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In praise of the 'very online right', with Connor Tomlinson
0 Playsin 3 hours
The UK conservative political class have not led the public discourse. Instead, they have been dragged, sometimes kicking and screaming, to sensible policies on issues such as immigration by independent media and prominent social media figures. In other words, 'the online right'. There are few more influential voices on the online right than political commentator Connor Tomlinson.
Will and Connor freewheel on (among other things) how the public discourse has changed in the post-MSM age, immigration, the economy, the differences between Australian and British politics, and whether Reform are really capable of solving the country's problems.
Follow Will Kingston and Fire at Will on social media here.
Read The Spectator Australia here.
Watch Connor on YouTube here.
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Transcript
Migration and Multiculturalism: UK vs. Australia
00:00:19
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Fire at Will. I'm Will Kingston. I've just returned from two weeks in Australia back to London. And the thing that really shocked me was that comments that are now firmly within the Overton window in the United Kingdom,
00:00:36
Speaker
questioning mass migration or multiculturalism or Islamism were seen as edgy, controversial, perhaps even worthy of cancellation in my home country of Australia. There hasn't been a reckoning quite yet.
00:00:52
Speaker
Whereas in the United Kingdom, people have done away with the niceties. They have seen the damage that can be done when you don't confront uncomfortable truths. And I think one of the main drivers of that change in the discourse has been the rise of what some people call the online right.
Online Right and Establishment Challenges
00:01:11
Speaker
And one of the leading voices in the online right would be political commentator, Connor Tomlinson. Connor, welcome to Fire at Will. Hello, sir. Good to finally chat.
00:01:22
Speaker
I mentioned that term online right. Some people use that as a slur or the very online right as a slur. Do you see it that way? like I prefer terminally online. I like to really, really lean into it.
00:01:34
Speaker
I believe that my friend John Doyle was once called a alarmingly far-right young man. And so he made it his Twitter bio for a little while. I think we should just embrace these labels because they're used as pejoratives. But one of the great mistakes that the establishment right, the Westminster bubble, and I will say ah boomer conservatives make,
00:01:55
Speaker
is they confuse the they confuse the medium for the message. So I know Marshall McLuhan's old phrase is the medium is the message and the the medium actually dictates the message.
00:02:07
Speaker
But what they think is that if you just switch the internet off, the message would not
Generational Divide on Identity and Demographics
00:02:13
Speaker
exist. so So Charles Moore recently attacked in the pages of The Telegraph James Orr for being ah the mentor Vice President J.D. Vance, and therefore he's one degree of separation away from Tucker Carlson, who interviewed Nick Fuentes, and Nick Fuentes is this avatar figure of...
00:02:31
Speaker
provocative young men online who are basically uncancellable because if you kick them out of every institution or mainstream media platform, they still find an audience on Rumble and say things that aren't out of place in an MW2 lobby but aren't said at Westminster or DC dinner parties.
00:02:46
Speaker
And he also says some very ill-advised and insulting things about Jewish people and Islam and women, etc. So that aside, They think that if you just shun the people that have connective tissue with the online space, and if you just kind of close your eyes and shut your ears and say, la la la, or anything that comes from the online space, then it won't exist.
00:03:07
Speaker
But it's not that these narratives come purely from online. It's that there is a generational divide between older conservatives who took the pre-political we, the sort of identity constituency that has to be settled for us to discuss matters of infrastructure and economics that Roger Scruton spoke about.
00:03:28
Speaker
The demographic givens upon which a high trust, homogenous culture rests, they took all that for granted. And they could take it for granted because they grew up in a largely homogenous, ethnically, culturally, in terms of national identity country,
00:03:44
Speaker
in which the main concern was the threat of the Soviet Union, the threat of nuclear armament, and the the battles over socialism v. capitalism in the Cold War.
Cultural Shifts Impact Politics and Economy
00:03:53
Speaker
And now, due to demographic realities that they either were complacent in overseeing or actively championed in the cases of both Blair's Labour and Boris Cameron and Gove's Conservative Party, accelerated, now that that demographic composition and thereby the cultural composition has changed, as Matt Goodwin observed in a recent report for Policy Exchange, the questions of identity, of ethnicity, of nationality, of belonging, centering around immigration and Islam, as you've mentioned, are as prescient for our generation, naturally, because we've grown up in a country since 1997, was in 98,
00:04:33
Speaker
the So we've only ever known this sort of diverse, multicultural UK or Australia or America in our Anglosphere cousins cases. We've only ever known that country. And so the questions of identity are as important to us as questions of economics, capitalism v. socialism that but Maggie Thatcher or Ronald Reagan apparently settled in their time as they are to the boomer generation.
00:04:55
Speaker
And so they think that this is a consequence of term of online echo chambers. And yes, there is a... there is a a way in which your discord servers or, or, you know, uh, anonymous Twitter pylons, which and I'm sure, ah I'm sure are very fun to some can accelerate this, but that's only petrol and an already burning fire.
00:05:15
Speaker
Like the, the, the, the blazing fire that they want put out as quickly as possible would already be burning, even if social media did not exist.
Role of Social Media in Societal Issues
00:05:24
Speaker
Social media is just sort of a ah lifting of the veil on an existing problem.
00:05:28
Speaker
They're just pointing at the elephant beneath the rug that nobody wants to talk about. And so I'm fine with cook being called online right or very online right or alarmingly far right because none of these labels really mean anything.
00:05:40
Speaker
It just says you're talking about uncomfortable conversation topics that need to be addressed, but that I don't like because it makes my liberal friends call me, you know... racist, sexist, homophobic, etc.
00:05:51
Speaker
And so I would just say, don't hold the people who have encouraged or actively run this reckless demographic, cultural and economic experiment in high regard.
00:06:01
Speaker
And when they call your names, shrug it off. Yeah, and we will get to the finer points of that reckless experiment a bit later on, but I want to delve a bit deeper on that messaging piece.
00:06:14
Speaker
Because what you've just articulated is a modern incarnation of a timeless lesson, and that is that there is no example in human history of effectively getting rid of an idea by banning it or by censoring it.
00:06:28
Speaker
You just drive it underground and We know through centuries of philosophy, history, debate, that free speech, open inquiry is the best way to actually seek truth and to develop a more ordered, principled society. Or at least that's what I think you know most right-thinking people would tell you.
00:06:49
Speaker
We've forgotten that lesson in the UK. We've forgotten it in Australia. We've forgotten it across the Anglosphere. There are 30 people each day, give or take, who are now arrested for things they say online, which has now almost must become a cliche, that that that's fact.
00:07:02
Speaker
How have we forgotten that lesson that debate and open inquiry and free speech are the ways to combat some of the ills that society faces?
00:07:13
Speaker
Okay, so this may sound like I'm contradicting something that I just said about the medium being confused for the message. But the reason that censorship often hasn't worked throughout history is because it's just trying to dam up the tide of public mood.
00:07:31
Speaker
And when the riverbanks widen, then the dam gets flooded. And the widening of the riverbanks is shifts in technology. So the best example for this are ah the Inquisition, the the crackdown on Cathar heretics, the sort Gnostic sect that denied the material world, and the Catholic Church.
