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All aboard the far-right bandwagon, with Tom Slater
12 Plays1 minute ago
Keir Starmer's latest U-turn may be his most consequential. Last Saturday, he announced a national inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal. Will it be a vehicle for justice, and a long overdue reckoning for multiculturalism and mass-migration? Or will it be just another pointless political excuse-fest?
To help Will understand the latest developments in this shocking story, he is joined by the editor of Spiked, Tom Slater.
Follow Will Kingston and Fire at Will on social media here.
Read The Spectator Australia here.
Read Spiked here.
Listen to Last Orders here.
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Transcript
Keir Starmer and the Grooming Gang Scandal
00:00:19
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Fire at Will. I'm Will Kingston. I was on air when the story broke on Saturday evening that Keir Starmer was U-turning on his decision not to hold a national inquiry into the grooming gang's scandal.
00:00:36
Speaker
It has, of course, been a source of national shame for the United Kingdom. For decades, young, predominantly working class British girls have been raped and many cases killed by predominantly Pakistani Muslim men.
00:00:54
Speaker
And these
Public Awareness and Multiculturalism
00:00:55
Speaker
atrocities have been in many cases ignored by a political establishment, by a media class and by police forces that were too scared of the consequences of being called racist.
00:01:08
Speaker
When I was on there, it felt like a watershed moment. Perhaps finally a reckoning was coming, not just about the grooming gang scandal, but a broader conversation that needs to be had in this country around multiculturalism, around the rise of Islam, and around the mass migration that has underpinned both of those phenomena.
00:01:29
Speaker
Then i went out to dinner with a friend last night. She's an otherwise well-informed lady in her late twenty s And when I said what I've just told you now, the first thing she said was, well, what are the grooming gangs?
00:01:43
Speaker
It made me think that we are living in many cases in very different countries, in very different worlds. Will this, in fact, be a reckoning when still there hasn't been for many people this problem um even on the radar?
Overview of the Grooming Gang Scandal
00:01:58
Speaker
To help me understand the grooming gang scandal and then the rise of the Islamic theocracy of the United Kingdom more generally, I'm delighted to be joined by the editor of Spiked, one of my very favorite publications, Tom Slater. Tom, welcome Fire at Will.
00:02:14
Speaker
Thanks for having Will. Appreciate it. Pleasure to have you on. We're continuing the tradition of the podcasting circle jerk, having having been a a guest on Last Orders recently.
00:02:25
Speaker
I didn't think I'd have to ask you the the prefacing question, but after my dinner last night, obviously, I do have to ask you the prefacing question. Give me the high-level view of what is the grooming gang scandal and where are we now in na respect to the events that have occurred recently?
00:02:40
Speaker
No, mean, it's for those who might not have been as aware of it. i mean, this is a horrific scandal. It's really called into question all layers of officialdom in society, which has been going on for now for 25 years. As you say, in the early 2000s, there were already these reports starting to surface.
00:02:56
Speaker
often in working class areas the North and the Midlands, that you had gangs of predominantly, then it was referred to as Asian. In time, it became clear that it was predominantly Pakistani Muslim men who were preying upon girls ages 10 to 15, sometimes younger, sometimes older.
00:03:12
Speaker
and the And the pattern of offences is often being very similar, operating in groups, plying these girls with drugs, convincing them that they're their boyfriends, and then essentially pimping them out to all kinds of members of their family or friendship groups and so on.
00:03:26
Speaker
And that this was really going on on an industrial scale.
Government and Media Response
00:03:29
Speaker
It didn't really take, and it we took around till about 2010, 2011, when it came much more to public consciousness. You had a reporter at the Times called Andrew Norfolk, who did a series of exposés on this and got a lot of flack for doing so.
00:03:42
Speaker
But even then, these stories started to reappear, continue to reappear, I should say. And there was still this kind of culture of looking the other way. Best you could say that you would have a scandal that would erupt, whether it was in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, Oxfordshire, Bristol, the list goes on and on.
00:03:58
Speaker
And people would talk about it for a day or so and then things would move on. The reason it's come to a point now, of course, is that the government was effectively shamed into looking at this more closely back in January. Elon Musk had started to make a lot of noise about this issue, having kind of suddenly discovered it.
00:04:13
Speaker
And it really put Keir Starmer on the back foot, not least because he was Director of Public Prosecutions, our kind of Chief Prosecutor in the UK for a number of years at the height of this scandal. And so Starn was shamed into, first of all, saying that there was going to be some local inquiries into this. That was seen as insufficient. There was this audit, which Baroness Casey was um set to do, which has been published this week, which has brought it back all into attention. She's basically found that according to her view, we do need national inquiry because there are so many questions which are unanswered around the scale of the offending and around how much it was covered up by local authorities, police and so on, who have already got a pretty good sense, decided to look the other way and not investigate properly for fear of rocking the boat where, quote unquote, race relations are concerned. So it does feel like a watershed moment, certainly for the Labour Party, who six months ago were referring to those calling for a national inquiry as jumping on a far right bandwagon.
Labour's Shift and Ethnicity Data
00:05:04
Speaker
But as you say, there's still a long way to go in terms of this issue really being reckoned with and the victims actually properly receiving justice. Have you had a chance to have a look at that Casey report? Absolutely. And just ah it's worth talking through a bit of it because it's quite clear from a lot of the coverage, certainly from the kind of liberal left media that they haven't really bothered to look at it at all.
00:05:23
Speaker
The number one finding that I think comes clear as day is obviously aside from the victims being horrendously failed. and when we're talking about easily thousands and thousands of victims here who have been the subjects of these vile crimes and then failed by the criminal justice system, the top line finding is essentially that there has been insufficient data which has been collected on a national level to be able to talk very clearly about the profile, particularly the perpetrators.
00:05:48
Speaker
All that being said, what has become clear is that where ethnicity data, which has always been the kind of hot potato in this debate, has been collected, she talked specifically about Greater Manchester, about South Yorkshire West Yorkshire, memory serves, there is a clear disproportion in relation to perpetrators marked down as either Asian, but more likely Pakistani.
00:06:08
Speaker
I think in Greater Manchester, they made up about 20% of the population there, but 50% of the perpetrators of this very specific form of child sexual exploitation. And yet there have been many people in the media who haven't even digested that information and and are trying to suggest that the case of review says that we don't know either way, which is not quite what she is saying. So that's a kind of clear, fundamental insight that we've seen there.
