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The boys are not alright, with Miriam Cates
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In recent years, Western society has conducted a perverse experiment. We have indulged the grievances of almost every identity group, exalting victimhood status and self-flagellating over the sins of the past. There is one glaring exception in the identity politics game. Men (and particularly white men).
A generation of boys have grown up being told that they are toxically masculine and that they must atone for their male privilege. The consequences have been disastrous, and we now have a generation of boys and young men across the West who are genuinely and seriously disadvantaged, and living without hope.
Few are brave enough to discuss this uncomfortable truth. Fortunately Miriam Cates is. Miriam is a former Conservative member of the UK Parliament, and is now a GB News Host and a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Social Justice, where she is spearheading the ‘Lost Boys’ initiative, a major new research project that seeks to understand what is going wrong for boys and men, and how to fix it.
Follow Will Kingston and Fire at Will on social media here.
Read The Spectator Australia here.
Learn more about the Lost Boys project here.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Far At Will'
00:00:19
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Far At Will, a safe space for dangerous conversations. I'm Will Kingston. If for some reason you're not already following the show, you can find us everywhere from Spotify to Apple Podcasts to YouTube. If you like what you hear here, please consider giving us a glowing five star review. If you don't like what you hear here, forget I said anything.
Critique of Identity Politics and Impact on Men
00:00:42
Speaker
In recent years, Western society has conducted a perverse experiment. We have indulged the grievances of almost every identity group, exalting victimhood status and self-flagellating over the sins of the past. There is one glaring exception in the identity politics game, of course. One group has been unrelentingly demonised as all others have been championed. Men, and particularly white men.
Miriam Cates and Research on Boys' Disadvantage
00:01:09
Speaker
A generation of boys have grown up being told that they are toxically masculine and that they must atone for their male privilege. The consequences have been disastrous, and we now have a generation of boys and young men across the West who are genuinely and seriously disadvantaged and a living without hope.
00:01:28
Speaker
Few are brave enough to discuss this uncomfortable truth. Fortunately, Miriam Cates is. Miriam is a former Conservative member of the UK Parliament and is now a GB News host and a senior fellow at the Centre for Social Justice, where she is spearheading the Lost Boys Initiative, a major new research project that seeks to understand what is going wrong for boys and men today and how we can fix it. Miriam, welcome to Fire at Will. Thank you. Great to be here.
00:01:58
Speaker
yeah It's a pleasure to have you on. And I think some people would still scoff at that premise that boys and men are disadvantaged in comparison to women. So
Educational Disparities for Boys
00:02:09
Speaker
set the scene for me. In what ways are boys and men disadvantaged in your eyes today?
00:02:14
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, as you said in your introduction, there has been this assumption for for many, many years now that men had their turn at dominating the world, if you like, and now it's everybody else's turn. And so we hear every week of a new campaign against disadvantage or a new glass ceiling that has to be smashed.
00:02:33
Speaker
But actually, if you look at the data, there is now one group of people who are persistently and genuinely disadvantaged. And that is boys and young men, especially poor boys and young men and especially white boys and young men. But I think there is a kind of anti-men narrative out there that applies to all men. So I think there's two separate issues here. One is particularly around genuinely disadvantaged males. And one is a kind of general ah anti-men narrative that we need to unpack. And if you look at the, The data on on poor boys, I mean, it is astonishing. They fall behind every single stage of education from nursery all the way through to university. ah They now earn less than their female peers up to the age of 30. They're obviously more likely to end up in prison, commit suicide. All these kind of bad outcomes that we focus on when we talk about disadvantaged group, actually boys and young men are at the bottom of the pile.
00:03:24
Speaker
And it was really interesting that the prime minister chose this week to, at last week I think it was, in a speech ah to set six targets for his government. And one of those was that three quarters of children should be school ready. And in a way that that target set out, stuck out like a sore thumb because most of the other targets were economic, the kind of targets that people would very much think politicians would look at. But he has a point because so many children now aren't ready for school.
Societal Prejudice Against Boys
00:03:51
Speaker
They're not toilet trained, they can't speak properly, they can't follow instructions, they don't they can't regulate their emotions and therefore they can't learn. But the disparity between boys and girls is huge, even at the age of four. So whatever is going wrong for boys is starting at a very, very young age. And I think, you know, the prejudice that is out there is just phenomenal. I did an interview with LBC the other night and the interviewer said, well, ah if boys are falling behind, it's their fault. They should just work harder.
00:04:18
Speaker
Are you blaming a four year old boy for disadvantage and would you say that if we were talking about girls or if we we're talking about a particular ethnic minority no of course not there is now this inherent prejudice against boys and when you talking about little boys in particular clearly you cannot blame them.
00:04:36
Speaker
for you know the patriarchy or past abuses against women. ah So we've got to get our act together really because the economic consequences of boys and young men being disenfranchised, falling out of education, falling out of employment are just too big for society to carry. Yeah, you can't blame the boys in that situation. I think you certainly can blame the parents in that situation. Do you see this as being part of a broader problem around parenting? like Is this something which has always been the case where parenting standards got worse? What's going on there?
00:05:05
Speaker
I think parenting has changed and I think like with anything, ah there are individual responsibilities that parents should take and if they don't take, they're at fault. But there's also societal responsibilities and I think the Western narrative has fallen into this idea that raising children is a private endeavor, that the nuclear family is a private enterprise.
