#057 - Dr Lawrence Newport - The Collapse of Law and Order

Summary

The Peter McCormack Show – Episode #057

Guest: Dr. Lawrence Newport

Episode Title: The Collapse of Law and Order

Date: March 11, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this engaging episode, Peter McCormack (using his “Con” persona here) sits down with Dr. Lawrence Newport—formerly an academic and now a prominent activist—for a candid discussion on the breakdown of law and order in Britain. The conversation diagnoses the rise in petty and organized crime, the systemic failings of policing and criminal justice, and the deeper symptoms of national decline. Dr. Newport explains how politics, bureaucracy, and a lack of backbone have contributed to Britain’s social and economic woes, and describes his movement, “Looking for Growth,” aimed at reigniting prosperity through policy and activism.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Symptoms of National Decline

• Economic and Social Signals: Dr. Newport opens with a dire summary: productivity has collapsed, making life unaffordable. Britain's decline is a result of conscious policy choices and unwillingness to address foundational issues.
• Anecdotes Illustrating Decay: Rampant bike and phone theft, even outside Scotland Yard, are symptomatic of broader government disengagement from basic services and law enforcement.
• Diminished Public Safety: Shoplifting is at an all-time high; retail stores are forced to lock up essentials like meat and chocolate. Police rarely investigate petty crimes, discouraging the public from reporting incidents.
• Quote:
  “We've chosen decline and we think we should do something different.” – Dr. Lawrence Newport [00:00, 66:47]

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2. Law Enforcement and Judicial Failures

• Police Apathy and Red Tape:
  • Example: Newport's own staged bike theft outside Scotland Yard revealed that even with GPS trackers and CCTV, police closed the case immediately.
  • New software procurement and bureaucracy reduce arrest figures and officer efficiency.
  • Quote:
    “They didn’t look at CCTV. They didn’t look at the GPS. They did absolutely nothing.” – Dr. Newport [05:19]
• Judicial Laxity & Prison Overcrowding:
  • Chronic underinvestment in prison infrastructure means habitual offenders (hundreds of crimes each) still get community sentences.
  • Penalties are lighter due to lack of capacity and an ideological push against incarceration.
  • Quote:
    “If we had a 10 strikes and you’re out law... we would radically change justice in this country.” – Dr. Newport [17:37]
    “You have a problem that you’ve not got any prison space. At the same time, there has been an ideological movement against giving people longer sentences.” – Dr. Newport [16:23]
• Two-Tier Justice System:
  • Government guidelines now explicitly encourage leniency based on ethnic, cultural, and faith minority status.
  • Quote: “This is an inversion of the rule of law. We... believe in equal justice.” – Peter McCormack [29:09–29:37]
  • “Yeah, I mean it’s just plain discrimination.” – Dr. Newport [31:05]

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3. Organized and Petty Crime: Causes and Effects

• Organized Gangs and Internationalization:
  • Phone and bike thefts are often conducted by organized international crime networks.
  • Stolen phones traced from London to international destinations within days.
• Shoplifting and Open Drug Use:
  • Certain UK towns feel abandoned to crime, with businesses networking by radio to warn of thieves, but powerless to act.
  • Shop staff are reluctant to intervene for fear of violence.

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4. Broader Signs of Decline and Political Stagnation

• Declining Infrastructure and Services
  • For the past 20 years, both major parties (Labour & Conservative) have failed to improve health, rail, housing, or economic productivity.
  • Energy prices, housing shortages, population pressures, and near-blackouts all signal failure.
  • Quote:
    “We’ve completely squandered our inheritance.” – Dr. Newport [39:10]
• Managed vs. Accepted Decline
  • Policies avoid radical change, preferring to slowly manage, rather than reverse, national decline.
  • Quote:
    “It’s not managed decline, it’s accepted decline.” – Peter McCormack [42:37]

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5. Cultural and Institutional Weakness

• Bureaucracy and Lack of Accountability
  • Civil service culture and government procurement are corrupt, inefficient, and rarely held to measurable outcomes.
  • Staff are rarely fired for poor performance, and private sector principles like “metrics and accountability” are absent.
• Quote:
  “If it was a private company, you would say it is insolvent.” – Peter McCormack [49:27]

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6. The ‘Looking for Growth’ Movement

• Aims and Genesis
  • Born of frustration, Newport and colleagues started the movement to demand real, bold pro-growth policies and infrastructure reforms.
  • Policy proposals include bypassing planning laws for crucial infrastructure and incentivizing local acceptance of projects via direct payments.
  • Bill Campaign: Sent their drafted “growth bill” directly to MPs, receiving both interest and passive-aggressive pushback from the political class.
• Building a Movement
  • High turnout at events (“people are optimistic it can get better”). Plan for monthly policy summits, new staff, and regional chapters.
  • Quote:
    “We are running out of time as a country...” – Dr. Newport [95:20]
    “If the country gets better, my life gets better, my family’s lives get better, everyone’s lives get better.” – Dr. Newport [68:01]

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7. The Rot inside Academia

• Ideological Conformity and Declining Academic Standards
  • Academic freedom is stifled by leftist bias; dissenting views are discouraged or punished.
  • Quote:
    “It is unfortunately the reality that there are entire viewpoints which are actively disliked, discouraged....” – Dr. Newport [82:36]
  • Staff petitioned to exclude controversial speakers—Dr. Newport’s pushback drew only silent, private support from colleagues.
  • Quote:
    “As a whole you end up in this weird, weird zone where people don’t want to say what they think.” – Dr. Newport [89:33]

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8. Optimism, Urgency, and What’s Next

• Brain Drain and Youth Disillusionment
  • High taxes and a stifling economy are driving talent abroad—a genuine “brain drain.”
  • Students and young entrepreneurs feel unvalued and blocked at every turn.
  • Quote: “I’m 25 years old and all I’ve ever known is decline. Things just have to be better.” – shared at LFG event [79:13]
• Summits and Actions
  • Looking for Growth is hosting policy events with the aim to revamp UK policy, including specific biotech policies.
  • “The idea is to build this movement and if people care and... want to see Britain build again... join us.” – Dr. Newport [78:13]
• Closing Call: The hosts agree Britain is at an inflection point; only radical courage and real reform can reverse the cycle of decline.

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• On State Decline:
  “We’ve chosen decline and we think we should do something different.”
  — Dr. Lawrence Newport [00:00, 66:47]

• On Police Inaction:
  “They didn’t look at CCTV. They didn’t look at the GPS. They did absolutely nothing.”
  — Dr. Lawrence Newport [05:19]

• On Two-Tier Justice:
  “This is an inversion of the rule of law...”
  — Peter McCormack [29:09]

• On Prison Policy:
  “If we had a 10 strikes and you’re out law... we would radically change justice in this country.”
  — Dr. Newport [17:37]

• On Institutional Stagnation:
  “We’ve completely squandered our inheritance.”
  — Dr. Newport [39:10]

• On Systemic Incompetence:
  “If it was a private company, you would say it is insolvent.”
  — Peter McCormack [49:27]

• On Why Activism:
  “If the country gets better, my life gets better, my family’s lives get better, everyone’s get better.”
  — Dr. Lawrence Newport [68:01]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:00 — Dr. Newport on productivity, national decline, and the failure to address root causes.
• 03:15 — Viral “stolen bike outside Scotland Yard” experiment and police indifference.
• 07:03 — Reactions from police and public to viral video, and discussion of systemic apathy.
• 15:10 — Shocking shoplifter case: 217 offenses, no prison time.
• 16:23 — Prison overcrowding, ideological aversion to imprisonment.
• 21:44 — MOJ stats: 10% of offenders responsible for 50% of crime.
• 29:09 — Discussion of sentencing guidelines favoring minority groups.
• 39:10 — Reflections on squandered British infrastructure and lost capability.
• 50:20 — The “Looking for Growth” movement: origin, bill, and aims.
• 66:47 — The need to rebuild productive capacity to escape misery.
• 68:01 — Brain drain and the need for renewal.
• 82:36 — Academic culture’s leftist bias and suppression of dissent.
• 95:20 — Time running out for political bravery and real reform.

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Conclusion

This episode is a wide-ranging, incisive critique of modern Britain’s state collapse, mapped by Dr. Lawrence Newport’s personal and professional journey from academia to activism. The conversation blends personal stories, data, and strong policy analysis, ultimately offering a blueprint for both individual and collective action. The “Looking for Growth” movement is positioned as a critical counterforce to political cowardice—rooted in the belief that, with courage and accountability, Britain can escape its downward spiral.

“We are running out of time as a country very, very quickly... We need brave, competent people who are ready to actually tackle this and tackle it fast.”
— Dr. Lawrence Newport [95:20]

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Transcript

[Lawrence Newton]

The problem is without being able to actually build stuff, make stuff, have a productive economy, things become unaffordable. And that's really, really tragic and is one of the reasons why we should be putting all our efforts into being productive. You know, we should be putting all of government effort as much as possible to growing the economy so we don't have to live with a bunch of misery. Because the poorer you get as a country, the worse life gets for everyone. And you can't forever pretend that doesn't exist by just endlessly growing, you know, costs, recouping it by tax, it eventually just starts to kill off your economy, which is, of course, what's happened to us. And eventually you just have to start cutting things all over the place. Prisons full, no spaces, burgeoning population, no new housing, blackouts on the horizon. This is really grim and is the result of choice. Like, we've chosen decline and we think we should do something different.

[Con]

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[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah.

[Con]

Kind of. Thunder McCormack. Yeah, his first fight. He's been training so hard.

[Lawrence Newton]

Wow. Really?

[Con]

Yeah. Relentless. Training every day, keeping to it, eating well, sleeping well.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah, I. My big nightmare for my son is that one day he'll want to do something like that. I try to work out how do.

[Con]

I stop that, you know what? Yeah, but then it depends who they are and how it shapes them.

[Lawrence Newton]

Exactly.

[Con]

I think a lot of kids could do with boxing.

[Lawrence Newton]

I actually think. Yes, I think, I think, I think he might even be one. He's very energetic and so we'll see, I guess.

[Con]

Is he young?

[Lawrence Newton]

He's like 18 months at the moment, but he's already climbing up stuff and trying to jump off of it. Like he's learned the word jump and he'll try to climb on top of sofas and he goes, jump, jump. To try to jump to the next sofa. So he's like, yeah.

[Con]

You've got like two. Two to three years of trying to kill himself. That's what they do. They spend. They literally, for two to three years, try and kill themselves. Bit their fingers and stuff. Jump off. Shit.

[Lawrence Newton]

Terrifying.

[Con]

It gets easier from about four.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah.

[Con]

Because you can. It's not only that they understand words, you understand sentences and they can reason and they have logic. From about four. So it gets a bit easier. But yeah, good. Good luck with. Is that your only one?

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Con]

Good luck with that, man. It's good. It goes quick.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's fast, right? It is. It is crazy, actually. Like six months ago he couldn't crawl and now he's on his bike and he's ramming into doors and stuff and yelling, crash, crash.

[Con]

Is he locking that bike up? Well.

[Lawrence Newton]

It'S not outside Scotland Yard. That's.

[Con]

That was funny because I'd heard this story a while back.

[Lawrence Newton]

Oh, yeah? Yeah.

[Con]

And then obviously your fella George got in touch and. Yeah. Mentioned coming on the show and I. And I. You kept popping up on my Twitter and I kept seeing things about you and. And then I read about this. Looking for growth, which hits right. On things I'm interested in right now. And then I realized you were the guy who had his. You locked your. Am I right? So you locked your bike ups up outside Scotland Yard? Yeah, it got nicked.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah.

