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

Don't you think part of the issue with our cultural society as it is and the politics as a result of that is we live in the age of delusion? Yes, and people have been encouraged to be deluded. The problem that Andrew Perman faces is that he's trying to do things which will fail because they're fundamentally unworkable. The most likely thing has got to be the currency, which is losing value hand over the first as we speak through the great fear that I have. The money which we use to be ceases to exist. I don't know how our country and our current state will cope with that. The country is obviously finished. It's just a question of how and when this will become able to do everybody. I sort of laughed when you said the country is finished because of the way you said it. But actually I'm afraid both Francis and I over time come around to the idea that Peter Hitchens was right. This episode is sponsored by our friends at Hillsdale College. Right after this episode go check out the incredible online courses which are absolutely free at Hillsdale.edu/trigger. Peter, it's always a pleasure to have you back on the show. I always look forward to it immensely. When you're looking at the UK at the moment, what is your diagnosis? Where are we? How far do we have to go to your predictions come true? I could predictions very easy to make, but it's not so easy to say exactly when they're going to happen. The most likely thing has got to be the currency, which is losing value hand over the first as we speak. But it's a sort of normal rate, but it actually gets into a really serious inflationary spiral then that will make it evident. Because everything we do at the moment is based upon an overestimate of how rich we are. And if the currency shrinks to the point where you can't make that pretence anymore, then everything, all the things that people don't dare reform, particularly the enormous amount of government spending, will frivol away and will be blown away in a wind of inflation. I think it's quite possible that that will be the end of it, but there might be other things. There's a great determination in our elite to get us embroiled in a European war. And some people still want us to get embroiled in a war with Iran, so these also could tip us off the tracks. There's a very interesting film, which is made by the four realms of CIA, the OSS, during the later years of the Second World War, showing how to derail a train, which is something they were then interested in doing rather than stopping. And it's quite difficult. It's much harder than you think. I won't give you any hints. But as the others say, the country has a lot of ruin in it, so it can take quite a while, but the definite direction is downwards of an accelerating pace. What makes you say that? So there's the currency element of it, there's the economic element of it? First simple fact, this is a current country, which is where the government is borrowing money to pay the interest on its debts. And if you knew somebody who was doing that, you'd expect trouble. Secondly, it's a country which has a very little power of recovery because we destroyed, largely in the factory era, at other times as well, our industrial capacity. So the ability to rebuild is very, very limited. Then we have trashed our education systems, so the talent pool and the proper use of the talents of the country is almost impossible. We haven't got the people who were trained either to do things or at the elite level to think rationally. So there's an awful lot of irrationality and ignorance. Then we have a criminal justice system, a police force which might as well have been abducted by aliens, and may well have been. I don't know when did he last see one and a criminal justice system, which is obviously unable to cope. The length of time people wait for trials and the quality of the trials when they get them is atrocious. These all contribute to a general feeling that nothing works. And then on top of that, of course, the transport system, which is utterly congested and falling to pieces, what more would you ask? If someone had cursed the country with a number of horrible things, which would happen to it, that those things would be quite near the top of your list. Then you find it quite strange that when people were blaming, it seemed to me, look, Kirstama was not the best of prime ministers. I think we can all agree on that. But he did seem to be blamed for every single thing that was happening. When if you look at it, you just go, if you're in any way objective, you go, our problems preceded Kirstama. Yes, but his claim that he'd made things better, which made the other day in Parliament, is I think a bit of a bit of a nerve. And I am confident the Britain is now stronger and fairer than it was two years ago. Our economy is stronger. Our public services are on the up with the biggest fall in waiting times for 17 years. Children are being lifted out of poverty every single day. Immigration is down significantly. Our defence and security are on a far stronger footing and our international reputation is greatly enhanced. No, I think we sat and talked about problems at Kirstama, and my problem was that people thought that he was a blank sheet on which they could project their desires. When, in fact, he was and remains a dogmatic person, leading a dogmatic party, which is determined to do things which will fail. And the problem that Andrew Perman faced is that he's trying to do things which will fail because they're fundamentally unworkable. You can't carry on behaving like that when there's no money. Can you flesh it out because I think it's a really important point and it would be worth somebody who's as thoughtful about these issues as you are to breaking it down in a little bit more detail. When you say that the Labour Party and Andrew Burnham, as you call them, are determined to do things. What should I call him? Well, Andy Burnham, he wears t-shirts for that very purpose. I don't know him. I realised that I had met him once, but he'd forgotten it, but I don't claim to know. I call him by his name. What is Mr Burnham likely to do and why is it likely to fail? He's likely to spend an awful lot of money he hasn't got. He has to satisfy a new set of backers who will desire a different pattern of spending, but fundamentally similar. But the real problem that sets this country is twofold. The first is extraordinary, but it's much more important, much richer and much more powerful than it is. Which causes us to, first of all, to engage in all kinds of foreign policy, which is dangerous and expensive. And also to spend money on defending our islands, which is, frankly, misspent. There's this call for us to spend more. The question is not how much you spend, but what you spend it on. You spend it on a cold war, superpower, a submarine launched into continental ballistic missile, deterrent force. Then you will bankrupt yourself if you're a small country off the northwest coast of Europe without many resources. And it won't work. So that's problem one. And most conservatives live in that delusional. The other thing which governments have been trying to do really since the late 1950s, and particularly since the 1960s, is to substitute the state for the family. Yeah. The two things have gone on together. I think very few of the people involved have realized that they're even linked, but they are. The one is enormously weakened the married family as an institution. So there's almost ceased to exist in large parts of the country. And the other is to concentrate more and more and more on state provision for the raising of children. And indeed for looking after the old, which things