#125 - Tom Slater - Policing Speech & Ignoring Crime: The Decay of the UK

Summary

The Peter McCormack Show – Episode #125 Guest: Tom Slater Episode Title: Policing Speech & Ignoring Crime: The Decay of the UK Date: November 4, 2025

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Overview

In this incisive conversation, Peter McCormack is joined by Tom Slater, editor of Spiked, to unpack the accelerating decay of state institutions, the rise of censorship, and the growing disconnect between the UK’s governing class and everyday citizens. Centered on the themes of free speech, policing priorities, political realignment, and the consequences of misplaced government incentives, the episode crisply navigates both the nuance and urgency of the UK’s current crisis.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Decay of the State – Priorities Out of Order

• The UK state is failing at core responsibilities like public safety, while zealously policing speech and funding misguided initiatives.
  • Slater: “There are certain things that the state does need to do and it's doing those things terribly. Meanwhile, there are all sorts of things it shouldn't do at all. And it's doing that zealously..." [00:00]
• Citizens increasingly feel that taxes and contributions vanish, with living standards falling and state services decaying.

2. Cultural and Class Blindness in Political Movements

• The Greens and Labour parties appeal to metropolitan and youthful naivety, often insulated from the real effects of their policies.
• The working class feels abandoned, shifting toward Reform or other alternatives, splintering old loyalties:
  • McCormack: “The party itself doesn't represent the working class anymore because... they've fundamentally been left behind.” [14:40]
  • Slater: "On all these different levels, it's like they're on the wrong side of the working class, but they still claim that that is actually their core constituency. But it's just not washing anymore." [16:35]
• Policies like net zero and immigration are positioned as "class issues," not purely ideological divides.

3. Immigration, Community Impact, and Policy Contradictions

• Firsthand accounts of failed asylum policy, perverse incentives for NGOs and hotels, and misallocation of funding:
  • McCormack: “...they put a proposal together…we need 150 grand...And then I read we're spending, what, 15.4 billion a year on housing people.” [17:49]
  • The burden of mass/illegal migration falls largely on poorer communities, not the middle classes advocating for open policies.
• Widespread public frustration with perceived injustice, lack of transparency, and government avoidance.

4. Policing Speech vs. Real Crime

• UK police are investing significant resources in “online harms” while violent and property crime remains unsolved.
  • Slater: “We are in the UK comfortably arresting more people for speech crime today than the American state did during the first Red scare...” [36:16]
• Case studies of police overreach:
  • Parents arrested for emailing schools. [39:16]
  • Alison Pearson investigated for a deleted tweet. [45:55]
  • People like Jamie Michaels detained for Facebook videos warning against violence but expressing migration anxiety. Jury acquittal took 17 minutes. [55:18]
• Police culture has shifted markedly towards "woke" identity politics, virtue signaling (rainbow cars, hate hotlines), and policing thought rather than action.

5. Political Realignment and Public Disillusion

• Collapse of the two-party system; rise of multi-party politics (Labour, Conservatives, Reform, Greens, Lib Dems all vying for relevance).
  • Slater: “We're entering...an era of potentially four or five party politics..." [31:14]
• Elites increasingly misalign with popular sentiment, especially on migration and energy policy.
• Growing grassroots calls for direct democracy, learning from models like Switzerland, where referendums can directly block or create laws. [92:07]

6. The Problem with Political and Media Class

• Politicians and mainstream journalists are disengaged from ordinary people's lives:
  • "We've created a structure that incentivizes the worst people, dumbest people, to take up the most important positions in our country." [86:56]
  • Media often shapes stories to fit a narrative, omitting key facts that drive public mistrust. Independent media fills this gap.
• Spiked's consistent principles: freedom of speech, democracy, and human flourishing as counterpoints to decay.

7. Can the Culture Be Fixed? Where Does Optimism Lie?

• Both agree that the UK is at a breaking point, but optimism resides in the public's growing resistance:
  • Slater: “First of all, I think even though things feel like they're going a bit haywire at the moment, there is a correction underway...they're making their voices heard...” [96:06]
• Parenting, resilience, and culture change are needed, along with a smaller state, concentrated on essentials rather than all-encompassing paternalism.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On State Dysfunction

• Slater [00:00]: “It should be protecting people from violent crime, it shouldn’t be protecting people from offensive speech. And yet...they’re doing the latter and not very well doing the former.”

On Public Betrayal

• McCormack [57:22]: "That sense of betrayal exists across the country right now. I mean, I feel betrayed as a taxpayer who's worked his bollocks off for 30 years...and I feel like someone who's been demonized..."
• Slater [36:16]: “We are in the UK comfortably arresting more people for speech crime today than the American state did during the first Red scare in the early 20th century.”

On Immigration and Political Incentives

• McCormack [22:39]: "The politicians get the virtue, the hotels get the contracts, the NGOs get the contracts, but ordinary people are forced to suffer the consequences."

On Policing Priorities

• McCormack [45:55]: “I want to know how much time is my police force spending on policing these tweets and Facebook posts when there are serious social issues around drug dealing...I want the match. Because to me, none of this makes fucking sense.”
• Slater [42:20]: “It's that combination of being useless when it comes to actual crime, and sinister when it comes to speech crime…”

On Government's Inability to Improve

• McCormack [82:40]: “Defense hasn't. Borders hasn't. NHS hasn't. Education hasn't. Policing hasn't.”
• Slater [83:02]: “I can't think of nothing that certainly came from government that would be beyond some piddling little measure…”

On Direct Democracy and the Swiss Model [92:07+]

• McCormack: “Why don't we trust the citizenry to know what's best for us?...Can we have more direct democracy?”
• Slater [94:40]: “The story of the past 10 or 15 years is like the elites have gone insane and the public remain pretty commonsensical.”

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• State failure & priorities: [00:00–01:05], [78:28–79:39]
• Political class critique & class dynamics: [08:04–16:49]
• Immigration and social impact: [17:49–29:30], [24:22–28:03]
• Rise of speech policing: [36:15–41:26], [45:55–48:42]
• Case studies of police overreach:
  • Arrested parents: [39:17–41:26]
  • Alison Pearson: [45:55–48:42]
  • Jamie Michaels: [54:30–56:40]
• Political realignment and Reform rise: [30:30–34:53], [31:14–34:53]
• Police culture problems: [63:14–67:20]
• Media and independent voices' role: [97:13–102:14]
• Optimism for change: [96:06–98:10]

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Tone

• Energetic, exasperated, sharp, anecdotal, and occasionally profane—characteristic of McCormack’s plain-spoken, inquisitive style, and Slater’s journalistic clarity.

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Conclusion

Arguing that the British state has not just lost its way but actively undermines the basic social contract, the episode is a clear call for both reassertion of free speech and a radical rethink of governmental scope. Both host and guest thread personal experience with trenchant analysis, pointing to a hopeful public backlash even as institutions fray. Their optimism, tinged with frustration, underlines the possibility—but not the guarantee—of meaningful democratic renewal.

Transcript

[A]

There are certain things that the state does need to do and it's doing those things terribly. Meanwhile, there are all sorts of things it shouldn't do at all. And it's doing that zealously and to the ends of the earth. It should be protecting people from violent crime, it shouldn't be protecting people from offensive speech. And yet, you know, making great guns are doing the latter and not very well doing the former. All kinds of things about, you know, you kind of see that across the piece. The fact that they've allowed kind of defence and national defence to kind of completely wither on the vine. Meanwhile they're spending insane amounts of money on things that really don't matter. There's some kind of reckoning with that is absolutely necessary because at the moment people feel like it doesn't matter how much they pay in tax, it doesn't matter how much they kind of contribute to the system, it just disappears. Meanwhile, their actual kind of living standards get worse. So I think there's more of a kind of whether or not it's going to be pushed in a kind of purely libertarian perspective, I'm not sure because I think people are still kind of, not necessarily kind of in themselves, pro free market, but a sense that there needs to be a reckoning with the state so that it focuses on the things that it should do and could potentially do well and get the hell out of the things it has no business doing and that have kind of tyrannical consequences when it tries to do.

[B]

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[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

Whereas this one, for example, at the moment I'm listening to that audiobook about nuclear war. Do you know that book?

[A]

I don't know that, but I mean, it's about Nuclear war.

[B]

But what it's nuclear war. A scenario. I think we're parked here now. Yes, nuclear war scenario. I'll show you it. So this one here, I think plenty of people listening probably either read it recently or Annie Jacobson. So it's on the back of. Have you seen this Netflix film that's just come out called A House of Dynamite? No.

[A]

Okay, I'm so out of the loop on this. So you've got to. You've got a right.

[B]

So you got to go and watch this. So starting point tonight, go watch the Netflix film with House of Dynamite. It's basically about nuclear war scenarios.

[A]

Okay, so this is emerging theme of your sort of interest is.

[B]

Yeah, look, I mean, I'm just a curious person. All kinds of stuff. I'm interested in everything that you could. You could possibly think of. But.

[A]

And it feels alarmingly more possible at the moment than it did even a few years ago.

[B]

You know, are you connected to the screen, Kurt? Nah. Okay, so the trailer's worth watching. They do a great job on the trailer of making you want to watch it because they basically show there's an ICBM that's coming across. I don't know where it's coming from. And it's like, what do we do? And I watched it and it was fine as a film. I enjoyed it. It could have been a lot better, but it was fine. But I went sometimes once I've watched a film, I go and read reviews to see have I got this right? Should have been better. And then somebody said to it, oh, I. I think whoever wrote this, whoever did the screenplay or whatever, must have read the Annie Jacobson book. I'll listen to the book, but it's nuts. So what the film does really well, which I think was one of the criticisms, is it the US has all these protocols for different types of nuclear attack. Is it a single icbm? Is it a full scale decapitation event? And there are just protocols what the president should do, but it puts people in the actual scenario. Okay, it is happening. What the fuck do we actually do? And you see everyone just start to crumble under it. But anyway, so I go start listening to this book. And then my girlfriend messages me. Yesterday she sends me this Instagram post. She's like, hilarious. And it was somebody with a book like this. You can't see what it said. This is hands down the scariest book I've ever read. It turns around, it's the same book. And so in a nuclear war, the thermonuclear weapons we have now, which were described in the book as being purely evil. When one hits, it hits with so much power that it's like a thousand times the power of what was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So it's a thousand times more powerful than that. And I think that killed hundreds of thousands of people. So these weapons just instantly vaporize potentially millions of people. And if you're far enough away to not get vaporized, but you look at the light, you're blinded. And then you may face the nuclear fallout and get cancer and die. I mean, the whole thing is mental, but there's. And so then I found my brother this morning. He's like, oh, now you need to go and watch the. What's it called? Is it the. There was a documentary series on Netflix about 9, 11, something point, not turning point. Was it turning Point as well?

[A]

I think it's.

[B]

Well, we're just saying that because we think it was. Charlie, Kurt.

[A]

That's the marmod.

[B]

Yeah. So they've also done one on nuclear. My brother said, you've got to watch that and see how close. In like 1983, they were running a test and all the. All the chiefs were sent to the bunkers. And then other countries thought it was happening. So I don't know what you think about nuclear war, but I'm not a.

[A]

Fan of nuclear war. I'd rather it was avoided. Yeah, I'd like that on the record. So if it ever actually happens. Well, I'm just picturing you kind of driving down a drizzly day from Bedford just thinking about the. The nuclear fallout.

[B]

I mean, I'm, like, curious about a lot of things. I'm curious about how we as humans have been given this beautiful gift of life. We've been given this universe we can't explain, this beautiful planet full of rainbows and forests and animals and oceans and. And yet we as humans have managed to develop a. A system of mutually assured destruction. That. That if some maniac decides he can kill everyone on the planet. Yeah.

[A]

Just by pressing one button.

