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"Why I left Mumford and Sons" - Winston Marshall
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Winston Marshall was the banjoist and lead guitarist for British folk rock band Mumford and Sons. In 2021, he left the band so that he could be free to use his voice to shine a light on the taboo topics of our age. His podcast for The Spectator, Marshall Matters, is now one of the most popular political and social commentary podcasts in the UK.
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Transcript
Introduction and Promotion
00:00:00
Speaker
Today's guest is former Mumford & Sons lead guitarist Winston Marshall. Before I chat to Winston, sign no more because I've got a fantastic deal for you from the Spectator Australia. The winter winds are coming, which is a great excuse to stay inside the cave and read the speccy. At $16.99 a month, with one month free when you sign up, you'll be doing a Dust Bowl dance with Glee. I will wait, but not for too long, so sign up now at spectator.com.au forward slash join.
Leaving Mumford & Sons for Freedom
00:00:44
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia, a series of conversations on Australian politics and life. I'm Will Kingston. Like me, today's guest hosts a Spectator podcast. Unlike me, he's won a Grammy, scored several worldwide number one albums, and has played in front of millions of adoring fans from Madison Square Garden to Glastonbury.
00:01:06
Speaker
Winston Marshall was the banjoist and lead guitarist for British folk rock band Mumford and Sons. In 2021, he left the band so that he could be free to use his voice to shine a light on the taboo topics of our age, a calling he has taken to with gusto. Winston Marshall, welcome to Australia. Well, thank you for having me and for that flattering introduction, although I should I should correct one little thing is that so when I did two years ago that I quit Mumford and Sons and
00:01:35
Speaker
it was actually more rather than quitting so that I could speak on the taboo topics. It was rather a position where I could have stayed in the band and had the microphone and not being able to, a metaphorical as well as literal microphone and not be able to talk on difficult topics or give up the microphone and speak my mind freely in the irony has been that in so leaving,
00:02:03
Speaker
And it's taken about two years for me to, well, took me a while anyway to realize this, but now I oddly have a bigger voice than I had anticipated with, as you say, a spectator podcast just like you. And I guess one of the ironies, I don't know if it's an irony or, but yes, thank you for that flattering introduction. Thank you for having me on your show.
00:02:25
Speaker
Let's start there because your story is well known in the UK. It's perhaps not as well known in Australia. Maybe the first story is about how four young blokes from West London join up and become the biggest band in the world. We know that story. The next story about how you actually leave the band is less well known. Tell us that story.
Controversial Tweet and Backlash
00:02:45
Speaker
So, as I said, it was a couple of years now and I guess it was pandemic. So it feels like, I don't know if your listeners will go back to a period of
00:02:59
Speaker
international worldwide insanity, I think. And the further we get away from that period, I think the more clearly it seems that we behaved. Whatever your opinions are on the minor politics of it all and wherever you land on the various issues, certainly you'll agree that in the stress of it all, whether you agreed with things or disagreed with things, everyone was hyper stressed and
00:03:26
Speaker
Twenty twenty and twenty twenty one seem like two particular years of insanity anyway in amongst that period i am. The band had stopped to talk to me so i was in band month and sons and we did our last show in florida and i think the very beginning of march twenty twenty when we had a couple of more shows but then obviously.
00:03:47
Speaker
postponed eventually cancelled those shows and the lockdowns descended upon us and amongst other things in that period I took some sort of rest. I'd spent my entire adult life touring and in the studio which I loved but it came at a much needed time to kind of
00:04:09
Speaker
decompress, I think. And I was posting two of my not very many followers on social media about, amongst the other things, the books I was reading. One of the books I tweeted about was by the American conservative author, Andy Ngo, who had published a book at the beginning of 2021 titled Unmasked, documenting far left extremism in the United States specifically, not just
00:04:37
Speaker
the Antifa movement in places like Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington, but also the BLM riots in which 19 people were killed in the first 14 days following the killing of George Floyd and documenting the CHAZ zone in Seattle, all these various things. Anyway, somehow it just exploded on Twitter and
00:05:07
Speaker
I mean, I quite literally had 3000 followers and yet it just somehow over the course of one or two days.
00:05:14
Speaker
me tweeting about this book, it went up all the trending lists. By the end of the weekend, it was a segment on all the biggest TV shows and the band were getting tremendous hellfire. And if I may interrupt there, because this is important for listeners, I revisited that tweet and the thing that strikes you is how much of a nothing tweet it is. It's along the lines of congratulations on a book on an important topic. It was not at face value a controversial comment whatsoever.
