#130 - Peter Bleksley - The Government Have Surrendered the Streets

Summary

Podcast Summary

The Peter McCormack Show – Episode #130

Guest: Peter Bleksley
Theme: The Government Have Surrendered the Streets
Date: November 21, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this episode, host Peter McCormack (joined by his co-host Connor and additional commentators) interviews former undercover detective Peter Bleksley. The discussion delves into the state of policing in the UK, addressing the surge in street crime, the erosion of frontline policing, bureaucratic hurdles, and wider concerns about governance, social attitudes, and public trust. Bleksley openly critiques the direction of modern policing, the influence of academia and political correctness, and government policy, while offering reflections on British society and optimism for the future.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Crisis in British Policing & "Surrendered Streets"

• Resource Deficiencies & Crime Surge:
  Bleksley opens by expressing deep respect for frontline police, but laments their lack of street presence due to resource constraints. He argues this absence has led to a "plague of crime" with rampant knife and vehicle crime, deteriorating public safety.
  “The police will tell you they don’t have the resources to do that. And what we’ve got is the streets being surrendered.” (00:00)

• Public Event on Policing:
  Bleksley describes a recent high-level policing event in Bexley, attended by top Met Police brass, reflecting the seriousness with which the force claims to view community engagement. He praises the discipline and character of the young Metropolitan Police Cadet Corps.
  “Their shoes were bald to the point that you could use them as a shaving mirror.” (04:14)

2. Public Perception, Trust & Policing Tactics

• Disconnect and Disappointment:
  Attendees at the event, including Bleksley, voice frustration: people report crime less frequently because so little is done, and victims feel ignored.

  • A security worker’s story of violent encounters and lack of police response draws public applause, highlighting a sense of abandonment (08:00).

• “Normalization” of Everyday Crime:
  The hosts discuss their own experiences of frequent shoplifting, drug use, and theft in their communities, concluding there’s a growing public tolerance or resignation to low-level (“petty”) crime.
  “Bike theft is now decriminalized.” – Additional Commentator (17:10)
  Bleksley rejects the label “petty crime”—emphasizing the real impact on victims.

3. Historical vs. Modern Policing Approaches

• Lost Tradition of Community Policing:
  Bleksley gives a detailed comparison between the proactive, relationship-driven neighborhood policing of his early career and today’s performance-driven, bureaucratic environment.

  • Historic practice: officers patrolled on foot, gathered information, engaged directly, and followed up personally with victims.
  • Modern practice: Reactive, "paper-driven," lacking personal engagement or follow-through, hampered by bureaucracy and “academia.”
    “The effectiveness was not measurable … so what did policing do? They abandoned all of that kind of policing … Now, as a consequence, there’s a shoplifting epidemic, knife crime runs rampant, car crime, vehicle crime, all of that is off the Richter scale.” (10:27–14:12)

• Impact of Underreporting:
  “When crime stats get rolled out, we get a completely false picture ... About the only one you can trust is the murder rate.” (10:32)

4. The Influence of Academia & Political Correctness

• Academization of Policing:
  Bleksley traces changes back to Blair’s “education, education, education” ethos, leading to academic culture infiltrating police leadership and a shift towards quantifiable data and bureaucracy at the expense of practical common sense and communication skills.
  “Policing is in the grip of academia ... They came back with their heads full of pseudo-intellectual clap-trap, a lot of it which didn’t have a place in policing.” (22:24–24:01)

5. Gender, Diversity, and Police Cohesion

• Women in Policing:
  • Discusses public perceptions, roles, and challenges women face on the front lines, including stark examples of assaults. Bleksley emphasizes that communication and resilience matter more than physical strength, and the best police—of any gender—are those who excel at both.
    “It’s not always about whether you can land a right hander ... A lot of the time it’s about common sense, communication ... diffusing a situation.” (28:26)

6. Frontline Constraints & Bureaucratic Hurdles

• “Plaster on an Open Wound”:
  Bleksley shares recent ride-alongs where police could only provide temporary fixes, constantly being pulled to new cases, unable to “grip” problems at the root due to overload and shortage of resources.
  “They would apply a temporary fix rather than really gripping a situation … All of that there was, for me, a fundamental lack of grip.” (31:39)

