:35.100 is like the people involved here, they're actually EU member countries with smaller populations than

00:33:40.100 people we've got in sickness benefits. So to do something as big as that will be absolutely huge,

00:33:45.540 and it will be strewn with danger. But the one thing that gives me hope that it might be reformed

00:33:50.980 is, as you say, it's unaffordable. That £100 billion is money which this country just doesn't have.

00:33:56.280 And it's also the fact as well that you're looking at this Labour government and you're going, 0.97

00:34:01.580 are you really going to have the balls to tackle this? If the right didn't have the balls to tackle 0.98

00:34:06.220 it, are the left going to be able to do it? 0.99

00:34:08.160 Yep. That's such a good question. It is the £100 billion question. Because if Stainless Kendall

00:34:17.060 personally wants to do it, she thinks, OK, I'll take the flack, then can you get that past the

00:34:21.060 Cabinet? Can the Cabinet get it past a Labour Party who has spent the last 15 years attacking

00:34:25.600 with Tories for welfare reform? When it goes wrong and you get the first person who genuinely is too

00:34:31.960 sick to work, has got a cancer diagnosis, has been told by the department to work, because

00:34:35.900 that will, statistically, that's bound to happen. When that goes in the headlines, will they be able

00:34:40.220 to get past that stage? Because if you look at one of the things that stopped the reforms last time

00:34:45.720 around, there were a few cases of suicides amongst welfare claimants who would be given the wrong

00:34:51.040 advice. Now, that really shook up the system, by the way, as it should. But the lesson we learned was,

00:34:56.480 OK, maybe it's time to drop these reassessments. Maybe it's time to basically to dial down the reform.

00:35:01.680 So the system lives in fear of a kind of post office versus Mr. Bates kind of thing,

00:35:08.060 where you will get the system being as lazy and as cumbersome as it is. It is almost impossible to do

00:35:14.760 reform that isn't going to include some sick people being deprived of the help that they need.

00:35:21.700 So do you, if you list Kendall, say, OK, I'm going to do this, I'd like to prepare you now

00:35:26.180 for hundreds, perhaps thousands of people who are going to be wrongly treated by the system.

00:35:31.420 But this is the only way that we can proceed if we're going to save everybody else. That is an

00:35:37.100 incredibly hard argument to make politically. It's one the Tories never dared to make. And I think a

00:35:43.220 lot of it depends on whether Liz Kendall and perhaps Keir Starmer managed to describe this as a

00:35:49.200 progressive mission, that this is the beverage reform of our days. This is what we're going to

00:35:56.620 take to heal society and to stop this kind of social apartheid that we're inflicting right now.

00:36:03.060 But it's so difficult. And I really don't, I really have my doubts. Perhaps Liz Kendall will

00:36:08.000 surprise me, you know. Liz Kendall and Wes Streeting are the two people I've got the most hope for in

00:36:13.960 this government. Because I think both of them are facing, both of them realise just how calamitous

00:36:18.720 the welfare and the health system is. Both of them realise what will happen if they don't fix it.

00:36:23.020 Both of them want to fix it. But both of them are in charge of the mother of all bureaucracies.

00:36:27.880 So even if you give them the 10 best special advisors in the world, could they really turn it

00:36:32.060 around? And it's also as well, do they have the moral fortitude when the Guardian inevitably runs

00:36:39.100 the pieces? And they will be true about some poor, unfortunate person who was diagnosed with

00:36:44.560 cancer. And there was a mix-up. The Daniel Blake scenario, yeah.

00:36:47.560 Yeah. And the meltdown from the Labour backbenches.

00:36:50.440 Yeah. But there are solutions to eliminating 99% of something like that. You know, you create an

00:36:56.700 appeals process or some kind of hotline where you get assessed by a different thing if you,

00:37:01.240 you know, something. There are ways to mitigate that risk. If you're creative and willing to take a

00:37:09.040 risk and willing to do things differently, right?

00:37:11.100 Yeah, yeah, there are. Absolutely. But will you be able to eliminate it to zero?

00:37:14.900 No, no, no.

00:37:15.580 I mean, look at, we just have the Ofsted School Inspection Regime changed after the tragic suicide

00:37:20.060 of a teacher. And it's always been linked. There used to be a convention that you would never really

00:37:24.840 read political meaning into a suicide in this country. But people are absolutely politicising

00:37:30.360 that teacher's death. And I think we're now living in the era where the single person 0.96

00:37:37.180 can actually change policy. Like the single body of a boy in the Turkish beach changed

00:37:42.180 German migration policy. Because it's not so much the guardian, it's social media.

00:37:46.600 Well, social media can now magnify one person's case and make a huge thing over it.

00:37:51.120 And it become, and it can create a furore, which is almost unanswerable.

00:37:55.500 Now, say after that tragic death on the beach, if Angela Merkel had said, look, we can change

00:38:02.720 a policy because if we do, you know, we cause a lot more harm than we do good. And in the

00:38:08.520 end, she didn't. She went and went along with it. So it is difficult and not impossible,

00:38:13.000 by the way. But I think if you're going, you would need to do more to persuade people that

00:38:17.340 this reform needs to be made and the things that are as bad as they are. It's a lot easier

00:38:22.180 for everybody just not to talk about it and keep spending the money.

00:38:25.640 Well, I'm glad we have you here talking about it, because I suppose the obvious question

00:38:29.120 is, if you were Liz Kendall, what would you do?

00:38:31.740 If I was Liz Kendall, first of all, to raise awareness of the problem. Because right now,

00:38:36.100 people just find it very hard to imagine what's happening. For example, I spoke to a taxi driver

00:38:41.600 who'd said that he called them up and said, look, I'm not sick anymore. I want to come off

00:38:45.980 benefits. Three years later, he's still waiting for somebody to reassess him. So you need to

00:38:51.360 understand how many more people there are in that situation. And also, I mean, you need to do a lot

00:38:57.780 more work to think, OK, if you are in sickness benefit, statistically, what are the chances of

00:39:03.300 you ever coming out? What is your sort of life trajectory likely to be? Nobody's done that work

00:39:09.440 yet. So there will not be support for the solution until there is understanding of the problem. And I

00:39:16.360 think that an imaginative left-wing politician could absolutely go out there and say, look

00:39:23.080 at this sort of decay, look at how, say you politicise it, look at how the Tories abandoned

00:39:27.480 it. Look at the great James Purnell and Frank Field reforms. Like, when you look at sickness

00:39:33.600 benefits, it started going down in 2002 quite significantly. So Labour does have a track record

00:39:38.480 in managing to use a language to talk its progressive mission, to say, well, this is about saving

00:39:44.020 lives, not saving money. They've done it before. They could do it again. But that would, I think,

00:39:49.860 require the Labour Party collectively to become a lot more bitten by reality than it is right

00:39:56.260 now.

00:39:56.740 OK, let's say you've done that. You've established that the problem exists. You've convinced...

00:40:00.200 Oh, yeah. But what practically would you do? I think that's relatively straightforward.

00:40:05.240 Like, right now, you would, first of all, take these assessments, right? End this half-an-air-down-the-phone

00:40:09.900 nonsense. You would need medical evidence to be provided, and it should be seen by an occupational

00:40:15.120 health specialist. Not somebody down the other line of a phone with a script, not by a GP

00:40:20.260 with a 10-minute session, by an occupational health person who's genuinely got the patient's

00:40:24.560 best interests at heart. So that would get the on-flow down quite a lot. Number two is the

00:40:31.520 reassessments. We used to reassess literally hundreds of thousands of people on sickness

00:40:36.660 benefits and say, actually, you're better now, you can work. Right now, that's barely

00:40:41.020 10 a day at the moment. The reassessments have almost entirely stopped. So simply by

00:40:45.940 starting reassessments...

