Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Debatable Discussions podcast.
Speaker: Today we're here joined by a very special guest in Douglas Carswell, who's agreed to come on and we're going to talk about UK politics, American politics, and hopefully we'll get a very good analysis from Douglas around what is happening in the world today.
Speaker: So thank you for coming.
Speaker: Thank you for inviting me.
Speaker: So it is an honour to have you with us today, Douglas.
Speaker: So could you start perhaps by giving our listeners a little sort of personal history of your career in UK politics and now over the pond in the US?
Speaker: Sure, very briefly, I was born in Britain.
Speaker: I was raised in Uganda and I now live in America by choice.
Speaker: But between all of that, I managed to find time to be a member of the House of Commons for 12 years.
Speaker: I represented Clacton in the House of Commons in Essex.
Speaker: And I famously, infamously, some might say, switched from the Conservative Party to the United Kingdom Independence Party, UKIP,
Speaker: in order to try to secure a referendum on Britain's membership of the EU.
Speaker: And having secured the referendum, I then co-founded the official campaign Vote Leave.
Speaker: And since that was the main reason I went into politics, having won the referendum, I then quit and then moved to the United States almost four years ago to the day.
Speaker: Perfect.
Speaker: So you've touched on the first question there, which is regarding Brexit.
Speaker: So could you tell us why did you support Brexit and do you think that has paid off so far?
Speaker: The European Union is a dismal and disastrous project that will bring ruin and destruction to all of those people, unfortunate enough to live within its ambit.
Speaker: It is a catastrophic way of running a continent.
Speaker: Now, the
Speaker: The great secret of Europe's success is, to get philosophical for a minute, that it is organized on the basis of what Hayek called evolutionary rationalism.
Speaker: That means there's no grand plan.
Speaker: You've got competing systems.
Speaker: In management speak today, you would say there's systems competition in Europe traditionally.
Speaker: That's why a
Speaker: pretty nondescript corner of the Eurasian landmass created the greatest art, economics, thought, literature, civilization known to humankind.
Speaker: Unfortunately, what the European Union does is it turns that European tradition of evolutionary rationalism on its head, and it tries to organize European society on the basis of something called constructive rationalism.
Speaker: This means a blueprint and a plan for everything.
Speaker: And it's a catastrophe.
Speaker: It destroys innovation.
Speaker: Indeed, innovation.
Speaker: When the European Union was first created in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Europe was still 40% of global GDP.
Speaker: It was still a hotbed of innovation.
Speaker: Since then, Europe has become ever more of an open-air museum, a backwater.
Speaker: And this is directly because of the European project.
Speaker: is destroying the very continent that it purports to strengthen.
Speaker: It is a catastrophe and a disaster.
Speaker: I believe that if I could persuade my country to abandon membership of that project, it would save itself by its example and save Europe by its example.
Speaker: That's still a, you know, we're still waiting to see that.
Speaker: Britain has been catastrophically run since leaving the European Union.
Speaker: But that is not to say that leaving the European Union was a bad decision.
Speaker: Britain has failed to take advantage of the freedoms of Brexit.
Speaker: It continues to, in effect, shadow the dysfunctional and defunct European model of high tax and high regulation.
Speaker: Britain is only going to really benefit from the advantages of leaving the European Union when it adopts a more, what you might call a more American approach, less regulation, lower taxation, more laissez-faire.
Speaker: I am very, very pessimistic about the future of the German-dominated Euro-Hartland.
Speaker: I think it will sink into a demographic and cultural abyss, and it's already well on the way to that.
Speaker: I think the future of Europe...
Speaker: under the European Union is of debt and gradual process of Islamification.
Speaker: And sadly, we see that it's the death of European culture.
Speaker: Europe mustn't blame outsiders.
Speaker: Europe must blame itself for its own folly in allowing itself to be ordered this way.
Speaker: So Douglas, I agree with you there.
Speaker: And I too am someone, I mean, I was obviously very young at the time, but I always found the argument of like reclaiming the UK sovereignty, becoming less regulated and more laissez faire.
Speaker: I always thought that made very much, very much made sense to me, even when I was younger.
Speaker: But do you think under the Starmer government that is at all realistic?
Speaker: Do you think the shadow of the European Union will always hang over Britain?
Speaker: And yes, do you think it's realistic that we will take advantage of Brexit?
Speaker: Of course we will.
Speaker: I mean, having not been responsible for our government, having lost the art of self-government for a generation, it's always going to take some time to rediscover the art of good governance.
Speaker: I set up immediately after standing down from Parliament something called the Good Government Project, which was an attempt to furnish an incoming Johnson government with a blueprint to overhaul the Whitehall machinery, the essentially dysfunctional triumvirate between Downing Street, the Treasury and the Cabinet Office.
Speaker: Government in the UK and the civil service are essentially dysfunctional.