[Con]

Outside Scotland Yard.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yes. It's stolen. So we looked it up. We. So actually we told the bike store we were going to do this thing and they gave us a great discount because they were like, this needs to be known, this is happening all over the place, etc. So we get a hold of this. This bike, they do it up really nicely for us as well, because as bike shop owners, like, we see this all the time, customers coming in complaining and of course, people are buying cheaper and cheaper bikes as a result and all this kind of stuff. So we get this quite nice bike, we chain it up outside Scotland yard under about 15 different security cameras. You know, I mean, Scotland Yard is right next to Parliament. It is in full view of the police themselves, physically and digitally. They have cameras everywhere. We put a GPS tracker in the handle and we put one under the seat. The idea being that if they found it in the handle, they'd think they were very smart and. Oh, but. But they've got another tracker underneath. They didn't find either but hold on.

[Con]

Is GPS tracking the thing on bikes.

[Lawrence Newton]

Now, you can buy. So we just used airtags and put them in them. But you can buy GPS trackers specifically for bikes that go in the handle and stuff like this. We just did, like, a cheaper version, you know, with some duct tape and stuff. It didn't take very long. It was stolen. I reported stolen the next day. So they actually. They had to clip through a chain outside Scotland Yard to take this thing.

[Con]

It's bold, man.

[Lawrence Newton]

I mean, it's like. I mean. But the worst thing was, right, I did this thinking, yeah, it'll get stolen really quick. And it did. From directly outside the Met. Taken. We report it stolen. Tell them. Tell them the location of the bike when it's traveling. Tell them where it's ending up in the evenings.

[Con]

Here we go.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yes, this is it chained up. And then we actually have it. So we have the GPS trackers. I tell them about the cctv. Nothing happens. They say, yes, we review it. The next morning, I get a text saying we're closing the case. They didn't look at cctv. They didn't look at the gps. They did absolutely nothing.

[Con]

Well, they don't give a shit about petty crime anymore. Yeah, there's a certain level of crime that they just don't care about. It's weird. I feel like we are. We get to watch our future. We get to look at America and see our future. Because I. It's funny. Yesterday I was chatting to one of my friends who's just about to open an office in San Francisco, and I was like, what was it like now? Because I was going there for 25 years and watched it just get worse and worse. And the last time I went, just after Covid, I mean, it was. Have you ever been.

[Lawrence Newton]

No, I haven't.

[Con]

It's a dis. You can't. When you think so, you think of San Francisco, big, amazing American city, and you hear of the homelessness. But until you see it, you cannot believe it. It would be like coming out of here. And I said, I don't know. Leave our studio here and walk to where would be. Walk to Leicester Square, okay? And all you see are people injecting drugs, shitting on the street, shouting at people. It's everywhere. It's everywhere in San Francisco. And we went to dinner and we'd rented this car, and we parked outside the restaurant in a nice neighborhood, came out smashed in. It is. It's. It's a full dystopian hell. And they've seen there, like, in la, like in Portland, that if you don't get a grip on petty crime, you destroy a city. And I think we're seeing the future now here, because they don't care.

[Lawrence Newton]

No. And I think what's really frustrating is you kind of have a dual effect, or a dual response, rather to the video. You know, the video went really viral and there was a kind of a jaw response from police. Some were talking about how frustrating the system is that they're working in and how they wish they could do a lot more. And there are like, a lot of things in their way, a lot of blockages, a lot of problems for good officers who want to do good work. Then there was a bunch of other accounts which basically strongly implied petty crime, doesn't matter. As an officer, I'm not going to focus on it. And they thought this was a rejection. They thought that, oh, they were. They were showing me I'm doing much more important things. But the entire point of the video was to show they just aren't looking into this stuff anymore. They don't care about it. They're not putting the effort in to check cctv, which surprised even officers that I know were surprised that they didn't check CCTV directly outside their own headquarters when a bike has been stolen. Directly outside. And then, of course, they change. When I gave the story to the Telegraph, the Telegraph contacts are met. A few hours later, I get contacted by them saying, we're going, actually, we are going to look at the CCTV footage. Which then when the story came out the next day, by the way, they never looked into the footage, they never followed up.

[Con]

It makes me wonder what's going on, because I know when I was a kid, I don't know how old you are, but I'm mid to late 40s. Police used to deal with this. You used to see police. First of all, you see police on the street. Gotta sound like an old man in my day, but you did. You used to see police on the street. If your bike got nicked, you'd report it, the police would come and deal with it. And I can't figure out, have they just got too much other stuff to deal with, you know, violent crime, sexual assaults, murders, knife crime, drugs, or have they got more red tape than they used to have so they just don't have enough time to do police work, or are there less police because of the budgets? I suspect it's a mixture of all of it. But have you looked into it?

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah. So there are loads of. Loads of red tape issues. Which do swallow up insane amounts of time. They have problems with some of the new software. Systems that have come in have been really shoddily built. What seems to be, and we can see it in arrest figures, that essentially when they've changed software to, like some. Which at least some officers say is much, much worse, you actually see arrests fall by around about a third because it's so much more difficult to just log people in.

[Con]

Why does. Why don't any systems built by the government or local councils or hospitals work? You. You see, there's one. Was it Birmingham council? I saw there was like a system they had to build. It was going to be, I know, 10 million and then it was 90 million or something.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yes, yes.

[Con]

I assume. I just assume corruption.

[Lawrence Newton]

I think. I think it's actually a really, really interesting question. This is something which I'm hoping to look into in the next kind of year or so. What is actually going on with the procurement? But it's actually going along with some of these massive contracts. Where are they going? The money is like. The money is absurd. The way things balloon. And then they don't even seem to work very well. The fact that, I mean, there's also a problem as well in policing, of course, that every new. If there is any kind of tragedy or difficulty, it does require changing the police. But that change has often just resulted in yet more forms, yet more stuff they have to go through, yet more stuff they have.

[Con]

What kind of stuff has done that?

[Lawrence Newton]

So, I mean, it's. There's a largely. It's kind of a politicization of certain aspects. So things like one officer told me about. There is. If someone's getting away on a bicycle and you're. You're in pursuit of them, like in your car, and they take their helmet off, you're. It's best for you to simply stop and stop pursuit.

[Con]

Do they know that? And therefore they're taking their helmets off. Fuck them. Just knock them over.

[Lawrence Newton]

But because of cases where people have come off their bikes and injured and then the police get the blowback, you end up in a position where they just don't want to take the political risk. It's better, in their view, for this one guy to get away with a bunch of phones than it is for them to have to spend the next huge amount of period of time in the media spotlight and with investigations and for individual officers. Why do you want to risk that?

[Con]

True.

[Lawrence Newton]

You know, the incentives are all really quite messed up. So. And of course, then, yes, criminals know it and then play It. Yeah. This one officer told me he's been in traces where they've taken their helmet off, pointed at the helmet, and then they're laughing.

[Con]

Us. Yeah, they are laughing at us. I mean, you see it now. So all the time on Twitter, you'll see these videos. Someone going into Gregg's getting a sandwich, couple of drinks, are walking out, going into a Tesco. I mean, going into a Tesco's. Now there's one near us. It's depressing. They've got the big screens up.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah.

[Con]

I mean, for me, the signs were bad. When you started to see the security tech and. And firstly, it was like bottles of champagne and vodka.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yes.

[Con]

And then it was bottles of wine and then it was like packs of razors. I don't know, 20 quids worth.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah.

[Con]

And then when you started to see on food, on, like, meat. You're like, chocolate. Oh, yes. I was like, oh, this is depressing. Like, anything now can be stolen.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah.

[Con]

And you go into these Tesco's and I don't know, it's like, again, it's kind of disturbing. It reminds me of. Have you ever watched the Wire?

[Lawrence Newton]

No, I haven't, but it's on my to watch list.

[Con]

Well, you have to watch it. It's the greatest series ever. Get through season one. Because it's slow, but it's.

[Lawrence Newton]

I've heard that too. Yeah.

[Con]

But there you're in the proper Baltimore ghetto and people are going into stores and you see, you know, you see, it's all, you know, it's all bulletproof glass because they have guns in Baltimore and they want to buy something and there's a little kind of shelf to.

[Lawrence Newton]

Push and there's awful cabinets and.

[Con]

But we've got that now in small town. We've got them. Bedford, where I live, small towns, you have this in standard local, Sainsbury's and Tesco's. And I'm just like, this is depressing.

[Lawrence Newton]

It's really, really sad. And. And it's actually one of the signals. So the reason I started the Crush Crime campaign was phone theft and bike theft. So many of my friends have been victims of it. And then going to local shops and just seeing like, well, this has changed a lot in the last two years. And the figures bear it out. Shoplifting is actually the highest on record. We've never had rates like this. And of course, most of it goes completely unreported. Like, barely anyone ever reports actual shoplifting because it's so numerous and staff are completely. They just completely expect the police to not do anything about it. And of course, unfortunately, that is often the case.

[Con]

Well, they don't exactly. We have it where I live. We have on our high Street, There's. There's. At the top of the high street in Bedford, there's a kind of these little grass plains. We've got a bunch of alcoholics. And then down on the high street, you've got. What'd you say, Connie? Drive down, you'd expect to see three or four crackheads usually sat outside Tesco.

[Lawrence Newton]

Geez.

[Con]

One guy was doing something in his coat the other day. I don't know what he's doing, like burning a rock of crack or something. There's also the Corn Exchange where we have. There's a set of toilets there. We ran an event there last year and I was parked outside and I noticed within two minutes of being. I was like, what's that? I noticed people going in there. I realized they were drug dealing in there. And so all this is happening and there's no police presence. You might get some of those community support officer people who look completely unscary. And I realized they'd kind of given up on the town center. The town center itself is also, though, declining. And so I went around some people I know, in some shots there, they've got a radio network between the shops saying, so and so's this person. They're wearing this. They're. They're on a. I don't know, a shoplifting crawl or whatever it is. They know who the person is and they kind of radio between. But then I started to think, well, what do you do if someone comes into your shop and, you know, do you. Do you stand in front of them? Do you stop them? You putting yourself at risk.

[Lawrence Newton]

Exactly, exactly.

[Con]

It's a fucking fucked up situation.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah. I mean, you know, and the. The worst case of it is as well is that even if these people are caught, the sentences they get are pathetic, if at all.

[Con]

I saw you tweet about it this morning.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yes.

[Con]

Con, do you want to grab up Dr. Lawrence Newton? Does everyone call you Dr. Lawrence? Is Lawrence all right?

[Lawrence Newton]

Lawrence is fine. Yeah.

[Con]

Yeah. So you picked out. Go down a bit further. It's the. There's a particular woman. Wasn't there like 207 offenses or something?

[Lawrence Newton]

Oh, yes, I think this was yesterday. Oh, I tweet a lot. This is very sad.

[Con]

Here you go. Here she is.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yes.

[Con]

So 217 previous offenses over 46 years. 169 previous thefts. Other offenses included fraud. Guilty of stealing hundreds of Pounds in clothing, sentence, community order, no prison time. What is the community order? What does that mean?

[Lawrence Newton]

So it's often things that they have to do in the community, or do they do it like, I mean, they should and they're meant to be tracked and all kinds of things. But I actually haven't had a look into how many don't turn up. I'm sure there's some failure rate. And then if they ever get followed up on, it's unclear to me why, why don't.

[Con]

Why aren't they imprisoning people like this?

[Lawrence Newton]

So I think there is. So there's multiple factors here and all of them are very depressing. One is, is that for about 20 years, really, the previous multiple governments have completely failed to build prison space. We've massively increased our population and have built barely any prisons. So between, I think 1997 and about 2010, there was 23,000 prison spaces added. Since 2010, there's been 500 and we've added around 6,5ish, I think, million people to the country.