of state is not actually very good at doing. It's also fantastic, expensive. End of life care is an obviously expensive as we see. And the schools and the nurseries and everything which we provide to substitute for the mothers who've now been conscripted into the workforce don't bring up children and anything like as well as the family and herm used to do. So it's both expensive and bad. So those are the fundamental millstones grinding together which make running this country impossible until anybody turns around and said these things are mistakes. We must stop doing them. And also until the somebody with the political courage to say to the people in this country, these things that we need to do will be difficult. I mean that there is less of a lot of things that you become used to and you will have to do more on the state will have to do less. And that is a hard thing for anybody to say and it doesn't tend to win elections. No. And this is why, you know, I sort of laughed when you said the country is finished because of the way you said it. But actually I'm afraid both Francis and I over time is sort of regular as we're talking about something else eventually come around to the idea that Peter Hitchens was right when he said, you know, people should leave. Most people do get it in the end but it often, as always, I can't communicate my experience of life in the world to other people. I've had a uniquely privileged life and not in terms of being rolling in money but in terms of being able to see things seeing how this country is running close courses when I used to be a political reporter and other things and seeing the country from outside when I lived abroad. And so I just happened and also having a Marxist learnedness training and said, so I'm just simply not credulous in the face to propaganda. So I see things differently from other people, it takes them a while to realise. that I'm not joking. I'm not. I'm just not joking. Quite. And I suppose one of the challenges you described there is, and I think it was partly cultural but partly also technologically driven, you talk about that I don't want to overstay the case but I think it's definitely true if you look even at their opinion polling in terms of what women say they would prefer to do given the opportunity even in our society now which has this sort of girl boss feminist ideology lots and lots of women nonetheless say that they would prefer to spend lots of time with their children if they could the challenge is as you say rightly that even if you were at an individual level you literally have to be as a man in that situation earning way way above the average income in this country to be able to provide that for most people I think that's true but even if you were to find some way of doing that you'd end up with you know your GDP would go down rapidly and all all the other problems that I don't know I don't know whether it's even reversible it was the most cynical pact since the most of ribbon-trop pact in 1939 when when the ultra-left feminists are the sort of Betty Friedan type and big business got together and said right let's go every woman in the country we can out of the home and there's the workplace turn them into wage slaves and it convinced them as was successfully done by the whole array of women's magazines and intelligent programs so everybody else who preached or or not it's it it work outside the home is the only is the only respectable form of working inside the home is demeaning slavery tied chain to the kitchen sink and that idea has been so successful and I think a lot of women have found in practice that it's that it's not true but it's too late now because the the the conscription of women I regarded as conscription were into the workforce is now more or less complete and it's very hard to escape from that cycle yeah absolutely so I'm so it's also possible for men to discuss it because immediately you're accused of being wanting to oppress women I if women want to go out to work that's fine by me what's none of my business if people want to but if they come under immense social economic pressure to do so then that's different well that's exactly why I made the point that all the polling shows that when asked women consistently say that many many women not all of course but I think it's something like 80% say they would prefer more time with their children and like you say that seems to me difficult to reverse particularly in the current economic I wish I could think of a way of making it possible to reverse it but at the moment I just I just look at it and think oh heck and the other point you make which is something we've talked about a lot which I think is undeniable is you know we're living way beyond our means people want to pretend this isn't true and yet at the same time for actually the reasons you also articulated so well you have a situation because government is seen as the ultimate provider of all things if people feel poorer or are poorer it's then automatically assumed that well that's the government's force so they don't vote for them and the government should fix that so they vote for somebody else without checking very carefully what they're going to get yeah and when we've lost disgust really politics what I was trying to explain to people was that voting reform in large numbers was voting for the Labour Party which turned out to be true I think in a fairly clear way it wasn't very difficult to work out and it was absolutely the case and how could anybody have thought especially those people who voted for reform that putting the Labour Party in office was going to solve any of the economic or political social educational or law and all the problems which the country faces I don't know it's the voting is so irrational I mean those people would say to would counter with well hang on a second people without 14 years of conservative government they effectively led us to where we are oh sure so why would I vote for again tell me about it I've been arguing against the Conservative Party since the early years of the 21st century begging people to dump it but the the point came when the the alternative was so bad that it was worth going down to the seashore and hauling the thing out of the sea where they didn't because it was better than what was coming and I couldn't explain that to anybody either the my fundamental principle now which I put to people is if you understand what's going on you must learn the art of voting against what you don't want not try to vote for what you do what you will never get what you want but you might stop what you don't want or some of it by both voting cleverly and speaking of avoiding things you don't want are you mentioned the currency potential currency crisis I mean the the the fact that there's a looming fiscal crisis is something people have talked a lot about on our show most recently Nigel Farage made that point in the interview which is did we had lots of people explained the mechanics of it one of the hopes I know exists within some people is and I sort of tempted by this idea without being an expert on it is it feels to me like if there is a chance to turn something around I know you'll say there isn't and I'll probably eventually agree with you 10 years from now but nonetheless human me for now if there is a chance to turn things around it's that moment when we are forced by the external circumstances of reality to confront the massive spending that we can't afford because we have a fiscal crisis and some and basically the people who actually own this country which is the people we borrow money from say you can't do this anymore you've got to do this and then we're forced to confront that reality do you think