France Riots - Are We Next? - Off The Fence

Hello everybody and welcome to this weeks of the fence with me constant in kissing my trigonometry host Frances Foster, Tom Slater from Spike, then of course Winston Marshall from the Winston Marshall show Gentlemen, welcome back this week again The story is of course the French riots which continue to erupt across the country with more expected this weekend We will also talk about the midterms, Frances and I are here in the US so we can update you on what's going on Will that Tom take us away on what's been happening in France in the last week? Absolutely so of course France descending into riots is hardly a new story but I think there is something obviously very darkly new about what we've seen raging on the streets of Paris, Bordeaux, Marseilles, cities across France spreading into other parts of Europe as well, something which is distinctly different in its scale its intensity and also its unfrenchness if we've been perfectly honest for reasons that we'll get into so far has been two and a half thousand arrests at least due to the destruction that we saw over the weekend, anywhere between hundreds of millions and potentially even a billion euros worth of damage done in looting and arson across all of those French cities, yet the depti mayor of Paris saying that this was something we've never seen before and I think that's very true not just as this in terms of scale but also the symbolism I mean if you just go through what are some of the key moments of last weekend it's hard to ignore the subtext of what is going on there everyone will remember those horrific scenes from Limoges where the city hall there which is this neo-Renaissance masterpiece, stood for two hundred years survived two world wars as you can see their set of blaze its clock tower is now just a smoldering ruin, you also saw in Marseilles actually where the police lost control of the streets for hours on end at one point over the weekend but what we're seeing here is protesters busting inside of the city hall and when they got there many of them as we'll see drapes and palestine flags toppling the bust of Marianne the great symbol of the French Republic whilst chanting slogans again you can't really beat, don't need a degree in semiotics to understand the symbolism there, we also saw in Toulouse where there is this huge monument to Joan of Arc we see there the writers have climbed on top of it put veil over her head and also tucked a palestine flag underneath one of her arms and then just elsewhere just scenes of absolute carnage and looting, one particular image that has done the rounds on social media is this shopkeeper trying to defend his video game shop in Nice and getting a fly kick to the back as we'll see in just one moment for his trouble what we're seeing here is a sort of confluence of coming together of various different malign forces and constituencies within France so first of all there's the ultra left faction the black block the anarchists it's actually a 34 year old anarchist leftist who's been arrested on suspicion of burning down the town hall in limo she seems to have been part of a family of sort of basket separatist arsonists so that's clearly a clear faction here there's also the sort of adventurous would be radical young people and students who are sort of joining the carnage out of a mix of just delight in the the violence in the chaos but also repeating islamist slogans as we've talked about in the show before kind of taking on very anti-French sort of Islamic politics as a kind of rebel posture and of course you've got the the migrants to kind of unintegrated sections of the suburbs from the housing estates who are doing the lion's share of the looting and amongst those as well a pretty firm islamist component as well if anything if the slogans and that what people have been shouting on the streets is anything to go by so what we're seeing here is young people a bit brought up to hate France migrants who have never really joined France and then a mix of islamists and leftists who are quite willing to burn it all down and certainly have the wherewithal to do so naturally the media and I think it's to a certain extent important it's focused on just like the broader economic and cultural context that's not unimportant I mean France is a bit of an economic basket case has been for some time it's debt it's eye watering is it something like a hundred and nineteen percent of GDP politically it's been in complete deadlock certainly since a manual macro I'm called these snap elections back in 2022 and it's just basically been ungovernable but I think if we were to focus purely on that we would miss the miss the tinder for the spark if you like because even when society is going through quite tough times and there's always a potential for disorder and violence something that keeps a check on that or stops at getting out of control is just that there's a kind of baseline there's a sort of social civilisation or ballast that everyone feels like they are brought into the society that they are part of its future even if the present is not particularly good I think what we've seen both in terms of the scale of the violence the symbolism the people who are doing it is that that ballast is sort of rotten and we'd be lying to ourselves if we didn't see like echoes of our own country in the midst of what's been going on there so we'll see what happens there are more demonstrations quote unquote call for this weekend maybe some opportune rain will douse those down but the facts on the ground aren't changing and I don't think it'd be long until something like this fires up again but I was wondering given Winston's actually been the only one of us who's been in France recently what he's been making of this since it's developed for those kind of school protest slash riots to this kind of more full blown and broader base configuration that we see yeah I'm extremely pessimistic about what's going on in France I think that we're witnessing the birth pangs of what may very well likely or it's an opinion but I the way I put it together it seems like it might be a decades-long anarchy ahead of us and I to explain that we perhaps I should explain why what happened last weekend is even worse than what we talked about two weeks ago so numbers have gone up now last weekend it was up to some estimates 800,000 60,000 police and John Darmory across the nation do you think about how many 60,000 police are to deal with that's three arenas worth of police a thousand of the police were injured someone was killed it is I've seen reports well over a billion in damages and these horrifying images of small businesses losing the port of Asian heritage girl who lost her business she'd build up she sort of ventures you showed the video there of the the man who had his sort of is I don't know is a comic book store and he's kind of beaten and I'd also note it is due to be another set of protests this weekend what's even more concerning about this weekend is that the Paris police prefecture have told