• Prosecution Difficulties:
  Police face growing procedural obstacles in prosecuting even straightforward shoplifting or organized crime cases, due to red tape and legal standards of evidence.
  “Any experienced, pragmatic detective will tell you, there’s a whole world of difference between knowing and proving.” (33:42)

7. Oversight, Politicization & The PCC Debate

• Abolishing the PCC (Police and Crime Commissioner):
  Both host and guest mock the political bureaucracy around police oversight, expressing skepticism that cost-savings from scrapping PCCs will reach frontline policing.
  “It was a daft idea ... just a ludicrous idea. Of course, before that … you had local police authorities ... The trouble is … people cozy up.” (46:05–49:41)

• Need for Real Accountability by "Real People":
  Bleksley advocates for robust, sometimes “prickly,” civilian oversight but worries about the dominance of political and establishment insiders instead.
  “You don’t get real people on these committees … they're always sops.” (49:41)

8. Broader Societal Critique: “The Pendulum Swung Left”

• Softening of Society, Rise of Bureaucracy & Victimhood:
  There’s a sense that public service, politics, and society at large have become “soft,” dominated by performative HR culture, grievance procedures, and a lack of personal responsibility.
  “Since 1997, when Blair started off with his political correctness campaign ... the pendulum swung and swung and swung to the left.” (55:32)
  “We are undoubtedly far too fluffy as a nation than we ever used to be ... those kind of things have gone.” (68:45)

• Work Ethic and Young People:
  Despite critiques of "softness," Bleksley acknowledges the challenges facing younger generations, including lack of entry-level jobs and the offshoring of positions due to cost pressures and government interference.

9. Immigration, Integration, and National Identity

• Metropolitan Change & Nostalgia:
  Bleksley voices concern over rapid demographic shifts, the rise of extreme ideology, and the difficulty of integration, advocating for a renewed focus on British values and social cohesion (90:33–96:19).

• British Values and Manners:
  Cites lost traditions, such as civility on public transport or the concept of “manners maketh man,” as elements worth preserving.

10. The Search for Optimism

• Despite deep pessimism about current governance, Bleksley expresses hope for “common sense” returning and is encouraged by the resilience and talent of many young people.
  “I am ... a sort of sickeningly optimistic kind of bloke ... this once wonderful nation is worth fighting for.” (88:41–90:33)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the State of Street Policing:
  “What we've got is the streets being surrendered and this plague of crime ... runs rampant ... making this place a worse place to live.” – Peter Bleksley, (00:00/21:11)

• On Public Trust:
  “Consequently you think the police don't give a shit and you don't give a shit about them.” – Peter Bleksley, (45:14)

• On Bureaucracy & Academia:
  “They came back with their heads full of pseudo-intellectual clap-trap, a lot of it which didn’t have a place in policing.” – Peter Bleksley, (24:24)

• On Crime Prevention:
  “If the police were visible, known, contactable ... I think they would therefore become trusted and be far more likely to receive information.” – Peter Bleksley, (06:21)

• On "Petty Crime":
  “There is no such thing in my book as petty crime ... It is a very serious matter in your life.” – Peter Bleksley, (17:13)

• On Progress:
  “Can you think of anything that's got better in the last 20 years ... courtesy of the government?” – Connor, (77:12–77:21)
  “I might need a very, very long time to think about this.” – Peter Bleksley, (77:21)

• On Political Leadership Today:
  “Is that the best we've got out of 70 million people? Do me a favor.” – Peter Bleksley, (84:20)

• On Optimism:
  “There's a lot of very bright, smart young people out there ... this once wonderful nation is worth fighting for.” – Peter Bleksley, (88:41–90:33)