00:07:48
Speaker
persecuted them in in many cases were were perhaps a little bit overzealous, let's put it that way. I say this as a Catholic. And eventually the Cathars went underground. They wrote of courtly love literature. you can This is why you see a lot of, and romance novels, the themes of, I think, Romeo and Juliet, the sort of tragic, unrequited love where they die before they can consummate it, but that they're eternally together in heaven. This is a very Gnostic idea.
00:08:11
Speaker
um And where I'm going with this is, eventually, the ability to control the interpretation of the Bible was rendered impossible for the church because of the printing press.
00:08:23
Speaker
And this is why you know Martin Luther eventually nailed his 99 theses to the door. He translated
Demographic and Economic Challenges in the UK
00:08:28
Speaker
the Bible into German. He cut up bunch of books out, and it led to the Protestant Reformation. The Protestant Reformation was as much a consequence of the printing press as it was corruption in the Catholic church that people wanted to speak about and were censored and persecuted for doing so, ah Martin Luther being our best Catholic, of course.
00:08:44
Speaker
And so now what we're what we're seeing is these issues that mine and and your generation are organically concerned about, mass migration, changing demographics, the cultural change that results...
00:08:55
Speaker
from there on. And the economic change, by the way, because all economies are just the aggregated activity of a people in a time, in a place, operating consistently under one given culture. And this is why, you know, in America, the Anglo-Protestant work ethic was much more prosperous than the the beliefs in various African cultures that the future doesn't exist and therefore you can't plan for it. there's no word for maintenance. You know, they can't actually build businesses. It's not an immediate concern to them.
00:09:18
Speaker
All of these things are organic. And the recognition of these things is caused, as T.S. Eliot wrote in Notes on Culture, when a a entity comes into contact with its antonym and so has to redefine itself in opposition to that thing.
00:09:34
Speaker
So we have had our cultures, our demographics melded, and there are problems that have arisen because of that. But it's only because of the change in technology with the introduction of social media, with the introduction of ah long-form video content like this, and especially with the the lifting of the algorithmic restraining bolts by Elon Musk's purchase of X that has allowed more of these conversations to be had. I would also include Rumble in that direct capacity to YouTube.
00:10:02
Speaker
Forcing YouTube, especially after the Trump election, to stop censoring the platform and demonetizing people and discouraging the exploration of things that they found taboo or uncouth. And so what has forced these conversations, when when people don't want to have them, is the fact that technological circumstances have changed.
00:10:20
Speaker
And what I think we're seeing, if like if I may comment broadly on whether it's the Australian establishment, as as we know, I sort of threw a hand grenade at Matt when I went to CPAC and said the unsayable, whether it's the ah current American battle for the soul of MAGA, whether it's the various legacy right-wing institutions and parties in the UK, what we're seeing is a backlash to that by trying to keep the old ways of controlling the narrative in control, but they're being outfoxed and outpaced by just the the rapid exchange of information enabled by social media and and the likes of YouTube and podcasts.
00:11:00
Speaker
And so even though you might you know leak a brief to the Times or hold a press conference or try to get out ahead of something, as we saw with the attempted cancellation of Rupert Lowe, for example, the most powerful party in the country, the presumptive next party of government, couldn't actually permanently cancel an MP that they had kicked out the party because he just took to Twitter and immediately refuted the claims.
00:11:20
Speaker
And so as much as these issues are not a product of social media existing, the ability to talk about them and the ability to circumvent the gatekeeping by either people who are risk averse or a bit cowardly or trying to carry the Ming-Va's over the finish line at election, or people that just don't want these conversations to be had, that have an ideological reason to denial deny these things, you know, Mr. Fraser Nelson, look at this graph, crime isn't going up, pay no attention to the knife in your neck.
00:11:48
Speaker
the that that They can't keep the conversation on the ideological plantation long enough because people are just voicing what they actually think, and it's quicker than they can put the lid on this sputtering pot, if that makes sense.
00:12:00
Speaker
I think that is well put and there is well eloquently put and with a very strong intellectual grounding. Let me be slightly less eloquent and slightly less intellectual and say that another reason why these conversations are taking place is that things really have just turned to shit in the UK.
00:12:18
Speaker
And it's got to a point where it is now impossible to ignore the changes in demographics and the impacts in those demographic changes having.
Immigration Policies and Crime
00:12:27
Speaker
It's also impossible to ignore the fact that the kind of economy has barely grown on a per capita basis for years and years and years. It's impossible to ignore the fact that when you walk down a high street in London, it just does not feel the same as it once did.
00:12:44
Speaker
But you did note Fraser Nelson there, and there is this interesting control. It is actually now what used to be the establishment position. It's now almost strangely a contrarian position that says, no, no, If you actually look at the data, things have never been better.
00:12:57
Speaker
So Fraser Nelson, he used to be the editor of The Spectator. He now has a weekly column for The Times. He is supposedly, I guess, centre-right, but I think that can be called into into into question.
00:13:09
Speaker
For people who are unaware of of how he has contributed to the debate in the UK in recent months, it's this narrative that says, look, there's there's this doom and gloom going on from people like Will Kingston or Conor Tomlinson or Rupert Lowe on a much larger scale.
00:13:24
Speaker
But actually, really, when you look at the data, things have never been better. What is your response to the Fraser Nelsons of this world who put forward that type of argument? Okay, I think it's best to actually reverse engineer your your question, go backwards, because there's a story here.
00:13:38
Speaker
So Fraser Nilsen is performing the function of, as everyone may have seen the episode, or maybe just the meme that came out it, a poo when he's diving in front of Homer Simpson when he's working at the Quickie Mart and about to get shot by the guy with snake tattoo on his arm, whose name I always forget.
00:13:52
Speaker
So the guy with the snake tattoo is basically like, oh, it's going to annoy me now. Sorry, They didn't need to be here. Homer Simpson is... not Sorry, I think it is snake. Okay, there we go. yeah so he's he's come That's not the point. yeah but we know Simpson's references bound. So he's he's basically like, oh, foreign criminal? They didn't need to be here.
00:14:10
Speaker
Homer Simpson is the ruling political blank slate order that says everyone is as British as you and me if they you know have the prerequisite passports or are born on the soil or are just given documents as soon as they rock up at Dover Beach or through the arrival lounge of Heathrow and Gatwick.
00:14:24
Speaker
And Fraser Nelson is diving in front of that particular bullet the bullet that would ah obviously solve all of our problems. You know that that sort it's like you can't press that solve all problems switch. You're obsessed with pressing switches. Don't press the switch.
00:14:34
Speaker
You don't know what's going to happen Fraser Nelson is just like, no, have you seen this graph that actually is based on a crime survey that was invented by Thatcher that requires people to actually report crimes and then give their perception of whether or not crimes are going up and takes the broadest possible view that says, oh, crime overall is going down. Pay no attention to the fact that we're describing things like you know property crime and fraud, whereas actually rape, knife murder, and bike theft is going up. And it's like, oh, okay, interesting. Those specific crimes are going up. Who's committing those crimes?
00:15:04
Speaker
Well, if you ask that question, you lead to uncomfortable conversations about people from different places with different cultures behaving in different ways to the indigenous population, which then posits there is an indigenous population who can feel aggrieved about never wanting these people here in the first place.