00:40:48.020 Why did they stop?

00:40:48.740 They stopped in lockdown. They never got... Because my guess, I don't know, they won't

00:40:53.060 admit it, but my guess is that they thought to themselves, OK, there is lots of political

00:40:58.260 risk in us getting it wrong. So let's minimise the political risk and just keep everybody

00:41:02.360 on the system. I think the department lives in fear of a scandal, and it's the Treasury

00:41:06.680 that worries about the payments. That's one theory. The other theory is that they thought,

00:41:11.640 OK, the system is so decayed and so rotten, it's going to be replaced. Because for about

00:41:17.080 a year, two years now, everybody left and right has been saying, this is terrible, it needs

00:41:21.080 to be replaced. So they just leave everybody on the system thinking, OK, it's going to be replaced.

00:41:25.640 Now, Liz Kendall says you're going to replace it. But when? This is, we're 2025 now in February.

00:41:31.320 I think it's probably going to be 26, 27 before a new system comes in.

00:41:35.880 So you change the admission systems, you would restart the reassessments. But here is the other...

00:41:43.960 Then, of course, you would come up with a system where everybody on these benefits can see exactly

00:41:49.880 what would happen if they were to train, go into training or go into work. I take the guy I spoke

00:41:55.720 to who got a job at training as a plasterer. Now, he was given what I believe to be wrong information,

00:42:00.120 that he loses benefits. But then again, if I was him, I Googled around, I couldn't see how he could

00:42:04.680 have got proper advice. It just doesn't exist. So what you need is an online portal that people can

00:42:11.800 check. They can basically be given advice saying, no, you can train as a plasterer,

00:42:15.560 you won't lose a penny of benefits for at least a year. And by the way, print out this paper and

00:42:20.040 this will be your proof that we will not go back on our word. I mean, you can do that. For example,

00:42:24.440 self-assessment, you can ask, you know. So you need a simple way of getting advice,

00:42:29.720 and you need advice that you can trust. So it shouldn't be beyond the wit of man to tell people,

00:42:34.440 because right now, I didn't speak to a single person who wasn't completely baffled about the

00:42:39.880 various combination of benefits they were getting and what would happen to them in various scenarios.

00:42:44.840 They weren't just baffled, they were afraid, and they were deeply suspicious of anybody in

00:42:49.480 authority. They just completely lost trust. So if you've got a way that you can actually get advice

00:42:54.520 as to how you can get out of this situation you're in, and that's reliable, and you can do that with

00:42:58.920 tech, then that's good. And the third thing I would do, which is expensive, but I think it needs to be

00:43:03.480 done, is you need to have, in the same way that somebody unemployed can be given a kind of

00:43:07.560 back-to-work advisor, somebody on sickness benefits should have a point of contact as well,

00:43:12.120 a kind of work coach, a life coach, somebody making sure that they're getting the CBT if they

00:43:17.560 need it, that they're getting the kind of the back-to-work advice, and that somebody that is

00:43:23.080 liaising with companies who are willing, in the same way you get companies who are willing to take

00:43:26.680 on people who've come out of jail, for example, you know, a bit of a higher risk, but you want to be

00:43:30.440 like Timbson, socially responsible. If we do the same people with sickness benefits, and I think there is

00:43:35.480 social capital in this country to do that, and we put it through a coordinating center, then we can link

00:43:40.520 those who want to get back to work, and there are plenty of them. And then the final thing you need

00:43:44.840 to do, of course, is to create a tax incentive, because right now the government takes away far

00:43:49.720 too much of people's money when they're just starting out and work again. So I think they need

00:43:54.360 to be demonstrably better off. It shouldn't be too much to say to somebody that if you want to leave

00:43:59.800 sickness benefit and take a path to work, we can arrange things where you can credibly be financially

00:44:05.080 better off, maybe not immediately, but in two or three years. I mean, right now, that kind of way

00:44:11.080 out, which used to be the basis of a free society, of a just society, has been destroyed by a whole

00:44:17.560 bunch of things. And if that is repaired, then you're a rational person. And remember, all these

00:44:23.880 guys, all these 3.3 million, with a few exceptions, rational people, if they see that their efforts can

00:44:31.000 get them out, that there is an alternative, and they can rebuild the lives for themselves and for

00:44:36.280 their families, then they will take it. But the system needs to be built. But to do all of this,

00:44:41.560 you need to start seeing the problem from their perspective. And right now that's not happening.

00:44:46.200 We're just seeing statistics. It's a top-down thing. Ah, they're getting this benefit, that benefit.

00:44:50.760 Nobody sees the way these benefits pile up with each other. You're getting hostels that are exploiting

00:44:54.840 people by taking people on sickness benefits, filing the paperwork themselves so they can get the

00:45:00.040 accommodation money and keeping them basically as little money printing machines. I mean,

00:45:04.840 the system needs root and branch reform, but you just need the political capital to care enough

00:45:11.240 about this country within a country that we've managed to create, and just to give them what

00:45:15.960 everybody else has, which is the ability, by your own efforts, to improve your own life.

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00:46:36.600 besticles. But it makes no sense. And the really good thing that your film did as well is that it 0.97

00:46:46.920 looked at the effect it's had on employers, where you had one company who was advertising a job which

00:46:54.040 offered training, progression, a decent starting salary, and they literally couldn't find anyone.

00:46:59.720 And this was in a place where they had something like 22% of people were now to work benefits.

00:47:04.600 It's unbelievable. And that was, again, this is, because right now we're talking about,

00:47:09.080 when we spoke about the cost, we're talking about the welfare cost. What we're not talking about is

00:47:13.240 the cost of the economy, of having these millions of people who could be out there in the economy.

00:47:18.520 Now, I asked a consultancy, the CEBR, to run the figures and say, okay, let's do a counterfactual.

00:47:24.440 Let's imagine that a number of sickness benefits hadn't started to surge in 2018. Let's say it

00:47:32.200 hadn't, it just stayed where it was. What would have happened? The answer is, by now,

00:47:36.120 we would have the fastest growing economy in the G7. That's simply by using the human talent that

00:47:41.480 we've got. As it stands, you've got the sheet metal worker, you're saying, quite right,

00:47:46.040 you can't get a trainee. So what are they going to do? They're going to hire an immigrant, 1.00

00:47:49.880 because they need to, this is, of course, I think this is very much related to immigration,

00:47:54.360 because we're talking about how the welfare state has created a vacuum in the labour market,

00:47:59.240 a massive vacuum, where workers are desperately needed. So first of all, people blame Brexit.

00:48:04.280 That wasn't it. Oh, we can't get the workers. That's because all the EU guys have left.

00:48:07.960 Figures come out and find we've pretty much got the same number of EU nationals as we had

00:48:11.880 earlier on. And they've been joined, by the way, by a record number of non-EU nationals. There's no

00:48:16.360 shortage of immigrants in this country. What there is a shortage of is British guys looking for work.

00:48:22.200 And that's because so many millions of them have been paid not to work. So this vacuum,

00:48:26.760 I think, created the immigration sucking in of people in a way that even the Conservatives didn't

00:48:32.360 work out. So I think you can fix so many things by getting this right. You can, first of all,

00:48:37.880 get people's lives back on track. You can cut the welfare bill. You can get the economy to grow.

