← Conversations with Coleman
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Douglas Murray. Douglas is a British writer, author of many books, including the Strange Death of Europe and the Madness of Crowds, and he is now a columnist at the Free Press. In this episode, we discuss Keir Starmer's recent resignation as Prime Minister of the uk. We talk about what's gone wrong in British politics over the past decade, in particular on immigration. We talk about the emerging Iran deal and whether the whole Iran war should be viewed as a success or a failure. We talk about the nature of the Iranian regime. And finally, I ask Douglas whether he loves the UK or America more so, without further ado, Douglas Murray. On this show we've spent a lot of time having honest, unfiltered discussions around Israel, Zionism and antisemitism. And if our conversations have made you more curious about any of these topics, I have a recommendation for you. Wandering Jews with Michal and Noam is a podcast hosted by two of the leading Jewish voices of today, Noam Weissman and Michal Bitton. On their show, Michal and Noam are finding fresh perspectives on tough subjects. They've explored the war on Iran from the viewpoint of Persian Jews, poked fun at antisemitism with comedians, and asked prominent rabbis about the future of religion. If you value nuance over hot takes and want to get past all of the noise, this show is for you. Search Wandering Jews with Michal and Noam on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube and subscrib. Douglas Murray, thanks so much for coming on the show again. Great to be with you and welcome back to the Free Press.
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B
Thank you. It's a great joy.
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A
You had a. For what, two years? You had a column, Things Worth Remembering on Sunday and I was there from the start. Yeah. Fantastic. So we're really glad to have you back. I know our listeners to this show will be happy to be reading your columns. There's a lot to talk about. We could start with the UK or start with Iran. Which would you prefer? I want to hear your thoughts on both.
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B
It's bad news all around. Let's start with the at least slightly funny bad news, which is the uk.
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A
Yeah. So the news just broke yesterday. I'm not sure when this episode will come out that Keir Starmer will be resigning as Prime Minister. I guess I can. Let's just start out with what do you feel his legacy will be
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B
non existent. Really. There's nothing much. You know, the oddity of the British system is we have this. We obviously my country of birth we have this system in the uk, first past the post, which is meant to. It has certain downsides, but it's meant to deliver clear mandates from the people in each electoral seat. And therefore with governments, the argument against proportional representation has always been that first past the post means we have. We don't have unstable coalition governments like, say, Italy. Now, for the last 15, 16 years, Britain's been in this very strange position of having our usual system of first past the post and a sort of coalition politics. The 2010, there was a coalition between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. Theresa May ran a minority government in 2017, supported by the Ulster Unionists. Keir Starmer got a mandate from the country of a kind in 2024. But really the mandate, although it was a very large majority, was incredibly thin in terms of popularity. It was simply an election in which the British public said they wanted the Conservatives out of office after 14 years of conservative Party rule, in which, particularly in the last few years, Conservatives seem to think that there was an endless appetite in the country for Conservative leadership elections. That is where the tiny number of people who are members of a political party vote for their party leader, who then, if you're in power, becomes prime minister. And that's how we got, in a short number of years, David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss. For a month, Rishi Sunak. And the public had just had enough. The Conservative Party obviously needed the time on the back bench, on the opposition benches. So Starmer came in with no. There was no love for him in the country. It wasn't like 1997 when Tony Blair really did come in with an enormous wave of enthusiasm as well as a desire to kick the Conservatives out after a similar sort of period of stagnation in Conservative rule. So unlike Blair, Starmer came in with no particular popularity and with no particular program. I mean, he, he studiously in the election campaign avoided saying anything much that he was going to do and then he succeeded in not doing very much. I don't think history will really remember him. There's. There's a few things. I mean, he continued British support for Ukraine. That's sort of been a happy place in a way, strangely to say, for British Prime Minister since the war began. It gives him a feeling of grandstanding on the world stage, but other than that, you know, he's tinkered with some social media laws and so on. If he's remembered at all, it'll probably be for badly misjudging the public mood from the moment of the Southport stabbings. Onwards, which was really only a few weeks after he entered office and deciding that instead of dealing with any problems that existed in the country, he should clamp down on and prosecute and suppress the opinions of people who didn't like the bad things that were happening.
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A
Can you remind people the details of that stabbing?
