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Who is the real Nigel Farage? - Alex Phillips
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The UK is arguably at its lowest ebb. It is beset by a series of existential economic, cultural and social problems. The major parties appear ill-equipped to address these problems. After all, they created them.
Nigel Farage's Reform party is leading in the polls. Is he the right man for this monumental job, or is he just another member of the 'uniparty'? There are few people who know Nigel better, and are better placed to answer that question, than journalist and political advisor, Alex Phillips.
Follow Will Kingston and Fire at Will on social media here.
Read The Spectator Australia here.
Read Alex's Substack here.
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Transcript
Introduction to Political Despair in the UK
00:00:19
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Fire at Will. I'm Will Kingston. Images have an ability to summarise a political moment in a way that a newspaper column or a series of stat statistics just can't.
00:00:33
Speaker
They hit us on a ah visceral level. Think Trump shaking his fist after the assassination attempt or Rishi Sunak announcing an election in the pouring rain.
00:00:45
Speaker
Or more recently, when the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, sobbed on the front bench as Keir Starmer stood at the dispatch box, oblivious and uncaring.
00:00:58
Speaker
It spoke to a country in despair and a government adrift. This was after one year of the Starmer government, a year which has widely been panned as being one of the worst in modern British history.
00:01:13
Speaker
But at the same time, this country has had dark moments before. Is what we're seeing at the moment really that bad? To help me understand the first year of the Keir Starmer regime, with the word regime used deliberately, I am delighted to be joined by Talk TV host and political advisor, Alex Phillips.
Rural vs Urban Perspectives
00:01:32
Speaker
Alex, welcome to Fire at Will.
00:01:34
Speaker
Hello Will, good day. G'day mate, how are you? Yeah, all right, not too bad. I'm in the wilds of Wiltshire at the moment, went hence dressed like a farmer. But real England, you managed to get out of the the multicultural delights of London.
00:01:48
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. This is my, you know, if I didn't have an escape in in the sort of West country, I think I'd go crazy. It's the one thing that keeps me sane, getting out of London, getting back to where people have real jobs, set alarm clocks, can talk freely in the pub about things that are worrying them.
Is the Current UK Situation Uniquely Challenging?
00:02:04
Speaker
And yeah, that sort of you when you get out of London and come out to somewhere like rural Wiltshire, you kind of realize there's still a country to save. Yeah, well, that phrase, a country to save, is is interesting. And i want I want to start there because yeah anyone who is living in the UK at the moment feels this i this despondency.
00:02:22
Speaker
But at the same time, if you are a student of history, you would know that the 80s were pretty grim with industrial action. 70s, the UK economy was literally being bailed out by the you know um IMF.
00:02:35
Speaker
yeah We can go back a thousand years if you want. And there were Vikings raiding the countryside, which was probably a pretty dark moment. Is there something uniquely bad about where we are today? Or is this just another bad trot which can be rectified?
Social Issues and Demographic Changes
00:02:50
Speaker
No, this is uniquely bad. And let me explain why. Because when we look at the sort of huge pitfalls we've had in the past, they're largely economic. They were things like, you know, the the three-day working week, needing an IMF bailout, like you said.
00:03:05
Speaker
You know, moments in our history where we've been blighted by crime levels or blighted by economic disaster or blighted byi useless government scandal.
00:03:16
Speaker
All of those things are irreparable. All of those things are things that another government can come in and put right, basically, with different policies. They can shake things up. They can try something different. They can rescue the country out of a feared oblivion.
00:03:30
Speaker
Where we are right now is the issues that blight us mainly are social issues. they' It's this sense of degradation of society, the hugely, rapidly changing demographic, this idea that there's been this sort of almost brainwashing and gaslighting for 20 years that you can't even criticise or talk about.
00:03:50
Speaker
the things that are probably the biggest changes happening to Britain. And these changes, when they are demographic changes, due to unfettered migration, due to splintering of our societies into vulcanized communities where people don't share our values, don't speak our language, the rate at which this has happened over the past 20 years, even over the past 10 years alone, it's very difficult to reverse that.
00:04:14
Speaker
That is where we are at the moment. so I think people palpably sense that we're in a sort of existential moment. Are we? Who are we? What are we? How do we defend it? What sort of policies do we need to defend our sense of nationhood and identity? Are they palatable? Can they actually be enacted?
00:04:31
Speaker
So we find ourselves, I think, in 2025, at a pivotal moment in history, where out there in real England, people know that our country has essentially been chucked into the dustbin of history by by it's extreme left-wing ideologies who advocate for open borders, who push for multiculturalism,
00:04:50
Speaker
who demonize anybody who dares speak the about it, who try and censor us and prevent us, not only not talking about this, but not even having that the audacity to think certain things.
00:05:02
Speaker
And this is, ah to me, this is probably one of the worst moments in British history because, you know, the amount of immigration we have had in the past 10 years alone is probably more than we had since we actually even became a nation state to present day.
00:05:16
Speaker
And those things just, it's very difficult to see how those things start being unpicked but without the sort of policies that most people would find unconscionable.
Immigration Policy and UK vs Australia
00:05:26
Speaker
Yeah, that's very interesting. Most people would find uncomfortable. I think that is changing, actually. I think in the past, some of the things you just said would be blindly dismissed as racist, whereas now people are very much, the Overton window is moving.
00:05:39
Speaker
You also i threw out several existential questions there about the future of the country. Who are we? What do we believe in? How do we resolve some of these issues around cultural integrations?
00:05:51
Speaker
I feel I may have an instinct as to where your answer may go, but how do you think the Starmer government has responded to those existential questions in the first year that they have been in office? The Starmer government has done what previous governments have done, which is realise that they've essentially screwed up our country with mass immigration, that this massive demographic change has led to some of the most disgusting, egregious, vile scandals, such as rape gangs, terrorist plots.
00:06:16
Speaker
They've realized that we we have a problem. And so rather than actually try and solve the problem, the only thing they think that they can do is silence us or repress us and prevent us from reacting to it.
00:06:27
Speaker
We saw that in the aftermath of Southport. We're seeing it with the introduction of Islamophobia laws. We're not allowed to talk about the fact that there's a whole fifth collar of people in this country who hate us, who wish us harm, who don't share our values.