00:05:43
Speaker
Quite, but I think then maybe to understand, and it might take me a lifetime to fully process and understand, and I can't tell you that I'm fully recovered from the whole thing, and that might sound like I'm being dramatic or oversensitive, although my life has completely changed as a consequence of that, and my whole concept of my own future has changed, because I was an ambitious
00:06:11
Speaker
musician and i still am a musician and still have ambitions of music music but life is different now that way and
00:06:21
Speaker
Trying to understand why this tweet blew up. In many ways, I see it as an act of God. But I also think that if you take it within the music industry, because it was really a dog pun in the music industry on me. Firstly, BLM was a sacred cow. You could not criticize the BLM riots. If you remember, it was, I think, I forget when in June exactly, but there was the Black Square moment, Blackout Tuesday, where everyone put up a black square.
00:06:50
Speaker
in support of the Black Lives Matter organization and movement. I think those are two different things, but that's another topic. But also at the time of the BLM riots, the very damaging riots, damaging on note, particularly to many black businesses, paradoxically,
00:07:12
Speaker
was that many people in the creative industries were putting, posting, raising money to post bail for the various Antifa and rioters who had been arrested in that period. So the creative industries, and the creative industries are very small industries, not many people in them, so everyone sort of knows each other. They were fully and unquestioningly supporting
00:07:40
Speaker
this movement. And so this book challenged some of those narratives. And I think that's part of the reason you cannot challenge it. And I think now that there's been a bit of time and voices criticizing the obvious flaws in not only movement, but also the BLM organization, for example, they raised 90 million dollars in that period of which something like 25 million went on Wall Street.
00:08:07
Speaker
They each of the founding and leading members of the organization, including people like Patrice Kahn colors, have acquired pretty impressive property portfolio. And a ton of the money has gone on to trans charities as if that's got anything to do with.
00:08:26
Speaker
the plight of African Americans in America.
Trans Issues and Personal Impact
00:08:29
Speaker
So there's so many obvious flaws and now it's been time and enough people have debated the topic. It seems like, oh, of course you can criticise that, but actually at the time you really could not criticise the shortcomings of the movement and those charities. And there are a bunch of topics like this.
00:08:45
Speaker
I've mentioned trans there. Trans is another issue that seems to be retaining its controversy. And it's almost every week or every month that someone loses it all for defending women's rights and women's spaces and standing up against the transitioning of children and what I consider the mutilation and the corruption of children. And it's just another topic. And there are a few of these topics. I guess there always will be
00:09:15
Speaker
these topics as long as, as, as long as humans are still, are still around as nature. I have a couple of those topics, including the trans topic on my list to get through with you just before. Okay. Well, let's do it. Before we do, before we leave this saga, I am interested in the human dimension of it all because no one who's listening to this. I imagine would, would have experienced being in the center of a cancellation storm like that. I'm just fascinated as to what it feels like.
00:09:43
Speaker
It's, you know, on a personal level, I don't really care what like strangers or whatever. It's like the difficult thing about it, or rather the most difficult thing about it was firstly, what happens on a personal level with people that you know, love and work with.
00:10:00
Speaker
I don't really care what some stranger in far off, you know, Twitter sphere thinks of me, I don't care less, but when it's your friends and that's where it becomes very difficult. It's like, it starts off, okay, there's some attention on Twitter, but then it's like you get the phone calls, you get the text messages and people are very upset and people saying like, oh, you know, how could you do this? What's going on? It's like, well, hang on a second. What's going on here? And that's what's difficult. And then your life sort of crumbling
00:10:27
Speaker
at that moment. And another difficult thing was that, you know, I was in a band and they were coming after my bandmates. And that was I had perhaps, I mean, it's certainly with retrospect, it seems like an obvious thing. I shouldn't have done that tweet, although, you know, I'm not sure it is obvious, to be honest. Yeah, I mean, anything's obvious with with wretched, you know, in hindsight, but but they were coming after
00:10:56
Speaker
my band as well. So if I'd been a lone actor, I think things would have gone very different. If I was a solo artist, obviously I would. So just for listeners who don't know the story, I then issued an apology for endorsing the book. And then over the coming next two or three months, I really dug into the issue to see, you know, what's going on here. And I felt more sure that I had been correct that the author was indeed brave. In fact,
00:11:23
Speaker
he was attacked and he'd been attacked beforehand and and suffered a brain hemorrhage but he was attacked in that period again the video footage of which came out online and it was in a in a hotel in in portland and i just felt like i'm part of the problem here i'm i'm effectively endorsing these these antitha hooligans and so it just didn't play of my
00:11:43
Speaker
I wasn't sleeping. I wasn't eating properly. And then as an artist, the artist's duty, artist's role is the pursuit of truth.