there's any chance of that but it's possible the sunlight rises in the west but I don't see any lightly of it I don't see anybody in British politics and I know he's capable of saying it and be winning an election on that basis that's why Catholicism's happened and you I saw in in Moscow when I was living there in the 90s after the collapse of the Soviet Union the middle-class professional people standing by the red side do you remember those little fake wood veneer tables everybody had only too well Peter exactly they were characteristic of the whole of the Communist Party and on them were displayed shoes ornaments cutlery all the the stuff of ordinary life on sale by the roadside to pay for bread that's what people were setting their possessions to pay for bread and these were people who five years before thought themselves secure in their jobs their children secure in their education they thought they were secure in their accommodation they saw a life ahead of roughly what they previously enjoyed and it came to an end the problem with catastrophes is that rather than them being like that amazing painter who has his pictures and take gallery whether sky falls in everything turns red and the huge earthquakes and floods for lava and everybody dies the Catholic ism happens you're still alive but you're living in the ruins of your former life as a ghost of your former self and that's what happens and this is generally when money dies which is the great the the great fear that I have that the the the money which we use you see just to exist really it's just becomes paper and a binary code and it doesn't pay for anything and when money dies then that's what happens but the problem is this is also accompanied by social disorder and it's very hard to control and I don't know how a country in our current state would cope with that it's not something I look forward to but if I would if if if a modern Jeremiah was saying this is what's going to happen we're not all going to be carried off by the Babylonians for servitude but we might well find ourselves in a state of severe hyperinflation and impose policy it was sort we simply never thought we'd see and also what we'll see in that kind of instance is the rise of political extremism when it's already rising isn't it yeah you the people are willing to listen now to people they want never to listen to who are you talking about you can spend three hours in a cinema watching Christopher Nolan's movie adaptation of the Odyssey or you can spend that same three hours understanding the actual poem for free guided by Hillsdale College professor Hillsdale College runs free online courses on the books that shaped the Western tradition taught by their own faculty using the same material this student study on campus the newest course covers home is the Odyssey professor Benedict Wayland walks through it courage loyalty leadership temptation family and what it actually means to go home it has held an audience for close to three thousand years that doesn't happen by accident the scene that changes how you read the whole thing is calypso offering a disius immortality if he stays with her and he turns it down he picks a mortal life an aging wife a home that might not even want him back anymore that's the entire argument of the book in one scene there more than 40 of these courses and I couldn't recommend them more highly go to hillsdale.edu slash trigger turn roll it's totally free read the classics study the west that's hillsdale.edu slash trigger and also what we'll see in that kind of instance is the rise of political extremism well it's already rising isn't it yeah you the people are willing to listen now to people they want never to listen to who are you talking about you can get I mean I it's not even worth raising names I mean there are there are people now becoming I would say prominent but influential on the edges of politics who are very worrying indeed I don't want to help them to all even by naming them you're talking about both the far left and the far right I'm guessing anything the far left as much to say frankly what about Zach Polanski for example well he's sort of imploded didn't he I mean there's still look I mean this is a relatively small sample size but where I live which is a you know she she's about of North London and it's covered in green, green placards. Well, that's a nice, the enthusiasm for the green party has been really since official communism collapsed, has been the result of the left all over Europe. And that's what they do. And you can't, when you see that the Labour Party is in government, they're longer able to deliver because it can't. If you still want to pretend that some day there might be a government that would do the left want governments to do them, greens your party, isn't it? Well, can I just come back to something, which is, you know, you talked about the collapse of the Soviet Union, you and I both witnessed it with our own eyes and those scenes are very memorable and it's one, and Francis and, you know, his family background being from Venezuela, I think it's one of the things that separates us from many people because we know that the status quo is not remotely permanent and can only be maintained by good policy and if good policy ceases to be practiced, then cataclysm is what will follow. Most of the things which happen, happen to people who five years beforehand would never have imagined that they could possibly. University professors. They were university professor three days ago and now they were selling their belongings on the street. Yeah, that's what happened. That's it, that's what happened. It also happened interestingly, it's not so much in Britain, but it happened in the United States during the Great Depression, a highly qualified professional people were begging from door to door and they had no conception of this, this, this lay ahead. But the reason I bring this up is Russia is a, it's not the best example because, you know, with Putin and charge it pollutes people thinking about this and, you know, he's obviously, in my opinion, a terrible, a terrible person. Well, in mine too, so I agree on that. But if you take a country like Poland, or indeed, like you say, the United States after the Great Depression, there is the possibility for recovery. There is the possibility to fundamentally change course and to let go of the terrible policies that have taken you to the place you've ended up to accept the pain and the suffering that comes and out of that to have clarity about how to move forward in this way. Sure. Now, and it might turn out badly, well, I wish people would see the possibility of catastrophe and act accordingly. Me too. There's not going to happen. Well, that's my fear. We know it's not going to happen. That's my fear. And if I had some way of entering the minds of people, but with speech and thought and writing, and I would, look, in my mid-70s, I have nothing particular to gain left in life, and I haven't got all that much longer to live if it were possible for me to do anything, to prevent this from happening. Then I would do it, but I'd try it. And people then listen, but they prefer to listen to more seductive voices. And I don't offer seduction at all. I can't. It would be just nice, but people would prefer to be seduced and to be told the truth. And it's only when after catastrophes happen that it's possible. So there are other people, I'm sure, in this country, who feel the same way that things are going very badly and something ought to be done to stop it, but where are they? Where are they? They're not in the civil service. They're not in senior person, the universities. They're not leading the political parties. They're not by and large