00:06:30
Speaker
The lack of data, the lack of seriousness, the wooliness of the Some of the laws in this area are also called into question. You know, a lot of this stuff we did kind of know already. Every time there's been a localized investigation into what went wrong with the grooming gang scandal, not just the offenses themselves, but the cover-ups that we've seen time and again, you see exactly the same picture in Telford, in Oxfordshire, in Greater Manchester, which is that you had these young girls who were often, sometimes it's a bit of a misnomer to refer to them as working class, very poor, often in care, learning disabilities, the most genuinely vulnerable people in society you could imagine,
00:07:04
Speaker
who were abducted, abused in this way. And then in the occasions that they would actually go and try to raise this with the authorities of the council or so on, they were effectively treated like child prostitutes, that they were dismissed as sort of drug-addled slags. And then on the flip side of that,
00:07:21
Speaker
when it came to the perpetrators, very explicitly, and you see this in all those localised reports I just mentioned, there was a very clear it sense expressed at the council level and in the police that to pursue these crimes too forcefully risked a race riot, as it put it in one particular report, risked accusations of racism being flung at the police, which they've been particularly sensitive to ever since the Stephen Lawrence scandal in the nineteen ninety s And that that therefore paralyzed them. And I think the overall picture that we've seen, although this audit doesn't touch on this area of it, the National Inquiry may will, is that time and again, local authorities and police were given a choice between polishing the reputation of multiculturalism
00:08:01
Speaker
and saving the most vulnerable children in society from rape. And they chose the former in every single case, it seems like. And that's really at the heart of
Multiculturalism vs. Real Issues
00:08:09
Speaker
this scandal. Yes, it's a question about the disproportion or not of the perpetrators in relation to different demographics in society. That's obviously something we shouldn't shy away from talking about.
00:08:18
Speaker
But the one thing, all of these scandals that have made the news over the past you know, more than two two decades now. The thing that they have in common is that they were ignored because in those cases, the perpetrators happened to come from a particular community and the police and the local authorities were worried about rocking the boat. So that's really at the heart of this scandal, I think.
00:08:36
Speaker
Yeah, when i when I look at this story, but also when I look at, say, the way that the illegal boats crisis is covered, the way that I look at the various types of civil unrest that you're starting to see pop up in the United Kingdom, there is that thread, which is that facts are often secondary to trying to maintain a narrative around the success of a multicultural society.
00:08:59
Speaker
And often that narrative is increasingly at odds with reality. So we'll get back to that. But before we do, I want to go to that top line finding of the report that you mentioned, which is the failure or in some instances, just the indifference towards collecting ethnicity data in these crimes.
00:09:15
Speaker
Now, I've heard several arguments as to why that hasn't happened or it shouldn't happen. And in some cases I've heard, well, it just doesn't matter. The color of your skin does not dictate how you, you know, whether you are more or less likely to commit crimes.
00:09:30
Speaker
I've heard the argument that you referred to that this says that it would be dangerous to release this information because you will lead to rioting. I've heard several arguments to why this is why this is the case. Why does ethnicity data matter? Why should we be collecting this as opposed to just saying, you know what, it doesn't matter whether you're white, you're brown, you're Asian, you're whatever, the crime is the crime and ethnicity is is not relevant.
00:09:53
Speaker
I think definitely so two sides to this, one of which is the fact that in a way, many of these local councils were not blind to ethnicity. They just happened not to record it. They chose not to investigate these crimes because they saw who the finger was being pointed at and they ran scared.
00:10:07
Speaker
So there's a weird sort of way in which they have been very ethnicity conscious. It's just they've done so in such a way that it's meant those crimes haven't been investigated. So you're right. I mean, if we were in a in a world in which, you know, the the the reason these Crimes weren't properly investigated. but' not a lack of ethnicity data. If anything, it was a quite clear cowardice built off of political correctness or whatever else you might want it to be named
Cultural Factors and Ethnicity
00:10:28
Speaker
as. In terms of why it's important, I think, in terms of getting a grip of this scandal, first of all, because it's quite clear that there have been failings depending on what the identity the perpetrator is. I think we're in a horrendous situation where
00:10:39
Speaker
within the kind of identity politics intersectional world that we now live in, in which just as there's a hierarchy of victims, there's also a kind of hierarchy of perpetrators. If there are certain people who are committing certain crimes for whatever reason, that it becomes, it it doesn't do to say that, it doesn't do to acknowledge it, to maybe wonder if there's something going on with a particular community, whether that's culturally, whether that's just geographically in a particular area that needs to be addressed. I think that needs to be looked at.
00:11:04
Speaker
I think particularly given that we've had 25 years of shouting down and gaslighting where this issue is concerned, it's almost more important than it has been in other areas that we get to grips with this. I think that, and Dame Louise Casey has made this point in herself very forcefully, is that what's fascinating about the grooming gang's cover-up, the refusal to talk about it openly, the refusal to collect this data, the shouting down of anyone who might point to certain disproportions in the data that we have and so on, is that it was always implicitly or explicitly done.
00:11:34
Speaker
to the ends of trying to soothe race relations to try and make sure that this issue couldn't be hijacked by the hard right. It seems to me that it's precisely that approach which has had the opposite intended effect.
00:11:47
Speaker
You've created a situation which there is genuine tensions within many of the communities which have been ripped apart by this horrific abuse. And also you have created a situation where it's changed now, but there was certainly a time when the only people who were willing to talk about this were the people with genuinely nefarious racist agendas who really did want to suggest that all Muslims are like this, or all Pakistanis are like this, or all Asians are like this.
00:12:10
Speaker
So it was precisely that conspiracy of silence which allowed the room for the genuine bad actors to hijack this issue as it so often talks about and and and run with it. So it's it's important, I think, for all kinds of different levels for getting into grips with what you know the patterns of abuse, how you might tackle it, where it might be coming from, but also to get us over this period in which, if anything, the desire to suppress this debate and this information has inflamed tensions rather than salved them, if you like.
00:12:41
Speaker
Yeah, that desire to suppress information from the public is interesting. To me, it feels like almost a contempt for the people that you are governing.
Suppression of Information and Public Trust
00:12:49
Speaker
It says, you are too stupid, you are too emotional, you are too racist or bigoted to be able to handle the truth, you know to use the immortal Jack Nicholson line.
00:12:58
Speaker
you know Is that what it comes down to? Is it a fundamental mistrust of the people on behalf of the elite class? but Absolutely. And I think it's a fundamental distrust of the whole spectrum of the British public. I mean, in those local reports and inquiries that we're talking about, where they talk very explicitly about we're worried a race right will kick off.
00:13:18
Speaker
There is this tendency on behalf of officialdom to think of the white working class in particular, as basically a pogrom waiting to explode, like all you have to do is talk too openly, even about very real crimes which are being committed, and they will suddenly just go and beat up the first Asian person they find. It's that kind of contempt, that racist caricature, which is certainly part of the picture here.
00:13:40
Speaker
I think you could equally say there's a deep contempt for British Pakistanis. There is this assumption that a vast majority of them are essentially pro-Basani. paedophile, they're pro-grooming gang. If you dare go after the people who are engaging in that horrendous behaviour at the margins of their own community, that that will upset them in some way, shape or form. that you There is no way to potentially you know bring them with us. it You see this reflected in the Islamism conversation, all kinds of different ones where Again, the kind of desire to tiptoe around, say, the British Muslim or specifically here, the British Pakistani Muslim community betrays a kind of prejudice all of its own.