[B]

But that's what it is. Because if a maniac sends a. An icbm, a nuclear ICBM to the. To the United States, what the film gets wrong is then they should instantly react. But in the scenario of this film, they don't know where it's come from because it's potentially come from under the ocean. So if it comes from under the ocean, you don't know which sub has sent it. And in that scenario. Well, who do you. Because you're meant to strike Immediately you're meant to strike from the threat, not from it hitting because of the time. Right, well, who do you strike? And there are options. You know, if you think it's North Korea, you attack North Korea, but if you think it's Russia, you attack Russia. If you're not sure, you attack everyone. But if you attack that. So, and, and, and your choice is. They say it in the films quite clearly. It's essentially capitulation or suicide.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Surrender or suicide.

[A]

What is your. What a wonderful choice.

[B]

Well, then I. But then I was thinking about it on this one. I was thinking, well, I actually think the terrible human right decision to make is. So it is. Sorry, surrender. Because I did the rough math in my head and I was like, well, mutually assured destruction is the decision that you pro attack and then everyone counter attacks and everyone in the world, whatever, 4 billion people died and nuclear fall, whatever, it's just a disaster. Or you just surrender and the world has got more of a chance of carrying on, run by the Russians and the Chinese. This is what I think about, mate. Yeah, this is what I think about.

[A]

This is what haunts you in the Weir. Yeah. So.

[B]

But yeah, I'd recommend it. Go and watch it. It's. It's a great thing. Anyway, look, great to meet you. I. As you know, I was a big fan of you, Taron. Zach Polanski.

[A]

Yeah. That's done the rounds that clip. People really hate him or really like him, as is the case amongst some people.

[B]

But I just. Student politics. It's just childish politics. You know, the Greens are talking a lot at the moment about how if there was a vote tomorrow and it was, I don't know, under 30s or 40s, they would win a general election. It's because they're relying on the naivety of young people who don't understand how the world works. And I know that sounds really condescending, but, like, I firmly believe it. They are supporting ideas from somebody who is a political lightweight and is very naive, immature. I enjoyed Zia Yousef Destroy one Question Time. Did you see that?

[A]

That was great.

[B]

So what was the background to that? What did they invite you for? Because I just saw a clip.

[A]

Oh, the clips. That was BBC2 Politics Live, which is that kind of daily weekday politics discussion show. He had just been elected leader the day before, so he was kind of being brought in partly to get a grilling, but also just to be on the panel and talk about things.

[B]

So he's not an MP yet, is he?

[A]

He's not, no. He's essentially just a member of the London assembly last time I checked. So he's not actually in the House of Commons, but if you know his poll numbers hold up, they could be looking at quite a few seats next time around. So yes, it was partly just to talk about him, but also just to hold forth on the issues of the day. That was just after Graham Linehan had been arrested at Heathrow Airport.

[B]

Geez.

[A]

And Zach Polanski did something that even I didn't see any other the party leaders do, which was basically support the arrest, the arrest of a comedy writer at gunpoint by five police officers for making jokes on the Internet. So that was, that got quite spicy and then it just generally kind of went into, you know, all the absurd Net zero ideas and what have you. But he's, you know, he's great on social media. Zach Plasky make a really good 45 minute video, 45 second video rather, that will do the rounds on TikTok and G people up. But yeah, he's not without wanting to be too uncharitable, someone I met on a couple of occasions. He doesn't seem to be the kind of great mighty political oak that he's being made out to me by some people.

[B]

Well, it's, it's. I consider student politics because you get to appeal to people with things that sound good. Yeah, I think it's a real test of maturity is if you're able to analyze things that sound good but critically think them through and understand the consequences. I thought, I think the great example yesterday was labor passing all these, the renters bill, which I think as a socialist, they sound good. You know, if you've got terrible landlords who are allowing for, I don't know, black mold and rats, you know, should they be punished? In some ways, yeah. I mean, as a, as libertarian as I am, I know that the free market allows people to get away with bullshit. But, but fair enough. But when you actually start talking about which backdoor rent controls, we know what happens every time in these scenarios. You disincentivize landlords so you have less of a supply and the cost of rent goes up. So the people you're claiming to help, ultimately you make it more difficult for them. And I think, I think just requires a maturity to go. I know this sounds good. You know, it's like anyone can be any gender they want. Yeah, we should let any migrant in that wants to come into the country. You know, we should have full empathy for anyone with any form of addiction issue. You know, we should empathize with those who are caught up in crime. Like all of this, they all feel good, but, like, with a little bit of maturity.

[A]

Yeah. And I think sometimes it also reflects the sort of, like, class interest and base of these parties because it seems like the Greens are really picking off where the Corbynistas left off as far as trying to be very much the party of, like, Brighton, Bristol, the university towns, whatever. And they'll probably make a lot of inroads in those places where you're. First of all, if you're a student, you're kind of insulated from a lot of those kind of economic questions anyway, so you could happily support a party which is actually formally, doctrinally against the idea of economic growth itself. That's actually a policy that they hold to. And then also, you're renting at that age. You don't like your landlord, He's a pain in the ass, whatever. This stuff sort of makes sense. But I think there's also a lot of other people, maybe a bit further up the age range, who are just, you know, so comfortably off that they are insulated from the consequences of, like, net zero or any of these other policies or the issue of, like, illegal migration just doesn't touch their lives in the same way it would if you were in an impoverished seaside town who have had umpteen numbers of illegal migrants housed in the old hotel on the seafront. So it's just one of those things where there's. There's a blindness that comes from being kind of achingly metropolitan middle class, I think, which plays into it.

[B]

There's a really interesting thing that came out yesterday. Z Yousef shared a some polling data which in the, like, when I finally saw, I was like, it didn't surprise me, but it did surprise me. They looked at voting based on education, and the only one that labor won was private school educated. I was like, huh? Because I've been defending private school. I've been saying, do not put tax on private schools. Do not put VAT on private schools.

[A]

Start to reconsider now.

[B]

Yeah. Because part of the problem. Look, we have to, like, there's an honest thing we have to accept. Even if you're a full socialist, Private healthcare is better than state healthcare. You get seen faster, you get better doctors. Cause you're paying for it. The market delivers on that. Education's the same. As rough as it is to hear, it is true. And I was like, we need more private education. Because if we're private education, we are creating, like, future leaders and, and yes, they can come from the. Yeah, they don't have to come from the private sector, it just fundamentally works. And then I saw this thing, I was like, hold on. So all those people I'm defending are voting for Labor? Like, how have I got this so wrong?

[A]

How these scales fell from your eyes at that particular point? That's been going on for a long time, though. I mean, people talk about New Labour being the time when Blair tries to pivot towards the sort of middle classes and what have you people. When Jeremy Corbyn came through, there was this kind of sense of, oh, he's really going to bring back the working class because he's really focused on the economy and anti austerity and whatever complete opposite happened. The Labour Party became much more middle class now than previously. And even under Keir Starmer, it continues. It just does feel like at some point someone's going to have to like take the trading standards in terms of their name, because it just doesn't represent working class people in terms of the policies, but also just in terms of the people who are voting for them and actually like members and activists and MPs and all the rest of it. It's just a. Yeah, I think the.

[B]

Only working class part left of the Labour Party is actually the unions who. Yeah, we can sit here and attack all their incentives and the incentive structure they work by, but the unions are doing the job of protecting groups of working class people. The party itself doesn't represent the working class anymore because the working class people are the people who've been going to Tommy Robinson marches, putting up flags, campaigning against the Southall South. Southport. That's it. Sorry, Southport riots. They're the people who are voting reform. They're the people who've fundamentally been left behind. And I think it's quite easy to draw a line from it is that these policies are feel good policies, nice policies, ultimately have driven up mass inflation. A huge number of high lumber immigrants coming to the country. Actually, I think you can go back to the open up of the EU with freedom of travel, freedom of movement, because what happened is a lot of people in Eastern Europe, traders started coming in, they could earn more money and they were taking jobs of working class people. The working class have been fucking shafted by the political elite for. I think you can go back as far as Tony Blair and I think a lot of them have woken up and said, I fucking had enough of this.

[A]

And they're just so voting for the Labour Party or any of these left or centre parties. Is just against working class people's interests in so many different ways. Now, there was the kind of cultural chasm which people have been talking about for a long time. You know, people in the north or wherever would continue to vote labor because it was the sort of tribal affiliation. Up until quite recently, the idea of voting for anyone else, certainly the Tories was completely verboten. Brexit changed that to a certain extent, but still. And there was this kind of sense, but still there's this cultural chasm, you know, about issues of patriotism, about issues of national pride, trade, culture, whatever. But even though there's clearly a chasm on those issues, even the economic policies or the broader set of preoccupations the left now have are completely cut against their interests as well. I mean, there's the whole Green agenda, which is really fascinating. That's now becoming an entirely left right issue in the way it was bipartisan until about five minutes ago. You've got labor and the Greens and everyone else basically campaigning to make people's energy bills more expensive and cover that up. And people have cottoned onto that now in a way that they didn't four or five years ago. I think it was relatively well hidden. And then immigration, it touches on the cultural issue, but illegal immigration is a class issue. I mean, if you think about the number of small boats, migrants or people who just entered the country illegally, where they're being housed or where they're being put up in hotels is in some of the poorest parts of the country. There was a bit of analysis, I think it was in the Guardian a couple of years ago. We said, like a quarter of all of the people who were being put up by the Home Office as asylum seekers, legal migrants, a quarter of them are in just 10 local authorities and nine of which are some of the most impoverished in the UK purely because the hotel rooms are cheaper and it's cheaper to stick them there. And it's often far away, far enough away from London that no one in the media or politics world notices. So on all these different levels, it's like they're on the wrong side of the working class, but they still claim that that is actually their core constituency. But it's just not washing anymore, I don't think.

[B]

Well, it's so obviously not. I mean, this immigration issue. And look, this is. This is the. This is the part I find hardest myself personally, to wrestle with this. This idea of. You know, Matt, when I hear terms like mass deportations, it just does. I don't know, it hits Somewhere in me where I'm like, okay, that's. That sounds like a. You know. And I understand the argument. We're talking about illegal migrants. It is illegal, but it's still just kind of like. It feels like a big thing. But at the same time is. Yeah. Where I live in Bedford, it's not a particularly wealthy town. I've been digging into some of the issues in the town. We're very good at supporting homeless people. But I went to see this really great charity. They've run a pre Bend street day center. So what they do is they bring people in who are addicts, people who are forced into the world of sex work, people who've just homeless, and they try and work on an outcome for them, which is to provide somewhere to live, an opportunity to go into rehabilitation, to get back into society. They do a brilliant job, right? This fucking amazing job. Anyway, they put a proposal together. I wasn't ready for this. A proposal together for me to say, look, this is all the stuff we wanna do. We need 150 grand. I was like, that's not a huge amount of money. And then I read we're spending, what, 15.4 billion a year on housing people. That's a new statistic.

[A]

That came out. Yeah, that came out from Home Affairs Committee this. Yeah, it was 15 billion a year on asylum accommodation of all different kinds. And I think it's. That's tripled over the course of however long. I forget how, what the time period was, but it's enormous. Like, that's not. That's not nothing by any stretch of the imagination.