00:05:23
Speaker
But it never used to be understood like that. People took collective responsibility for raising the next generation. The same standards of behavior that were expected at home were enforced in public, in institutions, in the church. if you If you misbehaved in public in days gone by, you would have got clipped behind the ear from a neighbor, dragged back to your parents and told off. You know, that was how we understood collective adult authority. That doesn't exist now. People expect the nuclear family to bear the entire burden.
00:05:50
Speaker
for raising children in the virtues and the values of society. But that's impossible. That's
Parenting, Authority, and Discipline
00:05:54
Speaker
never been possible for the nuclear family to do. So that to whole society is at fault for not setting the standards of behavior that we expect from boys and young men and reinforcing that. But of course, individual parents are also at fault too. And I think one of the ways that parenting has changed is that parents are now afraid to exercise authority. Authority has become a dirty word and and obviously authority has to be exercise with kindness and gentleness when it comes to children. We're not talking about parents being authoritarian or brutal, that's clearly very wrong.
00:06:23
Speaker
But parents should expect their children to obey them, for example. So a child is not going to choose to go to bed early. A child is not going to choose not to hit his sister because she's stolen a toy from him. Parents have to insert those standards and expect obedience. And I think that's something that parents have become very afraid of because our culture is very much now about individual liberty, individual autonomy, and almost feeling it's wrong even to make a child do something that they don't want to do. And I think this is the root of the problem we've got with potty training.
00:06:53
Speaker
And it might seem like a very, very trivial thing. But you know as a parent, I know how difficult it is to train a child to use ah the toilet, to be confident. It's not something that comes naturally to children. They have to be trained. That takes two or three weeks or more of persistent discipline from a parent.
00:07:09
Speaker
Pushing on the potty every five minutes, constantly asking them if they need the toilet, helping them clear up mess, all those kinds of things. And it requires you to force a child to do something they don't want to do. And there will be tears and there will be tantrums and that child will be very upset. And I think the modern attitude to parenting is, I don't want to upset my child. Therefore this must be wrong. Whereas of course we know from hundreds of years of history that actually sometimes you have to To gain discipline, to gain virtue, you have to do things that you don't want to do. Now, it can be done in a gentle way, of course, and it should be. But I think that modern parents are afraid now of exercising even that authority over child. And one thing that teachers say when kids arrive in the classroom age four, there are some children who have never heard the word no. And so, for example, the the idea of trying to get an iPad off them in the classroom just becomes impossible. And that's terrifying. And it's tragic ah that a child of the age of four has never heard the word no. No one's ever taken the trouble.
00:08:02
Speaker
to give them the discipline, to give them the virtues that they're absolutely going to need for adult life. where my brain goes is probably to the extreme cases where giving kids autonomy, which at that stage they haven't earned and they can't exercise properly, is in the right case of gender. We've been told now by, you know, trendy intellectuals on the left that children have the ability to be able to choose effectively what gender they can be, that they know something somehow innately there at the age of four or five.
00:08:33
Speaker
in a but Yeah, is it drawing too long a bow or do you see that argument around gender and and the gender ideology debate playing into this? Yes, definitely. I think it's all part of the same idea, this idea that children should have rights and that they those rights should compete with the rights of others rather than children ah being owed protection, which of course is an entirely different mindset. and yeah So this idea that a child can claim that they're the other gender and all the adults around them suddenly ah treat them with wrap them in cotton wool and say, well, of course you must be right, rather than
00:09:04
Speaker
like exercising adult authority and saying, no, actually, you're wrong. But this is how we're going to help you. And this is how we're going to protect you until you get to the age of maturity, where you can see that for yourself. And I think where this, the differences between how boys and girls respond or are damaged by this lack of adult authority, you know, they're, they they're very, very different. Obviously, girls have, you know, gone down this route ah of gender ideology. the anxiety, the social media, you know, those kind of things. Essentially, they have been given freedom online that they are not mature enough to process and to use. But boys respond to a lack of of authority and a lack of role models in a different way. And obviously, boys have natural tendency towards aggression and violence and risk taking. All of those things can have
00:09:49
Speaker
positive out workings, although we tell we tell young boys that they can't at the moment, but without those kinds of disciplines and those figures and those role models, those natural male tendencies are much more likely to end up in the kind of destructive forces that we're seeing now. So boys and girls need training, they need discipline, and they need role models, but when they don't get those, they respond very differently. And I think that's you know why we do have the problem with boys that we see today.
Gender Differences and Conservatism Redefined
00:10:15
Speaker
It's interesting, isn't it, that in modern society, there are a lot of people who are willing to ignore that very obvious reality that men and women are different, yeah and boys and girls are different, and therefore they need to be taught in different ways, they have different strengths and weaknesses.
00:10:29
Speaker
What's the end result of of liberalism and and in a way? you know if you're If your worldview is based on you know the idea that what you think is what matters, so I think that there should be no difference between men and women. Well, you're quite welcome to think that, it's a point of view, but the observed reality, the empirical reality, the evidence of science and our eyes and tradition says that that's just not true, and obviously that's a conservative print point of view.
