Englishness Debate, Migrant Protest Leader Arrested & Burnham's Ministry of Truth - Off the Fence

Hello everybody, and welcome to this week's Off the Fence with me, Constantine Kissen, Frances Foster of course, and Winston Marshall of the Winston Marshall Show and Tom Slater from Spike. Gentlemen, welcome back. What a show we have for you today. We're going to argue about Rishi Soonak, who's been having a pop at me over the Englishness comments I made last year. Or earlier this year, I don't remember, it feels like it was a long time ago. We will talk about the latest polling, which claims that reform would win fewer seats than labor and the Tories, but prediction markets interestingly disagree. We'll talk about that. We will talk about the anti-migrant protests happening on the south coast of the UK, and we will touch on the government's plans to effectively introduce a ministry of truth. With that aside, gentlemen, welcome back. Let's talk first and foremost about the Englishness debate. Let me set the scene. In February, I believe, we had journalist Fraser Nelson on trigonometry, and we actually talked about the welfare system in this country, which isn't working and bankrupting the country. As part of that, we had a bust back and forth about the importance of ethnicity and cultural identity during which I said the eternal phrase Rishi Soonak is now English. I wasn't the one that brought him up. It was Fraser Nelson, and I did say that it was because he is a brown Hindu, which is not remotely what I meant, but in the context of that back and forth, it's what came out. This week, Rishi Soonak wrote an article in which he referenced this incident, again, and said that we live in the most successful multi-ethnic, multi-religious, not multicultural, importantly, but multi-religious society. Creating this kind of test of who can be English is wrong and alienating and created a two-tier society for ethnic minorities. I've written a response in order to lay out what I'm arguing, and I've had lots of invitations from various BBC and other mainstream media to talk about it. I know that having experienced it, they don't want to have the actual conversation. What they want is just to call people names. For example, in this instance, they want to call me racist for saying it, even though in that very same interview, I said, both of my children, this is a joke, I pinched the Francis, by the way, but I think it's a very good joke. Both of my children are whiter than a Michael Booblay Christmas album. I also said that they can't be English because they are born in this country to two parents who are born of a different ethnicity and born abroad, even though they're born in England to two British citizens. So it's not about race. So a braverman, the former home secretary, Rishi's former home secretary actually wrote several articles saying, she's not English. Lots of people say that they are English Rishi. Sooner claims he says he's English, and it's a live debate, and I want to explain why I actually think it's important because a lot of these things become cul-de-sacs, where people say what they think, and there's no actual point to the argument, and so people are arguing about these finer points that offend everybody for no actual game. But in my opinion, this is actually a very important debate because my argument is this, after two decades of open-door mass immigration, with tens of thousands of people streaming in illegally every year on top of that, and after two decades at least of this multicultural experiment, DI, identity politics for minorities, we've created a society that I was desperate to avoid, and which is why I opposed the woke insanity in the first place, which it was obvious to me that if you racialise everything, then eventually everyone will think of themselves through the racial prism. And in my view, you're clearly seeing that on the ethnic nationalist right at the moment, the sense that white people need to think of themselves as a collective and act accordingly. And to me, that's not the way a multi-ethnic society can function in the long term, but it's an understandable reaction to what we've seen up to this point. And so my argument is we have to have an identity that is greater than the different ethnic groups that make up our country. And to me, the English identity is not sufficient because there is a sufficient minority, it's a minority, but nonetheless a sufficient minority of both white English people who won't see it as anything other than ethnic identity. And they will say, "Rishi Sunak can never be English." And there's also, by the way, a higher percentage of ethnic minorities who also agree with me that this isn't a workable definition. And so my view is what we should be doing is picking an identity to unite around that will work for everybody. And that to me is Britishness, which is why that is the identity I'm proposing for all of us to unite around. And by the way, we kind of already do, we already say the British Jewish community, the British Muslim community, the British Asian community if there's such a thing. British Indians, British Jews, etc. Because I think instinctively we understand this. And just finally to absorb myself of the charge of racism, here's a black guy who ran with me. Yo, some idiots on here are highlighting the fact that, "Oh, you're not English, or British, or you're from this and that, this is how I look at myself." So I'm black British. I'm not an English man because I think English people are white. I think England's a white land. And you've had black people come here through slavery and through after-world war two, helping rebuild the country after everyone got wrecked. And they've been coming over here since, along with black faces, brown faces, wind rush, and whatever. I was born here as a part of that whole stuff. So I'm black British. Now, that's okay to say that. If I was born in China, yes, I have a Chinese passport, but I'm not a Chinese person, if you look at my black face, I could have been born in Russia, and I have a Russian passport and speak Russian, and Russia is the only place I've ever known. But if you look at my black face, this isn't what you call a Russian face. So I am from where I'm from, which ain't England, like my people are from elsewhere. It's just I was born here. You know, a dolphin can get born in a aquarium, but where's a dolphin really from? The fucking sea. Do you know what I mean? So it is what it is. I call myself black British, and I'm okay, not being English. And by the way, just for context, it's not a random guy we found on Instagram. I think he's a he's a he's an influencer, but he fought in the British army and suffered significant wounds. So just just for context, this is someone who's clearly very patriotic. Right. That's the context. Let's have the debate. He wants to jump in. There's a massive toilet from everybody. You're all cut. And you don't want to address the real problem. No, because we're English, I'm flatteringly polite. That's the problem to lean into the stereotype. But no, I mean, just to lay this out, because one of the things I think is really interesting about this discussion is that in the wake of your inflammatory comments, Constantine, is that there has been this response from sort of liberals or centrist types, which is rather than getting into this discussion about what is the identity that we can all unite around? Is it Britishness? Is it Englishness? Is to deny that the English as an ethnic group exists at all? I mean, the kind of most extreme example of this, I suppose, being that new Labour, Apparachic, John Turner, who's been running around suggesting that the idea of an English ethnic group is an evil idea. But as also in response to this whole discussion, many people kind of doubling down on this idea that it's something which almost doesn't bear talking about, which I think certainly puts us onto a loser for the fact that how do you have ethnic minorities if you don't have an ethnic majority is one thing? And also how do you create any kind of cohesive society if you have a level of sort of asymmetric multiculturalism, which not only says that all groups can be celebrated apart from majority one, but all groups exist apart from the majority one. That doesn't seem to me to be something that will bring people together. If anything, I think it's going to encourage a level of sort of ethnic siloing that surely we all want to avoid. And so we're seeing that now it feels to me. Yeah, I think it's what we're seeing at the moment. No, exactly. And that's something which clearly anyone who's got a head screw in their shoulders should want to push back upon. I suppose the point in which where this gets quite thorny is the notion of Englishness and the existence of English people as an ethnic group, I think it's broadly speaking beyond question, at least in terms, in the terms that we generally understand, groups and nations, or what have you, the thing which gets much more thorny is is there a sort of cultural dimension to Englishness set aside from Britishness in which people can buy into. And it certainly seems like even if we're taking poor old Rishi Sunak out of the frame, it's been kind of thrusted to this discussion. It's clear that certainly when you pull people in Britain, people in England, you see large majorities in essentially every ethnic group, well, there are differences which we could get into who say that it's not an exclusively ethnic category that someone who's born and bred in the country who takes upon its values, sensibilities, humor, whatever, is clearly of this nation in a way that someone who might share a direct ancestry isn't. To put it bluntly, Rishi Sunak is culturally of England in a way that Narendra Modi obviously isn't, which is something that I tell you back mentioned. And I think in the same way that there are many people who have popped up in this discussion, people who are English by ancestry, who feel a sense of loss and theft and a sense of a frontery by being told that they do not exist as a group. There's also other people who might be second generation, who have only ever really known this country, who have by any reasonable definitions integrated into it, who also feel like they're being denied something if they're told that they are not English in some way, shape or form, you know. And again, to take, I suppose, Rishya out of the equation, I think it was sort of a figure like, I know Morrissey, who is someone who I think is a quintessentially English pop culture figure, but is the child of Irish immigrants. And I think there's something which there is clearly kind of blurry lines here, which definitely need to be addressed. And one example, they blow both ways though, Tom. So yesterday, we recorded an interview with your spiked colleague, Brendan O'Neill, who is himself a virus stock, and he was like, I don't think I'm English. So like, you can get people of the same ethnicity, have a different opinion about this issue. That's a really good point. And also, I think that the kind of hang up about even acknowledging ethnicity as a thing is something which predominates amongst world to do white English people, more so than it does ethnic minorities. And actually, if you look at that polling reference, more in common is the one that's seen most recently, out of British Asians, black British and white British, the group that is least likely to say that ethnicity has nothing to do with it is British Asians. Still a majority, but it's a reduced majority. So that's something which is clearly an indicator of the fact that ethnic minorities do not have the hang up about admitting the existence of ethnicity than some members of the ethnic majority do. I suppose that the place that I come to on all of this is that even if you are broadly speaking a civic nationalist, someone who recognises that yes, there is an English ethnicity, but also there's a kind of cultural identity that many people have clearly bought into and we shouldn't seek to exclude. You still need to take multiculturalism, mass migration and the sort of demographic issues which flow from that very seriously, because if we keep going in the direction that we're going, which is the level of sort of hyperdiversity that we see in certain areas, and if that's met with a denial of even the idea that we should have something to unite around, you're really onto a loser. And also I think in a situation in which more and more areas do become hyperdiverse, I also would predict that you're going to see fewer and fewer children of ethnic minority background or migrant ancestry identifying as English or identifying as British because the kind of, in the absence of a sort of population which is stable in their subcontinuity, the gravitational pull of the majority culture which is not going to exist, well, you know, they could possibly integrate into English or British life if the English, however defined are not there anymore if they've kind of retreated to their ethnic enclaves in the way that we might potentially see. So it's a really notty issue, but I think that the fact that this is even being brought up as a discussion point is precisely for the context you set out constant in is that particularly over the past couple of decades, society has changed in quite dramatic ways and it throws up these arguments in a way that we've got to take seriously and can't just dismiss as something which is unimportant and nor can we pretend like the way in which we think about identity is going to be unique and different to the way in which we think about it in any other context. So yeah, it's definitely a notty issue and I hope that doesn't sound like a bent sitting answer. Well, no, you're totally right, you're totally right that it's a notty issue, which is why I think it's really worth discussing. The only thing I, there's a few things I just want to add before we carry on the debate is one, I do, the one thing about this whole thing that I regret is that I responded to Fraser bringing up Rishi Sunak by engaging with a personalized debate where it's like I'm saying this person is an English, look, I don't go around telling people who's English or who's not, I'm more interested in the general conversation that we're having. And so I've actually tried to reach out to Rishi Sunak directly and apologize for making him the case study. He hasn't replied. Maybe the number I have for him is wrong or maybe he doesn't want to accept my apology which I understand. I will say two things though that I think are important to add to this. It's true that polling in this country will show that if you say to people, is this well-liked and well-respected and fairly well-known member of an ethnic minority group who was born