citizens to arrange their own security now as far as I'm concerned that is the French state abdicating in their primary responsibility in the social contract if you cannot protect the citizens that's the what why should any why should people pay into the state anymore why should that is literally the beginning of anarchy and in France the problem has been it's within borders as we've discussed on other topics in Britain it's been at the borders but it's a it's a similar thing we're seeing around the country and just why I'm so pessimistic is if you look at what is going on population rights so the French do not publish ethnic demographics of for their country but they do show who is who is foreign born under Macron since 2017 he's let in 2.7 million non-European migrants that's not including other European migrants there are estimates of 900,000 illegals in France in Britain the estimates between 1.2 and 2 million i suspect in France there's actually more than 900,000 of the population we do know the foreign born population is 14% the Muslim population is at least 7% but with some estimates up to 10% again hard to know because they don't record for kids for miners and so we don't fully know and it's also the case that census data is not always accurate and I also suspect Muslim communities don't participate in those kind of censuses like other communities might so that will be said we've got and that would make it in Western Europe the highest Muslim proportion of any Western European nation and so as Tom rightly points out you have that side of the portion and we've seen videos of them stopping looting to pray towards Mecca and then get back up and get to that those are the images we've seen on on X and you have the kind of indigenous antifa cosplay types you have the anarchist the hammered sick or all of these guys and then you've got the schooling right so obviously essentially this is about schooling it doesn't explain why you would destroy small businesses but French schooling is a problem and they've got the worst piece of scores they are in the OECD they it's the record it looks like the state of schooling is bad but they spend more than anyone else in Western Europe on on-screw schooling and they have the highest tax burden I think not the highest maybe second highest tax burden in Western Europe so this is all the the protesters who are blaming capitalism actually this is the most socialist or one of the most socialist make top two most socialist countries in Western in Western Europe so you've got this and then And this, this, again, I've got data on the English side of this, but in England, in Britain, 80% of teachers are left wing and 25% of teachers vote for the green party. Green party is far left. So all of these kids, all of this Gen Z have been marinating in this anti-French ideology coupled with a huge portion of, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, my, my grocery population. Uh, just, just, just, sorry, I could keep throwing more and more expressions about why I'm so pessimistic. There's another important thing to point out. So I've got a clip here of the BBC describing it. Dean, can you play it for us, please? In Paris and beyond half a million people that fill the cities across France to protest over the future of their country, they were mostly peaceful, but as we saw in the capitals in the wings of those who wanted to take advantage of the people that were mostly peaceful. That's what I wanted you to see. So mostly peaceful. Now my course has blamed AI and, uh, he says, is AI disinformation. He says that President Trump is stupid, he said that this week, President Trump is stupid for blaming Islam and mass migration. Ursula von von der Leyen, the EU has blamed Russia and disinformation. So what you've got is a classic political class saying, you know, not actually able to articulate what the actual problem is and they're kind of going for other things. The far left under Melanchon, he has said, yes, it is the far left, yes, it is Islam. And it's a good thing. And France doesn't really exist and there is no French culture. And so you've kind of got them who kind of more explicit about what the problem is. I think Trump is much, much closer to the truth. And given this increasingly divided, it's also worth noting there is a kind of indigenous patriotic pushback. I think in law, they had a kind of small uprising. And so it's not going unnoticed. And Emmanuel Petit, the French World Cup, or the French World Cup, 98 winner went on it. This is absolutely beautiful rant about it, but he completely lost his temper saying he's had enough and he's saying it's not all immigrants, but we can see if you come into this country and you don't, and you don't like this country, bugger off, it's actually, it was even more harsh language than I just used there. I think that France is unbelievably divided in a way that a lot of, more so than a lot of Western Europe. But I think this is across Europe, we've been seeing similar images in Italy. We're seeing images in Belgium. We're seeing small protests coming up in Spain. There's a whole thing going on in Albania, but that's maybe another thing. I'd also note that France seems to be teetering on a fiscal crisis. All of this is why I'm so pessimistic about the problem ahead of us and what might be done about it. So before I, I can elaborate more, but maybe I'll bring Constantine and Francis into it at this point. Well, we've spent the last few days here in the US talking to people and it's amazing. They all walk in chipper and happy and very American and smiling. And they walk out of the room, absolutely, do nourishing the press after asking us questions about what we think is going on. The interesting thing for me is I feel like despite the conversation we had on off the fence, despite the media coverage, I mean, you saw in that BBC report, the thing that I was most struck by is actually not them saying it was mostly peaceful because there is a defensible version of that claim in that factually, that's probably true, right? The violent people are always a minority of a protest movement. But what I found fascinating is in that report, they said they're protesting about the future of their country, which is a casual phrase that means nothing that informs you about nothing and we ultimately have no idea what it is that is causing all of this, right? And I feel like I still am not certain that I can say it's this or that. Now, would we be accurate to say that as you describe a Palestinian-Nism winston is a contributing factor? Well, it's very clear that people who hate this country and who are from a foreign background, whether that's in the UK or in France or elsewhere, I mean, the first thing I was struck by when I went to the pro-Palestine marches in London, and I also went to the pro-Israel marches in London, and I did both with a completely open mind at the time. The thing that struck me, and I remember saying it on camera was, and I think Douglas Murray has made a similar point, there isn't a single British flag or a singer's