Apology and Pursuit of Truth
00:11:53
Speaker
And the apology I'd issue hung around my neck like a tablet of shame. So I came to a point where the only way forward was for me to leave the band. And so I issued or I explained the situation
00:12:08
Speaker
to the band, there was no real objection. And I issued an apology, sorry, I retracted my apology rather, and issued an explanation letter and quit the band. And actually, I was immediately liberated, but my conscience was liberated by it. So certainly not no regrets there. But it was just weird, weird as hell position to get into.
00:12:31
Speaker
a weird experience generally. Can I take you back to that essay that you wrote announcing your departure from the banks? I think it's very poignant. You had a wonderful conversation with Ignat Solzhenitsyn, the son of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It was your very first podcast interview. You quoted Alexander in that essay. If you'll indulge me, the quote goes, and he who is not sufficiently courageous to defend his soul,
00:12:59
Speaker
Don't let him be proud of his progressive views. And don't let him boast that he is an academician or a people's artist, a distinguished figure or a general. Let him say to himself, I am a part of the herd and a coward. It's all the same to me as long as I'm fed and kept warm. You said in that essay that that quote profoundly stirs you. Why?
00:13:20
Speaker
Well, Alexander published the... That's from an essay called, Live Not by Lies, which he published in 1974 upon his expulsion from Moscow. And then he went into exile eventually in the United States.
00:13:35
Speaker
And I know it's, again, seems a bit dramatic to, in any way, compare my life to him. I'm not. But that essay in that period, I must have read that about five times over the course of three months, and it really affected me. You know,
00:13:55
Speaker
perhaps in ways I don't fully understand, but it resonated in a way that, yeah, how dare I, you know, I call myself a musician and a, you know, a songwriter. Whether it's music or whether I want to write prose or whatever I do, if I've got this apology, which is essentially participating in the lie, then I'm just as bad as the lie. So it really, that really bothered me. And I think it was the best articulation of the, of the pro of, of my feeling there of the, that I'd done.
00:14:26
Speaker
in apologizing, I'd done wrong. Although at the same time, you know, I give this example as well. If you're at a dinner table and you say something that someone's offended by, you're not going to double down and go like, yeah, you're going to go, Oh, I'm sorry. Have I offended you? Why have I offended you? What, what, uh, you know, explain to me what I don't understand. And that's analogous to, I think what I was going for is like, well, first I wanted to protect the band, but also like, maybe I don't understand this whole issue.
00:14:52
Speaker
about Antifa and BLM, what do I not understand? And so that's why I spent the time really digging into the issue. So anyway, yeah, that essay, I recommend to your listeners, Live Not By Lies by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, it's a five page essay, it's a pretty short one, but it's very, very powerful.
00:15:08
Speaker
will include the link to the essay in the show notes. You mentioned that you're an artist. You continue to be a musician. It is one of the, if not the, great passions of your life. Let's go on to the arts. Do you think the arts can still be subversive in the way that they once were?
00:15:26
Speaker
Yes, I think they can. And there are examples of it. There's a fantastic interview with Nick Cave recently, he's a provocateur of sorts. This is the unheard one. Exactly. And I was lucky enough to be in attendance, it was a live recording. And I recommend also, given that this is an Australian podcast, probably most of you listeners have already read his recent book, Hope, Faith and Carnage, or I think that's the title is
00:15:55
Speaker
Such a beautiful book i think i was on the verge of tears for most of it and and and plunged over.
00:16:01
Speaker
into tears a couple of times. It's really breathtaking and a great articulation of suffering and faith. But in this interview with Freddie Sayers, on the one hand, he sort of suggested that he's a, and he's a little bit sort of abstract at times, I think intentionally, just to keep, because when you're dealing with the issues of faith, it's hard to be too specific, I guess.
00:16:31
Speaker
On the one hand, he suggested that he's more conservative now and as a means of being provocative. But on the other hand, I think that he really does resonate with those deeper, not necessarily political conservatism, but traditions and
00:16:51
Speaker
and beliefs that have sustained us for so long. And so I think he's in this current era amongst artists to be what Nick Cave thinks to be a conservative is to be a... How did you put it? What was the... I think he basically said the best way these days to put two fingers up at the establishment is to be a conservative, is to be religious. That is the ultimate counter-cultural position is to be conservative today.