prominence in the media, particularly the broadcast media, which is, it's through anybody remotely informed or with any historical knowledge listening to our broadcast media is torture. Yes. Yes. It absolutely is. I guess what I'm trying to ask you is, and look, I completely appreciate your perspective. And I think if you're looking at it in a 10-year time frame, I don't see this country being better in 10 years. No. I can't, it might in my 10 years still have managed to teach her along, like the train in the ISS film that, you know, we'll actually managed to get it off the rails, it might still survive. You can't tell. What I'm getting at now is. Pro-prediction predictions are easy in general, but they're hard in terms of how long it's going to take. What I'm getting at is something else, which is, my hope, and I only express it as a hope, not as a belief about what's likely to happen, is that the inevitable cataclysm can produce the conditions for recover, not necessarily recover, but the conditions from which recover is possible. It's very Marxist. Tell me more. Well, all my comrades in the '86s and '70s, rather hoping for a collapse out of which might arise the longed-for revolution with the leading role of the party and the establishment of the dictatorship of the predatory. That was the theory. It was all going to go wrong. And I have to say, Ted Heath in the early '70s made it look very much as if we were right. Well. Get trying to shut the country down, pick huge fights with industrial unions, and say nothing worked. Blackouts. Fantastic. He was a great. I remember the recruits pouring into the international specialists in the early '70s about that time. Ted Heath was a great recruiter for Marxism. So? At the end he let us all down. Sadly. By losing an election. Harold Wilson was. I mean, I'm not hoping for. I'd like you. No, no, no. I'm just telling you. This is just a formula that I don't myself believe that catastrophe is justifiable. I'm a. No. I'm saying justifiable. No, I'm saying justifiable. Or desirable. Or are you. No, am I saying that?. conscionable. I think you have to say, if it looks as if it's going to be a catastrophe. Do whatever you can to prevent it and won against it. But Peter, you and I have to be honest. We have all been making these arguments. We've been trying to say we're heading towards a cliff. No one wants to listen because they're much more comfortable spending money we don't have. So they're not going to listen to us. Okay, so we're going to go and begin. We are going off the cliff. I don't know what you're supposed to do. We're going off the cliff. We've got a lot of. A monastery in a high mountain. Oh. A Shangri-la. I don't know. If you can't, if you can't influence it, but I'd very much doubt where the catastrophe will produce at the end of it by some kind of baptism of fire. A better world than the one that was before. So, but the example as you gave, like we said, the collapse of communism. It had been very beneficial to many, many countries in Eastern Europe. The collapse of communism has. But on the other hand, the. They've had a recovery. The US after the Great Depression had a recovery. They have had a recovery. Even World War II terrible as it was. There was a recovery after that, right? All these things are true, but this is a different thing. Why? Well, first of all, everybody knows when you start wars, that there will be terrible destruction and everything will change the result and there is an opportunity for reconstruction. Though I have to say that there were quite a lot of people in the world who'd been affected by World War II who didn't get all that much reconstruction afterwards. Lucky Old Western Europe did quite well, a lot of other people didn't. Everybody knew, I've just been re-wrote, services book about the August 1991. Purchase, everybody knew, and so it could not go on. They knew it had to be fixed in some way politically and economically. Gorgoshoff, alas, was not an economist or even a runny skilled in the economy. He tried to do what he could in England. Also, he was faced with Western leaders who continued to have a profound mistrust of him as a Soviet leader and so would not help. He would repeat, it comes up very much in the service book, and a number of times he goes to Western leaders and says, "Look, we're on the verge of economic catastrophe. What we need is some sort of new martial plan." I'm saying, "Well, not until you've denationalized the sugar and some such, and they kept making conditions. They never did." The reasons for the piratical rate of what was left for the Soviet economy was the unwillingness of the West to enter into a proper serious reform program. I think you won't find that in Poland. I think a lot of effort was made, and it has been a fantastic success, I might say, to turn Poland into a modern well-off civilized law government country, which I think the world should be really pleased about, but I do often wonder why the same thing wasn't done in Russia. It could have been, I think. Well, but this is my point. Fantastic resources. Incredibly well-educated people. Of course. But thrown away, and the place turned into a declining slum and dictatorship. Very good point, but a bit of a side point. Well, you mentioned it. I mean, it's not something else. It's a material thing, to some extent, to cover what they're not, but it means for everybody I don't think. I think there's still people living very badly in Russia. Yes, there are. But what I'm saying is there is, in a cataclysm, which you and I, well, I think, as a realist think, is kind of inevitable, there is the opportunity for recovery, the opportunity for recovery. Okay. Well, I accept that. You do. Yeah, of course you can't be certain about the future. There you go. A sunshine from Peter Hitchens. We've got that. No, you can't be certain. I would think it's unlikely, but it's possible. You can rule things out, which are playing impossible, but what you can't realize is something which is theoretically possible. Why do that? Don't you think part of the issue with our cultural and society, as it is, and the politics, as a result of that, is we live in the world in the age of delusion? Yes. And people have been encouraged to be deluded. It's been going on for a very long time. This is part of the point that I harp on about my Bolshevik training. I mean, the fundamental thing that we were told, apart from some basic Machiavellianism, and how many people in the modern world have read Machiavellian's The Prince? It's very short, it didn't take long, but there are people who don't know what it's actually. They think they know, but they haven't read it, so there are so many books of that kind. But the other thing we were told was how to tell pre-sex from motive, and distinguish pre-sex from reality, and we're constantly bombarded with politicians giving us pre-sex for actions that I'm taking, which is fundamentally unbelievable, particularly in foreign policy. People don't see through them. Then again, we have an education system, which is instead of challenging the the intelligent of all classes to understand more and no more. Encourage them in a child-centered myth of unknowing. Well, they never actually compelled to learn things. They didn't know to find out the books they've heard of contain things. They didn't realise we're in there too. And so we have a huge number of untrained minds. Among us there's one of the reasons why it's so easy, with one of the reasons why it's so easy to fool people into doing absurd things. The Covid panic was such a warning of the general level of skepticism and trained minds in our society. If the government had decreed that to reduce the spread of the disease, everybody had to wear a five-inch-long pink extension on their nose, people would have done it. They very nearly did. I mean, those masks that they wore, which, how shall I put it, were doubtful use. Were also the other thing about them, or to me, it was forced conformism. If you instructed everybody in the country to wear a make America great again, red baseball can, they said, "Well, I can't do that. I don't agree with it." By wearing one of those masks, especially under pressure, you were endorsing an attitude towards the Covid panic, which a lot of people didn't share. One of the reasons I objected to it so much was forced conformism to an opinion, not just a city action. But the level, I mean, there were people, I mean, a lot of them got in touch with me, and some people still do come up to me in the streets about it. There were people who resisted it, but enormous. A majority of people were happy to accept it. I'm going to be honest with you. I used to think grilling was simple. Meat goes on, meat comes off. You look vaguely competent in front of your mates. Jobs are good, and then I tried to grill anything that wasn't a burger or a steak. 