00:10:53
Speaker
But the end result of liberalism, the idea that there's, you know, that so there shouldn't be any difference, that people should be fungible, yeah mothers and fathers should be fungible, men and women should be fungible, immigrants and natives should be fungible, you know, the end result of that thought process is, well, if men and women should, yeah ah ah aren't different, then why can't a man become a woman? And of course, that's exactly what we've seen and it doesn't help children these kind of idea of no boundaries or loose boundaries or they're not being an actual truth it's really really confusing and and and damaging for children because, you know human being human babies i thought it's a science teacher coming out now but human babies are born at a much earlier stage of development that, any other species on earth. You know, if you think about a lamb within hours of it being born or or a kitten, what it's able to do and how quickly it reaches independence. And actually it needs very, very little training and behavior. That's all instinctive. That's not the case with human beings. We are born without those. We don't know how to be a human. We don't know how to act socially. We don't know how to control our impulses. Those things are taught in childhood and actually the brain doesn't fully mature to the age of 25. And if you
Parental Challenges in Value Instillation
00:11:58
Speaker
don't have parents and other adults,
00:11:59
Speaker
training you in those social behaviors, how to act as a man, how to act as a woman, how to cooperate, you know, those kind of things, then you just won't learn them. And I think there's this liberal attitude that children are essentially born good and adults ruin them. That's not true. Children are born as a ah with a blank slate and it's up to adults.
00:12:17
Speaker
to train them into the kind of social behaviors that we know ah will help them to prosper and when that doesn't happen we get exactly what we see today and you're exactly right boys and girls are different they play differently they act differently they have different desires psychologists know this and yet we've now got this idea that they should be the same and when they're not it's boys that are at fault so there is a story the other a couple of weeks ago.
00:12:39
Speaker
about a school in Strasbourg where they are tagging little boys and little girls aged four to watch what they do in the playground because they worry that boys are taking up too much space. So boys take up proportionally more of the playground than girls and they want to teach boys to be more to be better.
00:12:58
Speaker
Of course, boys take up more space than girls. Have you seen little boys playing? No, they're running around, they're playing football, they're wrestling each other. Boys take up more space than girls because of who they are and how they play. And the idea that that's wrong and that's bad and we need to change it ah is really, really disturbing because how are you ever going to get you you know how are you ever going to celebrate the masculine virtues if you can't even do that in four-year-olds?
00:13:21
Speaker
What this points to is that there is often this disconnect between the way that you want to raise your children and then the way that your children are being taught in a lot of schools where we hear stories like this and there's a lot of even worse stories that come out of of ideological indoctrination from a very young age. You have three kids. yeah How do you think about how you go about instilling the values that you want to see in your children, keeping in mind that there may be other forces out there For example, in the schools day to day that may not be giving them the same principles or values that you would like to see. That's a great question. I mean, it is, it's a really difficult one. and And I'm sure every generation kind of has regrets about the time that they live in and and, you know, and harks back to some sort of former days when apparently things were better, which I'm not sure that's true. But I think one thing that was easier in the past is that there was a common understanding of.
00:14:15
Speaker
what it meant to be a parent and the kind of values and behaviours and beliefs even that we were collectively bringing children up into. There was a monoculture essentially in in Western ah Christian society that made it easier. There was more of an overlap between what parents were teaching their children at home, what society was teaching them, what institutions like the schools, the state and the church.
00:14:38
Speaker
That's gone you know we are absolutely in a multicultural multi faith multi idea society where you absolutely cannot assume as a parent that the values you hold will be taught by schools. and I think in that kind of pluralistic society is no longer appropriate for schools to teach.
00:14:56
Speaker
moral and ethical values beyond the kind of generally accepted of, you know, being kind, taking turns, respect those kind of things. Absolutely. Of course, schools should be instilling that kind of social behavior. But when you talk about schools teaching about the ethics of sexual relationships or, you know, the life issues like abortion. Now, I don't think any, any longer it is appropriate for schools to be teaching those things because there isn't a commonly accepted morality around those things. And therefore they are treading on the toes of parents.
00:15:25
Speaker
Where in the past they might not have been because there was a general understanding. So I think how, you know, how do you raise your children as a conservative in a profoundly un-conservative culture? And, you know, I don't have an answer to that except that you have to behave in a very un-conservative way and teach your children to challenge authority from a very early age.
00:15:43
Speaker
And that doesn't come naturally to a conservative because you want children to be able to you want there to be collective authority, you want children to have the security of knowing what's expected to of them, both at home and in wider culture, but that isn't there. And I remember in June lockdown, the beginning of lockdown, sitting the kids down and saying, don't believe what the government tells you.
00:16:04
Speaker
You know, and that's really hard for conservatives to have to tell young children because you want them to have trust in authority. You don't want to turn them into rebels at the age of... seven and eight but I don't think there is a choice at the moment and I think the duty of conservatives is to raise their children understanding those values and being of course open-minded and tolerant and kind and willing to make friends with everybody but also able to recognize the difference between conservative and liberal values.
00:16:35
Speaker
Actually, I think, you know, schools get a bad name and there are some terrible schools out there, but there are also schools that genuinely do allow free debate where children who are, who have conservative values do, do have a voice. It's hard for those children, but you know, if they've got a good grounding, grounding in those beliefs and those debates, then it's going to play out well for them in the rest of their lives, I hope.