00:06:39
Speaker
ah who have very medieval misogynistic attitudes towards women. ah But because, you know, they let all these people in and you can't really get rid of them. Instead, they think that the best outcome is to try and prevent anybody from talking about it. Sweep it under the carpet and do it by using censorship.
00:06:56
Speaker
um and And it's the opposite of what we need. It is adding more insult to injury, frankly. Yeah, and we'll get to the responses to that particular problem from both the Conservatives and Reform.
00:07:07
Speaker
With Reform leading in the polls at the moment, Nigel Farage, again, there's a long way to go, four years to go to the next election. But if an election was held tomorrow, he would be the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. And there is an interesting little divergence emerging in how the Conservatives and the Reform Party are responding to that challenge.
00:07:25
Speaker
But before we do, I want to understand the problem more. let's Because there's two limbs to the immigration question. There's the illegal immigration question and the legal migration question. Let's start with the illegal immigration because as an Australian having seen the same problem in Australia 15 odd years ago and then seen Australia successfully solve for the problem,
00:07:45
Speaker
It is, in many respects, baffling to me that the UK can't get to grips with it because the solutions seem, whilst difficult, also very obvious if you have the political will to be able to grapple with it.
00:07:55
Speaker
Starmer
National Interests vs Moral Obligations
00:07:56
Speaker
recently has been speaking with Macron about a one-in-one-out deal, which some people are now calling a 17-in-one-out deal. Why is this such a difficult problem to solve when, at least from my perspective, the policy levers to solve it are relatively straightforward?
00:08:12
Speaker
You know, that is the question that everyone wants the answer to because it's very easy. You can defend your country. You get to decide where your frontiers are and how you're going to protect them. You know, if I were to enter most countries illegally, I would at the very least be dragged to a police cell and immediately put on a flight back home.
00:08:30
Speaker
At the very worst, I'd be shot. I'm not advocating we start putting cannons on the white cliffs of Dover. But the point is, if a country wanted to defend its borders, it is able to. I don't see other countries where they actually militarily defend their borders being dragged into some sort of, you know, trial at the hay, breaking international law. I don't understand why there is this acquiescence to some crazy radical open borders theory where everybody who tries to illegally enter this country beatified as some sort of victim that we owe the rest of the world some sort of compensation for things we did in the past.
00:09:06
Speaker
And so I don't really understand why when it comes to the the small boats. It's very simple. You just block them getting into your territorial waters. You take them back from whence they came. You turn around two or three boats and it sends a very clear message to anybody then wanting to get on a dinghy. If I do this, it won't work.
00:09:22
Speaker
It sends a message to the traffickers, okay, this route is no longer an option. We're going to have to find somewhere else. And yet successive governments have tied themselves up in legalese, going, oh, well, we can't solve the problem. We're going to have to sort of do this to the law. We're going to have to leave the ECHR. We're going to have to get rid of certain judges. so I'm like, no, you just defend your borders.
00:09:42
Speaker
It is perfectly valid for a country to defend its borders. And so I don't understand where this sort of peculiar Gordian knot of obfuscation has come from and why any, any leader of any country would think it's acceptable for their nation to be repeatedly invaded, for their boundaries to be breached on a daily basis by young men coming from nations whose cultural attitudes are a counterpoint to us, whose ideology is often hostile to our own.
00:10:14
Speaker
I've never known a single time in history where this has been allowed to happen, almost shrugged off as acceptable and and a problem that can't be surmounted. To me, it is absolute madness. and i think most people in the country are sitting there going, why can't we just stop the bloody boats?
Economic Challenges and Lack of Solutions
00:10:34
Speaker
Well, i'm I'm trying to think. So if I'm on my my weekly GB News show, the response from the token lefty on the panel would be first and foremost, well, we have a moral obligation to let these people in, to to give them asylum.
00:10:49
Speaker
How do you respond to that moral obligation argument? You decide if we've got a moral obligation to help, you know, someone from Somalia or Sudan or Eritrea or Ethiopia or Ghana or Nigeria or Syria or Africa.
00:11:01
Speaker
We don't. We don't have a moral obligation. The people who have a moral obligation to those people are the leaders of their countries. They have a moral obligation. If I decided it I wanted to tomorrow, I'm fed up in London, I'm fed with being harassed on the streets.
00:11:13
Speaker
I want to go and live in Papua New Guinea. Do they have a moral obligation to me? No. it's absolutely ridiculous. You we already as a country give aid to these other countries. We already do our best to try and elevate them, to help them develop as economies. We already do our best to try and intervene when there's monstrosities like a terrorist Islamism and bloodthirsty regimes.
00:11:40
Speaker
We already do all of those things. We don't have a moral obligation let the whole world move to Britain. It's absolutely balmy. So I just, you know, I don't understand where this suicidal empathy has come from. I think it's largely used as a sort of Gucci handbag, a self-righteous positioning and posturing by a certain small subsection of society who want to make themselves look good by showering themselves in faux moral rectitude.
00:12:07
Speaker
It is utterly baseless. These same people, you know, if said to these people, right, you live in a five-bedroom house in Islington worth £3.4 million pounds and there are homeless people in London, you've got space, let them come and live with you. They'd say, why not have a moral obligation to those people?
00:12:24
Speaker
It's very simple. You just don't. That's not to say we have to be cruel. That's not to say that we cannot have sympathy or concern about what goes on around the rest of the world. It's not to say that we shouldn't, as a wealthy nation, try our best to continue to try and improve the quality of life of people in other countries.
00:12:42
Speaker
But we don't have a moral obligation to anybody from anywhere to decide they want to come and live here that we must simply go, okay, fine. It's bonkers. Well, it's interesting you just said as a wealthy nation.
00:12:56
Speaker
And the sad reality is that very, very rapidly the UK is becoming a less wealthy nation, if not a
Energy Policy and Climate Change
00:13:03
Speaker
poor nation. The economic situation is utterly dire if you look at rising debt levels.
00:13:08
Speaker
And you look at the apparent unwillingness of this government to do anything about the disparity between debt and then the revenue that they are getting in from from taxation, apart from and instinct tax the rich and an instinct to just continue spending because that is that is in the DNA of a Labor government.
00:13:28
Speaker
Talk me through, I guess, the the economic side of this conversation and why it seems like this country is heading towards an economic cliff and yet no one really wants to do anything about it. Very easy, I think, to actually see what is the fundamental issue going on when it comes to the economic ill health of this nation. And there is a silver bullet.