here, who says he's English, who sounds English, who's culturally English, are they English? A significant majority of both white people and ethnic minorities will say yes. However, I have discovered by talking to people about this individually that those very same people will deny, for example, the Axel Ruder Kubana is Welsh or indeed that he's British because he's not a well-liked person, he's a mass murderer. So people's opinions about this stuff is kind of partly dependent on whether they like the person we're talking about. That's number one. Number two, this is another really important thing is you can say an isolation Rishi Sunak is English. You might say, well, I would argue I am as English culturally as Rishi Sunak and I am culturally English. I may have other elements to my personal background that inform my views, but I've got an English sense of humor, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, we could say, right? The vast majority, not the vast majority, but polling will show that individually people will agree that Rishi Sunak is English. If I was born here instead of coming here as a young child, they might say constant incision is English, blah, blah, blah. Would they then say that a country that is filled only with people who look and sound and have the names like Rishi Sunak and constant incision? And only those, and as you alluded to Tom, the actual English ethnic group is no longer there. In other words, when we've replaced everybody who was native to these islands with constant incisions and Rishi Sunaks and their children, would people then say that is England? Because I suspect if you do polling on that, you're going to get a very different set of answers. And that is what we're actually talking about when we talk about mass immigration, which is why I come back to my original thesis. The only way, in my opinion, to save this country from civil strife is to find something that we unite around. And that's where I may be disagree with you, Tom, perhaps. I'm not sure. When you say, well, even if you don't, if you accept people can be cultured English, blah, we've just got to deal with mass immigration and all this other stuff. And then you know, well, what do we unite around? This is my argument because if you've denigrated both English and British identity to the point that people aren't even allowed to say it one exists anymore, how do we unite? How do we unite? And that's why I say we have got to think about what British now means. And it's almost an Alfred the great type of project to create a new identity from the remnants of what was there before because of what's been done to this country through mass immigration and D.I. and identity politics for the last 25 years. That's my argument. Let's carry on the debate. And I also think optics plays a part in this. So you had that influencer who kept referring to the color of his skin and saying my black face, etc, etc, etc. but I remember so everybody knows I'm not going to actually everybody drink. Obviously my mother is not from this country, so I'm a completely different culture, a different country, different continent, South America, my grandmother is Irish. So effectively, I am one quarter English. I remember we were doing an interview in trigonometry with a right-wing commentator. And he said to me, he referenced me and said to me that you are an Englishman. Now here's the question, would he have said that if I looked more like my mum and I didn't have my father's rather beautiful, pasty, Irish skin, probably not. So there's also this unpicking that we have to do of people who come from numerous different backgrounds and numerous cultures. When I tell people, for instance, and I start speaking Spanish in America particularly, their heads drop off because they go, I can't understand with a man with a face as English is yours, is able to speak Spanish in that way with that accent. So also optics plays a part. Some people will be perceived to be more English than others because if they come from a mixed background, they take from one particular side of genetics, not the other. If I have a sister, if I had a sister and she took from my Latin American side of the family, would that mean she is less English than me? Or maybe if my mother gave her a South American name or a Spanish name, would that mean that she would be perceived as somehow more of a foreigner in her own land than I am? And these are the very thorny questions that we then have to grip because it's not just as simple as black or white or brown. There's a lot of people who are like me who are in that kind of, shall we say, a no-man's land. And I have always felt incredibly English. I've always felt and I'm very proud to be from England. And I, if I'll be honest, I associate far more with England than I do with Venezuela or Ireland. I've always thought of myself as culturally English. And I think one of the things that mass immigration has really, really done a great deal of damage. I'll tell this story. There were two footballers in the 1990s called Ian Wright and Paul Ince. And Paul Ince, and this was in 1997, was given the captaincy of England in a very important qualifying match for the World Cup against Italy. It was a hugely significant match, very important. And Ian Wright tells this story of how, when he found out that Paul Ince was going to be captain, they were so happy that they literally jumped up and down on their hotel beds for joy. And one of the things that I'm worried about is this with what has happened. happened with mass immigration, what has happened with this racializing of society is those are going to be the knock on effects. Would a young black or ethnic minority footballer react in that manner in 2026? I hope they would, but with the way things are going, maybe not. I've got to say some things about Sunat because I've got very triggered by some of the things he said in this little debacle. First of all, before you do that, we should say Winston, that as my friend and a dear friend, you actually disagreed with me about this privately and we had a chat at the time. So whatever you're about, however you're about to slag off, we have class on this in my face. Yeah. We have classed on this a lot and I'm going to attempt to clean this up now, but you have said a couple of things that make me think I might have pulled you towards my side, but I'll have to explain that. First of all though, there's some absolutely insane things that have been said in this week in this conversation. Firstly, Rishi Sunak, he has said, and this is the kind of like boomer wet version of diversity as our greatest tank. He says, Britain, we've created the world's most successful multi-faith, multi-ethnic democracy. Now obviously it's a multi-faith and multi-ethnic democracy, but to say that it is only a multi-faith or to imply that it is only a multi-faith, a multi-ethnic democracy, completely misses the point. We are centered around a majority as Tom Spelder earlier. You have to have some sort of majority to tie the nation together. So that pissed me off, but what pissed me off more in his ridiculous article, yeah, we didn't have the courage to, and it is ridiculous and I'm going to, this seems like strong words, but because he criticises you without actually being clear what he's saying, and I think he's very unfair because there's a lot of implicit accusations towards you, Constantin. He says that it's values and cricket that makes us English. Cricket. Sorry, no, it's not cricket that makes us English. Cricket is one of the great things we've given the world, I'm very proud of that, but it's not the thing that you're not, it's not sport that you're not, this is a name saying that Indian curry is the kind of the food that you're not, that's not the point. It shows that he hasn't thought about this at all. The other thing he says is values, and you hear this all the time, oh, it's fair play. That's what it is to be English. Sorry, that just means you're not Argentinian. I don't understand what this idea, I did, people say, oh, it's values, but they never say what those values are, and then if you actually push them on them, they'll just say a bunch of values that loads of other nations have. So it's not values, I'm afraid, it's something more complicated than that, or deeper, it's more profound rather. Now, I'm going to try and explain why I think the ethnats and the Sivnats get wrong. What happened at the end of the Second World War was that there was a lot of philosophers trying to work out never again, how to deal with, what had happened, the horrors of the Holocaust and try and deal. The most famous philosopher was Karl Popper, and he had his open society dichotomy, good societies are liberal, democratic, free, bad ones are fascist, Nazis. So far so good. I mean, I agree, I mean, but he then lumps in nationalism and religion into the fascist and Nazi side of things. So that's one false dichotomy he's made. That's the famous one, but the another one was by a man called Hans Kohn, who published a book on nationalism in 1944, and he creates the ethnic, the ethnic nationalist, Sivnats, civic nationalist dichotomy. And he puts, in a civic side, it's a sort of political acceptance of institutions and almost a sort of geographical administrative alignment of people. And in the ethnic side, it's not just blood and soil, it's also culture. So he puts the culture on that side of things. Now a lot of people have conflated those things, and I think in your argument with Fraser, and it seems also in your argument with Rishi now, is that culture is doing a kind of yoyoing side to side, depending on who you talk about it. And Tom, you actually didn't put it in the ethnic side when you were speaking there. You put it in the civic side, but I actually don't think it's a dichotomy. I think it's a tricotomy, but that might be overcomplicating it, but there is an English culture. It is obviously the case that Rishi is not ethnically English. You were right, uh, constant in to say that. Obviously is the case constant in that you're not ethnically English. But I might argue you, as you pointed at the end, I was a bit surprised for you to say that because you haven't said that to me privately, is that you say you are culturally English. You say you're culturally British. But the other aspect which you've all been alluding to, or three of you, but I'll spread it out. There's a metaphysical component to being of a tribe. And so it's not just that you yourself have to feel part of it. So for example, the Americans, I'm in the States at the moment, a lot of them are ethnically English, but they're not, they're not English. They wouldn't call themselves American because they don't accept that they're part of this tribe. And nor do we accept them that they're part of us. It's also the case that not only do you have to have that metaphysical feeling within you, the tribe itself does. So for example, I had on the show Ibn Warak who was, I think he's originally from Pakistan and North India. And he loved Britain and he was sort of an angler file moved to Scotland or somewhere in Britain in his late teens for university and came there thinking, finally, I'm with my people and he was completely rejected. So the tribe himself didn't accept him. As you constant him pointed out when you talk about certain individuals, people will change their mind depending on the deed. It's a metaphysical thing and it changes and it changes across time and will change again. And that's one of the reasons why there's been this whole argument around it is because it's, it is got this metaphysical thing and it changes through time. You mentioned Alfred the Great Constantin. He united the English with four things. Well, let me just pause you. Hold on. He didn't unite the English. He united four separate tribes and told them you are now English and effectively created this identity kind of out of nothing, right? Which is my point. He took four separate tribes. Oh, well, yeah, yeah, okay, fine. That's a good clarification. So it's more than just four. I mean, there were Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Latins, Keltz. There were just so many different tribes and different languages and he united them against the Great Heathen Army, against the Vikings. And he did four things to give a unity to them, which was he created a common religion. He made Christianity the common religion. He created a common language because they were not all speak in the same language. He created a common language. He created a common history where he, by translating bead and not bead would have already been in English, but he's important text and said, this is our history. That's really important. And he created a common law. He started our legal tradition with his Don Bach, which starts with the Ten Commandments. Now, all of this is pretty horrifying if you bring up Alfred because when we don't have any of those things anymore, we don't have a common religion. We don't have a common language, even. I mean, there's I think there's something like a million people who don't in England who don't speak English as a first language. We don't have common law, as we've seen the Sharia courts going up to this sort of different legal practices going on around the country, depending on where you are. And we certainly don't have a common concept of what our shared history is. But I think that's the key. If you're going to think about how we can unite us, it is that shared history in which you're invited to participate in and contribute to and contribute to. But you have to take it on as you are. So I have friends who are zero, not ethnically English or British and actually first generation. So they they were, I guess second generation. So born here, neither the parents like you are not like you can't sit in, but they are more English than English people I know. They just love this country. They don't even look at it. Well, hold on a second. Loving a country doesn't make you English. It's an important component. Sure, sure. Well, actually, no, it's not. There's English people who hate England. You wouldn't deny that that's true. But that's true. But there's this is why it gets complicated. This is my point. There's a tradition. There's a tradition of hating it as well. There's an English tradition of a country, exactly. Well, exactly. So you saying your ethnic minority friends love England doesn't make them English. It makes them culturally. They are culturally English because and their loyalty, their patriotic loyalty is to England over any other nation. And so that's another component to it. There's a couple of things that the Conservatives are getting wrong on this side, which is, this debate has been very interesting to me. So a famous