00:16:55
Speaker
It's a fascinating paradox that I want to repeat. If you are a conservative, you have to now raise your children in an un-conservative way because the institutions around us are now so captured by, I wouldn't even say a liberal orthodoxy, I'd say this sort of warped version of liberalism. And a confused liberalism because it's not You know, not everything's liberal, you know, I would say extreme wokeism is more kind of Marxist in its roots, but it is this kind of, you know, very confused culture that certainly isn't conservative, but perhaps conservative it is now meaningless in it as a term because what is there left to conserve in terms of those kinds of traditional values? And perhaps orthodox is actually Conservative Orthodox is perhaps a better term. I don't know, but so but yeah, I mean, it it it is is challenging. And I think that, I don't know if you've read the book by a philosopher called Yoram Hasani called, Conservatism and Rediscovery. And he talks about parental authority in there and how
00:17:57
Speaker
actually respecting your parents is the mechanism by which culture is transferred from one generation to the next because if you respect your parents as they respect their parents doesn't mean you agree with them but that is the way that our heritage and our heritage and culture are transmitted through the generations if you reject everything that your parents hold dear out of teenage rebellion or ah expectation of what young adults should do, then actually how do we transmit our culture and heritage and how do you have a conservative society? But he he makes the point in the book that when an adult, a parent criticizes a child's teacher in front of the child, actually they're undermining their own authority and standing in the eyes of the child because they're weakening this collective adult authority. But of course now as conservatives, what choice do you have if your child comes home and says,
00:18:44
Speaker
My teacher said this, yeah you know, my teacher says, my friend is sexist for saying that young women make better nursery teachers than male teachers is a story I know from an acquaintance of mine that really happened. A little boy said it was asked why more women went into nursery.
00:19:00
Speaker
into child care he said because women like children more and he was told off for being sexist I mean it's ridiculous but you have to say to your children the teacher's wrong you know and that's really hard because you don't want to undermine the teacher and collective authority but the choice is that or undermining your own values so you've obviously got to choose the former.
00:19:18
Speaker
One of the other obvious challenges is around technology and the proliferation of technology, particularly with young kids.
Technology's Impact on Boys and Girls
00:19:24
Speaker
I think we all agree that kids as young as three or four tapping away at ah iPads all day, every day, can't be doing them much good. But is there a difference between how this is impacting young boys and young girls?
00:19:36
Speaker
Yes, I think that there definitely is certainly in the teenage years, I think less of research has been done into the early years, but I think that is urgently needed because it's clearly having a big impact on things like language development. um But in the teenage years, what seems to be the case, and I've taken ah most of what I know from the work of Jonathan Haidt.
00:19:56
Speaker
that girls particularly are drawn into social media. So social comparison, Instagram, Snapchat, you know, a lot of it is about comparing how people look, how people behave. And sadly that often ends up in pretty horrible bullying. The kind of ah bullying that that girls are more tended towards anyway, but obviously is exponentially enhanced by the internet and can now take place at any time of day or night.
00:20:20
Speaker
through millions of people rather than just in the classroom between the ages of ah between the hours of nine and three. So I think the big impact for girls is about social comparison. um And obviously that's had a huge impact on mental health. For boys, I think that there's evidence that a couple of hours a day on social media doesn't really make much difference to them, but it's the it's the ones who become get addicted to gaming that is clearly a boy thing. Obviously the war games and risk games really appeal to boys brains and and you know boys love them. they but But boys always love computer games since they're invented. But obviously now the the availability of them, the quality of them, the ability to play with other people yeah know throughout the day and night is very, very tempting. And I think a significant proportion of boys actually have addictions.
00:21:09
Speaker
which is clearly harming them in terms of their ability to learn, their ability to form relationships. And then of course we've got pornography, which I think has been one of the biggest and most negative influences on our culture in the last 10 or 15 years. And I think people think about pornography as the old top shelf magazines, something you might, boys might share with their mates behind the bike sheds in schools or find under a bed. But it's nothing like that. You know, online pornography is violent. It's horrific. Much of it is abuse. I mean, it's easy to find videos of actual rapes.
00:21:44
Speaker
There's masses of child exploitation. It's become a huge industry across the world. And young boys age 11 or 12 are coming across these images. That's their first experience of sex. They're at a very vulnerable age, very impressionable age. And the more they get absorbed into the world of pornography, the more their brains think that that is what it means to have sexual stimulation. And of course, you know, the rest is history. Look at the rise of child on child sexual abuses, the number of girls reporting being choked.
00:22:12
Speaker
ah The children's commissioner ah did some research last year and found that a huge proportion of boys and it was over half think that girls expect violence during sex so the influence of of pornography on boys and their attitudes to girls and women has just been phenomenal and at the at the you know in the small print of a lot of these awful sexual violence cases that we see.
00:22:33
Speaker
It's always, oh, and he was addicted to hardcore pornography. I mean, you know, of course this is, where do boys learn what's normal in sex and what to, what, what is expected of them? Well, at the moment they're learning it through pornography and a lot of it is completely horrific and violent and would not be allowed offline. So we have different rules for offline and online pornography in this country and the offline rules have worked perfectly well for quite a long time, but we haven't translated them online. And I think we're really, really underestimating at the moment the impact of pornography.