00:15:20
Speaker
And Fraser Nelson's friends, the politicians that he has spent his life advising and bigging up, are the ones responsible for it. So they are directly... pause that, to pause that. So when you look at that sort of data...
00:15:32
Speaker
Basically, there are ways to frame data at a very high level. Say overall crime is going down. But really, you could argue that white blokes getting into punch-ups outside the pub has gone down dramatically whilst stabbing, sexual assault has gone up.
00:15:49
Speaker
And the variable around knife crime and sexual assault is obviously the rise in cultures that have been imported that do not share the same values as people who have been brought up in a Western liberal democracy.
00:16:03
Speaker
That's basically what we're saying. Yes. So there's there's a few elements to that. So first of all, thanks to the Centre for Migration Control's Freedom of Information requests, we know that 50% of all sex crimes committed in London, where a rape is reported every hour, are committed by men of another nationality than British. Now, that is not an ethnic breakdown.
00:16:20
Speaker
If you broke it down by ethnicity, which the data is not provided by the Ministry of Justice because they have this blank slate mindset, where anyone with a British passport is as British as you and me, including the son of a Hamas official who has just got arrested in Germany for plotting a terror plot, and ITV had say, British man,
00:16:34
Speaker
Sure. you know, if you break it down by ethnicity, the majority of rapes committed in London are committed by non-English people. So that means none of them needed to be here. None of those lives needed to be ruined or ended in the case of knife crime, where in gross and thereby even worse per capita terms, 60% of knife crimes and above 60% of knife murders are committed by young black men.
00:16:58
Speaker
So... all of those crimes are optional. the The perpetrators never to be need to be in the country in the first place. And so even if Fraser is saying, well, it's not in absolute terms for ah certain crimes, you know, better example is nationwide, a third, up to a third of crimes, sex crimes are committed by men of foreign nationality, again, not ethnicity, but foreign nationality.
00:17:19
Speaker
Well, that means that two thirds, for example, are committed by British nationals. So therefore, You know, it's not as big a problem. Okay, let's say that ignore per capita, let's say it's just a third. That means we could eliminate up to a third of crime if the criminals were never in the country in the first place. And so if the goal, as Fraser has conceded, is to reduce crime, because less crime is better, we all agree, that means that all the crimes that are committed by people who don't need to be in the country are optional, and so we can easily reduce a third of overall crime.
00:17:48
Speaker
Are we for that? No. Instead, any time that someone brings up the fact that these crimes are committed by people who never needed to be in the country in the first place, Fraser dives in like a poo with his graph and says, this is all one big scaremongering narrative. Actually, Britain is undergoing an integration miracle, which was the article he wrote in The Telegraph in December of 2024.
00:18:09
Speaker
which then prompted the entire grooming gang scandal to kick off again. And he had a debate with Sam Bidwell. That's when Max Tempers posted the transcript of the Oxford trial, caught Elon Musk's attention, and hey, presto, it became the national conversation.
00:18:20
Speaker
So the fact that Fraser knows he kickstarted it off and still insists that the graph explains away all crime when we know that each of the criminals who are in causing the increase in crime don't need to be here.
00:18:31
Speaker
means that there is an active containment and gaslighting operation going on. And you should stay focused on the fact that every single crime committed by an immigrant never needed to happen because they never needed to be in the country in the first place.
00:18:41
Speaker
And so if they were here via government choice, they could easily be removed and turred by government choice. And so all of this is a choice and we can make a different one. Yeah, this is the obvious answer argue answer to whenever someone says, well, you know, there are white rapists as well.
00:18:57
Speaker
there are as There are English rapists as well. And of course there are. There are scumbags in every country. Unfortunately, you can't do anything about that other than lock them up promptly, which, or go by the way...
00:19:09
Speaker
that's that's easy That's the easiest way to outflank this narrative, by the way. either do the pakele option or you or you return the old English custom of the mind is concentrated by hanging. But, as just sorry to interrupt, Robert, as if we concede, yes, there are horrible criminals in every country.
00:19:24
Speaker
Right. So we are saying the very act of the crime they have committed is horrific. Agreed. Thereby, why should we be importing more of them? Why should we risk our women and girls in this way, especially if we can recognize cultural differences that make these crimes more important?
00:19:39
Speaker
But the problem, as we've noted, not the crime itself. The problem is you noticing the differences between people, between cultures that makes crimes more likely to happen because they believe in a kind of Schrodinger's diversity.
00:19:53
Speaker
So these crimes only happen if you observe them. If we just, again, shut our eyes and shut our ears, none of them would happen. And this is, and people people may think I'm exaggerating here. They genuinely believe in a blank slate where all differences between peoples, cultures, identities, and patterns of behavior are consequence of economic education disparities or the just injustice of being born on a different continent. So if a state that recognizes we're all equal underneath were just to act by giving them social housing and a few classes on women's consent and bringing the entire world into London and packing this cheap by jowl, everyone would be equal.
00:20:27
Speaker
And if you don't think that they believe this, read a very revealing Guardian column by Zoe Williams in the aftermath of the protests in Epping, Essex during the summer. Because before it was revealed,
00:20:39
Speaker
The identity of the the sex offender, Hadoush Kabatou, you know, the guy that broke into the country eight days later, tried to proposition a 14-year-old schoolgirl in uniform, lied about it, was then convicted by a judge who weirdly said he was a good character.
Cultural Compatibility in Immigration
00:20:50
Speaker
And, you know, then we paid him £500 to piss off back to the Horn of Africa. Before all of that was revealed and the trial had gone on, Zoe Williams wrote in The Guardian, well, you know, put yourself in the shoes of these refugees.
00:21:01
Speaker
If you arrived in a country fleeing economic privation, and then you had people protesting outside your hotel every day saying you weren't welcome, wouldn't you struggle to fit into? Now, first of all, the protests only happened because he sexually propositioned a schoolgirl, Zoe.
00:21:14
Speaker
But second of all, the latent ideological strain in their argument is... If you say they don't need to be here, if you notice a difference between you and them on whatever grounds, nationality, culture, identity, etc., then you cause them to commit crime.
00:21:28
Speaker
So if we just all make believe that we are all equal, we will actually live in John and his imagine. This is why hate speech is more important to them than the actual crime, because the ah criminal is a victim of inequality, injustice, racial prejudice.
00:21:43
Speaker
And so if you just redress their grievances by giving them more money and teach people not to be racist and not to notice differences, no crime will happen. And this is why they clamp down on the speech of the indigenous population who say these foreign rapists don't need to be here more than the actual rapes committed by foreign men.
00:21:59
Speaker
Yeah. And at what risk of sounding like a wet, wishy-washy liberal, I feel as an immigrant, I do need to clarify that you are not saying that immigration is per se bad. In fact, from memory, up you put a tweet out a few weeks ago, which simplified the issue, I thought, quite nicely, which was along the lines of,
00:22:18
Speaker
If we like you, you can stay. As in, it is not Australians and Canadians and New Zealanders and Americans that are disproportionately committing crimes because they share the same cultural underpinnings as the United Kingdom.