00:48:42.440 And you can control immigration numbers by simply cutting the size of that vacuum.

00:48:46.760 Well, I'm really glad, actually, that you brought up immigration, because you wrote about it in your

00:48:50.760 latest article. And you got a little bit of pushback.

00:48:54.040 Oh, we do.

00:48:55.320 There were some people who were really quite miffed about it. Can you explain why?

00:48:59.960 Yeah. I've just given you a very bleak version of what I think is going wrong in Britain right now.

00:49:07.560 But overall, I am quite optimistic about us as a country and about what I call the project of

00:49:14.680 the United Kingdom. Now, when you look around the world, you see there is a lot of people are

00:49:21.720 grappling with the crisis of human shortage. You might call it that. You have Japan's prime

00:49:26.520 minister who was last year saying that Japan is on the brink of whether it can function as a

00:49:31.160 society or not because the birth rates are so low. You've got South Korea that spent $200

00:49:36.760 billion on various initiatives trying to persuade women to have more babies. And they succeeded only in 0.99

00:49:42.360 beating its own record for the lowest birth rate in the world year after year after year.

00:49:47.000 You've got Georgia Maloney, who is in full-on panic. She's created a ministry of birth rate 0.99

00:49:53.960 or something like that, because Italy is set to lose 5 million working-age people in 25 years' time.

00:50:00.360 You've got France is going to lose 1.6 million working-age people. Macron is talking about the

00:50:07.480 need for demographic rearmament, he calls it. He's having free fertility tests. And then you've got

00:50:12.760 Spain, which is also about 3 million working-age people. Now, the Bank of Spain did a report a

00:50:19.800 while ago saying that, sure, they're about to get lots of immigrants, but you would need

00:50:25.080 three times that in order to keep the working-age pension-age balance correct. So country after country,

00:50:31.640 we can see in a panic about the coming human shortage and what that means. What it means,

00:50:36.920 by the way, is if you're young and paying into a pension, then that's a joke, because they've got

00:50:40.600 absolutely no way, even in theory, of working out who's going to pay that pension by the time you get

00:50:45.400 to pension age. So Macron tries to change it, the French have riots in the streets, and we can see the

00:50:50.520 problems. Now, switch to Britain, and we've got the exact opposite conversation. We alone in Europe

00:50:58.360 are going to have a significant working-age population increase in 25 years' time. We're

00:51:03.800 going to have 5 million people more. The Italians are going to have 5 million more people less. 0.99

00:51:08.120 Now, by our standards, that isn't particularly much. That's about the standard kind of working-age

00:51:12.920 population increase. So it's not as if we're going to have an overpopulation crisis. We just don't have

00:51:18.040 the opposite. Now, my position is this, that there's two, if you look at the birth rates crisis,

00:51:24.280 and I think you can call it that, right around the world. We can see that nobody has managed to

00:51:30.360 find any way around. You can bribe people to have more kids, but by and large, if women and young 0.96

00:51:37.240 people are taking different lifestyle choices, it's difficult for the government to really sort of

00:51:41.480 change that. So if you've got an underpopulation crisis, either now or coming down the road, I mean,

00:51:47.800 China, for example, is going to lose 25% of its working-age people by 2050. I mean,

00:51:53.400 they can kiss goodbye to the fears about China dominating the world, but those demographics,

00:51:58.120 you're going to end up as a country where the playgrounds are empty and the care homes are full.

00:52:02.200 Same with Japan, same with Korea. Now, not China, not Japan, not Korea with all its money, 0.94

00:52:08.440 not Italy, nobody's found a way of increasing this. But of course, if your problem is immigration,

00:52:15.160 then you can decrease this. We can do it. So our demographics are pretty strong. I think the UK 0.91

00:52:22.360 is managing demographic change probably better than anybody else in Europe right now. Now,

00:52:27.480 that's not to say we don't have problems, but we don't have the sort of problems. Our problems are

00:52:31.480 fixable. They require the right policies, but you can fix them. But our birth rate is very similar to

00:52:35.960 other countries in the same predicament, isn't it? Yes, but let's take...

00:52:40.360 So what you're saying is we're able to compensate for it with immigration?

00:52:43.480 They're a different sort of immigration. Now, let's take Germany. They've got more immigrants

00:52:47.560 as a shared population than we do. That was one of the reasons for Merkel letting in the 3 million,

00:52:52.280 to that, okay, we're going to need workers. Now, Germany is also facing a sharp decline in working

00:52:57.960 age people. So the integration issues economically have been way worse than ours. So they've taken in 1.00

00:53:04.840 all of these people. They've got far bigger problems than we do in migrant crime. I think something 1.00

00:53:09.960 like 40% of all criminal suspects in Germany, that's how they calculate it, are foreign nationals

00:53:15.160 right now versus 1% of the German population. You can see this reflected in the rise of the AFD and

00:53:20.760 the despair of East Germany, where they look to the future, they see decline, they lost in a way a good

00:53:26.200 chunk of the population after reunification, and they just see the whole society going rotten. Now, 0.99

00:53:33.000 my point is, if it were as easy as immigration, then any country could pull it off. Germany would

00:53:37.800 not have the demographic decline that it's got right now. But it is not as easy as that. We have

00:53:42.840 managed immigration in a way that has brought huge challenges, and for a second, and minimize those.

00:53:49.960 But by and large, we have done it under this model of Britishness, which as integration works,

00:53:55.400 has worked pretty well. We could be in a few decades time, the kind of United States of Europe,

00:54:00.600 as it were, because the US has got the same kind of demographics as us. And it turns out a lot of

00:54:05.480 these ethnic minorities are voting for Donald Trump to, in a way, people thought the opposite a few

00:54:09.720 years ago. So I think that Britain's problems are the problems of demographic success and demographic 0.85

00:54:16.200 growth. And we can, of course, at any moment, now we've left the EU, we can cut down to zero

00:54:21.720 the number of immigrants if we so want to. But what no country can do is mandate an increase

00:54:27.000 in population. So between these two problems, ours is the better one to have.

00:54:31.960 The problem is, Fraser, is when you have the level of immigration that we do,

00:54:37.560 the cohesiveness of society really does suffer. And also, the other problem is when you have an

00:54:43.800 electorate who election after election after election goes, we want it lowered. And the government

00:54:51.080 I agree.

00:54:51.640 Quite frankly, ignore that.

00:54:53.080 Yeah.

00:54:53.560 Well, the government don't ignore it. They promised to do it.

00:54:56.040 Yeah, they promised to do it, but they did the opposite.

00:54:58.440 And then they gaslit them, basically.

00:55:00.040 Yeah, and then they get chucked out. I put that, not really matters, but I put that down

00:55:03.400 more to incompetence than cynicism. I mean, I think the Tories had these new Brexit controls,

00:55:08.360 and they thought, oh, isn't this great? Immigration is not an issue right now. All the opinion

00:55:12.040 polls say that people aren't worried about immigration, because we've now got Brexit,

00:55:15.000 we've got complete control. But they set the bar way too low. And by the time when you

00:55:19.240 worked out what was happening, there were like two million people coming in off the scale,

00:55:22.680 that's a quadruple level of net migration. So we're having this conversation now in the context

00:55:28.120 of a country which has just completely lost control of immigration, under Tories who campaigned to

00:55:33.720 take back control in Brexit. And they got kicked out of power, and they absolutely deserved to do that.