[B]

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[A]

Yeah, exactly. And it's one of those things where on the one hand I think the political class of. They get the ick talking about this issue, I think, and that's. That can explain at least half of why they've ignored it for so long. They don't. There's a certain type of person, particularly in the Labour Party, but not exclusively. I mean, the small boats crisis began under the Conservatives and they didn't do a hell of a lot about it, where it would just. It would make them feel somewhat morally questionable to even for a second maybe contemplate the fact that some of the people, just some to try and get them to admit this, who are coming across in a small boat, aren't actually fleeing war and pestilence, but are fleeing charges in other countries, as is often the case. Or maybe they don't have a legitimate asylum claim. Maybe this is just a route to economic migration, that maybe if you don't vet people, that a non negligible portion of them are going to be a threat to public safety, as we've seen time and time again. We could get into some of the examples. They just don't want to touch that. It just, it seems to. It seems kind of anti migrant, uncaring, whatever. So I think that's a large part of it. The other thing is that they don't necessarily see the consequences of it in the way that a lot of people around the country do. And then there's also the question of there's a whole kind of racket which has cropped up now. I mean there's the, the hotel chains, many of which were failing anyway. Covid hits, they all get shut down by the government and then have just found a way to kind of coin it in off the government off the back of the dysfunction of the asylum policy. So they're doing pretty well out of it. There are all these kind of refugee NGOs, some of which are in receipt of government money to run helplines for refugees and so on and so forth. They're doing pretty well out of this dysfunctional arrangement, but it's not obvious to me that anyone else is really. So, like, the politicians get the virtue, the hotels get the contracts, the NGOs get the contracts, but ordinary people are forced to suffer the consequences.

[B]

There's a contradiction in there as well, in that the same people who, policy wise, talk about wanting to help the working class, they consider they want to help the working class, then sneer at the very people they say they want to help who are questioning why they're having to put up with this in their community. And. And I've been into a refugee camp I went to just literally as Covid was about to outbreak. It was two days before, three days before Boris locked us down. I jumped on a plane and went to Turkey, went to Istanbul and then I went up to the border. Erdogan was kind of sick of the amount of Syrians. Yes, but it was more than Syrians, but because they're the gateway to Europe and millions of people in the country. And I saw it and so he was busing people to the borders.

[A]

So I went up to the border.

[B]

With Greece, full barbed wire border, and I broke, kind of just walked into a refugee camp with a secret camera and just filmed it, went around and spoke to people and the people from all the countries you'd expect, Syria, Eritrea, blah, blah, blah. One thing a lot of people miss, they always talk about, it's always young men. So the reason it is, is the journey is so hard. The men go ahead, they create the base, they bring their wives and children afterwards. People should just, just know that. But the majority is economic migration. And look, I get it, I'd want to do the same. But you have to, you have to, you have to at least discuss the consequences. And the consequences, I think long term, they still hit these sneering middle class people, but they hit the working class people a lot harder, sooner, and it's, it's just not viable. I mean, look, you made a documentary about it. You went to down to the hotel protest. Yeah, yeah.

[A]

That was down in Canary.

[B]

Canary Wharf, yeah. What did you find with that?

[A]

Well, I thought that was. That was really interesting, because when that was shortly after you saw the protests kick off in Epping outside the Bell Hotel, which obviously became a big story, shortly after that, there were these protests which erupted outside the Britannia Hotel, which is Canary Wharf. It's kind of the edge between when Canary Wharf becomes like the Isle of Dogs proper, which is a sort of properly kind of working class old East London kind of community. So when it first kicked off, people are like, why is, why, why are the, you know, well off residents of Canary Wharf upset about this? That's not really who was upset about it necessarily. So the hotel was being handed over for, again, asylum seeker slash illegal migrant accommodation, however you want to put it. These protests began largely peaceful. People just showing up with flags, placards, often saying, we're not far right, we're just worried about our kids. That was the sort of message that you got. We went down there one day to just talk to people. Didn't really go into it with any preconceived ideas about who I was going to encounter, to be honest. And I think they really defied expectations. It was a very multiracial group of people. You're speaking to kind of mixed race couples. So young mother of five, all of her kids were half Moroccan, who was incensed about this particular issue. To a man and woman, they said a version of the same thing, which is that we don't have problems with people from. We don't have problem with immigrants, we don't have a problem with people from different backgrounds. All of our families are mixed race, our friendship groups are mixed race, whatever, but we don't know who these men are. That was the story over and over again. And I think, as well as working class people feeling the economic and kind of social effects of these insane policies quickly as well, I think they also just don't have the blinkers on in a way that a lot of middle class or upper middle class people do. They haven't kind of been trained through university, the media or whatever to ignore the evidence of their own eyes.

[B]

They haven't been socially coerced.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. They still have that kind of ability to just see what's going on and to say it. So I think that was one thing that was really, really striking. And I think in a lot of these hotel process, and of course, some of them have turned ugly, some of them have been hijacked by people who are just there looking for a fight with the police or whoever. And we shouldn't wilt from saying that. But to dismiss those protests up and down the country as just being that, I think really misses a trick because all the ones I attended got out to Epping as well. Also to report you're again seeing people making almost exactly the same points, which is, we don't have a problem with immigration, we just want it controlled. We wanna know who these people are and you can't lump this on our doorstep. And when you saw in what happened in Epping, where you know that Ethiopian asylum seeker, illegal migrant was in the country for eight days, during which time he managed to rack up a series of sexual offenses and has now only just been deported, they obviously had a point. And it's fascinating, in such a short space of time, the political class have been forced to respond to this, even if it isn't quite too late in the day, in slightly cac handed fashion as they're doing it at the moment.

[B]

Well, there's a really weak argument. It's like we're a nation of immigrants, We've been born. That's true to some extent. My father came over when he was nine from Ireland with his dad. But what happened is they, they moved to Accrington. My granddad got a job on the trains, worked hard, put all his kids through school. They all created good jobs. My dad became an aircraft engineer. He put us into good schooling. And generationally we've built better outcomes for the family and for the country. And I think a lot of people did that. They came across legally in the right way, not always. And created businesses and created opportunity. What we've got now is just a huge amount of people that we don't even know how they're going to contribute to the country. Can they contribute to the country? Can we create enough jobs in the right amount of time? And it just so obviously isn't working.

[A]

And everyone's saying that. I think even people have sort of migrant backgrounds are seeing that. That's one thing that's been really interesting. Like that Canary Wharf protest. There was a group of recently arrived legal migrants from mainland China who showed up and they were seemingly quite well to do. The sort of people who are living more on the Canary Wharf side than the Isle of Dog side.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And they were talking about, first of all, they themselves felt unsafe walking the streets at night when they're coming back late from their software job or whatever. But also they were really keen to come down and show that you don't have to be, you know, it's not racist to be concerned about this. They actually had a placard that they'd made that said, legal migrants against illegal migration and just anecdotally out in terms of friends, family, out and about, you do hear increasingly people whose parents might have come over in the 60s, 70s, whatever, who did the right thing, who went about it through the right way, who contributed, who did this, that the third, who are almost more incensed than even the white British population about this because there is that sense of unfairness. People forget that like a third of ethnic minorities voted leave at the EU referendum where migration was obviously a big issue. So I think it's quite clear that when you talk about like white Brits, the idea that this is concern about high legal migration or illegal migration, the idea that that's just racist is obviously for the birds. It's not ethno nationalism exactly, not in the slices, but when what that's also is really telling is the fact that people who have played by the rules, whose families have been here a long time, who have contributed and what have you, they're increasingly incensed by this as well. And I think that's something that you're definitely detecting right now.

[B]

Well, it's, I think it's really mid curve behavior because I'm talking to a lot of, where I live in Bedford, I talk to a lot of voters and one of the most interesting things I found with reform and a lot of people think I'm pro reform, I'm going to vote reform, it doesn't even matter. I haven't actually voted last three elections. I don't know if I'll vote in the next election. But I also want to be realist and why are people voting reform? And what I've noticed is a lot of working class people who are voting who are saying they're going to vote reform because the only people are listening to them because they've been ignored by political class. There's a lot of very wealthy, intelligent people now saying they're going to vote reform because they feel they're just watching the shape of the country and they feel that the country's been let down. It really is this kind of mid curve, middle, upper middle class socialist republic. I call them where I live the Socialist Republic of Castle Road because it's this like little area where all the middle class twats live.

[A]

They tend to stick to their own, don't they though?

[B]

Well, they do because the problem isn't on their doorstep and they've got to share their virtual Facebook that they're intellectually weak, they're emotionally driven and every single one of their arguments breaks down on the most simplest examination. But the really interesting thing is it's breaking across the whole country now. I mean, the Caerphilly vote was pretty, I found fascinating. I think a lot of people were very happy reform didn't win. They're probably more happy that reform didn't win than the labor getting utterly destroyed. But this like end of the uni parties is here.

[A]

Yeah, absolutely. And that's so exciting. Like that's something which we really haven't seen before. I mean, we've seen. What's interesting as well is that, you know, we've had this two party duopoly, Labour and Tories for a century and it was interesting enough that it looked like a party was gonna come along in the shape of reform and displace one of those two main parties, become potentially the main party of the centre right in British politics. What's happening at the moment is even more fragmented than that. We're entering a era of potentially four or five party politics. I heard someone on the radio the other day, kind of political contact, saying if you look at the poll now, out of all of the four main parties, you think, oh, this is a shift that's taking place under an electoral system first past the post that is supposed to mitigate against European style multi party politics. It's supposed to create when you get the right vote, share a solid majority through which you can govern and a solid position. Exactly who can hold you to account. You don't get shit done. That's kind of our system. Even with first past opposed, we're ending up with three, four parties which are potentially could be in contention to win an election or at least come first in an election, even if they can't properly get over the line. So that's so new and that's so fascinating and it's just down obviously to the failure of the uni party, of the labor and Conservatives. They've just completely destroyed their credibility. They're completely detached from the kind of historic electoral basis to which they were attached in Labour's case. And you could always kind of count about 30% of the electorate. Tory case could always count about 30% of the electorate. One of them based in the working class, the other one based more in the kind of middle class that's just completely imploded now. Labour betrayed the working class with Brexit and in a way, Tories betrayed the middle class with Brexit to a certain extent. So all of these things are up for grabs now and roughly reform are the ones who are primarily benefiting from it at the moment. But anything could happen between now and the next elections would be fascinating.

[B]

Yeah, I was looking at the polling yesterday and there's a clear lead for reform and then kind of Conservative, Labour, Lib Dems are, Green are all kind of. It's like a four horse race. Weirdly enough I expect a lot more conservative defections to reform and then the others. I think it's just the lefties. Where's my home? Yeah, like do I go full socialist with the Greens? Do I stick it out with Labor? Do I go to the Lib Dems because like they're the more rational and slightly snobbier leftist. Like where are people going to position self in the next election? We had Anne Widdakeham here. She thinks the, the next election is going to be between reform and Lib Dems. I don't think so. I, you know I had Zia Youssef in here yesterday and he actually said Labour's main argument would be it's us or reform, stick with us. I don't think that's a strong argument.

[A]

Kind of all they've got, I suppose. I mean Caerphilly was a good example. I mean obviously it was atrocious for Labour. I mean the fact that the centrality of Wales to the Labour Party really cannot be overstated, you know, that's the real heart of the Labour Party. That's why Caerphilly has always been in Labour hands for as long as the party has existed. So for them to barely make it into double digits of percentage of the vote share in that by election is crazy. But what was so telling there was that the question of Nigel Farage and reform is now the defining question of British politics. You're either with him or against him. So he's still setting the weather even when he's rallying people in opposition to him. If you see what I mean. Yeah, no, I do. So that's something which is as you say, it's telling that that's all labor of God. But I think that is going to be the move which is to say to all of these people who are tempted by the Greens or tempted by the Lib Dems or tempted by your party if it still exists by the time next election you know, it's time to come back home for your dinner because we've got a bigger fight on here. That's the sort of thing that, the fact that that's all they've got is pretty pathetic. But it's probably the best strategy that they have left at this point.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, I just find it all fascinating. My worry with reform is that I think winning the election is going to be fairly easy for them. It's what they do with the keys when they're given it. Can. Can they reverse a lot of this? Because I don't know about you, but I'm so many times, like, recently I was like, what the. What is going on here?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

What is happening to our country? I. I go to the US Quite a lot, and, I mean, I've been out twice in the last month, and there's this. It's like kind of like dual feelings that people have. One, they're laughing at us. Well, that's actually three, they're laughing at us. They feel sorry for us and they're worried for us.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And I know they're getting the extreme aversion on social media, but friends of mine are saying, like, what is going on in your country? And you've covered this. You're arresting people for tweets. You've got mass migration, you've got high tax, you've got low. Like, is anyone. Are there any adults in the room.