Conservatism as Counterculture
00:17:20
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's funny because what is to be counter-cultural? Because you could make an argument perfectly legitimately that, okay, let's say in my country in Britain, the Conservatives are not only in power, but they've been in power for something like 13 years.
00:17:32
Speaker
And so to be counter-cultural, you want to be in opposition to that. But then if you live your life completely surrounded by counter-cultural stuff, how you counter the culture itself. So whichever way you land, you can sort of claim that you are the counter-culture. You could probably rationalize your way that way. But he seems to me, and given that I still think that most of my friends
00:18:00
Speaker
are progressives and liberals. I've got a few conservative friends as well. But certainly in the creative industries, it does feel to me that someone like Nick Cave is the counterculture. And there are a few people like that. What's the name of the Sex Pistols singer? John Lydon. He's another example of being oddly countercultural. He's always been countercultural. And then a couple of years ago, he gets photographed in a MAGA hat.
00:18:29
Speaker
He's a good test of what being counterculture, a good personification of counterculture. Well, these guys would probably say that they haven't changed the world around them has changed. I was fascinated listening to your conversation with Don McLean and he made a really interesting point or reflection on American Pie. He basically said, we are living through the day the music died. And he said,
00:18:55
Speaker
He can see it in the way that people are canceled, in the way that statues are pulled down, in the way that language is weaponized. He called American Pie, actually, an anti-cancel culture anthem in today's day and age. How do you think that attitude would go down amongst the music industry today?
00:19:16
Speaker
a good question, and this is a very hard point to make because it's hard to get data on it, but I can't tell you how many private messages, DMs I get, but also when I meet artists, so many are prepared to say like, okay, I don't agree with you on everything, but I actually agree with you on this. And this is a really common thing I hear is that, you know,
00:19:41
Speaker
I need to, I can't say that, you know, I can't, you can't say that, so I'll keep my mouth shut. And this is not just in Britain, it's time I spent in America. And now that I'm sort of out as a someone, you know, who doesn't think exactly like everyone else, a lot of the people who in that position have come to me because they feel, oh, finally, there's someone I can talk to. And for
Self-Censorship and Artistic Expression
00:20:04
Speaker
some people, it's very, I've had incidences where artists have broke down in tears. They're so frustrated that they can't
00:20:10
Speaker
speak amongst their peers and they have to hide what they think, even though they have perfectly reasonable opinions. A lot of their positions, traditional liberal positions, but they still feel that they can't, they talk. And what that does for an artist, by the way, artists need to express themselves. They need an outlet. So many people probably think, oh yeah, so what? Just keep your mouth shut, put your head down, get on with it.
00:20:37
Speaker
an artist's whole career, whole work is to express themselves. So if they feel like they cannot express themselves, the psychological impact cannot be underestimated. It's really awful.
00:20:54
Speaker
I'm sure it's I suspect it's like that for most many people. But so within the industry, I haven't quite because it's hard to like sort of get data and and and I'm probably in a position where availability heuristic makes me believe that everyone's self censoring. But I also know that a lot of people I know people who are very, very dogmatic in their in their woke beliefs, you cannot change
00:21:17
Speaker
You know, you cannot talk certain topics without without, you know, basically starting an argument or fights because they're almost like religious beliefs. So within the industry, there's a funny thing going on that there's a lot of it's also generational. I think this is another another thing is that there's there's older generations, let's say, next.
00:21:37
Speaker
Nick Cave's generation, you know, he's I think he's about six years old and that, you know, they're a bit more sensible and adult about it. And then there's a kind of the young artists who age sort of 20 to 30, you know, hyper progress, you know, marinated in these deep progressive ideas. I've tended to find them that far more ideologically possessed and stringent almost to a sort of puritanical religious extent and
00:22:11
Speaker
I don't know whether the music industry or the creative industries is going in the right direction i'm yet to see it but as i said earlier in the interview it's a very small industry of knows each other and completely prone to group think as all industries are and i'm.
00:22:26
Speaker
And I do worry that the dominant artists who shut down speech are going to do a lot of damage to the arts more generally. And arts can only thrive if artists feel like they can express themselves.
00:22:41
Speaker
Well, that's an interesting question. Can you actually draw a relationship between the quality of art, the quality of music, the quality of literature, the quality of comedy and the rise of this cultural Marxism? In other words, can you actually see whether this has had a positive or I imagine you'll view a negative impact on the quality of music that is produced?