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Important Timestamps

• 00:00 – Opening: Bleksley on respect for frontline officers & "surrendered streets"
• 04:14 – Praise for Police Cadets & discipline
• 08:00–10:27 – Event Q&A, stories of crime ignored by police
• 13:00–15:30 – History of community policing vs. bureaucratic policing, public trust
• 17:13 – "No such thing as petty crime"
• 22:12 – Academia's influence, Blair years
• 28:26 – Gender, resilience, and policing complexity
• 31:39 – "Stick in plaster" policing—temporary fixes over real solutions
• 37:47–45:14 – Loss of public confidence and underreporting cycle
• 46:05–49:41 – PCC abolition, overspending on bureaucracy, political meddling
• 55:32–58:23 – Political correctness, pendulum "swung left," HR/benefits/cultural change
• 64:31–68:03 – Youth unemployment, job outsourcing, and the work ethic debate
• 68:45–73:12 – "Gone soft," national character, energy policy, climate change
• 77:12–78:01 – "Can you think of anything that's got better?" (Elizabeth Line cited)
• 88:41–90:33 – Bleksley’s optimism and closing thoughts on national identity

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Conclusion

This episode is a blisteringly candid, contrarian call for the revival of traditional policing values, greater public accountability, and a rejection of the bureaucratic, academic, and political trends beleaguering British society. While critical of government and institutional inertia, Bleksley tempers his frustration with hope—rooted in his faith in young people and his belief that Britain's core decency can endure. The conversation is grounded in personal anecdotes, historical context, and a no-nonsense, nostalgic tone that challenges listeners to reconsider both policing and the direction of society.

Transcript

[Peter Blexey]

I have a huge amount of respect for those cops on the front line. They do some brilliant work, but by and large, they're not out on the streets patrolling. The police will tell you they don't have the resources to do that. And what we've got is the streets being surrendered and this plague of crime, knife crime runs rampant, car crime, vehicle crime, all of that that is making this place a worse place to to live.

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[Connor]

All right. Good morning, Peter. How are you?

[Peter Blexey]

Very well, thank you.

[Connor]

I, I'm, I'm very, very much looking forward to this. I want to talk to you about policing in this country because like a lot of other things, I'm worried about it. Are we in a crisis?

[Peter Blexey]

Oh, completely. Policing, per se, yes, is in a crisis.

[Connor]

That's what I mean.

[Peter Blexey]

In, in so many regards. And just to help illustrate my point, if I may, last week, the Metropolitan Police here in London have just launched phase two of their new Met for London. It's the initiative of the Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, and they're rolling out phase two. And what that means is that they have a big flagship event in every London borough and that includes the outer leafyish sort of suburbs where I've been born and raised. In Bexley, albeit Bexley borough, covers an area of chronic social deprivation in Thames Meat, Bexie Heath with all its issues, my hometown, and then goes through to the leafier Sick Cup. So all the devils are there in one way or another, and they launched this event. So of course I've gone online and booked my ticket for it and I went with a lot of anticipation, some optimism, because I'm an optimistic kind of bloke. And my notebook and pen, and I was surrounded, I was surrounded by the Metropolitan Police. Okay, There was a large cast there, which is indicative of how importantly they're taking this whole Project. The most senior police officer there was an Assistant Commissioner called Lawrence Taylor. It's a very senior rank. He sits on the management board of the Met. He's the country's lead for counterterrorism policing. So we're talking top brass here. There was a Deputy Assistant Commissioner, Lou Puddefoot, her name was. She's been promoted seven times to get to Deputy Assistant Commissioner and she joined the met in 2001, so she's still got some years to go. If she gets another three rungs up the ladder, she'd be commissioner. So this is a. An indicator of how seriously they took it. There was also a local superintendent, two chief inspectors, one of whom was a detective. Please don't lose the will to live while I rattle through.

[Connor]

No, no.

[Peter Blexey]

So many old bill that were there at least two inspectors that I saw, Sergeants, Plain Clothes and Uniform PCs, a raft of police staff with their lanyards on saying police staff. And in fairness to them, they were really busy and engaging and wanted to hear what we were saying before we went into the. Into the meeting. And huge credit to the youngsters of the Metropolitan Police Cadet Corps. I think they call them volunteer cadets now. They were the most courteous, polite, brilliantly turned out young people you could want to meet. Their shoes were bald to the point that you could use them as a shaving mirror. You know what I mean?