[Con]

Was that about 10% growth?

[Lawrence Newton]

Ish. It's. Yeah, something like this, yes.

[Con]

So logic would say 10% more prison places.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yes, exactly. And perhaps more, depending on who's coming in. Yeah. Which would be something in the region of like 8,000 and they did 500. So you have a problem that you've not got any prison space. At the same time, there has been an ideological movement against giving people longer sentences. And so there has been this belief in shorter sentences or no prison at all. And so you end up in this bizarre situation which kind of supports each other, which is that, well, there's no prison space, so we might as well do what I want to do anyway, which is not give them any prison time.

[Con]

Why don't they want to give. What's the logic behind no prison time?

[Lawrence Newton]

So there is. There's a whole bunch of beliefs about things like if you send people to prison, they get worse. There are beliefs that really it's better to care for people, look after people in the community, keep them in their communities for as long as possible until very last resorts. But the bizarre aspect is, of course, when you're talking about 200 or more offenses, you would think that that would be a last resort. When I first started looking into this, and someone said to me, if we had a 10 strikes and you're outlaw, like 10 strikes and you get five years, we would radically change justice in this country. We would see much lower crime rates. And I thought, 10 strikes, that is a I basically laughed. I was like, well, surely you mean three strikes.

[Con]

Yeah, three strikes.

[Lawrence Newton]

No, it's so bad that 10 strikes or more would make a massive difference.

[Con]

Who's committing the crime? My. Purely based on what I see on Twitter, I see, I think three types. You see youngsters.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah.

[Con]

You see the kind of homeless, crackhead, alcoholics. And then you see what feels like almost organized foreign gangs.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah, I think that's. I think that's right. I think a lot of phone theft, a lot of bike theft is certainly organized crime, some of which are from abroad and they use, you know, networks here to then send all over the. Actually, the really sad thing about phone theft and bike theft in this country, well, particularly phone theft is it is international. My sister in law's phone was stolen actually only a week after the bike was stolen. But this was not set up. This was. This was. This was not a sting, this was a snatch. Even worse, she was looking after her two toddlers, turned her back and somebody grabbed it from her pocket and ran on like Westminster Bridge. Absolutely awful. You know, like a young mother looking after her children and they just see Target, grab it. Within a few hours it's in a phone shop. Within a few hours after that, it's in an address in Haringey in London. And then a few hours after, well, a few days after that, it's in China. You know, there's an international system there which is actually very sophisticated, that exists.

[Con]

With the car thefts. Right. They end up going on containers and a lot of end up in Africa, right?

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah, loads of. This is one of the things that also. I was actually stunned. So once I'd started the campaign, people got in contact with me, multiple people. They're saying my car was stolen. Police didn't check cctv, they just gave me a crime number and left. And some of these are just. It's unclear exactly what's happening, but I think, yeah, they're being taken abroad, they're being stripped down, it's all kinds of stuff. But I had someone call me who lost. Well, it was stolen. Their 2022 red Porsche stolen outside the house. Police did nothing about it.

[Con]

I bought a new car about a year ago. A guy, on the day I bought it, drove into the back of me. It wasn't bad at all. I think it was like one of those 5 mile per hour ones. But my exhaust went into his light. I got out the car, took a photo, took a photo of his light, took a photo of my exhaust with the bit of light in it.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah.

[Con]

Asked him for his details. He blamed me. He said I broke. I tried to explain to him the rules that it's your original fault. He drove off. Okay, but I've got the photo of his car with the light broken. I've got the piece of light from his car because it's in my exhaust. So I contacted the police, said, look, this has happened. He's driven off. I've got the light from his car. Here's a photo. I've got the measurements of the height of my exhaust and the height of his light. I can prove it all. But I've got the piece of light. And they said, we don't have enough evidence to pursue this. And I'm thinking, I think that's if I've got the light and you go to his house, knock on his door, that piece of light fits in it. Yeah, but they didn't want to do anything. And again, my assumption was we're too busy. We just. It's like when you prioritize your day, you. You've probably got a to do list. This is just stuff you don't get on with. I think petty crime, they just, they just don't care anymore.

[Lawrence Newton]

Well, that's. This is. This is it. And there is, it is definitely the case that it is not being prioritized. And we can see this because after about two and a half months of our campaign, so about three, four weeks ago now, the Met did an operation where they actually went after phone thieves and they arrested 230 people in a single week.

[Con]

What do they do with those 230 people?

[Lawrence Newton]

Well, I mean, we'll see. We, we will see what actually happens. I will see if they'll actually, like, get actual sentences. Because partly the problem is here, of course as well, is that most of this crime. So this is another kind of radicalizing point for me when first looking into this. MOJ figures, Ministry of Justice over the last 20 years shows that 1 in 10 offenders are responsible for about 50% of all crimes.

[Con]

Wow.

[Lawrence Newton]

So these are people with 15 or more offenses each. And many have, like, as you've seen, hundreds they are committing. They're responsible about half of all of our crime. If we were to arrest, imprison these people for longer lengths of time for like you've seen in the case of 200 offenses, we just keep letting these people out. They keep committing the same crimes over and over and over. This small population, arresting and imprisoning them can drop crime by 50%. In some cases, up to 90%.

[Con]

How many prison places do we need to build for. Do you know what's the number of people we're talking about here?

[Lawrence Newton]

So it kind of depends as well, exactly on the crime. But I think if we would have between 100,000 and 120 or 150,000 places, at the moment we have about 83,000.

[Con]

So we need to double.

[Lawrence Newton]

If we doubled it, we will be in a very, very, very different position. Yes.

[Con]

So I wonder what the math of the cost of building the prisons.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yes.

[Con]

Staffing the prisons.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah.

[Con]

Versus the cost to society.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yes.

[Con]

It feels like. Feels like they may have done the math and accepted it was too big a problem to deal with.

[Lawrence Newton]

Definitely have not done the math on this, but there are some indications. But actually, right now we're putting together exactly something on this, on the cost, and there is obviously a point at which it doesn't makes sense, but the cost of crime is, like, pretty dramatic when we think about the cost. If we just take the economic cost as one side. So we have all the stuff in the shops, all this bulletproof glass, everything. We're all paying for it. You and I are paying for it every single day. The companies aren't actually paying for it. It's all on us. And all these security measures. There are some crazy ones. There is. I think it's like the Grocer's Gazette or something. It's like an industry thing that. There was an article recently talking about how some stores are bringing in, you know, like robotic CCTV guards, you know, to like, go around the floors or whatever, just to check what's happening at night. And they have smoke machines and all this kind of stuff to like, fill the place with smoke as someone breaks in. And this. This is expensive and crazy. And of course, phones and bikes and all of this. There's also the. The wider social costs, which are absolutely dramatic. Like, you say, going into a shop and seeing this is awful. Having to hold your phone to your chest if you're in public. To have our MPs told, which they were in December, don't have your phone outside Parliament because it will get stolen. This is completely crazy.

[Con]

What's this? So estimate 4.45 spent on every prison place currently.

[Lawrence Newton]

So you would be doubling that. Yeah, yeah.

[Con]

There's also 4 or 5 billion per year. So it's 51 grand a year, 52 grand a year to keep somebody in prison.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah. There is also a terrible cost at the start, which our prison places, I've been told, cost maybe hundreds of thousands per cell to build. This seems to Me completely crazy.

[Con]

Maybe we should build the cells like El Salvador. Have you seen those?

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah, they built that incredibly fast and huge. I think it's like. Is it like up to 40, 000 people or something in one place? Something like.

[Con]

Yeah, it looks pretty depressing. So, I mean, I've been. So I've been out there a few times. I went out there, made a documentary a couple of years after Bukele became president.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah.

[Con]

And went down, down to one of the red zones, well, traditional red zones, where. Which were run by the, the gangs. Ms. 13, is it? And yeah, I can't remember the name of the two gangs. But anyway, so I was interviewing a guy and it was. This is what makes me laugh. And this will make you laugh. He said there's just little changes that you've seen. He said before, I used to not be able to get my phone out in public because it'll be taken from me. He said I could walk down the street and make a phone call and nobody's taking my phone. Then I think what you're saying is like here we're saying the opposite. That's the trajectory we're headed down.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, we don't have to build prisons of 40,000, but we do have to keep up with population number at a baseline. The fact that, you know, multiple governments over the last 15 years didn't build any places, although they will say things like we did build places, but what they mean is they also close out the prisons. So yes, they built new ones, but they closed old ones. So there's, you know, your net about 500 places. This is a complete failure. It's just a complete failure, a complete dereliction of duty. Right now the prisons being built mean that we'll get another, I think 4,000, 5,000 places in the next two years. But because of population growth, again, we're not even remotely catching up. We're still in the same position. And this has led to the government saying a couple of very strange things. One is there's a statement made by their sentencing czar on that we can't build our way out of this problem. I mean, you can if you just build prison spaces. That is actually possible. But two, just, I think it was just last week, the interim sentencing report, which the government's kind of testing out, seeing how the reaction is, publicly blamed the problems, the criminal justice problems, on the fact that Britain has for too long been too tough on crime.

[Con]

Do you know, you say that and then I think of all those videos that get leaked from inside prisons where you see guys like hanging out with their mates, they're smoking weed, banging prison officers and you're like, are we tough? That doesn't look tough.

[Lawrence Newton]

Well, you know, if you steal, I mean, there's cases here of people stealing 300 times or actually, sorry, having three offenses, some of which are theft, some which might even be violence in their past, etc. And they are getting no prison time, two months prison time, which is a complete waste. And it's also another problem for police. You spend all this time chasing, catching, even if you put in all the effort and you do get these guys who sometimes are maybe stealing, you know, hundreds of phones, thousands of phones, whatever they get two months, six months, a year, suspended sentence. Why? Why did you do that?

[Con]

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[Lawrence Newton]

Yes, yes.

[Con]

Have you seen the guidelines look up Generic? I'm. I'm not surprised and shocked at the same time.

[Lawrence Newton]

Y. Yeah.

[Con]

That we are openly building A two. So people have been, you know, saying two tier care and saying we've got this two tier justice system, but they're openly now admitting to a two tier system. So it's that bit of the top con. Go to that one at the top, play that. So just. Yeah, take it to the start.

[Lawrence Newton]

The new sentencing guidelines that's been published alongside this statement, which will make a custodial sentence less likely for, and I quote, ethnic minorities, cultural minorities and faith minority communities. Why is the Justice Secretary enshrining this double standard, this two tier approach to sentencing. This is an inversion of the rule of law. We on this side of the house believe in equal.

[Con]

If you click on that tweet, I think he's actually put it in below it. Yeah, here we go. If you click on that conversation, right, here we go. A pre sentence report will normally be considered necessary if the offender belongs to one or more of the following cohorts at risk of first custodial sentence and or at risk of a custodial sentence of two years or less after taking in any reduction of guilty plea. A young adult, typically 18 to 25. And look, you can understand some of that. Female, you can understand some of that from an ethnic minority, cultural minority and or faith minority. That's obviously the one. We'll come back to that. Pregnant or postnatal again, you can understand that sole or primary care for a dependent relative. So look, I can understand a scenario where a mum has shoplifted and she's raising her kids and you think, okay, maybe we can have some lenience here. And I can understand a scenario where someone's pregnant. You're like, well, we don't want to put a pregnant woman in prison. Can we do something else? I understand for a young person, maybe an 18 year old, is that going to make their life worse? Are they going to come out worse? Can we rehabilitate them before prison? Again, I understand that first sentence, I understand that. But to have a lenience based on the fact that you're from an ethnic, cultural or faith minority. This is the one I don't understand because this to me is discrimination.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah, I mean it's just plain discrimination. I mean there's several things here which is just a little bit bizarre. Like there is of course, I mean, the young adult one, it, it does make sense to get early interventions in.