one is Roger Scruton who's tied it to the land. A lot of his concept of English is tied to the land. And as you just said, they're constant in. If the land of England was conquered or invaded or taken over by people who are entirely from the Asian subcontinent or something like that. And the English were all moved to, I don't know where, Brazil. Is England, or did the England move to Brazil? And by the way, this happened with Armenia, and you'll know this one, but Armenia as a nation is moved all over the place over the last two millennia, because the people, the tribe moved all over the place, or the more famous example, the Israelites. Israel is referred to as Israel, as a noun, even when they're not in Israel, when they're roaming around the desert. The Israel is roaming around the desert because it is the tribe, it is a people. And I think that Israel's another interesting example, because there are people brought into that tribe who aren't necessarily ethnically Jewish as they move along. It's like Moses' wife is an Ethiopian or Abyssinian. So anyway, the point is it's complicated, it's metaphysical, not all tribes have the same concept. So when people like this guy, the video you played, I said, well, if I'm Chinese, clearly I'm not Chinese, well, obviously he's not ethnically Chinese. But if the Chinese decided that he was, like the Americans have decided that African Americans are American, then the tribe decides that they are American and then they are American. But I have some issues with bringing up America, Canada, and other new world nations because they didn't have, well, they did, they basically found a way to get rid of them, but they didn't have a native people. The difference with England, with Ireland, with France, with Germany, is that there is a long established in this country for a thousand years effectively, native population that has existed here. And by the way, the interesting example you give about, you know, we talked about Alfred the Great, but also the formation of a nation. I didn't know this until I started traveling around Italy, a country that I'd really love. Do you know what the greatest problem the Italian army faced in was, the Italian army faced in World War I? They didn't have a common language because there was no Italy. It was a collection of tiny city states that spoke their own languages. That came together. It's still a case. And the Italians only come together for football. Well, that's the only time that you've seen it. But no, they have a common language. They have a country with form borders. There is an Italian identity that has been formed. Sure, in the same way that Northerners hate southerners and southerners hate Northerners and working class people hate the middle classes and vice versa. But they formed an identity in a place in which there wasn't one. And what I'm saying is people are not going to like this on both the ethnic nationalists right and elsewhere. But we have now put ourselves in a position. People will talk about re-migration on the ethnic nationalists, right? You're going to round up millions of ethnic minorities and get rid of them because that's the way to. But it's never going to happen. It's just not going to happen. We're going to have to deal with the reality that what's happened to this country has happened. Now we were all against it, but that is what's happened. We have to find a way. Well, sorry. Go ahead. Let me just do a thought experiment for you. Sure. To use your scenario earlier, let's say that South Asians took over all of the island of Britain. Yeah. Would you still be against re-migration then? Well, I wouldn't-- Because we wouldn't have any power to deal with it. I'm not saying I'm against re-migration. No, but, sorry. You mentioned Alfred the Great. Alfred the Great re-migrated the Vikings. He said, either you assimilate into being English, or off you trot. And that's what he did. So right now-- No, it's not. No, you're comparing a military invasion with the people we have. We-- our government has brought in this difference. This is actually why it's in some ways more difficult to deal with. If we had an enemy army on the doorstep, it would actually be pretty easy to get people of this country to get together and go and fight it. The reason we're having these debates is what's happened to this country has happened as a result of the actions of its politicians who officially lead us by consent. These are people that we elected who did this to the country. And so it's not the same as a military invasion. But my point about re-migration is, I am all in favor of deporting all the up to a million illegal immigrants who are in this country. And, by the way, I'm very much in favor of creating the conditions where people who've come from elsewhere who are not contributing, who are net takers, that we effectively-- there is no welfare for them here. And so they're forced to either up their game or to go back to the country from which they've come. These are all reasonable measures. And they're workable measures, hard as they well be for any incoming government to do. But the idea that some people on the right believe-- it boggles the mind for me-- that you're simply going to deal with the consequence of mass immigration by what? Stripping nationality from millions of people because of their skin color and shipping them back to where they came from. Are you telling me that that's what the British public are going to get behind? It wouldn't get through the British public as well, which is something that maybe some of the more honest people on that side of the argument would at least accept, which is why they tend to flirt with authoritarianism and walk on a different-- the diversity of this country, such as it is, is a fact that needs to be reckoned with. And whilst there's been certainly a lot of discomfort about the speed of change over the past 20 or 30 years, there are also people across Britain, white English people, if we're going to go back to that category, who were up to a point very comfortable with the level of quite and quite diversity that we've had. The problem is it's sustainable at a certain level. It's not sustainable at another level. It's certainly not sustainable when you have a policy of state multiculturalism combined with that level of mass immigration. And I think going back to the kind of ethnicity in culture and culture and ethnicity question, this is something which is really fundamental. Because clearly there is a relationship between those two things, people of one discernible ethnic group will bring with them and will transmit to future generations a certain set of cultural values, religious denominations, outlook, sensibility. And it's important to note-- and it's just again a historical fact-- that the institutions of this country that, broadly speaking, the sense of self of this country has been born out of the pretty stable English-ethnic majority that has existed for, as you say, constant 1,000 years. So to completely deny that seems to me to be a denial of just fact aside from anything else. But also, I kind of return to this point, which is that, if you want to maintain a notion of national identity, whether we're talking about British or whether we're talking about English, which is not purely ethnically exclusive, which will allow people to buy into being a member of this society, however defined, provided that they do. Subscribe to the culture that they love-- the culture, they are part of it. They're almost shaped by it even without realizing it. This is not about being given a PowerPoint presentation or told to go off and read Shakespeare. It's something that they live and breathe almost without realizing. Then you need to be concerned about hyper-diversity, and you need to be concerned about mass immigration, multiculturalism, and the sort of demographic challenges, I say, which sort of flow from it. It's almost like to rescue civic nationalism. You need to recognize that these issues matter, I suppose, is where I'm coming from in this particular question. And something they get lost, I think, a lot of the time. And also, I think people who are just trying to pretend that these issues aren't really a problem or want to re-fight the arguments over migration and racism that we might have had in previous generations, you're precisely fueling the more explicitly hardline racist tendencies that you claim you want to combat. You are surrendering the territory to them. You're giving them a script. And I just wish more and more people would recognize that. I suppose. If you see your ex-mentions and think, where the hell of these people come from, or where the hell of these arguments come from, it's not representative of the British public, but it's clearly a growing tendency. You should take these matters seriously and want to focus on how we remedy them. But at the moment, there's a kind of doubling down into, as I said, denialism of the fact of English ethnicity on the one hand, or a crude simplistic and quite authoritarian measures to combat it on the more ethnanationalist, hardcore ethnanationalist side. So, yeah, surely, that's not too centrist about it. We've got a plot of course between those two. Take your options. I think one of the major challenges when we're talking about this debate is that we've never had to encounter it before. We're all feeling our way through. We don't know because none of us are completely certain. We think we might know, but the reason we're having this debate is that we're simply not 100% certain on this topic, because we've never had to confront it, because the reality is, as a result of successive governments in immigration policies, we've been forced to confront it. If you look at Spain, I mean, people were talking about Italy, I think Spain is actually a far better example of this. Spain isn't really a country. If you look, if you ask a Catalan, if he's Spanish, the answer would be no. That would be reflected in its football team Barcelona, famously hating Real Madrid, who are seen as the team of the royalty, Royal Madrid, and the same with the Basques, et cetera, et cetera. And I think one of the real challenges that we're going to have to come to grips with is how are we going to move forward? Because not having this conversation is simply not an option anymore. We have been forced into this, and we are going to have to come to a consensus. Because if we don't come to a consensus pretty soon, then what we're going to see and what I really fear is a bullkenisation of our country where people go, I'm not English, I'm this. I'm not English, I'm that. And what are we going to see? - But that's already happened. - No, no, no, no, but it's going to happen on a mass scale, Winston. - It's already happened on a mass scale. - I disagree, it hasn't happened on a mass scale. It hasn't happened on a mass scale, [BLANK_AUDIO] - We've got NTAVs. - We've got NTAVs. - NTAVs. - Right, it hasn't happened on a maths scale because the people that I talk to and I go around in, London and other places, it is happening and it's happening at a rapid scale, but I don't think it's happened on a maths scale. - Okay, so what exactly is the inflection point that it's suddenly a maths scale? I mean, London Birmingham, Manchester or the English, ethnic English, ethnic British, whatever that means, are a minority, albeit the biggest minority. You've got enclaves in London where people don't speak English. You've got towns in the North, like Bradford, where people are, completely sort of different loyalties. You've got parts, you see videos and is it Manchester, where people are hoisting the Pakistan flag, likewise in Birmingham, they're doing, they've got these allegiances to other countries, even in Parliament, you've got five or six Islamokami independent MPs, that sort of, as far as I can see, it's already in the middle of it, and that's not going. - I don't think we're in the middle of it. - I think if when you're in the middle of it, it's when these things, as when it openly starts breaking apart. And I think we're on the trajectory, that's where I agree with you, but we haven't reached where it's the peak, and the peak is where it gets really dangerous. - Yeah, but those are two things, the peak and when it openly starts breaking apart. We don't know, we won't know where the peak is until we're looking back at this all, but it's definitely, it's definitely openly breaking apart. Look what's going on in the streets. It's not just what's happened since October 7th, and we're seeing all the sort of violent far left stuff, and politicians being assassinated by the far left, literally, this year. But it's also, which is a topic we're going to discuss here, is now, the Patriots side are engaged in direct action, not just protest direct action trying to do stuff. As far as I concerned, it's already falling apart. - Well, I think what Francis is saying there's levels to this game, and if we don't deal with this, which is why actually we're having this discussion, because my contention, if you remember, from the very beginning is, if you want to save Britain from serious civil unrest, you have to change everything we're doing. And part of the thing that Tom is talking about is addressing the demographic concerns, because what people feel about identity is determined by what else is going on. When I came to Britain, 1995, we weren't having these debates, because we didn't need to, because you had a country that was overwhelmingly confident in itself still, had an idea of what it was still. The English, Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish, ethnic groups were not being treated as some sort of lepers, whose history is evil and to be denigrated. And they were overwhelmingly the majority of the country. And when you walked around London, it was an English city, in a way that it simply is not visually today. And you can, people can cringe and argue and say that's racist and whatever. The fact that matter is, I have people who are friends of mine coming from the Middle East, coming from Africa, coming from Eastern Europe, who all arrive in Heathrow and all say the same thing. What happened? That's what they all say, right? So this thing has changed, and my view is the only way to avoid continued vocalization and getting to a Yugoslavian type of situation is to find a way to say, what is an identity that is not controversial by virtue of being inclusive enough for everyone? Can we, you know, other than the very fringe of the ethnic nationalist right and the very fringe of the far left, can we all agree that everyone on this call is British? Yes. Can we all agree that almost everybody in this country, go ahead. But, okay, what exactly is it to be British? I mean, you've not