00:55:40.600 But what we're also seeing now is you can guarantee this time next year, immigration will be about a

00:55:46.040 third of what it was last year. Because we can actually cut down the visas, the Tories started

00:55:52.120 to do this, so it will take time to come through. And I would support, for example, net zero migration

00:55:57.880 for the next two years or something like that. I mean, Sweden's managed that right now. It's saying,

00:56:02.520 okay, as you were saying, the integration has become a bit of an issue. We're going to start

00:56:06.520 to pay people to go back to the country they came from. It's one of the things that Swedes are doing. 1.00

00:56:10.920 But Sweden has shown that net zero immigration, in other words, people coming in is equal or less

00:56:17.320 than people going out, is achievable, even under the EU, even under the ECHR.

00:56:23.480 But this is what I call a short-term problem. The long-term, a 25-year forecast,

00:56:27.800 it seems that the British model is something that the world's most discerning immigrants still

00:56:34.360 want to come to.

00:56:35.400 Well, there's no dispute about that.

00:56:37.960 In a way, that's not true for Spain and not true for Germany.

00:56:40.280 Okay. But I think what people might say to that, and I'm one of those people, so I will say it,

00:56:45.640 is that famous line, in the long-term, we're all dead. In the short-term, the problems that we see

00:56:51.080 now, you know, you say integrated, blah, blah, blah. And what I see, and what people will tell

00:56:55.880 you, is up to 50,000 people a year, perhaps more, coming into this country illegally every year.

00:57:01.640 Oh, yeah.

00:57:02.040 Right?

00:57:02.920 That's the small boats. You can get to that figure alone. God knows how many other there is.

00:57:06.120 Right. So we've got illegal...

00:57:07.560 So, yeah, a collapse of border control.

00:57:09.960 Yeah. The illegal immigration should be zero. I think any sensible person can agree on that, 0.94

00:57:13.960 right? Then on top of that, let's not paper over the cracks. We've got ethnic riots,

00:57:19.000 effectively, and they're ethnic from different directions. We had the riots by people who were 0.88

00:57:23.880 upset about the stabbing in Southport. There was a counter-rioting from Muslim communities who were

00:57:29.160 protecting themselves by wielding knives and machetes and whatever, running around, having fights.

00:57:35.880 If I'm a normal person looking at that, I'm going, that's not integration. When I talk to people in

00:57:40.360 various other countries, they look at what's happening and they're going, the government of your

00:57:43.960 country is irresponsible and they're going to lead to civil war. That's what people will say.

00:57:47.880 That's what Elon Musk has said. I think they say civil war is inevitable in Britain, yeah.

00:57:51.960 Well, and I think inevitable is perhaps putting it strongly. But what I would say is we're not on

00:57:57.320 a path from an integration perspective to what they have in America. It's very different in America. In

00:58:02.280 America, they have a uniting vision. What is the British dream, exactly?

00:58:08.280 Well, the British dream is, it's funny. It might be whatever drove you and your parents to come here.

00:58:14.760 My parents didn't come here. My parents sent me here, and the reason they sent me here is they

00:58:18.120 wanted me to receive a good education. That's why they did it, right?

00:58:20.920 That's a British dream.

00:58:22.360 Yes.

00:58:23.160 And look at Sajid Javid's parents. They came here penniless. Their son ended up home secretary.

00:58:28.600 They, his illiterate mum would make sure he sat in the library after school every day because they 0.99

00:58:34.760 wanted him to have an education, believing that that education would lead him to a better place. That is

00:58:39.480 absolutely a British dream. And I think one of the problems we've got in Britain is that the British 1.00

00:58:44.360 dream is working out a lot better for those who arrive here than it is for some of the white working 0.99

00:58:49.480 class.

00:58:49.800 Hence the tensions.

00:58:51.480 But you're saying we need more immigration over the long term.

00:58:55.240 No, no. What I'm saying, right, is that, of course, by the way, of course, we absolutely,

00:58:59.560 given that right now we've got tens of thousands of Brits leaving the country, even if we wanted

00:59:03.800 to hit net zero, we would need mass immigration to keep it at net zero. Now, 0.91

00:59:10.360 A lot of those people would stop leaving if they stopped feeling the way they do about this country.

00:59:14.760 Oh, yeah, of course. I mean, that's, that's true for every country handling these things. My point

00:59:20.840 is that the debate about immigration can get so polarizing right now. And it's difficult to try

00:59:27.480 to say, for example, that the integration failures are real, they're serious, they're there for all to

00:59:32.440 see. But we also have integration successes. Now, let's take the King's coronation, just, you know,

00:59:39.080 we're sitting here, just overlooking Westminster Abbey. In that Abbey, you had a king who, and his

00:59:47.880 Hindu prime minister, his security arranged by a Buddhist foreign secretary. You had a Muslim 0.90

00:59:54.760 mayor of London, a Muslim first minister of Scotland, both in attendance. You had the chief

01:00:01.320 rabbi who was a guest of Buckingham Palace, so he wouldn't have to break the Sabbath coming over.

01:00:06.920 That ceremony, I thought, said a lot about our country. Because I can't think of another country

01:00:12.520 in the world where that sort of cohesion would have been imaginable. We're talking, I get it,

01:00:18.440 this is the elite, this is the politics. But can you imagine ever being an American prime

01:00:22.920 president sitting in the Oval Office with a Ganesh idol on his desk, as Rishi Sunak had on his desk?

01:00:30.120 Now, how many Brits cared about Sunak of a Ganesh idol? Zero. Nobody cared at all. We're like that.

01:00:35.480 We're like that as a country. It is, Kemi Beidnik says that this is the best

01:00:40.440 place in the world to be black. Very controversial when she said that. But when you look at other

01:00:45.640 countries and the integration issues they've got, usually it's immigration, immigrants falling behind

01:00:50.600 educationally, economically, they're a subset that never quite manages to catch up, and creating social

01:00:56.680 problems that leads to riots. I think that in Britain, our employment differentials are very

01:01:02.040 strong when you look at how more likely. In Sweden, for example, immigrants are way less

01:01:05.640 likely to be employed than a native speaker. Nonetheless, they take in lots of people,

01:01:09.640 and they lead to this society within society. And every day this year so far, there has been

01:01:15.240 a domestic bombing in Sweden. I mean, terrible problems that we simply don't have.

01:01:20.200 My point is that we can get it right quite a lot. We can get it right. That's reflected in our politics,

01:01:25.960 it's reflected in not just football teams, but football supporters. It's difficult to point to

01:01:31.320 any kind of serious team of people in this country. That doesn't reflect some kind of signs of our

01:01:38.280 integration success. Now, my point is, it's become almost verboten to say that now. If you point to,

01:01:44.920 if you basically say the project of the United Kingdom is broadly speaking a successful one,

01:01:48.680 but our successes in integration, broadly speaking, outnumber our failures, that we have got more

01:01:54.040 reasons to be optimistic about our future than we might like ourselves to admit. I mean, the column

01:02:00.040 that I really wrote that caused everybody to go bananas was one simply at the end of last year, saying

01:02:05.720 that journalists do, and so we should do, and so you guys should, in your podcast, focus on what's

01:02:10.680 going wrong. But that can lead to a negativity bias, because what's going right happens in smaller

01:02:16.920 increments. So you would never know, for example, that surveyed crime suggests that violent crime is

01:02:22.600 halved in this country in 20 years. Your average person would flat out refuse to believe that,

01:02:27.720 and yet that's the best evidence that we've got pointing out where that's happened. That the

01:02:31.320 number, you know, everything from the number of road deaths to the universe has never been

01:02:35.560 a better time to be young, for example, than right now. That's not how young people feel.