trickle or at a pro-Palestine protest, while the pro-Israel protest, it was Israeli and British flagged or Jewish symbolism and British flags intertwined throughout. So there is a portion of this movement that is people who, who solidarity is with elsewhere and who have zero interest or love for the country in which they live. But I also, I'm struck by, Winston, I'll definitely let you jump in, I'm keen to hear your opinion, but I was also struck by that clip from the French TV show in which you've got this woke, wealthy, privileged white girl mocking people whose shops have been looted and burned, while having a woman from an immigrant descended background, explaining it to her that actually working hard and creating businesses and all of this is probably a good thing and destroying those things is terrible. So I think there's so much like univariate framing, this thing has caused this and I feel like there's a lot going on, I mean we talked about economics, I think economics is part of it. We also, you know, AI and Russia and all of this stuff, but I think it's true, I think Russia and China are demonstrably trying to amplify protest movements in the West, there's plenty of evidence of this. I mean there's a whole warehouse in St. Petersburg where all these guys get on the internet and try and manipulate public opinion in Western countries through social media, I mean that is happening, foreign bots are influencing a lot of this, right? Yeah, but that's not the primary. No, no, no, I'm not saying any of these things are the primary, this is what I'm saying is I think I am still in a position where I don't feel that I can say the primary cause of this is X, Y, Z and by the way, one other point, if you want to get really depressed and tumorous about all of this is the inquiry that Francis and I have been on the entire time we've been in the US is about the impact of AI and we've had people like Andrew Yang on who's the former Democratic candidate, that will go out soon but hasn't yet and we talked about the potential for job losses and job destruction, et cetera. And even if you accept either that actually, well, look, if you look at previous technological transformations in history, the impact of that is that you have a disruption followed by new jobs being created and actually everything's great if you accept that version or if you accept Andrew Yang framing, which is well, actually that's not happening and not going to happen and what this will do is take everyone's jobs. So okay, well, we've got to take the wealth that's created because it will be so much wealth created and we've got to redistribute it to everybody through a UBI or whatever freedom benefit, whatever you want to call it. The problem is, and this is something that European policy makers and leaders don't seem to have realized because we are not engaging in the technological innovation or creating the fundamentals that are necessary for it. If you accept that part of this will involve the level of redistribution from the wealth creators who are using technology to everyone else. The problem is that all of that wealth is going to be created in two countries. It's going to be created in America and it's going to be created in China because that's where all these companies that are doing all of this are based and taxed. But in Europe, we will still have all our jobs destroyed or taken for a period of time or the economy, the economic upheaval or whatever, but we are not going to have the tax base of taxing your Claude's and Anthropics and open AIs and chat GPs etc. What that means for this kind of protest and this kind of situation going forward, I think is even more terrifying if that's what you were looking for this fine evening. One of the things, unless you want to respond to it when he and then because he responds when he goes on. There's just a couple of small details. Just a small detail. Absolutely not, let me talk. Small details, it's just that it is the case that in some of these French rights, there have been people with the tricolor and there are some people singing the Marseilles. But it is overwhelmingly anti-Western, it's not just Palestine flags, it's Algerian flags, it's Moroccan flags, it is the A-Cab, it is the hammer and sickle, it's the deliberate talking of French monuments. There is an anti-French overwhelming anti-French attitude about it. It's just a small detail, because I know if any lefties are listening in, actually. We have loads of lefties listening in, I think it's a helpful question. I think it's a useful point for you to make, because that's exactly what I was saying. I was saying is there are clearly different factions. different causes for each of these factions to be activated in this way. So I imagine if you are a far leftist agitator, well you just see this as an opportunity to glue and rire and cause trouble. If you're an Islamist you see this as an opportunity to raise the Palestine flag in a profound way. If you're a student who's upset about the situation in schools then that's what you're there for. And often when these things come together it's this smogest board of frustration or agendas which is why you get the report on the BBC that you get which says these people are protesting about the future of the country as if that means anything. There is that. The only thing I would add to that is that there's clearly a thread which connects at least a chunk of those groups. So whenever you're talking about the students, whether you're talking about the hard leftist, whether you're talking about the Islamist or the unintegrated migrants, one thing that is clearly shared is a lack of affection for France, is a lack of connection to France, is no sense in which it is something horrific to desegrate some of its great symbols and beautiful accomplishments, whether it's architecture or what have you. And they've ended up in that position for slightly different reasons, you know the propagandaizing to the youth in the schools, whether it's the absolute failure and breakdown of any project of integration, let alone assimilation. And of course on the left, this kind of turn over the course of decades now away from class politics or identity politics, away from aspiration to universalism which used to chime quite well with the project of France to this project of sort of third worldism. And we've already talked a bit about Melanchron but he's a perfect example of this. This is someone who after the Charlie Hebdo attack would be happy to go and give a barnstorming speech as he did to memorialize his friend Shab who was murdered in that horrific attack, castigating the Islamic zealots and saying that this is something which we must put up with, he's even criticized the veil, we even used to criticize the concept of Islamophobia fast forward to today. And he is openly courting Islamist, he is openly courting these unsegregated sections of society, my colleague, Fraser Meyers, it's quite great article kind of itemizing all of that. Even he himself, who is ethnic French but was born in Morocco and was