00:23:03
Speaker
on boys. You cannot blame a 12 year old boy for what he's watching on on ah ah on the internet. And yet at the same time, we're saying that that they're toxic and they're the problem. So I think this is a big thing that we've got to tackle. I recall Ted Bundy making this his excuse before he was put in the electric chair 30 odd years ago. and Pornography has always been a social bugbear on the the right. But you're saying that the game has changed with the internet and that's what they're saying now is is considerably worse and more dangerous.
00:23:33
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Because if you at 12 can come across videos of actual rapes, and if you are watching videos of women being horrendously degraded, these videos look non-consensual, whether or not they are is a matter of argument. And, you know, the most search for terms are things like teen and incest. You know, this is what boys are being exposed to ah in their formative years. I spoke to a an expert, a guy who tried to rehabilitate Men who had been caught in possession of of child pornography and he was saying that what happens in in a teenage and adolescent boys brain well but what girls as well I assume but there's what's called an erotic imprint and the experiences of sex and sexuality that are that that a boy is exposed to during those years lay down what he expects of sex, you know as a man ah again, it's not a ah you you know, a child is not a doesn't grow up knowing what human sexuality is you know there is some sort of level of of experience and understanding and exploration and if your blueprint is violent pornography then it is no surprise ah that there are now these difficult relations between men and women that are being reported all over the world and i think yeah of course that again there's this crossover between of course any individual who abuses women
00:24:51
Speaker
Who rates to you know who is coercive is at fault and should be prosecuted by absolutely individual responsibility. But at the same time we have a problem if boys as young as twelve are viewing this material and then thinking it's normal to treat girls in that way. Boys are the victims here as well as as well as the girls.
00:25:11
Speaker
When you look at this bucket of harms that sits under the technology umbrella from hardcore pornography through to all of the ills of social media, do you look at the solutions primarily coming from better parenting and from parental responsibility? Or do you look at it coming from impositions and regulations from the state? I think it's both. And I think as a conservative, the argument for The need for a state I think is is very strong in a complex modern world because I see the role of the state as to be there as a defence against the kind of powers and vested interests that individual families and communities cannot defend themselves against. So the obvious example is ah military power. you know the An individual family cannot defend itself if Russia invades. right We need a state to have a military
00:26:07
Speaker
to fund our defence forces, to be in charge of those defence forces, to defend us against foreign powers. I think everybody accepts that. You could say the same about you know infrastructure. ah In a modern complex world, if the state was not in some way responsible for infrastructure, we wouldn't have any.
00:26:24
Speaker
and but we obviously know things like big multinational companies pharmaceutical companies for example we expect the state to regulate drug companies because we as parents can't do that ourselves the same with road regulation you can't teach your child to cross the road safety if safely if they're safe if there are no speed limits no rules the road no traffic lights it would be impossible.
00:26:42
Speaker
So the role of the state is to regulate to step in when ordinary families can't do it themselves. and I think we've got to that point with technology because even as ah an exceptional parent, somebody who didn't have the willpower to refuse a mobile phone to their child to not let their child on the internet.
00:26:59
Speaker
Even that parent cannot protect their child because they are only as protected as the least protected child in the class so children show each other things on their own mobile phones pornography you know violence whatever. Whether or not that child themselves has a mobile phone and of course that child is existing in a culture where you know this kind of anti culture.
00:27:22
Speaker
it is dominating so i think even exceptionally strong will parents now can't actually defend their children from this technology and that's why i do think there is a role for the state i do think conservatives have given big tech a free pass i mean they are making trillions of dollars out of our children's attention.
00:27:40
Speaker
Now they're changing our children's brains. Our children have less attention span than previous generations. They have less language. You know, IQ seems to be going down. Educational attainment is going down. And yet we're saying, oh, well, it's bad parenting. But what about these enormous tech companies that are more powerful than most countries? And we're just saying, yeah, carry on, carry on profiting from our children. I don't think that's a conservative approach. I do think there is a role for government.
00:28:05
Speaker
I think the difficulty has come in the the discussions about free speech. So I think governments should not be in the business of telling people what they can and can't say, including online. And so of course, it's very dangerous if governments start to introduce this kind of idea of what's harmful. And there were big arguments in parliament last year about the the idea of legal, but harmful, which the conservative government did in the end.
00:28:28
Speaker
ditch. But that is a different argument to saying children are different from adults and children don't have freedom of speech or freedom of anything. They're gradually given more freedom as they grow up. yeah They can't drive a car, they can't buy alcohol, they can't have sex, they can't there's all sorts of things that children are not allowed to do. We don't say that that's an affront to liberty, that's just an understanding of the difference between children and adults. And I think it is absolutely right to say and conservative to say Technology or the social media and pornography is a product that is not suitable for children. And therefore, it should have an age limit on it just like alcohol and cigarettes do. But then once you are of the age of digital majority, 16, 18, whatever that we decide that is, the government does not interfere with your freedom. And that is a very a clean way of doing it. We say this is not for children.
00:29:19
Speaker
But once you're 16 or 18, the government has absolutely no in interest in what you're saying online. That's a much cleaner way than try to say, oh, this is harmful. Let's take this off. Oh, children shouldn't encounter this. Let's take that off. And you very quickly get into the space of, you know, who's in control of this? Whose definition of harmful is this? And of course that is very ah challenging to free speech. So an age gate is an easy way to do this. It doesn't threaten free speech. It's just a simple age limit.