01:02:39.320 Exactly. It's not how they feel.

01:02:40.600 What about the housing crisis?

01:02:42.600 It's not because of the media, Fraser. Come on.

01:02:45.880 Let's stick with immigration. Let's stick with immigration. So the point you're making 0.99

01:02:52.520 is entirely correct, which is Britain is very good at absorbing people from other places.

01:02:56.680 And better than most of the European countries.

01:02:58.920 I've made this point my entire public career. I've said this is the best place to be an immigrant in

01:03:04.120 the world. And that's not to say we don't have really serious issues. It's what we do.

01:03:08.280 And what I would say to you is the reason we're having the conversation about immigration

01:03:13.720 is not that people feel that me or Francis's mother coming here has been a disaster for this

01:03:19.960 country. There are people who feel that way, right? The reason people feel strongly about immigration 0.97

01:03:27.000 is they see the numbers that we have had over the last two decades. They naturally, people will,

01:03:33.960 I think, quite reasonably project that into the future for the reason that Francis gave,

01:03:37.800 which is it doesn't matter what politicians say. They're not dealing with this issue.

01:03:41.320 That means, are we going to have millions and millions and millions and millions more people

01:03:45.160 coming? And then they go, what is the impact of that scale? It's not about immigrants and our

01:03:52.280 willingness to welcome them. It's about the scale. What is the impact on our infrastructure?

01:03:56.920 What is the impact on societal cohesion? Look, this is something that no one wants to talk about,

01:04:03.400 especially in these kind of places. But I, as an immigrant, can say it. At what percentage

01:04:09.480 of the native population does England cease to be England? Is it 50 percent? Is it 40 percent? Is it

01:04:15.960 10 percent? When there are no English people left, is it still England, right? That is a thing that no 1.00

01:04:21.240 one wants to talk about. But I know millions of people subtly feel, and not just English or British

01:04:26.840 people, my relatives from Russia or Ukraine or Armenia or whatever, they come to Heathrow and

01:04:32.200 they go, is this still England, right? Now, you could say that shows the success of our society.

01:04:38.440 There's a hell of a lot of people who don't agree with you.

01:04:40.440 That's right. I mean, do we regard Rishi Sunak as English, for example?

01:04:44.120 I've always said, this is a very unpopular thing, that I'm not English. I will never be English. I

01:04:49.800 don't think Rishi Sunak is English. We're both British, but we're not English.

01:04:53.080 No, you weren't born here. You were an immigrant. 0.77

01:04:55.720 No. Well, my son was born here. I don't think my son is English.

01:04:59.160 Right.

01:04:59.720 He's born to a Russian and Ukrainian immigrant.

01:05:01.240 Again, that's definition, right? I would say that Rishi Sunak is as English as

01:05:05.480 Tizer and Wyfrance, right? He is absolutely English. He was born and bred here.

01:05:10.360 And I wouldn't say that the colour of his skin makes him any less.

01:05:13.720 He's a brown Hindu. How is he English? 1.00

01:05:15.640 Because he's born and bred here.

01:05:17.400 So, by being born here, you become English, in your opinion.

01:05:20.520 Yeah.

01:05:21.800 English. Because there's a difference, right? 0.63

01:05:23.480 I don't think English is national. Look, I'm a Scottish, right?

01:05:26.920 Yeah. And now, are my kids English? I would say they are.

01:05:33.240 How?

01:05:34.120 Because they were born here.

01:05:35.400 They're Scottish? 0.77

01:05:36.760 Nope.

01:05:37.080 By blood, right?

01:05:37.960 No, they've hardly ever been to Scotland, unfortunately.

01:05:40.120 So what?

01:05:40.840 By blood, so give me this.

01:05:42.200 I mean...

01:05:42.840 My son is born to a Russian and a Ukrainian, right?

01:05:46.440 How on earth is he English?

01:05:47.880 Because he was born here.

01:05:49.240 I mean...

01:05:49.880 You think that being born in a country makes you of that...

01:05:54.760 So, if your children had been born in Japan, would they be Japanese?

01:05:58.440 If they were born there...

01:05:59.720 Look, you get white Caribbean people, for example.

01:06:02.760 Hold on.

01:06:03.320 Just the Japanese example.

01:06:05.080 Would they be Japanese? 1.00

01:06:06.440 If they were born there and lived their life there, then yeah.

01:06:09.960 Look, this comes down to the...

01:06:11.320 Look, I think...

01:06:12.120 The imperial identity I get, and I've said this, right?

01:06:16.200 People should be able to come to this country and they buy into the imperial overarching identities. 0.60

01:06:20.760 We're all British.

01:06:22.040 That's fine with me.

01:06:23.240 But pretending that my son is English, I...

01:06:26.280 What?

01:06:26.600 Come on.

01:06:27.480 It depends if you think English has got an ethnic undertone.

01:06:31.240 Of course it does.

01:06:32.120 Well, I disagree.

01:06:33.320 And by the way, you might say it's not my country.

01:06:35.400 Okay, no, no, no.

01:06:36.440 What about Japanese people?

01:06:37.800 I would say Hamza Yusuf, for example, is Scottish.

01:06:42.440 Right?

01:06:42.760 So, look, you might disagree with me.

01:06:44.040 People have different definitions of this.

01:06:45.560 But in my opinion, if you're born in a country, you are of that country. 0.81

01:06:50.040 And I can look at my...

01:06:51.320 Do my sons have half Scottish, half Slavic blood?

01:06:54.360 Right?

01:06:55.160 If you were to do one of these ancestry.com tests, they might say that.

01:06:58.600 But in what meaningful sense are they half Czech, really?

01:07:02.360 I mean, they don't know the first thing about Czech Republic.

01:07:04.840 I mean, it's...

01:07:06.520 They know everything about England because they were born here.

01:07:09.160 This is...

01:07:09.880 They cheer for England's football teams now.

01:07:13.000 Took them a while, but they do.

01:07:15.240 And so, that's the way I see nationality.

01:07:18.520 Now, I know that not everybody does that.

01:07:20.280 Now, again...

01:07:20.840 Most people don't.

01:07:22.200 The overwhelming majority of people don't see nationality.

01:07:24.040 Well, perhaps not, but I'm...

01:07:25.080 In every country in the world.

01:07:26.360 But I'm giving you my answer.

01:07:28.360 Yeah.

01:07:28.520 And I think that...

01:07:30.280 Take, for example, my wife.

01:07:31.480 Now, she was born to refugee parents.

01:07:33.880 They fled the Soviets.

01:07:36.280 And she brought up in Sweden, but she never felt Swedish.

01:07:40.680 Because she felt that the word Swedish, the way that people used it, did have an ethnic undertone.

01:07:45.560 If you looked a little bit dusky, right?

01:07:47.320 If you look a little bit foreign, then you would not be seen to be Swedish, right? 0.92

01:07:52.280 Now, it's very strange because I don't look at her and see somebody who looks a bit foreign. 0.94

01:07:55.960 But only if you do it for the Swede's eyes.

01:07:58.920 You might look at you for it.