[A]

That says that we've become a sort of basket and as you say, it gets a bit amplified by the glare of social media, but it's kind of true. No, that's the thing. They've got a point, you know, even though we haven't fallen to some kind of personalist dictatorship under Keir Starmer, as some people on X might believe, if they don't actually live here, it's pretty bad. You talk about the free speech issue, which we've just put a documentary out about called Think before you post.

[B]

Brilliant, by the way.

[A]

Oh, thank you very much. Talking to some of the people who've been at the coalface of this. We're arresting at least 30 people a day for offensive social media posts. That was a figure that came in the Times, and that was a survey they did of just two offenses, one under the Malicious Communications act, one under the Communications act for kind of grossly offensive online speech. We have many more speech laws than that, but 30 a day. There was a U.S. free Speech Organization which crunched the numbers on that. So on the basis of those figures alone, we are in the UK comfortably arresting more people for speech crime today than the American state did during the first Red scare in the early 20th century. If that's not a free speech crisis, like, I don't know what it is. We've got to take that.

[B]

Is that a whole Number or a.

[A]

Percentage, that's, that's in terms of actually like absolute numbers.

[B]

You know, what was the population in the US Then?

[A]

I can't remember off the top of my head, but it was certainly bigger than our population now, even back then. So it's the sort of thing where you think this is a horror show and then you see things like the Graham Lyndon case, where I know that policemen at airports have guns anyway or whatever. But the fact that, that the symbolism of that comedy writer returning home from the US which we're told has fallen to authoritarianism and is a terribly scary place for dissenters, is frog marched off the plane, is confronted by armed police officers, he's locked in a cell for hours and hours, is interrogated, is so stressed out by the experience, he has to go to hospital because his blood pressure's through the roof. I mean, if we're not going to accept that the state has gone insane at this point, that it's not only just authoritarian, but incredibly cruel as well, when are we going to come to that conclusion? I think in a way, the Americans wading into this, even though they can sometimes overeg the pudding a little bit about how bad things are going, has forced us to kind of look at ourselves afresh from the outside.

[B]

That's been useful to somebody who was in your documentary. You had the bit with J.D. vance, didn't you, with Keir Starmer and Trump, and that embarrassing moment where JD Vance calls him out and Keir Starmer's all like, oh, no, no, we have free speech here. It's like, we, we don't. Yeah, we don't. I mean, I know my. I don't know if, you know, I had a 5 year lawsuit for 17 tweets calling a fraud out for being a fraud. 5 year lawsuit nearly bankrupted me. I won finally in the end because he was a fraud. But that would never. It would have been a slap case in the US Immediately struck out. Yeah, but this, this idea, that was it 12,000 people.

[A]

Yeah. In a year.

[B]

In a year. How much did you dig into the range of tweets? There's tweets, Facebook posts and WhatsApp things, whatever.

[A]

So that particular survey was focused on those grossly offensive communications, which is a useful one because it's so broad. You know, there are all kinds of people who've been swallowed up by that now. It's hard to separate out how much of that might be kind of genuine threatening, menacing behavior. But there's plenty of examples of people who were arrested under that Legislation for things that are entirely innocent. There's one couple in our documentary, WhatsApp. This is the WhatsApp groups absolutely insane.

[B]

So tell the story of that.

[A]

So, Maxi Allen, Rosalind Levine, they're a couple, they live in Bournemouth, they've got two children. They find themselves in a kind of protracted row with one of their daughter's primary schools over the appointment of a head teacher. Maxi, I believe, used to be on the board of governors. He's particularly concerned about this. Teacher steps down. It's not obvious when the next one's being appointed. Parents start to ask questions about this. They're talking about it on WhatsApp, they're talking about it on social media. As a consequence of this, the school appears to become increasingly agitated. They send out letters to parents saying that essentially trying to ward them off from engaging in this, you know, engaging in this dissenting activity on social media, that it was upsetting the staff, that it was rocking the boat at the school and so on and so forth. It escalates to the point where Maxi and Rosalind are banned from the school because of the fact that their behavior was deemed to be so over the top, which is a big problem, because their daughter, incidentally, has epilepsy and various other needs. So they kind of need to be, you know, back and forth at the school quite a fair bit for her care. So they're then facing a situation where all they can do is email the school. So there's an issue with, oh, she's got to go swimming, where do we pick her up? Or say, you know, new teacher, this is what needs to happen if she has a seizure, whatever. They can only do that over emails. And what seems to have happened, and I have put these questions to the school and they haven't responded to me, is that they then essentially were reporting them to the police for continuing to email too much, for engaging in malicious communications, for harassment. The investigation goes on for about five weeks. No evidence to back up any of these claims is found. But that comes after they were arrested at their home by five police officers in front of their youngest child. They were held in a police cell for hours and hours on end. So it's one of those things where even in this case, eventually it becomes no further action. The process is the punishment, isn't it? You've been humiliated in front of your neighbors, you've terrified your own children, you've been subject to a kind of police raid that you normally expect to see with like a kind of, you know, drug syndicate or something. Like that, and then for five weeks later, then turn around actually. No harm done. We couldn't find anything. But this just happens over and over again. And that was precisely one of those malicious communications offenses which.

[B]

How much resource is wasted on this?

[A]

That's a really good question. I think that's something that maybe Harry Miller and the Fair Cop guys have either looked into or certainly should, because.

[B]

I've had Harry in here, I should.

[A]

Ask him, because that would be really interesting. Because that's one thing which I'm sure it's not the lion's share of what it is that they're doing. You suspect that part of the appeal of going after these particular cases is that it's easier, cheap. You know, you're not having to spend months on end investigating this stuff. You are just looking at what people openly publish on social media or you're dealing with complaints that are being sent to you by irked members of the public or people with an axe to grind. It's kind of easier to sit there, as Alison Pearson says in the documentary where you pack a hobnob scrolling social media, than it is to, you know, chase down a drug gang in the street. But even if, you know, a pretty small amount of time and money is being devoted to this, given how terrible police forces up and down the country are at solving burglaries, attending actual violent crime, I don't think any of that time is justifiable. But they just found themselves in this position now, I guess.

[B]

Well, I'm asking for a reason. I talk a lot about Bedford, where I'm from, to the point of putting some people off. But, you know, I'm trying to get behind various local issues and we have a massive drugs problem in the town, as a lot of towns do. And I used to be pretty libertarian about drugs. We should talk about drugs actually. And you know, any adult should be able to choose whatever they want to do. But I'm also seeing the impact in our town. There's a particular building we have, it's called the Heights. It was an old BT back when BT in their heyday of, you know, having offices up and down the country. Big, this big building must be 13 stories big. Once BT didn't need anymore, it got redeveloped into housing and it was like sky living. Beautiful apartment. And it did. They look like beautiful apartments. I've been up to one of the high floors. One of the residents, actually, you got a beautiful view of Bedford. But what they ended up doing, social housing, took the first, I want to say five floors And I think the company's called Genesis and what you've essentially created is Snowpiercer. Have you seen Snowpiercer? No. Right. Snowpiercer is this film whereby everyone in the world has died from, from a catastrophic weather event. I think the planet's frozen and there's just this train, there's all that's left, this train that's going around, around the world and, or America or wherever and. But in there you've got the different carriages.

[A]

Oh yeah.

[B]

The rich people live at the front, the poor people live at the back and you know, you've got all the social issues within that. This building is Snowpiercer because within the social housing you've got plenty of good people who just need a helping hand. Yeah, single mother needs somewhere for her and her kids, but in there you've also got fuckheads like crack dealers, drug addicts, an arsonist and the kind of people who just cannot socially integrate. And what that has brought to this tower block is all kinds of issues. It's got so bad, I can show you some of the pictures. It's got so bad that every night drug addicts were breaking into the place. They were pissing on the carpet, puking in the elevator, in, on the floors, all the carpets have been ripped up, all the walls are stained, the elevators don't work, the boilers haven't worked for months. So all these people who bought these homes now can't sell them. They can't sell them for two reasons. First, if you walk in there you're just going to be grossed out, there's rats outside, whatever. And they've paid 150, £200,000 for these properties. Secondly, the landlord let the property down. He hasn't spent the service charge on the upkeep so they've had to raise the service charge to fix so many issues. It wasn't fire safe, it was a potential another grenfall. And so even if you want to buy this properties, you're not going to because the service charges are like 8,000 a year, which is ridiculous. Anyway, I'm getting to a point is that I have this private security team I've been deploying around my town. We just deployed them there for a couple of days. And what happened was the people who'd been running the drugs and the addicts started to think who these guys with yellow jackets, they started not attending or question why are you there? And it's got a little bit worried. We then shared all the information with the police and the police started Doing door to door knocks and based themselves there. And I asked one of the residents, they said, yes, the issues that we've been suffering have been, you know, have been lesser over the last couple of weeks. And then, so I, like, I want to go, I want to know how much time is my police force spending on policing these tweets and Facebook posts when there are serious social issues around drug dealing and drug consumption that are genuinely ruining people's lives and destroying the economic value that they've created in their properties. I want, I want the match. Because to me, none of this makes fucking sense.

[A]

No. And people could see it everywhere. Like the police have kind of withdrawn from so many areas of like public space. Then it's become a running joke that if something gets nicked, you only call the police so you can, you know, you can get your investigation record so you can claim it on your insurance. I mean, this just become a joke, a running joke. And then at the same time, all this time is being devoted to chasing people for what they've said on the Internet. And there is, there are enough of these cases now to the point where it can't be nothing that they're spending on this. Like another case in the, in the documentary with the kind of second case study is Alison Pearson, who's a Telegraph columnist. I'm sure, you know, I'm sure many of you viewers will. She was visited by the police on Remembrance Sunday last year, over a year old tweet, which she had promptly deleted afterwards. Anyway, it was essentially during the kind of anti Israel marches that kicked off after October 7th. She mistook a group of people, she mistook them for Hamas supporters, saw the police posing with them, said that, you know why the police snuggling up with the Jew haters. Turned out they were supporting a different group, a kind of Pakistani political party. She deletes the tweet, doesn't think any more of it. A year later she gets a knock at the door and they say that they're investigating her for inciting racial hatred. They refuse to tell her who her accuser is. They refuse to tell her what tweet it was. There was this absolute farce where she was having to defend herself against allegations that she wasn't even sure what it is that she had said. But as that investigation by Essex police carried on, it just became absurd. At one point they set up one of these kind of gold group commands, which is usually, you know, reserved for if you're dealing with a kind of ongoing terrorist incident or something like that. To do with one tweet. They continue to push and investigate this, even though, you know, Alison had the Telegraph on her side. They were digging in to try and find out who it was. It later transpired and it was, I think, leaked to the Guardian that it was someone who clearly just had a political axe to grind against Alison Pearson, dare I say it. So it was complete farce from start to finish. But you think even this case, which never got to the point of an arrest, Alisson refused the. The voluntary interview, being who she is, she was very well advised, both by the Free Speech Union, but also people at her own newspaper. But even that was surely the amount of time that must have sucked up is going to suck up a lot more time, because I know she's pursuing legal action. Police now. And as you say, in the context of people feeling like various crimes have almost been decriminalized, it's a lot easier to buy and sell drugs than it used to be. It's a lot easier to take drugs in the street. It seems like shoplifting has become compulsory. It feels like parts of London. It's one of those things where you just think, surely this is not only like a problem of cost, but also people just not even trusting the police, people you wouldn't expect not to trust. The police are now really wary of them because they know that it's that combination of being useless when it comes to actual crime and sinister when it comes to speech crime that you detect all. Lots of people.