00:22:33
Speaker
But if you are leeching off the state and if you are coming from a culture which does not share the same values, there's no real business case to say that we should be taking you in. That's effectively what you're saying, right?
00:22:45
Speaker
Yeah, I have a friends and enemies immigration policy. We don't need to break the colour swatch out. And we also don't need to pretend that literally anyone ah is as British as you and me, or from the from the Anglo-Celtic diaspora, as it were, I'm part Irish and that's, you know, what built Australia, just because they put their hand on whatever book, it doesn't need to be the Bible, and say a scout's pledge of, agree with British values, brother, now let me have access to your benefit system.
00:23:08
Speaker
The reason I'm not just going to pick up on the Anglosphere, because of course, that's kind of cheating, because we all have a kind of ethnic and cultural lineage that links us together, even if you know we're a bit more bashful or or have more bravado between our varying countries, and especially because we can hold our liquor better than the Americans can.
00:23:24
Speaker
But if you notice, we had a few hundred thousand Hong Kong refugees come into the country, and... Just just for for the record, I hope that the Hong Kongers get their sovereignty back over their own land eventually, crawl out from underneath the thumb of the Chinese Communist Party and can return to their country because that's where they want to be.
00:23:42
Speaker
However, if you notice, there haven't been any Hong Kong grooming gangs. Weirdly, in ah impoverished Japan, in feudal Japan, even when the the Japanese people were starving under World War II occupation, ah they didn't form mass grooming gangs in their own country.
00:23:59
Speaker
There are course, atrocities committed by all sorts of armies in all sorts of countries against all sorts of other ethnicities. There were always awful people, especially in wartime settings. But it's weird how there are certain immigrant groups that come over to the UK, like the Ukrainians, and don't commit mass rape and stabbing attacks.
00:24:15
Speaker
So even though immigration from those places is a question of logistics or cultural compatibility or just the lack of democratic consent to have hundreds of thousands of people from another place dropped into a certain area,
00:24:28
Speaker
You can at least, if you have some cultural common ground or just a baseline level of civic sense, you know, I don't have much in common with the Japanese. I'm neither Shinto nor Buddhist. We don't share the same ethnic heritage.
00:24:40
Speaker
We're halfway around the world to each other. But they have a high level of civic sense. You know, they take their trash with them. They don't play music allowed on trains. They're very polite. So you can kind of get along with them, even if you don't have the same religion or such.
00:24:53
Speaker
If you have none of that in common with people, it turns out it's basically impossible to integrate. And the only way that integration has ever worked throughout history, there's a good character from the Bible that represents this, is Ruth. So she ends up renouncing her previous people and her God and joins the Israelites by saying, your people is my people, your God is my God, and she marries an Israelite.
00:25:12
Speaker
The only way that's ever happened throughout history, basically with named characters, is to literally marry into the tribe, to renounce your prior loyalties, to adopt the religion of the state, to marry someone of that place. And so your children have the ancestry of the land, and over time, your descendants become indistinct from the indigenous population.
00:25:30
Speaker
That can only have happened in small numbers at the organic request of the population receiving those immigrants. And so the mass migration experiment that has happened ever since...
00:25:41
Speaker
mass transit has been available, whether by boat or airplane, because of ah the blank slate liberal ideology that we adopted in the aftermath of the Second World War, because the sin of the 20th century was, of course, to kill rip people in a very racist way.
00:25:53
Speaker
This has meant that we've completely detached ourselves from this understanding that people have different cultures. Cultures are more or less compatible with one another. And that the only way immigration works is not by bland abstract values or international laws or just the raw logistics of building enough houses and having enough doctor's appointments to accommodate people.
00:26:12
Speaker
No, it only works if individual people have good relationships with the host majority of the country that they are entering. And so if we like you, you can stay.
00:26:22
Speaker
If we don't like you because you commit crimes, because you take our money, or because you recreate the conditions of some third world slum that you left in my major city, Sorry, you should leave. And it's maddening to me, as I said to you on Twitter, that no politician, even on the right, bar Rupert Lowe, speaks in these terms. When Katie Lamb says, oh, we want a culturally coherent country, not even being as precise as I am here, she gets denounced by Kemi Baden-Ock, despite it being the popular position.
00:26:49
Speaker
when When Reform UK speak about ah immigration, they often speak about it only in logistical terms or in terms of these vague platitudes of British values, which are ill-defined. It's much easier actually to speak in terms of relationships than in terms of economics or laws or platitudes because people, and this is this is the hurdle that the sort of all non-native English people must go, people will find themselves running into.
00:27:14
Speaker
Because most people know someone who is not of the same ancestry that they know and like. and so And that is a small number of people compared to the the millions of people that have been let in that live in enclaves completely apart from and in direct opposition to and at the at the cost of the host population.
00:27:32
Speaker
But if you talk in terms of relationships rather than these vague abstractions, you make it less, you make it seem less unjust for people. And I think that's actually the winning messaging strategy for any immigration restrictionists to say our friends stay and our enemies, the majority of people that exploit us, disrespect us and won't reproduce our culture, they can go.
00:27:54
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And again, everything you've said, ah don't see as being particularly controversial. And I don't think any sensible person can argue with it.
00:28:05
Speaker
It really comes down to that old line, not all cultures are equal, which some on the left are still desperately trying to cling on to. And when you tell them that 98 or 99% of women in Somalia experience from female genital mutilations,
00:28:21
Speaker
you but that there There is no argument to be made that that culture can be seen on the same footing as a Western liberal democracy. And then you just get this sort of sort of diversion.
00:28:32
Speaker
It's, in my sense, ah in in it is so simple, but at the same time, so difficult to get this across the line in the political realm as you have laid out.
Political Dynamics and Rule Adherence
00:28:42
Speaker
I'm curious about that speech you made at CPAC, which you referred to earlier, because whilst I think there is now progress being made in the United Kingdom,
00:28:50
Speaker
In this regard, I think whilst you said that that reform are very slowly moving to that position that you just mentioned, albeit not as quickly as you would like, We're making progress.
00:29:01
Speaker
Australia, from that just two-week visit back to my country at birth, I don't think is making that progress. I don't know. Did you get a sense when you went out there about how they're feeling on this concept of mass migration and multiculturalism, keeping in mind that the numbers in terms of immigration, not just on a per capita basis, on a net basis, have been considerably higher in Australia than they have been in the United Kingdom over the last five or so years?
00:29:29
Speaker
Yeah, we're getting a 1% increase in our population every year via migration. You guys are getting 3% to 4%, which know Australia is a much larger country, but there's actually like fewer regions of Australia that are habitable. It's basically all along the coast.
00:29:41
Speaker
so it's a bloody There is a bloody big desert in the middle, which is pretty tough to live in, yeah. Yeah. And and ah just a reminder to people who who don't understand the ingenuity required by Australians to make it habitable.
00:29:53
Speaker
Australia was only made habitable because of the culture and the identity and the intrepid nature, the spirit of heritage Australians that came along and founded a country out of this this, it's hardly got the Goldilocks conditions of America. It's got a lot of rare earth minerals and that you can exploit if you are the kind of an intrepid entrepreneurial type, but they're very hard to get to. So it wasn't just, you know, a treasure chest waiting for them ah in the middle of the ocean. They had to really work hard to make these beautiful cities and clean beaches out of, as you said, barren desert.