[Con]

Yep.

[Lawrence Newton]

One thing that we talked about across crime is, you know, when people commit that first offense, what you want, you don't always really want a prison sentence. What you want, you know, depending on the crime, obviously, but what you want is quick feedback from the system. They're arrested quickly, they go to court quickly and there's a quick, you know, some kind of negative response so that they understand that's been shown actually to stop people before they get into the kind of career criminal, 15 offenses kind of zone. You do have an issue though with of course, young adults, particularly young men 18 to 25, is when they are at their most violent. So, you know, most violence offenses are committed by people around about that, that age group. So there is a Little bit of oddity there. But yeah, the real one that really, really stands out here is, I mean it is discrimination from an ethnic minority, cultural minority and or faith minority community. But this isn't actually out of step what they've been doing for the past like 15 years. You can see it in sentencing guidance across the board. You can see it in rape cases where a mitigating factor to be considered is if someone is for instance, poor or has had bad actors, bad influence from others on them, um, if they are from minority groups that have been discriminated against and this is for like rape cases, that these are mitigating factors to be considered by the judge. This is like completely patronizing and completely unjust. You know, the fact that someone is poor or rich shouldn't affect whether or not they're going to rape somebody.

[Con]

This is, I think we all know rape is wrong.

[Lawrence Newton]

Exactly. Yes. It's, it's, it's. And it's not the result of, you know, bad influence from friends. This is, but this is a mitigating factor under rape. This has been the sentencing guidance, the sentencing council's approach for quite a long time.

[Con]

Who writes this?

[Lawrence Newton]

So there's a committee set up. Basically, it's basically a quango.

[Con]

It's deep state left wing bollocks.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah. And, and you know, I, it's, it's been this case for 15 years and there has been no, I mean the previous governments didn't do anything about it, you know, and it's just continued. And the fact that they feel, not only that they feel confident enough to put this out, but actually they doubled down on it last night and sent out a defense saying about why this is a good thing.

[Con]

What, what radicalized you? What was the. Do you know the moment? Because you've become essentially you're an activist now.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Several, you know, realizing the government doesn't respond to data and good arguments or popular things they just care about.

[Con]

You.

[Lawrence Newton]

Know, individual individuals in government tend to think about. What are people around my dinner table talking about? What, what does it seem like the vibe is? Politics is mostly vibe. That was very depressing realizing that. And on crime in particular, it was just this sudden. So many people I would meet, oh yeah, my phone was Nick. Oh yeah, my bike was nicked. Oh, there's all these, these horrendous stuff in shops everywhere. What is happening? And then you look at the figures. They're all going in a wrong direction. No attention on it. And that to me just felt like, well, why does no one Seem to care. This is like very simple stuff. And when you find out that 50% of all of it is committed by a tiny fraction of offenders and we're not imprisoning these people, in fact, they're more likely to avoid prison now than they were in, like, 2007. What is going on? And there's no attention on it. And, you know, the academic response, the justice response, the response you can see from the sentencing guidance, there's things you now hear coming out from the government on their interim reports is that, no, no, no, Britain is a. We're obsessed with prison. We're obsessed with, you know, being too tough on crime. We need to be softer, more understanding of, you know, the offenders here.

[Con]

It doesn't work. It's not worked anywhere in the world. That's actually. It's not entirely true. There are exceptions. I looked into the Norwegian prison system and they've got some really interesting cases where they've built these really nice prisons. They're like hotels. And they treat the prisoners and the criminals, certain criminals, with empathy and they build an environment which conditions them for a real environment when they come out. And it's been successful.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yes.

[Con]

So that's not to say sometimes a different approach. Yeah, you know, won't work. But at the same time, it's slightly.

[Lawrence Newton]

Because the Norway example is a really good one, because they actually do. There is some complexity here as well, because I also thought that the best way would probably just to be take the Norwegian model. Partly the problem here is that their reoffending statistics are slightly skewed because they also imprison people for things we don't tend to imprison people for. That also don't have high reoffending. So they will imprison people for, like, driving offenses. Really? Yeah. So they don't. Which people don't tend to be offended on speeding. I don't know the exact breakdown, but yes, this is the like. So. And they don't tend to have reoffending rates as high, of course. So, yeah, you end up in a position where their numbers. So there is estimates on this where if you do, like, for, like comparisons between the us, uk, Norway, you basically end up with the same reoffending rate.

[Con]

They tricked us.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah. There is partially this. It is also the case, though, that there is nothing wrong to say that, you know, the first duty of government is to protect the public, imprison these people. If they are then being imprisoned, there's no reason why we can't then do proper rehabilitation programs. Have, as you say, Much better quality prisons. There is also saying though that that Norway was for their more kind of violent offenders. They have actually been told off, I think it was like 2017 by the human Rights Council because they essentially put a lot of people in solitary confinement for such lengths of time. So they also got quite a harsh side to their criminal justice as well that often isn't highlighted. But there is this. There is definitely room to take people off the streets. Number one, protect the public and then number two, rehabilitation programs make complete sense. We don't want them coming out and doing it all over again.

[Con]

Yeah.

[Lawrence Newton]

The idea is to try to break the cycle.

[Con]

But these are all part of all the different signals of everything in decline. Yeah, everything in decline. Which is why I'm interested how you. Are you full time activist now?

[Lawrence Newton]

I am now, yeah.

[Con]

You were teaching before?

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah, I was a university lecturer.

[Con]

What were you? What were you teaching?

[Lawrence Newton]

Law and so my doctorate was in legal history and I did law and.

[Con]

Yes, yeah, perfect.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah. Radicalizing. Radicalizing, yeah.

[Con]

And so I was a couple of times recently. It's been really interesting just making this show and yeah, friends of mine are on Facebook, see me. I put every episode out. And despite we try and have a broad mix of guests, we've tried very hard to have people from the left wing on as well. It's very hard to get. But we have had a lot more success against conservatives, reform people and more conservative minded or people who are just fucking pissed off with everything at the moment. People ask me about it, they're obviously a little bit concerned for what I've become. But I'll have a conversation with them and there's a really great question. I'll say to them, I'll say, well, look, we've had consecutive labor and we've gone Labor, Conservative, labor over the last 20 years. Tell me what's got better. Yeah, just name me something the government has done which has got better because I think we're paying more tax. We've had real wage decline, tax GDP is higher, we've got higher borrowing, a higher inflation, everything's costing more. It feels like there's more crime. There may be on certain things less crime, but it feels like there's more crime. Feels like there's more petty crime.

[Lawrence Newton]

It definitely is. Yeah.

[Con]

And to me all the signals of a decline, the decline of a. Yeah. Society, the lack of performance within government and it's a question that stumps people. They're like they often can't come up with anything because the NHS hasn't got better yeah. The railways haven't got better. The roads. The roads haven't got better.

[Lawrence Newton]

No.

[Con]

What else?

[Lawrence Newton]

We've completely squandered our inheritance. Like, that's just it. We've had this incredible. When you look at things like London Underground and we could build the first underground line in the world, it took 40 years for anyone else to follow us. In 10 years, we managed to build five other lines at about 1900. Five other underground lines. They all cost the taxpayer absolutely nothing. They were all directly funded by private enterprise because it made sense to invest in the country. You could do this. We could build things at incredible speed. We could build things incredibly impressive that no one else could do. We don't do that anymore. We've basically given up. We've. We throw barriers, blockages, everything we possibly can, we tax as high as possible. We've basically given up on any ambitious view of Britain and instead the political response, like you say, from Labour and the Tories for the past, like, 20 years has been, like, just shuffling at the edges, just moving things around the edges a little bit. And it's seen as brave to do even something a little bit outside of the edges, just like. But there's nothing that just tackles with the fact that we have shot ourselves in the foot repeatedly and we don't seem to want to believe that things can get better.

[Con]

Yeah. I mean, what have. What have we built? The Victoria line?

[Lawrence Newton]

The Elizabeth line.

[Con]

The Elizabeth Apologies.

[Lawrence Newton]

Which is actually.

[Con]

It is brilliant. And that took what, two decades?

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah, well, yeah, exactly.

[Con]

Great line.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah.

[Con]

So we built that. We built the O2 Center. Remember, the Millennium Dome?

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah.

[Con]

That was actually a complete disaster. I was talking about that to my son previously, trying to explain, because it's a great private dome concert, boxing venue. Brilliant now. But when it was built, it was an absolute disaster.

[Lawrence Newton]

Weird theme park or whatever that they had in it was.

[Con]

That's just weird. The private sector fixed it. Yeah, Wembley. But that's really kind of private sector. I mean, private sector's done well. Got a lot of good stadiums.

[Lawrence Newton]

Well. But we throw things in the way of that all the time as well. The amount of things that we could have accomplished, could have built, could have constructed and we do everything. I mean, you know, there's this crazy fact that, you know, to build a tunnel for a road, there's examples where the actual environmental application for it is longer than the road itself that we. It's cost us more in planning to.

[Con]

Well, you saw the bat tunnel, didn't you?

[Lawrence Newton]

Exactly, exactly. Another good ex, like £100 million on a bat tunnel for rare bats that aren't actually that rare.

[Con]

So we can build bat tunnels?

[Lawrence Newton]

Yes, yes. Attached to. Yes. Well, this is, this is exactly, exactly the problem. We have thrown up every blocker we possibly can. We have made things as difficult as possible and we've been able to do it because we've been rich. And we can say, well, you know, it's okay to take our time on this. It's okay. Now we're no longer in that position. We have, you know, energy bills that are some of the highest in the world. They're completely, utterly unsustainable. And we've chosen this because we, we thought. Well, I think in part the political belief, it's very much the same in prisons. You know, 2020, it was very clear it was going to happen with prisons. We were going to run out of prison space. It was going to be a crisis. The belief seemed to be, well, I don't really feel that that's really going to happen. You know, that can't really happen. And I think the same thing's happened with growth. Well, surely Britain will be okay, you know, like, why does it make sense?

[Con]

I try to get to the bottom of it logically.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah.

[Con]

So I even myself use that term, managed decline. But then I was like, well, if we say manage decline, someone has chosen the decline and choses to match us through. But, but I don't think people are choosing to. I think it's accepted decline.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah, I think that's true.

[Con]

I think managed decline implies someone wants the decline and they're creating the environment for. I think it's accepted to climb decline because then I'm willing to do the difficult things. Yeah, stop it.

[Lawrence Newton]

I think they're managing in, in a sense of, you know, keeping it. So it's not a dramatic fall off, it's a slow death by a thousand cuts, you know, and, and it's because they, you know, once you get to a certain point, I've heard from people, you know, that there has been talk, civil service, for instance, on loads of things like energy prices. Well, energy prices are very high. Well, maybe they should be that high. You know, it's, it's, it's. Maybe energy just is expensive, you know, all this kind of stuff. Like it's. If we have certain mindsets that get into us, and I think we have as a country and I certainly think we have particularly really in kind of Westminster that, well, this is a trajectory we're on, anything to change his path dramatically or radically is scary. And Uncertain. So instead we're going to just keep hoping that if we do the right things in our view, playing with the edges here, we should be able to get ourselves kind of out of this. It's not really looking for how do you change the country radically, dramatically to turn this around? Because we are on a trajectory where things will just get worse unless we are able to radically and dramatically get a hold of some of the levers of state and actually change things very, very quickly.

[Con]

Well, it's so obvious. Everybody I speak to who runs a business is telling me it's getting harder, it's getting more expensive. Margins are being hit. Wealthy people I know. Not even just wealthy people, actually. I mean, there's wealthy people I know, they're like, I'm getting the out of it.