[B]

I want to talk to you about one of my sponsors, Incogni. And that means we're going to talk about the weird world of spam. And I don't just mean those spam emails that you get day after day from companies you never heard of and companies you've never signed up to. I'm also talking about those spam phone calls you get from those people who seem to know a little bit too much about you, trying to get your bank details. It's all a bit creepy right now. This all comes from the world of data brokerage. There are companies out there collecting your data, building profiles and sending that data to anyone who wants it. Which is why when one of those scammers phones you up, they seem to know everything about you. Now, I've tried, I've tried myself to get off these lists, tried to get off the phone lists, try to get off the email list. I unsubscribe from every one of these emails that comes in, but this game of Whack a Mole, it just never ends. And so this is where Incogni comes in. They do all the hard work for you. They reach out to these companies and they will get you legally removed from these lists. And I know because last time they sponsored my show, I signed up and I didn't take the free option that they offered me. I wanted to pay for it. I wanted to see if you get value for money. And they removed me from 79 data broker lists. And so I've stayed on, I've stayed a subscriber and I have seen a massive decrease in the number of emails and phone calls I've been getting. So it's a great service. I recommend you check it out. If you're sick of this like I was, please head over to incogni.com Peter and sign up. If you use the code, Peter, you will get a lovely 60% discount. So that's incogni.com Peter, in making the documentary, like, what was the background to all this? Is it just because of Southport and they're worried about more riots? And it's an escalation from someone who obviously is a dumbass, but, like, thinks this is a good idea or is there something really more sinister going on?

[A]

I think it's got a really long tail to it, is the boring answer. Because essentially, in this country and in many European countries, but I think we're a particularly bad example. Over the past 60 years, we've basically been engaged in this kind of experiment with policing speech, with policing hate speech in particular. So in this country, in 1965, we passed the Race Relations Act. It's got many things that are just protections against racial discrimination, but it also introduces this idea and this offense of inciting racial hatred. So inciting violence is basically considered a crime pretty much everywhere, across the free world, even in America. But this is a new concept, the idea that if you're inciting hatred, if you are saying things which are deeply racist or what have you, then it's within the state's interest to clamp down on you. Since then, you just start to see these laws proliferate. We get incitement to religious hatred. In the 2000s, these communications offenses crop up, particularly 2003 Communications act clamping down on grossly offensive speech. So it just kind of piles up, creep, creep, creep slowly. And then you get the arrival of first the Internet and then social media. So in the 2010s, you start to see all these stories which people might remember if they're of a certain age, but have kind of been a little bit lost now, of people just. It was often just drunk students, you know, There was a guy called Liam Stacey, I believe, in Wales, who got very, very drunk and said some absolutely horrific things on Twitter one night, and it ends up being landed in prison for it. There was another young man, I can't remember his name, who was like copying and pasting Madeleine McCann jokes from Sikopedia and ended up actually being prosecuted for grossly offensive speech as a consequence of.

[B]

This is me of that Scottish guy who taught his dog to do a Hail Hitler. Yes, he went to jail.

[A]

He did. Well, that was Count Dankler, AKA Mark Meekin. Yeah, he was under this precise bit of legislation, Section 127 Communications act, for this skit in which he teaches his girlfriend's pug to do a Nazi salute. Being quite careful, he even makes a point of explaining the joke at the beginning so that no one could be in any doubt that he's doing this because he thinks it's funny. His girlfriend loves the pug, so he's gonna turn the pug into the worst thing that you could possibly be. So he lays out all the context, does it? He's still visited by the police, he's arrested, he's eventually prosecuted and found guilty and he has to pay a £800 fine, I think.

[B]

I thought he went to jail.

[A]

He was definitely. He was definitely locked up for a period, but it was one of those things where in the end it was just a fine which he refused to pay, I think, eventually. So there was some question as to whether or not he'd be properly locked up as a consequence of that. But I think it was all resolved in the end. But there are loads of cases like this, so you've got the building up of the speech laws and then the rise of social media, and those two things coming together with a general kind of climate of offense taking that's cropped up, you know, in this country, many others, over the course past 10, 15 years. It's a lethal combination. And then I think what happened with Southport was it just brought everything into sharp relief because you did have this moment of incredibly high tension. You also had a moment of horrific riots kicking off across the country, people saying absolutely horrific things on social media, of course. But I thought it was really telling that in the wake of Southport, the response from the government was not simply to crack down on the people engaging in the violence, which no one disagreed with, but it was also this sense that free speech was to blame. Like Keir Starmer on television saying people who are engaging in this violence either on the streets or online, you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. There's a big difference between those two things. I think it showed that we have a political class which essentially sees censorship as all that stands between civilization and barbarism. That if you allow too much free speech on the Internet or anywhere else, riots is what you get. They kind of have this very simplistic people are kind of very monkey see, monkey do attitude towards this. And I think that's just what came to the fore after Southport. But also what you saw after Southport was how even though these laws, people pretend that they're very tightly defined people, this is only about clamping on the most extreme speech. When you have something like inciting racial hatred or stirring up racial hatred on your statute books, it is by definition subjective who defines what hate is. So you end up with someone like Jamie Michaels, the kind of third case study in the documentary thing before you post, he gets on social media after the Southport stabbings, after that horrific massacre.

[B]

Was that the sole.

[A]

This is the soldier. Exactly. So it was a footballer in his youth, ends up joining the Royal Marines, serves in Iraq. You know, the sort of person who you would hope that the British state were trying to look after rather than lock up. But there we go, he gets on Facebook, he makes a video after Southport. This is kind of around the time there was that misinformation swirling that the killer was like a Muslim small boats migrant or whatever. So he's kind of working on that assumption, as a lot of people were. He makes his video, he's quite angry, but he's still talking about we need public safety around parks and schools, we need to do this in the right way. I'm not talking about violence or anything. He's explicitly saying this. We need to have meetings with the councillors, we need to have meetings with the politicians because illegal migration is getting out of control. Some quite spicy language in there, but it's nothing. He's obviously quite angry, but he's literally warning against violence and against going after.

[B]

Anyone in particular and saying what a lot of people are thinking.

[A]

Absolutely. And so he is arrested for this, for inciting racial hatred. Although comically, when the police officer arrests him, he said that he was indecent, racial hatred, which isn't a criminal offence. So that tells you everything you need to know about the police. They're kind of both sinister and incompetent at the same time. His case was particularly shocking because he, unlike many of the people who were arrested after Southport he pleaded not guilty against, actually, the advice of his duty solicitor, who sounded pretty useless, to be honest with you. So he pleads not guilty, he therefore ends up actually going to court, but he's held on remand for, like, 17 days, which is very, very unusual, particularly for a speech offence. Free Speech Union find out about his case.

[B]

Remand is generally for people who may abscond or who are dangerous.

[A]

Exactly. And what is it a danger of making another video? It was what they were kind of getting at. So it was one of. It was. And they would have banned him from social media anyway as a condition of his release. So it's one of those things where. But by dint of the fact that he did plead not guilty, that gave enough time for his case to be reported. Free Speech Union found out about him, they took up his case, they got him home, they got his tag taken off, which they tried to send him back with, and it ended up in court. So, bearing in mind that he was in police custody for 17 days, it goes to a jury and they acquit him in 17 minutes.

[B]

Amazing.

[A]

In the documentary, he tells me that he didn't have his cup of tea, hadn't even had time to call before they were called back in, because everyone was like, what are you talking about? As soon as they were presented with the evidence, it was absolutely clear. And I think there as well not, you know, we should defend people's right to speak, regardless of who they are and what their background is. But you do have someone who served their country, who risked their life for this country, who went to Iraq, you know, a war that we were launched into on false pretenses. And to be treated that shabbily by the British state, it just adds that extra level of kind of horror to what's been going on here. I think that's why. I think it's probably one of the more powerful moments in the documentary when he talks specifically about that sense of betrayal that the country that he'd given so much to was quite happy to lock him up just over what he'd said.

[B]

Well, that sense of betrayal exists across the country right now. I mean, I feel betrayed as a taxpayer who's worked his bollocks off for 30 years, paid a lot of tax, created a lot of businesses. And I feel like someone who's been demonized is someone who's worked hard as a creator. And I think every Reform voter you speak to has a story of betrayal. But the most interesting thing on that was, is you then look at Lucy Connolly. And you think what bad advice she had.

[A]

Yeah, that was really striking.

[B]

And it was a gross. What she said was gross. And there's other grosses. I don't agree with her. I don't think I'd even. I don't think she's the kind of person I'd be friends with. I'll defend her, but. And the fact that if she'd have maybe gone to a jury trial, she might have been acquitted 17 minutes later and not been thrown in jail and treated again so horrifically. Yeah.

[A]

Oh, and that does seem to be so much what it hinged on in her case. And also because the fact that she wasn't being bailed, the fact that she wasn't being sent home, it adds this extra pressure to say, just plead guilty, you'll get time off. All the rest of it. There's the air that's some. It's one of those things where, particularly when people find themselves arrested, chewed up by the criminal justice system over speech, the outcome seem primarily based on whether or not you know what to do in that situation, whether or not you know that the Free Speech Union exists, whether or not you've got a bit of money and therefore you've got, you know, some pretty good solicitors on hand, like that is the kind of dividing line. So if you can understand why so many people just go along with what their duty solicitor says, because why wouldn't they? But. But there's so much that so many people who probably wouldn't have seen the inside of a. Of a prison cell had they just been better advised about how to deal.

[B]

Do we know how many people are currently in jail for speech crimes?

[A]

I have no idea off the top of my head, because it's one of those things where there's obviously a big difference between the number of kind of arrests that are taking place and investigations and actually things ending up in court, ending up being prosecuted, ended up in conviction. That's kind of one of the problems actually is that a big part of this is the police. So we've seen the number of people being investigated for communications offenses, for instance, shoot up. But at the same time the number that are actually making the prosecution seems to be going in the other direction. So they're clearly over interpreting laws and arresting people left, right and centre. Well, we had a chart that's become.

[B]

A big issue in a previous show that was shown when the. It was a number of arrests overtime for speech crimes. And there's this massive jump when labour. Massive jump during their term are the Police and courts, do they essentially have their hands tied because of the way the statutes are written, or do they have the ability to kind of call this out for what it is and just ignore it?

[A]

I think it's quite clear that particularly the police are part of the problem now because as I say, they're arresting a hell of a lot of people for speech at the moment, but a lot of those cases are never making it to court at all because there's just insufficient evidence for the situation. Did they ever proceed? Yeah, well, they could certainly show more discretion. They could certainly be much more careful about who they actually pursue. I think they've got it into their heads that, that they are first of all kind of duty bound to investigate these kinds of crimes. I think they've, in their head, it's wrapped up this idea that they need to rebuild their reputation with certain communities, minority communities, different sexual orientations, whatever. They've been on this kind of for the past 10 years in particular, but for a bit longer than that, this kind of self flagellating tour of like, we've changed, we're not the police of the past. We'll show up at the Pride Parade even uninvited, we'll put the, the rainbow flag on the car, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I think this has got wrapped up within that. They've really come to see in a quite perverse way, policing people's speech as their ways to rebuild trust with ethnic minority communities or with the gay community, what have you. Which is perverse because I think those people are primarily more concerned about, you know, people drug dealing on their estate rather than whether or not someone somewhere is saying something offensive. But that's a big part of the problem. A lot of the kind of speech policing that's crept up has emerged from within the police itself. I'm sure when you had Harry on, he talked about non crime hate incidents, which of course was recorded against him. It's very Orwellian practice, clues in the name. It's a non crime. You haven't committed any crime by any stretch of the imagination.