00:30:27
Speaker
ah so don And a shameless plug, I go into great depth on that exact topic with former Prime Minister Tony Abbott in the next episode coming out next week. Sorry, shameless plug, please go on. No, and not shameless plug at all. i look forward to listening to that. So I had the pleasure of actually meeting Tony at CBAC Australia.
00:30:45
Speaker
And obviously, you know, private conversation, I won't disclose what was said. But I did get the sense from Lots of people in the Australian political establishment who spoke quite candidly with me because I'm a POM and therefore they had nothing to lose by just being open.
00:31:01
Speaker
the Even things like the Trump administration, who are still going too slowly for my liking, especially as Trump the other day said, we need 600,000 Chinese students to prop up our historically black colleges. Yeah, not MAGA.
00:31:12
Speaker
Even him, who is in in policy a moderate, but in rhetoric a firebrand, was still seen as to be on the pale. That's not how we do things in Australia. And I think there is a commitment to procedure in our respective countries. Australia even more so than Britain, but I'm very much feeling the yoke of, you know, it's not polite to say at Westminster dinner parties by the fact that I'm being cancelled from everywhere everywhere at the moment.
00:31:35
Speaker
there is still the belief that you need to play by the rules that the other side have flouted for generations and will just use as a stick with which to beat you and call you a hypocrite when they don't believe in the underlying morality of the rules in the first place and they will disregard them to use naked power.
00:31:53
Speaker
This is something that Charlie Kirk pointed out before his death, think it was couple of years ago, and he said the reason the right loses is because we play by our rules and then the left doesn't play by those rules and when they don't play by those rules, we don't you know flip over the monopoly board and say, okay, you don't get to pass, go and collect $200 anymore.
00:32:10
Speaker
Instead, we keep paying out from the bank and we complain when they then spend the money to attack us. We say, oh, aren't the left just hypocrites? And it's like, no they're not hypocrites. They just don't agree with your moral premises and so therefore won't play by the rules.
00:32:23
Speaker
But because they believe there is no truth but power, they will use power and your own rules against you to get you to basically punch yourself in the face. So stop punching yourself in the face. Give me an example of how that has taken place in the UK since Tony Blair.
00:32:38
Speaker
I'm putting you on the spot, but I think it was worth actually making this, grounding this for people. Here's an example. So Tony Blair conducted a constitutional revolution.
00:32:49
Speaker
He enshrined the civil service code into law in 2010 with the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act, which means that civil servants can't be sacked by ministers. Ministers have to follow civil service guidance, even if it's wrong.
00:33:02
Speaker
And if they stray from their ministerial brief concocted by civil servants, they will be accused of politicizing the civil service because the premise is that the civil service has to be a neutral and impartial institution. What that means in practice is that they pretend not to be party political,
00:33:18
Speaker
But they're clearly ideological because nobody goes into politics is without an interest in politics. It's absurd on the face of it. There is no such thing as a neutral institution. And so what the conservative government did was rather than challenge Blair's constitutional settlement when they came in as part of the coalition government and then you know had outright majorities under Cameron, May, Boris, Sunak, etc.,
00:33:39
Speaker
Rather than challenge Blair's constitutional revolution that put the government on rails because it meant that all elected ministers had to play by the rules set for them by unelected left-wing civil servants, they instead... And unelected judges.
00:33:52
Speaker
Exactly. Yeah, with the 2005 Constitutional Reform Act, which invented the Supreme Court, which means that parliament is now no longer sovereign. They are beneath the rules of the ECHR and beneath the rules of the British judiciary.
00:34:04
Speaker
What they did is rather than challenge those rules, they constantly whined and complained about the blob, in Michael Gove's words. Michael Gove, single-handedly responsible as the longest serving cabinet minister for feeding and expanding said blob and making those appointments.
00:34:16
Speaker
They complained about the blob. They complained about civil service bias. They complained about the BBC. But they never did anything to actually attack the laws that had only been set 10 years before. Because it would be un-British, because it would be unpopular, because it would attack the integrity of our impartial institutions.
00:34:34
Speaker
Top tip, anytime they say independent or impartial, just substitute with the word unaccountable and everything makes much more sense. And so what they did, rather than conserve anything about the culture or the country or the interests of the people,
00:34:46
Speaker
Instead, they just conserved the gains of Tony Blair's revolution because they were more committed to procedures than they were to principles and serving the interests of the people. And when the left understands that you are committed more to procedures than principles and people, all they have to do is change the procedures to favor their ideology and you end up serving their ideology. And this is why conservative ministers in last government were going around their departments and Again, Michael Gove, Department of Education, handing out copies of Blair's autobiography and calling themselves the heir to Blair and calling Blair the master because they made the mistake of thinking, well, this is the age of social progressivism, so we have to double down on social progressive ideology. And that was the secret to Blair's electoral success rather than recognizing
00:35:30
Speaker
The only reason they were being fed the diatribe of social progressivism to act upon, you know, flying the pride flag above the home office or rubber stamping visas like they were going out of fashion, is because Blair had enshrined as a matter of unimpeachable precedent in the civil service and the judiciary that progressive ideology. And so they mistook the successes of Blair's revolution as being a result of the progressive ideology, which is unpopular with the majority of the public, rather than his tweaking of the rules and procedures and constitutional apparatuses.
00:35:59
Speaker
And that's why now, if reform get into government and they don't repeal any of those laws, they're going to be, and you've already sworn on your show, so I'm going to use it, they're going be up shit creek and unable to paddle backwards.
00:36:10
Speaker
So yeah you need to actually attack this constitutional settlement. You need to be willing to break from the the the polite rules that have been set by your enemy, because otherwise you are engaging in a battle on your enemy's terms and surrender will be the inevitable outcome.
00:36:25
Speaker
Yeah, we spoke to David Starkey, spoke to David Starkey a few weeks ago and he's been very strong on this thesis. At the same time, and and sorry, before I go on, there's a very fascinating little insight which you very correctly picked up on, which Australia is arguably even more beholden to that sort of feeling of procedure than the UK is.
00:36:45
Speaker
That notion of the rugged, irreverent Australian anti-authoritarian individualist, I think has always been a myth. One of my favorite quotes is that Australia is, or the problem with Australia is not that it is a country descended from convicts, but it is a country country descended from jailers.
00:37:02
Speaker
So I think Australia does have that same problem of the blob or the administrative state and not wishing to pull it back. The difference is, and I think this is something that a lot of people in the UK don't fully appreciate, it is much easier to make change happen in the United Kingdom than it is under the Australian system.
00:37:21
Speaker
As long as you have something, if you've got a massive majority in the House of Commons, and you have then put something in your manifesto, basically, you can get it through. Australia has a Senate, which makes it almost impossible to get any sort of change done.
00:37:37
Speaker
So I always find it slightly odd when people say, well, you know, it's really difficult to close the borders, or it's really difficult to reduce the size of the state. To use that term from Buckele in El Salvador, you can just do things, and you particularly, under the UK system,
00:37:56
Speaker
You can just do things if you have a majority.
