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The horror of Starmer's Britain, with Nick Dixon
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The United Kingdom is a great country. It’s arguably contributed more to the flourishing of Western civilization than any other. Which is why recent events have left many people heartbroken.
Racially and culturally motivated riots have erupted on British streets, met with a two-tiered policing and judicial response, a crackdown on free speech, and an awful sense that the next five years could see the country change beyond recognition.
At the same time, the United Kingdom has faced dark moments before, and triumphed. Will it do so once again? To help Will answer that question, he is joined by GB News presenter and the co-host of The Weekly Skeptic podcast, Nick Dixon.
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Transcript
00:00:21
Speaker
G'day and
UK's Troubled Landscape: History and Recent Events
00:00:22
Speaker
welcome to Far at Will, a safe space for dangerous conversations. I'm Will Kingston. Without wanting to sound too much like Hugh Grant in Love Actually, the United Kingdom is a great country. It's arguably contributed more to the flourishing of Western civilisation than any other, not to mention David Beckham's right foot and left foot and all that. Which is why recent events have left many people, myself included, heartbroken.
00:00:49
Speaker
racially and culturally motivated riots have erupted on British streets, met with a two-tiered policing and judicial response, a crackdown on free speech online and offline, and an awful sense that the next five years could see the country change beyond recognition.
00:01:08
Speaker
At the same time, the United Kingdom has faced dark moments before and triumphed. Will it do so once again? To help me answer that question, I am joined by GBNews presenter and the co-host of the fantastic Weekly Skeptic podcast, Nick Dixon. Nick, welcome to Fire at Will. Hey, thanks for having me. How are you doing? I'm good. I just told you off air, I'm currently on holiday at the moment and and may pass out as a result of sunstroke, but otherwise splendid. And you've just been on holiday as well. How was it?
00:01:37
Speaker
Yeah, although as I was telling you, I just did nothing. I just lifted weights, um went on five mile runs, read about civilizational collapse and the cyclical versus linear version of history. Just a typical holiday. I sound like Dr. Evil. My childhood was typical. Summer's in Rangoon, luge lessons.
00:01:57
Speaker
That's my my holiday was typical, Will. Yeah, I just got a lot of my own work because it um I'm always doing GB news. I'm obviously grateful to be there and I'm always doing the weekly skeptic. And so I just had time to do my own stuff and I've got my own podcast, the current thing. I've got nixon.net, sorry to promote, but that's my substat where I put all my articles and little solo podcasts and things like that. So I just got on with that stuff as well.
00:02:20
Speaker
A link is in the show notes for everyone. I'm glad that you've been reading up on civilis civilizational decline because that is relevant. what Was I being melodramatic in that introduction? What's your assessment of the state of the United Kingdom at present?
Critique of the UK's Legal System: Injustice Under Starmer?
00:02:35
Speaker
Well, um you I'm the wrong guy to ask if you were being melodramatic. I don't know if you just saw my latest tweet. I just wrote a whole basically poem about how much I hate Starman. It's maybe too long to read, but um maybe check that out on at Nick Dixon comic.
00:02:50
Speaker
Yeah, i'm it's, you know, you're not exaggerating. It's a shocking situation, isn't it? It's it's really, you could call it the apotheosis of anarcho tyranny, to use a phrase I dropped once on GB news. We have violent criminals well we haven't maybe not violent criminals being let out it feels a bit like starmas policy is basically what the joker would do it's like well let out criminals so we can make room for innocent people who have just maybe said something misguided online and put them in prison it couldn't really be more dystopian than that now okay yeah it's apparently they're not letting out violent criminals but they are
00:03:27
Speaker
postponing people's cases. And they are letting people out on bail who otherwise wouldn't be. And they're keeping people in police cells because there's not enough room in the jails. And who are they putting in people who've tweeted about a riot. And of course, you know, we condemn violence and we condemn incitement to violence. But if you just look at what's going on now, we have things like There was a young man called Tyler K who he wrote a post that was quite misguided it he actually copy and pasted it from the wife of a conservative counselor and the post was something like I don't eat care what happens to these migrants even if you burn down the hotels is obviously not a great post.
00:04:03
Speaker
But he was only copy-pasted to it to prove some sort of misguided point that he wouldn't get arrested. he He didn't seem to understand what the tears were. Obviously, he was going to get arrested. He went to jail for three years and two months, not a suspended sentence. And you only have to compare that to there was a man in Newcastle raped a 13-year-old. He got a two-year suspended sentence. he did it He served community service in the end, something like 180 hours. There was another man in Newcastle.
00:04:27
Speaker
who was part of a two-man group that killed a 14-year-old boy with a machete. He got out after six months on manslaughter. They sent a letter to the mother. We know this won't come as welcome news. It's like, oh, really? it's So just to give you an idea, that's what's going on. Everyone's saying, well, these are thugs. They're inciting people online. Yeah, they're certainly doing some misguided things.
00:04:48
Speaker
but the two-tier system is so obscene and so obvious to everyone and now immediately Stama has the nickname two-tier Kia. There's a good reason for that. So he's been worse than anyone could have possibly imagined and I thought it was gonna be pretty bad but he's almost immediately just made the UK the laughingstock of the world. You've got Americans tweeting about how we're a prison island. yeah Obviously got Elon Musk tweeting about it.
00:05:13
Speaker
And he has no he's not attempting in any way to tackle the real problems, which we could get on to. He's just tackling tackling the secondary problems, as Douglas Murray calls it, and and the perception management rather than the actual problems. So there's a sort of opening rant to start you off.
00:05:29
Speaker
There's a lot to unpack there, but let's start with Stama, the man. So when I saw him coming in and it was obvious he was going to win for some time, I assumed he was a bit of a a nothingy technocrat. What we've seen recently and some whispers about policies to come indicate that there may be something far more radical there. What do people need to understand about Keir Stama?