offered something there. I have actually. Do you read my article? I read more nebulous than Englishness. Well, this is where I was going to argue with you about the values argument, because I know people struggle to define it, but actually it's only difficult for people who have not lived in other countries. You talk about fair play being this vacuous thing. I don't think it's vacuous at all. I mean, one of the things of Francis and I have talked about since the very early days of trigonometry, we miraculously discovered that the culture in Venezuela, where his family are from, is exactly like the culture in lots of the countries I've lived in, like Russia, Ukraine and Armenia, where if I screw you over, because you left the door open for me to screw you over, I'm the good guy and you're the idiot, right? The fact that in Britain, we don't see things like that, is actually extremely unusual by world standards, the civility with which this country conduct itself. When I think about England and Britain, I kind of think of it as the shire. It's a place of calm comfort where people get on with their lives and they're able to enjoy things because it's a safe place, it's a high trust society. And the reason it's a high trust society is that people generally act kindly and respectfully towards each other with a level of respect and understanding and mutual kind of respect and interest. It is completely unusual around the world. - You're just fooling around the world. - This is Rishi Valuesism. - No, no, no, no. What I'm saying is my prescription for all of this is what I wrote in my article, which is this. Britain is a country that recognizes the different ethnic groups that make it up. The English, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish ethnic groups exist, they are the founding ethnic groups of this society and they are the most central part of its beautiful diversity. That is the starting point. After that, we have to do what Catherine Berbel Singh does with her kids at her school, which is we have to inculcate ourselves and our children with the idea that they all belong to the nation of Britain. Right, we don't have an English passport, we don't have a Welsh passport, we don't have an Irish passport, we don't have a Scottish passport, we all have a British passport. And it's up to us the citizens of this country to feel our way towards what that means, resting on the shoulders of the giants who came before us, which you alluded to, which is our history and what it means to be British throughout the ages. And that's why we're having this debate, isn't it? Yes, it is. But unfortunately, the Britishness is a harder history. It's firstly, it's a much shorter history. Secondly, it's a harder history to define. Jacob Riesmog, bizarrely on this week, said that Englishness, there's no such thing as an ethnicity of Englishness and Scottishness. It's like, what an earth are you talking about? Like, it's obviously not looked into it at all. And he then says that through time, that Englishness and Britishness have been conflated and they mean the same thing, which I think is just his Victorian bias, because if you actually go in any way further back, you can see, like we've talked about Alfred, it was Rex Angolorum. So it's Englishness is a thing. Britishness actually technically is older than even Alfred, because I think the first word to describe Ireland was, was Britain, some-- Actually, the Angols displaced the Brits, believe it or not. So the English displaced the original Brits. But these are all historical and fairly boring arguments that won't be that of interest to people. Well, the reason I bring it up, sorry, is because I think history is what united. I loved what that black lad you had on the beginning saying. He fought in the armed forces. He actually said that the black people came after the war to rebuild Britain. Actually, they came during the war and fought with the British against the Nazis. Actually, that's quite, that's maybe quite-- That's the Indian's. That's the Indian's. Well, the Indian's, the million, million people army fought for the British Empire. Yeah, exactly. And maybe that's a kind of history we can latch on to. And saying that whilst we are sort of correcting people on the other side of this argument, it's also, you have to become some sort of bleeding heart liberal to recognize those contributions to recognize the sense of cultural buying. And also to recognize that when we're having this discussion about the demographics of a country and what that might mean for its social cohesion, whatever going forward, that it's not necessarily to make an entirely exclusionary or tall exclusionary argument, because of course, ethnicity and culture are connected for reasons that are pretty obvious, but it's not mutually exclusive. I mean, one example that I've seen many people on the more ethnic and ethnic side get tripped up by is the question of who is more English Bob Marley or King Charles. Because if you're going by sheer ancestry, it would have to be Bob Marley, because one of his parents was of entirely British ancestry, whereas Charles, primarily German, bit of Danish in there and Scottish and what have you. So it's one of those things where clearly this is something that people should actually be encouraged to buy into. And the more kind of hard line we get that you remove any incentive towards integration at all, which is something that surely no one should want to support. But at the same time, these are big problems which have been forced upon us and need to be dealt with precisely to rescue the kind of cohesive society that everyone at least claims towards. All right, guys, we budgeted half an hour for this thinking that's what it would take and we would overrun. We've actually done an hour just on this debate. So let's move on. I'm really grateful we had this conversation. I think it's worth carrying it on over time and thinking about what it means actually to unite in our country, which I think is the most important thing. Before we move to our next story, a lot of people in the comments were asking what when I was in my previous home studio about the map behind me. that map is by a fan of the show called JG Fox and if you want to buy a copy he's offered for because so many people were asking he's offered a 10% discount using the link in the description of this video if you want to get yourself a map they come in different sizes it is a map of the culture war and I believe it has all our faces in it my son finally enough who's four years old he looks around it and he he he he picks out all the different people that he's met on it anyway moving on to our second story and actually not entirely unrelated so we're talking about the demographics and immigration and so on is a poll has come out this week showing that reform would get fewer seats than both labor and the Tories but it's more complicated than that isn't it Francis? well it is more complicated than that so you gov which are one of our more most respective pollsters have done a large scale seat by seat poll and what that means is they've gone to every seat in the country they've pulled people and then they've collated the results and they've published them so we're gonna go through it it says with the number one they're we're heading for a hung parliament labor are going to get 241 seats Tories 130 reform 123 so what that would mean is we have a hung parliament the labor would need the Lib Dems and the Greens Lib Dems by the way got 71 seats Greens got 9 seats to declare an overall majority and be able to rule so what will we get is a left wing coalition this is also where it gets really interesting because last year reform were on 27% of the vote and then now on 22% now this is possibly due to restore and the financial scandals restore is taken more than 3% from reforms votes which is a massive blow to reform particularly in those marginal seats where it's neck and neck and people are unsure whether to vote conservative reform restore and the split on the right means that those marginal seats reform are simply not getting across the line and those seats are either going to conservative or they're going to labor labor Lib Dems Greens S.M.P. applied Kimru which is the Welsh party and S.M.P.'s over the Scottish Nationalists and those are broadly left wing in their outlook when 67 60% of seats right wing parties which are obviously reform conservators restore when 47% of the vote so as it stands and bear in mind this is a snapshot of how things are at the moment this is not a prediction I'm going to come on to Kaushe which is a prediction market which has a slightly different picture and in the immortal words of the late great Scott Adams Scott Adams if nothing changes and it will then that's where we are at the moment now if you could bring up the prediction markets please do not and just for clarity the conservatives are the orange labor are the blue navy blue and reform are the turquoise and we can see that reform and this is a prediction market so this is what Kaushe predicts will happen at a general election which is the reform party have a 37% chance of winning a general election labor have a 33% and conservatives have a 27% but where they do agree is that the vote for reform is going down and the vote for labor is going up in that Burnham bounce and as well we can see the conservative party are starting to get momentum so as well it changed overnight so over last night it was saying that labor were more likely to win overnight is changed and it's now same reform so where we are is this I think is really really really tight and it shows some of the damage that the recent financial scandals have made them on reform it has shown the impact restore is having on the chances of reform getting elected and it also shows that in a purely tactical sense maybe the labor MPs were correct in oustings here Starmer and getting Andy Burnham in as they start but as we all know a week is a long time in politics and I'm just putting it out there to the people what they think do they agree do they disagree do I think this is a moment in time or do we think this is more representative of a broader trend over to you gentlemen and what worth correcting one thing as well it's the calcium prediction markets is not what calcium predicts it's what the cumulative some of the bets that are placed and one thing that's worth pointing out actually is that one of the possible reasons for the discrepancy between polling and prediction markets is the prediction markets don't give you the option for a hung parliament and so people like choosing a party that will win it's very possible that no party will win and so that's that's another feature of it as well yeah I just thought I'd throw that in before people yeah I also think for we go and we should apologise to the Welsh viewers for France's horrific pronunciation of applied comery which would no less raise how close in that part of the country and this is really faster I think it's been clear of some time that we were we were potentially heading towards a hung parliament but there's a few things that we always need to take into account in the new political era that we find ourselves in one of which is that volatility in political preference is a higher scale than we've seen for about 100 years so the willingness of people to switch parties to shop around to tactically vote which is something which is increasingly going to come to the detriment of reform it seems like is is higher than we've previously come to expect it plus we're in this very strange situation where we have multi-party almost European style politics but within a two-party first-party post system and what that means is is that making predictions and even really doing MRP polls is a bit of a mugs game because in the run up to an election small percentage changes in voting intention could have vastly different effects across the country the willingness again to vote tactically could have vastly different effects to the detriment of one party and to the benefit of another so without wanting to just dismiss any of this because obviously I think it is an indication of certainly where labor are now relative to a year ago and where reform are now relative to a year ago is hard to make kind of hard and fast predictions off of it one thing is absolutely clear is that Keir Starmer was a gift to reform that maybe they didn't fully appreciate at the time as well as to the green party it was a bit of a sort of truism about a year or so ago but I think it more or less hell which is that if the next election was whether or not you wanted Keir Starmer to be Prime Minister reform could quite definitively win that but whether or not the next election was one about do you want Nigel Farage to be Prime Minister by didn't have the fact that he does remain quite polarising figure in the country whether that's Farer unfair that can well be reforms campaign to lose and with the rise of an appetite for tactical voting on the left of British politics meanwhile you have the breakdown of the right-wing vote in British politics between the Conservatives reform and to a lesser extent restore that just builds in a kind of advantage to the Labour Party which is sort of unthinkable the only thing I would say suppose which is slightly in in reforms cornering all of this is that expectations were risen for them to such a stratospheric level there was always going to be difficult for them a stratospheric level I should say it was always going to be difficult for them to measure up to it even if reform went from you know what was it five MPs that the last election to north of a hundred at the next election that would have been a political achievement the the lights of which arguably we've never seen it I mean it took the Labour Party 22 years to get to over a hundred MPs in the 1922 election so partly because you saw this collapse of the Labour Party sort of collapse the Conservative Party this kind of unique opportunity that was lent to the reform party and also the sense amongst right of centre voters reform supporters that the country was in such a mess that really reform needed to take the reins of power as soon as possible the country's finished it created a situation of what might in retrospect look like kind of slightly unreasonable expectations placed on any political party and I generally have the view that if you want to even if you want to be quite radical that requires a combination of urgency in patience which is not always easy to square but no it has shown Andy Burnham is not single-handedly revived the Labour Party's fortunes the Burnham bounce has been pretty modest I think it's fair to say and in whatever MRP poll looking at or what a projection