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The thing that I found most shocking, above all, was the British public's desire for big government and to be looked after. Yes. I thought that was fundamentally un-British. Well, it used to be, but the Paul Convo, who was the French ambassador in London before, during and after the First World War, said after it was over that he believed that between 1914 and 1918, this country had undergone a revolution as profound as significant as the one France had undergone in the 1780s and 1790s. And that was the moment at which government became big and as feared in everybody's lives in almost every conceivable way. His second dose, 39-45. Of course, the third dose of the anti-government has completely changed that. The idea of the British of fundamentally independent mind is stand up on your own two feet. Quite like the Americans is actually not true. And that's a very dangerous place to be, because we've seen that you big government simply doesn't work. And what we have now is we're going broke, but yet people have been indoctrinated to believe that big government is what is needed and they need to be looked after. And ultimately, we're going to come in for a pretty rude awakening, aren't we? The big government isn't always wrong. In wartime you need big government to be effective for start. I mean, there's some things, when I used to argue about nationalization and privatization with conservatives, I said, you say you don't want to take control of anything. You actually think you can privatize a Royal Navy. That could run. And some of them, to my amazement, said, "Well, yes, of course, all we need to do is hire a lot of people with private years." I said, "Okay, well, then we're in the realm of madness here." But they resisted the idea that anything was better run by the state. There's some things are. So I'm not, I'm not going to let the free market rip personally. For instance, I would really like it if they properly renationalized the railways, rather than the ridiculous poor age they're making at the moment, because I think there are some things which are just better run that way. So, yeah, no, but there's no point yearning for British people to be as they were before 1914, because amongst other things, you have to remember. The until 1960 in the British Army, which went to France and was mown down in the mud was composed of volunteers. And these volunteers were people who'd been persuaded that this was a vital war for civilisation, in which every man and spirit had to take parts as a matter of conscience. So what did you do? You lost the best people in the country in many cases before they could get children. So it didn't just change the way that people behaved. It actually changed the nature of the whole British population. Hundreds of thousands of men, who were the best of their generations of their reclass, were just mown down by Jim Machineon for our eaten by rats, before they could marry and have children. And this affects the country. I mean, you have similar catastrophic effects, of course, in the European countries. They're not quite the same, because the volunteer nature of the British Army, I'm absolutely sure that the post-1917 civil war in Russia either drove out of the country or killed huge numbers of the best people. It made it very, very difficult. And then the great purges are starting. By their nature also selected the best people. So you do make it difficult for a country to recover when you kill so many of your best. And that's a real concern. And that was a shocking for me from COVID. And like I said, everything else is, I expected more people to stand up and challenge and push back. I remember being a kid in the classroom and being taught about Nazis. I mean, I understand the chronology of events. I don't understand how so many people could fall for this. And then you see, I mean, the trans-history was one example. You know, people saying, you know, you can change your sex when we both know that is palpably and scientifically false. And I just remember, and I saw this happen. I was like, oh, I get it. I get it how you could deny a fundamental reality. Yeah, I probably can be very effective if it's well-aimed, and if it targets the right to its content. And a lot of German people were simply told that this is this period of unemployment and chaos and fighting in the streets must come to an end. And they were told that we are the people who will do it. And in many cases, you know, they didn't ask too many questions about how it would be done. In many cases, you can easily understand how people you know could have done that, I think. People pretend now that they would have seen coming. But from what we know, I'm very sure quite a lot would not. And it's also as well. And, you know, there's a, we've all of these things. There's always an element of self-interest. There is a, well, nothing wrong with self-interest. people have to be interested in themselves to some extent. It's just, it can be taken too far. Peter, you touched on something very important about which you wrote a book, actually. I think it was called The War We Should Never Thought. Well, the war we never thought was the one about drugs. No, no, that's right. I meant the one about The War We Should Never Thought. The Furny Victory. Yes. Which people keep telling me it's called The Furny War, which is absolutely is not. It's a different subject. The Furny Victory is, I was trying to be too clever. It does, if you think about it, explain what's going on. We came, everybody's heard of The Furny War and we sat around doing nothing for the first. What was it, nine months of war? And then suddenly we were engulfed in Blitzkrieg and the next thing, you know, we're the victors at Potsdam. And I thought, how do you get from The Furny War, a defeated country, Dunkirk, bankruptcy? How do you get from there to being one of the victor countries? And you don't, the truth is. And France began the first, we in France began the Second World War by declaring war on Hitler here. You could say he began it by a very Poland, but it was a positive decision on our side to make that the issue. But we weren't prepared for the war that we declared, particularly France. I mean, we would all rely. People don't realize now just how much people believed in the strength, the military strength of France in 1939. They thought that it was colossal and unchallengeable. This vast army, which had been victorious in 1918 and was the army of a great and valorous country, they were amazed that it collapsed. It was