00:05:54
Speaker
Well, I always thought it was interesting that Peter Hitchens pointed out he is a Pabloite, which was a subset of Trotskyism, very little known. and So he does have a radical background. He did edit that magazine, Socialist Alternatives. So he definitely is a radical. And, you know, Hitchens pointed out that in some ways he's more radical than Corbyn. And I think that There's something in that. Corbin's an old-school commie. We know what Corbin thinks. It's mad, but it's kind of it's out there and it's kind of nothing new. Starmer seems to be far more sinister in a way. and He's more sinister than Blair. i mean Blair was sort of he was make doing all these reforms.
00:06:31
Speaker
kind of just stealthily changing the country, which was very damaging. But Starmus seems to be even worse than that. he seems to be He's a prosecutor, isn't he? And he's running the country like a prosecutor. So when he had that moment of the the the Southport stabbings and the subsequent unrest, that was a time to say something about we know you're angry or you know it must be, I can't imagine your pain or something. There really was nothing about that. There was something about letting the the victims grieve and so on. But there was really nothing about what the country's feeling ah about years of problems as a result of
Immigration Policies: Incompetence or Deliberate?
00:07:09
Speaker
immigration. And obviously, the final expression of that was somewhat incoherent and ah not strictly rational. you know The Southport Killer was not
00:07:18
Speaker
for example, a migrant and legal. He was not a Muslim even though a mosque attacked. So it was was not strictly logical as these things are when it reaches that stage. But it was clearly an expression of years of problems being ignored. And people have repeatedly voted to bring immigration down and been ignored. And they've been promised by the Tories that we would bring it down to the tens of thousands. They went against their promises. you know I saw a meme that kind of annoyed me from an an American account.
00:07:45
Speaker
with a British woman saying, I don't feel safe on the streets. And an American guy, you know, those little those little memes of like, ah the guy comes in and goes, you literally voted for this. And it's like, we didn't vote for it. Tony Blair didn't warn us about it. They just imposed it upon people. And then repeatedly politicians said we would get it down. So how can people Be set to vote if they voted explicitly against it, but we're completely ignored and the and the politicians went against that Many times ah and now they're just doubling down. That's the frightening thing. So on Starmer Yeah, we don't know his mind. We don't know if they would maybe we don't know his soul. There probably isn't one but he does seem to be a
00:08:20
Speaker
He does seem to be more of a zealot. I knew he was a zealot, but he seems to be a kind of unbending zealot. I think there was a clue when he said that he wouldn't send his child to private healthcare, even if they were dying. He's like, well, who is this weirdo? So there is something of the zealot about him. People are calling him Kier Stalin. That seems kind of fitting. There's something of the totalitarian about him.
00:08:43
Speaker
ah You did highlight correctly, though, that this complete refusal to engage with both illegal and high rates of legal migration is not just a Labor policy. The Tories have done very little about it in 14 years, despite saying before each election, we will handle this issue. The the obvious question is, despite the British public overwhelmingly wanting to reduce rates of legal migration. And despite wanting to eliminate illegal migration, nothing's happened. but Why has nothing happened?
00:09:18
Speaker
Yeah, that is a big question, and you can go down two main routes with that. One, you can say it's deliberate, and two, you can say it's incompetence, and I suppose three, they actually have no idea how to solve it and can't solve it, which could come under incompetence still, I suppose, or could be that it's actually insoluble, which I don't particularly believe. but so So, I mean, in terms of the deliberate thing, well, there was that comment years ago from Andrew Nether that we're going to rub the rights faces in diversity or noses in diversity. So there was from the Blair administration a kind of explicit belief in this stuff. You do have the liberal ideology and mindset, which suggests that people are, I've heard the phrase something like fungible economic units, you know, so in the liberal ideology, the idea is you can
00:10:05
Speaker
exchange people endlessly. not Nations don't really mean anything. People are just all the same, and that is there's this globalist project. So you could say that that's one element of it. Also, on ah on a more micro scale, Victoria's post-COVID deliberately brought in more people because they're worried about the economic effects of COVID, which they had caused with their lockdown so you know largely. So they deliberately brought in more people at a time when that was absolutely the last thing we needed. And then it reaches these obscene numbers, like what is it, a million gross or something like six or 700,000 net in a year, completely unprecedented, completely unsustainable, absolute madness. And we don't know where the people are coming from. Many of them are obviously not from compatible cultures, hate to sound too right-wing for the spectator, but it was just, you know, it's so clear there's different types of immigration and we just seem to just bring everyone in.
00:10:59
Speaker
So why is such a strange question? It seems to be a mixture of bad policy, ideology, incompetence, sort of all the above. you know At the furthest end, people think, well, they're trying to destroy the country. And you could argue they are trying to destroy the nation state. It gets a bit sort of conspiratorial. Some of it can just be put down to incompetence and to some some extent their naive ideology.
00:11:22
Speaker
and I think, and and you you touched on it, but it seems like the UK has got itself into this awful position of being reliant on cheap. It's got a stagnant economy and it is reliant on effectively cheap migrant labour to be able to cheat its way to growth because it hasn't really thought about productivity in any meaningful way. Where do you see this going? Where does this end?
Economic Dependence on Migrant Labor: A Sustainable Future?