Authoritarianism vs. Liberalism in Governance
00:38:00
Speaker
But it feels like there's this defeatist attitude to say, well, it's all too hard. Yeah, Bukele is my model, my my my political aspiration. I once tweeted that every single young man who's politically engaged wants the aesthetics of Bukele's victory speech. You know, being surrounded by your wife and children on the balcony of a lavish palace, having destroyed a satanic, murderous, rapist gang.
00:38:23
Speaker
Dressed to the nines like El Presidente with a crowd calling your name, having 90% approval rating and an 80% win of the vote share. And then just to fix your country and be praised for it. And he retweeted it. So that's a highlight of my life.
00:38:36
Speaker
So i more before we go any further, for people who may not be aware, who is Bukele? what What's the highlights of what he has done in North Salvador? Okay, so he's a, I think he's a half-Palestinian El Salvadorian Christian who was elected to fix El Salvador, which was the most dangerous place in all of Latin America, had one of the highest murder rates in the world, was overrun by a satanic gang that you may be familiar with from American immigration discourse called MS-13.
00:39:02
Speaker
And their motto is literally like murder, rape, and pillage. So you have to commit those things in order to be inducted into the gang. And Bukele just went, hmm, there's an awful lot of murderers with face tattoos of skulls and satanic emblems in my country.
00:39:14
Speaker
What if I just round them all up and stuck them in a mega prism, treated them very harshly, and then by locking up like 1% of the population who are committing heinous crimes, we keep the rest of my country safe.
00:39:26
Speaker
And now it's gone from like murder capital of the world to the safest country in Latin America. They've got thriving economy because he's done some interesting things with attracting capital investment and adopting Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. What do you say to the classical liberals who would say that he didn't round up people who...
00:39:43
Speaker
Well, he knew had committed crimes. He used that symbol, which again, we know they've committed crimes, but there wasn't, say, the due process of a Western liberal democracy.
00:39:55
Speaker
And therefore, as a result of that, whilst the means justifies the end argument, shouldn't hold up. We shouldn't be a liberal in the pursuit of a liberal end.
00:40:08
Speaker
I'm not a liberal and liberalism believes that everyone is blank slate and therefore that the the criminal themselves. Okay, well, let me, let's cut this political theory. Why is it unfair to lock someone up just because they've got a face tattoo?
00:40:21
Speaker
Okay, number one, because the reason they have the face tattoo is because they're a member of the murdery rapey gang. So therefore it's pretty easy to identify them. Number two, because cruelty to... Lenience to the perpetrators is cruelty to the innocent. And so if you just put them in a nice padded room with a PlayStation...
00:40:40
Speaker
It's not a punishment. It's not a deterrent. And so the moral ledger remains in balance for all society. And if i if I may say, in in the spirit of you can just do things, you can just infer whether or not things work from their consequences.
00:40:53
Speaker
So let's look at the places where we have lenient approaches to criminal justice. The UK, where they've let out thousands of potentially violent criminals early from the sentences. And now we've had multiple crimes committed by those people yet again, which is a dark stain on Shabana Mahmood's record.
00:41:09
Speaker
Or the various cities in America, like North Carolina, New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, etc., whose Soros-funded district attorneys and mayors practice permissive criminal justice policies, have cashless bail for violent crimes and property crimes, whose streets are flooded with ah homeless drug addicts who are given clean needles because you shouldn't stigmatize their use of drugs. You should only incentivize that they use them responsibly somehow. And this ends up with the criminalization of self-defense and the promotion of violent crime, where you see people burning to death on the subway.
00:41:42
Speaker
Meanwhile, when some violent skitzo tries to attack a subway car for the people, Daniel Penny is prosecuted for defending them. So I think I would much rather live in an El Salvadorian illiberal state than quote-unquote liberal state which treats the criminals as the victims and victimizes innocent people and then throws you in prison in their stead if you say a mean thing on Twitter, about the propensity of certain groups to be more predisposed to violent crime.
Trust and Multiculturalism in the UK
00:42:07
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's a fair response. you know i I have always thought of myself, not just as a classical liberal, but as a libertarian. The UK has a funny way of radicalizing you, and I certainly think that the limits of my libertarianism have been challenged, as I've seen some of the consequences of this.
00:42:25
Speaker
classical or pure, pure classical liberalism in the United Kingdom ah in recent months. Can i ah kind challenge that a little bit just because i know it's your podcast. I don't want to derail the structure. Well, you can.
00:42:38
Speaker
Well, no have you read Alan McFarlane's Origins of English Individualism? No, I haven't. Okay. So highly recommend you bump it up your reading list. What we in the Anglosphere, as in descended from Anglos culturally, but also this is a difficult conversation to have ethnically because of our family structure, what we think of as liberalism is just the ancient customs and liberties that seem intuitive to us.
00:43:01
Speaker
And liberalism is the universalization of that, which then applies to other cultures that do not hold the underlying ethics of liberalism to be sacred. So it rests on, yes, the Christian idea of Imago Dei, that everyone is made in the image of God and therefore has equal moral consideration.
00:43:18
Speaker
But it also requires you to think individualistically as a habit. And Alan O'Farlane's book points out that we, as far back as the Middle Ages, because we have way better records in England than most other countries because of our climate and because of our high levels of literacy, we had basically non-existent levels of child marriage, non-existent levels of cousin marriage.
00:43:35
Speaker
The common law property ownership system would incentivize like the eldest sons and daughters to possibly inherit the farm, but it wasn't guarantee. The rest of the siblings would split off and form different farms and land holdings in the same area.
00:43:47
Speaker
But then this would mean that families mixed a lot more. So there was a low level of incest, a low level of clannishness. And so it became second nature for us to think of extending moral consideration to be polite, to be considerate in public spaces to people who weren't just ourselves and our families.
00:44:02
Speaker
Whereas the rest of the world, read Patrick Nash's work on cousin marriage, for example, for Oxford University, the rest of the world has cousin marriage rates of like 40 to 90% in areas of Pakistan, which we are importing.
00:44:13
Speaker
And so it's impossible to think individualistically, liberally, in a Christian fashion, in areas of the world where you only extend moral consideration to your family your clan, your ummah, the sort of global Muslim race, because you operate in a shame-based system that attributes morality collectively.
00:44:30
Speaker
And so it's basically impossible for the rest of the world to think liberally or libertarianly because of their family structure, because their identity and their religion. Yeah, this is why I've always thought that classical liberalism can still work in a high-trust monocultural society, but it breaks down in a low-trust multicultural society.
00:44:48
Speaker
And there is no doubt that the UK has now become a low-trust multicultural society that is fractured around, as you said, particular cultural and ethnic enclaves, many of which are dictated by the norms of the countries from which those peoples have come from.
00:45:03
Speaker
And many of those cultures don't align with those liberal values that that that you just mentioned that go back to antiquity in in England.
00:45:15
Speaker
So for me, I think it is still it is still the dream, but unfortunately, as so someone like Bucalli would probably say, we're well past the point of, you know, you know, dream political theories, and we need to deal with harsh realities.