00:23:03
Speaker
I think that when it comes to music, I think there has been some good music and I do like some modern music, particularly electronic music. I personally like that a lot. But the arts more broadly, what it's done for film, it seems like there hasn't been great film made for a while. But in this period, I'll say, and this is an attempt to be hopeful, Hemingway said of Dostoevsky that Dostoevsky was made as a writer when he was exiled.
00:23:33
Speaker
Siberia a writer is forged in the fire forged in injustice like a sword is forged in the fire and so artists now that might feel like and that they're restrained or that you know this i've met many artists who you know going for this kind of culture stop and i have interviewed some of them on podcast.
00:23:54
Speaker
this difficult period now I think will make for greater art later. And when there's a great author who can go into the psychological drama of this sort of social, because another point is I don't think that what we're going through now and the kind of getting kicked out or expelled from social groups for having the wrong opinions is unique to this time. I think it's a very ancient
00:24:20
Speaker
phenomenon, you know, is Galileo a person while they saw Socrates, you can go back to the talk of all rights about it in democracy in America, you know, the Puritans, that there's a lot of historical context that having the right having the wrong ideas will get you ostracized from social groups and professional groups. And so it's not a new thing. So I think in this current period, there's a
00:24:46
Speaker
great artists will emerge who can articulate what's going on and those will be pieces of art that will resonate as long as humanity continues. Which
AI and Ideological Impact on Arts
00:24:55
Speaker
isn't guaranteed by the way. I just did a podcast on artificial intelligence with Neil Ferguson and getting into this AI stuff. A lot of these people think it's the end of humanity. I don't know where you stand on that, Will, but maybe that's another topic.
00:25:10
Speaker
interesting aside, I actually looked at an interesting chart only last night on Twitter that looked at the relationship between the countries that people lived in and how trustworthy they were of AI. And it basically found that people in more developed countries were far less trusting of AI than countries in the less developed world. So basically 80% of Chinese people are embracing AI and about 30 to 40% of Americans.
00:25:34
Speaker
Not quite sure where to go with that, but I found it was, I think the views on that topic would differ based on culture. That is interesting. I don't know how much you can trust a poll coming out of China. No, I don't think the poll was coming out of China, but the top of the poll, the most trusting of AI of any country were the Chinese and towards the bottom were the British, the Australians, the Americans, the Western countries. It was a very stark divide.
00:26:00
Speaker
That's quite encouraging that the West are prepared to be cynical and critical of this new technology as someone who lives in the West. Yes, that's right. That is about the extent of my AI knowledge. I will not continue to bullshit any further, but I do want to
00:26:19
Speaker
cover off one more element of the arts, which I think is probably the most pronounced example of the harms that come with the rise of cultural Marxism, and that is comedy. You've spoken to several comedians. You've spoken to Andrew Doyle. We've both spoken to Constance and Hisson. They would all agree that the comedy industry has changed dramatically and in a very short space of time.
00:26:41
Speaker
From those conversations, why do you think that change has emerged, and potentially why has it emerged even more dramatically in that field of the arts compared to, say, potentially music?
00:26:52
Speaker
Well, I'm not a comedian and I know a few comedians, but I don't know that industry particularly well. And I say that as just as a caveat before I say this, but I'm not fully convinced that the comedy world is suffering quite. I don't think it's very easy to do a sort of like low definition criticism because, okay, so with comedy, unlike music, music, you can make music. You don't have to go into the
00:27:16
Speaker
realm of non-fiction and ideas. You can speak poetically about phenomenon, be they personal phenomenon or, you know, societal phenomenon, whatever. With comedy, it strikes me that, you know, to make a joke, whether it's between two people or whether it's between, you know, it's in a theater or on a Netflix special, to make the joke, you have to agree on what the truth is. So comedians can't afford to get ideological.
00:27:40
Speaker
unless their audience is ideological otherwise they won't have an audience they're relating that they're exposing the truth and they have to carry their audience with them on that journey now constant and andrew i have heard them both speak about comedy.