00:11:45
Speaker
Yeah, well, I'll answer that, but just on the other on the other point, yes, it's become a sort of Ponzi scheme. Partly the the root cause is birth rate, you could argue. Birth rates are too low you know in across the world many parts of the world, especially in in this country where about a whole one point below they need to be they need to be about 2.5 and I was sort of 1.5 and obviously Japan, Korea, loads of Italy, loads of countries have catastrophically low birth rates, and no one seems to be able to fix that. And so then you bring in people becomes a kind of Ponzi scheme it only works in the short term. And I think it's been shown they don't really have the economic benefit that people believe Douglas Murray has shown this in the strange death of Europe, they might increase GDP, but not GDP per capita. In terms of
00:12:28
Speaker
where it's going. That's the really troubling thing. To deal with this problem, you have to get outside of the current Overton window. And who's prepared to do that? Who is prepared to come and say, well, we need to start, you know, deporting illegal migrants and various other things. We need to get much tougher on um immigration.
00:12:46
Speaker
the Tories can't really say the things that are required. you know There's a hint of it in America, in Trump's manifesto, he's talking about the biggest deportation program ever, and stuff like that. I assume he means illegals, because I think the first point is about illegal immigration, and he says that second. so he means that but so there's those kind of things which i haven't even heard in this country and you look at the torrey leadership race and it's all very milk toast and very safe and only robert genwick sounds like he's seriously grasping the problem of immigration he laid out a whole plan for it i still don't the last thing i'm going to do is trust the torries but i i do think
00:13:21
Speaker
he'll I think he'll probably win and he's the only one, I could be completely wrong, but he's the only one that seems to me to have a serious grasp of it. Obviously, you've got reform, putting on pressure as well. There was a poll the other day, I don't know if you can believe the poll, but it said if there was an election now, they would win 63 seats. So that's significant. So they're going to have to do something to get nearer to public opinion on it, unless of course, we're just going to head for more and more chaos, which is also possible. Because the the problem is, this problem of the Overton window, who has the will Who has the sort of balls to take this problem on and to be vilified by Westminster? That's the big issue to me. you know The Tory leadership, Kemi is kind of popular amongst spectator-type people, but I've not heard her talk much about immigration in any strong terms. and Some people said she even is partly to blame because of that thing to do with the cap in 2018, and she said that was unfair. but
00:14:14
Speaker
you know Who's really gonna tackle it i just i don't see how it gets solved so far there's been no will to solve it. But but someone has to step up with the will to solve anything do they'll get loads of votes. But do they care about that are they more dedicated to kind of you know maintain the manager elite.
00:14:31
Speaker
We will get onto the Conservative Party and the future of conservatism more generally in the United Kingdom in a bit. But before we do, I want to tease out that thought around the Overton window a bit more and potentially the one which is the most dangerous, the most dangerous concept to talk about is Islam in this debate.
Cultural Integration Challenges: Free Speech at Risk?
00:14:51
Speaker
It is obvious that there has been a problem around cultural integration with Muslim communities and or some Muslim communities.
00:14:58
Speaker
and the British community more generally, is Islam incompatible with a Western liberal democracy like the United Kingdom? Yeah, that's the big one. um that that is don get I don't want to get you cancelled. Well, cancelled would be the least of it. I mean, you know what? It's like, you know, you do you do worry taking on questions like that, but I will have a crack anyway. I mean, certainly aspects of it are at odds with with aspects of of of liberal democracy. I'll give you an obvious example is the drawing of the profit
00:15:30
Speaker
mohammad So, they we saw with this Batley Grammar School and many other examples, these two things are incompatible. you know One of them is and it's free speech and free expression, and the other is strict blasphemy laws around certain things. Now, maybe looking at it dispassionately, maybe they are smart to you know, aggressively police the boundaries of their religion, because Christianity believed that we could do away with blasphemy laws in this country. And look where that's gone. I mean, you could argue if I was to make a dispassionate analysis, you could say, perhaps there's something in robustly defending your religion. But clearly, it's it is at odds with with that set of values, the sort of liberal democracy, but if you even believe in
00:16:16
Speaker
free speech and all that which we get into but certainly our conception of free speech as we've known it certainly when I was growing up is completely at odds with with that. That would be one example. can't be You can't just shake hands on that. Someone has to win and someone has to lose on that argument. Can I interrupt you because you mentioned Batley Grammar School and not everyone will have heard of that case. Talk me through what happened there.
00:16:38
Speaker
Do you know what? Even I can't remember all the exact details, but broadly, a teacher drew Muhammad al-Shodah drawing, was it? to To make a point. And the school was was ah protested aggressively by Muslims that the They didn't defend him, the head teacher and so on. The school as a whole did not defend the teacher. He went into hiding in 2021. So yeah, he showed a caricature, just to get it right, of the Prophet Muhammad during a class, just to make a sort of point. of he wasn't He wasn't trying to be subversive as far as I know. He was just he was just illustrating something. And this was in 2021. He was forced into hiding, and he's still in hiding.
00:17:20
Speaker
and um There was a review published that showed he was completely let down by the council, police and the trust running the school. So, and we've just sort of, but once I don't know if we've totally accepted it because there's a certain amount of uproar, but you know, his life's ruined and it's ongoing. and you know So what do you make of that? I mean, that's what we've gone with in a sense, you know, free speech and free expression there has completely lost even in an educational setting.
00:17:47
Speaker
Yeah, that's that's right. And you mentioned Douglas. I spoke to Douglas on this very point. And we talked about the two very particular forms of cowardice, which stops people from standing up in these situations. There's fear of physical violence, which can come with elements of Islamic extremism. And there's the fear of being called a racist. How do you reflect on both of those different fears and how they influence this conversation in the United Kingdom?
00:18:17
Speaker
Well, in terms of physical fear, I think that's completely reasonable to an extent. I mean, we now have, as we've seen, I mean, maybe it's this two-tier topic again, but we have um what Starmer calls our communities. we have ah We have a different treatment of certain communities. If you're a Muslim gangs can basically roam the streets, we found they have community leaders who are essentially their own police.