00:14:15
Speaker
So I think shot through all of this, as it is in so many of our discussions today, is fear and loathing of the public, by which I mean the full spread of the public, if you like, demographically. That point there that this actually represents a contempt not just towards, say, the Anglo-English community, but also British-Pakistani community is another thing which I think is worth mentioning. And I think there's probably an uncomfortable truth here that a lot of people really struggle to grapple with.
00:14:43
Speaker
And that is, does the colour of your skin inherently make you more or less likely to commit a sexual offence? Of course it doesn't. We all know that. And similarly, is average british British Pakistani person a criminal in this regard?
00:14:55
Speaker
Again, of course not. It's a tiny minority of people. But the uncomfortable truth is that, a in many cases, ethnicity is correlated with culture, which again is, I think, another reason why that collection of ethnic data is is probably, sorry, is important.
00:15:11
Speaker
But also, on a per capita level, we now know that there is a significant over-representation of British Pakistani men who are committing these crimes. More broadly, we know that, I think, from what I saw recently, if you are an Afghan migrant in the United Kingdom, you are 22 times more likely to commit sexual offences.
00:15:31
Speaker
In Gerritreans, it's something like 20 times more likely. so How do you grapple with this uncomfortable truth that whilst we recognize that that that ethnicity does not mean you are necessarily you know a criminal as such, but at the same time we know that there is an over-representation of these particular ethnic groups in these crimes? And what do you do with that information?
00:15:56
Speaker
I mean, what you do with that information is that you try and work out why. And you look at that without fear of where that information might lead you. And you do so in a way that makes clear that this isn't about demonizing entire communities. This is about trying to work out a specific problem that exists here and why it might actually
Open Discussion and Political Implications
00:16:10
Speaker
exist. I mean, there are all kinds of factors which are more to do with the kind of industries and the kind of towns in which these people operate. It seems like the vast majority of the offenders in the grooming gang situation work in the nighttime economy. They're taxi drivers. They work at takeaways that might skew things in a certain direction to a certain extent.
00:16:27
Speaker
But then there's also been some writing by even Pakistani journalists who have made this point in the British press recently that there are particular patterns of migration coming from particular parts of Pakistan, which, to be frank, do not have a particularly enlightened view of women and that kind culture of misogyny might play a certain type of role. It could be all kinds of different things.
00:16:47
Speaker
I just think we need to explore them. and There's obviously some people who look at the Islamic component of that insofar as pointing to particular scripture or suggesting that often in forms of sexual abuse and group-based sexual abuse, there's a kind of othering to use a quite loaded kind of woke term that often takes place, which kind of allows people to be slightly more, to lose some of their inhibitions in the horrific things that they're doing.
00:17:10
Speaker
And perhaps the fact that you've got kind of unbelievers and believers play some sort of a role there. Anecdotally, it's fair to say that a lot of the people who involved in a lot this were hardly, you're kind of pious going to Friday prayers every weekend type of Muslims. So maybe that's a bit of a misnomer.
00:17:22
Speaker
It could be all kinds of things. It's clearly a disproportion. Shouldn't we want to talk about it? Shouldn't want to work out how this might actually be tackled? And as I say, I go back to this original point, which is that if if you don't want this to become a really overgeneralized, xenophobic, racist, whatever you have a discussion, then you should want to get into that granular detail.
00:17:43
Speaker
You should want to look these issues in the face. ah Otherwise, it's only ever going to go in the in the wrong direction. So I just think everyone just needs to be a bit braver here. And what's interesting is, and they often get written out of the picture,
00:17:54
Speaker
There have been, and I hate this phrase, but quote unquote, kind of community leaders within the British Pakistani community who have been trying to kind of sound the alarm about this over the course of time. And they've just been ignored as well. So I think it's really interesting that and this so often in this debate, there's a kind of, even amongst the people who claim that they're doing so to protect societal harmony and so on, are refusing to listen to some of the voices that really claim to be speaking on behalf of, you know Keep the powder dry on Islam just for the moment, one ah one dangerous topic at a time, but we will get there.
00:18:26
Speaker
The other interesting thing that that comes to mind for me here on the ethnicity point is you hear a lot of people in the liberal media like, say, the Emily Maitlis's of this world.
00:18:38
Speaker
And there was a really revealing interview that she did recently with Rupert Lowe where she basically said the only reason that you're focusing on these grooming gangs is effectively because you're a rape a racist. There are, on a net or gross level, far more grooming gang perpetrators who are white British than there are Pakistani.
00:18:58
Speaker
Therefore, we need to direct our attention there. You also hear a separate but related argument say, well, this isn't a cultural or a racial problem. This is a male problem. This is a misogyny problem.
00:19:10
Speaker
How do you think about that sort of line of thinking that's come predominantly from that sort of liberal media establishment, the Emily Maitlis' of this world? but It's just so obviously a deflection, isn't it? I mean, the the problem with the grooming games, for instance, is that it's a very specific form of abuse, which was covered up for very specific reasons. Therefore, we should talk about it specifically.
00:19:31
Speaker
But this tendency to say it's a kind of all, it's almost like an all lives matter move. It's like an all forms of child abuse, a terrible move, which is not the debate that we're trying to have. Everyone agrees that child abuse is terrible. The issue is that the state has taken a very partial view to how it enforces those laws for all the reasons that we've been talking about.
00:19:48
Speaker
What's interesting now, you might have detected this yourself this week, Will, is that there's a kind of attempt to, just as Keir Starmer has now you know kind of boarded the far-right bandwagon he was decrying only six months ago, people trying to say that actually this is an issue that we really should take seriously and talk sensitively about and so on. So maybe there is a way on this issue, as there has been on so many other issues recently,
00:20:08
Speaker
where a lot of people who just went along with the liberal left party line are starting to realize that the game is up, that actually they were defending the indefensible or at least running interference for the indefensible for some time.
00:20:19
Speaker
But ah without wanting to be rude to anyone in particular, I think a large part of the nonsense that you have to clear way through in these debates before you can get anywhere is because people are talking about stuff they haven't looked into for more than about five minutes.
00:20:31
Speaker
And that unfortunately is an endemic problem, certainly across a lot the mainstream media these days. Yeah, the level of gaslighting that you're now starting to see coming through from people like Owen Jones, from most of the Labor MPs is, well, we've always known this was a problem when they are on the record time and, again, either minimizing it or, in the instance of, say, Owen Jones flat out ignoring it. So, unfortunately, something that we're just going to have to tolerate. But it actually does raise the question of the political implications of this national inquiry going forward.