we're looking at it seems to me pretty nailed on that the Labour Party at the very least will lose a significant amount of seats at the next general election which is worth bearing in mind they're still kind of from a relative position of weakness in light of 2024 but yeah everything is still to play for to be frank so in the same way that it would be absurd to write off the Labour Party given that the fact that they're fortunate of recovered. Similarly, those who are willing to say, you know, it's just over for a form now, and they are just doomed to kind of entropy. I think doesn't take into account just how volatile things are out there. And also how, let's face it, the issues that animate the reform vote are roaring back into focus once again, because they can't not, whether it's illegal or mass migration. So yeah, all remains on the table, I would say. There's two things that interest me here. One is that if you look at polling since the last election and you group the left-wing parties, Labour, Lib Dem Greens as one block and you group the right-wing parties reform conservative restore as one block, basically it is 47, 47. And that hasn't changed. And when reform had that massive spike after, it was just after Southport, I don't think they were getting left-wing voters, particularly. They might have had a few red wallers, but what's astonishing to me is everything that we've seen, everything that we've seen on the South Coast, the illegal migration, everything we've seen, even after Axel Rudekabana, those horrors, all of the downsides of migration is so abundantly clear that actually people don't move across that divide. And so either it's because we're in completely different information ecosystems now, and we're just, we're not even hearing each other, or we're not sort of getting each other's information. Or maybe there's something else going on, and maybe ideological capture, or maybe you guys have got insight here, but that shift is not actually happening. It's very marginal of a tool, and it does happen. And the other thing, which is the conversation in Westminster where my studio is, is there going to be an election, is there going to be election? And so this polling comes out, comes up to the time to, by the way, it's basically the anti-reform paper at this point. They barely criticise the Tories. They barely criticise Burnham. It's almost entirely directed at reform. So, I take what they say of a pinch of salt, but there are serious questions about, is there going to be an election, and whoever it is that mentioned that the hung parliament is the most likely, hung parliament with Labour winning, I think, is what looks more likely. And given that, I don't think Burnham would give up three years of being in parliament, as Prime Minister, in a majority. And he would probably back himself, he probably thinks he's likable, that he's brilliant, and he's smart, he's got a vision, and I mean, I don't think he has got a vision, but he goes, so back himself, he's like, let's do this for three years. He'll look back at Theresa May and be like, well, that was a mistake, because remember, she wanted a mandate, and then she got a hung parliament, and it was a nightmare for her. She'll look back, he'll look maybe back at Gordon Brown, who also decided not to run, and not to corner election, rather keep the majority. I think he's, I think he's going to back himself and stay, we've gone in for three years. That's the things that pop out of this story for me. All right. Well, one thing I would hypothesize about why the country has basically stayed exactly where it is politically, even though we've been having these debates, is because all of these issues, the key issues are so well ventilated at this point, like who is undecided about illegal immigration? You either think it's a terrible problem, or you think no human is illegal, right? The same with everything else, the same with Ned Zero, you either think you're saving the planet, or you think you're destroying the economy. At this point, those issues have been sufficiently debated, that everyone kind of has a position on it, and we could carry on down the list, you know, do the rich need to pay their fair share, quote unquote, or do we have an unproductive economy that you can't make productive if you don't create jobs, and to create jobs you need to take the boot off the neck of business and job creators. You know, all of these things have been talked about so much. You kind of know where you stand. Number one, number two, because we have the constituency system, 10 people or 100 people, even a thousand people changing the mind within a safe, a safe constituency makes absolutely no impact on election outcomes. So that's also another reality to contend with. The one thing I would say about this is I think we've got to keep in mind that polling and prediction markets as well are very, very good measures of very short-term things, and the reality is that there probably is a long time until the next election, even a firm, of course, an old one. And here's where I think I actually disagree with both Tom and Winston's analysis here, because the fact of the matter is, Andy Burnham's popularity right now is a temporary blip on a long-term decline in the fortunes of the Labour Party as long as remains in government. And I don't even think that it's necessarily a huge amount to do with the Labour Party, per se, because this decline was going on just the same under the Conservatives. The reality is we're poorer today than we were in 2008 on a per capita basis. The country's economy is miraculously outstripping our European competitors from Germany and Italy, but it's sort of an intellectual quiz in a care home type of thing. No one's their best. Whereas there are countries that are pulling ahead because they have a totally different approach to the one technology that is actually going to generate pretty much all of the growth of the future, which is, of course, AI. So we've got the highest industrial electricity prices in the world, while in the meantime, America is allowing individual people to build power stations of their own, something that like, you know, cannot be people but companies, right? So our economic stagnation is much of the reason we are where we are. He's not going to fix illegal immigration. He's not going to fix the cultural issues that we're talking about. The economy is going to continue to tank over time. The war and a run, I know you're a big fan when, but the rest of us are not so much. And the reality is it's having an economic impact, which will continue as long as it's going. So the economy is going to get worse. The welfare system, which you can't reform, is going to carry on being a massive drain on the UK PLC, if you like. And then on top of that, you've got all these cultural issues that they just can't fix because they're ideologically opposed to doing the things that necessary. My point being Andy Burnham will never be as popular as he is again is my prediction. And so if I were him, I would think, you know what? I actually, I'm going to be in charge of a lib, a lib lab green coalition that it's going to allow me to go further left and I actually am allowed to tell you why you're wrong. I can tell you why you're wrong straight away. Tell me, because he won't see it like that. He thinks he's brilliant. You don't run for part of the prime industry. If you don't think you're brilliant in backing yourself, he's not going to think, oh, I'm going to get less popular as it goes on. No, he's actually going to think, wait till the British public, find out what I'm going to do about this. Yeah. He's going to think he's going to think that we don't disagree. No, no, no, we don't disagree. I was saying what the sensible thing for him to do would be. I don't think he will do it. I agree. There's a very strong probability. He follows the path that you're following. What I mean is, if he was smart and playing purely the percentages, the smart thing might be to go, well, I'm going to get the greens on the Lib Dems, and then I can take the country to beautiful socialism that I've always wanted to. Whereas now I've got the sort of right-wing Labour Party, which is the thing people in the Labour Party always say, you know, the right of the Labour Party. Okay, I'm telling you what that is. Certainly, but I actually don't disagree with your constant in about the fact that the idea that Andy Burnham is going to conquer before him is obviously a nonsense. I think it's just quite clear that he is an obvious improvement on Keir Starmer, who led them to sort of dull drums, which were such a gift not just to reform. Hold on Tom, but is that really true though? Is he an obvious improvement or is it more like? For now, yes, not long-term, but you're absolutely right about that. He's a kind of improvement. Yeah, I mean, it's for the moment, absolutely, because I think you're right as far as this is a blip, primarily. And there's also a smaller blip than they were hoping for. I mean, they were hoping that this would single-handedly kind of transform their fortunes, make a majority of the next election more likely. It's been much, the Burnham Bounce has been much more modest. And also, if you just look at the kind of structural issues affecting the country, the Labour Party to say that it doesn't have an answer is an understatement. It wants to do things that will make all of those matters worse. It wants to soften. It's already quite soft position or migration and asylum. It wants to double down on debt and spending. It wants to maybe kind of moderate the net zero policy around the edges, but I don't think that the Labour Party, the Parliamentary Labour Party certainly is constitutionally incapable of doing things that would be necessary to get the country on the right track and also to win over a significant amount of voters. And it's almost resigned itself to just being one party amongst many in a multi-party system. The sort of potentially reaching up to 40% of the vote. That is not something that the Labour Party is realistically expecting to do any time soon. I wouldn't be surprised from this. Yeah, it's just not going to happen. The difficulty is partly because of our system is the fact that, depending on when you call that election, depending on how disorganised your opposition is, depending on how split the vote is on the other side of politics and on the right versus how potentially unified it might be on the left of British politics under the right conditions, you can still ride that high 20s to maybe percentage of the vote to a higher seat share than you otherwise might have. And I think the only thing Burnham doesn't strike me as like a gambler necessarily. He's actually a bit of a prevaricator. We've seen that. that on various positions that he's taken over his time and also everything from the kind of prison release scandal to whatever you just sort of flipped lots from one thing to the other. But you know, various politicians, particularly unelected prime ministers, get to a point where they get a bit high on their own supply and they think that they can just go for it. So that was Theresa May and we all know how that panned out. So I don't know if everything's going to call an early action as a simple answer. But sometimes there can be these things, maybe a win in the whole, when there's some pancreas by election and make some think, screw it, will probably be in a worse position, but this is the bet. There's no better time than now. That could easily be the calculus, I guess. On the contrary, if he wins, sorry, Hoban and St. Pancras, they're running this hijabi girl, Somali, it's completely playing and placating the Green Party side. And this is what happened. He showed he could do it in make a field. He swallowed up the Green Party vote. Green's got absolutely quashed. If he beats Polansky in Hoban and St. Pancras with an unknown Somali refugee, he is winning the Green Party vote. He's shown that he can take back that and create another majority of the left with the far left. He's won back the far left and if he can do that, he won't worry about coalition with these other parties. But look, I proved it. That's my point. He would use that as proof to think I should go to the country because I've dealt with that threat to my left. And yeah, I can just talk to them about Nigel Farage being evil and then I get all the left wing vote for me because that that's been the strategy, right? Right. Francis, unless you want to jump in before we move on, um, there's one point, final point. I want to make very quickly. To me, this will eventually come down to personality politics. Who are the people who are most likely to want to form alliances? The ones that do will eventually I think be the ones that win and will be the ones that be able to form a coalition government. My concern is is that I look at relationships on the right now. Kemi doesn't particularly like Nigel. I believe the future, I believe, you know, the feeling is mutual. You look at restore, you look at Rupert Lowe. We don't need to go into that because I think everybody knows where that's where that stands. So at the moment, the right is so divided that unless, unless they're prepared to overlook their differences and work together and form a coalition, as things stand and look, going back to Scott Adams, you know, if nothing changes in it will, I think we're looking at a left wing coalition. Yep, I had to argue with that at the moment. I mean, the, the, the, I remember Francis and I were walking around London after some interviews yesterday and he was like, you know what? Well, I think this, you know, this, you know, this work thing might be kind of, you know, moving. I was like, what are you talking about? Look at our politics. My sense is the left is much more likely to be elected now, which is interesting because the, the right of the country is clearly moving to the right and the center feels like it's moving to the right. But when it comes to election time, you're not necessarily going to see that in election results. And then the country will carry on on the trajectory that it will. And it makes you wonder. And then in fact, very much ties into our next story, Winston, which is the anti-micron protest that we are now seeing. And you called it direct action. And it is because you're now having people slashing boats and things like this. So tell us what's been going on. So Danny Tommo has been arrested and charged in Basing Stote and his supporters. I think most of whom are the black clad, balaclava lads of the patriot platform were protesting outside the station last night. But this comes after a big week for him. So presumably, this is the, you can see the videos here of the mass, the