[B]

It's the naughty step. Yeah, it's the naughty step for adults.

[A]

The naughty step, but with consequences and police officers involved. You know, people like Harry, who has his name put down next to one of these as a non crime hate incident, recorded against him for nothing other than speech, in his case, on his Twitter account. But of course it does have consequences because it can show up in advanced DBS checks if you're going for a particular job. So you kind of. It's a kind of soft criminalization of speech, I think, and quite sinister. And particularly because the police can record these things even if there's no evidence, or they certainly were until recently, no evidence of there being any hate involved. And also basically just at the say so of the accuser, which makes it a particularly slippery slope. That is fascinating because that just is something that the police came up with out of whole cloth, really. It goes back to the MacPherson Report into the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence, that reports in 1999 suggest that police forces should engage in more kind of intelligence gathering where racism is concerned, just to kind of work out if there are emerging problems in a particular community. You know, is there is that kind of low level hostility that could build into something. But the police take on this idea and then develop this bizarre Orwellian non crime hate incident notion which they lay out in their 2014 policing guidance. This is something that was never created by an act of Parliament. This is something that there was never any politician who said, we want the police to do X. They just started doing it all of their own volition. So it's another example of how, yes, our laws are a big problem and in many ways they're the primary problem. And I'm really heartened to see both the Conservatives and reform talking about repealing those laws, which I think will be a really positive development. But there is also a problem of the culture within the police itself, which, strange as it might have been to say, like 10 years ago, have fallen to woke identity politics to a degree that almost exceeds many other institutions in society. You never would have thought that if you think about what we traditionally associate as the police force as being like. But it has become particularly captured by this stuff, I think.

[B]

Is it because the police have struggled to recruit the right people as well. I mean, you know, I went out to Ukraine in 2012 for the Euros and I distinctly remember a moment. Unfortunately, British fans tend to like England fans tend to not always be the.

[A]

Best, not cover themselves in glory, not all.

[B]

And so there was this big square which was the big kind of like party square. And you had the Swedish section where they're all like. Half of them are just the most beautiful people you've ever seen singing songs and having a beer. And then you got the Danish section, they're all beautiful. And then you've got the French people, all kind of cultured and you get the English section. Honestly, it was just not everyone, but what you would expect. It was a Lot of like skinheads, tattoos out, shirts off, singing. Two World wars, one World Cup. Anyway, so I'm obviously with the England fans, I'm with my mate Ollie and, you know, and I'm looking a lot across the Swedish lot, thinking I kind of want a bit of that. And what I mean by that, I mean. I mean that looks like a fun party, to be clear. This.

[A]

Yeah, this is a lascivious comment.

[B]

No, this is just a bunch more. Anyway, so one English twat lobs a bottle. Yep. Lobs this bottle flies across, smashes on the floor. Out of nowhere, 200, kind of like the most heavily armed police come out, you know, full riot gear with shields and just block off. Yeah, the England fans and they all themselves and don't do anything. And I, I know police have to do work in the community, but I think we should be a little bit. Get scared of the police in the right way in that if you commit a crime, a real crime, they're going to come and get you and they're going to arrest you. I think I. That's something I want. I want to know the police are out there dealing with crimes I don't want to see. I went to visit John Tizard, the PCC for Bedford. It's a very weak man. I walk in, the first thing I literally notice, he's got a trans flag pin badge. And I'm not like an anti trans person, but I'm just like, here we go.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And I discuss issues in the town. He's. It's just things. He's not going to deal with these particularly weak. And it's like, why I don't want the culture war within the police here are crimes. Go and investigate them. Give the police the time and enough resource to go and deal with crime.

[A]

The problem is this is how they're using the resources that they're being given because like so much, this is coming from within. The calls are coming from within the house, as it were. Like, it's. That's. You see that with all of these campaigns that they will launch into out of nowhere. I think it was South Yorkshire Police a couple of years ago, again, entirely of their own volition, as far as I can tell, launched a hate hurts campaign, which had a hotline that if someone had said something mean to you, whatever you could call up. I mean, they present this as, this is about hate crime. But the line between hate crime and hate speech is completely blurred now. But there was a few years ago, I think it was in Merseyside, they parked up outside in Asda Merseyside.

[B]

I know what you're going to tell.

[A]

Me about this big board.

[B]

It was like a vat, like it was lorry.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. And it just said being offensive is an offence.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Which is kind of true and not true, but nevertheless, the fact that they had to then qualify that to clarify that actually being offensive is an offence, being grossly offensive is an offence, to be technically clear. But that's basically trawling for reports that's going around saying, could you please come forward and tell us if someone said something offensive to you? And we will happily take it very seriously. So this is them doing this. It's hard to speculate, like Harry will know the policing world a lot better than me, having been within it, as well as kind of raging against it from the outside now. But it does seem like, I think the push towards a lot of graduate employment in the police has almost certainly been a massive mistake. I think like many institutions, they've got into their heads that particularly for more kind of senior levels, that you need to have a degree. I think if anything, they should ban degree holders from going in there on current evidence. It's obviously not working out well for them. I think the College of Policing is a massive problem. The kind of policing quango which came up with the non crime hate incident guidance, I think that place should obviously be shut down. It's not obvious what purpose it is serving other than encouraging police forces to engage in this kind of behavior.

[B]

What about PCCs? Do you have any thoughts on pieces?

[A]

Well, in theory they should be a way of holding this stuff in check, but at the same time, that doesn't seem to have worked out too well. It's one of those kind of layers of elected office that I think most people are unaware of, don't really think about. So therefore how useful is it to actually hold them to account? If, you know, you ask your average person on the street, they wouldn't even know that position existed. So that's a difficult thing because obviously there's a tradition of that more in America people know that that person exists, they get elected on a particular platform, but here they just don't seem to serve anywhere near the same kind of, like, scrutiny.

[B]

Well, so I didn't even know what a PCC was until I started scratching the surface and then I looked into it and I didn't know who they were, who voted for them and why. And I'm particularly skeptical of the PCC that we have. But I also interviewed Lisa Townsend, who cover cover Surrey and I thought she was great. She put up a robust and strong argument for it. But it really comes down to how good is that person more than their incentives. My fear is it's so political. You know, if you've got labor PCCs up and down the country, they need to do a job of communicating that the, that what they're doing is working and therefore they're incentivized to do certain things, to skew, to push data towards a place where it proves that they're doing a good job. But overall, I don't know, I just feel like a bit like the bank of England. Even though I hate the. Can't stand the banks England, I feel like the police should just be completely independent organization run by police people with no interference from politicians. Have you read Ian Dent's book, How Westminster Works and why It Doesn't? I've talked about this show a lot. It's a fascinating book.

[A]

It's.

[B]

It's scary when you read it, you're like, oh, I know why Westminster's. But in reading it, there was this really important part where it's talking about education. Every time a minute, new minister comes in, new minister, education, they want to prove a point, so they want to change things. Yeah, he said. This guy was interviewed, he said, I just wish someone would come in as a Minister of Education, said, I'm not going to do anything, just carry on, just give it. Yeah, I kind of feel like that with the police. It's like, stop trying to reinvent them for whatever ideological bullshit the current government has. Can we just police crime? Can we just stop people going into Greggs and stealing? Can we stop kids running around with knives? Can we stop drug addicts taking control of our town centers? Like, can we, can we go back to this? Like, is that crazy? Am I fascist?

[A]

I think the problem is they've got so out of control that in a way it does invite more central government meddling because obviously they are supposed to be operationally independent and what have you. But at the same time, like with the NCHI stuff, there's been time and time again there's been attempts to knock that back. You know, it went through Harry's case, it goes to the High Court, where they ruled that this, not only in his particular case was this an interference with his free speech, but ultimately when the case concludes that this, the collecting of these NCHIs in the manner in which they'd been doing it at Humberside Police was unlawful, that didn't shift the dial at all. You then had kind of successive Tory Home Secretaries kind of issue edicts and guidance to try and get them to rein it in. I can't remember if it was Suella Braveman or Priti Bissell who pushed this through, but just saying things like, stop recording schoolchildren, please, and they couldn't even hold to that. There was this case in the Times a few months ago where one girl had been put on, had a non crime hate incident put to her name because she accused one of her classmates of smelling like fish. Considering their argument for this is that we need to keep a tabs on hostility in society in case something big kicks off. What they think is going to happen, like a pogrom against people who smell like fish is going to emerge if this teenage girl is allowed to say what she thinks. So the police are just like kind of becoming Lawrence themselves where this sort of thing is concerned. So you can understand why there's more moves to say stop it from central government. But you do think that if you removed, if you pared back all of these speech laws we've got, they would have less reason to do it in the first place. So that's definitely a better place to start than getting too involved, I suppose.

[B]

Well, look, I'm a bit older than you, but I'm pretty sure people still say to their kids, sticks and stones. Yeah, when did we get so wet? When did we get so wet?

[A]

That's a really important question. It's kind of the question of the age, isn't it?

[B]

To some extent, it's a combination of pussies.

[A]

Yeah, it's insane. Like, because you say that, people still say that to them. But you do worry that we've moved so much into this kind of victimhood culture, this sort of preoccupation with vulnerability, the way that's preached to kids so often as well. And you see it show up in the, in the speech sense. You see it show up in the kind of mental health area. Kids from a very young age being kind of almost encouraged to see themselves as pretty fragile as not as, you know, that sense that previously it was all about being robust and resilient and now we've flipped completely in the other direction. I don't know how you unwind that so quickly because that's not about laws, that's about culture. And just where we've sort of shifted over the course of the past generation or so. But.

[B]

Well, I think we have to shift the culture of the entire country.

[A]

It's.

[B]

I think a lot of it needs to come from parenting.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I'm conscious of what my kids go through. I'm there to support them, but at the same time, I'm trying to build resilience into them. And I think I. I don't know, man. It's. It's like it feels like all of this is linked.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Like every part of the, the decay of this country and the normalization of decay is all linked. And to me, it's all downstream of government. Yeah. Every part of this is downstream of government that government wants to be in. Every part of our business, wants to protect us from every scenario. But it's like that comedy sketch that I played before and Christina P. Where she's saying, I was on red hot monkey bars and I didn't fall on mulch or foam, I fell on a hobo. The world we've created now, it just seems to want to be like a giant blanket around everyone. And it's, it's, it's not good.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, it's also one of those things where, you know, when there'd be some campus controversy. Yes. Someone being no platformed, as we used to call it a few years ago, or people freaking out because someone of an opinion ever so slightly different showed up and they just basically had a mental breakdown. There was this tendency to just sort of turn around and be like this started emerging in the kind of mid 2010s where it kind of became a mock, much bigger issue. Although we'd been writing about it for quite a bit before then, to entirely generationalize it and be like, what is wrong with millennials as it was then? Or what is wrong with Generation Z? These kids have gone crazy. Where are they getting it from? They've clearly been like, socialized into a society which has made them like that. They're going for a schooling system which some quite well meaning policies have resulted in them basically being told to always run to the teacher if something upsets them. I think like the kind of anti bullying crackdowns of recent decades have probably gone too far in the other direction as far as any kind of teasing or back and forth is something which is supposed to be met with quite a firm response that's obviously going to contribute to it. You also have just the rise of like, political correctness more broadly in society and the fact that you do have, you know, any interaction with particularly the state institution. You're going to have those kind of, you know, bromides about how it's so important that we don't use the wrong language, that we don't offend particular communities and so on and so forth has been drilled into them. Growing up in a kind of multicultural environment, by which I don't mean the existence of different cultures and different backgrounds or whatever, but that kind of sense in which it doesn't do to talk about certain issues. You shouldn't be too critical of other cultures, you shouldn't talk too openly. You put all these things together, then someone's going to show up at a university. It's no wonder that they're going to take ostentatious offense to things or that they're going to be unused to encountering kind of ideas and speech that they dislike. And then there's the parenting piece of it as well, which I think is probably more concentrated amongst kind of middle class parents or what have you, but what in America they would call kind of helicopter parenting. That sense in which kids don't have any unsupervised time anymore. This is something kind of. Jonathan Haidt and Lenore Skinnies in the US have written very good stuff about.