[Lawrence Newton]

That's a big one.

[Con]

I'm going to Dubai.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah.

[Con]

I'm going to Portugal, you know, I'm going to Italy. I'm going to, I'm going to somewhere hot.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah.

[Con]

Where I'm given a golden visa and I'm not going to pay tax for 10 years and I'm going to come back 90 to 180 days. And it.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah.

[Con]

And you know, some people get upset and say, well, good, we're better off without them. No, we're not. No, stop being an idiot.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah.

[Con]

So there's that, but there's eve people now. I, I upper middle or middle class people, like, I'm just fucking done with this. I just want to go live somewhere else.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah. Startup founders.

[Con]

Yeah.

[Lawrence Newton]

You know, like a big, a big factor. So they're looking for growth movement that we've started, started a few months ago. One of the big groups of people who are signing up and joining are people in like 18 to 35 who are starting companies, are founding and a lot of them say, I really want to stay here, but I just feel like this place doesn't want me to stay here. Like everything is in your way. Everything is, is, is trying to stop you wanting to, to build. I mean, there are worse places to build companies as well. That's definitely true.

[Con]

Yep.

[Lawrence Newton]

But there are certainly many, many, many, many reasons. I mean, energy prices is just one of them. And it's constant in every business that you want to run. It's going to be absolutely huge for you. Be very, very difficult.

[Con]

It's a tax, I tell people now. Energy prices are a tax.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah. A massive one. Yes. Yes. And, and we are, there is very little sign that there is going to be a turnaround on that. At the same time of Course that we see industries exploding which are very. I mean, growth and energy. Energy prices are very closely tied. And one of the ways we can see this at the moment, AI exploding massively. How are we going to play a part of this when just in January, we almost had blackouts across the country? Because we had. I think it was one. We were one power station away from blackouts. And projections are in the next two, three years, we should start getting blackouts.

[Con]

It's like Venezuela. Yeah. It's fucking crazy.

[Lawrence Newton]

But this is the thing, right? It's the same thing as in 2020. If you talked about the prison crisis and said, well, we're going to run out of places, it'd be like, oh, I'm sure that won't happen. That can't happen. Not in Britain. Right. And the idea about blackouts happening in Britain cause we can't get energy around the country is like, well, come on, that's crazy. That's like not normal. It isn't normal, but it is a signal of decline. And we are going more and more in that direction. And one of those signals is the energy prices are through the roof. And that's telling us. That's an early sign saying to you, this is scarce now, this is difficult now.

[Con]

Yeah. Well, the levers of power and government, and they're real levers of power that can constrain business and turn business on. If you create an environment for people to want to invest, they will invest. You create environment for people to build business, they will. And if you do the opposite, they won't. It's very, very obvious. And I've come to the conclusion that we don't have very good people holding those levers. We just do not have. And I don't think they're good intellectually, but I also don't think they have a backbone. Because some of this stuff requires a backbone.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah, it does.

[Con]

You have to say tough things to people.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah.

[Con]

You know, we talked about, you've got a child now, you're gonna have to be really tough on that child sometimes and you're gonna do not make it.

[Lawrence Newton]

But you will.

[Con]

I'm telling you will.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah, you will.

[Con]

You'll be tough. You'll be. You'll be really tough on them. There will be times you're saying things to him that he cannot do, even though he will be upset with you, might cry, whatever, because you know it's the right thing as a parent.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah.

[Con]

When you run a company, it's the same you have to make. When you're going to make payroll on a Friday, you have to make tough decisions. Yeah, Yeah. I used to have a advertising agency here in Covent Garden and there was a time we had, we lost our biggest client. We had to let 30% of the staff go and we did it.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah.

[Con]

It just seems within government, they're always trying to squidge that square peg in a round hole. We can get it in somehow. We can borrow a bit more here or tax a bit more here, but. But they don't have the backbone to say no. Yeah, just say fucking no.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah. I mean, been at talks where people have talked about stuff like, you know, we have even the idea about firing civil servants for, you know, for just not being good enough is completely anathema. It's like, no, anathema. It's like, no, you don't do this. This isn't what we do. You don't need to fire people for being bad. You can all. And you end up with a system. Of course, it just like, attracts, like the best talent tends. Some do stay and really try to fight from the inside. Many of them leave because they just get frustrated and they're like, well, even if I try really hard, it doesn't make any difference because everyone's like, promoted up in one way or another. Or if you just want to stay in the same place and just like, not be very good for a long period of time, nothing's going to happen to you. You know, systems like that obviously decay. They just obviously decay.

[Con]

Designed to fail.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah, they are. And the fact that it's seen as completely outside of the realm of acceptability to even talk about. Well, hang on, should there be like, actual metrics here to measure things? The fact that that's seen as completely impossible, crazy to think about for the civil service, which employs, you know, tens of thousands of people, um, is a very, very good sign of. If I looked at a company that looked like that, I would say, well, obviously that company's going to be going in not a great direction. There's gonna be a lot of people there who are.

[Con]

It's insolvent. Just let's say what it is. It was a private company. If, if, if it was a private company, you would say it is insolvent.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Which. Yes, yes. And this is, and it takes political, you know, a lot of. Well, this, this is actually the exact same issue that I was saying earlier now. Like, they're thinking about, well, what will people around my dinner table say? Will they be really, if I do this thing? Like, how will they Think of me, what will they, what, what will their reactions be? How will I get through that? And then it's that kind of very human thing of everyone around me is saying the same stuff. So I don't really want to say actually guys, I think this is entirely wrong. We need to have a radical different approach because socially it's very difficult and as you say, requires a lot of like backbone, bravery, going out there and saying it and actually doing it. And this is why in part. So Looking for growth, the reason why set it up, co founded it.

[Con]

Yeah, just explain what looking for growth is.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah, yeah. So basically I was spinning up. So in, in the middle of doing research for cross crime stuff on crime policies, things I wanted to launch on and target. I read a bunch of rumors about what the budget was going to look like and I became very depressed and thought, well, new government in, they talk a lot about growth. This looks like something that was probably written just by the Treasury. This looks like the same kind of stuff again. And I just began to think, if I'm this frustrated, I bet there are many, many people this frustrated and things don't happen by default. If, you know, if you give these guys a chance, it looks like they're just going to go down the same pathway. So the best way of affecting change seems to be by sticking to what you believe and being coherent, constant, fact based, but also loud and also hold them to account repeatedly. Bring it up all the time, pin them on this stuff. This is what the environmentalist lobby is very good at. You know, they have a big organized system, hugely coordinated, so that whenever a new project is by, you know, somewhere in the country, there's a whole opposition. It's, it's all built, there's nothing on the other side. So the idea was to say, okay, me and my brother actually, who used to work in the treasury, and Joe Reeve, who ran Future House, he left school at 16 to do coding, then worked in Silicon Valley for a bit. We co founded Looking for Growth. We basically sat on our sofa and we were like, hey, we're frustrated, you're frustrated, we're going to fix this. And we just announced an event on December 11, so come along, we're going to do something. And then we had huge, huge signups. It was like 500 people in day one, you know, and then a thousand a week or two later signing up for this event which we had announced anything for. We had to get like a space and get larger and larger. Originally I was budgeting about 50 people. It ended up Being like we found a space for 400, we ended up with like 90% turnout. So we limited tickets. We had all this kind of stuff and it was so popular. I only released speakers speaker list five hours before because I was just like, we literally don't know if we're gonna fit everyone in the room. This was Dominic Cummings and Mark Warner, both of which were absolutely fantastic and hugely supportive. And at the same time, because I don't want this to be a think tank, I don't want it to be something that just does reports or just talks about stuff, we actually put together a bill that if government wanted to, they could pass literally tomorrow. Like it's fully written, fully ready.

[Con]

A growth bill.

[Lawrence Newton]

A growth bill, yes. So it allows it bypasses most of the planning law for nuclear power stations, overhead electricity cables, because we literally can't move power around the country and data centers. This would allow, if the government did pass it within a month or two, you could start building these projects. And it limits judicial reviews that stop projects all the time. Doesn't get rid of judicial review, but limits it a lot. Gives payments to people in local areas for joint construction money off their bills or money directly to them if they want it. And would enable government to literally, you know, the idea would be if kiss someone wanted to do it, he could pass this thing and next month take a photo of him next to the building site where you know, they're going to build a new nuclear power station.

[Con]

And who sense checked this whole thing.

[Lawrence Newton]

So I had a bunch of people who are policy experts in the area look over it all anonymously, of course. And it was actually written by a world leading lawyer in this area as well, also anonymously. And I had several other lawyers pitch in because also there are many. This is one of the other things about Looking for Growth is announcing this. The people who want to get involved are disproportionately extremely high agency, extremely interesting people with fantastic backgrounds who just want to see the country get better and don't know what else can do it. And so we're trying to build a movement of people who care about the country, want things to get better, want to pitch in to help us make it better and to force government, whatever that government may be, to actually do something that radically changes the country in a positive direction.

[Con]

Do you know if they read your bill?

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah. So also what we did, which is very funny, Joe came up with the idea literally a moment before I went on stage at the event. He said, let's give people the opportunity to Donate for us to print a physical copy of the bill and send it to MPs. We ended up with a thousand and we sent them to MPs and actually I've had multiple MPs reach out to me, tell me that they've got it in front of them, tell me that they're reading it. I believe actually today or so, a couple of them have even recorded videos saying that they've read it. They like various aspects. I did get one email, which is very funny, slightly passive aggressive one, that said, hope you're well. Just to let you know, we've received your bill 11 times in the post because some MPs got quite a few more than others, depending on how people donated, etc.

[Con]

But what's the reality of something like this? Just say, yeah, he doesn't even get to. Keir Starmer gets to one of his backbenchers or even front benches and they look at it and think it's interesting. Put it in front of him. What would be a reason for him not to look at that bill? Seriously? And go, yes, let's do it. It's a bit like, you should watch my interview with Shankar Singham, honestly. He said, I can give you 5% growth like that. He said, what was it? 0.1% growth. I think it's your pin tweet.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yes. Yeah.

[Con]

It's pathetic. That's not really even great.

[Lawrence Newton]

And that's not even per capita. It's actually declined per capita.

[Con]

Yeah. Our per capita growth is in decline, which is the real.

[Lawrence Newton]

Which is what you feel.

[Con]

Yeah. When everyone says about GDP growth, I'm like, give me per capita.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah, yeah.

[Con]

And inflation. Adjust it, please. But what would stop him doing something like this? Stupidity. Pigheadedness.

[Lawrence Newton]

Well, there's like various political games here, right, that. It's like, imagine if they. I know they like various aspects of the bill because in the following few weeks they announced a bunch of policies that were very, very close to it. Not exactly the same, but close to it. So there's politics around this too. It's like, well, do we want to say that we've taken ideas from, you know, this group? No, we want it to be from us, but they could do like their own versions of this. They are going to release an infrastructure bill, Will, you know, in the next couple of weeks, actually, we'll see what that looks like. There are rumors that there's some very good stuff in there that, you know, approach some of the stuff in the bill. We'll see in our bill. I mean, in the LFG bill, we'll have to see how far they go. But it's also like it is a radical bill, like it is one that if you passed, would change things very, very quickly.

[Con]

But is that radical and it just common sense?

[Lawrence Newton]

I think it's, I think it's something that for them to do they would have to be very brave. They would have to stand up and say, yes, we actually do believe we should build things in this country. Yes, we do actually believe growth is possible. And yes, we do think the longer term trajectory will make this country a hell of a lot better. Very, very quickly.