part of the people who were kind of expelled in the midst of decolonisation, has started referring to himself as a Magrebia which is not a song by Edith Piaf, it's this idea that he's a man of the Magreb, he's spoken as Winston as alluded to of this idea that French society is just a kind of creole that doesn't really exist. And he's even indulged in a bit of what you could recall a sort of lame anti white student union politics talking about how all of France is white and ugly and that the new France, which is what we see burning everything down, is actually where the future lies certainly for the left. So again, it's to go, that's a bit of a tangent about the left and John McMurray, but I say you can see how much there is a, as much this is in Co-A, yes as economic factors, social factors, political ones, people just joining in writing because it's their young and it's fun, which is something that we can never totally discredit as a motivating factor. They share that hatred of rejection of France, that clip about their concern about the future of their nation. A lot of them couldn't give a shit about the future of their nation, they don't much like their nation, they don't really know what they want, it's an alternative all the time, but that's something that I think you can say is sort of shared even if they've ended up in that position for slightly different reasons. One of the things that we haven't yet spoken about, but I think is very, very interesting, is the effect that this is going to have on French politics, but also politics across Europe more generally, because what it's actually going to do is it's going to give credence to populists on the right, because what they're going to say, and they have a real point in this, is the elites that you currently have do not have the answers to the problems that you are facing. You're elites a week, which we all know they are, people on the left, the right, and even the centre would probably agree with that, unless you're fed a diet of BBC News in Channel 4, in which case you're the proverbial dodo when you're the proverbial dodo with the political established with the political forces that are coming down the pipeline, but we can see that our elites are no longer fit for purpose. That's where we are, and it's to a certain extent they're more fit for purpose, and some countries are less fit for purpose than others in others. And what Winston said, and the thing that he pointed out about them saying that effectively they won't be able to protect French businesses, French citizens, French individuals, shows they've lost, they have given up, they have admitted publicly that they are no longer able to do the most important thing which is to keep citizens safe, which leaves a vacuum, and as we've said, and as we all know, nature abours a vacuum, so it's going to be filled. And what that means is this, it leaves personally for me, if nothing changes, and it might, this leaves the way for Marine Le Pen to come in and to make a very simple but very effective point. They cannot keep you safe, they cannot do what is necessary for France, not only can they not do what is necessary, not only can they not implement the correct policies, they can't even be honest about what is actually happening. They are literally philosophically, metaphorically, bankrupt. It is bankrupt, the entire establishment. And I think what you're seeing, and maybe France is the test case for this, is the collapse of the elite, and actually it's a Marine Le Pen and populist government all the way from here. Maybe because if this spreads all the way through, if it spreads God forbid to our country, and I really don't want this to happen, then I think we are going to see less faith in labour. Look, I mean, the conservatives are already, there's less faith in the conservatives, and it's going to be more support for Nigel Farage and Reformed potentially. I'm so triggered by what you just said there. I'm going to start by saying, firstly, it's already in our country, this idea that this is unique to France, and it's people in Britain. In fact, in Americans as well, kind of smirking and looking across, sorry, in America, you have this in 2020, it's the same, exactly the same ideology that's part of the BLM riots, in which significant more damage was done, significantly more people were killed, and it was absolutely heinous. As for Britain, we've had it the same with the Palestine marches, it's the same ideology behind that. But what's actually triggerably, sorry, France is what you've done, is you've basically taken the New York Times Wall Street Journal establishment line, which is, yeah, they're happening, but the real headline here is that Marine Le Pen's going to win the next election. Oh no, Marine Le Pen's going to win the election. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. This isn't the bloody problem. What's going on now? Can you imagine it being worse than this? I mean, really? We are a total carnage and anarchy across. When hold on, hold on, hold on. You're misrepresenting what France has said. He wasn't saying it in the way that the mainstream say, which is, you do a deriat or a problem, but the worst problem is the Marine Le Pen will get elected. I think he's just saying what will happen as a result of this is Marine Le Pen will be elected in France. And by the way, in this respect, I am kind of. I've said this for some time now. I'm kind of an accelerationist. Sadly, you know, I was on Coleman Hughes podcast earlier this week and he asked me about he said, well, you know, how do you stop this sort of thing happening in Britain? And no one's asked me that question before, so I had to think about it. And I just sat and thought about it for a few seconds and then I went, I don't think you can. Right? And I don't want this to happen in Britain, but I honestly don't think you can stop it from happening in Britain. For the very reasons that you so beautifully laid out, which is this is about anti-Western hatred, this is about people, children who've been taught for two generations now to hate their own society. Why wouldn't they be burning it down at a time of economic and technological upheaval when the future is up in there? No one knows what's going to happen. And our economies have stagnated for 20 years. It's the most logical thing in the world. And I would actually tragically say, I suspect, given where the country is at the moment, the only way you get a right-wing correction to all of this, particularly on immigration and the economy, is if this kind of stuff happens. Now, I am not remotely advocating for any violence or anyone to go out on the streets and burn down our country, obviously. I just think the entire Western world, other than perhaps portions of the American political elite and electorate, is locked in this thing, because let's be honest about why these protests have exploded in this way. Let's just be honest about this, right? Francis is right, and you're right when you say, you know, the fact that they've told people you are responsible for