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B
Yeah, that was when a young man called Axel Rudipicanu, who was a child of Rwandan immigrants to the uk, went into a Taylor Swift themed dance party of young girls in a place called Southport, which would ordinarily be a sort of Labour heartland, and sort of started stabbing all these young girls and killed three of them in really brutal circumstances. These things happen. And you, you know, you sort of can't blame a politician for the actions of a lone madman, but you can judge a lot by their response. And the response of the Starmer government was to try to cover up. And, you know, they basically, they knew within 24 hours the WHO the guy was, that he'd been downloading Al Qaeda manuals, tried to make ricin and all sorts of things which the public deserved to know. And the police and the government put out this thing that this sort of Welsh choir boy had gone crazy in Southport. Now it was just incredibly dishonest. Now there was rioting and terrible unrest for a period after that, and that's obviously terrible. You know, in those situations you do have to be careful about what you say as a politician. But really what the public got from Starmer was you, the public are the problem. And that sort of continued, really, for the remaining two years he was in office. You know, I'm afraid that Britain, like a lot of countries, is not very good at dealing with its problems. It has this habit of addressing secondary issues. It has this habit of always focusing on what one person has said in response to the issue, things like that, and a total inability to address real societal problems. I suppose that most recently came to. To a head as well with the trial of the killing of a young man called Henry Novak, who was killed by a Sikh man who accused, totally falsely accused, Henry Novak, who he'd stabbed on the streets of having said something racist to him. And when the police arrived, it turned out that they arrested the victim who had been stabbed.
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A
They immediately believed the Sikh man's lie.
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B
Yes. And the Sikh man's family also involved themselves in the cut attempt to cover up the crime. The fact that the police had been trained, and this is something happened under Conservative as well as labor governments, but the fact they'd been trained to regard the accusation of Racism as being, as it were, even more serious than the claim by a young man dying out on the streets he'd been stabbed. And the body cam footage showed that the police, one of the police officers said to him, you know, I don't think you have made somebody who's been stabbed to the chest and the face and so on. It's pretty obvious. And to handcuff a young man in that situation and for his dying moments, to have him being read his rights, strangely enough, you know, again, you know, these cases, they're not. You can't blame the case on a single politician. You know, individual people do individually terrible things sometimes, but the response to it, again, was clearly just of one of Starmer completely misreading the country. There's a lot of anger in Britain, a lot of anger, as in, you know, most European countries. And there's just. There was no attempt by Starmer or his government to really understand public anger about things like that. Yeah.
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A
So when I hear of a policeman handcuffing a young man because he's been falsely accused after having been stabbed of saying something racist, when I hear about, you know, the endless stories of cops knocking on grandma's door because she made a Facebook post about Muslims or indeed, arresting, arresting, you know, poor old woman. When I hear what you just said a few minutes ago, what the cops put out after the Southport stabbing. Right. One of the questions that confuses me is, are the cops not conservative in UK because they skew conservative in America, which means that de facto, even if there is liberal policies, the average cop skews in the other direction and the culture of the police can only get so leftist, if that makes sense. Is that not the case in the uk?
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B
No. I mean, first of all, I mean, throw in Robert Conquest's third law of politics. You know, the fastest way to understand an institution of which you're not a member is to presume it's been overtaken by a cabal of its enemies. And that rule holds pretty true. You know, you expect the police to be something and it turns out that they're not what you expect. You know, people think that. I know intelligence agencies are filled with sort of, you know, right wing patriots, geniuses, patriots. And they're usually suffused with. With, you know, quite the opposite. Anyway, with the police, it's been a hot. In the UK, it's been a horrible journey for some 30 years now. There was a. There was an act, there was an actually racist murder in the early 1990s of a young black man. Called Stephen Lawrence. And in the 1990s when that happened, the police undoubtedly botched the investigation because they didn't think that it was a racist killing, or at least they thought it was some kind of gang thing. I can't remember the exact reason. There was a sort of unforgivable set of failures by the Metropolitan Police looking into that stabbing. There were subsequently, many years later, prosecutions for it. But the investigation into that, that was called the McPherson Report, came out in 1997. 998 accused the police of being institutionally racist. And that was the first time that phrase had become commonplace. And this accusation of institutional racism really caused the kind of breakdown that I've seen in my own lifetime in the British police, which is if an individual police officer were accused of racism, that would be the end of their career. Many, many policemen.
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A
Just the accusation.
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B
Just the accusation. Many policemen and women I've spoken to over the years have confirmed that. It's just that's. You can, you can botch an investigation into something, you can fail to follow up leads, all sorts of things and you'll be covered for. But this.
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A
Have strong unions protecting them in those situations.
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B
No, they don't. No.
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A
Maybe that's.