[Con]

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[Lawrence Newton]

Yes.

[Con]

You know, success in the country. The coffers are spilling over and they can go and do some redistribution and.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yes.

[Con]

But they've come at, they come, they came in at a time which didn't suit a Labour Party because the country can't afford left wing economics at the moment. Just we cannot afford it evidently proved with Rachel Rees first budget being a disaster.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah.

[Con]

And the impact of disaster. And now I even read yesterday or heard on the radio say they're talking about cuts to social care. I haven't seen what they are.

[Lawrence Newton]

Oh, yeah.

[Con]

Do you know what they are? Because I've actually seen what they are.

[Lawrence Newton]

No, but I mean, I have a look on. It's basically absolutely, unfortunately, completely necessary.

[Con]

Yeah.

[Lawrence Newton]

Because like the budget is mad, you know, and yeah, we, we are completely broke and we're paying for things we haven't had to afford for years. And the last guys didn't cut it. The last guys didn't get to grips with it. So now these guys have to try to get to grips with it. And I think it's going to be very, very painful. And it is exactly as you say, it's not what the ideology would like them to do. And yet that really aren't many more options. Like it's been left so long and so bad. I mean, the thing that really frightens me is, you know, this is a period where other countries have been growing, we've been stagnating, we're not even facing recession.

[Con]

We were growing into labor, weren't we? There was growth at the tail end of the Conservatives. I'm not defending the Conservatives, I thought they were for most of their 14 year period, but I know we had growth at the end of the Conservative Party and I know we've had a dropping. So we were growing the number of jobs. I know there's some basics around that.

[Lawrence Newton]

I mean, none of it's, as you said earlier, the radical change. None of it's actually getting to grips with, you know, the fact that we've got so many blockers, blockages that we don't allow. And I mean, you know, it's not that. Well, I mean, some of it is really the fact that they just don't want to look straight at the thing and say, well, we are in decline. This is stagnation. In fact, worse than stagnation, it is decline. And that this does require actual bravery. And I don't think that the last government, the last few governments were really very brave. They weren't ready to, to face it head on. Um, you know, maybe apart from, you know, around Brexit, obviously there was loads of like, you know, and which also obviously took a lot of time up. And so there's also these delays. But the government now has to really, actually be brave, has to really get to grips with it and do things that I think they're not going to be particularly happy doing.

[Con]

I mean, they, they're on a, in a hiding for nothing really. Because look at this. The Chancellor is preparing to trim planned spending on health and disability benefits by around 5 billion as UK economy has blown off course. Can you just click on that article, Con? Just see. I mean, health and disability, it just sounds the cruelest. We're going to target the disabled. Here we go. Last October, the OBR decided that the Chancellor was on track to meet her current balance rule by 2930 with 9.9 billion spare. A tiny margin gamble hasn't paid off. Did the OBR actually get anything fucking right?

[Lawrence Newton]

Well, yeah, that's. That's a very good question.

[Con]

I think the room for maneuver largely disappeared because the capital gains tax changes, because people left. Here we go. Where is it? Over the past four years, the number of people working in age came in incapacity or disability benefits has jumped from 2.8 to 3.9 million. Yeah, there was a. There was a. Was it a panorama or something?

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah, there's. I mean, this is. There's. There's a whole bunch of stuff on, like mental health stuff as well, which does get particularly difficult, I believe, like anxiety, you know, depression, things like this, for why people are signing out of work, which obviously at scale is just completely, completely unaffordable.

[Con]

And it's easy to say I'm depressed, but the truth is, when I've had depression, the best thing was going to work and keeping busy, not being sat on the couch, being healthy and active, I think. Did it just say there, Conor, that they expect health spending to jump from.

[Lawrence Newton]

65 billion to 100 billion?

[Con]

Yeah. I mean, we cannot afford this trajectory. It's a problem at the council level as well.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yes, it is. Yes.

[Con]

I choose you. So I denied about ideas about getting involved in local politics, maybe a run for mayor or something, just to get involved. No, no, it's not nice. I looked. You can't. You can't. You can't do the job.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah.

[Con]

You have this statutory requirement on adult social care.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah.

[Con]

And it's just eating up more and more and more of the budget. We've got growing homeless, we've got growing mental health issues, we've got growing adult social care issues, and there's just no money to do anything else. And.

[Lawrence Newton]

And that gets worse every single year. And government has basically passed on the buck, which keeps happening. Of course, all these systems are. You know, it's meant to be more and more accountability at local levels or. But actually what happens is everyone passes the buck. It's everybody else's fault. I found this with. You know, the Met will say, well, it's because of the mayor and budgets, and the mayor will say, well, it's because of the government, the money I'm given by the government. And nobody can tell you whose fault, like, who actually bears the brunt of this, who actually needs to solve this problem. Everyone can pass it on to Somebody else. And I think this is the same thing here, right, with councils that the care budgets are absolutely massive because they have the statutory duties to pass them by government. There's all the other things they have to do locally. Like, I know councils where, because of their care budgets and also, I'm sure, some mismanagement as well. You know, they're looking at things like collecting Bruins once every three weeks.

[Con]

Yep. So that was it.

[Lawrence Newton]

Bristol, Something like this.

[Con]

Yeah, completely.

[Lawrence Newton]

I mean, it's mad. And then things like cutting streetlights, which, if you cut street lights, crime goes up, you know, there's. There's more opportunity, it's darker, it's worse for people. It, of course, also ruins your nightlife and all this kind of stuff as well. All of these things have, like, worse and worse and worse effects. But does government want to take that back on or.

[Con]

You don't want to be seen as mean.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah, yeah, you don't want to be seen as mean and. And you don't want to harm people, which, you know, you want to, you know, like, it's. People are in difficult positions and it would be very good to be able to help those that need it. There is also, of course, the problem that, just as you were saying before, it's very easy people to exploit these systems as well. And so you have a very, very difficult balance here and you need very competent systems to deal with it. And at the same time, we have systems where it's basically impossible to fire people, it's basically impossible to keep people. So all these things, you know, begin to work with each other to make a system that's completely collapsing. And because nobody wants to say, well, look, it's actually quite nuanced and complex that we have to get to grips with it and actually deal with this, it's just left for years to get worse and worse and worse until it basically almost collapses. I mean, councils across the country now basically going bankrupt.

[Con]

They're going bankrupt everywhere.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah. All over the place.

[Con]

I mean, what the. The legal limit to raise council tax is 4.99%.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yes.

[Con]

Without a referendum.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah.

[Con]

But there's a way around it. But I. Who put it up 20? Somebody put it up 20%. Who was that?

[Lawrence Newton]

Birmingham.

[Con]

Birmingham. About 12 and a half percent here. And other places talked about 10%. So add that to all the other tax rises. You just go, look, you are. You are destroying our country. Yeah, you are, because there's a pot of money and where are you going to put it? And I think we need to direct it More to productivity, growing the economy, real growth. But it means being tough on things like welfare. You cannot have an endless welfare state.

[Lawrence Newton]

Well, you need better afford it. And the problem is, without being able to actually build stuff, make stuff, have a productive economy, things become unaffordable. And that's really, really tragic and is one of the reasons why we should be putting all our efforts into being productive. You know, we should be putting all of government effort as much as possible to growing the economy so we don't have to live with a bunch of misery. Because the poorer you get as a country, the worse life gets for everyone. And you can't forever pretend that doesn't exist by just endlessly growing, you know, costs, recouping it by tax, it eventually just starts to kill off your economy, which is of course what's happened to us. And eventually you just have to start cutting things all over the place. But if you get to grips with the actual problems, if you build stuff like our bill is trying to do, if you actually start to lower energy prices, if you're actually able to do this by letting companies construct stuff, build stuff, hire people, you can actually start to lift the country out of this nightmare scenario we're getting into where things will just keep getting worse. You know, prison's full, no spaces, burgeoning population, no new housing, blackouts on the horizon. This is really grim and is the result of choice, like we've chosen decline and we think we should do something different.

[Con]

Yeah, and I think the time is right now. I think sentiment has definitely shifted.

[Lawrence Newton]

Definitely.

[Con]

There is no happy conservative voter, there's no happy reform voter. And I don't think there's a lot of happy Labour voters. Because the problem the Labour voters have got is they're seeing their Labour Party do things that they don't vote for, they didn't vote for. Which goes back to my point why I feel a little bit sorry for them at the moment. Because they're running the country at a time where they can't afford labor policies. Because look, and let's get to the reality of why they won the election. Low voter turnout, 60%. I think it was apathy. Conservative voters like myself, there's no one to vote for. And so they didn't get a huge mandate, let's be honest about that. But the mandate they got was, was a mandate from labor voters or people who were fed up with conservatives. Those people who fed up conservatives realized they voted for something worse. And I think there's a lot of those labor voters have realized they're not getting what they wanted because we can't afford it.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah.

[Con]

So we're, I think nationwide, I think there's, the sentiment is. You can, you can feel it. Yes, you can, you can feel around the dinner table, in the pubs.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah.

[Con]

On social media, everywhere. Everyone's fucking sick.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah. I have had lifelong labor voters say to me over the past, and I can't say who because they'd be very upset with me saying this, but called me and said, you know, Lawrence, I hate Trump, hate what he represents, but he is doing stuff, you know, like people are that desperate for stuff to actually happen. And this is why I do think there is a moment, there is a political moment that if the government wants to, they can get away with being a lot more radical, especially because they're early enough in the election cycle that they actually could see results in the next two, three years and, you know, get into grips with things like the waiting list, getting to grips with, you know, borders, getting to grips with crime, getting to grips with the economy. None of these are particularly super easy things. Well, some of them are easier than others, actually. But like, there are paths through this. There are many ideas out there about how to handle this. They just haven't come in day one with a plan. They sat down and actually gone. We're going to roll this out straight away. There is time to recover. Like this government can actually recover and do things incredibly well. And I want them to do things incredibly well because I want to live in a better country. This is why set up looking for growth. This is why I, I'm, you know, we're a non party affiliated group because if the country gets better, my life gets better, my family's lives get better, everyone's lives in this country get better. We don't have to deal with this horrendous situation, like you say, of, you know, having to talk about, well, now we can't do anything to support people. We can't help people out. We can't because we're so poor, everything is falling apart. We're going to face blackouts. It's crazy. It's crazy. And the worst thing too, or one of the worst things, seeing young, impressive people with great ideas leave our country, go elsewhere, become hyper successful. And for them to say things like, several of them have reached out to me and said things like, I would love to come back home, but I just feel like it doesn't make any sense for my family. So I'll, I've just got to stay out. But if things get Better. I'll be right back.

[Con]

And they do come home. I went out to Argentina pre Malay election and one of the saddest things was I was went to this rugby club and I was chatting to a few people and they were talking about the brain drain, the young people leaving. They go to Australia, they go to America, some go to Europe because there's no opportunity in Argentina for them. They can't save, they can't buy a home because inflation is just so rampant, corruption so rampant. And post Malay people are moving back because Malay is trying to get a grip on the economics of Argentina. So people will come back. Yes, the brain drain here is I don't think it's big, but it's real. It does happen. People do leave. They certainly, if you're tech minded, they go to America. Yeah, but, but we should have these people here. My fear is, Lawrence, I don't think it will get better under labor. I think it's too difficult for them ideologically to do what the country needs because it's essentially they need conservative policies. Yeah, we need small government deregulation, low bureaucracy, low red tape. We need the things that libertarian minded conservatives would do. That's where we are in our trajectory. And I think what will happen with labor is the unions have too much control over them for one ideology has too much control over them. So I think we're just going to creep through this next four years. Some subtle tax rises here or there, a bit more borrowing here, some stagnant growth, people complaining. But I just don't think they can, they certainly can't do what Trump's doing.