00:21:04
Speaker
Yeah. what What do you think, how do you think this plays out for Labor? How do you think this plays out for Keir Starmer? As you said yourself, he said only this year will seem to suggest in very strong terms that this was nothing more than effectively dog whistling.
00:21:15
Speaker
Another Labor MP, I've forgotten the the name escapes me, said that this was a dog whistle when she was on it. Lucy Powell, yeah. Lucy Powell, that's right, when she was on the BBC. but Where does Labor go from here and how potentially damaging is this?
00:21:27
Speaker
Keeping in mind that a national inquiry could take years and years and and we may actually, this may just get the can kicked down the road. but Absolutely. And it how quickly this national inquiry takes place, there's talk of it lasting about three years, which is pretty zippy for UK national inquiries. They're usually gone for what feels like decades, almost seemingly intended, intendedly so that anyone who might have been responsible is far out of power, well on you know their um retirement leave and therefore can't properly be held accountable.
00:21:53
Speaker
So there's of it being quite quick, which would be positive. Also in terms of the terms of reference, what it's actually going to look at, it's going to be quite interesting because it's very clear to me that a lot of the failures, first of all, they go right to the top. As far as Whitehall, there have been revelations in recent weeks put about by Dominic Cummings, former you know Chief Aids of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, saying that when he was in the Department of Education during the coalition government years, that there was an attempt, I believe it was by, he alleges, by Rotherham Council to try and issue a judicial review at the last minute to block and Andrew Norfolk's reporting in the Times about what had been going on there and that he and Gove intervened to stop it.
00:22:28
Speaker
Sky News have reported that because they've corroborated it to an extent, but there's not been any response from the from the council yet. So there might be another side to that story. But clearly, this goes to the top to a certain degree. At the very least, there was a refusal to take this seriously enough.
00:22:40
Speaker
And think on that score, both Labour and the Tories haven't covered themselves in glory. There is a specific issue, obviously, for Labour because of the fact that if you think about the the towns that have been particularly scarred by this, not exclusively, but particularly,
00:22:53
Speaker
It is very much Labour's old heartlands. Obviously, they've been more politically up for grabs in recent years since Brexit, but you're talking about places which have been Labour basically forever, which have had Labour run um councils for many, many years, which have had Labour and MPs. And that's going to raise a lot of very, very difficult, awkward questions for them about why a blind eye was turned to all of this.
00:23:13
Speaker
And also just specific individuals who may well have been alerted to this and look the other way. So If this actually goes as far up, if you like, and as far down to the kind of grassroots levels, I hope the inquiry will.
00:23:24
Speaker
It's not going be good for any of the political parties, but Labour is obviously particularly implicated in this because this is really where it began, was in their own heartlands. And I made this point on the site this week on Spikes, but... you know The Labour Party has been betraying the working class for a very long time, but I think this really is the most morally depraved example of it.
00:23:42
Speaker
You had poor and working class girls who were essentially thrown under the bus for the sake of protecting the PR image, the PR rep of multiculturalism, the new kind of ideology of this sort of post-class Labour Party. So I think it could be very, very damaging for them. But it's already quite interesting that the media ah have been very keen to present this as if it was the Tories' problem because they never held an inquiry.
00:24:05
Speaker
for the past, you know, for the 14 years they were in power. So it's always hard to tell where the narrative will go, but let's see. There is some truth to that, isn't there? Look, Tories did have 14 years to hold a national inquiry and they didn't do it.
00:24:15
Speaker
Oh no, absolutely. And I think they should, there is something a bit unseemly about the Tories kind of take a taking a victory lap at the moment for an inquiry that they didn't even try, let alone fail to hold over the course of the 14 years that they were in power.
00:24:28
Speaker
um I think that being said, I think there's The focus on that, certainly in the last day or so of discussion, seems to me a bit of distraction activity to get away from Labour, who were not taking this seriously even six months ago, let alone 10 years ago. So I think there's a of blame to go around, but because of where a lot of this happened, it's going to ask some very difficult questions of Labour.
00:24:47
Speaker
Yeah, well, the other thing which makes things difficult for Labor, and you know this is something if you were creating a criminal series fictional criminal series, you would almost script this. Keir Starmer was the Director of Public Prosecutions whilst for for a long period of time whilst these crimes were taking place.
00:25:05
Speaker
Now, I've heard some people on Labor side saying that he changed particular guidelines in 2012 or 2013 to make it easier to prosecute for these crimes, that he was deeply committed about this.
00:25:17
Speaker
You hear a lot of other people, and this is probably where I fall, say that there was a level of indifference for crimes of this nature that would raise great a great deal of questions, not just in his term as prime minister, but in his time as director of public prosecutions, specifically for Keir Starmer, who is already the most unpopular prime minister in modern history in the United Kingdom, which, given some of the recent prime ministers, is quite astonishing.
00:25:43
Speaker
how does How does this affect him personally, do you think, going forward? mean, it's those things where even if he wasn't director of public prosecutions through the period that he was, at least 2008 to 2013, if memory serves, this would already be another thing, just another albatross to hang around his neck because it's not just unpopular. People really dislike him, distrust him, see him in some cases kind a sinister character. So that's certainly not going change.
00:26:07
Speaker
they are Sorry, but... Before you actually move on there, why do you think that's the case? so I've got my theories, but why do you, like so many politicians in modern times have been seen as incompetent or unlikable, but there seems to be a level of loathing for Keir Starmer, which is actually on another level from what we've seen in recent times.
00:26:24
Speaker
It's really hard to tell because in some ways you would think that the plan of this incoming Labour government, because it was posturing as a very much more kind of centrist sort of ah the adults returning to the room, all those sort cliches, that the attempt would be to sort of bore the, I thought there was going to it was just becoming incredibly
UK Political Landscape and Multiculturalism
00:26:40
Speaker
boring. like it's kind of forgotten yeah British politics going back to the kind of 2010 roughly factory reset where Both the two main parties are basically indistinguishable and that not a lot really happens.
00:26:49
Speaker
Whereas the rules and spills have been non-stop. I mean, part of this have been you know scandals that were outside the Labour Party's control. But they have a tendency to, I guess... it's They are so kind of beholden to all of the most toxic elite orthodoxies of our age that they're coming into conflict, that those are exploding against ordinary people in pretty dramatic fashion, the way that even they don't expect.
00:27:10
Speaker
I think that even the kind of previous sort of more centrist Blairite New Labour years, they had a lot more political nous about them. You know, yes, they did all kinds of um very unpopular things, which are way out of whack with public opinion.
00:27:23
Speaker
But they always knew that they could only push things up to a certain extent. I think by a combination of being, as I say, very much given to all of these very woke, authoritarian, net zero orthodoxies, they almost don't realize how unpopular what it is that they're doing is.
00:27:37
Speaker
Also, just think they lack any of that political feel that previous generations of Labour politicians might have had. two that might stop them from going that far. Obviously, there there is also an element of sometimes, and you see this in some kind of the kind social media discussion, where a lot gets projected onto Keir Starmer, that he's kind of like some sort of sinister authoritarian. He's only a few steps away from sort of taking full control and so on.