01:07:59.880 You might struggle to pass yourself off as a Swede.

01:08:01.560 I don't know.

01:08:02.440 It's not something...

01:08:03.080 I don't think we really spend much time in this country looking at somebody looking.

01:08:06.200 Look at Constantine, right?

01:08:07.720 Is he...

01:08:08.840 You know, I don't know.

01:08:09.640 You might guess, but it wouldn't be that much important.

01:08:12.600 And here, she does not feel like an alien.

01:08:16.920 Now, perhaps she is because she's an immigrant. 0.95

01:08:18.920 But weirdly, she felt more of an alien in Sweden, where she was born.

01:08:21.560 That makes sense to me.

01:08:22.360 But she does here...

01:08:23.160 Because we have, as I said, an overarching identity.

01:08:26.200 It's the same in America. 0.84

01:08:27.080 It's actually a very...

01:08:28.440 To a lesser extent, but very similar in Russia, where,

01:08:30.920 you know, Armenians can be Russian if they're...

01:08:33.960 But Russian in an overarching sense.

01:08:36.360 No one would think they're ethnically Russian, right?

01:08:39.560 The point I'm trying to make to you is,

01:08:42.840 a country is what a country is.

01:08:45.000 And when that country changes over time in a way that's both

01:08:48.120 visually and culturally different, that is a discombobulating 1.00

01:08:53.160 thing for the vast majority of the people who live in that place.

01:08:56.120 Maybe not for you.

01:08:57.320 Maybe not for lots of people in the media.

01:08:59.160 Maybe not for lots of people in the building across the road and in the parliament.

01:09:03.080 But for the vast majority of people in this country,

01:09:05.960 their sense is that when the country ceases to be visually the same as it was at some point,

01:09:11.480 there is a level when it ceases to be that country.

01:09:14.360 Well, the countries always change.

01:09:15.960 You have the Gale, the Pict, the Saxon, the Dane. 0.58

01:09:18.600 I mean, you have got patterns of the...

01:09:21.400 By the way, I don't want for a second to seem to be disparaged or diminished people who feel that way.

01:09:26.040 These are hugely important, and I think we make a grave mistake if we say,

01:09:29.960 oh, they're all racist, let's not talk about it.

01:09:32.200 And when you boil down the concerns, they usually are very practical ones.

01:09:36.280 Like, how's my kid going to get to school?

01:09:39.000 Or they're going to be up against the world's workforce.

01:09:41.160 This is going to make their life tougher.

01:09:43.000 Or where are they all going to live?

01:09:44.920 It's all overcrowded.

01:09:46.840 Now, that would be true if there were a whole bunch of people coming down from Dundee or somebody, right?

01:09:54.920 So it isn't necessarily an ethnic thing.

01:09:56.760 Yes.

01:09:57.080 Now, I understand the ethnic thing as well, especially is true with Muslims, for example.

01:10:02.120 Now, that typically is what you hear, is Islam really compatible with the West?

01:10:05.720 We've got six million Muslims in this country.

01:10:08.280 Is it time we started seeing them as kind of fifth columnists? 0.95

01:10:11.080 Now, that is where I really disagree, because I think that the debate, especially around Muslims,

01:10:17.720 is getting really quite toxic, I think.

01:10:21.400 And I think that Islam is absolutely compatible with Britishness, with Western values.

01:10:27.800 In the same way that I'm a Catholic, for example,

01:10:29.960 there was a time when people were saying people like me were a threat to society,

01:10:33.720 that we shouldn't be allowed to do it.

01:10:34.840 Some people still do.

01:10:35.640 Yeah, they do, exactly.

01:10:37.240 When JFK ran for president, that was a big thing.

01:10:39.240 He was a Catholic.

01:10:39.880 Can you really trust him, right?

01:10:41.000 Right.

01:10:41.640 But I think, so there are always kind of demographic changes that come over.

01:10:46.120 There are always brings in questions.

01:10:48.120 These are questions that deserve answers, but we usually find a way of muddling through.

01:10:52.440 I'm talking about long term.

01:10:53.640 That isn't for a second to say that we don't have huge questions which need and deserve answers,

01:10:59.400 and people do, especially if we're heading for a period that we are,

01:11:03.080 where the birth rate is low in order to keep the economy moving.

01:11:07.320 We're going to become a country that's going to be taking probably, certainly six figures of

01:11:12.280 immigrants every single year.

01:11:14.040 We need to do that probably just to stay still.

01:11:16.120 But the ONS projections are that we're going to be taking, broadly speaking, 300,000 immigrants a year

01:11:21.000 for the next 25 years.

01:11:22.440 Now that's a lot of people.

01:11:23.960 So I think that does raise a lot of questions.

01:11:26.920 It should be like, one of the questions would be, what have we stopped?

01:11:29.720 What if we did what, like Nigel Farage says, and what has net zero every single year?

01:11:34.360 Is that an option?

01:11:35.240 Absolutely.

01:11:35.720 We've got the tools.

01:11:37.080 What will be the implications of the option?

01:11:38.760 Well, we can look at it.

01:11:40.760 Now you might say that AI is going to come along and everybody's going to be making so much money

01:11:44.440 that we don't need people to keep the economy going or to pay the pensions.

01:11:48.280 That's an argument.

01:11:49.560 But these are all, I think it's possible to have this conversation, I hope,

01:11:54.360 in a way where people aren't accusing each other of being racists or globalists or

01:11:59.000 or fifth columnists for George Soros and stuff like that.

01:12:03.160 But it's becoming, as you say, a really important question that isn't going to go away.

01:12:09.400 Now, I could perhaps be wrong in saying that you, that Englishness is a multi-ethnic concept.

01:12:17.000 Perhaps I'm wrong in saying that I regard Rishi Sunak as being as British as me or as English as my children.

01:12:22.760 I'm British?

01:12:23.720 English, right?

01:12:24.520 I understand.

01:12:25.320 And also you might say, I'm an immigrant to this country myself.

01:12:30.120 If I've voted the other way around in the referendum, perhaps I would be a foreigner.

01:12:35.720 And so who am I to talk about who's English and who's not? 0.99

01:12:38.120 But, you know, there's a phrase in Scotland that there are many strands in the tartan

01:12:42.440 that we're all Scotland's story, we're all worth the same.

01:12:46.360 And that applies to you of any religion or ethnicity.

01:12:50.280 And, you know, I guess it's, you know, I don't know if you were to do an opinion poll of Scots

01:12:55.960 and ask them, is Humza Yusuf Scottish?

01:12:58.680 Perhaps I'd be the minority in unhesitatingly saying, yes, it never really occurred to me

01:13:03.000 that he'd be anything less than that.

01:13:05.640 But I guess this is going to be, these are all important questions.

01:13:11.240 But I am on the side of the optimists who think that Britain as a country, the concept of Britishness

01:13:16.840 and the project of the United Kingdom is one that is more likely to get this right longer term than get it wrong.

01:13:22.520 So, forgive me if it sounds like I'm picking you, I just, what is the concept of Britishness?

01:13:28.680 The concept of Britishness?

01:13:29.800 Yeah.

01:13:30.360 Well, one of the funny things about it is that it's almost impossible to define.

01:13:33.640 But, you know, because we don't have a national day, really, of Remembrance Sunday.

01:13:38.280 We don't have a little list of mission statements or values.

01:13:43.160 Okay, you used to be in charge of a pretty significant operation of The Spectator, right?

01:13:47.740 If I came to you and I said, what is the mission of The Spectator?