00:45:28
Speaker
And this is this is where I want to get to. There was a fascinating thought experiment on a Lotus Eaters podcast recently. Are you still contributing to Lotus Eaters? You once were arguably that one of the faces of Lotus Eaters, along with Carl.
00:45:41
Speaker
No, i so I left in March because I was doing a few other ah projects behind the scenes that like haven't been able to talk about for a while, but they're still doing very good work over there once the guys came to my wedding, et cetera.
00:45:52
Speaker
Right, right, right. One of the thought experiments on one of their recent episodes was the fix everything button.
00:46:03
Speaker
As in what is something that you could just do easily? As in, it doesn't require money or much money, doesn't require much effort. It's basically getting rid of something or removing something and pressing the button and it just...
00:46:17
Speaker
fixes everything or it improves things dramatically. So for example, something like a massive infrastructure project would not count under the fix everything button because that requires a lot of effort.
00:46:28
Speaker
But something like and I may even take away one of your potential answers, but putting the English Navy or putting the Navy in the channel, firing a warning shot at dinghies and saying, if you continue to come forward, we will have no choice but to sink your dinghy, would within a week stop the illegal migration problem.
00:46:50
Speaker
That is an example of a fix everything button solution. What would be some of your fix everything button solutions for the United Kingdom?
00:47:01
Speaker
Okay, so that that's definitely one of them. Repealing various laws that would, quote unquote, stop you from doing that. So, you know, our membership of the UN Refugee Convention, the membership the European Convention on Human Rights, the Human Rights Act, etc. The sort of things that you spoke about with David Starkey.
00:47:17
Speaker
He's very good on his great repeal bill. taxing remittances at 95 to 100% because we shouldn't be the piggy bank for the third world. I mean, India and Nigeria are incredibly reliant on siphoning off money from our economies back to their home nations. so And they openly exploit our country by, in India's case, calling their diasporas living bridges to basically use demographics to gerrymander our democracy and cause our politicians to pander to Indian ethnic and religious interests. So easily ban visas, were whether humanitarian or or tourist or any other kind, from countries with a high propensity of criminality that are not culturally proximate to us.
00:47:54
Speaker
Hold those visas and foreign aid hostage for Pakistan so that they have to return their nationals who have not only just participated in the grooming gangs and rape gangs, but the family members that we know covered up for them.
00:48:08
Speaker
And if people think that's harsh, they should read the work of Muslim writers. So in 2016, the head of the Ramadan Foundation said the Pakistani community, and this is after three of his cousins were prosecuted, by the way. So he was courageous speak up about this.
00:48:20
Speaker
He said the Pakistani community in Britain has buried its head in the sand because they don't want to be seen as speaking up because they will be perceived as, quote, siding with the white enemy. Yasmin Ali Harvey Brown, the you know, the sort of pence perpetual race communist who goes on Jeremy Vine show.
00:48:33
Speaker
She wrote in 2013 after some interviews with some Muslim women who themselves had been abused by their husbands who were rape gang perpetrators. She asked whether or not they sympathized with the white female victims and they immediately switched and went, have you seen but how they dress? By Allah, it's so immodest. They basically bring it on themselves.
00:48:48
Speaker
So like this is a consistent pattern, you know, In 2024, Charlie Peters recorded a a Rotherham trial where one of the girls shouted out, I love you, dad, at the sentencing hearing after she had already heard about how he was abusing children.
00:49:00
Speaker
And the families actually went to attack one of the victims that gave a statement. So we can easily just hold these these sort of slush funds and tourist visas for countries that reliably produce terrorists and rapists hostage until they take their nationals back. We shouldn't just allow them to renounce their British citizenship and go, well, we're stuck here forever.
00:49:19
Speaker
um The other fix everything button we can push, and again, this would be very illiberal, It's Douglas Carswell's suggestion that we use the Shemima-Bagan precedent to just denaturalize and deport people we don't like. Again, we keep the people we do like, we deport people we don't like.
00:49:31
Speaker
But a lot of this, well, stems from the fact that people are unwilling to push the fix everything button because it challenges the core assumptions of liberal ideology. The reason I think that classical liberalism won't work is because from its foundation, it said that people are blank slates. And that was only put on steroids, again, after the Second World War, where the greatest crime of the 20th century, you know, wasn't Mao, wasn't Stalin. It was, of course, Hitler, who was categorically evil. But he was the most evil because he killed lots and lots of people in a very racist way.
Reform UK and Political Messaging
00:49:57
Speaker
And so it is racist and Hitlerian to notice differences between people, cultures, and nations. We have to pretend that everyone has a blank slate.
00:50:04
Speaker
And so if you press that fix everything button, you you concede that there are measurable, predictable differences between peoples, between cultures, between countries. And if you concede that to the prevailing morality of both Keir Starmer and Lord Hermer, who worship the universal system of international law, or the likes of Fraser Nelson, who has body-blocked the right for years by saying there's no such thing as English ethnicity...
00:50:28
Speaker
You challenge their morality, their assumption that says that literally everyone can become as British as you and me if we just give them time, if we lower our union jacks, we put them up in social housing and we give them a few presentations on women's rights.
00:50:40
Speaker
And transgressing that taboo, I think, is the number one to fix everything button. Yeah, yeah. No, I can't disagree with that. Before I get to my final question, you briefly mentioned reform and you mentioned it with what sounded like a tinge of cynicism.
00:51:00
Speaker
They are, I would guess still, if there was a vote, well, that they are currently the favorites to win the next election. They are certainly preferable to the Conservative Party and Labour Party.
00:51:13
Speaker
You do have people around the fringes who are trying to set up alternative right-wing parties like Ben Habib, but getting traction to the extent that they could actually win an election would be very, very difficult, if not impossible.
00:51:25
Speaker
So reform are probably the best hope. how much How much faith do you have that they will be able to turn around some of the problems that we've discussed?
00:51:36
Speaker
So I agree with your electoral assessment. And so I think as things stand, unless there is a seismic and unpredictable change, unless a Caesar figure comes along the way- Which, by way, three and a half years a long time. There may very well be.
00:51:49
Speaker
but Sorry, go on. Yeah, no, no. Our Buckele may well rise through the mist in that time. However, as things stand, efforts should be focused on making reform live up to the mandate that they are being afforded by the electorate. It's the same principle that is happening in the US at the moment.
00:52:06
Speaker
The idea that they were going to have Ron DeSantis replace Donald Trump was always laughable. And instead, the smart people bet on Trump, but they had the principle of trust the plan, but always chimp.
00:52:17
Speaker
Basically, put your faith that Trump will win the election and has broadly the right instincts. But when he strays off the reservation regarding things that his base wants him to do, for example, softening on H-1B visas and you know the demographic gerrymandering that India decides to do, or saying we need 600,000 Chinese students, then you freak out on social media, you make your voice heard, and via the people in the administration that are listening to the base on X and on YouTube, it gets funneled up the chain, and hopefully they will be receptive to changing their mind.
00:52:46
Speaker
So my pessimism to the extent that I have it about reform I think I share it with David Starkey, is that out of risk aversion, out of a sense that if they do things, they will be called far right and racist because they're only their ears are only open to the feedback channels of the BBC, ITV, Sky, Channel 4 and the like, who will always call them racist anyway.