Speaker: They need to be fundamentally re-engineered, rewired.
Speaker: Boris Johnson, tragically, I mean, there's no point in really blaming the left-wing Labour government.
Speaker: Left-wing Labour governments do what left-wing Labour governments do.
Speaker: The real...
Speaker: culpability for this lies in the failure of a sensible, credible free market center right.
Speaker: Having secured Brexit, Boris Johnson catastrophically failed to do anything significant with it on many areas like regulation, environmental regulation, energy policy.
Speaker: In fact, he moved further to the left.
Speaker: So, you know, I think the fault of
Speaker: And fine, great.
Speaker: Criticize Starmer for the shortcomings if you want.
Speaker: It's on his watch that we are seeing Britain sinking into the abyss and becoming a second, if not third world country on his watch.
Speaker: But the real culpability for this and the people we should get really angry with
Speaker: are Conservatives who ought to have known better, who stood on election promises to do better and have catastrophically failed.
Speaker: None of this left-wing nonsense under Starmer would even have got the time of day if the Conservatives had got their act together.
Speaker: By moving to the left, what the Conservatives did is shift this so-called Overton window to the left and allow in this left-wing lunatic nonsense.
Speaker: What's absolutely imperative is that the centre-right in Britain, the sensible free market,
Speaker: conservative tradition in the broader sense, and that goes well beyond the party, re-energizes and revitalizes.
Speaker: So you said that Britain has not yet taken the advantage of Brexit, hasn't delivered on this.
Speaker: And I've got two sort of follow-up questions.
Speaker: That is a phrase that we've heard
Speaker: before from Nigel Farage.
Speaker: So number one is from your experience of working with him, do you think he would be a good prime minister and perhaps why?
Speaker: And as well, do you think that in order to fully be able to deliver on Brexit, the UK needs to leave the European Court of Human Rights?
Speaker: So sort of two in one question.
Speaker: I'll deal with both of those and then maybe sort of elaborate further on a third point I wanted to make.
Speaker: I mean, yeah,
Speaker: You asked about Nigel Farage.
Speaker: I don't really care who does the stuff that needs doing.
Speaker: I just want it done.
Speaker: Rather like the analogy with making films, making movies, as they call them, on this side of the Atlantic.
Speaker: I don't really care who gets to be the actor or the actress.
Speaker: I don't really care who gets to win the best acting Oscar.
Speaker: I just want to make sure that people like me get to write the script as to what needs to be done.
Speaker: Now, the reason why Farage is back in business and I get on quite well with Nigel, actually, I've had my ups and downs with him, but I communicate with him regularly and I'm very pleased to see he's representing my old seat in Clacton.
Speaker: I did what limited amount I could from this side of the Atlantic to try and help him get reelected, elected, I should say.
Speaker: I wish him well.
Speaker: Not because I wish ill on the Conservatives, but I think we need the energy and the vitality that reform brings.
Speaker: But, you know, Nigel is constantly being put back in business by a dysfunctional and derelict and moribund Conservative Party.
Speaker: I mean, I think the question we really ought to ask is why is it that...
Speaker: the party of Margaret Thatcher, a party that has had such a good record of being successful, is so bad.
Speaker: And I think
Speaker: The real answer to this is not just a failure on a particular policy question.
Speaker: It's because the creation of a system of A-list candidate selection, centralization of candidate selection under David Cameron and George Osborne allowed, instead of ordinary members, grassroots members to choose who represented them in parliament, it allowed the A-listers to get a whole bunch of diversity hires in.
Speaker: And unfortunately, in the hands of diversity hires, the Conservative cabinet and Shadow cabinet
Speaker: has been tragic, has been awful, has been pathetic.
Speaker: And until we find a way of undoing the damage of the alias candidate selection, I don't think the Conservative Parliamentary Party stands much chance of doing what needs to be done.
Speaker: And because of that, Nigel is very much in business.
Speaker: If Nigel did become prime minister and it's no longer unthinkable, I hope that he would first and foremost, before any policy question, have a template, an almost Marxist template, Leninist, I should say, template for the destruction of the bureaucrats in the administrative state in Whitehall who really run Britain and have done so much to run Britain into the ground.
Speaker: before accepting the job of prime minister, an incoming conservative or reform person,
Speaker: needs to have a clear sense of how they're going to deconstruct the civil service, how they're going to sack civil servants, how they're going to get rid of the civil service code and the ministerial code that have done so much to reduce the power of those we elect.
Speaker: Until you're prepared to do that, until you're prepared to, in effect, treat the British civil servants the way Margaret Thatcher treated the National Union of Mine Workers, as an enemy to be confronted and destroyed, the country will continue to decline.
Speaker: The struggle in Britain, I think, is between those who want to arrest decline and essentially parasitic civil service and quangocracy who are happy to manage decline so long as their pensions and their perks continue to flow their way.