[Connor]

Yeah, Brilliant.

[Peter Blexey]

Just what you want to see.

[Connor]

Disciplined.

[Peter Blexey]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it reminded me of 1977 when I joined the cadets all those years ago. You should have seen their faces when I told them I joined in 1977. Kind of like the year their grandparents were born, I would imagine. Yeah.

[Connor]

Year before I was born.

[Peter Blexey]

There you go. Thanks for ruining.

[Connor]

My apologies.

[Peter Blexey]

Yeah, but. And it was so a proper, proper turnout. Buffet was lovely, by the way.

[Connor]

Is this you?

[Peter Blexey]

Yes.

[Connor]

There we go.

[Peter Blexey]

Look at you. 1977. Fresh faced, stern looking, impeccable uniform.

[Connor]

Yeah, I love it.

[Peter Blexey]

Yeah. I learned discipline there because I was an ill disciplined kid at school, which is why I kind of foolishly, largely flunked a lot of my education. When I went to Hendon as a cadet, they knocked me into shape in terms of discipline and fitness and all that kind of stuff.

[Connor]

Few kids now could do with that.

[Peter Blexey]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Connor]

We can get into that.

[Peter Blexey]

Without a doubt. It was very, very important. It actually shaped me in many regards for the rest of my life because I still believe in being smart. If you're going to go and feature in the media or come to somebody's podcast and such, like, apologies, I'm a T shirt, not at all dressed down Monday, clearly.

[Connor]

Right.

[Peter Blexey]

Know all of that. I believe in so many of those things. They've stuck with me. So it's a big meeting, high power people there, and after they'd spoken or the, the senior officers had spoken, they invited questions from the floor. Well, I would like to have asked a whole raft of questions, obviously.

[Connor]

How many can you get in?

[Peter Blexey]

I just did the one, okay. Because people were just asking the one. So I'm going to fall in line and be courteous and not in some pathetic kind of way, turn it into the Peter Blexey show, you know what I mean? That would have been utterly inappropriate.

[Connor]

But you had a big question.

[Peter Blexey]

Yeah, more of a statement. Okay, but so out of all the questions that were asked and there were many, many from the floor, forgive the self promotion here, two garnered a modest round of applause. Okay, only two. My one, which the Q and A was at the end of the session, was partly in response to what the uniformed superintendent had asked, and that was that we, the community, be the eyes and ears of the police. Tell em what we see, tell em what we hear, tell em what we know. And I completely buy into that, you know, as a fundamental of policing. So building on that, when it came to my turn, stuck my hand up, yes, man over there in a jacket, the mic comes. And I said, if our police, our local police, were visible, known, contactable other than via the Met Police website, in other words, if we had a telephone number for them, I think they would therefore become trusted and they would be far more likely to receive information from us, the public. And there was a, a modest round of applause. Nobody's clapped before any questions. So I thought, this is chiming with a number of the audience here, to be honest with you. I got a bit of Metropolitan Police, blah, blah, blah in response, and I was disappointed. I obviously. The other question that got a round of applause was from a bearded fella who said he'd worked in security in that borough for 30 years. He said, I've worked the doors of pubs, clubs, restaurants, he said, supermarkets, he said, I have seen thousands of examples of shoplifted, he said, many of which I've intervened in, he said, and with my other work in security, I've had broken bones, been clumped many times, suffered numerous assaults, he said. And with regards to all of that criminality, he said, so much I've reported and very little has been done about it. So he said, in essence, with all this crime, what are you doing about it. And that got a round of applause. I think a bigger round of applause than mine did, and rightfully so. This is the public asking the questions about policing that bother them.

[Connor]

Well, that resonates with us. I mean, you're probably having a little smile, I think, in the background there.

[Peter Blexey]

We.

[Connor]

I told you before we started we had a problem with policing in Bedford and there's some great police. I've met some of them, they're really great. The Chief Inspector's great. The PCC not so great. We'll talk about PCC soon.