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B
They do have union, but, but that nothing, nothing has been powerful enough to override that fear. And I mean, I suppose, you know, the, the best way you could say it would be that maybe, maybe the, the macpherson thing was an over correction or an attempt to make a correction that was then in the way that institutions do, becomes embodied and overcorrects. And you know, and then there are, there are sort of technical reasons, of course, why the police get obsessed with things like that. I mean, the social media sort of things that you point to, the sort of things that Elon Musk and others have highlighted on, on X and on social media and made kind of international stories. Those things I think in part come about because of laziness. You know, there's a great problem in the uk, particularly in London, of the theft of mobile phones. Completely routine. Everybody knows somebody or has themselves had their mobile phone snatched from their hands by somebody on a moped or cycle. And, and you know, you, you can turn on the trace thing and you can tell the police, you know, I actually know where my phone is and the police are totally uninterested. Totally uninterested. On the other hand, yes, prosecutions for social media posts or wrong think online, some of which is, you know, ugly stuff and some of which is, is just what you should have to put up with in a free society. There's a reason why the police are kind of more interested in that. And it's. And it's obvious, which is it's quite a lot of work to catch a burglar. Even if the homeowner has caught the burglar on their cctv, it's a bit of a bother to go and find the people who are hoarding mobile phones they've snatched from the hands of tourists and so on. It's quite easy to turn up at Mrs. Miggins house, you know, with nine armed police and, you know, wrestle her to the floor. And that's not an exaggeration, by the way, just a very quick example. There was a case that I wrote about a year or two ago because I was very tangentially involved, which is somebody who himself was a former policeman, had said something, made a joke online. He was totally misrepresented by the police. I think 11 police officers turned up at his door, handcuffed him. He said he was absolutely terrified. He thought the neighbors would assume he was a pedophile or something like that. You know, he was standing on his doorstep with handcuffs on whilst our former colleagues went through his house and looked for suspicious material. They found a couple of my books which showed he was a man of superb literary taste. And he also had copies of the Spectator magazine, which also showed he was a man of great discernment. But the police body cam footage that came out showed them going through his bookshelves and bringing out books like books I've written and books that other mainstream authors have written and talking about as if this was suspicious material. I mean, this is insane, absolutely insane.
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A
Like, how much is the British public incensed about these sort of stories?
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B
Oh, they're really incensed about it. But you know, what, what good does it do being incensed if there's no outlet for that? I mean, a lot of these laws, things like non crime hate incidents happened under, were created under Conservative government. You know, this is again, one of the reasons why people hate the Conservatives is they had 14 years in power and this, all this rubbish happened on their wall.
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A
This is one of my central questions about the. And I don't follow politics there closely, I just follow the very big stories. It seemed to me, as an outsider what happened is that like all of Europe, you had an enormous migration, refugee problem, and that was the central reason behind Brexit, and that there has been a mandate for at least 10 years to get a handle on immigration.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And yet it never happened. If you look at the numbers, and that's very surprising and I wouldn't have predicted it if you had asked me 10 years ago, right after Brexit, like, what's. I would have said, well, this might be good, this might be good for the UK and it might be bad for the uk, but surely the number of immigrants coming in will go down, like if. If nothing else that I can be sure of. So what actually happened?
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B
Well, just to do the numbers very quickly, net migration into the UK in the early 90s was some tens of thousands a year, and it had already been for some decades, an issue under Tony Blair's government that massively rocketed. And under the Blair years, It was around 300,000 a year net. And that makes a huge societal churn in a country of what was then 60 odd million people. The Conservatives always promised to bring that number down and failed completely. And worst in the period of Boris Johnson's Prime Ministership, only four years ago, they actually saw net migration triple from the height of the Blair era. I mean, they were always promising, we're not going to do what Blair did. It actually went up to a net of almost a million a year in one year in Boris Johnson's time. So that's one of the things that causes enormous political instability, is when both the main parties fail at what they're promising to do. And you put your finger on it with the Brexit issue, which was that vote happened 10 years ago, the British public voted to leave the EU and immigration was certainly a very, very large part of it. The general issue was sovereignty. You know, where do our rules come from? Are we allowed to make the rules or are we rule takers? And I'm, you know, I bow to no one in my suspicion of politicians and whether or not they're actually going to fulfill their promises. But even I was pretty amazed that the Conservatives lost control of immigration so badly during their time in office. And yes, the Brexit vote has caused this additional, you know, instability in the body politic in the UK because, well, there were a lot of people in the political class who said they would respect whatever the public said in or out of the eu, and then didn't worked for years. And this was both parties, all parties in a way, apart from reform, Ukip and so on. They worked across all parties to try to stop or reverse the British public's decision to leave the eu. This period of instability, in a way you could trace back to the moment after the Brexit referendum when David Cameron, who had called the referendum on a campaign promise and had said that he would see through whatever the verdict was of the people, resigned along with his chancellor in a fit of pique the morning after the vote. I mean, it was one of the most unpatriotic things I've ever seen anyone do. They said in 2016, you know, whether the public vote to leave or to remain in the eu, we'll stay here to see it through. And they literally just walked for days. About the only person in Britain who we heard from was the governor of the bank of England. It's extremely unnerving for a very long established democracy to be thrown into that kind of turmoil with the additional turmoil of people's understandable fury and surprise at the verdict from the 48% of the people who wanted to remain. And then the fury and amazement of the people who had voted to leave that they didn't get what they asked for. And that even now, 10 years on, Britain remains. The way I put it is the country tried to jump out of Europe onto the other side of a sort of cliff edge, fell down center and is stuck in this kind of crevice where managed to devolve from EU on trade and common market related issues. But still, for instance, the subject to the European Convention on Human Rights. Which is the excuse. It's not actually an excuse. Is the excuse that is given for why, for instance, you can't stop people coming daily illegally on boats across the Channel from France to the uk. The argument is we can't because of the European Convention on human rights again
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A
10 years ago, which is a treaty that, that you guys signed. Right?