like it was like some great cathedral being wiped off the map. People had no idea this could conceivably happen. And we certainly didn't, and we were left with a war, which we were not equipped to fight. And so we ended up handing over the war. As to other people, we handed over the war to the Soviet Union as the United States, and we were on the winning side, but in my view, we were not the victors. Well, I was going to ask you to go broader than that. And you've written so much and spoken so much and thought so much about Britain and its history, particularly in the 20th century. What is Peter Hitchens' sort of-- the Peter Hitchens' take on the 20th century for this country and the trajectory of adrenaline? Oh, the gravest mistake ever made by any British government was to enter the First World War in 1914. We should never have done that. There was no reason why we needed to. And many, many reasons why we should not have done it. It cost us almost everything we had. And we continue to pay the price for it. But just flesh that out for people who may be less familiar with the argument. You mentioned obviously losing hundreds of thousands of the best people. We did, yeah. But beyond that, how do we get from World War I into where we are today? Well, beginning of World War I, we were a creditor of a country. We had huge foreign investments. We spent what we earned, and we had, as it were, savings as a nation. We were also a stable, more or less contented country. I mean, there were problems at Problems of the Ireland and no other other things. But we were a solid society likely to last. We were a Christian country. Whether you like that or not, it was important to the existence of the shared morality. We were a country which people were monoculturally one. Everybody knew the same things. Everybody had read the same Bible and prayed the same prayers, sang the same hymns, read the same novels, the works of Charles Dickinson, the university, no. People could quote them to each other. And we were a society of people holding together. So economically and culturally, we were also a very peaceful society because of the huge success of Robert Peel's policing reforms of the 19th century, and also because of the huge success of the Sunday schools which had spread morality right through society. So we had all these enormous advantages. We were also mutually strong in the only way it was counted that it was to say no one could attack our islands because we had the strongest navy in the world. And we then answered for reasons which remain baffling a Russo-German war, which was basically about Ukraine, I don't know. Sounds familiar. Now why did we do that? It's very difficult to find out. And there was a fact-- there was a strong war faction. But it was quite a few people, if you look. Professor Henry Wilson, who were trying pretty much to get us into war. But most politicians were unaware of the planning of the taking place. Most of the cabinet, most of us with the cabinet, didn't know how much military planning had taken place. Joint military planning has been written in France since the fall of 1914. It had been kept from them. As for parliament, it was completely-- and then the thing advanced with immense speed. People say, well, what about Belgium? Well, it's very sad about Belgium. But the truth is that Britain, when confronted with the conflict between its own interests and morality, has in the past dumped other people in the mud. And most particularly, we did so in 1864 when pressure attacks Denmark had been promised to go to their aid. And Planston said, oh, actually, sorry. We're busy at the moment. We're not coming. And it's horrible thing to do, but it was very wise decision. Because there's nothing we could have done, to save Debra. Most people in 1914 believe when war was declared that it would be a naval war. But we would just enter it. I said, we would send the Navy to help the French in various ways. And that would be that. It never had any idea we were going to create a huge cross-athletesized army and lose hundreds of thousands of people who have conscription and rationing it and know it across their minds. Doesn't it speak to also the arrogance of the political class at the time? Because I can see you're going to disagree with this. But wasn't the narrative bad here? I don't think we've ever said anything. The political classes are always arrogant. That's why they do it. But who should know better than I, one of the most arrogant people I know? So that's not in itself necessarily criticism. You have to be a bit arrogant if you want to do some things. And the politics is one of the, I think. But I mean, but then there's a fundamental disconnect from reality or getting a decision so disastrously wrong that hundreds of thousands of people die. Because the narrative at the time was, well, this is all going to be done and dusted by Krimbo. Well, some people said that. I think there were three people in the cabinet who were worried about it, two of them were John Burns and John Morley. John Morley, probably the most intelligent person in British politics at the time, who actually resigned secretly. Asked with us to keep it secret over preparations for war, trying to prevent it. But an ask with, I think, had serious stats about himself, because he was a clever man. But he was afraid that if he didn't declare war, then his government would fall under a pro-war coalition which formed between the pro-war elements for his own party and the Tories. And that he was panicked into it. It wasn't a rational decision. It was largely a panic and made partly on the grounds that things had got out of control. Which they did very rapidly. Barbara Sutman's "The Guns of August" is probably the best description of how this happened. It wasn't, it was a sleep-bought into war. Absolutely not at all. The Germans deliberately encouraged Austria into a confrontation with Russia in the hope that it would lead to, and that was the only thing it was an accident, which is untrue. But the different kinds of events which followed, particularly between Britain and Germany, basically a matter of getting increasingly out of control, because we didn't realize that we were talking to a Germany which was absolutely set on war. For its fissures, great book, makes this quite plain. There's no doubt in my mind, Germany wanted a war. But they wanted a war with Russia. They felt they would have to knock out France. France was also a frantic for war. They wanted revenge for 1870. And they conducted the war in the initial months of the war. It was insanely sending waves and men in bright red trousers against the Straitsman into German gunfire. The casualties were colossal in the military-effect disastrous. It was crazy war. And we got involved in it. And for what? What was our interest in if Russia and Germany and Austria-Hungary have a conflict? What was the conflict between those states actually? Russia with the backing of Austria-Hungary, sorry, Germany, I started Germany with the backing of Austria-Hungary, wanted to expand eastwards, particularly into what is now Ukraine. And you can see the shape of the ambition in the 19th, 19th-century piece of Burstishof, which Germany signed with Bolsheviks, which actually created modern Ukraine amongst other things, one of the things that it did. And also it transferred all the Baltic states from Russian to German control and shifted Poland. That is the crucial, people think of it being Belgium and France. But that's gone. The actual cockpit of war in 20th century, or but now in 21st century, remains Ukraine. It says a hugely important piece of territory. And that's what they were worried about. Do you know what Lenin is when the war broke out? No. Paris, wasn't it? And that he was in, he was in Austria-Hungary in control, Poland, where he. He was quite valued, as it turned out, by the Austro-Hungarians, because of his role in fermenting anti-Moscow sentiment in what was to become Ukraine. He was arrested by the local policeman because he was obviously Russian and an alien. He looked sinister anyway. But within a couple of days, they'd been arrested in this small country town. He was hoicked out of prison by the Austrian government, the intervention. And I think of the army high command and put it on a train to Zürich. From which eventually he went, as you know, to with huge tons of German gold to overthrow the Russian government. This is what was really going on. This is what we bizarrely got ourselves involved in. Let me say this, because I know I'm not alone. At some point, your body just stops bouncing back the way it used to. Your train hard, your travel, your push yourself and suddenly recovery takes longer. 