01:13:52.940 And you went, well, the thing about The Spectator is it's really difficult to define.

01:13:56.620 And, you know, we don't have a national, we don't have a this, we don't have a that.

01:14:00.220 I'd think this guy doesn't know what he's doing.

01:14:02.140 I would, look, I, of course, and I could tell The Spectator is there to inform, entertain, delight,

01:14:07.020 bring humour, whatever, right?

01:14:08.140 Right.

01:14:08.380 Now, my point about Britain is that people can define it different ways.

01:14:12.060 I don't think there's a right or a wrong way.

01:14:13.980 But I would regard it as the world's first and most successful multi-ethnic state through

01:14:19.180 empire, number one, right?

01:14:21.660 Number two, it is we are the country that pretty much invented the notions of liberty

01:14:26.620 and democracy and exported them to the Western world.

01:14:29.100 I would say it's the home of democracy.

01:14:30.620 Although when you look at how few young people actually are into democracy,

01:14:33.420 you wonder if it's going to stay that much longer.

01:14:35.260 But I would say that's fundamental parts of it.

01:14:37.020 Rule of law, I think, is importance, tolerance, and also defending liberty, which we've done

01:14:46.700 pretty much better than any other country in Europe.

01:14:49.260 Now, hopefully, we will not have to do that again.

01:14:51.660 But it's the kind of place, I think, where Britain as a country is the cradle of opportunity.

01:15:01.980 It's a place which is recognised world over as being the place where, if it's done properly,

01:15:10.860 then you can make whatever you want of your life.

01:15:14.540 Now, quite often, actually, it's people like you, Constantine, people like Kemi Badenak,

01:15:19.260 who grew up in other countries, who can describe Britain better than those here, because it was.

01:15:23.980 I think Kemi's maiden speech, she was saying, as an African girl, she looked at Britain as a kind

01:15:29.900 of shining light on the hill, the kind of place, if you manage to get there, you can make whatever

01:15:33.740 you wanted of your talents in a way that simply wasn't true of her in Nigeria or other countries

01:15:38.220 in Europe, because we stood out because of nurturing the way that people get on here and

01:15:44.620 the notion of common sense.

01:15:46.380 Now, perhaps, if you've grown up in a country, you can't really see it how others see it.

01:15:49.980 But I think the British light has never shone brighter than it does right now.

01:15:54.700 And that, of course, every successful democracy is self-critical.

01:15:57.900 So if we're living in this country, we're going to point to these problems,

01:16:00.540 and we're never going to shut up about them quite right too.

01:16:03.500 But we should ask yourself why it is that so much of the rest of the world holds Britain in

01:16:07.820 such high regard, which would cross the opinion polls that they do.

01:16:11.100 And why, of course, the reason that we are, for the foreseeable future,

01:16:15.580 going to be trying to manage down the number of people who want to come here.

01:16:18.540 This is very different to the European situation, where they're going to be crying out for immigrants 0.94

01:16:23.100 and not able to get enough in quite a lot of other countries.

01:16:26.220 And China's losing people all the time now.

01:16:28.540 It's negative net migration for a while.

01:16:31.260 And that is because there's something kind of magical and wonderful and successful,

01:16:34.540 but also indescribable.

01:16:36.460 I think when I say the project of the United Kingdom is not something you can get a marketing

01:16:40.140 guide to come up with a mission statement.

01:16:41.980 You kind of know it when you see it.

01:16:44.620 And there is something about respect, tolerance.

01:16:49.660 That's the other thing.

01:16:52.780 Tolerance, I think, is, again, fundamentally British.

01:16:55.100 Other than the Civil War, we didn't have much of a track record of turning on each other.

01:17:00.540 Not really.

01:17:01.500 We all have the riots now and again, but they're sporadic.

01:17:04.700 We have a habit in this country of making things work through shared values.

01:17:09.260 Now, if we're going to be absorbing people and the rate we've, hopefully not at the rate

01:17:13.100 we've been in the last few years, but when the weight of the next 10, 25 years come,

01:17:16.780 then you need to put in a lot more work when it comes to the Britishness ceremony.

01:17:20.780 I don't know, have you had to go through one of those?

01:17:22.220 Yes.

01:17:22.860 Right.

01:17:23.420 Well, you know, you've got these little tests about Englishness and Britishness.

01:17:26.860 And I think, well, you have to be through it.

01:17:29.660 And I should be asking you if you thought you learned much about Britain in that process.

01:17:32.860 But you learn nothing about Britain in that process.

01:17:35.740 But I don't think you're going to learn about it through reading a book and passing a test.

01:17:41.500 I know, exactly.

01:17:42.220 It's a much more, this is why, forgive me if it sounds like I'm grilling you.

01:17:46.940 I'm trying to work these things out in my head, too.

01:17:49.260 And the reason I am grilling you to some extent is that...

01:17:53.340 Freedom of speech, sorry, I should have added that one there.

01:17:55.580 Of course.

01:17:56.540 But I don't know how much of, all of the things you listed are actually, in my opinion,

01:18:02.220 deeply a threat, including freedom of speech in this country.

01:18:05.260 So when people are being locked up for tweets, it's harder than say Britishness is about freedom

01:18:10.940 of speech, right?

01:18:12.540 And democracy itself, I would argue, is facing lots of challenges, especially amongst the young.

01:18:16.860 So here's me saying it's a fundamental part of being British.

01:18:18.940 Well, it won't be if enough people don't want it to be.

01:18:21.340 Well, exactly.

01:18:22.060 And then the third thing, I used to live in Tower Hamlets, which is a part of London,

01:18:26.620 where if you go to your GP surgery, there are leaflets in every language in the world,

01:18:31.740 pretty much, in that surgery, right?

01:18:34.460 That's not what integration looks like.

01:18:36.060 It just isn't.

01:18:36.780 When people don't have a way to communicate with each other,

01:18:40.220 because they don't speak a common language, integration is not possible in that environment.

01:18:45.500 So the reason that we're having this agreement, I think, is you actually said right at the

01:18:50.380 beginning, you know, net zero immigration for a couple of years, perfectly reasonable.

01:18:53.420 I think there are lots of people who are putting forward the views I'm putting forward that would

01:18:57.260 agree with that.

01:18:57.900 So it's a reasonable point.

01:18:58.860 I think the point I'm making is, unless we are very, very clear about what it means to

01:19:04.220 be British, what we expect of people who come here, this is something we've been terrible at, 1.00

01:19:09.820 absolutely woeful at communicating to new people who come into our country that 1.00

01:19:15.980 there are certain things that you have a duty to do.

01:19:19.260 Mm-hmm.

01:19:19.820 It's a duty.

01:19:20.940 You were given an opportunity, as Kemi said, and as I've said many times, to come into a place

01:19:27.500 that offers you infinitely more opportunity than you would have had in the place that you've come

01:19:32.220 from.

01:19:32.460 Yeah, you bet.

01:19:32.620 And that opportunity comes with responsibility, right?

01:19:36.060 You have a responsibility to adjust your mentality to the local mentality, not bring your own, adjust.

01:19:42.940 Yeah.

01:19:43.340 You have to learn the local language, you have to do lots of other things to make yourself

01:19:47.340 part of this thing, instead of bringing your thing and insisting that this thing becomes more

01:19:52.300 like that thing.

01:19:52.860 And I would add to that that if you break these rules in a significant way, you get chucked out.