00:27:57
Speaker
Around the edges, you see that from time to time. But um I think generally people, it's a combination of his own failings, definitely. Also, I think people have had enough of the particular brand of politics that he represents and are not really willing to put up with it anymore in a way that they might have previously.
00:28:10
Speaker
think that point that people project particular things onto Starmer is correct. But I think the reason that that happens is because he is so fundamentally empty as a political figure, because it is so difficult to work out who he is, what he believes in, both in terms of his style, he's robotic, he's charmless, he's a terrible public speaker, but also because there doesn't seem to be a guiding ideology.
00:28:33
Speaker
And I've heard some people you know, the Peter Hitchens of this world call him a radical neo-Trotzkiist. I've heard other people call him, you know, a bureaucrat. I've heard some people say, well, he's pretty much empty apart from a love of international human rights law and globalism. And I've heard some people say that he's now to the right of Nigel Farage and before.
00:28:54
Speaker
yeah So it's not surprising that you you see what is these things projected onto him because he allows those projections because he is so difficult to really pin down as a political figure.
00:29:05
Speaker
No, absolutely. And I think that reminds me that one of the reasons that he's been so disastrous and corrosive to freedom of speech, to all kinds of issues that we care about, I think is because of the fact that he is an empty vessel politician, someone who just unthinkingly imbibes all of the sorts of standard issue, high status, technocratic blob type ideology. But he's that kind of politician in an age when that high status, technocratic blob ideology is insane.
00:29:35
Speaker
Is that a touch? Is not attuned to the demands of the moment or public opinion. And so he ends up doing outrageous things without even realizing that he is doing it. There certainly has been over the course of the past few months, an attempt to try and if if um it's not It's not necessarily a kind of, you know, rotors as masochists, but a kind of a recognition that you have to make some allowances for public opinion on the question of migration, the question of the grooming gangs, all sorts of different issues, even net zero around the edges.
00:30:05
Speaker
But it you just feel like the train is still only heading in one direction. Yeah. where he's concerned. So I think that's the thing. He can be simultaneously boring and incredibly destructive because the kind of boilerplate position of the elites is incredibly destructive these days. And that's just what he's kind of unthinkingly repeating and pushing.
00:30:21
Speaker
The thread that I mentioned before that runs through grooming gangs, mass migration, illegal immigration at the same time, the boats, is this narrative around multiculturalism.
00:30:33
Speaker
It is that multiculturalism isn't a good thing. Again, even from reform, new chairman, David Bull, who admittedly has said he was taken out of context or whatever. He said, even the other day, immigration is the lifeblood of this country, which for anyone who has knows their history since 1066 would know that that is just empirically not true.
00:30:51
Speaker
This multicultural ideology instinct is so strong across the political class and you know the kind of liberal elite class. Tell me how that plays out and tell me if you think there will be a reckoning on multiculturalism as a result of A, the grooming gangs and then B, also the increasing frustration with both legal and illegal immigration.
00:31:15
Speaker
Whether or not a reckoning will happen, it's very, very hard to tell. It's something which every time any politician, certainly but you know obviously was of the centre-right in recent years, would come out and say anything about multiculturalism, people would just start screaming racist. I mean, I know this has become and very repeated playbook, shall we say, but I found it particularly dispiriting. The last time this happened, I think Suella Braveman had made some comments about this former Home Secretary very much to the right of the Tory party.
00:31:41
Speaker
herself, the children of migrants, incidentally, so but that didn't buy her any credit in that particular discussion, is that there is this tendency to treat multiculturalism as basically exactly the same as living in a society in which there are people of different skin colours, cultural backgrounds, whatever.
00:31:56
Speaker
They completely conflate the two things. Multi-ethnicism, yeah. No, exactly. like they They think if you criticise multiculturalism, you're basically saying there are too many black and brown people here, which is again shows how dumb and midwit-faceted full our media is because anyone who's just looked up in the dictionary or asked Grok to explain it to you, they say that multiculturalism is a specific type of project. It's but a specific type of policy in which the state, rather than emphasizing the integration of newcomers into a sort of national whole, that you want to treat different ethnic, migratory, religious b blocks as blocks that you relate to them you through kind of self-appointed community leaders, that you fund community organizations which organize those groups along those ethno-religious, sometimes even sectarian lines. And that ultimately, we've seen it in our justice system recently, in some cases you treat them differently.
00:32:49
Speaker
in accordance with those divides because of the fact that you don't want to have racially or ethnically disparate crime figures, for instance. So it's a completely different kind of project. It's a much more actually racially, I think, divisive project, multiculturalism, than more integrationist, universalist alternative because it says that essentially when people come here,
00:33:09
Speaker
And they might have been here generations, but they're not quite one of us, that they need to be treated in a slightly different way, that they might need to be tiptoed around, they might need to be either patronized in one way, shape or form, or given some kind of special accommodation in another. So it's it's I really hope we do start to have a debate about this, because certainly from my perspective, lot of the most powerful critiques of multiculturalism that you used to hear not that long ago were often people from the left who would recognize this as a much more divisive sort of project than was actually being presented. But I think the problem is it's become the common sense of the elites that this is a good thing.
00:33:43
Speaker
And i so therefore, that's a very difficult thing to dislodge bar um a real sort of, a real political upset the next election, I suppose. Well, for me, the most troubling elements of multiculturalism in the United Kingdom, and i would say actually as well in in many of the young many of the Anglosphere countries, is the accommodation of what I would consider the more troubling elements of Islamic culture.
Free Speech and Religious Tolerance
00:34:05
Speaker
For example, the seeming acceptance that ah in a Western liberal democracy, there should be two separate legal systems running almost in parallel with Sharia law courts, as well as the British legal system.
00:34:18
Speaker
The acceptance of the Burka, for example, which i I struggle with because I think there are arguments on both sides there. You wrote an article recently, which was titled, Welcome to the Islamic Theocracy of Great Britain.
00:34:31
Speaker
What did you mean when you put those provocative words out there? certainly intended as provocative. I suppose this came after a spate of Quran burnings that we'd had in the UK, and specifically a man's conviction for this supposed crime.
00:34:47
Speaker
And the point I was making in this, and we can go into the case in a bit more detail in a second if it's if it's interesting for people, is that you know we you know we are normally a liberal democracy, and yet we have just criminalized someone, we've convicted someone for burning a religious text. So at least when this happens in Iran, it makes sense. That's a society which is built around certain you know theocratic view of a particular religion. But for it to happen here, I think, should particularly trouble us. So this was a gentleman called Hamit Choskin, who is actually, he's a Turkish asylum seeker.