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And you described Britain, the British Empire, in the terms that you did solid, economically. I was talking about Britain. The Empire is a different question. How much longer the Empire could have survived? The Empire had weakened itself quite badly with the great folly of particularly the Second War War, in which we'd hugely lowered our international standing by behaving extremely brutally towards a small country. I mean, no, any sympathy for the wars now because obviously they were the people who brought the world apart. But the time, quite a lot of people did and also we established the famous concentration accounts in South Africa, which were not, I mean, the phrase is the same. The reality is not, by any means identical, but they were horrible and Emily Hopper exposed their horror in the world knew that we'd done a terrible thing. We'd done enormous damage. It was, in some ways, the Second War always brilliantly erupt, or the moment at which our world power began to decline. The Empire has come and go. It would have been perfectly possible for this country to quietly relinquish most of its empire, much of which was expensive to maintain and brought us no benefit and become a major country in its own right. We were still a huge manufacturer and exported with enormous foreign investments, especially in South America, and all that went. But we could have managed the transition to being a secondary part, a much more readily and successfully if we'd stayed out of that stupid war. Well, what happens, this way we start with this portion of the conversation with Britain as you describe it, is it very solid, economically, culturally, etc. You have this war that takes the lives of hundreds or thousands of the best men of life. It also costs us all our money. And it costs us all our money. By, I think late 1915, we were in severe debt the United States. It took very, once war is fantastically expensive, the same thing was truth in 1939-40. It took no time at all for us to be in debt. And do you know we'd never paid off our debt to the United States for the first world war? You did. I did not know that. There are most people don't. In fact, when I tell them they say no, it can't be true. We paid it off the other day. What we paid off, the other day was actually our second world war debt. The first world war debt, we stopped payments on 1934 and we haven't paid a penny since or any interest. We actually defaulted on it. It's one of the most undiscussed scandals in modern history. The Americans absolutely remember, you can get the Treasury to admit it if you try. And it has actually been a book about it, rather good book called The Long Shadow of Default, which I recommend to anybody. But we actually remain in debt to the United States for the first world war. And a hundred and more years later. Soon after, fairly soon after you get into World War II, which we already talked about, and what happens in your assessment in the post-war period that contributes to where we've arrived at today? Wow. It's all one road. And once you go to war in 1914 and you cease to be rich, you cease to be powerful. And again, look at there's another tremendous book. I can't recommend it highly enough, called The Deluge by Adam Tuz, which describes amongst – it's full of stuff about the First World War, which most people don't write about. But it describes what happened between Britain and the United States over naval power. But this was our power. And it was the ruins of nuclear power at the time. And the Americans forced us to limit our naval forces. They forced us to both the size of our navy and the size of our ships. They forced us to break our crucial alliance with Japan, which enabled us to remain secure in the Pacific. And the arguments between the admirals of the US Navy and the British Navy grew so tense at the point that this flight's nearly broke out between them over this. And that was, again, an aftermath, and you see from this, the long slope lying ahead of decline, which was dictated to us by our voluntary bankruptcy of 1914. And I think part of the problem as well is that we still – we're going back to the idea of delusion – we still have this idea of us being this kind of great nation, which has a huge impact across the globe. And the reality is there are much bigger nations who are much more powerful, who have a far more significant impact, who don't necessarily care what we say or do. A lot. So one of the first things you discover if you're going to live in the United States, of course, you think you expect to find a special relationship and everybody loves us. But I found myself being accused of being an Australian. What's that accent? And also I found that you would read the American newspapers and watch the American news bill. And our country just knew it wasn't a mention. Well, no, I didn't come to you. It might as well have been the fault of that. It just wasn't – it just wasn't – they really cared. And I searched, Washington DC, for two years, for any sign of the special relationship. And not really was the none. I actually watched this country being ruthlessly squashed on the Irish issue by the US government. It was incidentally. They just crushed us, like a beetle, over that. And if there is a special relationship, it's a specially nasty one. It was amazing to watch. But they don't – this is a fantasy. So we're neither important nor much likes, and it's important for people to realize this. But they won't – they won't to believe. It's the great compensation, actually, for having made – and it was the colossal sacrifice for the Second World War, as a country, years of rationing privation, the deaths of many of the bombing of our cities, surely we had to have something. As a result of all that, sacrifice and pain. And people really wanted to believe that it was our finest hour, and that we had immersed from it as a great and a powerful nation. Well, it was our finest hour. I don't dispute that. And we fought very bravely and moving me against very large and dangerous forces, and we suffered a great deal. And my parents went through it, but we didn't emotional, and this was a great part. People don't – it's like you're in a manhood. People don't like admitting that. And it's also like – you see it with the policy on net zero, where people go, well, you know, we're going to set an example to the rest of the world. But the Britain should leave the world by blowing up all its coal-fired pastations, which China is building about 10 a month, this I know, it's in the city. But it is… We blow them up, too. We don't. We don't. It's cautiously saying, oh, it might be a mistake in mothball. We blow them up, millions of pounds worth of