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B
Yes. And 10 years ago, if you said to the British public, do you think 10 years after voting to leave the EU, the country will still be subject to European laws? Not they thought, of course not.
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A
They would say, that's the whole point of this vote. That's the crux of the issue.
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B
And so, yes, and there's an enormous amount of anger and frustration and which is, I mean, one of the really sad things about it was that the whole point of the Brexit vote, really, whichever way you put it, was this had been a separating sore under British politics for four decades. There's a once in a lifetime opportunity to address it and to sort of, to change metaphor, to release the air from the radiators and stop the thing, you know, building up to an unacceptable pressure point. You get that moment and actually you
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A
only let half the air out of the balloon.
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B
Yes. Or I'm trying to extend the metaphor and my limited radiator related knowledge, but you know.
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A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's the status of reform Right now?
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B
They're doing very well in the polls, but they failed at the recent by elections to get a candidate elected. But they are riding high in the polls. This is Nigel Farage's party. You could see that as a kind of continuation of the Brexit sort of party, the Brexit movement. That's one of the other things that's causing, of course, the enormous problem in British politics is the left is sort of fractured. You get this. Not just the Labour Party, but you've got the party now to the left of the Labour Party, which is a Green party, which used to be interested in green in an environmental way and now is more interested in green in a Hamas way. They're stuck on the color. Just their reason for loving the color has changed. But anyway, you've got the Green Party there to the left of the Labour Party. But the left isn't as split as the right. The political right in the UK is now appallingly split. There's the Conservative Party, which has performed appallingly in recent by elections. And again, Kemi Badenoch, who's the head of the party, is in my view, doing a very good job in trying to reestablish trust in the Conservative Party. But she's only had two years to do that and she's got to make up for 14 years of broken promises. And then to her right, you've got this movement which is reform, which is always being described as, you know, populists and things like that. It's not a term I like, but yes, it's a more sort of red meat, in a way, version of right wing politics. And then now there's an even. There's a split to their right with a party called Restore. But if you look at the polls, the left will probably continue to. Well, is likely to continue to win even if there's general election called, is likely to continue to do well because the right wing vote in Britain is so incredibly split.
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A
Yeah. So I can tell you're emotionally exhausted by British. By the state of Britain and British politics. But I want to ask you, you know, on. On America's 250th birthday, you've been living in America for a couple years now, right?
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B
More than a couple. Yeah.
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A
How do your feelings of patriotism for the UK compare to your feelings of patriotism for America, if. If you have them at all? Are you a citizen?
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B
I do. I'll put it this way, I remain enormously patriotic to the uk. I love the country. I love everything that I regard as being the country. I think it's been badly despoiled, and I hope that that can be reversed. Like everybody who. Well, not like everybody. Like, a lot of people who move to the United States live here most of the time. I've got enormous admiration for the country and a deep love for the country, which actually has been there since I first came here pretty much as a schoolboy in the 1990s. There are things about America that I've just always admired and. And I'd say some of them are historic, some of them are cultural and so on. But if I was to put it down to one, I think it's a difference that absolutely nobody from Britain or Europe can deny is the big difference between the old continent and the new one, which is that for all of the challenges that America faces, there is still a sense of optimism that exists in this country. There is still that. I think, most important of all, one of the things I love about America most is it sort of goes back to that thing that Ronald Reagan said in the famous speech. You know, there are some people who think that a fat. When a fat man standing beside a thin man, that the fat man must have stolen something from the thin man. That's not the American way. It is kind of the European way. There's a. There's a sense in Britain and Europe that if somebody has something, and there's a good reason for this to do with hereditary principles, but there's a sense in the old continent that if somebody has something, it must be to the detriment of someone else. And I really do think it's my experience in America that people are pleased for people who get something or do well. It's a conversation I've often had with friends who've also, you know, moved to the US as a. As an app, including some mutual friends we have in common. There's a. There's a completely tonal difference in America that I see across all groups, classes, races, sexes, whatever, which is. There is a genuine delight in people doing well and earning money or status or respect.
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A
And part of that is the sense that if I learn from them, I can do it, too.
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B
Absolutely.
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A
Like, where's the boom happening? There's always a boom happening somewhere in America somehow.
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B
Yeah.
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A
That you feel you can be a part of.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Obviously, AI is one of them, the big one right now, but there's the. The mood is always one of, where is the boom how can I be a part of it? Yes, that's always available in America and there's always a strain of the culture that is, that is pedal to the metal on that.
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B
Yes, you can see. I mean, there are obvious measures which
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A
I think is good for the world. I think it's good for the country and good for the world. Yeah, Dynamism and innovation, almost all of it.