00:29:46
Speaker
So you may be aware that Australia has recently banned social media for 16 years and under. I'd be very surprised if this Labour government in the UK doesn't follow suit with a similar policy. The arguments from libertarians and classical liberals perhaps is not so much that children the the harms aren't there for children under a certain age when it comes to social media.
00:30:08
Speaker
but that this may just be a gateway for the government to impose controls on everyone across the internet. How do you feel about that sort of argument when you think about these sorts of restrictions on social media use?
00:30:21
Speaker
Well, I think we absolutely should be concerned about government control. I mean, absolutely. This is why I completely opposed, you know, all the COVID regulations and the idea of compulsory vaccination and vaccine passports, because it is truly worrying. But if we're worried about that, why aren't we worried about what big tech knows about all of us? And, you know, I don't know if you've had this experience where.
00:30:44
Speaker
ah you know I can't remember what it was while I was discussing something with my husband, I don't know, washing machines, and you get home and on the open your phone and on all your social media platforms, washing machines are advertised. That's more frightening to me than the government stopping my children going on social media. Now, I'm not that we shouldn't be concerned about both, but if we're concerned about government control, why the heck aren't we concerned by being controlled by Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, you know who are unelected and completely unaccountable? So I think we need to consider that as well but this is why I think an agegate is a much safer idea than a then ah and ah then then the policing of the internet because it is a clean idea and we have the same ideas around you know alcohol and driving you know all these other things it's like once you're this old once you're this old you can do it and as long as you stick within the law that's fine.
00:31:35
Speaker
Now i think you know we've got to accept that the world has changed enormously and so much of our life is online now so i know one thing that people are very very resistant to is the idea of digital id cards and the the suspicion is that if we do have an age limit for social media or smartphones or whatever it is that will require digital id.
00:31:55
Speaker
Now, I think that is a very, very valid concern and something we need to think about, but I think we also need to draw an analogy with the offline world. So let's say you want to buy alcohol in a shop and you're lucky enough to look under 25, someone can ask you for your ID and you will have to show your driving license, let's say.
00:32:14
Speaker
Now, you are proving that you are who you are and that you are over a certain age, but the shop is not, the off-license isn't keeping a record of who you are. They haven't got your address, your date of birth, your fingerprints. You have just proved to them in an instant that you are who you say you are and you're over 18. Same principle applies if you want to go to a nightclub, you show the bounce of your driving license.
00:32:37
Speaker
Now, we already have third party digital IDs on the internet. There's the technology for that. You can open a bank account, you know, there's all sorts of things that you can do. I'm not a technologist, you know, you obviously need experts to create this, but it must be possible to have third party digital IDs that you you You know, you flash to the social media company when you create an account. They don't keep the records, but you prove that you are who you are. And then your account is tied to Face ID, just like all of our accounts are. When you go on Amazon on your phone, it checks your face to check you are who you are. You know, this is not a new thing. So it must be possible to do this in a way that doesn't.
00:33:15
Speaker
further compromise digital security, because I think we're all massively compromised already, ah but set but does prevent children from accessing this content. I mean, no solution is going to be perfect, right? The fact that kids can't buy alcohol legally before the 18 does not stop a lot of children drinking, but it does stop the majority of children being badly harmed by it from a very young age. And that's what we're trying to achieve.
00:33:35
Speaker
I want to turn to how this crisis of masculinity is on display in the political realm.
Populism and Masculinity Crisis
00:33:41
Speaker
So we have seen across the yeah UK and the US, in fact, most of the Western world, a series of populist revolts over the last 10 to 15 years. In the yeah UK alone, you've seen UKIP You've seen Brexit, you've seen Johnson's Red Wall victory. Even in the last couple of days, I saw that Farage may now be out rating Starmer in the opinion polls. so This is an extraordinary political shift, and it's all characterized by a resentment of the existing political institutions. In many instances, a feeling of grievance, and a lot of people say that feeling of grievance comes from, say, working class white men, or it's driven there initially. How do you think, if at all,
00:34:24
Speaker
This crisis of masculinity has driven or has influenced some of these political trends that we've seen in the UK and the US. Oh, massively. I think it's had a huge impact. And I think one of the the, I think the crisis has come from a loss of status for men, particularly working class men. And there used to be a route to status for all men. You know, if you were a law abiding man, there was a route to status, even at the lowest economic levels of society. So that was you grow up, you get a job.
00:34:54
Speaker
You get married, you have children, your job feeds that family, you know, that's your responsibility as a man to provide for that family. And you might have a role in your local working man's club or your local church, you know, your, that is your status as a man. And even for, you know, very poor men, it was possible to obtain status through those things, being a husband, a father, a worker, you know, a role model in community.
00:35:19
Speaker
And in poor communities now, post-industrial communities, all those routes to status for men have gone. I mean, marriage just doesn't exist really amongst young people in in in poor communities. you know far The idea of fatherhood, I mean, you know Britain has the highest level of unpartnered births of of any comparable culture. comparable country and huge rates of family breakdown, fathers, you know, even courage to live apart from their children because you can gain more benefits that way. And then in terms of having a job that's capable of supporting a family, I mean, that's become almost impossible for working class men because in the past, there might be the steel works, let's say, so the constituency I used to represent, big steel works used to employ 11,000 people, all, you know, lots and lots of local men now employ 750 people.