00:53:10
Speaker
They will concede ground to the enemy over time. But they haven't learned the success of the Trump revolution, which is the media are the enemy. The other side don't want good faith debate. They want you dead, per Charlie Kirk.
00:53:21
Speaker
And so what they'll do is they will salami slice off allies and draw up the drawbridge to young talent out of a fear of people not being on message, not being sufficiently loyal enough to defer all judgment to the top table's decisions.
00:53:38
Speaker
And so what they'll do is they won't have the people to replace the civil service when they sack them. They won't have credible MPs. So they'll have people speaking off the cuff on ministerial rounds that are kind of dim and incapable of articulating their position.
00:53:52
Speaker
And out of habit and instinct to not want to be called names by the media, they will concede to left-wing framing. You're seeing early signs of this. First of all, in that they're becoming a refugee camp for Tory defectors.
00:54:04
Speaker
Some of those defections would be good. For example, Suella Braveman, who is making noises about wanting to do so after having held her nerve because of how they treated Rupert Lowe. But it's not encouraging the likes of Jake Berry or Nadine Dorries, the loyal ah members of Boris Johnson's cabinet who are still making apologetics for the Boris wave while in reform have gone there. It's also not encouraging that a Labour council is defected and he's still a member of the Fabian Society.
00:54:29
Speaker
But instead, they are body blocking people to their right who have an organic presence and have something to say. So, you know, I was recently banned from speaking at a reform event, despite having spoken at a fringe event in 2024.
00:54:44
Speaker
and i I don't take that personally because I don't expect people to like me. I don't expect people to give me opportunities. But number one, it was annoying for the local association who had marketed the event and sold tickets by the fact that I was going to go there anyway and they had to issue some refunds.
00:54:57
Speaker
But number two, it speaks to that trend of not willing to engage with your critics on your own side and thereby conceding ground to the enemy. Another example, they've recently started this student activist network.
00:55:10
Speaker
Now, in abstract, it's a great idea. You know, Turning Point USA got out the vote on American college campuses. It swung Gen Z towards Trump. Great idea. I had a friend, Charlie Downs, who had pitched this idea to them way back in the day. And Charlie Downs now has a show on GB News. He is a, it helps that he's a good looking young lad, but he's also very articulate and understands the issues And he's representative of this new class in Westminster of young men who aren't falling afoul of the same drink and drugs and hookup culture that the Tory party fell afoul of.
00:55:40
Speaker
Instead, they're committed Christians, they're getting married, they won't have compromise material on them, they're well-read, and they are mission-focused. He was told no, in part because they thought that he was too independent a free thinker and they couldn't keep him on a tight leash.
00:55:55
Speaker
So instead, what you've got is it's being run by people who, and I'm sure they're nice people, but nobody knows who they are. And the aesthetics are... comparable to like a Carhophone warehouse company retreat more than MAGA, right? More than enterprising and energetic and attractive and something you want to feel that you belong to.
00:56:13
Speaker
And so my fear is that by the time reform carries the Ming Vars over the finish line, They will have shrunk the ground upon which they stand to be so small that when the tide begins to rise, they won't have anywhere to run. the final someone but Someone can make the argument, though, that it is easier to compel people to follow a movement based around one charismatic figure in a presidential election than it is to win in a parliamentary, the Westminster parliamentary system, which is why they're trying to put those controls around around the
00:56:46
Speaker
those controls around So the only reason I would say no is because the the grounds upon which they're gatekeeping people out of the movement are those people are being right in a way that is perceived too early, even though the base already wants it. So, for example, the mass deportation conversation that happened because Stephen Edgington interviewed Nigel when he said, I'm not going to do them. You know, they're not my ambition. They're politically impossible. If I commit to them, I'm just going to be called far right forever.
00:57:13
Speaker
reforms I believe he said something along the lines of that could lead us down a very dark path or words to that effect. Yeah, he wrote that. That was about 12 to 18 months ago. Yeah, well, no, the the very, the the dark and dangerous use use of rhetoric comment was actually in March after Rupert Lowe was kicked out because that's what they cited as the reason. So that was very recent.
00:57:31
Speaker
And then in July, Farage, after the protests in Epping and Pink Lady protests across the country, came out and backed it. Now, I'm glad he backed it. But there were lots of people in that interim period, competent people, who were ostracized from the reform movement, who had just been saying what the base wanted and expected. Adam Renn did some polling after Rupert Lowe was kicked out, and they found that 99% of reform voters and members expected mass deportations.
00:57:54
Speaker
It's the reason they were voting for the party. So when you are kicking people out of the movement who are just saying what your base want, who are trusting the plan but chimping in the American sense, then it means that you are removing potential spokespeople, potential cabinet appointments, potential heads of department and civil service, potential people that are going to do your PR for you organically so you don't have to train spokespeople who don't have the talent or charisma or camera sense.
00:58:17
Speaker
for yourself. And so you're just ostracizing allies. And the the thing that the the recent like set two in America should have taught people about Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes and Ben Shapiro is that you can cancel these people. You can ostracize them from a movement. You can ban them from broadcast platforms or various conferences and the like.
00:58:34
Speaker
But if they're politically engaged and if they're talented... no matter what they're saying and how odious you might find it, they're not just going to give up. They're going to go somewhere. they're going to start their own institution. They're still going to have an audience. And eventually you'll be reacting to them.
00:58:46
Speaker
So it's better to engage with those people that have these ideas to build a broader coalition movement than it is to ostracize them because your enemies who want you to fail will always call you names.
00:58:58
Speaker
And the final thing I'll mention, if I may, Will, is you said earlier, the British system, it's easy to make change if you put it in your manifesto. Now, if you in the run-up to election, govern what you think is acceptable to say according to what will get you called names, then you're not going to put it in your manifesto.
00:59:17
Speaker
So then when it comes time to be more right-wing, as is promised, after you've got your foot in the door, you've won the election, guess what? The House of Lords has already been packed by the other parties. We'll just step in and block anything you haven't committed to. So you actually do need to lay the rhetorical groundwork that makes it possible for you to put things in the manifesto to run on them in the election, and then to make it so that the House of Lords can't block it because the public already agree with you.
00:59:42
Speaker
And the good thing for reform is the public are already there. They're just not willing to do it yet, which is frustrating and confusing. But hey, I don't want to be an MP anyway. So if I need to be outside the tent wrap them on the knuckles anytime that they so sort of like leftward soften, maybe that's my function.
00:59:56
Speaker
Okay. Well, I think that's a very neat way to end it because it brings us for full circle to the importance of people in the public sphere saying courageous things because it will hopefully drag the political class in the right direction.
01:00:12
Speaker
Connor, where can people read your stuff, hear more from you, ETC, ETC? ah They can find my work on Courage Media and they can also find it Substack under the name Connor Tomlinson or Tomlinson Talks.
01:00:25
Speaker
I regularly post videos and do live streams on YouTube under Connor Tomlinson and I post on Twitter at at con underscore Tomlinson where I'm sure I'll be saying things that everyone dislikes.
01:00:37
Speaker
I would doubt that very much at least with this audience. Links to all of those are in the show notes. Connor, mate, thank you very much for coming on the show. Pleasure, sir.