00:27:57
Speaker
in the uk and it's certainly true that and this is true in the music industry as well is that there's a lot there are many gatekeepers in these industries so it's people who run the the comedy clubs it's people who run the music it's the radio stations as well
00:28:12
Speaker
the venues and if they're ideologically captured and they start cancelling or not booking comedians because they've got the wrong opinions, that's where you have a problem. And there's plenty of examples of this. The famous example is Dave Chappelle in America had a show booked at First Avenue in Minneapolis. It's just listeners will remember the video Purple Rain by Prince that it was that venue
00:28:38
Speaker
that that video was filmed at and he had a show their book last year and then after some trans joke they cancelled the show. There are other, Lebovitz, I've forgotten his name, there's other examples in the UK of similar things going on but at the same time simultaneously Dave Chappelle, if we continue that example, has
00:28:59
Speaker
probably the most successful comedy specials on Netflix, if not the most, then certainly up there, and a huge audience and can tour arenas around the world. And so, yes, Counterculture exists, but for someone like Dave Chappelle, he's at such a level that he can, he's still got an audience. I think it's more worrying for the young and up and coming artists who say the wrong thing and then get ostracized for it. And there's plenty of examples of that. Earlier this year, there's a
00:29:27
Speaker
young comic in the UK called Alfie Brown and someone dug up some old stuff, which he was criticising racism, but then it was used against him as an example of him being racist, which wasn't at all. And I think a venue in Brighton cancelled the show and various people in the industry have cancelled the show.
00:29:47
Speaker
Really, it damages the up and coming artists more than it does the big ones. But at the same time, just to counter that opposition is, if those artists can move to other medium, now we have YouTube, social media, you redirect your career in that.
00:30:05
Speaker
in that way and you find a new medium for it. So it's double-edged that it's not like a clear like you're completely, your career is done and maybe this is a misconception about what cancel culture is. People means it's you're like over. Well, what it actually means is it doesn't have to mean your entire career is over. It means that you're, you know, certain things are not open to you because you have the wrong opinions, which is without even them being offended offensive opinions, perfectly legally held opinions.
00:30:33
Speaker
So another observation I have is that some comedians are really huge, and they're a woke comedian, so you're huge, because there's a lot of woke people. And so they don't need to play to the whole world. They find that audience. Likewise, there's a lot of anti-woke comedians who are huge. One of my favorites at the moment is a guy called Ryan Long, a very funny American guy. But he has a huge audience as well. And Shane Gillis, actually, he's probably my favorite at the moment.
00:31:01
Speaker
You know, you find your audience and there's wherever they find them, they find them. So yeah, there's a bit of a blabbering answer for you.
00:31:08
Speaker
No, it makes sense. As long as you can find an alternative channel to reach that audience that bypasses those gatekeepers that you mentioned, you have the ability to be able to reach people. Before we get onto a few of those taboo topics that you are now digging into in martial matters, I would be remiss not to mention that you are one of just many brilliant contributors to the Spectator UK. Some of my other favourites, Douglas Murray, Neil Ferguson, who you've just spoken to, Brendan O'Neill.
00:31:34
Speaker
Former editor, Boris Johnson. A reminder, if you subscribe to The Spectator Australia, you get all the wonderful content from the UK edition, along with the very best in Australian political and social commentary, digital subscription, 16.99 a month, one month free when you sign up, go to spectator.com.au forward slash join.
00:31:54
Speaker
Okay. He's got the added. My editor will be happy. I want to get to China because I know that you are a vocal supporter of the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement.
Support for Hong Kong and Integration Challenges
00:32:08
Speaker
You've established a nonprofit called the Hong Kong Link Up, which aims to link up British residents with Hong Kongers arriving in the UK. How would you assess the response of the West to growing Chinese authoritarianism?
00:32:21
Speaker
Bloody hell, that's a massive question. I'm conscious it's early in your morning as well, so I hope you've had your coffee. Well, it's a very difficult thing for the West to respond to. And if I speak for both Britain and America, they've done some things right and they've done some things wrong. So Britain, they announced the BNO scheme, which is Hong Kong is born
00:32:44
Speaker
before 1997 have a B&O passport. And so they were given the right to live and work in the UK for five years. And at that point, they could, they will be able to apply for a permanent residency, a permanent citizenship. So far, at least 100,000 Hong Kongers have come since January 2021. And I think there'll probably be a few hundred thousand more, although possibly
00:33:06
Speaker
Legally, there could be millions more. I don't think there will be but that's it. That's it That's a good response to the Hong Kong issue because a more heightened response Would be you know, you can't you can't start war with China like we can't start a hot war with China their win
00:33:24
Speaker
you know, from a geopolitical stance, it's not a bad response. Having said that, there's minor, your listeners should follow what's happening to Jimmy Lai, who's the founder of Apple Daily, which is one of the biggest pro-democracy news media outlets in Hong Kong. And he's under arrest, his freedoms severely, I think he's had almost everything confiscated, and he actually has a British citizenship as well. And the British government have done nothing about that. To America, one thing that's worth
00:33:54
Speaker
complimenting about what Biden's done. I don't have many compliments to Biden, if I'm honest with you, but they have, I've forgotten the name of the policy, but in essence, anything that's linked to the Xinjiang region of China, where the Uyghurs have been put into labor camps, stories of their organs being harvested, and I would argue a genocide.