00:36:05
Speaker
What are local young men who don't necessarily have outstanding GCSE results or wants to go into academia? What are they supposed to do? And they end up in jobs that are relatively poorly paid and we still have relatively high employment levels for those who are not signed off sick, but but those jobs cannot feed a family. And so again, one purpose of being a man has kind of been eroded Buy that the change in our industrial based on us not to say of course aren you know i know i'll be accused of being sexist but anyway course that's not to say women shouldn't work when you can't provide for their families of course they can. What i'm saying is they used to be a clear path to status for men that no longer exists and status really really matters for men.
00:36:46
Speaker
There's a big link between your perceived status and your mental health and suicide levels and all those kind of things. And let's be honest, so women are attracted to men of status. So it's a very important thing for a man to be able to gain status and for particularly poor boys now, that's impossible.
00:37:01
Speaker
And the kind of virtues that we used to celebrate as, you know, as masculine, whether that's your physical attributes, strength, being protective, being chivalrous, those kinds of things, they are now no longer virtues and actually have become vices amongst some political narratives. So the question boys are asking is, what does it mean to be a man? Is it even possible to be a good man?
00:37:23
Speaker
And how do I obtain status? And if the answer to that is, I don't know, no one's showing me to the wet the way and there is no hope, then it's entirely unsurprising that the established political model holds absolutely no attraction for these people. And then you add immigration into the mix and particularly illegal immigration and boys and young men growing up seeing that men from other countries are being paid for to live in hotels.
00:37:48
Speaker
Given benefits, even some of them though are committing crimes and they and that they are you know they've been brought up in this country, they've been educated in this country and they get nothing. It's very unsurprising that we've got this deep dissatisfaction now and it's manifesting itself in boys and girls, young men and young women having very, very polarized political views. And obviously we've seen this in the States um and you know we we're seeing it here.
00:38:12
Speaker
Farage would see himself as the antidote to a lot of those challenges that you've just mentioned. How do you see the reform project playing out? And I know that you are a former Conservative MP. where Reform may very well be an existential threat to the Conservatives. What will happen over the next few years?
Political Reform and Conservative Policies
00:38:30
Speaker
I think reform is a good thing for British politics because I've got a lot of respect for a forage. He is an excellent politician. He is not an extremist. um He has very sensible conservative points of view. So I think that the fact that he exists and that young men and boys can vote for reform or support reform is a very good thing because if there wasn't what is now a mainstream populist movement, there would certainly be a non mainstream one, which probably would you know not be as respectable and absolutely valid as reform. So I think reform is a good thing for keeping men and boys engaged in politics. But in terms of what happens next, it's incredibly difficult in our first part, our first pass the post system, because in a proportional system, you would expect at the next election, conservatives to get 30 percent of the vote, reform to get 25 percent of the vote.
00:39:23
Speaker
And they'd have to go into court coalition. And I think that would be a very interesting prospect because it would force reform to get serious about their actual policies on health and economics, which I don't think they've got sorted out yet. And it would force the conservative party to recognize where the shift is and that they've got to attract. They've got to be small, see conservative again, and they've got to attract boys and young men. So I think actually that would be a brilliant thing for British politics. However.
00:39:52
Speaker
it's not going to happen because of first-past-the-post. And we do have this problem now that the Reform Party and the Conservative Party could quite easily cancel each other out in a lot of constituencies next time. And the Labour Party, even with a vote of, let's say, only 25%, could come through the middle again and be the largest party. And that's a massive danger because you'd have another election in which the expressed will of the people is completely different to what actually happens in Parliament. so I think these are quite dangerous times for British democracy because I think our system itself now is preventing people's expressed wills becoming represented in Parliament. But as a Conservative, I'm also completely reluctant to ditch hundreds of years of constitutional history and rules. So I don't know what comes next, really. I mean, I think, and I've written about this many times, there's going to have to be a pact.
00:40:46
Speaker
whether it's official or unofficial between reform and conservatives in the next election. Maybe a no stand deal. Reform get to pick 70 seats where they want to stand unopposed. Conservatives get to pick 70 seats where they want to stand unopposed. Now that's never been done. Conservative central office will resist that. Lots of conservatives will just it resist it. Probably lots of reform will resist it. But if we actually are interested in putting the country first, getting rid of the Labour government and having some sort of centre-right coalition, that is the only mathematically possible way to do it in my opinion.
00:41:16
Speaker
You said that the the conservatives need to learn how to be small c conservatives again. How did they forget that? Well, where did this all come from? And do you think it is possible for them to regain that small c conservatism?
00:41:29
Speaker
Well, I think where it's come from is back in the, during the cold war, conservatives and liberals allied together to defeat communism, which of course was valid and successful and very, very much needed. And then we got this kind of economic liberalism, the Thatcher Reagan consensus.
00:41:50
Speaker
that was extraordinarily successful, powerful and revolutionary actually in the 80s. And because it was so successful and because Thatcher and Reagan were then perceived to be some of the most ah admirable right-wing leaders ah of modern times, I think economic liberalism got confused with conservatism.