00:18:39
Speaker
And they get away with an awful lot more than, for example, you know white British people. this is If you deny that at this point, you're basically deluded. So there's a there's like that, which is a new thing from the riots. And obviously, there's there's a risk of violence. i Everyone feels it talking about this topic. So I think that's pretty reasonable. but Shouldn't stop you necessarily, but it's not complete. I mean, look at Salman Rushdie. I mean, it's certainly not and insane, is it, to think like that? In terms of the racism one, that's the one that's completely appalling because that's what's allowed.
00:19:11
Speaker
the fear of being called racist has allowed atrocities like Rotherham, Halifax, Telford, all these places we can, the fact that we can list them is obscene. I mean, 1400 girls in Rotherham. And this grooming gang thing is, we still haven't come near to knowing what that has done to the country in terms of its psyche. You know,
00:19:34
Speaker
to cover that up because because people were worried about looking racist and it being not PC was so hor so horrific. And even so the the labor MP that raised concerns about it was had to leave the party. I mean, absolutely disgusting. And now it's coming out. you know This went on over 16 years. And one problem about it is it's so horrific. It's almost sort of beyond belief, because it wasn't just rape, it was torture.
00:20:01
Speaker
just horrendous tortures, people's tongues being nailed to tails and things, medieval stuff you can't even and so people are they don't want to talk about it and if they do, you know it's so so bad and so damning the one it's disturbing to even talk about and use this sort of It's almost too big to approach, but it but it has to be approached. And this is all part of the recent riots. The fact that that's never really been, you feel it's never been tackled. You feel there's been no, although people have now, some people have gone to jail. there's You don't feel there's been some sort of real public reckoning reckoning ah about that. You just feel like it's kind of festering in the psyche of Britain.
00:20:37
Speaker
Istama has basically attributed the motivations of writers down to racism. How much of this is racism and how much of this is more legitimate concerns about culture?
00:20:49
Speaker
That was interesting. He did it in Ireland, didn't he? he said In Northern Ireland, he said these are just racist and far right as a response to the riots. This was the shocking thing. He never attempted to look at people's actual motivations. Now, that if you read up in, there was a piece in the Mail Plus and there was a piece from BBC In Depth and they both imply that actually there is an awareness within the Labour Party that there is more going on here, but they they can't allow any hint that the riots are justified in any way. So they have to just completely crack down, and only later will they address
00:21:26
Speaker
But what was disturbing about these articles, the male plus one said, well, first on their list is social media. You're like, hang on, that's first. Doesn't sound like the first problem to me. And then they go, another problem is the alienation of the white working class. I think I think I put that number one. And then they go, and the other problem is that the boats. And I go, okay.
00:21:45
Speaker
So even in your list, you've put social media top, and then you've put the alienation of the white working class, which then the article you immediately reveals that they've misunderstood or they failed to grapple with the full extent of. they They talk about these towns have been deprived and so on. They basically make it sound like if these towns had a weight rose, this this wouldn't happen. It's like, well, no, yes, there is economic.
00:22:07
Speaker
problems, but there's also cultural problems. So they're not going to get to grips with that. And then they talk about the boats and no one has managed to solve the boats problem. You know, Dominic Cummings said, he's just got to leave the CCHR and get the Navy involved and bang done. But we we've not done that. So we can't stop a few boats. so So if you believe these articles, it's not completely, that I think it's not what he did was disgusting. Just trying to blame it on the so-called far-right thuggery, as if suddenly all these people, where were all these far-right groups? Where did they come from? They were suddenly all organized and bust into these places. There's just no evidence that happened. You always find the one bloke with the swastika tattoo and you go, okay, and maybe that guy. But there just isn't this organized far-right. So it is a spontaneous, in my opinion, spontaneous eruption of public feeling. And you never dealt with that.
00:22:53
Speaker
But if you read these pieces, you go, okay, maybe they do know, but they they're scared to tackle it. They also said it and spoke a sort of labor insider in the piece said, we can't deal with this because we don't have time in five years. There's too much to do. We'd have to get so many departments involved. So Logistically, how do they solve it? They're seeing it as a kind of economic problem of leveling up the north that they don't know how to solve. But they haven't grasped it. The problem is mainly immigration. It's mainly a cultural problem. It's also an economic problem. So they haven't grasped the cultural issue of of mass legal immigration. They've got no idea about what they're going to do about the boats either. And they're going to focus first on cracking down on Twitter and naughty Elon Musk.
00:23:33
Speaker
So you know you basically in conclusion they may be a bit more aware than starlets on in the press conference but it still doesn't look very good for how they're gonna tackle it. Yeah and we'll get to to free speech online in a moment but before we do the alienation of the white working class.
Populist Revolts and Political Disconnect: Tories' Struggle
00:23:51
Speaker
There have been a series of populist revolts in the United Kingdom over the last decade. UKIP, Brexit, the Red Wall victory for Johnson. You've been seeing this group yell and scream about their frustrations. I still don't quite understand why, despite all of that, the Tories didn't engage with them in any meaningful way. So it's easy to blame Starmer, and I'm more than happy to do that, but I don't understand why the Tories didn't engage that group.
00:24:20
Speaker
in a way that not just would have actually tried to address their concerns, but also to me, it seems would have been electorally a an intelligent thing to do. Yes, interesting. the There seemed to be that moment where Dominic Cummings was involved and they he understood more ruthlessly what was required to win. There was the red wall, as you say, the takeover of that by the Tories, the 80 seat majority and so on. and Then Boris just seemed to just throw it all away. it was a it was i mean Cummings calls it just the Tory party are just inexplicably shooting themselves in the head. I mean, it's hard to know why they did it. They got into internal nonsense and they got rid of the they're actually successful leader. Was it over Partygate? Was it over Chris Pincher? I mean, does anyone remember Chris Pincher now? Sounds completely absurd. The things that brought Boris down didn't really make any sense. You could argue brought himself down with his own sort of
00:25:11
Speaker
vagaries and lack of attention to detail and sort of, you know, tend tendency to wing it. But really, you look at that and you go, what was all that about? And then they brought in Liz Trussey that at least the members voted for, they ousted her, brought in Sue Naku, neither the members nor the country voted for. Well, how was that going to go?