[Lawrence Newton]

Well, I mean this is the bizarre thing because of course technically they're completely able to do far more. Like parliament in this country is so absurdly powerful. Yeah, they, and with a majority the size they have, they are actually able, basically they have unlimited ability. And yet if you were to explain this to them, which they know really is kind of intellectually true, they don't feel it. They don't feel that they could just do things, but they literally can just do stuff. I do fear that the path, as you say, is it's very probable that we end up in something like that, that they really just fiddle with the edges that they don't get down to it. This is of course, unfortunately what you know, largely what the last guys did, you know, was they didn't really want to really do even conservative policies, kind of, you know, traditional conservative policies. Then there was kind of, there has been a, a big, you know, the vibe shift Thing is, I think, also real. There was a very real. You know, we've had to kind of face reality. And I think there is just a sudden change in the kind of culture in a way that really surprises me. Like, eight months ago, you know, the world seemed very different. So there is like a big vibe shift. And I think this is allowing people to actually just talk about reality again in a way they haven't done for a very long time. But if labor is going to benefit from that is really their choice. And it is in their hands, like, they literally can do it. It's just whether or not they actually want to.

[Con]

Well, the vibe shift, I think, has come from two, two, maybe three errors. Reform have forced the hands of the conservatives. So reform have come in to be a traditional conservative party. Conservatives are losing voters to reform. So Kemi's having to think about that, and Robert Jenrick is also thinking about that. And they're talking more and more like traditional conservatives. We look across the Atlantic and look, we're at a time where it's difficult to criticize Trump on anything. It's like, maybe can we ask a couple of questions? It's like, no, you can't off back to your off and arrest people for memes.

[Lawrence Newton]

This is a very strange.

[Con]

We're in a strange time. You can't question anything. But like, even if you can't, there are things that Trump is doing and Elon Musk is doing and RFK is doing that we're looking at. Okay, that's kind of interesting. They're going through essentially their entire civil service and exposing all the corruption with their own Quango's own civil service. And they're cutting it, which is great. Okay, that's very interesting. We've also just got various people here making you. You as one. Charlotte Gill, I don't know, you know Charlotte, what she's doing with woke waste.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah, she's doing some excellent stuff.

[Con]

We get some good exposure here. So we are at a time. I just, I don't feel that it's. It might be the Labor Party may have the tools. I don't think they have the backbone or the intellectual capacity, the experience, the understanding how business works to do it. So I don't see it happening, unfortunately. I think we're gonna have a really shit four more years under them.

[Lawrence Newton]

Well, this is like. I think this is partly also what contributed to the vibe shift is that their beliefs were very strongly. There's an excellent, you know, series of ideas in the civil service that the conservatives have consistently Ignored. And then they get into government, they basically find that isn't really true. And then I think the last, like eight months or so has been them kind of coming to terms with, wow. Actually, we need our own ideas, their own thoughts. And these are some quite uncomfortable things that are coming to us as we're going to have to do. You know, last guys didn't. We're going to have to deal with this. Are they going to do it? I don't know. I don't. I try to stay optimistic. But I think also this is a reason. Definitely the reason why I originally set up Looking for Growth was like, you don't get this stuff automatically. You have to make noise. You have to make it. So around their dinner tables, people want to talk to them about this thing and they begin to feel pressure because even if ideologically they're not on site with this, social pressures are real. They'll feel it. And the Overton Window is real. Like, what you can do feels different sometimes, and what you can do now feels very different to what you could a year ago. Just purely on vibe, purely on the Overton Window. And so we exist as well, in order to kick that overtone window much wider, you know, open that as much as possible so in the right direction.

[Con]

So what next? You've put that bill.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah.

[Con]

So what Next?

[Lawrence Newton]

So on March 22nd, we have a. What we're calling at the moment a policy summit, where we're going to get a bunch of people together, actually releasing this tomorrow, details on it, so that people will be able to come along, pitch ideas on. We're going to come up with a list of particular demands.

[Con]

Check my diary.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah. Please, please come along. Please come along.

[Con]

March 22. That is a Saturday.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yes.

[Con]

Now I have football. Well, I own a football team.

[Lawrence Newton]

Bring, bring.

[Con]

We'll have a game. Who are we playing on March 22nd? I bet that's Berco, isn't it? Is it Berco? Yeah. So our team's top of the league.

[Lawrence Newton]

Oh, wow. Nice.

[Con]

Yeah, nice. Well, and we'll be playing second on the lead. Berkhamstead, is it? We're gonna smash him. That is the one game you won't get me for. But I mean, any other way we can help you. Can we help promote it?

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah, that'll be fantastic. Yes, yes. So we'll be sending this out tomorrow. We've got. So, March 22 policy summit and then middle of April, we're doing one in Manchester. Manchester will focus on. At the moment, we're putting together a biotechnology policy which we'll announce there, which will hopefully make Britain or contribute to making Britain the number one biotechnology research place in the world. And we have kind of ideas on the civil service which are being onwards. Our idea is that every month or so we'll be hosting a large event around the country and we will announce policies at these events, different kind of campaign formats, and put pressure on government, try to get wins, try to build a movement here and try to build a coordinated movement across the country. You know, we've got like nine chapters now starting out across the country. I announced this on stage on our first event. Like, we would like to set up local chapters and we were inundated with people who want to set them up. Several have already met. They've each got about 30 attendees. Some of them are already putting together policies in the local area that they want to for. It's huge.

[Con]

Like, it's like this is a real movement.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah. Like three and a half months in. So the thing is, like going very, very, very quickly. And it's because people are frustrated, but they also are optimistic. They do believe it can get better. And the way I view it is it literally has to get better. Because I live here, it just has to get better. So the idea is to, to build this movement and if people care and they want growth, they want, you know, higher wages, lower taxes, and actually to see Britain build again and become a superpower again, which we once were and not, not, not very long ago. Join us, come along with us, help us out.

[Con]

How are you paying for all this?

[Lawrence Newton]

So we've actually just started raising.

[Con]

Okay.

[Lawrence Newton]

So when we first sit, it's literally me and my friend on a sofa. And when we booked the venue, we people donated. If they wanted to come along, you know, they could come for free. I put some money behind the bar and with that price, I pleaded with people on stage, please buy our T shirts. I need this. But now we've just started fundraising now more seriously. And just the last couple of weeks we've had, you know, not loads, but enough in that we could hire our first staff member and stuff like this. So hopefully scaling quickly because the country is, in my view, running out of time until I'm gonna literally need to leave. Well, I've.

[Con]

I've looked at it myself. I have considered myself self. It's a selfish decision, I know.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah, yeah.

[Con]

But I have thought about it. I feel. Well, could I know I was looking at once I was looking at my tax bill. As I took my tax bill, look what, what I could Rent in Portugal. And I was like, that's kind of nice. Yeah, my tax bill would rent that for free.

[Lawrence Newton]

And. And it's also just things like, you know, when you have a kid, it's also like, you know, what do I want them growing up in? Yeah, very true. Do they? So one of our chapter events, someone there, was he 25 years old and says, you know, everyone's kind of talking about why they were coming along to the event. And he's kind of looks down, says, I'm 25 years old and all I've ever known is decline. Things just have to be better. Like, that's what you're dealing with, you know, like, because there's many people as well who just can't leave the country. There's nowhere else for them to go. True. And it's, it's horrendously tragic that their, their view is, it's really sad that I'm stuck here, so now I need to do something about it when they don't want to feel that way. Like, a lot of people want to be proud of their country, and a lot of people actually really are. And there's so many people here are setting up companies despite the negative economic factors, because they just want to contribute and they want to build something here. Because we do have, like, some incredible institutions here. We have some incredible opportunities here. Like, London is one of the best cities in the world, you know, no question. It's just sad that, you know, you can't have your mobile phone out in public. But, you know, we, we do have this incredible base to build from these incredible things that we've inherited, like these amazing. I mean, just the underground is just like an incredible, like, modern miracle, basically is astounding. Astounding that it works as well, like when you consider the numbers of people who use it every day. And incredible. It doesn't always work perfectly, but it's pretty damn good. It's pretty impressive. Like, it's really impressive, given this. You know, we have some. And we have incredible, you know, history of great universities, great thinkers, great ideas. That's difficult. You can't just copy and paste that across the world. That takes a long time. It takes a lot of engineering and a lot of ingenuity and particular culture of questioning things, trying new things out. We are moving away from that. But it's still here. You know, if we keep on this path for the next 20 years, maybe not, but right now it's still here. So there is opportunity, there is chance. We just actually have to take It.

[Con]

Yeah. Well, look, one of the reasons I didn't move away is because I love it here. Yeah, I just. I do. I just love the country. And if you leave, how do you help affect change? And I want to stand. I do want to help affect change. I want it to be better. And I see someone like you or Charlotte or I speak to Shankar Singham and I see. And I just know it's possible we've just cut through all that fucking sludge. Just one area I did want to ask you about before we do finish. If there's anything else I've not covered that you want us to, please bring it up. But you've worked in the academic profession. I had Eric Kaufman in here. Do you know Eric?

[Lawrence Newton]

No, I don't know him.

[Con]

Kind of interesting.

[Lawrence Newton]

No. Often, yeah.

[Con]

What I took from him is that the academic academia has become a little bit like the civil service. It's become a bit bloated, a bit wasteful, and it has this real shift towards left ideas that don't make sense. It becomes almost like. It almost becomes in. There's a lot of indoctrination within the academic profession. Now, look, you were a law professor, so it's probably slightly different, but have you seen it?

[Lawrence Newton]

Oh, yeah. Oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, massively so. Like. Like, just without doubt, without question. It is unfortunately the reality that there are entire viewpoints which are actively disliked, discouraged, if you were to voice, would be very bad for your career. It is now, you know, academics who basically happen to have opinions that match the kind of prevailing view, literally don't recognize this description. And they'll say things like, this is all kind of made up. I've never found this myself and I don't know anyone who has. Well, yes, because you're a part of this exact ecosystem, like, you think the same way, etcetera, but is very, very, very clear. True for students as well. You know, there are certain views which they can voice and they're very, very particular. They're very, very streamlined in terms of. Or constrained rather, in what they can or cannot kind of be really be permitted to think unless, you know, they're willing to take a bit of a hit to their grades, maybe. That's always happens, you know. Yeah, like. But not. It's not like, it's not even automatic. It's because a lot of grading, especially in essays, is kind of done and like, okay, have you made the right argument? Have you made good arguments? Well, if you're a particularly politically biased reader, when you read some of this stuff, you're thinking, well, that's not very good argument, because there's an obvious retort that they haven't dealt with, you know, because you know your own arguments very well.

[Con]

Right.

[Lawrence Newton]

And so you. You are harsher without really realizing that you're being harsher. And lecture, lecture content, all this kind of stuff, like all of it becomes incredibly biased, is one term, but I'd say rather constrained. It's really constrained to particular viewpoints. And that's how it feels as well. It's less like you're being told, go in this direction, and you're more being told, don't say this, don't do that, don't do this. And sometimes explicitly, but sometimes just very clearly, as strongly implied to the point where there was. I was once a part of an email chain that was sent out to all members of staff. I was an hourly paid lecturer at the point, so I could be fired in an instant or whatever, which a lot of staff members are on as well. So you also be quiet because, you know, you want to get paid the tiny amount of money they pay you, so you. You're. You're quiet. There was an email chain. There was some controversial speaker coming to the university.

[Con]

Love it. You want that?

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah. They didn't. So there was a secret petition being put around by all of the staff members to then be sent to the Vice principal. And they didn't want it going anywhere. They didn't want anyone knowing. They didn't want the press knowing. Of course. Yeah.