Speaker: We need to cut them out.
Speaker: We need to address them.
Speaker: We need to confront them.
Speaker: We need to take on and destroy them in an almost revolutionary act.
Speaker: If we can do that, then I think an incoming Conservative leader will
Speaker: could unleash Britain's potential and Britain is, you know, undoubtedly probably the most creative piece of real estate on the planet.
Speaker: Unfortunately, its natural abilities have been swamped by an essentially sort of dysfunctional Byzantine system of government.
Speaker: We need to, we need to,
Speaker: The Japanese in the late 19th century had an extraordinary period of upheaval called the Meiji Restoration, where they essentially realized that as an island country, they were falling behind the rest of the world.
Speaker: And if they wanted not to be colonized and taken over like the rest of Asia, they needed to change internally.
Speaker: And it was called the Meiji Restoration.
Speaker: Britain needs its equivalent to the Meiji Restoration.
Speaker: We need to overthrow and do away with the old order in Whitehall.
Speaker: Sorry, I've got so into that.
Speaker: I've slightly lost track of your second question.
Speaker: Your second question was about taking full advantage of Brexit.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So in order to do that, as you know, we've heard Nigel Farage say multiple times that Britain needs to leave the ECHR.
Speaker: What was your opinion on that?
Speaker: Do you think that should be done?
Speaker: That's very much part of what I would call the British version of the Meiji Restoration, not only come out of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Speaker: We need to, for example, abolish the Judicial Appointments Commission, which has done so much to put in partisan, unfair and arbitrary and subjective judges into the judiciary, undermining confidence in the British system of justice, where people are incarcerated for long periods of time for posting obnoxious comments on Facebook.
Speaker: We need not only to...
Speaker: extricate ourselves from the ECHR.
Speaker: We need to overturn the judicial system.
Speaker: We need to abolish the so-called Supreme Court.
Speaker: We need the wholesale.
Speaker: You know, you've got that picture of president of Argentina, Millet, with his chainsaw.
Speaker: We need to do that to the British quango state, not just cut them out of government, but if necessary, take away their pensions, take away their perks, drive them out of public life.
Speaker: It's either that or we become a third world country.
Speaker: I mean, it's literally a matter of national survival, either like, you know, the Venetian Republic.
Speaker: We continue to be the plaything of a parasitic elite and we will eventually be destroyed and become a museum or we're a serious country.
Speaker: And if we're a serious country, we need to drive out of public life, the parasitic civil service and the administrative state that now run Britain for their own convenience.
Speaker: We need to think of it in those terms.
Speaker: Oh, yes.
Speaker: And this sort of quite nicely leads on to the Conservative Party.
Speaker: As pretty much all of our listeners would have seen, Kemi Badenowk in November was elected as the new leader of the Conservative Party.
Speaker: However, she sort of seemed, in my opinion, at least to lack a certain level of competency and leadership within the party because, you know, she hasn't really gotten any policies.
Speaker: The party seems to lack some direction.
Speaker: So, Douglas, what are your views on this?
Speaker: And do you think she has the ability to revolutionise government, as you're saying?
Speaker: I really hope she does.
Speaker: I really I'm I'm I'm maybe 4000 miles away, but I'm willing her on.
Speaker: I'm urging her on.
Speaker: You know, the future of the Western world is too important to allow preferences between Tweedledum and Tweedledee parties to get in the way.
Speaker: I I really want her to do well.
Speaker: But, you know, I'm not expecting her to come out with detailed policies.
Speaker: I wouldn't want her to come out with detailed policies now, but I would want her to articulate clear points of principle.
Speaker: If you listen to interviews of Margaret Thatcher in the late 1970s, she went into quite a lot of depth articulating her political philosophy.
Speaker: And that gave people a clear sense of what it was that they were supporting.
Speaker: it meant that when the pervading sense of national crisis in 1979 became a thing, she had credibility.
Speaker: I would like to see Kemi Bedendoc elaborate in quite a lot of detail what her pervading sense of philosophy is.
Speaker: Now, she said some very good things on identity politics, but I'm not sure that cuts it.
Speaker: We also need to see if her principles and her instincts are right on identity
Speaker: a whole range of other things.
Speaker: Of course, Margaret Thatcher needed to revitalize the country economically.
Speaker: Badendocq's challenge, I think, is even greater.
Speaker: It's a cultural and a demographic renaissance that is needed.
Speaker: Margaret Thatcher had to deal with the idea of socialism, the idea that a small elite were better at planning the economy.
Speaker: Badendoc needs to take on as well, in addition to that, the idea that all cultures are of equal worth, because what is so debilitating to Britain and the Western world at the moment is not just the expansion of the administrative state into economic spheres of life, but the idea embedded within the administrative state and public academia that all cultures are of equal worth when they're not.