00:25:28
Speaker
It was never going to go well. At the root of it is something to do with, with if you believe in elite theory and you've you've read up on all that, it's kind of you end up thinking it's just managerial elites doing what they do. They they sort of they become much increasingly top-down and increasingly insular, increasingly detached from the public.
00:25:49
Speaker
And all they do is use the media to try and manufacture their perfect voter. And they don't listen to the voter. They try and create a kind of perfect voter. But they do still require the tacit consent of the people. And so when they get so out of touch with the people, as we've seen, that does cause them problems.
00:26:05
Speaker
As to why they did it, that's it's that's my best answer, because it's so obviously mental to just not listen to the voter. But that's not that's not what they do. We're sort of in the illusion of a democracy. But really, if you look at the behavior of our elite, they have their own agenda, as we saw when they tried to overturn Brexit, they don't care about immigration. Basically, they have an agenda that is odds with the people, and they're just pursuing it. And Starmer, now we see again, is doubling down on that.
00:26:30
Speaker
And someone like Matt Goodwin has made that that argument very in a very compelling way. And I think there's there's a lot to it. Let me do my best soft left authoritarian routine and say that Twitter is a cesspit. There's hatred spewing from all sides. We need to crack down on speech in order to make sure that the public is safe. How do you respond to to that line of thinking?
00:26:54
Speaker
Well, it's hilarious, isn't it? in some In a bleak way. I mean, there was a whole list of things I just saw today. There was a whole list of things they're doing to crack down on free speech. They already got rid of that higher education bill, didn't they? Which was to sort of try to make free speech a requirement from universities. But you look at some of the things they've done, they they've they want to make ah misogyny the same as islamic extremism and far-right extremism this is just a bleakly hilarious response from erect cuba and what's the problem i know it's misogyny and there was an article about it that mentioned incels like really it's the incels is it ever that's the problem i mean unbelievable you look at what's going on in the country you go i know it's incels i mean how deranged you have to be to come up with that
00:27:35
Speaker
By the way, studies on incels reveal that most of them are on the left and most of them are not white. But clearly, in a you can tell in Labor's mind, it's a kind of it's some alienated white guy that's watched Andrew Tate once, then he goes and kills everyone, which has basically never happened. I mean, it has been a few incel incidents in America, but there's various causes.
00:27:54
Speaker
and maybe in this country, but it's not like you watch Andute and then you go and you're a terrorist. That's what Labour seemed to think. So that's completely laughable. In a way, they're right to be worried about Twitter. So this idea of Twitter incitement is the reason for the riots. It's pretty absurd. I mean, yes, there was some unfortunate misinformation shared, and we should all be very vigilant to not share things too soon. I've tried to stick to that. And I think some people on the right failed at that. They're far too quick to post things they don't know about. It doesn't help anyone.
00:28:21
Speaker
doesn't help our cause, doesn't help anyone. So you've got to try not to do that that. It can be hard, you know, if you're emotional. But you've got to try not to share much misinformation. I absolutely agree. That's not the root cause, though. It's, you know, it it's maybe one small aspect. But they're right to be worried about Musk's takeover of X because it's completely out of their control. We see now an attempt to leg delegitimize Twitter by people leaving everyone on the labor. There's a coordinated attempt. There's like labor WhatsApp groups. This was revealed in the papers where they they're all trying to leave Twitter at the same time. A few of them have done it. Aleister Campbell keeps talking about leaving, but you know, it's going to be hard for his ego not to get his likes. He's got a million followers or two million or something. So they're only move.
00:29:03
Speaker
is to leave and try and delegitimize it and turn it into kind of parlor or gab, one of these right-wing-only apps. Because what Musk did, the genius, I'm sure you know, of what Musk did, he took over an existing liberal, lefty institution. Rather than try and start your own, he seized one of their castles, which is far more powerful. And that was the genius of it. And that's why it's very hard for them to tackle it. Of course, they're going to use the online safety bill. They're going to try and regulate it into oblivion. That's going to be horrendous.
00:29:29
Speaker
We'll see how far they get. there's Lots of people openly talked about banning it. they you know There was these voices in the middle. Should we ban Twitter in the UK? Yeah, good point. you know Just these weirdos on morning TV going, yeah, I think we should ban Twitter. like yeah Just become an international joke by banning Twitter. But to get back to my other point briefly, they are right to be worried because no one can control this thing, not even Musk. I would concede that. Musk wants free speech. Great.
00:29:55
Speaker
But he's thinking of the 90s. He's thinking, in my opinion, of free speech that he knew, which comes from a time of legacy-controlled media. No one actually knows what it's like to have free speech on X in 2024. It is quite radical. You see all kinds of ideas being shared and you know getting massive likes, and some may be mental and others may be true. And that's quite powerful if they're actually true.
00:30:17
Speaker
but but inconvenient and we see all kinds of videos and there's all kinds of inconvenient truths that come to light and that's a nightmare for the regime but even Musk can't control that. he he just His instincts are towards freedom and free speech but it is a very interesting sort of new tool and no one knows the outcome of it but of course the elites threaten because it's the Gutenberg press, it's the internet, it's Musk X, it's a new level of freedom for the people and of course that's absolutely terrifying for the liberal elite who it's not going to go their way and just lastly I don't know how it's gonna go either, but if you're someone who's been excluded by the the ruling class, let's say you're a straight white male unvaccinated GB news presenter, yeah you're gonna gamble on it being something that's gonna be good for our side because it's like, well, we hate the liberal elites, so let's see what this must Twitter things like.