station. Presumably, you will have seen he was in the Chan and he was, this is an amazing image actually of a clipper taking over from a French shadow vessel escorting a migrant boat over to Britain. Now, earlier this month, we had this kind of shocking news that migrants are now coming up shadow by the French from Normandy. So much further, further down, further west down the coast, the French coast, and taken across. And then Danny Tommo, having done his dover protests, rushed across to Esni. So you have, along with him standing, trying to literally block the boats. You have then the protesters trying to block the coaches, the British government, it seems have organized all of this in advance because the coaches were there. So there's some coordination with the French. Then they're then coached over back to Kent to the processing plant, whatever they go for, the processing building. And so the significance of this escalation though, is the propaganda win for Danny Tommo. So whilst what's happening on the coast isn't necessarily something there's new, there's definitely new things that are happening, like the RNLI are turning off the transmitters so they can't be tracked, it's the case that there's different locations being tried by the British state to land these people, seemingly like they're trying to test which towns are going to react badly, and you know, imagine if they dumped them bright and they might get a different response dumping them in the East. But there's a propaganda win here for Danny Tommo, which is that you have had these images this week, some of which we're going to see, of the British state police forces, emoticate escorting these illegal immigrants. So they're all criminals by the end of the fact that they came here illegally. And there's a huge amount of protection and tax per money going to protect them from the British public who are ostensibly or claiming to protect the British state, I'll put it more cleanly, the British state's main responsibility is to protect the British people territorially and otherwise. Here, they have failed, the British people are now trying to protect British territory. And the British state is protecting the invaders, the illegal criminals who are coming in from the British people. So there's a complete moral inversion and these images that are coming, I mean, I don't think it's actually anything that that's new, but these images are huge propaganda wins for Danny Tommo and the sort of Patrick Direct Action side of things. So that for me, Mark's, probably worth mentioning, he's been arrested for slashing this bow and has been charged with a bunch of offenses. That's why the men are in basing stoke, yeah, yeah. So propaganda win maybe, but he may be convicted of these criminal offenses now, which obviously is going to be an issue for him and his group, but we'll find out, I've seen different commentary. Some people say that the things he's been charged with are going to be thrown out and others say not, we will see. Yes, we will see. I guess the question is, and this is what I put to you guys. This is the difficult moral question, I think. I certainly have been saying, stop the boats for a long time. And I think it's an absolute moral imperative for us to stop the boats. There's a lot of people on the right who are saying, you've got to do it at the ballot box. The question is, if the state aren't doing it and there is not going to be a vote for three years, are you guys prepared to accept three more years of illegal boat crossings across the country? And so those people who are condemning Danny Tom O, are they prepared to accept more illegal immigration? Because that seems to be the alternative. I don't think he's actually going to literally be able to stop the boats, but these propaganda winds are hopefully going to force the state towards something. And so this is the difficult question. For those of us who want to stop illegal migration, legal entrance, what position are we really into how we condemn Danny Tom O, we might be able to criticize aspects of what he's doing and say, maybe this and that is sloppy, but are you guys against what he's doing? I think it's set to very dangerous precedent, Winston, because what it effectively means is that if you believe an injustice is being created, it is, and you feel that it is not being dealt with. Now, we can all agree that illegal immigration is happening. I mean, that's indisputable. We can agree that the government is not doing what it should be doing. Are we really, do we really want a position where essentially people then feel that they are, it is incumbent upon them to take it into their own hands? Because once you do that with one issue, once you open that proverbial Pandora's box, you are going to be opening it for a number of other issues. Because people are going, well, hang on a second. If you can do this when it comes to illegal immigration, why can't I do this with X, Y, and Z? Why can't I? So for instance, a me too movement, which was exposing, you know, which was exposing men who had behaved badly, badly, some of them indisputably so, some of them, I mean, who got thrown on the proverbial bonfire, who hadn't really done a lot wrong, as in the case of Aziz and Sorry, for example, who had behaved worse in an unjust way. Gentlemenly fashion with a woman that he had a one night stand with would we then feel would certain people will then go well actually As these or somebody like that needs to have justice Happened or hoisted upon him because the legal and the you know the court aren't gonna do anything This is where I become really uncomfortable because of the precedent that it sets I am okay, so your more boats and position is more boats more illegals What about what about Tom then? Well, I think this is a this is a this is the root sorry for Francis if you want to That's very unfair that he's Francis is therefore pro boats which obviously not the case But I in a way I think that the experience of sort of just stop oil and insulate Britain those Irritating quite militant direct action groups as long as led us to a situation where almost was suggesting that any form of disruptive protest is By definition illegitimate. That's just obviously not the case the calculation one is always making is are the tactics proportionate to the goal is their public support for what it's taking place Do we support their cause and do we think that their tactics are ultimately Digitimate so it's not as if in an environment in which people tried to vote for the borders to be controlled And that was just ignored if anything legal and legal migration saw in the other direction in an environment in which people have been Arrested for raging against illegal migration online and in which a Very rough hand is shown towards anti-migrant protesters to a to a degree that is genuinely Rannaclising a section of the population then in some way shape or form protest is going to be the inevitable Consequence and in some circumstances ultimately supportable and this goes before Patriot platform or Patrick platform I should say and the pink ladies protests of last summer Which I know of being talked about and kind of right wing activist circles is not going nearly far enough now Had a significant impact on government policy it led to this absurd sort of literal-minded response Which was oh you don't like the migrant hotels do you will take them out of the hotels? But nevertheless it really what happened in Epping what happened in other parts of the country put down a marker in a way that Simply hadn't happened purely by Epping returning conservative MPs or people voting for Brexit or what have you so clearly there was a role for protest Does that necessarily mean we have to row in behind one individual who for many of us is correct on the scene relatively recently? And kind of uncritically endorsing Maurice group and everything that they're doing of course not so that's the kind of position that we find ourselves in and It's one of those issues where I think Clearly there was a role for protest clearly that is going to change things and if nothing else the government needs to take as a message from all of this Which is that if you want to stop these protests there's a very simple solution to that It's not locking them all up. It's not another crackdown on social media It's not a new minister of misinformation has been talking about a little bit later on if we've got time It's stopping the votes and hopefully at some point the penny will drop But as I said, I don't think it requires us to whilst we might recognize the legitimacy of protest of direct action in certain circumstances and even leaders to endorse some of those groups does that mean we need to uncritically support some of these individuals? No, I suppose is where I'm coming out on this procedure and also I wonder whether The idea that their behavior is likely to produce produce the outcomes that you want Is true as well. It I think it's inevitably true that the government will be forced to respond But I suspect what you will find Winston is far from stopping the votes, which they all believe you can't They would much rather stop the protest and they believe they can and will and so what you're likely to see as as a response to this is People being arrested being prosecuted and then the entire opposition to a legal immigration being Tarnished with the brush of these are the sorts of people that will stab migrant boats as they're coming in to the country These are thugs these are people with a criminal record, which this guy has etc etc And the the reality is I mean you say there's a moral inversion going on I completely agree with you of course, but I also think you have to be Looking at the reality of the situation. Yes, it's true that the government is currently protecting illegal migrants as it Busses them from wherever they've landed on the shores of Britain to their migrant You know detention facility if you can even call it that What would you write would you rather they just Landed them on the button the beaches and then let see who wins against British people I mean like what what are they supposed to do? This is why Tom is entirely right. You have to stop these people from ever landing here because once they do in The current environment we're in it's just an impossible problem to solve We can't seem to deport them, but we also don't want you know people being dumped on the shores of Britain And then people smashing the heads and with bats do it. So, you know This is where the conundrum you have once you allow them in and that's why we've got to not allow them in and The conundrum is for Burnham because Burnham in his ideology and trying to pat into the green party he cannot Not accept them. It's so against them You know the idea of repeating the human rights act It's just so fundamental to their ideology that they can't actually do anything so they're not going to do anything about it Now these people should never touch British soil. I think I've said this now. Yeah, every episode we've done never touch English soil and Singers we started talking about English history in British history You say that this is going to look bad for people on the bad representative of people on this side of the argument But people who love their country and who know their country's history They see what's happening and they know exactly how to place it in its historical place this sort of invasion They see it exactly the same way as you know bringing up Alfred isn't crazy talking about the Vikings You might think I sound crazy bringing up it But what do you think they were doing these people coming up the fair Kings were coming over pillaging raping that Are you saying we should all get our shields and swords and march down to the cliffs of Dover like what are you saying? At a certain point I'm saying Yes, that if the state if the state aren't going to do anything we have to protect we protect Britain if the state completely fun Look we might not agree about when that time is but let's say we have a situation where it's like it's not just 6,000 people have come since Burnham's been Prime Minister and it's something like 200,000 it's since 2018 across the channel And that doesn't include legal entrance but over illegal state overstaying their visas or Laurie entrance But if if you say take the money take the thought experiment experiment up to Let's say a million there's a million illegal coming across the the channel Every year just to kind of to give a big number just for the sake of the thought experiment And the government did nothing Would you then say yeah, no, we've got to just let the millions in let the millions in ridiculous It's a ridiculous example Winston, which is why you're using it. It's not a ridiculous example. That's what I've got to say enough I completely agree with you, but we would never have a million people coming in illegally every year Just wouldn't have okay, but I'm trying to say to you at what point would you I'm asking you at what point would you be actually I will go down and try and protect the country. I don't know But but my point to you is if you're calling for people to pick up weapons and head down to the cliffs of Dover You're certainly outside of my ovens on window at this point Well, I'd like the Navy to go down and they would have weapons Yes, well, we totally agree then he just sort of said when I said so we should pick up our shields and swords and head down When you talk about the fighting are these guys have already got there These guys have already got there and obviously I'm not doing that. I'm not going down there and doing that But I'm saying at certain point we would I don't know what that point is I'm trying to get it out of you, but we would try and protect our country And the fact that we're even having this conversation is proof of what catastrophic state failure has taken place You know, because it's one of those things where going back to that image of that motorcade of the police cars and the ambulances is escorting those coaches like Such a kind of perfect example of how a British state which has become a kind of by-word for incompetence and inability to dispatch even its most basic responsibilities towards a life and limb of people in this country Leaping into action at a moment's notice in order to try and escort illegal migrants from their illegal landing to the migrant processing center I mean, it's just It's one of those things about this issue is that we often talk about it. Understandably so as an issue of national security The safety of women and children Social cohesion all of those things totally legitimate talk about that It's also something a bit more fundamental it raises question about who the British