01:19:56.540 A hundred percent.

01:19:57.100 I think we should be doing a lot more deportations than we're doing right now.

01:19:59.580 Yeah.

01:19:59.820 Mm-hmm.

01:20:00.300 And so, but I completely agree with all of that, and I think that the difference between us

01:20:06.060 and America is America set out to become a kind of multi-country stage.

01:20:10.300 Yeah.

01:20:10.380 We set out to become a melting pot.

01:20:11.740 We've accidentally become a melting pot.

01:20:14.620 Now, I'd argue probably the most successful one in the rest of Europe, but still we've

01:20:18.140 got our problems.

01:20:19.340 Now, we've also accidentally created the world's most successful multi-faith democracy as well.

01:20:24.460 We didn't set out to do it, but take that scene from the King's coronation.

01:20:27.980 That's what a multi-faith democracy looks like.

01:20:31.020 We did this really without sort of codifying it, but I think what we're going to have to

01:20:36.140 do now is insist on a lot more of these rules.

01:20:38.620 We can't rely on some kind of natural melting thing because there are so many places, especially

01:20:43.100 in like Bradford and Alderman places, where the integration isn't happening and things

01:20:47.900 are getting worse rather than better.

01:20:50.220 So, we're going to have to be a lot more demanding on that.

01:20:53.260 And I think people are going to want to see a sense of fairness and established in a quite muscular

01:20:59.260 way. I think right now, the small boats crisis, for example, is the most visible sign of the

01:21:03.900 authority to simply losing control.

01:21:06.220 And you might argue, as some do, oh, it's only 50,000 versus the million people are going to

01:21:10.540 come in, but it doesn't matter. I mean, set aside the amount of money it costs, which is huge.

01:21:15.020 The fact that it's happening at all just sort of sends a huge message that we are not,

01:21:19.580 this project of ours is not being properly defended, that people who are skipping the queue

01:21:24.300 by coming via illegal people smugglers are getting the better of our system.

01:21:28.700 And I don't think it's to do with the Coast Guard. I think the problem there is that our legal system

01:21:32.620 is so kind of decayed that they get caught up in appeals and processes for months and months,

01:21:38.380 which should be dealt with very, very quickly. Right now, the Germans are having a debate

01:21:41.580 about kicking out the illegals immediately. And this is a company which is in the Schengen area.

01:21:46.620 And if you look at some of the German debate, they are saying now that if liberal democracy cannot

01:21:52.060 defend itself in this way, it can expect to be supplanted. Now, this is a country where the 0.92

01:21:57.340 democratic project has faltered, to put it mildly, over the last few decades.

01:22:01.580 I wouldn't say that we are immune from that kind of pressure at all. I think

01:22:05.340 there are lots of threats to British democracy and to what I would regard to be our liberal

01:22:11.500 country. I would say that I'm a liberal ahead of being a right, I wouldn't call myself a right

01:22:15.660 winger, I wouldn't reject the label either. But fundamentally, I'm a liberal in the kind of

01:22:20.460 British tradition of the word. But I think that is under huge threat right now. Unless you can be 0.93

01:22:26.140 shown that this will work. Unless you can prove to people that this is not being taken advantage of,

01:22:31.820 then you can expect support for liberal democracy to be undermined. And I think there was a poll last

01:22:36.780 week showing that 52% of under 28 would think things would be better if they were a strong man

01:22:42.780 who was in charge of everything. Now, you fled, not fled, but you left a sort of Soviet country.

01:22:49.900 I grew up in an era where you can remember what the alternative to the liberal democracy looks like.

01:22:55.020 We're getting a whole bunch of young people now with no real memory of what the alternative

01:22:59.500 liberal democracy looks like. So that's why I do take seriously the support, which you see not just

01:23:04.940 in that Channel 4 survey, but Pew will ask it again. And Jonathan Sumption makes, in his essays,

01:23:11.180 he's got a new book coming out where he talks a lot about this, about how Britain could end up on

01:23:15.420 the list of countries like Brazil, like Russia, of countries that simply aren't democracies anymore.

01:23:21.260 They've got the shape and form of it, but they aren't. If you look at the way that he thinks

01:23:25.180 of the way the courts are ruling so much of our lives, it's taking power away from democratic

01:23:29.900 parliaments and putting it more into an illiberal system. But here's the thing he thinks is happening,

01:23:35.100 not because the lawyers are grabbing power, but because people are so risk averse now that they

01:23:39.500 want the government to protect them from a growing list of things. And if you want the government,

01:23:43.900 the more you want the government to protect you from,

01:23:45.820 the more liberty you need to sacrifice and let the government put down laws.

01:23:50.220 So in this way, we're not talking about the end of democracy as being a kind of explosion or a coup.

01:23:55.020 We're looking at the slow decaying of these values that I would describe as fundamentally British. 0.94

01:23:59.580 All these things I say about my country, I talk to them as if they're as natural as the weather,

01:24:04.140 but they're not. They're there, you can never stop fighting for democracy,

01:24:09.740 because the battle is never won. And I think for Quile, especially after the Cold War,

01:24:12.860 we thought it was. And now we see it being eroded in a way that we didn't expect.

01:24:18.300 So to go back to welfare, that is a sign of our economy fundamentally and our society

01:24:23.420 not working out for a whole bunch of people. We see for the vacuum that creates an immigration, 1.00

01:24:28.620 a demographic shock that we can't quite respond to. And then we see people asking serious questions

01:24:33.740 about that, but not being given serious answers and instead being called racist or xenophobes,

01:24:38.300 because the authorities don't quite know what's going on. This adds up to the British project in

01:24:45.260 some danger, a lot more danger, I think, than people commonly accept. And I think it's absolutely

01:24:50.460 there to be fought for and defended, which those of us who believe in it can try and do the best we

01:24:57.500 can. But the government absolutely needs to defend it by addressing people's concerns.

01:25:01.900 Fraser, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on. Thank you. Final question is always the

01:25:06.700 same. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?

01:25:09.500 The one thing, you guys talk about everything under the sun.

01:25:18.620 I think the fate of Scottish traditional music is much underappreciated.

01:25:24.540 What's happening to it?

01:25:25.500 It is basically not flourishing the way that it should be. It's doing better in Canada and

01:25:29.260 other countries than it is. You know, it's a great, indigenous, beautiful art form, which is...

01:25:34.140 I wouldn't go that far, Mike.

01:25:35.100 Oh, yeah. I could take you to some places in Emberness that would change your mind on that.

01:25:41.180 But yeah, thank you, Fraser. Thank you very much.

01:25:42.780 I nearly made the joke about how much the use of taking on the mantle and running with it.

01:25:46.780 Anyway, Fraser, it's been great having you on. We've debated for so long, we've run out of time,

01:25:51.260 so we won't be able to do any sub-stack questions, but hopefully it's been worth it for having that.

01:25:55.340 Very important discussion, actually. And thanks for playing along. It's been great having you on.

01:25:59.020 Congratulations on the Channel 4 documentary. It was really, really good. And all the best with

01:26:03.820 everything you're doing in the future. Thanks very much.

01:26:07.100 Remember to like and subscribe so you don't miss any of our incredible interviews.

01:26:12.060 If you want ad-free and uncensored episodes that are too spicy for YouTube,

01:26:16.860 join our sub-stack by clicking the link in the description.

01:26:21.260 okay.

TRIGGERnometry - February 16, 2025

Why Britain's on Benefits - Fraser Nelson

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