Decline of Free Speech: Generational and Educational Biases?
00:31:05
Speaker
X is a part of this story, but there is a broader concern, I think, that freedom of speech is less valued in the United Kingdom than it once was, say in the 90s, as you mentioned. There are obviously some bulwarks, you know, the Free Speech Union is is one of those. But is it fair to say that we, as a society, have forgotten or are at least less concerned about the value of free speech than perhaps we once were? And if so, why?
00:31:33
Speaker
Yeah, that seems to absolutely be the case. Some of it seems to be the younger generation, doesn't it? Sort of post-Gen X. I'm a sort of zennial, so I'm technically a millennial, but I'm the on the earlier side of it, where you still have a kind of Gen X mentality, which was of a belief in free speech and edginess and, you know, you had all these violent movies that were kind of funny and ironic, and that was a Gen X mentality. The millennial mentality seemed to be a lot more earnest and a lot more worried about harm and offense. The Zoomers seemed to go both ways, the young men,
00:32:00
Speaker
go very right-wing, but the the young women are very lefty, so that's interesting. But um yeah, there's definitely a fall away from free speech. Some of it is to do with obviously different people coming into the country who don't have those values, because there was a kind of delusion, I think, that free speech was a universal value that everyone would adopt. you know The whole sort of neoliberal or neoconservative agenda was, okay, we've we've perfected we've perfected things now. Think about Fukuyama's end of history, where he believed that liberal democracy was you know the terminus As he put it the end point of how humans are going to organize society He's like right we've nailed it with liberal democracy now We just export this to the world and everyone will love things like free speech, but they don't most people don't like it and actually What is it really anyway is it really free speech? What does that mean? Probably it turns out to mean I'm not I'm not an expert in this but probably it turns out to mean that more of it what Michael Knowles calls a set of speech standards that we call free speech, but they have certain limitations already. And we know they have limitations towards incitement to violence. That's even in the American First Amendment. But I think it really means ah a set of cultural assumptions that we developed over time that were developed in the kind of in a kind of Christian Europe or something that is just they're not shared by the world. They're not even shared by the new generation who's been
00:33:20
Speaker
Another reason is they've been radicalized by education into leftist theories. So it's a kind of combination of things. it's One, it's that free speech was never completely free, and it was certainly not universal. Two, it's immigration. Three, it's our own domestic students being taught new leftist ideas. And I could go on. this this Those are just a few ideas.
00:33:44
Speaker
That point around education is a really interesting one. And whenever the conversation comes up around, have we reached peak woke? This is the thought that comes to my mind, because whilst maybe some of the extreme parts of, say, gender ideology may be left in the the rearview mirror, hopefully, I think we're going to be dealing with the basic tenets of wokeism, which is a belief in subjective truth, which is a belief that that words are violence and and can be dangerous and we need to therefore sensor views that are are disagreeable will be dealing with all that stuff for some time because the education institutions have been so effectively captured. Talk me through what you've seen in the the education system in the united kingdom and whether that is that's a fair thing to say.
00:34:29
Speaker
yeah Well, obviously, I mean, I left it a while ago, so I can only read what you read. I mean, even when I was at university, though, studying English, I do have an MA in English literature, weirdly, which doesn't come up very much. But even then, you did see the infiltration of leftist thought, Marxism, postmodernism. You know, I wanted to study instinctually. I guess I was conservative instinctually without really understanding it at the time. I wanted to study the the the canon, the kind of Western canon that Bloom talks about, the the the classics, you know,
00:35:00
Speaker
but we didn't really get to do that. and And if we did, we had to immediately deconstruct them. For example, there was a ah course where Conrad's Heart of Darkness was on the kind of additional reading if you wanted, but we were told to read a KB's Things Fall Apart and his critique of half Heart of Darkness is calling it racist. I'm like, well, Things Fall Apart is a decent book, but can we actually read Heart of Darkness first and see what what it is we're deconstructing?
00:35:24
Speaker
And everything was, any any really great novels, even which had to be them on the side, except for things like classic American literature, which was amazing with Melville, so on. And romantic poetry was great. But when it came to a lot of the fiction, you had to go and read things like Dostoevsky and find them yourself, because the canne was all ah the and sorry the syllabus was all about Ronan Barth and Jacques Derrida and all these people, you know, and these Lefoucos and all the deconstructures. So it was already there.
00:35:50
Speaker
And this has just become, as far as I can see, more and more rampant. That's at the higher education level, obviously. You're taught these things without necessarily realizing they kind of they bring them in. You don't necessarily realize what you're being taught is quite radical. So they kind of, I don't know, I'm making it sound very sinister. And it is quite sinister. They sort of bring in leftism by the back door, whatever, if you're studying any humanities subject. And now we know it's even creeping into math and sciences. And then the schools, it's a bit more simple, but in the schools, it seems to be more of a straightforward hatred of our past, decolonialization, all this nonsense. This incredibly simplistic narrative. Britain had an empire. It was evil. We had slavery. That was bad. Of course, the real narrative is we ended slavery. Slavery is still rampant throughout the world now.