[B]

Jonathan's great.

[A]

Yeah. And they've really got all the kind of statistics on this, which is. Makes it so clear that because there is not only are young people not being exposed to kind of difficult ideas or whatever, but just they're so unaccustomed to doing anything for themselves, to kind of going out and only coming back when the sun's coming, sun's coming down, getting into scrapes and all the rest of it. They don't build up that level of resilience that you would naturally build up if you had a slightly more unsupervised sort of live and let live childhood. So I think you crash all these things together and you end up with a generation who are, you know, freaking out and literally screaming when someone says something they disagree with. It's kind of obvious where it's come from, but it doesn't mean that it's it Also, it makes it even more difficult to unwind because you're talking about kind of decades of culture and socialization at this point.

[B]

But it does feel like it is unwinding.

[A]

Early signs of it.

[B]

Yeah. You know, a lot of the woke stuff has now failed. A lot of that's being wound back.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Which is a positive sign. But I, I go back to. I think this is all downstream from government. I think when government gets to like, if you defer to government to fix every one of your problems, you yourself are not resilient and you're teaching your kids that you need to Default to the state. But I really struggle to understand people who don't have a deep sea seated skepticism of the state. You might have been convinced to do the bidding of one party and that they're right and all the like. If you're left wing, all the problems are caused by the conservatives and practice, okay, great, you might have been convinced of that or vice versa. But the problems that we are living with now are decades old. I think they started at the tail end of Thatcher. They went through Blair Cameron and the fucking bullshit conservatives, and now into what we have with labor now. It's like, I just have a deep skepticism of the state. I think the incentive structure of the state is that the bigger it gets, the more malignant it gets, and we will suffer the consequences. I mean, I don't know if you know, this podcast was a bitcoin podcast before, and for eight years I covered, like, the economic system, how the bank of England works and how money works. And once you get, like, once you get into it, I find it so hard to come to a place that is other than the bigger the state is, the worse is for all of us. Yeah, yeah, we're broke as a nation. We're carrying too much debt. We've allowed rackets. You'd mentioned a racket earlier of the hotels, but rackets exist everywhere because the state is so easy to get money out of. I think nursing is a racket. Private nursing is a racket. I think the NHS people are so scared of privatizing parts of the nhs, but what we've done is we've pseudo privatized IT parts by allowing recruitment agencies to create a racket around nurses. It's like, at what point do people go, this isn't working. This big government project just isn't working for any of us.

[A]

You would think, and I do think, that people are more up for questioning some of these things they might have done previously, like even something like the nhs. I think regardless of where you stand on the kind of broader, you know, what system does it look like? People recognize that this thing we've got isn't working and it's not being emulated anywhere. It isn't the envy of the world. No, it needs a rethink. It's almost become an insult to people. It's like, you know, you're told to worship this thing, which is useless and could quite likely lead to you dying unnecessarily because of how dysfunctional it is.

[B]

Like sacred turd.

[A]

Exactly. A sacred turd is a very good way of putting it. But at the same time, it's kind of striking how there are certain things that the state does need to do, and it's doing those things terribly. Meanwhile, there are all sorts of things it shouldn't do at all. And it's doing that zealously and to the ends of the earth. It should be protecting people from violent crime, it shouldn't be protecting people from offensive speech. And yet making great guns are doing the latter and not very well doing the former. All kinds of things about you kind of see that across the piece. The fact that they've allowed kind of defense and national defense to kind of completely wither on the vine. Meanwhile, they're spending insane amounts of money on things that really don't matter. There's some kind of reckoning with that is absolutely necessary because at the moment people feel like it doesn't matter how much they pay in tax, it doesn't matter how much they kind of contribute to the system, it just disappears. Meanwhile, their actual kind of living standards get worse. So I think there's more of a kind of whether or not it's going to be pushed in a kind of purely libertarian perspective, I'm not sure, because I think people are still kind of, not necessarily kind of in themselves pro for free market, but a sense that there needs to be a reckoning with the state. So it focuses on the things that it should do and could potentially do well and get the hell out of the things that has no business doing and that have kind of tyrannical consequences when it tries to do this episode.

[B]

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[A]

Oh God, that's a difficult one. Leaving the European Union I think is an unalloyed positive and had nothing to do with the politicians because they didn't want it to happen. And I think that's telling. I've often said that you can these days really work out what the right position is to take. What are the public saying?

[B]

But even on that point, just on that point you say Brexit, that's not the overwhelming opinion. It's a slightly over 50.

[A]

Yeah, of course, 52 national poll.

[B]

But you know, but, but is that what's improved because of government or is that what's improved because of voters? Is that just democracy?

[A]

No, no. What is the government? Why is the government done? Yeah, I've dodged your question entirely. You write to pull me up on.

[B]

That because actually they fumbled the opportunity.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, exactly. When, when it got back to them, to implement it in a way that they absolutely screwed it up. That's a real tricky question.

[B]

Defense hasn't.

[A]

No.

[B]

Borders hasn't.

[A]

No.

[B]

NHS hasn't.

[A]

No.

[B]

Education hasn't. Policing hasn't.

[A]

What else?

[B]

The environment. You can give them an argument for the environment because they've, you know, ram net zero down.

[A]

But there's very bad for the economy.

[B]

You know, if you care about the environment, there's a, there's a small argument to Say we're maybe doing a better job than some countries on that because we're ramming at zero down. But yeah, let's give them a pass on environment. What has genuinely got better?

[A]

I can't think of nothing that certainly came from government that would be beyond some piddling little measure that wouldn't really touch the sides. I mean, there was a couple of things I think the last Conservative government towards the end started to get right, but often that was just undoing problems that it either made itself or ignored for 14 years. They started getting much more concerned about free speech and higher education, which is not the full extent of the free speech issue, but that was welcome. They started to unwind some of the trans stuff and, you know, the fact that schools were propagandizing this stuff to confuse pre teens again, it's nice, but it was a bit late and it was in large part undoing things that they supported five minutes ago. So even when you can point to a few things that maybe the last one of the versions of the last Tory government had done, in a way the only things that come to mind are them reversing things that they supported five minutes previously, which is not a great ringing endorsement of them, I suppose.

[B]

Well, so that's. And I ask it for a reason, because if people are struggling and I struggle with it, being a Conservative, all right, I didn't vote in the last three elections, but as a Conservative person seeing a Conservative rule, I struggle to say anything that's got better. Like I really. But. But if I think more broadly, what's got better? Well, you know, convenience as a shopper got better, the Internet's got better. Premier League football is the envy of the footballing world. You know, I can find things in the private sector that have done really well and I think you then have to sit back and go, okay, if nothing has got better, I mean, I might be Conservative and the person might be talking to might be a raging left wing lunatic for all I care. But like, can we just agree that things haven't got better? Can we just, can we just come to a meeting point and say, can we question. Maybe it's the role of the state, maybe something isn't. Maybe something in our democracy is broken. I interviewed Curtis Yarvin recently. Do you know Curtis Yavin fan?

[A]

Well, I'm kind of a Democrat from anything else. So the kind of neo monarchism is something that on a very fundamental level doesn't jive with me. Yeah, but he's a interesting and curious character to say the Very least.

[B]

So I like interviewing controversial people because I like to find the nuggets that are interesting. It. Which is. I mean, if I could only interview controversial people, I would. What I found interesting with him is that I don't agree with the idea of going back to a monarchy. And I understand the argument and I understand where his argument comes from. I just disagree with it. And I also felt like he doesn't have an answer for the idea. Well, with a bad democracy, well, what happens? You get another election, you can vote somebody else in. With a bad monarch, you might cut their head off and replace it with democracy again. So, like, you kind of just got to figure out to get democracy. Right. But. But the interesting point is, like he said when he talks about California could not build the iPhone. Yeah. You talk about what happened with SpaceX taking over a lot of the work of NASA. Like, there's a lot of things that work within the private sector. Are there things from the private sector we can learn from? And can government adapt to that? That idea of a CEO that runs a country, like, why not? Why? Yeah, what do we pay a prime minister? 140 grand a year? I mean, all the money we're wasting, could we pay 10 million? Could it be a job that's £25 million? They're like, shit, I want that fucking job.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I mean, that might be wrong again. That might create the wrong incentives. But what we have at the moment is the most important decisions that affect all of us in our country are made by the most stupid ideological people with the worst incentives. The labor front bench is embarrassing. Keir Starmer is a Fabian. Angela Rayner, I'm sorry, she's a pig at the trough. You know, fucking Rachel Reeves. I mean, this is easy to forget about them.

[A]

They're so forgettable figures.

[B]

Well, they're embarrassing.

[A]

Despite all the damage they do.

[B]

Edmund Yamahan is a lunatic. These people are embarrassingly poor and they're making the most important decisions on the country which. The butterfly effect destroys people's lives. You know, go back to the Conservatives. I mean, how many good. I like Katie Lamb. I think she's decent. Yeah, there's a couple of people I like. But generally speaking, we've created a structure that incentivize the worst people, dumbest people, to take up the most important positions in our country. I mean, that's what I think the problem is. Like, what's the shift to that?

[A]

No, I think that's a really good point because the, the political class is just so low quality as Much as anything else, these are not the great minds of our age. These are not the great visionaries of politics. If you even think back a few decades, to the kind of people who would normally populate a Labour oratory front bench, I mean, and you look at the sort of Oxbridge bluffers who are occupying and keeping those seats warm now. I mean, it's absurd. I mean, these are people who. You get the sense that really a lot of this is just personal ambition which has carried them through, which is why the. They're quite happy to have foregone the kind of money that they could have made in the private sector, because they're in it for the status and the red box and what have you. I think pay could be part of that, but I think it's also just. There's a certain point in which you struggle to generate the kind of politicians who are actually necessary. And you can see that on both sides, insofar as, yeah, you've got the Tory side traditionally drawing itself from business or from elite education or what have you. On the labor side, although it's kind of, you know, the mixture's got a bit mottled. It's become an increasing kind of middle class, professional kind of party, you know, the party of lawyers. The fact that it's run by a human rights lawyer, the fact that it's top to bottom, I mean, I think it was in the run up to Brexit, but working class representation in the House of Commons had crashed to kind of single digits amongst MPs. And that was largely because the Labour Party had become so middle class. People who came out the third sector, the charity sector, if you look at a lot of the Cabinet currently, that's.

[B]

Generally speaking, charities, trade unionists and lawyers.