Speaker: And cultural relativism is at the root cause of so much of Western malaise.
Speaker: We need to see
Speaker: If we have a leader, hopefully Camille, if not that, perhaps Nigel, perhaps Jenrick, someone else, the West, and particularly Britain, needs to produce leaders who are able to outline clearly and succinctly what it is about cultural relativism that has been so toxic, what is so wrong about it, and why we need to take a stand and insist upon people living in Britain recognising
Speaker: the better way of life that is the Western way of life and the superiority of Western rationalism over and above other creeds that, frankly, are, you know, not conducive to Western success.
Speaker: I'll put it that way.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So following on from that, how would you, if let's say tomorrow you are prime minister, how would you attack the civil service?
Speaker: Because we've we've heard a lot about that.
Speaker: I personally am going to say I don't know a lot about the civil services, actual rights.
Speaker: to do, but I don't think a lot of people actually know what they do do.
Speaker: So how would you attack it?
Speaker: Would you go sort of a libertarian way of just getting rid of it?
Speaker: I mean, let me, by anecdote, let me give you an example.
Speaker: I was appointed to be a non-executive director of the Board of Trade to help oversee some of the free trade agreements that Britain negotiated with the wider world.
Speaker: And there's been some success in doing so.
Speaker: Britain has very successfully concluded an agreement with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, for example, a
Speaker: a treaty that I think will become of growing significance with the passage of time.
Speaker: But again and again and again, from my perch as a non-executive director, I would see civil servants with no mandate to do so,
Speaker: steering the direction of the discussions in a clearly ideological and partisan way.
Speaker: It was almost impossible to impress upon the civil servants responsible for these negotiations that making it easier for people to import things to the UK was a win for the UK.
Speaker: They had an almost mercantilist view of trade, like a medieval monarch,
Speaker: They regarded exports as good and imports as a sign of weakness.
Speaker: The precise opposite of what Adam Smith teaches us.
Speaker: And it was almost impossible to get them to see any differently.
Speaker: I would find myself in discussions with civil servants gently asking them why it was that in free trade negotiations there was a chapter on women's rights and why there was a chapter on sustainability.
Speaker: It was they, the civil servants, who decided that a free trade agreement, which should basically be about the removal of tariffs and the acceptance of common standards, had to include basically an agenda you would find more often in the pages of The Guardian.
Speaker: So that taught me that the leftist mindset of the civil service is very embedded, very pervasive, and very difficult to actually confront.
Speaker: If I, as a non-executive director at the Department of Trade, with the ear of the minister, couldn't get them to shift direction,
Speaker: What chance have we got of getting them to abandon leftist ideas on immigration, on border control, on managing the economy, on interest rates, on the role of central banks, on multiculturalism, on a whole range of areas?
Speaker: So I think we need to realize that the civil service is not going to get better just because you elect a new government and the civil service promises to be good.
Speaker: You need a wholesale deconstruction of the civil service.
Speaker: This means you need to be able to fire the senior civil servants, appoint people.
Speaker: You need a system of accountability through parliament.
Speaker: You need government departments and quangos to have to annually appear before the House of Commons in order to get their budgets.
Speaker: You need to rewrite the ministerial code and the civil service code so you can frankly
Speaker: Treat civil servants who don't perform the way that in the private sector, the CEO of a company accountable to his shareholders would deal with middle management who defied their instructions.
Speaker: So you need this far reaching transformation.
Speaker: of the UK civil service.
Speaker: Incidentally, you need a civil service that no longer appoints people on the basis of diversity hires and actually starts to appoint people because they're good at the job.
Speaker: Take, for example, the British Foreign Office, once an esteemed institution for years now, it has appointed people on the basis of diversity criteria.
Speaker: And I would say as a consequence, we have a pretty third-rate amateurish diplomatic core as a direct consequence.
Speaker: We need to undo all of this nonsense.
Speaker: It will be difficult.
Speaker: It will require people with a stomach for the fight.
Speaker: It will require people to say things, as I'm saying to you, unfiltered, without deference to social niceties.
Speaker: It will require officials to be prepared to do this.
Speaker: Now, you said if I was prime minister,
Speaker: If I was prime minister, I wouldn't take the job.
Speaker: If the king was to ask me to form a government, I wouldn't take the job unless I had the orders in council that I had brought with me signed by him.
Speaker: I would use the orders in council that the king signs before taking office
Speaker: to enable me to dismiss key civil servants, to fire permanent secretaries, and to dismantle entire Whitehall departments at the swish of a pen.
Speaker: You need that sort of preparation for government because if you walk into...
Speaker: Downing Street, with the permanent secretary there setting out your diary and your agenda, if you allow that to happen, you're lost, you're doomed, you're finished.