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B
There's measures of it like the number of Americans who are invested in the stock market compared to the number of British or Europeans. There's tangible things like that. But yes, people sort of think, yeah, well, if, if, if, you know, I don't know, SpaceX or something is going up, you know, God, you know, good for the people who are in there. I wonder if I can get a bit of that right. And whereas there's a kind of, again, this isn't with everyone. There's a kind of snarky resentment that exists towards success in Britain and elsewhere. I hate to bring it to sort of anecdotal, but the other week when actually when SpaceX was going public, the main so called comedy program on the BBC had a couple of sort of hereditary comedians snarking about Elon Musk and they really hate him and saying that he, he. What was it they said? They made some joke that he'd said something about the new film of the Odyssey and one of these idiot establishment comedians sort of said, you know, the only Homer Elon Musk has heard of is the in the Simpsons. And you go, yeah, that's right. The world's first trillionaire must be a real idiot compared to you guys. This is anecdotal, but it is cultural at some level. The snarkiness, the resentment, actually.
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A
Yeah, well, one domain where America seems less and less able to achieve its goals is militarily and foreign policy. Which brings us to Iran. We still don't, as of as of today, understand the full contours of the Iran deal that is supposed to be inked over the next month or two. But it seems hard to characterize it as a win if you judge it against the stated objectives of the war. You know, I think Trump came into this wanting zero nuclear capabilities and material held in Iran. Hopefully the long shot was regime change and a greatly diminished diminished missile capability and missile manufacturing capability. I think we've gotten maybe half of that third objective, you know, maybe half of the nuclear objective. We've probably delayed them by many years, but we certainly haven't gotten rid of their capabilities and we certainly didn't get Regime change, it looks like, looks like a military success and a political failure. I'm curious, how, how do you view, how do you view this action overall? Do you judge it against the stated objectives and see it as a failure, or do you still somehow see it as a qualified win?
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B
I see it as a partial success. To my mind, the stated objective, the most important one, the one that actually the administration here in D.C. made clear, was Iran. The Iranian revolutionary government must not be allowed to continue its nuclear weapons program. This is something that's gone on for decades. As I wrote in the free press the other day, there have been so many lies told from Iran about what they've been doing for decades. Long before Barack Obama and Joe Biden and the JCPOA and all of that. Long before that the Iranian regime was caught lying again and again and again. Multiple UN Security Council resolutions, including unanimous ones in the 2000s, finding that the Iranians were lying to the IAEA international inspectors about what they were doing. To my mind, stopping the worst government on earth, a millenarian theocracy. Getting nuclear weapons is one of the big issues of our time. It's one that I've said for 20 years more. It's one that if it happened on the watch of this generation, would be so deleterious for future generations. That would be unforgivable because the ayatollahs would have the world's most dangerous weapons, the whole of nuclear. The whole of the Middle east would go nuclear in response, and the world's most dangerous region would have the world's most dangerous weapons. I've always thought all my adult life that this is a scenario that must be avoided at all costs. President Trump took a very clear hit at that. That's very much his belief as well, has been for decades. He took a shot at that last summer in the 12 Day War, and then again since February of this year. We actually don't know everything that's been achieved by any means. We know that there's still fissile material in Isfahan, Fordo elsewhere that should be extracted manually. The weapons program has been so seriously damaged, as far as I can see, that it's, it's going to be very hard for the regime in Iran to get going again and get back to capability anytime soon. So that is a win. I, I think that the destruction of not just missile capabilities, but naval capabilities, air force, so on, is all important work to have done. I think that, as you say, though, I mean, there's a risk, there is a risk of a political failure at the end of this whole process. And I mean, the way I've characterized this is this is a problem when a regime that, you know, certainly a lot of its members are thinking about the end times is confronted by a government that's worried about the midterms. This is a difficult balance. I found in recent days since the Memorandum of Understanding has been, as we understand, has been circulating. I find that I'm slightly more sanguine than some of my erstwhile friends and colleagues who are deep, more deeply panicked by this than I am. And I think it's because my beliefs, I said in the free press the other day, is that a lot of international treaties aren't worth the paper they're written on. This virtual Memorandum of Understanding isn't worth the paper it's not written on. I don't think it's going to hold. I don't think it's going to hold. It's already not held. There are too many moving parts and there are too many things that I think it would be simply impossible for the Trump administration to call a win. There was one, as I said in the free press the other day, which is the obvious one, which is the unfreezing of tens of billions of dollars of Iranian assets in the 2010s under the JCPOA agreement was something that Donald Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024, as well as many times in between, repeatedly attacked at rallies and interviews. And everything he said, you remember the pallets of cash? Well, none of those pallets of cash of unfrozen Iranian assets anywhere near the sum of money that is being discussed, which is somewhere in the region of 300 billion that would be given to the revolutionary Islamic government in Tehran if they follow through with the current deal. I mean, everybody has their views, but I don't see how the Trump administration could possibly portray such a gift to the Iranians as being a win promises from the revolutionary government in Iran. I keep saying that, by the way, and it's because I'm so aware of, you know, the fact that one mustn't say Iran on this because of the people, including friends, who are in my ear all the time saying, please God, this is awful. Regime is not Iran. So that's why this rather long winded throat clearing I say every time. But yes, there's, there's no scenario in which I think the revolutionary Islamic government in Iran abides by these agreements. Is it going to stop funding terror? Is it going to change its views? Is it, is it really going to be able to resist something it's not been able to resist in the past, which is to seize any passing vessel it wishes to. And Straits of Hormuz? I don't think so.