[Con]

So terrible.

[Lawrence Newton]

I. The whole email chain was filled with people going, excellent, excellent, excellent. Now, I'm not a fan of this speaker either.

[Con]

Can you say who is.

[Lawrence Newton]

I think it was Katie Hopkins.

[Con]

Yeah, I mean, she's a. Yeah, but. But, like, let's hear her speak.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah. So I email the entire staff chain as, like, you know, hourly page could be got rid of any moment. I was like, you know what? Literally, this is so indefensible. This is so. And it's all behind closed doors. It's crazy. So I emailed the chain and was like, you know, I don't. And, you know, start off by saying, I do not agree with this person. I don't like them. However, they should be allowed to speak here. It seems crazy. To be fair, I got no negative response. I got no response at all, apart from several very established professors privately messaged me to say, I agree, but they wouldn't publicly say it.

[Con]

Of course they won't.

[Lawrence Newton]

This is the problem.

[Con]

You need a backbone on this stuff. I'M not a fan of Katie Hopkins. She says some things I agree with. I think she says some things just. Just to be loud and heard and whatever. But there's a lot of people who do agree with her. So we need to hear why they think like that, what's pissed them off to this point, what's got them to the point where they think like this. If we don't listen to them, how do we know why they think the way they do?

[Lawrence Newton]

But I also just think it's like a terrible principle to have, like that your university should be. That you. You bring the constraints in further and further and further. You know, that. That fewer and fewer people can speak. The viewpoints become more and more constrained and as a result, people are trained from, like, 18 onwards. Actually, it's early on, too. Yeah, it's way earlier.

[Con]

No, it's earlier. Listen to this. So a friend of mine, this is. I love this. They. During the election. This is a primary school. Up until the age of nine, they had an election in the school. All the kids got to vote. So they all came in and did their votes. You can probably guess the majority of the vote a lot for Green, which I'd want, even though I would never vote for the Green Party. I think they're communists, I think they don't understand energy, I think they're nuts. But when kids are voting for Green, it's like, yeah, you care about some. You've got a good heart, you want. You know, I get that. Yeah, there was a lot of labor, there's a lot of Liberal Democrats. There was. I've talked about this on the POD before, actually, but there was one kid, apparently, who voted for Conservatives. One kid in the whole school. And I'm like, who is that kid? I think they deserve a prize. Go on. I was like, I'm so proud. Just because of the fact they did it in the face of.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah, it's.

[Con]

If clearly as a kid, it's not acceptable to be a conservative.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah. I mean, but it's, as you say, things also change with age and time. But it is also the case that they are actively discouraged from these viewpoints. I mean, just grabbing university reading lists and going through those and you can see exactly the kinds of political moves in the material are very clear. And it's a bit sad. It's not just frustrating, it's not just politically bad, it's like a bit sad in terms of just like intellectual curiosity. It's like we have entire institutions that the only way that they seem to think of the world is through a political lens only. It's like so much, so many ways of seeing the world and politics is one way of seeing the world and yet it's the way that dominates like most academia and basically nearly anything, you know, there's. For so much of time, it was everything, you know, whatever you're studying is really about politics, whatever you're doing is really about politics. And that's like one way of interacting with the world. It's very important one. I care about it a lot. But like there's a lot of other ways of interacting with the world and we just restrain it and we restrict it and we don't encourage people to step out and say what they actually think and to, you know, confront stuff. And God help, Electro has to try to confront stuff as well, you know, and actually deal with different worldviews and try to understand them and try to deal with them. That is not what happens and it's very depressive. And of course what ends up is that gets worse because over time everyone who gets frustrated tends to leave. And so you end up. I've been in weird discussions in academia, sometimes very, very strange ones, where everyone around the table is like, you know, talking in very particular kind of, you know, let's say, woke stuff or whatever. And you ask people individually and I've realized at a certain point everyone here disagrees but they're all repeating the lines. And actually individually, though, if you ask them, they go, yeah, well, I don't really, you know, I. I'm just kind of humoring because nobody wants to just say I strongly.

[Con]

This is bollocks. Yeah, this is bollocks.

[Lawrence Newton]

Funnily enough, the one exception I have to this is, I was once complaining about this because someone actually said they were opposite me. They were quite an established professor who I think would strongly disagree with all my work on crime at the moment, who said, you know, I have never felt that I can't say my opinions. That's crazy. I told them, look, I'm telling you now, this happens all the time. I feel it all the time. And this guy who I think would describe themselves as almost communist, I was so upset to hear this. He organised a group, a committee, took it to heads of universities saying no one should feel they can't speak. So it is possible there are people there who really do care and will try to do things, but, you know, there's not many of them. And the university kind of actively doesn't really want to deal with it, they just want it to go away.

[Con]

Have you any blowback? People think you've become some kind of radicalized Nazi?

[Lawrence Newton]

No, I actually, what's really surprised me too is that the amount of particularly previous colleagues and stuff who've been incredibly supportive even if they disagree. I think the Overton window is genuinely bigger. And I think it is actually a case of saying what you believe. And so long as you're like, you know, not mocking the other people or whatever it is, I think they're much more willing to hear it. But also, I'm out now.

[Con]

Yeah.

[Lawrence Newton]

So it's not the same level of like, problem. Right. And there's no, like, you know, they don't have to have staff meetings about, oh God, Lawrence has gone on this podcast and said some crazy shit. They don't have to deal with that anymore. So. Although I should also say that always been supportive on that as well. Like people individually to me have been very, very supportive. It's the system as a whole, which sends people down really bad incentive lines. And then as a whole you end up in this weird, weird zone where people don't want to say what they think and everyone's being a bit, you know, brave is one way of saying about it. But it's also like, for saying what you think, you may get so much negativity and is it really worth your time as an individual lecturer? And so you keep making those trade offs.

[Con]

It's a ballsy move though, because you're pretty secure as a professor. Do we have tenure here?

[Lawrence Newton]

Permanent contract is basically our version.

[Con]

Yeah. So you had a trajectory of a career and you've one day said, I'm not going to do this anymore, I'm going to become an activist. I'm not sure what your wife said, hey, I'm going to just give all that shit up and I'm gonna, I'm gonna start up this organization. We've got no fucking money. But. Yeah, but it, but it, you know, there's a big risk there.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah, I mean, there's been some fun conversations, I would put it that way. But I mean, really, actually just, just like really supportive. Because like, partly what was happening is I was extremely depressed. And like, no, not like clinically depressed or something, but just fucking sick of it. And I hate being in stuff where, you know, originally when I was trying to change even very small things, I was, you know, told things like, well, that's not how it works here, that's not how it works. And eventually it moved from Lawrence is a bit naive about this to, oh, Lawrence is just like, he, you know, he hasn't learned yet that the system doesn't work like this. And it was just frustrating because it's like such a low level academic stuff where you're like, we can change the rules. We lit. I once asked somebody, you say the rules are stopping us doing this. Who writes the rules? Like, well, we do. Okay, so could we just change them? That's not quite how it works. Okay. You know, and you, you end up with these kind of barriers all the time. And the individual people, again, are not, not the problem. They're just a part of this thing that just incentivizes you because what's the point? You know, you put a lot of energy into the system and the system doesn't care. And so you just become demoralized. You see it with police, with, you know, you, you catch somebody, you send all these guys away, just like you said, right? They do 230 people, they find 230 phone thieves in a week, arrest them. What's actually going to happen? You know, there's this, like, you just lose morale. You, you stop caring. And I began to feel that. And I'm somebody who, I just can't do that. So, like, the choice was like, continue on in this kind of malaise or do stuff. And I very, very, very much want the country to, to turn around. I want things to get better and I don't want people to feel like that. You know, it's very depressing. And to feel you're part of a system that just wants to crush you and that no one individually is really to blame. It's this weird thing that everyone's kind of in and they wish they weren't in it, but somehow they are. And I just want to end that stuff. I want people to be able to be free to do their own stuff, to go into the world and to make it better. And that's possible. It is very, very, very possible. And so, yeah, looking for growth is exactly. Trying to do that.

[Con]

Amazing. Well, look, I think how you're feeling is how the country's feeling. I'm feeling it. I'm sure these guys, they can ask for themselves, but I think they're feeling, I think the country is feeling this at the moment. And, and this is why the Trump thing's so interesting. And yes, look, I understand why a lot of people don't like Trump, but it's not Trump himself. It's this signal that we need a complete change. Something has to change. I mean, the US could not continue on its own trajectory. We cannot. And something big and different is needed and essentially we've got to put the pressure on the politicians to have the balls to make big changes. If they don't, we'll get rid of them. And so what will happen in four years time, we'll have another election. Labor cannot do what we need. I just fundamentally believe they can't. Maybe they can, but I just fundamentally.

[Lawrence Newton]

It's incredibly hard to do it.

[Con]

Yeah, yeah.

[Lawrence Newton]

And yes, it's.

[Con]

I think it's very hard for the conservatives to do it, but they could do it.

[Lawrence Newton]

I think it's hard for anyone to do this and actually do it. Well.

[Con]

Yeah, but, but something new. We need some fresh faces. Not these student politicians, career politicians. We need people with pair of balls to come and go. We're going to change everything. We're going to, we're going to take it, we're going to. We're just going to cut through all this shit and we're going to rebuild this country. We're going to. We're going to allow for growth, we're going to create opportunity, allow for investment. I say it's hard, actually. I don't think it really is. I don't think it really is. I think actually it's fairly easy. I just don't think we've got the right people doing this. I hope, hope. I just hope you're really successful with this. Thank you. It's already. We have a discussion which we had.

[Lawrence Newton]

No, I mean, I think, I think the thing with all I'd say about labor is they have the opportunity. I also am afraid that they won't take it and it does require guts and they are going to have to step up and there's not much time left. Like, you know, the last year of your government is not you doing a bunch of stuff, it's you justifying what happened for the last four years. They're running out of time very, very quickly and we are running out of time as a country very, very quickly. And so, yeah, I. They need to get to grips with it. They need to be brave. Will they do it? I don't know. But in our future I completely agree. We need brave, competent people who are ready to actually tackle this and tackle it fast.

[Con]

Who's our Elon Musk and who's our. Who's our rfk and who's our Vivek and who's our Tulsi?

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah, that's a, that's a. That's a really good.

[Con]

I think about that a lot. Yeah, I think Jeremy Carlson could be one of those, potentially.

[Lawrence Newton]

I hear this more and more.

[Con]

Yeah, Yeah. I try and think, who are them? I don't. They don't stand out at the moment.

[Lawrence Newton]

No, I. I think over the next few years, partly, also, like, looking for growth is we're looking for people who want to, you know, step into the political sphere and do things and, you know, in whatever these directions these may be to improve the country. And there are some incredible people that have already taken part in various ways, and I think we may yet discover our. Our versions of these people.

[Con]

Well, look, I think the work you do is really important. I'm really glad George reached out. I'm really glad we've met. Any way we can help? Stay in touch. Just let us know if there's another big thing you want to talk about, if you want to bring somebody else in. If we can help promote what you're doing. Just stay in touch, man. I think it's great. If we didn't have that football match, I would have come.

[Lawrence Newton]

Yeah. So I'll try and come something on to another one.

[Con]

Yeah, no, I will do. I will do. And I don't know where you're based, but we're here two days a week. Stay in touch and I wish you the best. It's very cool what you're doing, and we need a lot more people like you and that and, you know, to quit your career to go and do this. It's ultimate bravery. I love it. Keep going, man.

[Lawrence Newton]

Cheers, man. Thank you so, so much. Thank you.

[Con]

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, everyone, for listening. See you.