00:34:19
Speaker
has happened, as with the Uyghur tribunal that occurred, which took place in Britain two years ago. There is a Uyghur genocide and trying to stop manufacturing that is done by the Uyghurs and supporting the whole infrastructure of that heinous crime against humanity. Anything to stop that is a good thing. But as I also say, well, you can't really start a war with China, because then I really do think that's the end.
00:34:48
Speaker
of us all. It's a tricky one. I'm not sure what I would do if I was foreign secretary on the issue. You're playing an important role in your own way in accelerating the integration of Hong Kongers into the UK.
00:35:08
Speaker
Back to a person, just to color that in, just to be more specific. So I started the Hong Kong link up thing because when the government, my government announced the BNO scheme, as I've already described, they didn't say anything about integration or assimilation. And at the time, that could have been hundreds of thousands, as it turned out, it was hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of new people coming to our country. And no one talking about assimilation and integration, that's a serious, that causes for serious social upheaval. It's a serious issue. It's no one was doing anything. So I started it. I was meeting Hong Kongers and hosts
00:35:38
Speaker
them as they had already arrived, some of the early exiles and refugees. But now what our organization, Hong Kong Link Up, does is we're no longer doing this budding scheme. It's more about we host seminars to help Hong Kongers integrate. It's a very small operation, but there's a few like this going on in the UK and
00:35:58
Speaker
there's a nice it's a nice bridge between hong kong community british british community but but it's not it's not anything it's not as you know it's a very small local community level thing it's not your earlier question about the geopolitics of it all i don't know how to un un unpack you know i haven't quite worked out the answer that question.
00:36:20
Speaker
Well, it's interesting you mentioned that I think this has been a problem in the UK over decades, a failure to sufficiently integrate and different cultural groups together. I've heard this sort of argument put forward by someone like a Douglas Murray and he says for that reason multiculturalism has failed in the UK. Do you agree with him?
00:36:44
Speaker
Yeah, well, look, I'll add to that. I read this morning that we project, last year, in Britain, we had 500,000 net plus migrants coming to the UK. By the way, for listeners, before Brexit, the peak was 330,000 yearly net migrants. And now we're projected to have a million net migrants for 2023 coming in.
00:37:06
Speaker
So it's a huge, it's an absolutely massive thing, the migrants coming in. And the multicultural issue is that I agree with Douglas on that specific issue. And so I personally think that you should take each migrant group
00:37:25
Speaker
as different groups and think about how they can integrate. Now, one of the positives about Hong Kongers and why it's a much easier group to integrate is that Hong Kongers, as Hong Kongers, the Hong Konger identity almost is wearing two hats. On the one hand, they have a Chinese heritage. On the other hand, they have a British heritage. It's a country that they proudly are, technically they've never had democracy in Hong Kong.
00:37:53
Speaker
But they believe in democracy deeply. They believe in the rule of law, a common law, and they believe in responsibility. And also, notably, about half of one poll I saw of the Hong Kongers who have come over are Christians. Now, there's not, as a percentage of Hong Kong,
00:38:14
Speaker
the Christians aren't a huge group, but them being that most of them that have come here or half of them have come here are Christians. It's much easier to integrate if your foundational beliefs are the same as the local population.
00:38:27
Speaker
It becomes much harder when you had, if they were all Taoist, it would be a harder integration process. Likewise, there are other religions, it's much harder to integrate into a Christian society. So that's, it's a serious issue and that integration and failure of integration is less, I mean, Douglas has written about it extensively. Just read his book, The Strange Death of Europe.
00:38:54
Speaker
It's a serious problem, and I don't think it's one that's going away. It's the same challenge in Australia. I think the numbers this year are 400,000 net new migrants coming in in 2023, and we also have a chronic housing shortage.
00:39:10
Speaker
If you put forward these types of comments, too many people will just throw out carelessly terms like xenophobic or racist when it's very much a pragmatic conversation around how do we live in harmony together and then also literally how many people can we afford a quality of life that we think, you know, a country like the UK or Australia should be providing.