Speaker: You've got to go in there and you take control and you decide who is going to be a permanent secretary and who is not.
Speaker: You decide the contents of your inbox.
Speaker: It's that important.
Speaker: Day one, you have to have those orders in council.
Speaker: Now, I started doing some preparation on this, thinking naively that in
Speaker: late 2019, we would have a majority that allowed us to do this.
Speaker: History would be very different if we had had a reformist government then.
Speaker: Sadly, Boris, who wanted to be Churchill, turned out to be a version of Mr. Bean.
Speaker: We're going to have to wait for our latter-day Churchill for a while, I think.
Speaker: I think what you're saying there is really interesting because it reminds me of an MP who's quite local to where I live, Dominic Raab.
Speaker: And Raab had these allegations of bullying.
Speaker: But the key takeaway, I remember him saying, was just as you said.
Speaker: And it was that the civil service has got too much power.
Speaker: They're far too opinionated.
Speaker: And they're just sort of, they're stuck in their old ways.
Speaker: They can't adapt.
Speaker: I mean,
Speaker: Rob was a straw in the wind of what was to come.
Speaker: He was, in effect, drummed out of office, not quite drummed out of office.
Speaker: He was put on the back foot repeatedly by the machine working against him on trumped-up charges.
Speaker: Sure, he was a little mean to people.
Speaker: He didn't suffer fools gladly, and he was surrounded by a lot of fools in the civil service, people who he gave clear instructions to not following through on those instructions.
Speaker: And occasionally, he probably spoke to them in a rather blunt and rude way.
Speaker: But
Speaker: If you're running a big organization, you should be free to talk to people in that way if they don't do what you say.
Speaker: That's how the world works.
Speaker: Raab was not guilty of anything other than trying to get civil servants who refused to do what he was instructing them to do to do it.
Speaker: He wasn't actually treated quite so badly as Boris Johnson.
Speaker: Boris Johnson was literally removed from office.
Speaker: by civil servants, Sue Gray and others, who engineered to oust him from office for allegedly eating a birthday cake or not eating a birthday cake at an event that may or may not have been an office party.
Speaker: But part of me also thought, karma, karma to you, Boris Johnson.
Speaker: You know, some of us offered you a blueprint of how to reform the civil service code and the ministerial code and make sure that people like Sue Gray didn't sit there in judgment of you.
Speaker: Boy, you should have listened to us because that might have saved you, well, it might have saved you your job.
Speaker: Sadly, both Raab and Boris were undermined from within.
Speaker: I think another great example of this is probably Liz Truss.
Speaker: I mean, I think Liz Truss certainly had the right instincts of getting rid of a dreadful man called Tom Scholar, who was a Mandarin in the Treasury.
Speaker: But I think she showed that she didn't go far enough.
Speaker: It's not just one or two permanent secretaries that need to be removed.
Speaker: she ought to have removed the governor of the Bank of England.
Speaker: She ought to have systematically used orders in council signed before she formed a government to systematically root out civil servants who think that they have a greater right to determine public policy than those that the British people elect.
Speaker: So you've said that you were raised in Uganda and now live in the US.
Speaker: So could you tell us a bit what you do in the US now and what is the Mississippi Center for Public Policy?
Speaker: I try and advance the cause of freedom and liberty.
Speaker: Having grown up in a country run by a dictator, Idi Amin, I got from a very early age a sense that if people are left to pursue their own interests, if people are free, they flourish.
Speaker: If they are denied freedom, economic and political freedom, they stagnate.
Speaker: I saw that as a child growing up very visibly.
Speaker: So my great cause is that of freedom and liberty.
Speaker: To use the phrase of Ronald Reagan, it's lifted our species from the swamp to the stars.
Speaker: I think that America really is the citadel of freedom and liberty.
Speaker: If Britain falls tyranny to the European Union or to Keir Starmer, it will eventually, I think, so long as there's an American example to follow, swing back.
Speaker: But if the United States becomes a sort of extension of California or a North American version of France, then I think the lights really do go out in the Western world.
Speaker: Most of the great innovations that have happened in my lifetime have been innovations produced by English-speaking people overwhelmingly in the United States.
Speaker: We need to keep the essence of American exceptionalism alive.
Speaker: We need to ensure that America remains true to the traditions established in that courthouse in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787.
Speaker: I'm trying to do that here in a part of Mississippi, sorry, a part of the southern United States, Mississippi, because I'm basically banking on the future of conservatism in America having a southern twang.
Speaker: If conservatism in America has a future, it will be in the South.
Speaker: The Southern United States is the economic center of the country.
Speaker: It's where businesses are moving to.
Speaker: We famously know that, for example, Musk moved Tesla and Twitter from California to Texas.
Speaker: I think just today, Zuckerberg,
Speaker: announced that he was essentially moving a large part of Facebook from California to the South.