00:42:10
Speaker
And now when you ask people, what does it mean to be conservative in Britain? They say, oh, small state, low tax. Well, a small state with low tax might be the fruits of a good conservative government, but they're not principles. And yet that is now what stands for conservatism. So as long as you believe in a small state and low tax, it doesn't matter what you think about social issues, you know, be as liberal as you like, you know, we're conservatives, we stand for autonomy, don't we? Well, that's not what conservatives used to stand for. Certainly, you know, that there are limits to individual autonomy. That's the whole point of conservatism.
00:42:39
Speaker
But because it's now been reduced to this economic liberalism, I don't think the Conservative Party knows what it believes anymore about social issues, or indeed why it believes them. So I think this kind of merging with the Liberals has just not destroyed, has has diminished our understanding of what it means to be Conservative. And therefore, people have been selected as candidates for Parliament since this kind of happened, or since 2005, who aren't actually conservatives. They are liberals. They think they're conservatives because they like low taxes, don't we all? But they don't have conservative views when it comes to, you know, other issues. And therefore, there became this split in the conservative party between people who are liberals and people who are small city conservatives. And everybody got crossed with the conservative party fighting with each other and falling out and said, why can't you just be unified? But unified over what?
00:43:29
Speaker
Because there is if you've got this fundamental fisher between people who believe in the supremacy of international law and people who believe in parliamentary sovereign sovereignty, that's not a crack that can be papered over. you know That is two parties within one party and that was why the conservatives struggle and and you know fell down at the last election.
00:43:46
Speaker
I don't think reform are going to be immune from that either, by the way. And they're split on assisted suicide, you know, it reveals that they're not quite sure where they are philos philosophically either. But I think that's where conservatism got confused with liberalism. And if you look back in history, a hundred years ago, for example, it was the conservatives that were protectionists, that wanted to protect British industry, that wanted to impose trade tariffs. It was the Labour Party and the liberals that were opposed and wanted free trade. And yet now free trade is seen as the foundation of conservatism.
00:44:16
Speaker
except Trump and Vance maybe are changing that. But I think we've just forgotten what it means to be conservative and we need to work it out again.
Media Narratives on Masculinity
00:44:24
Speaker
Final thought on the media, so you're now working with JB News. JB News is doing incredibly well and and now regularly betting BBC and Sky in the ratings, which would have been unthinkable even a few years ago. Does the media play a role in these sorts of narratives around men today? And is the success of the Common Sense channel, JB News, a response to the failures of the mainstream media in this regard?
00:44:49
Speaker
Yes, and yes, I mean, I think the the mainstream media absolutely does play a role, particularly the BBC, the way that they curate stories and report stories. You know, men are always the the oppressors, the perpetrators, all these stories about toxic masculinity and how dreadful Andrew Tate is. And don't get me wrong, Andrew Tate is is dreadful. But he is the symptom of what's going on, not the cause.
00:45:11
Speaker
So I think people are fed up with this kind of relentless preachy narrative of how to be a good liberal. And so GB News, there was an open door really in terms of representing the views of of ordinary people. It's had, it struggles with, you know, ah there's huge amounts of people who are against GB News, even existing in principle. But the fact that it's broken through in the last few months, I think is indicative of of the desire to just hear common sense, free speech, different points of view.
00:45:40
Speaker
And i think the election of of donald trump was a a big moment for for gb news because of course not everybody who watches gb news supports ah donald trump by any means but when you're watching the bbc and itv and all the other channels and they're also.
00:45:54
Speaker
How could anybody vote for Trump? And yet you've just seen the majority of the American people think that it was worth doing. You know, it's unsurprising that people then switch over to a channel as asking those questions. Well, actually, what does Trump have in his favor? What are his policies? You know, why, why, why could this be good for Britain? You know, those kind of questions. So I think it's a ah really, really big moment for GB news. And so um it's a really exciting place to work. I mean, it's a great time to have joined it. I feel very, very lucky.
00:46:20
Speaker
But it's got great interaction with the audience and you see all the comments coming in and so it kind of helps, yeah you know, guide where you take, take things. But it is, it's really, really exciting what's happening. And I just, yeah, I'm, I'm sure it will go from strength to strength. How can people learn more about the Lost Boys project or potentially even get involved?
00:46:40
Speaker
but So go on the Centre for Social Justice website. We've got a call for evidence there. So if you are a boy or a young man, or you are a parent of one, or you work with one, or you teach a social worker, or you've been one in the past, we really, really want to hear about your experiences of growing up as a man in Britain today. So there's a short Q and A form that you can fill there, fill in there, let us know your experiences and also indicate if you, if you want to get involved, if you want to be kept up to date ah with research. So yeah, just go to the Centre for Social Justice website.
00:47:11
Speaker
A link is in the show notes. Miriam, thank you so much for coming on Fire at Will. Thanks. Great to speak to you. Thanks for listening to this episode of Fire at Will. If you enjoyed the show, why not consider a subscription to The Spectator Australia? The magazine is home to wonderful writing, insightful analysis, and unrivaled books and arts reviews. A subscription gets you all of the content from the British edition of the magazine, as well as the best Australian political commentary Subscribe today for just $2 a week for a year. No, I'm not joking. $2 a week for an entire year. A link is in the show notes.