state is actually for who it actually Serves and the problem to Winston's point about the human rights mindset that exists amongst the labor party in particular But the political class in general is the um they can bang on about their legal obligations to these people As in the illegal migrants as much as they like yes on paper. They do have a responsibility to help vessels in distress in the channel Yes, on paper. They do have a legal responsibility to allow them to apply for asylum Yes, on paper they do have a legal responsibility to prevent them from falling into destitution whilst they're applying for asylum But first we can change those laws number one number two Certainly the domestic ones and number two is that to all Intensive purposes you are still facilitating illegal migration at the expense of British citizens whether that's the terms of cost or the democratic wishes They need to recognize that this at a certain point the public are just not going to wear this And so far that has manifested in them defecting to other political parties making their preference is shown at the ballot box Now we're seeing this new wave of protests which even if we're taking out these sort of direct action forms of it We're you know whether it was the flagraising or whether it was the pink ladies or whether it was the United Kingdom demonstrations You're seeing a whole new form of like largely working class protest on the scale which we haven't seen for a very long time. So at some point, the pennies got a drop, but I understand the frustration of having to basically just wait for someone within government to finally realize that they cannot carry on as they have. But as some people-- - The extremists are the government. The extremists are the government for letting this continue. And it's harder for a lot of people to see that because it takes a bit of a mind shift. But if you actually look at their behavior, what the government doing is unforgivable, absolutely unforgivable, and it's destroying our country. And we wouldn't even have conversations about what it is to be English and what it is to be British. If this kind of crap hadn't been going on. So all of this, the condemnation of Danny Thomas and everyone on question time was slagging him off. But ultimately, it's Burnham, it's Labour, it's the 14 years of Tory government, it's Blair before him, they created this mess. And then the extremists-- - Yeah, that's fine. We all agree on that, but the problem is that two things can be true at once. You're saying the extremists are the government. Well, you can have more than one set of extremists. And-- - Sure. - And so it's perfectly possible to recognize that you, for example, would have condemned direct action of this type by extinction rebellion. But you-- - Because it's based on a law. - Because it's based on a law. - Right. - Okay, so then all that, there is no truth in this only power. - What? - Because we get to decide whether there's no principle about do we accept this kind of behavior or do we not? We accept this type of behavior when it's in a cause that you support, but we reject this type of behavior when it's in a cause that you reject, right? So we would say, extinction rebellion blocking roads is illegal and therefore the police are correct to take them away when they block roads, right? - It's illegal, but it's also based on a lie. - But I know it's based on a lie. What I'm saying is, it's also illegal when it's based on the truth. - Right. - And so we have to have some consistency about how we treat people who protest or engage with direct action when it comes to causes that we agree with and also causes that we disagree with. - Right. - Which is why I open up this dialogue by saying at what point do you guys break with that principle that you have of that? Look at what point is this situation so serious that you go actually, okay, I'll give you another example. Outside of my house in London, I've had drug dealers going on on my front door and I've called the police and this has happened a few times over the last couple of weeks, I've called the police several times. They've never come to deal with it. And then I bumped into a policeman, police woman I should say, and explain the situation. And I said, I've got to protect my family. And if you guys won't do it, I don't give a shit. I'm going to take things into my own hands. She said, I totally understand fair enough. The police, get it. Like it's morally my responsibility to protect my family over a by obeying the law. Like I have to do that. And at some point it's morally our responsibility to protect our country when this, it's been recklessly vandalized like this. Well, then there is no law anymore. Sure, but this has been done by the government. I know, we all agree with you on that, Winston, but what we're discussing is how to respond to it. And what you are saying is do you want to live in the society where we don't obey the law if we don't like it? No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying the government are the ones who are betrayed their duty, their moral duty. And I think we all agree on that. At certain point, and obviously I'm not on the South Coast do anything about it. But at certain point, I would be as, if example, if there were literally hundreds of thousands coming every single day, the English people would come together and go like, no, if the government are not going to do anything about this, we're going to do something about this. Well, we don't have to work out who's English and who's not. All right, it's an interesting debate. And I think Thomas Wright, it shows you the point to which the country has come when we're having to discuss these things, which I think all of us would prefer not to have to discuss because we prefer not to have the problems that we do. Let's move on to our final story, which is actually making the point that I made earlier, which is I'm not remotely convinced that the response to protest and direct action from people like the ones you're describing, Winston, will be to address the issue. It may well be, to create a system of restricting people from being able to talk about it, Tom. Yes, exactly. So this was Andy Burnham's-- excuse me-- Andy Burnham's big announcement at the UN General Assembly, which is that he wanted to set up this new national center for information defense to combat what he saw as the scourge of disinformation. He was talking primarily or explicitly about the threat posed by Russia, particularly noting that Russia and hostile foreign states are interesting in pushing notions of national decline in Britain. Of course, that everything is absolutely fine here, and it's purely because we've been brainwashed by bot farms that we even count against that particular view, but that seems to be the drive of it. But really, I think seems to fit this established play that we now have with anti-disinformation efforts, which is it's presented as dealing with some kind of hostile foreign threat threats, such as they do exist. There are attempts to influence the information space that have always gone on in a particularly in the social media range. But really, I think it's just a code for trying to police discussions domestically. So whilst we haven't got a lot of meat on the bonus to what this new organization, what this new institution would do, I think from very recent experience, we can work under the assumption that this is going to be as much about policing the opinions of systems of this country, as much as it is trying to keep the fake news of foreign states that they-- during COVID, I think we saw this pretty clearly. A big brother watching some great reports on this, pointing out that these organizations within government, the counter-disinformation unit, the rapid response unit, were drawing up reports on just critics of the lockdown, people like Karl Henning. And also since I had this kind of hand in glove relationship with the social media companies, where they had trusted flagger status to flag up their posts in the end as they might be in some ways squashed, de-boosted, or ultimately de-platformed. There's also been a lot of discussion in recent years about the quite shady role that an organization called Riku, which is within the home office has been playing, in terms of trying to shape public discussion in and around terrorist attacks, trying to push certain narratives, liaising with families and family liais on offices in the wake of high profile terror murders, or racially aggravated murders, and kind of feeding into what the family statement should be, trying to kind of calm tempers and what have you. So the kind of very recent track record of these organizations has been not with the threat posed by Russia in mind, or Iran or whoever, but the threat posed by people in the country able to voice opinions that the establishment disagrees with. And one thing that is fascinating is that is really a, whilst that's potentially always been the case, that is a very distinct trend you see over the past 10 years. So the extent people can report on this, you have anti-disinformation capabilities within government, which previously might have primarily concerned themselves with external actors, found themselves in the wake of about 2016, and there's probably some reason for that, shifting their attention towards their own populations. And I think it's become clear now that it's almost impossible to disaggregate this war on disinformation, we've just a war on political positions that the establishment happens to dislike. So yeah, there's not much we know at this point, but prior experience would suggest that we'd be pretty alarmed and skeptical about this new organization. And if people don't mind, go ahead, man. Oh, yeah, if people don't mind, I want to pose a question, and it's related to this, and it's also related to what we've been talking about before. Does everybody know the term anarcho tyranny? Yeah, so for those people who don't, it's where we have a tyrannical government in charge who is oppressive to its citizens, but on the day-to-day level, there's people living in anarchy. There's no, there's very little rule of law. It's chaotic, there's a lot of crimes will go unpunished, low-level crimes, et cetera, et cetera. And I remember talking to a lot of people about this, and people have come up and talked to me and wanting to discuss this topic with me. And originally, I thought, well, this is a bit far, this is a bit extreme. But looking at a lot of what we've talked about and talking about this, is this, are we not entering a state of anarcho tyranny or is that hyperbolic? Well, no, clearly, I mean, the government's response, as we were talking about with the previous story, the government's response, it's easier to solve the problem of a few hundred balaclava protesters down in Dover than it is to solve the problem of tens of thousands of illegal immigrants on small boats. So if you're the government, the rational thing for you to do is to say these people are all bad, they're all racist. And what we've got to do is crack down with the full force of the law, as they've said, arrest the people who commit any sort of criminal offence, and then try to decapitate those protests. That's a much easier fix than solving the actual problem. Likewise, dealing with public sentiment and the way that it's shifting and the strength of feeling, particularly on the center and center right, and now, you know, further on the right, about these issues, that's a very hard fix. Because even if you stopped all illegal immigration tomorrow, the sentiment would remain because you have a million illegal immigrants in the country and the consequences of two decades of mass immigration, which people are obviously also angry about. Much easier to just say you're not allowed to have these opinions anymore. You know, we're going to be in the words of the great Jacinda Adon, we're going to be your single source of truth, as she famously said during COVID, and all the rest of it, because we good people, like Andy Burnham and others, can obviously all agree that asylum seekers are poor people fleeing, you know, war abroad, and anyone who seeks to, you know, damage their boats, well, that's obviously quite, quite thuggery, and that's obviously racism, and that's obviously, obviously, obviously. What do we do with thugs and racists? Well, we'd all agree with the thugs who, you know, break the law, need to be cracked down on, and before you know it, their opinions, you know, I've thought, for example, that this debate we've had today are really important and healthy, but, you know, you Winston may be considered to have strayed over the line in the course of this, and it will be people like that who are seen as giving some sort of tacit approval to these things, which people are perfectly entitled to do if that's what they believe, but it will be opinions like that that are prevented from being expressed in public, because if you have two decades of mass immigration, illegal immigration through open borders, and the ideology of diversity, equity, inclusion, multiculturalism, and identity politics, then this is all the natural government reaction to this situation. And so to me, it almost feels inevitable. And by the way, Toby Young of the Free Speech Union pointed out that far from being some sort of breakthrough new thing, there's like eight or nine of these types of units in government already that are trying to manipulate and restrict public conversation in order to shape the narrative out there about all of these issues, because the government, and I think in probably all of our opinions, I won't speak fair enough, I certainly speak for myself, the government rightly understands that if you simply step back at this point, you actually open up the door to hell, because the reason they're having to escort illegal migrants in buses with dozens of police cars is, let's be honest, there is the possibility that if they didn't do that, violence could erupt. That's why they're doing. And they know that, because that's the situation they've created. And so if you are concerned about protecting British people from violence, at this point, if you're the government, you have every reason to jump in and say people shouldn't be able to discuss things, because we've, we have messed things up so badly that even saying out loud how much we've messed them up has the potential to cause violence. That's where we are. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I don't, seeing as you've pointed at me and sort of straying out of the overton, I think that Britain and England is a gift literally from God, it is, it is done unfathomable good and spread it in the world. And it is precious and must be protected. And frankly, that is what, that's why I even do media. I do media, not because I want to do media, I do media, because I love my country. And I think it must be protected and bestowed to the next generation. And media is just a means for me to, to, to do that goal. And so if protecting our borders, which is now within, it's now without outside of the overton window, even if it means, you know, the methods we've been discussing, right, fine, so be it, I don't care, I love my country. And it must be protected. And it's just, I actually quite like what Tom was saying about this sort of history in the context of this, but I would stretch even further back. And this is something trigonometry been fantastic of, of covering not just through COVID, but before, but a lot of what we're going through the last few years is sort of against the post-war consensus. And it's, there's been these elites since 1945. And it's been various issues that they've been trying to push the Western and certain direction. And all of it, it really starts with Obama, like he used using a lot of infrastructure that was originally set up to fight Islamism. He then turned it on populism in around 2014-15. And so it's the same sort of, all of this stuff is exactly how both of you have been describing. It's, it's taken this old infrastructure and turning it against the people. And I suspect we're going to see a lot, lot more of this kind of stuff. It's not going to stop anytime soon because they're not going to go out without a fight. Unfortunately for them, those of us who don't have their worldview are also not going to give out that fight. I think one of the really dangerous things that we need to address is to talk about relationships. The number one predictor for a marriage breaking up, as some of you may know, some of you may not, is contempt. It's contempt. The number one foundation for any relationship is not love affection. I'm talking about respect. I'm talking about all relationships, whether it's a colleague, whether it's a partner, whether it's a friendship. It's also, I'm also talking about the relationship between a government and its people. And for a long time now, it feels like the government holds its people in contempt. And by that, I mean they simply have lied to them, gaslit them, whatever where you want to talk about it. And it's gone on for a long time. And I think what we're facing now is the breakdown of trust and respect between a government and its people. And if there is no relationship, what you effectively seeing is the breakdown of a society. And that, to me, is where we are rapidly heading towards. We're on the path to something absolutely disastrous. And I think we've been covering it, and we've been talking around it in this particular episode. But what fundamentally we're talking about is the death of a people giving, believing that its government can represent them and serve its best interests. And where we go from here is quite frankly terrifying. Well, look, I actually think we have to be honest. And maybe we have to recognize that we live in a left-wing woke country populated by left-wing woke people. I mean, the election results bear that out, right? I mean, is that the case though when we separate out the political system and the results and elections from what people actually believe? Because of the elections, unfortunately, maybe get boiled down to maybe one question, maybe two questions. What do you want to do about cost living? What do you want to do about immigration? And really, that's going to be the story of the next election is which one of those framings wins, which could also lead to a violently different outcome. But I do think that so many of the issues that animate us, that animate our audiences, that are clearly going absolutely wrong, illegal migration, there's a basic supermajority in the country who is against what is going on currently, the nonsense around gender. Again, you pollute even labor voters. They know that a lot of this is complete, you know, woo. And the fact that it's going back to our disinformation discussion, the fact that you've got a labor party which has just been flatly either lying about what it believes to be the reality about gender for the sake of trying to look good or actually believing complete nonsense. The fact that these are the people trying to police our speeches, absolutely fascinating. But you know, you keep going down the list. And what the story of the past 10 years is that our elites have gone insane whilst the public have remained remarkably common-sensical and also remarkably patient. That's not going to, the latter half of that is certainly not going to hold for much longer. And it just feels like the gap that exists is how is that going to get proper political representation at common sense majority, which I think still does just about exist on a lot of these questions. I think that's true on a lot of these questions. It's becoming more extreme, that's certainly true. I do think that's true on a lot of these questions. But if we come back to the idea that the economy is central to the next election, for example, I don't know your views on tax tone, but I imagine Winston Francis and myself are not in favour of pushing taxes up further. But that is overwhelmingly a minority position in this country. And against one of those things, depending on how you frame it, because people obviously don't want their own tax to go up, but the idea of, you know, squeaking the pips out of people who make a hell of a lot of money is something that when you poll is quite broadly speaking, it has public support. So there is of course nuance in all of this. And maybe the economy is the one that is the sort of elephant in the room. But even there, I mean, you can still see the people are persuadable on these matters. I think they're just also in a situation where they have economically and cost living wise, been suffering for quite a long time. So any argument which sounds like more harsh medicine is one that isn't going to land this. But this is exactly what I'm saying, though. This is what I'm saying, though, because to me, all of these issues are important. All the cultural issues we've discussed are really important. But I don't believe they would have remotely the salience that they do if it was not for the continuous decline of Britain's economy and people's living standards for the last 20 years. I just don't. And that's the reality because if you take the most extreme far right position that you can think of, which is you need to make Britain white again. Let's say that you take that position and you click your fingers and that happens. Is this country going to, is our living standards in this country going to improve tomorrow as a result? They're not. They're not. And in fact, in the short term things would get a lot worse economically right so addressing the immigration part of this is very important in dealing with illegal immigration in making sure that the mass immigration we have is people who are benefiting this country rather than and taking things from it but the reality is until you address the economic piece of this all of these other issues will continue to have salience simply because people are really really frustrated about what's happening to the living standards and on the whole British people believe that the solution to their plummeting living standards is a mansion tax is inheritance tax is higher taxes on business is higher taxing on the super rich which you know Dan Hodges when we interviewed talked about private jets while talking about top rate of tax which is like 55 grand so plumbers and electricians and you know people running small businesses are paying it right but but most people in this country when pulled feel that the reason they are poor is quote the rich the rich the rich the rich which is the way to more poverty and the way to more lack of productivity to fewer jobs and so I question those of us who are in this part of the the public debate how in touch we actually are with the average British person when it comes to a lot of these issues and I worry when we sit here and say you know the British people want this are the British people are very split you know Francis and I were at someone's wedding a friend of ours wedding which was kind of split down the middle in these two different directions you talk to people who don't have our views they have very different views and they hold them just as strongly as we do and there's a hell of a lot of them too so and by the way they don't like me no no and so what do you do he turned up with my face mate yeah with with his evil right wing face yeah my point being is this is why we were talking about you know extinction rebellion versus anti-immigrant protest I don't think either side has the right to say we speak for the country therefore we are entitled to behave an x-way x-way we all have to obey the law we all have to engage in the democratic process and ultimately you have to win at the ballot box you have to win at the ballot box oh yeah it's obviously the case we have to win the ballot it's just on the economics though if you look at having on the continent with Rassomal or National Rassomal or National and alternative for Deutschland they are both left wing economically they're actually both Rassomal or National certainly are national socialist here it hasn't the right hasn't kind of gone that way exactly although reform want to play with the nationalization of steel yeah and they have talked about nationalizing water so there is a left leaning side to reform and they've got the red wall base which is kind of represented by Leanderson somewhat but I think that whether it's on the continent or here the politics is no longer economically split like it used to be it's it's now it's more about identity I think and that's the new paradigm and so yeah of course you know yeah what's that numpte Gary's economics you know he can he can go and talk about wealth tax for all day long and get loads of airtime and he's very popular amongst sort of Gen Z people it's also the case that wealth tax will be popular even bizarrely amongst wealth conservative voters I've seen statistics so I think you're right constant in that even on the right in Britain there is a popular feeling towards more tax in certain domains but I think that that's not the overarching I think I think the politics is now a sort of a battle for the not for economics but for the soul of of our nation and that's a little bit of a cliched statement to to make but it's not quite the paradigm it used to be what if our country was growing a 5% a year and jobs were abundant and salaries were increasing all the time do you think we'd be having all these same debates about immigration in this way I don't think so yes of course you would because of the the Pakistani rape gang scandal because of the various people murdered by illegal entrance because of the the the two tier system that you have or it it's not just that there's different policing standards depending on on your identity it's different justice standards someone from the the protest this week has been given a two-month prison sentence for throwing a bottle compare that to some of the the kind of incrimes that you've been getting it's it's not comparable there's definitely a two tier sense of two tier in this country so yes I agree on all of this we wouldn't be at the fever pitch that we have it now it just wouldn't well also people wouldn't people wouldn't be quite as scratchy and infuriated as they might otherwise be but nevertheless a man in the women's toilet is going to be a problem in good times showing bad an illegal migrant rapist being allowed to run a mark is going to be a problem in good times absolutely or in bad and also I think these things are just sort of interconnected and also I think the general drift over the past 10 years is that there has been a chunk of the British electorate to some extent the sort of silent majority who has felt pushed out of the democratic process which has been in various different ways reasserting itself Brexit defecting to the conservative part whether it might have been reform of course now and I think that I think people start by a more democratic politics we can also get to the heart a lot of these economic issues as well because whilst of course if you look at some of these individual policy measures things like a mansion tax things like a world tax policy it well that's in the absence of a proper debate about them I think it's fair to say you know other things like one the core issues that this country faces both in terms of spending but also in terms of the drag anchor on growth it represents the welfare bill there is a very sensible majority who say that this is at hand and actually if you go further down the income scale working class people in particular are very aware of the issue of welfare dependency I think it should be dealt with similarly net zero starting to go in that direction as well so yes I mean it's one of those things where at the very least we can probably agree on the fact that we need more discussion about all these issues more aeration of them because whilst we might have spent a lot of time focusing on the cultural side there is also this economic side which can occasionally be neglected in the midst of all this no absolutely I think constant imposed the question which is do we live in a left wing woke country and I think to everybody here and to constant in I think next general election we're going to find out if we do because if we continue down this same trajectory if we're seeing the problems that we talk about if we're seeing these threats which I consider to be existential and they still vote for Labour and they still want a left wing government then that will show where the public ultimately stand as a whole and if we get up and if we even if it's a coalition it shows that yes we do and I think at that point it will become undeniable we're right and we've done two hours and we've got to wrap up but I will just say if you come back to our earlier conversation pretty much all of us predicted that the next election could well be a Labour and possibly left wing coalition so that would say that we maybe do live in a country that at least with you know the way democracy works at constituency system etc this is this is the reality so get get ready to pay more tax and love your new neighbour absolutely ready to learn Arabic yeah and we will all be happy no gentlemen it's been off the fence has been extra spicy and long this week thank you for watching thanks for being here everybody of course thanks for watching and listening make sure you like 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