Speaker: The Southern US, I think, is the example of how to run society successfully, low tax deregulation.
Speaker: And we're pushing to achieve that here.
Speaker: We've already had a big win on income tax.
Speaker: We're moving to eliminate the state income tax completely.
Speaker: We're now down to a flat 4%.
Speaker: George Osborne, when I was a member of parliament, promised to have a flat income tax.
Speaker: He promised that until he became a chancellor, at which point he promptly abandoned the idea.
Speaker: If we had a flat income tax in Britain, we would be far more competitive.
Speaker: We have a flat income tax now here in Mississippi.
Speaker: We're on the way towards eventual elimination.
Speaker: We've had a radical deregulation of the labor market and something that Europe and Britain in particular could do.
Speaker: It's having a transformative effect.
Speaker: I think as a consequence of that, Amazon has just announced a 12 billion, 12 billion and not million, 12 billion investment a few miles up the road from where I am.
Speaker: huge amounts of inward investment.
Speaker: In fact, Mississippi now has the third fastest growing per capita GDP of any state in the United States.
Speaker: Having been poor for as long as anyone can remember, Mississippi's per capita GDP has not only now overtaken that of the UK, it will this year overtake that of Germany.
Speaker: I think this shows that free market, low tax deregulation reforms like the ones we're introducing here in Mississippi
Speaker: They work anywhere.
Speaker: If you want to get rich like Mississippi, number one, recognize if you're watching this in Europe that Mississippi is richer than you.
Speaker: Number two, try and do what we do here in Mississippi.
Speaker: Deregulate, let people lead their own lives, quit trying to tell them what to do.
Speaker: have conservatives who actually believe in reining back government control.
Speaker: That's what we're doing here in Mississippi.
Speaker: I'd be more than happy to advise people in Britain and Europe how to do it.
Speaker: I have to say, if I was in the UK, I probably would have had policemen knocking on my door, threatening me with arrest for what I post on social media.
Speaker: I don't want to live my life like that anymore.
Speaker: I can speak and think freely here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Speaker: I hope that Britain becomes a little bit more like America.
Speaker: I would think it would be a shame if America would become more like Europe.
Speaker: Yeah, and I was actually recently on your Twitter, Douglas, and I did see that sort of infographic you had pinned.
Speaker: And it quite surprised me, to be brutally honest, that Mississippi was so successful because I had this idea of it being one of the poorer states in the United States.
Speaker: However, it's proved clearly with the Mississippi Center for Public Policy to be successful.
Speaker: I think it'd be immodest of me to take credit, but I play a small part in trying to push this agenda.
Speaker: We've got a great governor who believes in low tax.
Speaker: What's really interesting, though, is that when you engage conservatives in Mississippi about tax cuts or deregulation or school choice,
Speaker: They don't treat you as a maverick in the tea rooms the way I was treated for 12 years.
Speaker: If you believe in national sovereignty like I did over Brexit, you don't find yourself marginalized.
Speaker: You don't have your children asked to leave private schools like happened to me in London.
Speaker: If you believe in conservative things in this state, conservatives say, great, how can we make it happen?
Speaker: What can we do to build on these ideas?
Speaker: That's the key difference.
Speaker: Boy,
Speaker: Britain needs to make sure it has some authentic conservatives.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I mean, yeah, your reference there to freedom of speech is time and time again, just being brought up in the UK.
Speaker: I mean, figures like Toby Young, he was recently worried about if he'd be cancelled again with his Lord's appointment.
Speaker: But do you see a sort of divide forming in the United States between more conservative states like Mississippi and then more Democrat states, perhaps those in the North?
Speaker: I mean, I think it's interesting, isn't it?
Speaker: Clearly, America has 50 different models, and they talk about this often, to use the cliche, as a laboratory of different states.
Speaker: Undoubtedly, the conservative low-tax, low-regulation model is winning.
Speaker: I think you're going to start to see, and you're beginning to start to see signs of other states looking at what the South is doing and having to copy.
Speaker: It takes a lot for a politician in office to say, hey, we got this wrong.
Speaker: We need to learn from Texas.
Speaker: Boy, Texans have a swagger as it is.
Speaker: No one wants to admit that they need to follow the Texas or the Mississippi model.
Speaker: But you're beginning to start to see that, particularly with crime, actually.
Speaker: I think this is an area where the dial is beginning to move.
Speaker: For a long time, Democrat voting states had this sort of mad view about crime and they fell for the whole kind of Black Lives Matter shtick that, you know, the police were over militarized and, you know, you just need to be a bit more kumbaya, touchy feely to criminals and all would be well.
Speaker: You're starting to see Democrats in Democrat voting states adopting policies that frankly are conservative.
Speaker: I think it's only a matter of time
Speaker: You know, here in Mississippi, when we cut the state income tax to a flat 4%,
Speaker: The neighboring state set theirs at 3.9%, and they deliberately did that just to be a fraction lower.