00:35:19
Speaker
He is... ah currently in the in the process of claiming asylum in this country because as an atheist, he's also not Turkish ethnically. I forget which particular ethnic group he belongs to, but was basically fled Turkey because he was being persecuted there.
00:35:34
Speaker
Back in February, if memory serves, he burnt a copy of the Quran outside of the Turkish consulate in protest against what he sees as the Islamist turn of Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
00:35:46
Speaker
At the scene, he was... He was jailed, wasn't he? He was. He was. So he was he was quite clearly, you know, genuine sort of a genuine asylum case, shall we say, which is not always forthcoming.
00:35:58
Speaker
And yet, the way it was treated by the authorities was far from welcoming. So he burns his Quran. It's worth saying that on the scene, he was attacked by a passerby with a knife. There was also a delivery rider who kicked him while he was on the ground.
00:36:11
Speaker
So, you know, you would think that the police were going to intervene, it would be to arrest those two gentlemen, one of which was arrested, we should say. But nevertheless, it was to also arrest Hammett Choskin. So he was arrested for this.
00:36:22
Speaker
He was eventually brought up on charges of disorderly behaviour. which was ah liable to cause harassment, alarm and distress to anyone who was in earshot or sight of it, that was supposedly motivated by hostilities to a particular religious group, i.e.
00:36:39
Speaker
Muslims. So it was essentially a kind of religiously aggravated public order offence in the sort of legal parlance. He was found he was convicted of this and the the reasoning for it from the judge was staggering.
00:36:51
Speaker
So essentially, he said that the proof that Choskin was being disorderly was the fact that he was attacked. So it was real victim blaming. It was essentially saying, of course, his activity was alarming and distressing to someone because someone lunged it in with a knife, which is a funny way to talk about it. You know, this is the equivalent of like, well, what was she wearing in my view? So that was pretty shocking.
00:37:14
Speaker
yeah he he said He said something like, fuck Islam after being yeah stabbed with a knife. Yeah. would would probably be it will be running through my mind as well after being stabbed.
00:37:25
Speaker
And Lord knows he'd say after something like that happened. but I think a lot of allowances should be made for what people say at the moment as someone's lunging towards them with a knife. But that was really shocking. The other part of the judgment, which is very shocking, was that the judge essentially made no distinction between Choskin's disdain for Islam and the religious faith and the and hostility towards Muslims themselves. Choskin himself says, I have no problem with individual Muslims. I do not like the institution of Islam.
00:37:50
Speaker
And yet, because the judge... believed that Choskin's view of Islam was kind of warped in some way. It was extreme. He saw it as a religion of extremists and paedophile apologists and so on.
00:38:02
Speaker
Therefore, there's no real difference between hating Islam and hating Muslim. This is ah a horrendous state of affairs. First all, I don't want a judge to be proclaiming on what is and isn't Islam. you know i mean, that's a absurd state of affairs to find ourselves in, hence one of the reasons for that slightly provocative title.
00:38:17
Speaker
But also more fundamentally, I don't think anyone should be criminalized for so hating anyone or anything you just because you just get into this bizarre territory where you have to have a judge deciding what is and isn't acceptable. So top to bottom, it's horrendous. And what's also been horrendous since is that Chostlin has come forward and talked about the death threats that he's been receiving. He's out to be moved into a safe house, accommodation. I believe there's recently been an arrest for someone who was plotting to kill him. So what we see here in this case is the horrific coming together of kind of official intolerance and the kind of Islamist murderous intolerance. And that what's so disturbing about it is that when someone lunges at Choskin with a knife or plots to kill him or shows up, his accommodation has happened before his trial, saying, if you ever do this again, we're going to kill you.
00:39:00
Speaker
the The position of the British state now is you've got a point, kind of. And that is really, really chilling to me, I think. For me, the the key insight there is you shouldn't be penalized by the law hating anything.
00:39:14
Speaker
and We can say that if you hate Muslims, that may be morally questionable, morally unacceptable. But that's a separate question entirely to being criminally penalized for doing so.
00:39:25
Speaker
You know, there was a time in Western liberal democracies like the United Kingdom where we basically said you should be allowed to do or think, oh, sorry, you should be allowed to say what you want to the extent that it isn't defamatory or it doesn't incite violence.
00:39:38
Speaker
And at least in the you know in the United States, that bar for incitement to violence is incredibly high. Exactly. We've lost that. We've lost, and not just at the legal level, we've lost it, but we've lost it, I think, just to amongst everyday people, this distinction between what is legally acceptable and what is morally acceptable, and basically saying, you know what, we should still allow morally abhorrent things to be said because on balance it is better to have that stuff out there than from having the state and
00:40:10
Speaker
arbitrarily decide what and isn't acceptable to say. How has that war been, and this is a big question, how has that war been lost and is it possible to try and make progress back towards a more free speech society in 2025?
00:40:27
Speaker
I certainly think that there is more concern and interest in the slide into sort of woke censorship that a country like the UK has taken. like I've been writing about this issue of hate speech laws, crackdown on free speech very much you know from the state for you know more than 10 years now and never has there been as much interest in it.
00:40:47
Speaker
People are really ah awake now to how corrosive having any law that limits thought and speech is. Because for a very long time, the response you would normally get was, well, this is only really about the people who are really extreme, the people who are really abhorrent, the people I wouldn't want to live next door to, let alone fraternize with.
00:41:05
Speaker
But what because of the fact that censorship by kind of definition never really stays within the bounds that you set for it, that as soon as you accept that there are certain views which are so terrifying, so hateful, so dangerous that they have to be clamped down upon, that definition is going to grow. There's going to be more people who want to put this ideology in that pot or this view in that pot. And it just is, it has this kind of inexorable sort of logic to it.
00:41:30
Speaker
And, you know, it was it wasn't that long ago that when you were arguing for the abolition of hate speech laws, you were you were talking about cases in which you had kind of far-right racists or whatever who were criminalised for, you know, holding up certain placards or shouting certain slogans or publishing certain publications.
00:41:46
Speaker
And, of course, those people... should enjoy freedom of speech as much as anyone else. You don't have to don't defend them, you defend their right to say whatever they want. Precisely because it's also the mirror image of our right to call them dickheads and to discredit their arguments in public.
00:42:00
Speaker
But that's a very different proposition now. I mean, the kinds of cases that we've been talking about in recent years is you know gender critical feminists being harassed by the police because they called a man a man on the internet.
00:42:10
Speaker
You're talking about cases of people burning a religious text as if that should have anything to do with the police whatsoever. You're talking about cases in which now in the UK, arresting people for what they post online is a daily occurrence. According to the Times, it's at least 30 people a day who are being arrested under communications offences, which is just one of many sort of hate speech laws, is to use that term quite broadly, that we have.
00:42:33
Speaker
So I think that's awoken people to how important this is. And I think there's also a lot of people who, and like ah you know, people you come into contact and in in everyday life, but also people in kind of journalism, academia and so on, who maybe a few years ago didn't quite weren't necessarily free speech fundamentalists, are starting to turn in that position because they've faced a bit of the censorship themselves.