00:13:46
Speaker
And again, it comes down to this faux sense of moral obligation. We have the highest energy bills in the world. Now, that affects absolutely everything. That affects the money in your pocket and my pocket based upon what we have to pay to keep lights on in our house and our homes heated.
00:14:02
Speaker
It also affects the amount we pay for food when it's sort of trafficked by lorries and put into cold storage where it's made in factories that have to pay energy bills themselves. It also affects our public services because hospitals pay those energy bills, school pay those energy bills, everything. comes down too whether you're able to turn the lights on going back, making things, delivering things, selling things at a price that's affordable. And it all depends upon energy.
00:14:30
Speaker
And what this government have done, what the conservative government did under but Boris Johnson is, again, tie ourselves up in knots about we've got to save the entire planet by self-flagellating at the altar of climate change.
00:14:44
Speaker
It is absolutely insane. Now, my view of what Britain needs to as a country is a bit like the announcement you get on an airplane. You put your own gas mask on first, you put your own oxygen mask on first, then you can help other people.
00:14:58
Speaker
If we drive ourselves into the ground by continually chasing after targets that are not going to move the needle into internationally, but Because we've decided we want to sort of set an example and feel good and show the rest of the world how kind we are, how seriously we take this problem, how we're going to be at the forefront, the vanguard for change and dealing with this crisis.
00:15:20
Speaker
We're just going to go under and everyone else is going to carry on admitting whatever they want. Now, if we as a nation suddenly took a step back from this and said, OK, before you run and jump, you actually need to catch your breath.
00:15:32
Speaker
and figure out how you're going to get as far as you can. And we said, okay, you know what? We can actually be self-sufficient. We can actually be a fuel exporting nation. And we decided to do that. Guess what? All of a sudden, you've got diplomatic leverage.
00:15:46
Speaker
If you're selling gas to the rest of the world, if you're able to keep your lights on, if you're able to sell produce around the world because your factories are able to run day and night, If your population is healthy and happy because healthcare is affordable and your public services aren't on their knees and your kids are educated, if you're all of those things, then you have a position of strength. And then you can say to the rest of the world, this is how we ought to behave.
00:16:11
Speaker
But there's no point being grabbed down into the quagmire, going under bit by bit into the bog of misery and economic destruction while waving a little flag going, climate change, climate change.
00:16:22
Speaker
It is madness. Do you think if we suddenly, you know, manage to hit net zero, that China's going to go, oh, that's so brilliant. We want to be like Britain. But India's going to go, oh, look, they've led the way. Well done, Britain. and We can see that they've taken all these extreme measures to save the planet.
00:16:37
Speaker
We feel really bad. We're going to have to do this. No, they're not. They're not going do it. They watch us doing it and think, silly old Western world, they can do what they like. It's our turn to try and grow. They're not going to look back and go, oh, well, we should have done more.
00:16:50
Speaker
They're just simply not going to. And we as a nation need to figure out how to be self-sufficient in energy, self-sufficient in food, self-sufficient in actually looking after our own and not trying to invite the rest of the world here in order that we must babysit them or their nations, fail to do the bare basics.
00:17:10
Speaker
Yeah, but let's go deeper on the net zero argument here. So we spoke with Alex Epstein last week, who basically makes the case for fossil fuels better than anyone else in the world today. And there is an eternal truth that he mentioned, which is that fossil fuel energy is still the cheapest, the most versatile, the most reliable, the most scalable form of energy that is available today.
00:17:33
Speaker
And if you take that as a truth, which means that all of your other industries are going to be more easily affordable as a result of having baseline cheap energy to be able to run off, you have to have a pretty good argument in response to giving that up.
00:17:46
Speaker
And there are two that I've heard. And one is the one that you've just mentioned, which is the setting a global example argument. And to your point, I think you've smashed it down pretty well by saying, Russia, China couldn't give a rat about what the UK is doing. There is no no reasonable argument to say that what the UK does will influence the behavior of other countries.
00:18:07
Speaker
But the other one news you do here is that, well, we're going to create this new green energy industry. And this is the Ed Miliband argument. We're going to be able to actually make a the UK a leader and a superpower in green energy.
00:18:19
Speaker
How do you respond to that line of argument here? Where do they think wind turbines come from? Do they magically fall from heaven? Do they grow on trees? Do solar panels rise up out of the ocean, you know, and then appear and you just seize them like, you you know, go trawling with a, you know, vessel and get solar panels out of the sea? No, you manufacture them.
00:18:38
Speaker
And guess what? The factories manufacturing solar panels and wind warms and whatever it is you might want to use in your green technology revolution are probably still chugging out fossil fuels. So every time we hear about 45,000 jobs in the green energy sector, brilliant, but all going to China.
00:18:53
Speaker
They're coming to Britain because we can't afford to be the manufacturers of this technology. We've got no access to the materials that we need. We've shut down all of our heavy industry. We barely even produce steel anymore, let alone have mass factories with lots of gainful employ where people are churning out all of these products and making some sort of fantastic jobscape for everyone in Britain.
00:19:17
Speaker
We're just importing it. We're sending a massive charity check year upon year upon year to countries such as China who don't give a fig about their emissions, who know they've essentially got our balls in a vice because we're now becoming so dependent and reliant on this stuff.
00:19:32
Speaker
And then just smiling all the way to the bank and watching the West go into a morbid economic decline and are absolutely loving it. And it's very simple. Even if we wanted to have that green revolution, it's like, like I said, you have to take a few steps back before you run forward.
00:19:47
Speaker
We would need to suddenly become energy effective, energy cost effective, energy self-sufficient to then be able to produce all of those goods and all those materials in order to then chase the net zero dream if we so wish. But we're not doing that.
00:20:02
Speaker
So it doesn't make any sense because everyone who are is making this technology is still churning out emissions. Do you think that this Labour government will ditch the net zero goal?
00:20:13
Speaker
This Labour government aren't going to. Ed Zero with his ukulele and his win-win fields is an absolute radical. The man is a monstrous zealot and his brother makes an absolute packet out of all of this stuff as well. The Milibands have done very well out of climate change, as have previous
Governance and Ideology
00:20:29
Speaker
politicians. It is a racket, essentially.