[A]

Exactly. And as a consequence of that, you don't have people who have the kind of experiences of growing up in working class communities of the trade union movement, of those things actually would also produce genuinely interesting, formidable politicians on both sides that has kind of wilted. I think there is a question of incentives for within the elite itself. But I also think probably the primary thing right now is that democratizing the system is the answer, rather than the kind of Yavinite alternative. Because I can't think of a single. Like, especially the big issues at the moment. We were talking about illegal migration earlier. Like, that's one in a long line of examples in which the public were right and the politicians were wrong. For years now we've been told that anyone who's concerned about this is just either you know, has a misplaced concern. They've been lied to by demagogues. They're a racist. What have you any claims that this might be a problem for public safety is just again, the kind of Twitter fed fever dream of people who follow the wrong kinds of accounts. They've been proven right. This has been. The way in which this issue has been handled has been catastrophe from top to bottom. The amount of money that it sucked up, the effect it has had on public safety. We're speaking what, a couple of days after there was that stabbing in Uxbridge in West London. The suspect, the dog walker, the dog walker, 49 years old, bin man, loved by the community. He tries to intervene in what seems to be a violent altercation between an Afghan national in his early 20s and two other people who it seems like he may have been lodging with at the time, and he ends up being stabbed to death. This guy, the Afghan suspect, came to the UK in a lorry in 2020, was almost immediately granted asylum and leave to remain two years later. The fact that we could reel off a list of examples as long as your arm about cases in which people have come to this country illegally, often because they're running away from quite serious charges in other countries and end up committing violent crime, sexual crime, because of the fact that the political class was so blinkered, they refused to take this seriously. But because ordinary people, because I say that they didn't have the kind of indoctrination that you get, if you remember the political class or you read certain newspapers, they just saw that this was a problem where they didn't. I think you could say this on all kinds of issues. I think it's interesting how the net zero thing is increasingly becoming quite a populist issue because people are saying, hold on, hold on, you want to make our energy bills more expensive, More expensive? Isn't the point of view to make life cheaper for us so that the next generation can do better? Isn't the point of industrial policy and energy policy to bring those costs down? What do you mean making it more expensive? That's the sort of thing where I think it's quite clear that the more that we can have a politics which is more responsive to the people who keep getting it right rather than the people who keep getting it wrong, then we'll make a lot of headway in terms of producing better politicians, but also just producing better outcomes. But I think there's just a lot of people who tend to be quite sniffy about that possibility stuff.

[B]

Have you looked into the Swiss model at all.

[A]

It is interesting because it's much more direct, isn't it? And also kind of almost canton by canton, the way that this operates. I remember hearing someone talk about this recently. It's a bit hard to get your head around because we're so ensconced in our own system, but it is.

[B]

Well, we had a mayor of a canton in here. We've had two Swiss people in here now. And there's a couple of things that stand out that are really fascinating and I'll get the number slightly. But firstly, the Prime Minister is seven people, so it makes it really hard to get things done.

[A]

Right.

[B]

But if the government put forward legislation, a new policy and the citizens really disagree with it, they can. They can trigger a referendum with a. Say, a hundred thousand votes, you know, at the moment, like, if anything in the UK happens, we can trigger a question in Parliament.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

That's all. Like, we all go inside, we're all against digital IDs. 3 million people sign it.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Question gets asked, they'll have a little.

[A]

Westminster hall debate about it, which isn't even in part. Whatever they do. Yeah.

[B]

Doesn't change it. Well, this in. In. In Switzerland, it can trigger a reference. Say it's 50,000 votes or 100,000 votes, it becomes a nationwide referendum and you either and you vote for it happen. If there's a vote against, it doesn't happen. I'm like, that's cool. Digital ID would fall, would immediately collapse. It's not going to happen in our country. But if Tony Blair wants it, coincidentally, maybe his son is working at a digital ID company and also he's just a control freak. But if he wants to still try and run a country, we as a citizensry can block him. But it also works the other way. If the citizenry want a new law again, if they can get something like 50,000 votes, it becomes a referendum to have that law made. So the laws are really struck in or rejected by the public, not by, you know, one. One gang that we voted in who just get to arbitrarily just create. And I just think that's a better model. Also, 40% of all tax revenue is spent locally is. Is run through local. I think it's maybe through the cansons or the municipalities. Whereas we're at 4%. We. All our councils are going bankrupt because of all the statutory rights. All the statutory demands have increased and funding has dropped. I mean, where's that. Where do you think that ends up with broke councils? I just think the model's broken.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

It's not worked for three decades. It's still not working. Most people are unhappy. I think most labor voters are unhappy and they've got a Labour Party. They're rationalizing why it's still the conservatives fault. It's just not working. We're putting shit. The incentive draws in shit people. We can draw better people in with good money, but the incentive still might not work. Why don't we trust. Why don't we trust the, the, the, the brain power of a crowd? Why don't we trust the citizenry to know what's. I think we as a country know.

[A]

What'S best for us. Yeah, absolutely.

[B]

We know what a good lawyer isn't, a bad law is. And you know, some of them I might disagree with, but I think as a, as a general public we do. Can we have more direct democracy?

[A]

No, I think that's, it's definitely worth experimenting, but I think anything will be get us out of the morass that we find ourselves in. Because that is. You think of all the issues that have been sort of exploding. We talked a bit about legal migration, wokeness, getting completely out of hand, all kinds of things. The story of the past 10 or 15 years is like the elites have gone insane and the public remain pretty commonsensical. That's like the story of our time. So the more that we can lean into the public and kind of bring the elites to heal, the better. And I think a big part of the big kind of missing piece of the puzzle here is recognizing that when we say that we believe in democracy, it's not just. I think that it's about ordinary people are just as qualified as the people in the establishment to make this decision. I think they're more qualified. They live in society, they live with the consequences of the policies, the highfalutin ideas of people in Westminster or Whitehall. This is a point that the Chartists who were agitating for working class men to get the vote in the 1830s and 40s would make. It was like, we're not saying they're as good at making these decisions, they are better at making these decisions. And I think revisiting that kind of properly democratic spirit would get us somewhere. What form it takes, who knows? Because there's. I think often it can be, when we're talking about electoral systems or referenda or this or that, it can be put in the cart before the horse. We need just a more vibrant political culture, new parties, which people are actually involved in, to kind of carve out a New politics. But I think anything that's towards actually like democratizing the state would also lead to it becoming a lot more sensible and less dysfunctional in many ways.

[B]

You optimistic?

[A]

I am, you know, because things, first of all, I think even though things feel like they're going a bit haywire at the moment, there is a correction underway. Yeah, the public had enough. They're turfing out parties, left, right and center. They're making their voices heard even when they're denied to them. We've talked a bit about migration, but many other issues where they've sensed that they're not being listened to so they're taking to the streets or the sense that this party's not listening to them so they're going to another party. That's all immensely positive. You know, we had so long in British politics in particular where we were told people are really apathetic, they don't care. That's the big problem. Particularly since Brexit and onwards, people are much more involved now. They're just involved in a way that the political class would rather that they weren't. But I think that's great. And yes, we are dealing with a lot of very deep seated problems economically, socially, culturally, what have you. But the people are not putting up with it anymore. And yeah, it's probably going to get a bit worse before it gets better, but there is a correction underway. The political class being forced to respond to that public anger. It's going to be a bit bumpy, but I think the fact that a marker has now been put down as to what people want and they're not going to allow the elites to ignore it anymore.

[B]

And our role as independent media, I.

[A]

Think without wanting to blow too much smoke up over us, it is interesting how we haven't talked much about the media in this, but people are flatly rejecting that as well. The legitimacy, the viewing figures, the kind of sense that, that these people have a right to within the mainstream media, to lecture ordinary people or to withhold information from them. Social media and new media, I think have been tremendously positive. It's not to say that we should take credit for every good thing that's happened and disassociate ourselves from anything bad. There are always gonna be problems with new media as well that, you know.

[B]

Some people, we have our own incentives.

[A]

Exactly. Got perverse incentives in our own way. But yeah, I just think there's so much more out there at the moment. People are looking for alternatives both politically and in terms of what they're of kind consuming Media wise. And whilst there are always going to be some bad consequences that I can only really see overwhelmingly positive ones at the moment, things are shifting and when you're in a period of change that isn't necessarily going to be smooth, but I think that change was necessary and hopefully it will head in the right direction.

[B]

What drives spike?

[A]

Well, I think with spikes, it's. Our kind of principles have remained very consistent over the course of. We've been around for 25 years, which people are sometimes quite surprised to learn. But we were one of the first of, in fact the first online only current affairs magazine in the uk and our issues were always freedom of speech with no ifs and no buts. We talked a lot about that today. Democracy, the idea that there's almost no problem in society that can't be fixed by more ordinary people being involved and also the question of just human flourishing and plenty. The fact that people should expect and demand their lives to get better, to have a better share of the spoils, that we should fight for a society in which things are plentiful so that people can pursue their own interests and life free of the sort of penury that previous generations that's put up with. And it's not necessary on all those three fronts. You might notice things haven't been going great for the past no 20 years, shall we say.

[B]

But there's a free market for news now that's content and there's a lot of stories that the BBC kind of don't want to report on. They've not really done a great job, say with the rape gangs. Terrible job really.

[A]

They've got.

[B]

They don't want to touch it because it's like, I don't want to touch that. They have to think of voters, they have to think of politicians, have to think of advertisers. That opens up a free market for the likes of you or. I like, I am, by the way, I'm a quite a big fan of Fiona Bruce. I like Question Time. I like Question Time because it exposes the stupidity of the political class. But I also think Fiona Bruce does a pretty good job of correcting people and letting everyone speak. But outside of that there's very little I like in there. But there's a free market for this content now when people want to hear about hotels and for the BBC or Sky News aren't doing it, you guys are out there doing it. Plus you can respond quick and get out there. Yeah, like with this, I mean, look at. What is it? Three of us in a Room two staff. Sadly, my son isn't here today, but this is a three staff, three person business that generates millions and millions of views. Like, we have a free market, we can exploit their weaknesses.

[A]

Years.

[B]

I'm sure you guys have seen the growth.

[A]

Yeah, oh no, absolutely. Like the last few years in particular, the last kind of decade really, you're just seeing first of all, all of our issues kind of came around at once, which I suppose was quite useful. Been writing a lot about free speech, identity politics, you know, Euroscepticism, Greenism for a long time. So we were kind of pretty well set up for the political era that we found ourselves blundering into. But also you see it because people are really starting to see through the mainstream media and, you know, it's not as if it's this kind of grand conspiracy. They just have these tremendous blind spots and also a willingness, whether it's conscious or subconscious, just shape their reporting in line with their own particular narrative. I mean, the number of times that you see, for instance, a refusal to report what is actually the main issue of the story. So a piece going up on the BBC News about the recent riots that kicked off in just outside of Dublin over a migrant hotel because there had been a alleged rape of a child on the grounds of this hotel. What sparked the riots was not reporting that piece at all. So they haven't lied, but they have lied by omission. I not giving you the full story as to why tempers have run so high. You see that time and time again. I remember when the Epping protest started to kick off, there was a hasty piece which ended up on the BBC News report saying that 400 members of the far right were present. There's only 400 people at that demonstration. Unless they're all card carrying Nazis, which seems pretty unlikely given Nazis in the UK proper ones you could probably only get in the back of a minibus these days. There's not that many of them and people leapt on that instantly. And also social media played a key role in forcing them to correct that because it was obviously untrue. So I think all of us are profiting in this space from the fact that people are hungry for other alternatives. They see the blinkers and the blind spots of the mainstream media. And also I think they're just looking for politics again. Politics has just kind of woken up in the past decade in a way that it hadn't done for quite a while. And that is tremendously positive and makes people want to turn to, you know, new voices and what have you?

[B]

Well, brilliant. Look, I wasn't embarrassed to say I wasn't aware of your organization until I saw you humiliate Zach Polanski and went down the rabble. No, no, it's great. And I've watched two of your pieces since, and I'm going to be an avid viewer now, and I appreciate you coming in and just having a candid chat. Usually I have pages of questions, but I just knew I wouldn't need any today. It was like a fairly easy conversation. Look, I'm optimistic. I'm optimistic because there's a demand now for better people. And look, if it is reformed to win the next one, and if they fail, I think they'll be out pretty quick as well. But, you know, there is. I think we're in a new era now where we. We're going to demand better people. And look, I hope we get them. And I, you know, I hope you have a lot of success, you know, in driving the real conversation forward. We'll do our best here. But I appreciate you coming in.

[A]

Thanks so much.

[B]

Take care, and thank you to everyone for listening. We will see you all soon.

[A]

Bye.

[B]

It.