valuable blood blown up, dismantled. So no possibility that anybody might have made it a mistake, either. Peter, when you started making some of these points initially, were you more optimised? than you are now? Yes. You've been ground down by the reality that no one listens to your warnings. When I wrote my first book, The Abolition of Britain in 1999, I did so in the belief that it was possible. What I began to think was writing, I then wrote the Daily Express, writing a weekly column frankly in the Daily Express was not going to have much influence. What I really wanted to do was particularly was to get into national broadcasting or, and I was advised by a friend that you can't get anywhere very much in national broadcasting. If you haven't written a book, and so I wrote the book with the purpose of extending the reach in my ideas, and in fact it was quite interesting. Some of the initial reviews of it, although uncomplimentary accepted something serious as being said, in general, it was very hard to get published, had to struggle very hard to get it by. Most publishers refused to have anything to do with me in a major agent who I approached, wouldn't touch me, not only in the book, and eventually I got it published, and actually by a publisher so small that my family had to do all the work of getting into bookshops. It ended up, it still sells even now, what is it, 20, 70 years later, but it was a real struggle to get it out. But some of the reviews understood that something was being said, and I did begin to get a certain amount of opportunity in broadcasting. At one point on a channel four, let me make documentaries, and I would get on the big opinion programs, and the last, there is some point at which there might be the sprockets of what I think, and of what is talked about in politics, will mesh with each other and we'll get some, and then it became more and more obvious that this wasn't so. And the time went by, and the crucial moment for me remains, when David Cameron took over the Conservative Party on behalf of the Blairite. I can put this more clearly now than I could then, but I was quite clear about the time. If people allow this to happen, if people endorse this Blairite takeover of the only major opposition party, then it is the end. You mustn't do it. Don't just vote Tory because you want a Tory government because you won't get a Tory government. One of the points I can make now, more clearly than then, was actually Gordon Brown, was probably more conservative than David Cameron, particularly on things like European single currency. And he was, it was, and he was a more conservative person. But I was just trying to say, no, it's vital that this doesn't succeed. And I couldn't get anyone to listen to me. And I remember going round some other supposedly right-wing columnists and saying, if I keep saying this alone, I'll get nowhere. If anybody else joins in, it might actually make some impact and they wouldn't. And it was at that point that I just spared. And once the Cameron government came into office and everybody imagined that the Tories had won the election, which they hadn't even done. And the coalition settled in, I don't think that's it. Isn't that quite the minting in many ways? Oh, you must, I mean, it's a hank compound. It's not the word I choose. It's, it's, it's dispiriting. But for me, what is bubble because I have that kind of difference is furiating. And there are two ways of reacting to it, if you're furious. And one is just to have total contempt ever afterwards for everything everybody involved in in what resulted from what I tried to prevent. So I do. But it's also because what you're fundamentally talking about is it's a tragedy. I think so. I think it might have been avoidable. It would have been worth trying. I think I think 2010 was the last moment at which it might have, might have been doable. But it was just, it's just, it's just got me nothing except, it's such abuse. Well, I'm playing to appearances of trigonometry, of course. Well, that, of course, is, is a, is a great compensation. Your sarcasm is much appreciated. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, you should hear me being sarcastic. It doesn't sound like that at all. It's always wonderful to talk to you. We're going to ask you some questions from our supporters in a second. But the last question, as you know, is always the same. It's on the mug that you were looking at. I'll let what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be. We haven't really talked about the attempts to create war. When I wrote the, the phony victory, my purpose was actually to make, to make a strong case against what seemed to me at the time a drive for war, which I thought would emerge either in Iran or in Russia. I thought that these countries were both being prepared to become enemies. And I thought I could only spread the idea in some way, a mature idea that this is, but as a country, we shouldn't be beguiled into war by this constant repetition of the idea that every single world conflict is a repeat of 1938. Therefore that anybody who opposes it is Neville Chamberlain. The anybody who continues to oppose it after it started is Lord Haure, that everybody who's in favor of it is Winston Churchill. This is, I thought, first of all, I show that what we thought about Neville Chamberlain was not absolutely true. And also that the whole development of war in late 1930s had no parallels with what's going on in the Europe of today. And for all the good it did, I might as well have stayed at home. But that's, it does alarm me. We're constantly, people are constantly coming. Intelligence chiefs come out and say, we have to prepare for war. Russia is a great threat. Well, you can believe that if you want, though I find it a struggle. I always remember going to Moscow, was it in 2008? I know it was, it was the first big parade of the new Russian army. They decided they're going to restart the Red Square parades. And I'd watched the last one in November 1990. And so my officer, when you go out and watch it, and I watched it with my old friend, Igor Monasheth, whose father had been a Soviet nuclear submarine commander, and he knew his military staff. And we stood on balcony of the hotel, watching it as close as we could get. And I enjoyed the parade as much as the rest. And at the end of it, Igor turned to me and said, what did you think of our great split strategic scrap metal? And he was quite right. I mean, it was the big new weapons. They probably had two or three of. Most of the stuff they were able to put out was probably old, much of its Soviet era. We knew we'd still know the Russian military is fantastically corrupt and an incompetent and the training of soldiers is a disgrace. It's a terrible army and it can't, after four years, they have a nice to take a carcass off 20 miles from the border. It's a term this into a great bogeyman, which is about to turn off a done coat with its tanks pointed at the British coast. It just doesn't seem to me to be realistic. But the intelligence people retired generals, ex-defense ministers and NATO chiefs are constantly trying to prepare us for war. And the last thing I noticed was some suggestion. We might all start hoarding food and medicines in case there was a war. There's a real attempt to try and get the British people to become war-minded, which I think at any end, sadly. Peter, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Make sure to join us over on substep where we carry on the conversation and you get to ask Peter your questions. I've always greatly admired Peter's books but on finishing them, I always end up feeling rather hopeless about Britain's future. Is Britain doomed to disintegrate? you