00:20:32
Speaker
There is absolutely no chance that they're going to say to Ed Miliband, get rid of this stupid agenda. so i mean Billions have been given that to that department. like Billions. Billions. And what's it doing?
00:20:43
Speaker
It seems to want to just destroy agricultural land by papering it with solar panels, whose efficiency is extremely questionable, even when it does work. We've had a lovely summer this year.
00:20:54
Speaker
We're prone, therefore, to having massive energy surges in the style that caused blackouts in Spain. You know, the grid cannot handle having such a sort of random mix of whether it's sunny one day or not the next. Therefore, you get different levels of energy being produced. It blows up the entire network.
00:21:12
Speaker
We need to have a base load that tips over reliably, measurably, continuously, and that cannot be done at the mercy and the whims of the weather, especially in Britain. It's why we talk about the weather all the time, because it's mercurial.
00:21:27
Speaker
You know, we're a little island nation being battered by rains from the Atlantic, battered by Siberian winters, battered by heat waves coming up from continental Europe. We don't, you know, put a jet stream directly above us, for crying out loud.
00:21:40
Speaker
We don't have the sort of weather they've got in northern Morocco, where it is, you know, continuously sunny at a similar level, day in, day out, three, six, five days a year. So the idea that we should harness weather to be the judge, the dictator and the jury of our energy production is absolutely balmy.
00:22:00
Speaker
back of my mind there, I've been trying to pull together the different threads that we've been discussing so far to see if there's any commonality. And to me, the thing which is consistent is there always seems to be something which is placed ahead of the interests of the people of the United Kingdom.
00:22:16
Speaker
So in the instance of of the Climate change movement, it is, well, we need to put the global climate, even though the UK can't impact the global climate, ahead of cheap energy for British people.
00:22:27
Speaker
In terms of immigration, it is, well, we need to put the interests of asylum seekers, even though most of them aren't asylum seekers, ah ahead of the safety of British, particularly British women, but British people.
00:22:40
Speaker
In the interest of the economy, it's always there is something which is worth spending money on, which again, does not directly impact the British people. And the Chagos deal is a very good example of that, spending billions of pounds to go to a ah country to give away yeah UK territory.
00:22:56
Speaker
There are so many examples of this where it always seems like the instinct is don't put the people of the United Kingdom first, but put either international human rights law first or or some sort of more global agenda first.
Brexit and Supranational Influence
00:23:10
Speaker
And this is at the same time that the United States is going in exactly the opposite direction. So I guess my question is, how has this instinct amongst the political class emerged where it does feel like their core responsibility, which should be to the citizens of their country, does not take priority?
00:23:27
Speaker
Yeah, it's a very good question. And we're governed by ideology, not by practicality or pragmatism. And you cannot do anything based upon ideology and ideology alone. You need empirical evidence, not sort of, you know,
00:23:38
Speaker
these weird superstitious beliefs in the gods of climate change or the gods of open borders. You've got to be a pragmatist and a realist if you're going to be able to manage a country. And the problem is with many of our political classes, most of them have wanted to be politicians from day dot.
00:23:53
Speaker
They've not run businesses. They've not plowed fields. They've not cleaned toilets. They've not doled out medicines. They've not done sponge baths for the elderly. They've basically just, you know, brought themselves up on this idea of one day being in the Palace of Westminster, making lofty decisions.
00:24:09
Speaker
And so that sort of pragmatism just doesn't even enter their minds. And also, I think something else very interesting has happened in the West at large, which is at Actually, we live in one of the best times ever right now. It doesn't feel like it, but we do. Most people out there have accessibility to ah modern car.
00:24:27
Speaker
You know I remember when I was a kid growing up, people would still be tooling around in old bangers from the 1980s and in the 2000s, right? Now you look around, you don't see used cars anymore. Everyone's got a new car on finance.
00:24:39
Speaker
Same with mobile phones. Everybody's got a smartphone. You don't have people who are like, oh, I'm so poor. I'm still using my Nokia 2210. No, everyone's got a smartphone. and so so It's certainly not the case with houses, though.
00:24:51
Speaker
It's not the case with houses. But what I'm trying to say is the wealth divide. Once upon a time, a super rich person was able to get them on an airplane and go somewhere sunny, come back with a suntan and show off their latest car.
00:25:03
Speaker
Most people now could get on a flight somewhere hot, come back with a suntan and drive a car that probably looks very similar to someone who's in a completely different wealth bracket. And so what have the wealthy done in order to distinguish themselves from other people, in order to show that they are superior, in order to ram home that class divide, is come up with these mad ideologies because they get to adopt these principles they don't live in the neighbourhoods when nobody speaks English and people leave soil mattresses in the street.
00:25:31
Speaker
They don't live in the same world that other people live in where they can't afford to pay their energy bills and think, okay, this climate change is a nonsense when my grandma's going to die from hypersermia.
00:25:42
Speaker
They don't live in that world. And so they get to comfort themselves with being morally righteous. And like I said, flash about this ideology, look down their nose everyone else's ignorance, ill-educated, boneheaded, knuckle-dragging, because the things that they put in place based upon their superstitious ideology things that are never going to directly harm them.
00:26:03
Speaker
That is their insulation. That is their posturing. And this has happened across the West. You know, the people who actually have an idea of what the real world is all about are the working-class people. The people who live in their ivory towers in the London borough of Kensington or Islington,
00:26:19
Speaker
are completely cushioned from the real world impacts of the policies that they're making. They live such a sheltered existence. They cannot see reality. And this is not just happened in Britain. This has happened across the West as actually we've become wealthier.
00:26:34
Speaker
As we've actually the wealth divide in terms of assets. I'm not talking about in terms of money in the bank again, but in terms of accessibility to certain assets. through the technological revolution, the digital revolution, the closer that's become, the more these crazy, sort of luxurious, indulgent ideologies have taken hold among the very people who you need to actually be looking at the ledger of the country's bills, looking at the impact of those policies and making different decisions.
00:27:05
Speaker
Yeah, and that's a global trend, of course. We are had a very similar conversation with Bharti Runga Saigon recently, and she was talking about how back in the day you would try and demonstrate your status through Ferrari and a trophy wife, and now you demonstrate your status by having a particular set of beliefs. So that isn't unique to the United Kingdom, but it is certainly prevalent in the United Kingdom as it is in the United States and Australia and Canada.