00:36:36
Speaker
all empires had slaves and did things bad things. The Ottoman Empire was bad. When Douglas Murray's brilliant line, when's Turkey going to apologize for the Ottoman Empire? So we're being taught these things as if they're true. And a whole generation of kids just think, it's just you see all these surveys, don't you? You see these people, rocks popped on the street, and they all just think Britain's evil and racist. That's a standard thought amongst young people. And it takes a huge effort to turn that around. it's just And it's such a strange, just lastly, it's such a strange quirk, isn't it, of the English intellectual. George Orwell commented on it, you know, why does the English intellectual hate
00:37:09
Speaker
the country so much. It is absolutely bizarre. There's no obvious reason why. it's not it's not It doesn't go hand-in-hand with being an intellectual. It doesn't happen in other countries. It doesn't happen in Russia or China. They're very smart people. They don't automatically hate the country. So that's a very weird... It seems to be... Something something about Europeans that maybe is baked in. There seems to be a kind of weird self-loathing, which is kind of maybe, God said, we'll call it suicidal empathy. There's something baked in there it's not It's not all European. There was a guy there. I don't even know what his origin was. His name suggested maybe he wasn't European, but he was stabbed. I don't know if you saw this. He was stabbed by, he was the solicitor of a guy. He's a 71 year old solicitor. He's stabbed by his own client and said, oh, it's a pity because he you know he was getting so close to sorting out his citizenship or whatever. It's like, he said there was blood pouring out of him like a shower, but he's going, won't someone think of the guy that stabbed me? But that's that's kind of how we are in this country.
00:38:05
Speaker
I think that full George Orwell quote was along the lines of the English liberal intellectual is more likely to take money from the charity box at church than they are to sing God Save the King. For the national anthem, yeah, they'd rather be seen singing from a poor box. Yeah, and this self-flagellating instinct has been there for some time.
00:38:25
Speaker
Let's go to the future of the right in the United Kingdom, where we we touched on briefly before it became increasingly obvious that the Conservative Party didn't know what it stood for at the back end of their time in government.
Conservative Identity Crisis: A New Political Landscape?
00:38:38
Speaker
What does the future of Conservative politics look like in the UK? Can the Conservative Party heal or will it continue to to decline and and potentially be replaced by barrage and reform?
00:38:50
Speaker
Yeah. Like you said, I did kind of get into this earlier. If that poll is right, that reform would win 63 seats now, that looks incredibly bad for the Tories. That was just one poll. A lot can change. There's not much of an awareness that I can see amongst the Tories of how badly they fail. They're kind of is. They talk about it. They say we need to listen. Kemi's on a listening tour. And then we all need to listen to the vote voters, listen to the members. But I don't know if they really grasp the scale of it. Because the way they talk in interviews,
00:39:21
Speaker
And even in the telegraph, you see them still using this thing, oh, far right thugs. And there was that they did a piece about Spain, an 11-year-old child was was stabbed, which has just happened on ah on a football field. And they said, oh, far right, trying to rally people after the 11-year-old stab. And it's like, really telegraph, that's the problem. It's the fire. It's not the person that was stabbed. So even on the right, there's to me, these are still establishment politicians. They're still part of that bubble. They're still going to say, oh, the far right and all this.
00:39:49
Speaker
Are they really going to grapple with the problem? As I've said, only Genric, in my mind, of the leadership candidates even begins to grapple with it. But you'd be a fool to hold your breath for the Tories after after the, you know, just multiple monumental betrayals. Can they come back? The only thing that makes me think they can come back, of course, is how bad Starma has been already. He's been so catastrophically bad that if the Tories really did,
00:40:14
Speaker
to get themselves together and get their act together and and get serious on things like immigration, which have now become the number one priority. Matt Gordon was saying the other day, it's normally like number three. But all you have to do, you get someone like Cummings in, you go, right, immigration, leave the UCHR, sort the NHS. It's just a few topics, cost people are bothered about cost of living, NHS, immigration, you just go all in on those. You could do something, but you just don't feel He just don't feel his voice really will do it. You see, Kem is very smart, but she seems to me like an anti-woke liberal rather than a a conservative. That's just my humble opinion. Mel Stryde, no opinion. Toogan Hat to me, is a ah where he's pretending not to be now, saying he wants to leave the ECHR. Who else? Clever Lee is a one nation, whatever, pointless. I'm sure he's a nice guy. Who else is there? I've missed out one or two, but oh, Priti Patel, she presided over this massive amount of immigration. you know i I met her at GB briefly, she seems nice, but
00:41:10
Speaker
you know I don't want to diss anyone but she was presided over a certain level of immigration so it can't be her. um mic I like Swella the best but she of course couldn't even be in the race because she's too outspoken. So what does that tell you?
00:41:24
Speaker
i don't I don't know. My only hope is that Jen Rick comes in and is serious about immigration and actually does something and beats Starmer at the next election. Although maybe a reform really can become sorry waffle they may reformly can become the second party if this 63 seats thing is true. I can only see support for them growing at the moment because of everything that's happening. So they could potentially displace concerns. I think that's a real possibility. I agree. I think one of the The former Australian Prime Minister John Howard spoke of the challenge for right wing parties where he said that they have to be a broad church. They have to try and encapsulate liberalism and conservatism or else they won't have big enough constituency to be able to govern in their own right.
00:42:08
Speaker
And it seems to me the big challenge to the conservatives is that they've forgotten how to bring those two different strands together, which is why you have seen reform break away because that more traditional conservatism wasn't being housed in the conservative party. And I just wonder whether they will be able to bring those strands together again.
00:42:27
Speaker
and is that even really the goal? I mean, there's this idea you have to tack to the centre is the phrase. And Jacob Rees-Mogg tore that apart on, it was actually on the spectator, I think, on an event. He said, this this has never worked. we don't This is not the case. The people who've actually just been themselves, like Thatcher, and he listed a few others, they're the ones that have won, not the people who've tried to be everyone's friend and tack to the centre. Another point on that Dominic Cummings has pointed out, sorry to keep mentioning Cummings, but I find him very interesting. And he mentions that the centre is largely a fiction anyway. People have a strange mixture of beliefs. For example, people very much care about the NHS, although lately, that's almost changed post COVID. And because it's become so bad, I think people are open to reforming it. But for a large type but period of history, English people were very concerned about the NHS and very supportive of it. They also
00:43:13
Speaker
support the death penalty so it's kind of like a funny it's kind of like a funny pro-life and pro-death sort of thing is it was a you know we have English people have a different ah strange sort of group of beliefs that are not necessarily coherent with what Whitehall would like to be left or right I just give you a fun example the other day someone stopped me in North London of all places, in one of the most lefty middle-class strongholds of North London, and said, oh, I watched you on GB. And this was someone who voted Corbyn as an independent, but if he hadn't been standing, would have voted reform.