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A
So I would say, like, if, if the JCPOA is any guide, they might and probably will certainly as long as Trump is in office, obey any nuclear related dictates in the near term. But there's a 0% chance that they won't fund the terror proxies.
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B
Yes, I think that's.
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A
Even if that's right.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Even if there's some language in the deal about that I just don't see. I think they believe that's too important to their overall strategy. Funding Hezbollah, funding the Houthis, etc.
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B
Yeah.
- [40:39]
A
And if you look at the jcpoa, when they got access to all that cash, that was the year Hezbollah went from a minor threat in terms of the number of missiles it has into 5x10x. And I don't believe that that's an accident. And so it was a trade off between delaying, delaying Iran's nuclear ambitions because we're not getting rid of their nuclear ambitions. I think this is, this is a sticking point I've had with some, some guests I've debated this issue on and the line I always throw at them and I've never gotten a good response to it, is that there are zero examples in the history of nuclear proliferation, you know, since 1945, where a country has enriched kilograms of uranium to 60% and then not gone on to create a nuclear bomb. Literally zero examples. Right.
- [41:32]
B
So, but remember that the Iranians were only doing it for civilian domestic energy purposes in one of the world's oil rich. Oil rich. Yeah, Countries.
- [41:43]
A
So.
- [41:43]
B
And by the way, had this program to do this civilian nuclear program, but never produced the watt of electricity.
- [41:49]
A
Yeah, right. So there's additional things that make the joke even funnier. But like just fundamentally, people, people fixate on this idea that they're not currently sprinting from the 10 yard line to the end zone, as if that's the crux of the issue. And they'll say things like Iran is not building a nuclear weapon. Yes, but you mean they're not, they're not fashioning the last screw on the warhead. Well, sure, but it's a matter of having gotten to the 10 yard line, having effectively announced your medium and long term intent to create the thing. The, the when you make the last sprint is a matter of tactics. It's not a matter of goals. They have the goal of creating One, right?
- [42:33]
B
Without doubt. Yeah, without doubt. And by the way, and another thing, just another one. So this, one of the straight out lies is that the now late Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa saying.
- [42:44]
A
Yeah.
- [42:44]
B
That he was opposed to the use or creation.
- [42:46]
A
Is it a lie that he issued the fatwa or that we should take that seriously?
- [42:50]
B
Both. As far as I can understand it, none of it is to be believed. And I would just throw one other thing in there because it has to be said, there are people who have been claiming, and again, I had this argument, debated this for more than 20 years. There are people who seem to think that what the regime in Tehran has been doing for decades in the nuclear space really is innocent. Now, I think they're profound fools, but they're not. The largest number on this. The largest number of people who claim that the Iranian regime is not seeking nuclear weapons are people who want them to have nuclear weapons. We should be completely clear about this because it is not said often enough.
- [43:49]
A
The why would they want that?
- [43:52]
B
Well, different people have different reasons.
- [43:55]
A
So what? Like, why would someone who isn't an Iranian theocratic Muslim, Shia Muslim want that?
- [44:06]
B
Lots of reasons. One is they'd actually like to see Israel nuked. They like that. Another reason is they would like to see the Americans in particular get a bloody nose. They don't like what they perceive to be American dominance. They loathe what they perceive to be Israeli projection of power. Yeah, I mean, happy to name names, but I mean, it's very, very obvious to me from the people I've debated over the years and watched talking about this, if they are still pretending after all of these years and all of the facts that have come out, if they are pretending that the Iranians do. The Iranian regime has not been trying to produce a nuclear bomb. It's because those people are trying to cover over the era until the regime in Iran gets the bomb.
- [45:07]
A
One of the other lines that's very common is why are you so concerned about a theoretical bomb that Iran doesn't even have yet when we have Israel, which actually has bombs at Dimona that are undeclared? And if you're so worried about nuclear proliferation, how about let's focus on the country that does have the bombs?