00:27:29
Speaker
and the rest of the Anglosphere now. And do you know, the sense of all of this actually, of course, with the supranational governments, things like the UN, the EU, the WEF, all of these entities that were set up probably for very good reason, but seemingly need to keep going on and on and on, getting more land, more power grabs, more competencies, more things to stress over, the more reasons to create bureaucracy and become you know more and more important.
00:27:53
Speaker
You know, when you create any sort of entity, specifically, it especially sort of synchronational governance, what you'll find is it just keeps on growing. It's like a snowball rolling down a mountainside. just gets bigger and bigger, more bureaucratic, more detached from the real world.
00:28:07
Speaker
And I think actually too a lot of these synchronational organizations have really cropped up in the mid to latter part of the last century ah at the very nexus of the big problems that the West is facing right now.
Nigel Farage and Political Reform
00:28:19
Speaker
A lot of people would suggest that the UK is where it is now because of its decision to leave one of those supranational bodies, the European Union. In fact, even amongst many voters for Brexit, there is now this quiet whisper that, well, maybe did we make the wrong decision there?
00:28:36
Speaker
Do you think it was still the right decision to leave the European Union?
00:28:42
Speaker
What have we done with it? What are the Brexit benefits? What are bonuses? We've not done anything. you know, we're basically sort technically on paper outside the damn block and still behaving like we've got Stockholm Syndrome and a shackle to it.
00:28:58
Speaker
So this idea that this was some sort of radical thing that brought such great change, nothing happened. Nothing about Brexit's been used or enacted, barely anything. And actually what we saw is the sheer spite of these supernatural organisations who don't like the world being pulled from under their feet,
00:29:15
Speaker
you know This sort of idea that Britain must be punished for leaving rather than just say, OK, fine, you know you don't want to be part this anymore. Farewell and have a nice time. you know You see this in terms of this whole thing at the moment of passport gates and who gets to use e-passports.
00:29:30
Speaker
We've allowed the EU and loads of other countries to continue using e-gates. since leaving the European Union, because there was nothing in it for us to start making immigration queues longer because you need people there stamping passports.
00:29:42
Speaker
Other European nations have been forced to basically put this in place, even when it means that their airports are clogged up, even when it means they're going to have to employ more border force to go through an ancient way of marking a passport.
00:29:54
Speaker
You it's utterly mental. And this is what I mean about these supranational organizations. They sit there coming up, doling out rules and regulations simply for feeling like they've got a purpose. And most of them are completely detached from the basic tenets and principles of running something effectively.
00:30:12
Speaker
Okay, want to turn to one of the, well, the architect of that Brexit decision being Nigel Farage. You are the ultimate political insider. You're very close with reform. You also know the ins and outs of Westminster incredibly well.
00:30:29
Speaker
Reform are currently leading in the polls, largely because of all of the problems we've discussed over the last half an hour. I think people are at that stage where they go, you know what, they may be a new party.
00:30:40
Speaker
lot of the operational machinery still seems to be pretty ah work in progress, to put it put it very, very kindly. But we need to take a punt because there is almost this existential moment where anything is better than what we've seen over the last 20 to 30 years.
00:30:56
Speaker
Do you think reform are ready for government given many of the scandals that they have had in recent months and and their seeming inability to keep a cohesive team together?
00:31:07
Speaker
ready as anybody else seems to be. I mean, talking about sort of colleagues falling out ineptitude in governance, we've seen a lot of it with the Labour Party and the Conservative Party. It's not like the bar's been set very high in recent years.
00:31:19
Speaker
And I think at least with Nigel Farage, he's a proper politician. You know, he's the only person I can think of in that whole palace of Westminster who's able to go out and back from Britain on the international stage, who would go to Moscow and sit opposite Putin on a big white table,
00:31:33
Speaker
bang his fist on the table and say, pack it in Putin. He's the only person who looks like an adult, essentially, who actually has conviction in his politics and who has courage and bravery and doesn't just end up being a sop to all of these mad ideologies. He's the only person who called this stuff decades and decades ago before anybody else. So yeah, I think he's got exactly what it takes It's going to be something different. It is going to be a big challenge for a party that's never been in government before. But actually, judging by everybody who's had these many, many, ah many piano forte legs churned off the conveyor belt, you know, these ready-made politicians from cradle to grave who have totally failed our nation, I don't necessarily think the way that things have been done before, the modus operandi of creating political parties and politicians has done us any good.
00:32:19
Speaker
So actually, let's throw caution to the wind and try something radically different. Well, some people are starting to question whether it would be radically different, and some people are starting to question the courage that you just mentioned about Faraj.
00:32:31
Speaker
And they point to the way that he seemingly is caving on the topic of Islam. Basically, there are too many Muslims in the country now, so we can't engage with issues like the burqa or banning halal or the broader problem of Islamism.
00:32:46
Speaker
He seems to be caving there. He seems to be caving on a range of different issues, particularly immigration, for example, where he even conceded that Robert Jenrick will end up being to the right of reform when it comes to immigration come the next election.
00:32:59
Speaker
Some people are saying he's now just another member of the Uni Party. Do you buy into that? No, because I've known Nigel for years and I know what's in his heart. I know what's in his soul. I know what he believes and I know what he, ah but you know, but he knows what needs to happen to this country and he knows he's the man to do it.
00:33:13
Speaker
But to do it, he's got to be able to get into 10 Downing Street first. And the point is the rules of the game are completely different for him. They always have been. Robert Jenrick can run around talking about burqas and Islam and immigration and people pushing through ticket barriers and two-tier politics.
00:33:30
Speaker
He gets to do all of those things. We've been born, Rob. Yeah, woo, woo, woo. If Nigel even said the word Muslim, there would be all hell to pay. it be racist, racist, xenophobe, monster, dreadful human being, danger to society, you know, writ large.
00:33:47
Speaker
And the problem is then people go, gosh, I don't think I should vote for him. Oh, God, can't confess to my friends that i actually know back reform. And he's been through this for decades with UKIP, with the Brexit party. He's been accused of being the most monstrous of characters.
00:34:01
Speaker
And it actually has constantly kept his vote and kept his support. Like I said, Kenny Badenow can say some cultures are better than others. Robert Jenner can bang on about burqas.