Speaker: Other northern states are going to have to copy that.
Speaker: So you're beginning to see the effects of this competition.
Speaker: But the genius of the American system, and I hope that actually America gets through this idea of extreme partisanship, the genius of America is that before too long, you're going to get rock-solid Democrat voting parts of the Northeast implementing essentially conservative policy.
Speaker: So, yeah, I mean, America has this this quirk.
Speaker: It's got a two party system.
Speaker: But actually, you know, if the traditional sensible centre right Democrat.
Speaker: tradition, revives, ditches all this kind of woke extremist nonsense, abandons cultural relativism and becomes once again, and it's a good week to say this because Jimmy Carter is being buried this week.
Speaker: If the Democrats rediscover the traditions of Jimmy Carter and actually, dare I say, Bill Clinton, I'm actually, I shouldn't say this too loud, but I'm quite a fan of Bill Clinton.
Speaker: Then, you know, I think you'll start to see Democrat voting states doing sensible things.
Speaker: This is the genius of the American system.
Speaker: So coming almost to an end, obviously the USA has now got a new president, President Trump, who's going to be confirmed in about 13 days from when we're recording this episode.
Speaker: So how do you think he will perform in his second term now?
Speaker: Do you think he'll be better than in his first?
Speaker: Or do you think he'll have some more problems?
Speaker: Who knows?
Speaker: I mean, today I was listening to him talking about wanting to...
Speaker: by Greenland.
Speaker: I assumed it was a kind of a Twitter gag, a Twitter meme.
Speaker: And it may still be a joke.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: But I suddenly thought to myself, maybe he means it.
Speaker: He was talking about Canada becoming an American state.
Speaker: Maybe he means it.
Speaker: I don't quite know what to expect.
Speaker: I don't know anyone who does.
Speaker: I think there's been a vibe shift in America.
Speaker: where for years and years and years you had politicians talking in very scripted, measured, soundbitey ways, ways that were very intentional but intentionally deceptive because they allowed different audiences to hear what the politician triangulating wanted them to hear.
Speaker: I think part of Trump's attraction is that he talks unfiltered.
Speaker: But I'm not quite sure what his priorities are going to be.
Speaker: If he sticks to what he was talking about before the election, school choice, tax cuts, and I think most significantly of all, returning power away from the federal government back to the states, getting rid of the Department of the Environment, getting rid of the Department of Education, then I'm very optimistic.
Speaker: But I do sometimes wonder that maybe he'll go off on a tangent about Greenland.
Speaker: And I'm just...
Speaker: I don't know where that will take us.
Speaker: And Elon Musk is proving to be quite an influential figure now in not only US but UK politics.
Speaker: To what extent do you think Elon Musk will play a part?
Speaker: Do you think he'll just be there because he's rich or be there because Trump actually appreciates him?
Speaker: Just stop and think about it for a second.
Speaker: This is a guy who, if he had just built the most successful electric car company in the world, would be up there with Henry Ford.
Speaker: If he had built the most successful satellite distribution network that renders redundant most broadband infrastructure,
Speaker: you would think, wow, what an amazing man.
Speaker: But the fact is, he's done all of that in order to get enough money to try to colonize Mars.
Speaker: I mean, wow.
Speaker: And then as a side hustle, he has bought Twitter and undone the sort of counter-reformation of the elite who, you know, when the digital revolution
Speaker: Revolution came along and opinion forming was democratized, then tried to use algorithms to control what people could and couldn't say.
Speaker: That sort of counter reformation reached its height during the COVID lockdowns.
Speaker: Musk then comes along and having upended various industries and created entirely new industries.
Speaker: He then blows apart the media industry by finally showing journalists what it is they should have been doing all along by giving us unfiltered facts about what's going on in the world rather than the bogus phony narrative we've been fed for years.
Speaker: So, I mean, I'm a huge fan of Musk.
Speaker: Now, don't get me wrong.
Speaker: I sometimes send out a slightly cranky tweet late at night and I kind of think to myself, maybe I shouldn't have said that.
Speaker: I think he probably does that even more than I do.
Speaker: But I think he's a force for good.
Speaker: And I think he's... In every generation, you get a handful of geniuses.
Speaker: You had in Italy an extraordinary random gathering of geniuses that painted the Sistine Chapel and designed some of the greatest buildings we've ever seen.
Speaker: You had...
Speaker: a collection of geniuses in Britain at the time of the Industrial Revolution.
Speaker: I think Musk is up there with Michelangelo.
Speaker: He's one of those world historic geniuses.
Speaker: His genius is not to paint things.
Speaker: His genius is to create innovation and change through innovation.
Speaker: I think he's a force for good.
Speaker: Now, who knows if he's going to have a bust up with Trump?