00:39:32
Speaker
It's nothing to do with racism or xenophobia. It's nothing to do with their race. It's the same if they were white, ethnically the same, it wouldn't make a difference. Their culture, it's their beliefs. That's the thing that's the really big, the big issue that trying to get cohesion as a society, you need the majority of people to have vague
00:39:55
Speaker
similar view of the world. That's also why America, even though it's obviously multi-ethnic, but the big division isn't necessary on ethnic ground. It's on the view of the world. They're kind of the progressive versus conservative, the woke versus the anti-woke thing is because they have a completely different concept of their history and their future. And whether they, you know,
00:40:21
Speaker
regardless of their ethnicity or race. So yeah, I'll get so frustrated when I hear that. And another thing, just on the housing crisis, that's an excellent point, Will. We've got a dire housing crisis over here. And the knock-on effects are insane. We're going into population decline because people aren't starting families, because they can't afford to get on the bloody house.
00:40:48
Speaker
property ladder and you know they can't start their lives because it cost a fucking fortune you got to have these conversations okay you're gonna have a you're gonna have four hundred thousand net migrants are you to Australia okay are you gonna build some houses who's gonna build the houses when are you gonna build the houses how quickly are you gonna build the houses what's gonna happen who's gonna who's that gonna hurt who gets the houses first
00:41:10
Speaker
All of those questions, they're not being had because it's too politically dangerous to have those questions. Just shut up and have the bloody conversation. Otherwise, what hell awaits us all?
00:41:20
Speaker
Well, potentially
UK Grooming Gang Scandal
00:41:21
Speaker
the most shameful example of that is the grooming gang scandal in the UK. You've had this conversation on your podcast and I actually like to bring it up on this podcast because not enough people in Australia know about this, despite some parallels that can be drawn with what's happening in remote Indigenous communities in Australia. For people who don't know, for over 40 years now,
00:41:44
Speaker
Tens of thousands of girls and young women have been abused, raped, in some cases murdered, all across Britain by grooming gangs, which largely, not exclusively, but largely are manned by people of a Pakistani ethnic minority descent. It's been largely ignored by authorities and the media, at least until very recently. Why? Well, there's a few reasons why.
00:42:11
Speaker
And as you said, I did an episode of this with a investigative journalist called Charlie Peters. And he also made a documentary called Grooming Gang's Britain's Shame, if any of your listeners want to deeper dive into it. But yeah, there's a few reasons that one of the shameful reasons is political correctness, where police were too scared or journalists were too scared and even politicians too scared to
00:42:37
Speaker
bringing up the issue because it might be deemed racist. And Sarah Champion was a politician in Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Shadow Government and she lost her job because she dared write an article about it in The Sun. There's an example in politics. There's various examples of police not wanting to cover the store, not wanting to deal with the issues or report the race of some of the perpetrators.
00:43:08
Speaker
because they didn't want to be deemed racist. And this has happened in the shadow of the Stephen Lawrence death. And so a lot of that stuff has stopped people dealing with the real thing. And what's quite shocking about it, and I'll embarrass myself here, but there's some of these girls, they've been brutally murdered. One girl was stabbed multiple times to death
00:43:36
Speaker
one girl was a little like, these girls should be household names. I can't even remember them now off the top of my head. And this is happening and people don't talk about it.
00:43:47
Speaker
because they're just too scared. Talking about race in any way is just deemed too scary or people are too nervous about it. And it's not to say that all Pakistanis think this. No, some of the leading voices against the Grooming Gans fiasco have been of Pakistani
00:44:11
Speaker
origin and heritage. You can talk about a problem without lumping everyone into the issue. And if you don't deal with it, you end up giving it to the hard right and people with more nefarious ambitions who can actually use it for their racist missions. So the whole thing's very upsetting.
00:44:37
Speaker
Well, Winston, I loved listening to Mumford and Sons. I enjoy your podcast even more. For listeners, there's a link to Marshall Matters in the show notes. If you're like me and love to binge new shows, I strongly suggest starting with Winston's conversations with Peter Boghossian, Lawrence Fox, and Andrew Doyle, along with all the others that we've mentioned over the course of the conversation. Winston, keep doing what you're doing. I think you are one of the true
00:45:02
Speaker
men of principle in the modern age, and they are few and far between. Thank you very much for coming on, Australiana. Well, thank you for your great questions, and it's been a pleasure speaking with you, and I look forward to listening to your podcast as well.
00:45:15
Speaker
Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Australiana. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review. And if you really enjoyed the show, head to spectator.com.au forward slash join. Sign up for a digital subscription today and you'll get your first month absolutely free.