your own safety. By the way, in a country where you're not allowed to own firearms, right? The only force equalizer that people in the situation might have. That's an abandonment of their responsibility, and it's terrifying, and it will have the political consequences that Francis described. But what are they supposed to do? Let's say you're a manual micron, a terrible thought experiment, no doubt. And you have a bunch of people rioting in the streets, right? Significantly made up of ethnic minorities, whatever. You send in the police, right? There is a the confrontation. The police who are defending themselves, but also who are trying to restore order will inevitably bash someone over their head, break someone's theirs, hit someone here, and there will probably be the occasional misuse of force because there always is in these situations. And now you've given them a BLM George Floyd type of moment. It will be on camera. Someone will have been mistreated. They may have died. And now you've inflamed the rights even more because, and this is important, right? Your own public don't want you to deal with this. They're so terrified of the use of force in this situation to put down this kind of rioting. They were the ones who are going to get triggered by the fact that having been forced into a position where they're dealing with rioters, the police have to use what will in some instances be excessive force. And your own public are the ones that are going to turn away from you. So what are you supposed to do? So this is exactly why I was, I said, I was so pessimistic because even if it was not Macron, even if you actually have a right-wing party who come in and try and deal with some of the problems. I don't think, I think the problems are too deep and endemic for them to be properly sorted, which is why I do think we're going to see decades-long anarchy across Western Europe. Because I don't think the public even have the appetite for what could put, the drastic radical things that need to be done to avoid serious civil conflicts. I don't want to explain that to me. So I think the path to avoid that, the peaceful path out of this is so narrow now, I always can't see it anymore. And also about the election of a, the election of a Le Pen would also no doubt spark a new round of rioting as well, which is something that even before we had this present space of protest to riots, to the full-blown sort of insurrection we saw over the past weekend. You had again, our old friend Jean-Nell and Jean could have openly talking that there should be some kind of uprising in the event of the fascist coming to power. So this is something that does depressingly feel baked in at this point, finding a way out of that is very difficult. I do think it is worth underlying what Francis was saying though, it was just the complete failure of the political class. And the manual Macron is very significant in all of this because he was elected in 2017, so a year after Brexit, a year after Donald Trump. Here the way in which he sentenced to the French presidency under his own party and obviously sort of a Le Pen presidency was hailed across the Western world in the establishment classes as the hammer-blow to populism. He was literally depicted on the front cover of the Economist magazine walking on water. So convinced were they that he was going to essentially refashion the third way technocratic politics for the 21st century, that he was going to arrest that sense of French decline and disintegration. And France was going to be this wonderful start-up nation where everything was fine. Fast forward to today and he was at a Celine Dion concert the night for everything kicked off. And as soon as it did kick off, he gave an insipid speech and then buggered off to the golf to pose on the international stage. And again, the haughtiness of Macron, the fact that he's always presenting himself as a bit of a princeling, taken to sort of lecturing, unemployed young people on the streets saying, you know, I could go across the road and get you a job right now. Makes him a perfect foil for all of this, like an establishment that has completely failed to the point, as you say, Winston, that he's essentially suggesting that people should handle their own security. When we all know, he's in the Alize, he's probably absolutely fine and worse comes to worse. He's got progy to handle things if things get political. So this is, you know, it is one of those things where it's so clear that the establishment is not just failed, it's unraveled, it's disappeared, it can't command any authority on the streets that cannot even support the organs of the state, which is supposed to be there to maintain order. I don't know how you move back from that. And he certainly will. Well, actually on that note, I think we should try and have a little bit of a conversation about what we think some of the solutions are here because I am actually simultaneously as pessimistic as you guys, but also, also, I feel that the solutions to all of this are available. Right? And I actually don't think it's that complicated. It's not easy, but it is pretty simple. And the things that I would put on the table are, you've got to scrap all this net zero bollocks and make sure that you are using that you basically look at where all the wealth creation of the future is going to happen. The wealth creation of the future is going to happen through AI and other innovative technology in that field. So you have to make sure that you are competitive on that and you have to grow your economy. Number one, number two, we have attracted the wrong kind of immigration for decades because of our generous welfare systems. So we've got to scrap welfare foreign nationals. And that will eliminate, self-illiminate, a lot of the unwanted immigration that we have where people are festering in these enclaves where they're not necessarily engaging with the full British experience of working with other people and getting to know other people and embedding themselves in a culture. And then you have to look at what's happening in our schools. And this is the hard one and this one is both not simple and not easy, but I come back to what I said. And you know, we've got an episode with Catherine Berbal Singh coming out on this and we put a clip out last week. Our schools have been indoctrinating all our children, black, brown, white, you know, green, pink, everything with the hatred of their own society, its history and its values. And until you change that, that's really not something that you can turn around because it's about what's in people's minds and it's about in people's heads. So that's why having these terrible events happen in my view is the only way this will change because it's the only way this sort of bovine mass of the British and the French public will finally go, well, I actually can't have a situation where my president or my prime minister is telling me, I've got to defend myself in a country where I'm supposed to see off looters with a cricket bat. No, no, I'm going to vote for someone who's