00:34:12
Speaker
They get to do it. The Labour Party would probably get to do it, apart from they would be held accountable by their own mad loony left wing. But if Nigel dared do anything that even came close to the sort of stuff Jenrick is saying, it would be the only thing that people spoke of. Aha, told you so. Isn't he dreadful? Isn't he ah disaster? Isn't this evil? Isn't this how wicked Britain's become now?
00:34:34
Speaker
So actually, because they've completely crafted the rules of the game differently for him, he has to play a different game to everybody else. And that, to me, ah someone who's known him for decades and know knows what's in his heart and knows what's in his soul, is what he is doing.
00:34:48
Speaker
He knows that he can't fuck this up. He knows he's got to get into Ted Downing Street. He knows. He knows that he's essentially the last chance saloon. And what a pressure that is on an individual human being to have to be the Messiah to save the world.
00:35:01
Speaker
What a huge responsibility to have to bear. And yet he's going to have to do that. And he is doing it. And what he knows, you know, Nigel's a fisherman, okay? Okay. Nigel knows that when you go out and want to catch fish, if you just start whacking rods in all over the place, juggling them around, you're not going to get anything. You have to sit still.
00:35:21
Speaker
You have to be patient. You have to be able to have that sort of, the the the stoicism, right? The control. in order to realize that actually that is the way to get the biggest catch.
00:35:34
Speaker
And I think politically, this is what he's doing. He doesn't want to end up falling into one of the many layers, one of the many traps that the media lay out for him, that other politicians lay out for him.
00:35:45
Speaker
He doesn't want to be snookered. He doesn't want to be call tag. And he knows, right? He knows. There was an interview of him the other day on LBC and they asked him about animals and stunning. And he just said, look, that's not our biggest issue right now because he knows what would happen if he turned around and said, I want to ban halal slaughter.
00:36:02
Speaker
There would be protests on the street. The Islamists would be out with banners. be the only thing anyone spoke about. It would look chaotic. And then that would spook people. He knows that. he He just gets politics better than anybody else.
00:36:15
Speaker
And so I kind of, every time people are saying, oh, he's gone soft, he's become establishment, I just say, no, he hasn't. He's been very clever, very tactical, and it's working. So they're the political tactics. But as you said, you know him better than most. You know his underlying beliefs.
00:36:32
Speaker
And so the question is, who is the real Nigel Farage? And let me give you a few characterizations that I have heard in the media in recent months and years. You have some people that say, well, really, he's an old school, small government thatcherite.
00:36:46
Speaker
I've heard other people say that he's very quickly moving to the left of the Labor Party. in fact, i heard someone quite amusingly say after Starmer rolled back on the Island of Strangers speech that Nigel Farage has pulled Keir Starmer to the left.
00:37:01
Speaker
I've heard other people say that he is that sort of right-wing populist firebrand that many on the left mindlessly assume that he is. And I've heard people say that he has no real beliefs to speak of.
00:37:11
Speaker
There is a complete range of views across the political spectrum of who the real Nigel Fry is. So what's the answer to that question? think Nigel has been showing us who Nigel is for decades now. I think out of all politicians out there, people know exactly what Nigel is because he's always been that way. you know And the thing is, what was Margaret Thatcher before she was Margaret Thatcher?
00:37:31
Speaker
Okay, so there's Thatcherite-ism, Thatcherism. Well, what was it? What was she before she was Margaret Thatcher? What was Tony Blair but before Blair-ism? There's Farageism. And he's always shown us what it was.
00:37:43
Speaker
He's never hid it under a bushel, has he? He's always shown exactly what he believes and exactly what he's about. Whether it was about controlling borders and immigration, whether it's about protecting Judeo-Christian heritage.
00:37:55
Speaker
whether it's about actually making an economy that grows rapidly and works for the poorest in our society. He's shown us from the beginning what he's all about. He hates globalism. He hates supranational entities.
00:38:08
Speaker
He hates open borders. He hates all these namby-pamby, stupid, superstitious neo-religions like climate change that the political elite have introduced. He was the first one to say those things, Will.
00:38:20
Speaker
He was the only one at one point saying those things before it was even It's not even acceptable to say those things. He is the Overton bloody window. You know, so this whole, I don't know what he is. He's in it just for the money and he's in it for the fame and he doesn't believe in this. And now he's gone like, oh, shut up.
00:38:36
Speaker
All those people saying that and living in a dream world, they know exactly who he is and what he represents because he's always just been Nigel Farage and his politics is Farage-ism. Nigel Farage is the Overton window is a lovely little line, which I will be stealing for the title of this podcast.
00:38:53
Speaker
Okay, so so there's the beliefs there, and I can buy into that. But there is the secondary question of whether or not those particular beliefs can then be executed via policy and then pushed through the blob or Whitehall to actually make change happen.
00:39:06
Speaker
And a lot of people are concerned that, similar to Trump in his first term, because this is a new startup party, because some people would argue that he has not surrounded himself with enough talented people to be able to actually get the machine of government moving, well, that all of this will remain talk and he won't be able to actually change or execute change.
00:39:28
Speaker
How do you respond to that? Look, we're four years away from a general election, OK? And what we've seen the Conservative Party and the Labour Party is they fought like rats in a sack and were barely able to do bloody anything. Now, Nigel knows the challenge that's ahead of him. He knows we're going to have to do big things like leaving the ECHR, having a great repeal bill, dragging out the human rights act by the root, you know, sticking two fingers up at the global elites and the supranational organisations. And it's a big ask.
00:39:53
Speaker
You need to get a whopping majority to do it. So, you know, all these ifs and buts and we need these and what about Ben Zabib's party? Grow up. This is serious. This is about saving Britain. We need for reform to win and win big if we're going to realize even one-tenth of what people think the country needs.
00:40:09
Speaker
Is he going to be able to do it? Well, a lot of that depends upon people like you, me, communicating the strategy for this nation. It depends upon the media and whether or not they're going to try and vilify him and crucify him just for their own bloodthirsty joy.
00:40:24
Speaker
You know, that there's ah there's a lot of ips and buts. I've always hated the idea of having a presidential system in the UK. You know big believe in the royal family, hate the idea of republicanism, because if you have a presidential system, you could end up with President Blair.