- [45:30]
B
Sure. I mean, it's always this thing. I mean, people say, well, it's undeclared. And so, yeah, everybody knows that the Israelis have nuclear capabilities. The most obvious answer to that is they haven't used them and they've expressed no desire to use Them, no intent to use them. I mean, after. I don't know if it was some rogue regime after October 7, you know, a rogue Israeli. If Israel was a rogue state, some people think it was, I suppose, could have nuked Iran. Well, they didn't. There's no, there's not even remotely in the. In any more than when America is attacked, it thinks of using nuclear weapons all over the place. Like I say, Britain is a nuclear power. When we've been attacked or suffered terrorist atrocities or anything, we don't fling around nuclear bombs. And we, particularly in all of these countries, do not use the nuclear capability as a means of projection of force to build some kind of, I don't know, empire or something like that. They are, in each of the cases I've just cited, they are the. They are a deterrent, the ultimate deterrent. They have kept the peace in Europe since the end of the Second World War. They're the ultimate deterrent. But Britain, Israel, America, we don't go around in any of these countries saying we're going to nuke everyone.
- [47:20]
A
I don't know the. I don't know if the populations would tolerate even the serious threat of that.
- [47:24]
B
No, I mean, you know, there was a. There was, there was in the, during the Korean War, the 50s, when MacArthur
- [47:32]
A
wanted to bomb China.
- [47:33]
B
There was, There was a proposal got rid of him. Right, Absolutely. I mean, I mean, American troops were badly bogged down once they went above the parallel that meant the Red army came south suddenly. This is a real quagmire, Thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of troops being lost. And yes, I mean, there's this proposal put on the table. We could drop a load of nukes on China. Not anywhere near something that America was going to do even in the 1950s when opinion was different from what it is now.
- [48:12]
A
So then make the case for me that Iran is the kind of state that. That would do that. Because there are some people out there who believe. Okay, let's say, sure, there are some people that actually believe all the jihadist millenarian nonsense, but at the end of the day, the regime guys, they're probably, you know, they're probably doing all kinds of stuff that are haram. They're probably cheating on their wives, they're
- [48:42]
B
probably drinking alcohol, the children tarting around in LA as we speak. Yeah.
- [48:46]
A
So how religious are they really? At the end of the day, Mutually assured destruction will work on them too.
- [48:53]
B
Yeah.
- [48:54]
A
So really, if they get nukes, it's not going to be that bad. They're not going to do. They wouldn't consider doing a first strike on anyone.
- [49:04]
B
Well, several things. Again, sorry, I feel like a broken record on this. I've said it so many times. I'll do it very quickly. Firstly, you do not want a nuclear armed Middle east where all the countries in the region, the Saudis, the Gulf states and everyone has nuclear weapons pointed at each other, which is what will happen. Everybody will get nukes off the shelf in Pakistan or whatever else in that situation. An incredibly dangerous region and as a result an incredibly dangerous world. Secondly, by the way, even, even if the regime in Tehran wasn't one that had millenarian theocratic tendencies, indeed roots,
- [49:54]
A
why
- [49:54]
B
is Kim Jong Un likely to remain in power for the rest of his probably quite short fat life? Because they have some nuclear capability and if anyone struck North Korea, everyone would fear for the future of Seoul and other parts of South Korea very fast. This, that despicable hereditary Stalinist sort of regime in North Korea is sort of secured because it has a nuclear capability. Would, would it be good for the, the Middle east, for the, for the people of Iran, for the region if whatever the government, the revolution Islamic government after this war is, was in such a situation? I would say obviously not. It would make them impossible to replace, among other things, by their own people. And so the Iranian people, among other things, would remain repressed for the rest of time, as far as one can look forward to that. But the bigger thing is that whether it's Rouhani, Ahmadinejad, Rasvanjani, whether it's so called moderating leaders in Iran or not, all of them have said the same thing for decades about their intentions. Again, the people who would like, including people in America and in the commentating class in America who would like the Iranian regime to get a nuclear bomb, always pretend that the words that come out of their mouths don't come out of their mouths, the regime. But they have repeatedly stated that they would use the bomb if they get it, saying things like it would only take one nuclear bomb to destroy the Zionist entity. And by the way, there's a story that I think I told it first in the Wall Street Journal some years ago. It's sort of, it's an anecdote. But I don't know many people who had a meal with the, the late Supreme Leader. I have two Spanish friends who did some years ago and they were at a conference and in Iran and they were asked, some years ago, they were asked if they wanted to have breakfast with the Ayatollah and they said yes. And they had breakfast with him the next morning. And in order to break the ice, one of these friends said to the Ayatollah, what do you do first thing in the morning? Sort of, I think the aim of the question was sort of icebreaker to say, do you like coffee or tea? Sort of thing. Went through the translator. And the Supreme Leader replied, the first thing I think about every day is how I can destroy the Zionist entity.
- [52:55]
A
Me too, actually.
- [52:57]
B
Yeah.
- [52:57]
A
I mean, who among us doesn't wake up, roll out of bed and think about how to destroy Israel?