actually against this, right? So how do we solve this? If we were actually looking at how to solve this, how do we solve this? Okay, as a face and voice for the New York Times, can I please make my point? You're going to wait for us to laugh, okay, there you go. I'm just going to borrow America and Winnie's all the way over the other, over the pond because I think he'd linch me at this point. But anyway, I think part of it, get on with it Frankie, I'm going to say something and you're going to look at me like I'm a bit odd. A lot of this comes down to behavior, here's the thing. It comes down to behavior in schools and it's something that I talked about in my book and nobody ever really talks about with education, but the majority of lessons in education simply don't happen as they should because there is a small cohort of about three kids in every class which disrupt, which stop the learning from happening. And what happens is because teachers and the educational establishment and the government unload to deal with those kids, they become indulge and they are actually treated far better than the kids who turn up, work every day and actually do the work. And that sends a very powerful message to the rest of the children and by the way, this happens in every single state school up and down the country and I bet it happens in France and right the way through Europe, which is this. If you behave badly, if you are disruptive, nothing will happen for you and in fact, you will be indulged. And this disruption means that children can't learn, they're not learning in any lesson and they're not learning in history, most pertinently of all, which creates a vacuum, which means that all of this stuff, all of this nonsense, all of this slogans and the palestinianism is then allowed to fill the vacuum. I think first and foremost, I think constant is right, I think it comes down to education. I think we need to revamp education, I think we actually need to tackle the unions. It is not acceptable that the National Education Union, the biggest education union in the UK by the way, by a country mile is saying things like reform or a far right political party and not only that, they recognize palestine. We really need to have this conversation because if the biggest education union in the country is saying that, just imagine what's going on with its members and with the fringes of its members. So we really need to tackle education and this needs to be a priority because if we don't, this will only get worse. And I think what happens is, first of all, we need to be honest and actually have an honest conversation about it because our elites, unfortunately, are unable to even do that. And if you're not going to have the conversation at the start and talk about every facet of the problem, you really aren't going to be able to find a solution at the end of it. Okay, I'll go through some possible solutions because Constantine wants to be positive. But I'm also going to tell you the problems of those, right, one, massive protections. You need to get rid of all the illegal immigrants in Britain, it's between one and two million. And not only that, I would say that you need to remove welfare. As you suggested, Constantine, we have something like 1.9 million people taking 23 billion pounds of wealth. every year in Britain. If you get rid of that, they'd be disinvent-centivized. I think that you could also offer people something to leave. Trump tried that a little bit. And I think you could bring in more drastic measures like we know there are 40,000 jihadis on MI5 watchlists. I don't know how you would do it technically, but I think there's a pretty good argument to trial them and strip them of citizenship, remove them. The problem with this is that even when Trump was trying to deport illegals and is trying to deport illegals in America, so it's morally right for him to deport them because they're criminals for breaking into the country illegal. Even when he's doing that, he has had political pushback from even some of the kind of more centrist part of his supporters. And so there's this kind of way it's done affects people and so to do it politically is so unbelievably difficult, even though it's the morally right thing to do. But he has succeeded. But he has succeeded in that. Not entirely. I mean, he's done a lot, but if you think that between, what is it, 10 and 50 million illegals came in under Biden, or I forget the exact numbers. I mean, he's not, what is it? What's Trump deported? Dean, look it up with Venezuela. How many illegal immigrants came in under the last Biden administration? Okay, so then ask for education for Francis's point. Francis, you're absolutely correct that we could do something about education. You could bring in Statutory curriculum. And we actually do have a Statutory curriculum, but it's we don't actually know if teachers are properly teaching it. It's not well overseen. You could bring that in, but even that scenario, and I think we've discussed this in a previous episode, as I said earlier, 80% of British teachers are labor supporters 24 or sorry, a left wing, 25% are green. I mean, green, I mean, 24% green are far left. I mean, these guys are Islam, communist, not jobs. And that they're the ones teaching our children. So even if you had a Statutory change up, how are you going to get all of these teachers on side who are going to come against it? Also, they're always protesting these guys. So, you know, that's going to be a fight in itself, sorry to be negative. Then there's the demographic change, right? So it hungry. So this is the really pessimistic angle, actually, which we haven't mentioned, is that in Britain, the, why are we solving problems here when the white indigenous population are having fewer and fewer babies. They're shagging less, yeah? And the immigrant heritage, particularly Muslim communities, are having more, and maybe it's because they're more religious, maybe there's other issues, they're having more children. And as demographic trends, if they continue at this rate, it won't just be Manchester London and Birmingham, where the white British are a minority, albeit the biggest minority. It'll be more and more of the country. Now, where have this, has this been turned around? In Hungary, they were able to have some impact in turning around demographics, encouraging Hungarians to have more children. And they did it all through incentives. But really ended up being if the economy was working plus these incentives, it sort of went in that direction. The problem, though, with this is that how do you do that at once demographic? How do you encourage one demographic and not give other demographics the same option? Now, the Singapore did that, but Singapore is not a liberal country, and it's not authoritarian country. In the tradition of sort of European liberal enlightenment, how do we, how do we target that kind of government measures in a way that wouldn't be deemed unfair politically? I don't think I mean, it's maybe it can be done. Maybe it can be done. And the other