00:40:36
Speaker
But almost it's a damn shame we don't have a presidential system. or We can't get someone like Marjorie Farge in power with executive authority, because actually we live in a crisis right now where prevarication, just we don't have the time for it. We don't have the capacity. capacity for it. We need decisions to be taken and taken quickly and we need them to be quite strident.
00:40:56
Speaker
And unfortunately, the way that our civil service is formatted, the sheer size of the damn thing, the canon of legislation that's gone before, which acts as shackles around the ankles, the memberships of supranational organisations, things like the ECHR, all of these things have created a political straitjacket within which it's very hard to come out boxing.
00:41:15
Speaker
And so, you know, we've kind of made it difficult for even someone like Nigel Farage with his conviction and his determination to win at this game. But that doesn't mean he shouldn't try and it doesn't mean we shouldn't back him.
00:41:26
Speaker
Do you think Nigel Farage would prefer to be a president rather than a prime minister? Of course he would. Most politicians would, quite frankly. And if you don't, then you're not really a politician, are you? You know, you're some sort of strange union member.
00:41:39
Speaker
I mean, most people, when they enter politics, have all these lofty ideas of what they want to do in terms of legislation, then realize they can barely do any of it because of the way that we've set up our democracy.
00:41:50
Speaker
So actually, you know, any prime minister who has given the opportunity to be a president be able to just push things through and get them done, you refuse to do that, isn't really a politician. They're just, they're bureaucrats. Unfortunately, i think that is by and large what we've had for the longest period of time now in politics.
00:42:05
Speaker
And it's it's very chicken and egg, isn't it? You know, did did the system make the bureaucrats or did the bureaucrats make the system? I'm not really sure which one came first, but it was a long time. It feels like a very long time ago that we actually had a prime minister who was able to lay out a sort of really defined system.
00:42:24
Speaker
and brave strategy and manifest over the nation and being being able to enact
Future of the Conservative Party and Alliances
00:42:29
Speaker
it. That feels like a sort of distant dream there. Yeah, and once again, with the possible exception of the United States, the lack of leaders with long-term vision is a consistent theme across modern politics in the West, and it's um it's something which is very sad.
00:42:44
Speaker
Let's move to the forgotten party on the right, being the Conservative Party. Now, that's an unusual thing to say, given that the yeah UK Conservative Party is the most successful political party in modern Western history, and they for now are still the formal opposition party.
00:43:01
Speaker
How do you assess their chances moving forward and do you think there is an existential risk that they may yeah that they may fade into nothingness? One never underestimate the Conservative Party, you know, its ability to organise itself and bounce back, you know. I mean, I don't think we've got the right leader in terms of Kemi Baten not to be the one to salvage that party.
00:43:19
Speaker
I'm not even sure Robert Jenrick is the answer. You know, Robert Jenrick, I like him an awful lot, but he's almost cartoonish in his approach to politics. The Conservative Party don't have anybody, I don't think, with the sort of heritage and the experience and the stridency of Nigel Farage. I mean, there's just a load of wits in that party now who, you know, whatever they whatever talk they talk, i I've never seen any of them be able to walk the walk, but never underestimate the Conservative Party.
00:43:44
Speaker
I think at the end of the day, you know, at the What is going to unite reform in the Conservative Party is this realisation that it is the 11th hour and it must not be squandered. They've played too many political games in times past. You know, Boris Johnson in 2019, the snap election, getting Nigel Farage to stand down MPs and then doing absolutely nothing with his 80-seat majority.
00:44:04
Speaker
You know, this whole politicking on the right, even though it's got to be our fans, know, it's got to be our fans. No, we'll never work together. Because actually, if from the beginning, the right wing had actually been able to work together, the left wing wouldn't have even had a look in.
00:44:16
Speaker
because Britain is fundamentally a centre-right nation. You just have to speak to anybody anywhere in any town, city or village outside of London to realise that. But the right wing have played games with this. you know It's all been about the politics. It's all been about winning, one-upmanship. We're going to get more votes than you rather than we need to save this country.
00:44:35
Speaker
But you know what? I think this time round there's a realisation that the British public will not Forgive politicians who squander our future based upon their ridiculous egotistical gains.
00:44:46
Speaker
Well, both reform and the Conservatives have ruled out any potential alliance moving forward. Do you think, notwithstanding that, that it may be a possibility? It bloody well has to be if it's needed.
00:44:58
Speaker
So, you know, that i think that like I think everyone gets that now. I think come 2029, that will be understood. Now, look, they don't need to talk about going into alliances or making pacts like that, because as you said, if there was a general election, the Conservatives don't get a look in any way. They may as well not even participate.
00:45:12
Speaker
So it's not even, a you know, the question that we need, other than perhaps the idea that reform might do well to have some, you know, on guard amongst their lot, you know, that they could actually do with having some grey hair and some experience politically within the Cabinet.
00:45:26
Speaker
But otherwise, it's not even a question right now. But let's see where we are in 2029, because I actually think, you know, Nigel is somebody who is a great student of political history. There's a reason renamed the Brexit Party Reform UK, because he foresaw the future. He saw what was going to happen to the Conservative Party. He saw the sort of earthquake that was going to arrive in British politics.
00:45:50
Speaker
And he was very mindful of what happened in Canada, where the reform party came and it's an entryist party and Chukoba. And that's why he went for that particular moniker. Now, someone else that he has ah known politically for a very long time is Timo Soini from the Finns party.
00:46:07
Speaker
And when Timo's populist party did extremely well the Finnish elections, what you actually saw happen was Timo saying, well, look, this is great. We've won super duper, but we don't have the experience to run the country.
00:46:17
Speaker
So we're going to extend a hand to the party that we've essentially wiped out and said, come and join us, walk with us. Now, I don't know, not spoken to Nigel about this. I don't want to put words in his mouth or start some sort of rumour mill that that's what he's going to do. Like I said, right now, he doesn't need to.
00:46:33
Speaker
But he is a student of politics of various countries in various decades. And some of the people that he's had close relationships with politically, he will have looked at what they've done in their own countries, learned from it.
00:46:45
Speaker
And regardless of what people might want to say about Nigel Farage, he's in this for the country. He always has freedom. It's not about him. It's not about celebrity. For him, this is a calling.
00:46:55
Speaker
This is his purpose in life. This is what he has to do. And it's a huge weight to carry. It's a huge responsibility. It's a massive cross to bear. And so I wouldn't imagine for one minute he gets the opportunity to walk into number 10 and govern this country, that he's going to make flippant decisions based upon what looks best or what the newspapers might like the most.