00:42:51
Speaker
So whilst maybe it's got to get worse before it gets better. But think there's an opening now for a much more principled argument about why this stuff is important, which maybe wasn't there five or six years ago. Yeah, but the thought that comes to mind for me, particularly when you say something like 30 arrests a day for effectively nasty comments on the internet, is even if we make progress in the public discourse, and then even if that progress in the public discourse leads to change at the political and policy level, there is still, from what I can see, this ideological capture in the judiciary and then in elements of the police establishment,
00:43:29
Speaker
as well, which means that, and they are the the implementation arms of those policies that that we would be seeking to try and get change. And this also is where the grooming gang's inquiry begins.
00:43:42
Speaker
will potentially run into trouble in that it would be judge-led, it would be so apparently independent, but the government still gets to choose who that independent judge is. And we've seen so many instances in recent times, whether you want to point to Lucy Connolly or you want to point to all of the ridiculous refugee cases that you mentioned just before around the interpretation of particular laws becoming so silly and broad to further a particular multicultural law or leftist agenda.
Judiciary, Democracy, and Accountability
00:44:10
Speaker
The question is, because That ideological capture in those layers, how do you move past that? Or how is it even possible to move past that even if you can get political or public opinion change?
00:44:23
Speaker
Political change or public opinion change? No, absolutely. I think that's one of the frustrations that a lot people have felt in this country, as well as in other Western countries in recent years, where you have had, say, quite clear-cut public revolts against particular governments, particular policies, which don't really come to anything. I mean, obviously, Brexit was a really striking example of this, where the 52% of the voting population back leaving the European Union. And it almost doesn't happen. Like the the the state, the blob,
00:44:51
Speaker
the elite just cannot digest it. And it comes this close to actually being completely thwarted. Didn't happen, obviously. The system just about worked in the end. But I think that was a real wake-up call for a lot of people. And certainly people who are more right of centre, or at least have been voting for right of centre parties because they feel like those are the only ones who are who are listening to their concerns about a lot these issues we've been talking about.
00:45:12
Speaker
There has been this shared frustration of, we vote, even we Even when we get the party in, nothing happens. So I think that's a real clear call for the fact that what we need is just more democracy, more accountability, and that even if you're elected government, that's not the end of the story where those two things are concerned.
00:45:29
Speaker
We've clearly got a civil service, which is a law unto itself. which sees part of its remit as resisting the agenda of the elected government if it doesn't align with what them and their hand-picked group of experts believe to be the case.
00:45:40
Speaker
It's very clearly the case that we have judges who have taken it upon themselves to basically make up law on the fly, to reinterpret law, often in relation to various kind of human rights conventions and so on, in a way that it was never intended in the first place and that certainly would never pass muster with ordinary people.
00:46:00
Speaker
So the the kind of precise mechanism for creating much more accountability and democracy where policy is concerned, I'm not entirely sure, but it's quite clearly that that's what we need to explore. And it's the sort of thing that, to be honest, I think governments of of all political persuasions starting to recognize now.
00:46:16
Speaker
Which, you know, even putting these kind of quite clear political biases aside, the British state is incredibly least
Reform Party and Political Change
00:46:22
Speaker
sclerotic. Ministers get in, they pull a handle, nothing happens. Like, this is something that even the Labour Party have had to reckon with. So it's something that in time, whatever party, whether it's of...
00:46:31
Speaker
whether we want to call it right-wing, anti-work anti-establishment, whatever it is, these labels kind of are a little bit past their sell-by date to a certain extent. If they really want to change things, it doesn't end with winning an election. You to work out how to make sure that when you actually put a policy on the table, something happens, because at the moment, it's never entirely clear if that's actually going the same place.
00:46:50
Speaker
Well, you didn't mention them by name, but that right-wing anti-establishment party that is most likely to, at the moment in the polls, most likely to win the next election would be reformed. A lot of people have said that because of their lack of experience in government, they've currently just got five MPs.
00:47:07
Speaker
that it will be an insurmountable challenge trying to understand Whitehall, understand its operations and then fight back against the blob. So I guess this is a two-part question before you get to that.
00:47:18
Speaker
Can they actually make the change that would be required? Do you think that they are the answer to the problems that the Uni Party have have created over, what, a 20 to 30-year period now?
00:47:31
Speaker
Well, on the question of can they, I think that's the next big test for them because they clearly have to and of build a much broader organization, a much more sophisticated organization.
00:47:43
Speaker
i mean, the the previous kind of iterations of reform and were very much, and I don't mean this as a slur word at all, they were very much kind of single issue protest parties. It was about getting us out of the European Union or it was about immigration.
00:47:57
Speaker
It's the sort of thing where, broadly speaking, UKIP and, to a lesser extent, but still to a certain extent, the Brexit Party, were a kind of pressure point on the Tory jugular trying to get it to do things that party the establishment of otherwise didn't want to do.
00:48:10
Speaker
All of that's changed now. This is a once-in-a-century event that we're looking at here where reform could actually break through and destroy the duopoly that we've been lumbered with for so long now. I think Dominic Cummings, not to bring him up again, has said this for a long time, that if they need to do that, they need to find a way of kind of attracting the sort of people who know how to run things, who know how to not only run a party, but also potentially run a government.
00:48:32
Speaker
So that will be one of the many things to watch in the next few months is can they attract those kinds of people? Are those kinds of people being attracted to reform because they see something in it? Someone like a British equivalent of a Stephen Miller, who basically for the second Trump term was working before that for five years to say, how do we actually implement our agenda?
00:48:50
Speaker
And that's why at least initially they were able to move quite quickly in a way that they weren't in Trump's first term. I think the problem is at the moment, I can't see the equivalent of a Stephen Miller in in the reform party. No, absolutely. And it's one of those things where I suppose, in a way, we'll find out about them last because ideally it'd be a kind of backroom figure that you wouldn't even necessarily know about. But that's always a problem with populist parties in general, is that even when they get in, it's bit like the dog that caught the car.
00:49:13
Speaker
Like it now just doesn't know what to do. So I think it's that's something that they'll definitely have to look at. In terms of reform itself, whether or not they got all the answers is not entirely clear to me. Obviously, there's not been a lot policy which has been laid out. There's also some core issues on which I'm not necessarily singing from the same hymn sheet. But at the same time, it is so clearly a positive thing that there is a challenge to this party duopoly that the core issues that they're represent and reflect are being put on the table because a lot of these issues to do with immigration so on, this isn't even like a kind of 50-50 issue. It's like a issue in terms public opinion and dissatisfaction with the way things are going.
00:49:48
Speaker
The way in which they've put even kind of greed issues and so on on the agenda, which has been another kind of part of the kind of establishment common sense for so long now, they can't see how destructive and insane it is, particularly at a time of economic and geopolitical turmoil to be going down this particular route.