00:43:48
Speaker
So what do you do with that? Where does that fit into your little map? That doesn't fit in at all. That's someone who hates the uni-party, as we now call it, but just wants authenticity. But really, it was perfect to vote for parties with radically different, I mean, look at those, the views on like, just say Israel, Palestine, I mean, or any number of other issues, those parties must be complete opposites, but they're both not the uni-party.
00:44:08
Speaker
Yeah, interesting. And I think that ties into this broader global political trend, ah particularly seeing it in the US of vibes being more important than policy. That particular voter seems like he he or she wants the vibes of authenticity and conviction, as opposed to maybe thinking about policy as much. And and look, we're definitely seeing that with ah Kamala Harris and the preeminence of vibes over policy. This has all been a bit doom and gloom, Nick, so I'm going to ask the final question. That's my speciality.
00:44:36
Speaker
Well, is there any reason for optimism? if if if Is this a doom and gloom story for the UK? I said in my introduction you know that that the UK could change beyond recognition in the next five years, but at the same time, the UK has triumphed against adversity before. Are there reasons for optimism for the citizens of the United Kingdom?
00:44:54
Speaker
Yeah, certainly, I don't feel very optimistic. that There are some that I've given. I think i think this Elon Musk's ex is definitely a win. They're going to try and censor it, but that is definitely a cause for optimism. I think the white working class people that are being persecuted by Starmer, sort of coming together and realizing they are a group and need to sort of, not in a sort of fascist way, but they need to sort of, they are a group with their own interests, I think is a positive because, you know, they've just been suffering for so long.
00:45:24
Speaker
you know, poor white boys are the least likely group to go to university. Everyone just calls you racist and far right, you know, you get punished in a two tier justice system, punished by the police, punished by the justice system. But I think now they're sort of starting to realize, okay, that's not good enough. And we have a voice and we need to express ourselves politically and shouldn't be done with rioting, it should be done politically. I think there's some hope in that area that people have just had enough of being, you know, completely taught down to by the elite.
00:45:49
Speaker
which ah It's very dark at the moment, but but in is that gives rise to a kind of new rebellion in a sense. There's some hope in America, that I suppose that's not Britain, but it could impact Britain if Trump gets in, if you know if they don't rig it, and that might be too out there for the spectator, but if Trump gets in, and it's much harder to do anything dodgy because Trump has big backers now. He's got Musk backing him. He's got a lot of Silicon Valley backing him. And these are going to be like, right, count the votes again or we're suing you. And Kamala is a kind of nothing candidate. So I think there was a big chance that Trump gets back in and perhaps that gives hope for, since we're all in the American empire, that's kind of a hope for Britain. Maybe the hope would be Trump gets in, someone sensible gets in on
00:46:32
Speaker
here maybe even is for us, maybe it's someone like generic, and they can work with Trump and Musk and maybe we have some sort of, I don't think it's a, I don't think it's the the be all and all. I think it's probably ah an attempt to return to the kind of liberalism we had. There'll be muskets, very folks on high skilled immigration on Silicon Valley on, you know, getting things done.
00:46:55
Speaker
It'll slow the decline, at least. I don't know if it's the the answer. That's about the best I've got at the moment, because i've been um I've been studying too much stuff about decline. You never know what stage of decline you're actually in. you know Robert Carlisle, he's an actor. Thomas Carlisle thought we were in decline in the Victorian era. Vico thought we were in decline in like 16-something. He thought it was already all over. And you can go back hundreds of years and you find like we they all thought we were in a decline. So it's hard to know where we are.
00:47:25
Speaker
in that cycle. But um it's hard because I've been reading all that to be optimistic. That's about the best I've got. It's not it's not great, is it? But um the funny thing is you have to keep fighting anyway, don't you? have to kind of just keep You kind of just have to keep plugging away anyway. I was thinking about um the Civil War. You know, Musk said we were heading for the Civil War. I'm not sure this could really be described as a Civil War, but it got me thinking about Charles II. Imagine you're Charles, right? Your dad's executed. He's also the king. That's a bad day. And then you have you have to flee the country and live in places like France and Holland for ages. He wants to do that. You come back after 11 years, you restore the monarchy. It's like, wow, it's the it's like if that that would be the end of the movie. It's like Return of the King, right? It'd be like, that's perfect. Then what happens? You get the Great Plague.
00:48:10
Speaker
Which is an actual genuinely bad pandemic. You know, it's hands it's not hand space and space and social distancing, it's the actual plague. You sort that, then you get the great fire of London. Then you you have 14 illegitimate children, but you can't get a legitimate one. And then you you have to name your brother a successor, and he pisses it all away in under four years after you've just ruled for 25 years. So my point is, sometimes I think we're going to win the culture war. I get quite positive. I'm like, let's win this thing. But there's no real winning. It's just a kind of ongoing battle of history. ah That's what I think we're in.
00:48:41
Speaker
Well, nothing else. That's a nice reminder, which the British are very good at, which is just an ability to keep buggering on in the face of of one adversity after another. Nick, you are one of the ah the fighters that we need, if we are at least to slow the civilizational decline that we may find ourselves in. Thank you for doing what you do and and thank you for coming on the show today. Thanks for having me.