Speaker: You know, when people of character and ego get together, sometimes they get along, sometimes they don't.
Speaker: I don't think it really matters.
Speaker: Musk setting Twitter free has already had a knock-on effect.
Speaker: Facebook has abandoned its Nick Clegg-inspired attempt at doctoring what we do and don't say.
Speaker: You know, the genie can't be put back in the bottle now.
Speaker: Musk has transformed the world for better through his acquisition of Twitter.
Speaker: I don't think people in Britain will ever again be prepared to accept the fantasy narratives that
Speaker: that all cultures are of equal worth and that mass immigration is an unalloyed good and that Britain should be ashamed of her past.
Speaker: These narratives that we've had foisted upon us by a small old establishment elite at the BBC, people are never going to accept that again.
Speaker: It's going to be wonderful to watch as this democratic revolution unfolds.
Speaker: But I think we should all thank Musk for,
Speaker: Thank goodness for what he does.
Speaker: Thank goodness for him highlighting the failures of British politicians.
Speaker: Thank goodness for him for focusing on some of the big macro issues like birth rates, which no one else is willing to talk about.
Speaker: I'm a huge fan.
Speaker: I think the world owes him a lot.
Speaker: Weirdly, and don't tell anyone I said this because it might upset some of my Republican friends, but I suspect Musk will be a bigger world historic figure than any politician or any occupant of the White House in my lifetime.
Speaker: So the last question for me before we finish is, we've just gone into 2025.
Speaker: If you could pick the best world leader for 2024 and then one world leader to watch out for in 2025, who would they be?
Speaker: It could be Pierre, what's his name?
Speaker: Polyvair.
Speaker: I may have mispronounced that.
Speaker: The Canadian guy.
Speaker: Now, don't get me wrong.
Speaker: He may, in office, turn out to be a disappointment.
Speaker: Actually, I don't think so.
Speaker: I think in his... I mean, he's got that thing kind of... Do you know what I mean by geek chic?
Speaker: He's slightly nerdy, but he's got geek chic.
Speaker: There's that really amazing clip of him eating the apple.
Speaker: He's got that nerdy mastery of detail.
Speaker: But because of that, he's got credibility.
Speaker: He doesn't use angry words, but he's got this incredible mastery of phrases.
Speaker: I listened to him the other day on a podcast with Jordan Peterson, and I thought, wow, I wish I had someone like this that I could vote for.
Speaker: I would watch him.
Speaker: I think he is going to turn out to be something really special.
Speaker: you know, let's wait and see.
Speaker: But Canada could be about to produce the best conservative leader since Thatcher.
Speaker: I hope so.
Speaker: But let's wait and see.
Speaker: And best world leader of 2024?
Speaker: I don't think we've really got one.
Speaker: I mean, I think probably, I'm not trying to be clever here, but I forget his name, the
Speaker: The Indian prime minister guy who died, he was out of office some while ago.
Speaker: I mean, I think he was probably the best.
Speaker: In terms of elevating the lives of homo sapiens, humans, I think...
Speaker: he probably achieved more than pretty much anyone.
Speaker: You know, I forget his name.
Speaker: Singh, was it Singh?
Speaker: You know, I think he is probably the most significant world leader in the news in 2024, sadly, because he died.
Speaker: But, you know, I just, in the Anglosphere, I just don't really see any...
Speaker: credible leaders right now, which is why I'm hopeful that Pierre Polivare will do well.
Speaker: I mean, I'll be honest, if I was in Germany, I think I would vote for the AFD.
Speaker: Now, that might come as a shock to people who spend too much time on the London dinner party circuit or is it the Epson dinner party circuit?
Speaker: I'm not sure.
Speaker: But I just don't see any credible figures in the traditional conservative right in Europe.
Speaker: So I, you know, I, because the conservative movement has failed to produce people like Pierre Polyver, I would, I would look to people like Alice Watson.
Speaker: But, you know, half your audience has probably reached for the off button by now for me having said that.
Speaker: I know, but I can assure one thing, and that is I think people definitely have enjoyed listening from you today.
Speaker: And that message you really, that message you preached of deregulation, revolutionising, is something that we are seeing emerge in the world today and emerge to be successful.
Speaker: And so thank you a lot, Douglas, for coming on.
Speaker: Well, I hope I've given you some food for thought.
Speaker: Not everyone may agree with me, but if you think you can do it better without freedom and liberty, well, good luck.
Speaker: I'm not sure it can be done.
Speaker: Thank you so much.
Speaker: Really enjoyed it.
Speaker: Thank you very much.
Speaker: And again, absolutely fantastic.
Speaker: Even if some people do agree or don't agree, this is the beauty of this podcast.
Speaker: They can have their own opinion.
Speaker: I hope I've triggered all the right people.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Thank you.