00:50:04
Speaker
So, you know, it's one of those things where even though I'm not necessarily kind of like paid up reformer, I think it's really interesting, exciting and positive that the issues that voters are putting their trust in that party for are being put on the table again.
00:50:18
Speaker
And if nothing else, though the the old two parties of the establishment, as it were, thoroughly deserve the kicking that I hope that's coming to them. But time will tell. Well, there's an interesting question as to how big a kicking that will be.
00:50:31
Speaker
And I want to specifically look at the Conservatives in this regard. Are the Conservatives, who are the most successful political party in modern, not just UK history, in modern Western history, absolutely do you think they are done as a political force in the United Kingdom?
00:50:48
Speaker
It's so hard to tell because the one... kind caveat we must place on every prognostication about electoral politics moment. It is so incredibly volatile that almost anything can happen.
00:51:00
Speaker
I mean, this is one thing that made, say, Boris Johnson's 2019 landslide possible and Keir Starmer's 2024 landslide possible.
00:51:10
Speaker
It's that the more voters are up for grabs now than in the modern period. It used to be for you know, best part of the century, that basically neither of those two parties would ever get below 30%. That was the kind of hardcore of their support.
00:51:23
Speaker
With the Labour Party, obviously, this was the working class as well as the sort of smattering kind metropolitan liberal intelligentsia. And then with the Conservatives, you're you're essentially the party kind of the conservative middle class as well as business and so on and so forth.
00:51:38
Speaker
All of that's broken down now. And people are willing to shop around. They're willing to leave parties, join new ones, come back into the fold. like Anything could happen. I think the difficulty for the Conservatives is the reform are now taking up all of the oxygen. Even when they try to outflank reform on certain issues, no one really believes it.
00:51:56
Speaker
So even when they try and you know come out with a ah more kind of hardline stance on immigration. It doesn't really register. I think if they're being honest, they're probably hoping and waiting for and have it you know crossing everything for that reform will just somehow blow up and that that will be a way in which they can kind of sneak back in, maybe absorb it in some way, shape or form. But I think if if all things carry on in the current trajectory that we're looking at,
00:52:21
Speaker
I think the least that could be said about the next election is that reform will displace the Tories as the largest party of the right in Parliament all if all things carry on in the direction that they're currently put on.
00:52:32
Speaker
Now, lot could change in terms of the country, terms of internationally, in terms of the party itself. I mean, infighting and blow-ups and thrills and spills have been a ah common feature. not just reform, but certainly the Conservatives as well. So who knows what actually happened. But at the moment, they're struggling for oxygen. It's not just that people hate them, although i'm sure that's true for quite big sections of the country, it's that people have grown almost indifferent to them and they're almost not attention.
00:52:56
Speaker
And that's a terrible place for a political party to be in. Yeah, you mentioned those blow-ups, and they have been a feature of Farage-led political parties. And again, i think this is not the same as Keir Starmer. I think there is more to Farage than there is to Keir Starmer.
00:53:13
Speaker
But I have also heard arguments to say, well, do we really know the real Nigel Farage? You have the Lotus Eaters guys, for example, saying he's effectively kind of another member of the uni party. He's a political follower and a chancer.
00:53:26
Speaker
You have others who say that that he is more sincere in his beliefs around the populist right style of politics. And I've heard other people say that he's just an old school Thatcherite and some of the more populist elements of the reform agenda don't sit comfortably with him.
00:53:41
Speaker
How do you see Nigel Farage, the political figure, and do you think he's the right person to run the type of transformational political movement that reform hopes to be? It's an interesting question. I mean, it's sort of thing where, again, I don't necessarily have a sort of dog in this race as far as I'm not a reform party member. I didn't vote for them the last election.
00:54:00
Speaker
um I'm not kind paid up supporter in that sense. that All that being said, I do find that his critics, those who say that he's basically kind of crypto woke, those who suggest that he's essentially as bad as the rest of them from their kind of particular perspective. Those who suggest that really the answer would be Ben Habib or Rupert Lowe or whatever are just kind of clueless, if nothing else. I mean, if do you first of all, because of the fact that Farage is ah sort of... The reason people are really putting their faith in on immigration is is been he's been on this issue for a very long time.
00:54:30
Speaker
You know, the position might shift a little bit here or there in terms of a specific policy or whatever, but people quite clearly take him very seriously when he says mass immigration is a problem, we're going to something about it. He has been a politician who, in terms of achieving his goals, has been remarkably successful. Certainly the most successful politician of his generation who has spent most of it outside of parliament. That goes about saying there's even an argument to suggest that because of the significance of Brexit, the constitutional change that that represents, that you could even put him, you don't even need to apply that caveat to him.
Farage and His Influence on UK Politics
00:55:00
Speaker
where that is concerned. There's also, I think, in the in the form of, say, Rupert Lowe, when that whole blow-up was taking place, was that there is a big difference between X and the country. Even around that time, I think there was a poll that one of the pollsters did, showing asking people if they knew who Rupert Lowe is, even prompting by showing a picture of him.
00:55:18
Speaker
And even the vast majority of reform voters didn't know he was, which is, again, that's not a judgment either side. It's just to say that in the same way that the left in the twenty ten got it into their heads that whatever was really popular on Twitter was really popular with the country or whatever figure was really popular on Twitter was obviously really popular with the country. it In the same way that they got very rude away from time and time again, i think there's a danger of certain sections of this new kind of right-wing ecosystem going down very much the same path. And also, at the edges of it, also embracing some quite unpleasant, hard-line sort ethno-nationalist policies, which you see expressed online from time to time. not talking about anyone in reform here.
00:55:58
Speaker
where and and getting upset that reform aren't going down that particular route, again, is not only morally abhorrent, is politically absolutely clueless because you put that kind of prospectus before the British public and they will send you packing. So again, it's not that Farage is a perfect individual.
00:56:14
Speaker
It's not that there aren't questions to be asked about how he's running the party, his own consistency on certain issues. But I think he certainly has a track record of consistency, which people can point to. And to be honest, I think a lot of the challenges to him are a mixture of um clueless and wrongheaded a lot of the time.
00:56:29
Speaker
Where can people read your stuff, hear you, see you, give me the plug? Absolutely. So um they should read Spikes every day of the week, of course. We're over at spikes-online.com. We've also got the Spikes podcast, which comes out every week. The Last Orders podcast, which comes out every two weeks, which you were very kindly on the last episode of, which people should go and check out.
00:56:46
Speaker
And otherwise, I'm just on X or Twitter, whatever you call it, at Tom underscore Slater underscore. Links to all of those are in the show notes. Tom, this has been a fascinating conversation as ever. Thank you very much for coming on fire, Will.
00:57:00
Speaker
Thanks, Will. Good to talk.