- [53:02]
B
As I said to the friend, that must have put a chill over your muesli. They are not serious about that. I think one of the hardest things, I mean, this is terrain, you know very well as well. But I think the sheer incomprehensibility of mindsets other than the one that we broadly have in America and the west, the inability of the sort of modern, in every sense liberal or conservative whatever, mindset to comprehend that other people think differently is just constantly bewildering to me. The presumptuousness, the sort of people who'll say, in the end, everybody wants the same sort of thing. And you go, you bet. You really, you want to bet? No, that's just not the case. Some people, and I would put the Iranian regime that's been wrecking that country since 1979among these people. Some people want something very different from life. And if that belief involves a hidden imam or the eradication of an entity, or the eradication of a state, the eradication of a people, or whatever else you should believe they mean it. And as I say, I think the people who don't understand that fall into several boxes. One of the people who are just frivolous and unimaginative and incurious in a way, and have a kind of Orientalist mindset of their own where they just impose what they think onto other people and think they think it as well. But that also includes people who really share at least a portion of that.
- [54:51]
A
I would also, I mean, one tack I've been taking with people of that opinion is to point out all of the incredibly risky and self harming activities that the Iranian regime does overseas. In other words, if we are to believe what came out of a New York court recently, they backed an attempt to kill Trump.
- [55:17]
B
Yes.
- [55:19]
A
Who at the time had a 50% chance of being the next president. So this is, I mean this and this is, you scratch the surface here and you can fill a 300 page book with similar activities that, yes, the The IRGC has done, not just in America, probably mostly in Europe.
- [55:37]
B
Mostly in Europe, but just in the city we're sitting in. Multiple attempts to kill somebody who we both know here in Brooklyn.
- [55:47]
A
Yeah. And forget the morality of it, just think of the game theory of it, right? Iran, relatively weak country compared to America. There's not really any telling what the American public will be willing to do if you piss them off badly enough by say, killing incoming president, or likely
- [56:05]
B
president, trying to get the cell that was trying to kill former National Security Advisor John Bolton and former Secretary of State Mike pompeo in Washington D.C. yeah, I mean, that's kind of crazy.
- [56:18]
A
It is kind of crazy. Just in terms of game theory. Right. If you poke the American bear hard enough, we have shown that we can go a little overboard on you. And we have the most powerful military in the world. And so if this were a normal regime, you wouldn't expect that level of activity, that sort of risk taking, as frequently, as constantly as the Iranians have been doing it the past 20 years, even longer than that.
- [56:43]
B
It's constantly everything. I mean, sorry to harp on an old thing, but it still matters. A normal regime does not call for the murder of a British novelist for writing a novel that the regime in question hasn't even read. There's a man currently living in Harrow in the UK who was in the Ayatollah Khomeini's government and wrote the book length defense of the fatwa against Salman Richter for the crime of writing the Stanley Verses. He has asylum in the uk. This, this piece of work. But that, that wasn't a normal thing to do to, to send death squads around the world to murder a novelist. None of, none of what it's done in the region is, is particularly normal. As I said in my last book, in democracies and Death Cards. You know, one of the things I found most bewildering in American, let's say popular higher education, ignoramus class types is the lack of awareness of the fact that when they talk about colonialism, the big colonial power of the era in the Middle east is Iran that has colonized country after country, wrecked country after country. Just look at what it's done to Lebanon, which you mentioned earlier. Iranian meddling in Lebanon by paying for training, arming Hezbollah has helped to destroy Lebanon. I think, by the way, one thing I might just point out quickly, because it's necessary to sometimes point to successes where they've occurred and not been lingered over enough during the sort of, whatever we will call the post October 7th war, it is striking that because Hamas went off when they did and Hezbollah joined in the day after, it meant that the capabilities of Hezbollah have been massively diminished, not finished, but massively diminished. And that, as I understand it was always the knife to the throat of Israel from Iran. If Iran got to the brink of nuclear weapons and the Israelis struck, the Iranians knew that it meant that the Israelis would be aware that Hezbollah would unleash, you know,140,000 long and short range missiles and blanket bomb Israel. That's, that's been taken away for the time being. There's been an enormous degradation of Iranian power. My worry going back to what we were talking about with the so called peace deal that I don't think will hold in the region, my worry in both Gaza with Hamas and with Lebanon with Hezbollah is something I said from the beginning of this conflict, which is don't ever put out 90% of a fire. Put out the whole thing. My fear is that at the moment, in both of those theaters of conflict, enough of the fire has been left unput out that it has the opportunity to kindle again another day. And I think it should be a name of the international community, not just Israel, not just America, to make sure that that doesn't happen there. There is, there are some good signs in Lebanon, the Lebanese government, members of Lebanese parliament of multiple denominations, much more publicly saying that Hezbollah is the cause of their problems. As ever with Lebanese, you wish them luck. Yeah.
- [60:53]
A
All right, so that's the end of our time for now. But on that gloomy note, Douglas Murray, a reason for optimism is that we're going to get to hear a lot more from you at the Free Press. And needless to say, all the issues we're talking about now, sadly, they're not going away anytime soon and your voice will be needed on them. So thank you so much, Douglas.
- [61:15]
B
It's a great pleasure to be with you again. Thank you.
- [61:22]
A
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