thing is dealing with Islamism. And again, Singapore have been able to do this. They monitor every single mosque without exception. They make sure that Muslims are spread out so there are no enclaves around the country. So, but again, we're a liberal country. Like, are we going to give up on liberalism to deal with this problem? Maybe not. But let me actually do something hopeful, because maybe you have to, let me add you some hope. I'm a Christian. I believe in prayer. And I think that that's where hope is. And I think we should be praying about it. And I think this is a Christian project England and Britain. And without God, it can't be turned around. So always have faith. And that's where, if you want me to be hopeful, that's where I'll be hopeful. It's in Jesus Christ. Fuck me. Now I really am depressed. Jesus Christ. Tom, any thoughts on what some of the steps might be for constructively getting out of the situation? We find ourselves in before we move on to the next story? Yeah, quickly. I mean, there's not that a lot that I disagree with. And I also agree that many of these steps, whether it's anything as seemingly small as getting rid of net zero or anything as large as just getting the teachers stop propagandising to the youth, it's going to generate this almighty pushback. You're going to see this kind of counter radicalisation on the left and on the various kind of lump and parts of society are willing to kick off any one time. I think that still can't be an argument not for doing it. If the project has to be to construct a stable sort of democratic majority in any nation's parliament to a genuine mandate for these policies, and then to pick a fight with the sections of society, the institutions, the vested interests, who do not want it to happen, it could be a bit rough in certain circumstances, but providing it has the country behind it, provided it has that kind of silent majority, who are increasingly not so silent, as we've seen in many places across Europe recently, that's a sturdy enough basis on which to do it. It doesn't mean it's going to be easy, but none of these things are. I do think that the one thing that there is hoping, apart from deliverance and faith, is the point about so much of this stuff. Common sense kind of never has been tried in such a long time now. We've had 10 years of a manual Macron. We've had a succession of uni party rulers in this country, even when they were encouraged to pretend that they cared about the public's concerns, about migration or any other issue, just said one thing and did another. There is a lot of sort of low hanging fruit in all of this, which could at least get us closer towards a sane settlement. If someone that means sections of society who are always want to kick off or going to kick off, that has to be confronted as well. But these issues are too big to just either get into a kind of council of despair and resignation, which would be absolute disaster, certainly, electrically, or to just assume that as you sometimes hear as sort of meme on the right, that there is sort of no democratic way out of this. I think it's clear that the stakes are sufficiently high that people are persuadable. People are willing to behave and vote in ways that they previously wouldn't. And therefore, I think, whilst before we do succumb to despair or drastic measures, there's a hell of a lot to be done in convincing people. The hour is sufficiently late that change actually has to take place this time. So I don't think we should lose faith in democracy yet. Well, before we move on, Winston, there is no, according to Venice, I know specific confirmed figure for the number of legal immigrants who entered, but 10.4 million recorded border encounters during the Biden administration, 12.4 million, those encounters plus estimated got away. So you were pretty much on the money, although the number of illegal specifically is not confirmed there. The one thing I would say is we touched on it briefly before we move on, but the debt crisis is really a lot of where this could continue to go in the direction that Tom, you were talking about, because French bond yields are going up and up. I mean, if you are, some, I mean, people of France and I were talking about this other day is like most people don't just have what the bond market is. All the bond market is, is people you've borrowed money from, right? So the people that France borrow is money from, and it's already at 120% that to GDP. If you were one of them, or if you were someone who was considering lending money to France, I don't think you'd be looking at it now going, ah, this is what a great opportunity here. And so if that carries on, if the same thing happens in our country where yields are very, very high already as well, you will probably very quickly get to a situation where the fiscal crisis that people have been predicting happens, you are then forced, the government is then forced to cut spending at which point this whole thing gets undone very quickly, because it's one thing to sort of be a centrist dad while everything is great, or while you're, you're sort of doing, okay, when your mortgage interest rate goes to 17%, you might feel a little bit more inclined to go in either direction. And by the way, some of them will go to the far left too, but I just, I think your point is exactly right. The hour is late enough, and there will be more things that happen that will persuade people that the hour is very late indeed, that you may get a correction through the democratic process. That should be very troubling to all of us, but that's the best way out of this as far as we can tell. Anywho, let's move on to the United States. Very briefly, we've talked about France for most of this episode, but we want to cover a couple of other stories. One of them is in the US, which is of course the midterms. The Democrats are looking like they're very likely to have their Senate candidate win in Texas. This is James Talleriko, and according to Kalshi, he is now 66% likely. Now, we don't know exactly whether this is something that will happen, obviously, because it's a prediction thing, but also the impact on the broader midterms as well. The Democrats look set to take the House. They may also take the Senate. And if that happens, thanks to Winston's and Trump's war in Iran, what you're likely to end up with is a situation that he spends the next two years, effectively being unable to do anything other than through executive orders. So it's a complete paralysis. It's a completely lame duck situation, which will not only tarnish Trump's legacy, which you know, something probably he cares about more than the rest of us. But it will be something that paralyzes his power to do anything over the next two years, to continue to implement the things that he was elected to do. And of course, you will likely see a massive snapback in terms of the culture and all the stuff that we always talk about. Winston, what do you make of the consequences of disastrous war you advocated? - How much of the eye at all is paying (laughs) for this playtime couple? - Spoken over yet, this is past. - Bias, unbelievable. Un-believer, you gotta make a defense here. I mean, do you really want to have an Iran argument? Who can have an Iran argument? - No, no. - There's no argument to be had. - The gas prices went up. And Americans vote and gas prices, and they're gonna, it's so looking like very, very certainly, they'll take the House and maybe also the Senate. - And Iran, this is something that Ted Cruz predicted when he took you to the Moon March. - And Iran are massively military degraded. They've lost their missile shield defense system. And they are massively on the back foot. It's definitely the case that America have moan the lawn and protected the world from Iran. There are negative consequences as a result, but that's the fault of the eye at allers. That's the fault of Iran. But look, we don't necessarily need to have that argument. You are right that that's having an impact on the midterm. I basically otherwise largely agree with your analysis. I just don't love speculating on polls because you just don't know and we've seen so many polls get it wrong. And yes, people be motivated to sort of punish Trump and come out, they might come out and punish him if they feel like they're unhappy with it more than they're motivated to support him. But you never know, he's got a pretty strong core base. It might be that he loses the House as we discussed last week over Ukraine. His actions suggest to me that it is actually the midterms he's motivated by, not interested in the war or what might be beneficial for Ukraine or the U.S. So my feeling is that Trump is worried about the midterms and I even think the Ilhan Omar story that's coming out again is an old story. It might be the attempted October surprise. Did she marry her brother and sort of this coming up trying to sort of degrade the Democrats and make them look silly? I'd also note that the Democrats, they are, they can for the first time talk about economy but they've been going on culture stuff for so long but now they can actually talk about the economy which they haven't been, it always feels always focused on trends and race, racial, whatever, not work stuff. It seems now that they can focus on this stuff. They are still doing some of the work stuff but this is an economy stuff that yeah, I'm not sure. I don't know what's gonna happen. - I think what's gonna be very interesting is the rise of the Democratic Socialists and what we can see now is this is a real litmus test for them. Do they actually have genuine cut through with the Americans? Let's just call them maybe unfairly but let's just say the real Americans, the Americans outside of New York, outside of LA, outside of those big metropolises. Do they actually have genuine cut through? Does economic populism, whatever you may think about it, talks about the billionaires, et cetera, et cetera? Will ordinary Americans vote for this? Or will they think it's just a load of nonsense that people in the cities bang on about but doesn't have relevance to them? Or will they see as socialism 2.0 and therefore fundamentally untrustworthy? I think that's gonna be the really interesting moment in this election. Is economic populism something that is a potential vote winner? Or is it something that ordinary Americans are going to see through and think no, this isn't for me. I want a centrist normal mainstream politics. I think that's an interesting point because anything could happen. The economy is the issue now, which is something which naturally the left could potentially clean up on feed off those dissatisfactions. And so everything is to play for. And there's various figures in the mix here. I mean, there was some of the kind of painfully woke democratic candidates, like almost comically so. I think there was a government race somewhere where there would be candidate in the primary thought that Thanksgiving should be canceled and that she even felt slightly uncomfortable with the existence of a mixed race son. Like those people didn't quite make the cut. And the ones who did, you kind of Abdul Al-Saheads in the Michigan Senate race and whatever, are dodgy figures for reasons that we can get into but are much smarter. Know that you need to play a certain, a different tune if you wanna get a hearing from the public. That said, in general, it's the sort of Achilles heel of this whole kind of democratic socialist of America, a line section of the democratic party now, is that during the time sort of a Bernie Sanders challenge to Hillary Clinton, it was kind of much more authentically just kind of old fashioned class politics. He would even quite explicitly call out identity politics and say that I don't care if a CEO is, you know, Hispanic or black or whatever, fundamentally there's an inequality that needs to be addressed. This newer generation, like AOC onwards, are up to their necks in this stuff. They occasionally like to pretend that the wokeness, you know, woke one as AOC famously referred to it, which is just a sort of blip, people got a bit carried away, but they still hold all of those prejudices and they've also grafted onto it, all of the kind of Palestinianism madness as well, which is going to activate a section of society, you know, you could cobble together a kind of Mamdani style coalition, and that's gonna work in some places, but it's not gonna work in many others. So I guess it's how much as Trump's, you know, deeds and misdeeds as it were, degraded his level of support, made that there's kind of numbers of independence who might occasionally swing towards him on certain economic or cultural issues or what have you think twice. But I do think that hopefully at least there's a bit of a ceiling on what those DSA people can do, 'cause as much as they're trying to put up a better, more class-based front these days, underneath the surface, you've got all manner of kind of Islam oleftist tendencies, which will come out one way or another. - Well, that is us for this week. I have some trepidation actually anticipating what we'll be talking about next week, 'cause I suspect France may be back on the menu, given that the official estimates from French intelligence are there at least half a million people will be on the streets of France this weekend. Hopefully that doesn't happen. Hopefully the tensions simmer down, but we will see, and we will see you all next week, on off the fence. - Oh, by the way, please, can I just plug some in? Please follow my articles on the New York Times and the Guardian. Thank you very much. (laughing) - He's doing good work. (laughing) And I occasionally do right for the socialist workers' party as well, and you can follow me there. Thank you. - So I love that piece you did about the Ayatollas. You know, 'cause I've got a lot of negative press, and I know I've been hard on him, but to see that perspective on him, I thought Francis, you know, it was interesting at least. It was a quasi-erotic hit like this, but still, you know, it was, yeah. - Peace be upon him. (laughing) - See you guys.