00:47:16
Speaker
You know, he's waited his whole life to do this. And mean I think he's going to make damn sure he does it and does it well. hadn't heard that Finnish case study before. That's a really interesting one. And it raises ah an interesting question in that, on one hand, it makes all the sense in the world to try and create a broad church on the right to extend the Oli branch to conservatives.
00:47:38
Speaker
In the last 24 hours, the former conservative chairman, his name escapes me, he's Yeah, he's gone over to reform. In one one sense, that's really positive. In the other, you may have some people thinking, well, hang on, the reason reform has come about is because the conservatives have been so useless.
00:47:53
Speaker
It's because the conservatives have been so wet and they're effectively lit dams in the skies. So why are you now effectively infecting the reform movement with these center-left kind of fake Tories?
00:48:05
Speaker
How do you get that balance right? Well, I like Jake Barry. I know Jake Barry personally. He's a proper right-winger. He's great man. You know, working class,
Cultural Identity and Immigration
00:48:13
Speaker
gets it. He's a good band of touring. Okay, there'll be things in Romain. But you know what? but were We're over the sort of did you vote Romain, did you vote Brexit?
00:48:20
Speaker
The challenges facing this country now Yeah, people often think that there's some sort of drop-down menu, you know, that you can't be serious about X, Y, and Z if you're not serious about A, B, and C, that you've got to sort of sign up to every single thing and have a sort of unbrotted copybook in times past. Jake Berry is a man of great ideology, great caliber, and is a perfect fit.
00:48:40
Speaker
for the reform movement. ah But, you you know, you use the term board church on the right wing. We don't need a bloody board church. No, we need a church with a very distinct ideology and a big congregation.
00:48:50
Speaker
What took down the Conservative Party was this idea that you could have Dominic Greed in the same party as Jacob Rees-Mogg. You just can't. You're two separate wings of politics. And so we don't need a bloody board church.
00:49:02
Speaker
We need a massive congregation. Well put. Alex, as is often the case when I have conversations on British politics on this podcast, it does get pretty bleak pretty quickly at the moment.
00:49:14
Speaker
And I think with good reason. I think you've pointed out that some of these problems are not just normal problems in the cyclical day-to-day politics. They are potentially existential problems. With all that said, are you optimistic or can you see any signs of optimism for the future of this country? And if so, what are they?
00:49:32
Speaker
When you get out of London, I'm sitting right now in a thatched cottage, looking out the window at a manure splattered country lane. The local pub over the road where I was at until way too late last night, which got why I've got a bit of a fuzzy head this morning, ah was full of people talking politics, being, you know, just ordinary Brits.
00:49:50
Speaker
And you kind of think, actually, this isn't lost. This is nowhere near lost. You know, certainly I think you need to wall off parts of London and just say, great, that was a disaster. Wall off parts of Bradford and say that was a social experiment gone very wrong. But there are still parts of the country and the majority of the country is still real Britain.
00:50:08
Speaker
Now, what fills me with anxiety? is the idea that the sort of, um that that the vulcanized non-Western elements of um our capital city and, you know, some of our other metropolitan towns could end up leeching out into these areas. Because I tell you what, if suddenly you start getting ah people from the developing world who don't share our culture and don't buy into our heritage, moving out to the little rural villages in Wiltshire, there'll be no more fetched roofs.
00:50:36
Speaker
No one's going to be paying someone to go up on a ladder and stuff straw into the east. They'll be ripped off because they're too costly to insure. They need constant replacement. We've got to be very careful about how far, there you go, Paul's going by,
00:50:50
Speaker
We to be very careful about how far we allow this contagion to spread, if you will, for want of a better phrase. Because if people haven't got their roots in anything, right?
00:51:00
Speaker
It'd be the same if I went to live in India, right? I did used to live in India. love India. But if I went to live in India, would I be as exercised about the maintenance of a particular Hindu temple or a religious tradition that I didn't understand?
00:51:13
Speaker
I wasn't part of building. You know, you can't expect people to come and live in a country and suddenly feel like they've they they've got, you know, long established roots in it and and like in sort of harmony with it.
00:51:26
Speaker
So mass immigration has been the most poisonous thing to happen to this nation. It's the most poisonous thing to happen to any nation. And you can look at any nation in history to see that when you suddenly start redefining what is nationhood and what binds people together, you very quickly lose the nation.
00:51:43
Speaker
You know, it's that that brought down the Roman Empire, basically. We see this go on in, you know, throughout history. And it's a lesson that is worth being learned. Now, like I said, when you get out of London, when you get out of Birmingham, when you get out of Manchester and you come to rural Wiltshire or rural Gloucestershire or, you know, Lancashire, wherever it may be,
00:52:03
Speaker
you suddenly realise that we are still, by and large, the majority and nothing has actually changed that much. But they are looking in these villages and towns. They are looking at what's going on in London. They read in the newspapers and they they're alarmed.
Optimism for UK’s Political Future
00:52:16
Speaker
And so we have reached a point in our history as a nation where big decisions are going to have to be taken. And do you know what? Am I optimistic? Well, look at the polling. What it shows is the country has woken up to the fact we're at 11th hour,
00:52:31
Speaker
okay People know this. People aren't going to suddenly go, oh, do you know what? I might just vote Tory like I did before. Oh, well, I'll just stick with Labour then. ah No, you look at that polling and you realise that thankfully we're not sleepwalking towards disaster.
00:52:46
Speaker
The nation's suddenly gone, uh-uh, things need to be done differently. And so in that regard, yes, I am optimistic. Alex, where can people hear you, watch you, read your thoughts, give me the plug?
00:52:58
Speaker
Yeah, well, you know, that that's it. it's so there is There are plenty of people out here who will fight for this country. The average Brit is not going to go down without a fight.
00:53:09
Speaker
And so if people can can hear that fight on Talk TV and then on your sub stack, which is, remind me. That's what she said. I think it's thatalexwoman.com and it's called That's What She Said.
00:53:20
Speaker
Yes, please do sign up. I'd like more and more subscribers because the will'll subscribe but but but bla more the more i can work on it. link is in the show notes. Alex, fantastic conversation. Thank you for coming on Fire at Will.