[Peter Blexey]

On their way out.

[Connor]

Yeah. See you later, mate. See you later, Tizard. But we based ourselves in the town center and we noticed a lot of problems with drug dealing, drug taking and shoplifting. It become an epidemic to the point people were now no longer coming to the town centre. Shops were being stolen from daily. People openly smoking crack cocaine on the high street. Like, this is. This is a problem. What is going wrong here? And so we put in our private security, but during that process, we kept speaking to the police and they say, make sure you report crimes. The amount of times we've heard, nobody's reporting anymore. I mean, I reckon I'm the victim of a crime at least once a month these days. Anything from someone hitting my car and driving off to stealing from one of our shops, it's just we stop reporting it because nothing gets done. And so, Peter, like, this is why I'm saying, is there a crisis? What's going on? Is it a funding problem? Is it bureaucracy? Is it politics? What's getting in the way of police?

[Peter Blexey]

Just policing, first of all, I'll deal with the under report and a crime, if I might?

[Connor]

Yeah, please.

[Peter Blexey]

It has very, very serious consequence when anybody is a victim of crime and doesn't report it. Because when crime stats get rolled out, we get a completely false picture. You cannot trust crime stats these days. About the only one you can trust is, is the murder rate. Because of course, murders do get reported tragically, and that is indisputable. But when it comes to all these other crimes, just building upon, you said, whenever I go and meet people in green rooms, for example, if I'm broadcasting or wheresoever I might be, in a pub, on a train, meeting the public like I do, and they tell me their stories of being victims of crime, and when I say to them, did you report it? They shrug their shoulders and say, what's the point? Because they feel they will not get a prompt, professional and thorough investigation. And of course, in all probability, they won't unless it's a crime where there's serious injury caused, for example. So I echo exactly what you say. But then to tackle the other part of your question, why is policing in such crisis? I'll give you an insight, if I may. Some years ago, and I'm talking two or three decades ago, ambitious senior police who didn't really like the fact that a police officer, they were called home beats back in my day, but we can call them community police or neighborhood police, whatever you want to call them, would go out of the police station in the morning, for example, patrol the streets, meet people, talk to people, engage with people, and probably come back to the nick eight hours later awash with tea and probably biscuits, but also a wash with information. They knew what was going on and they knew to a considerable extent who was committing what crimes. Now, those brilliant neighborhood police officers would then feed that information into what I was at one point, which was a plain clothes PC trying to become a detective. And so the following morning at 6 o', clock, when burglar Bill had his front door kicked in, he had no idea where that information had come from, because the home beat officer, the neighborhood bobby, would be no part of the investigation and was completely detached from it and was therefore free the following day to go out and drink tea and eat biscuits and hoover up yet more information. But you see, because in those days there wasn't strict record keeping, we didn't have spreadsheets, there wasn't boxes to tick and all that complete utter bollocks which dominates so much of policing today. When senior police got their academic mates that they started cozying up with to do kind of time and motion studies on police officers who went and walked the beat, the academics came back and said, well, they don't prevent crime. How would they know? Right? Their effectiveness was not measurable. They couldn't give it a title and they couldn't stick it on a spreadsheet. So what did policing do? They abandoned all of that kind of policing because they couldn't measure its effectiveness. They didn't actually understand what its effectiveness was. Now, in slight defense of modern policing, I have to say, of course, policing evolved and policing discovered that, that whilst the streets were kept pretty safe by and large, and we didn't have shoplifting epidemics and all that, as a young PC, you cut your teeth on shoplifters. That's how you learned to deal with crime exhibits, witness statements and all that sort of stuff. The police realized there was a lot of crime going on behind closed doors, which we had not thoroughly investigated over the years. Domestic violence, for example, child abuse. Now, of course, those crimes do deserve having resources applied to them, but policing did such a shift and put so many resources into that, whilst at the same time largely abandoning the streets. What's going to happen when you surrender the streets? The criminals are going to take over. And that's exactly what has happened the length and breadth of the country, generally speaking, certainly in all our major cities and towns, because as a consequence, there's a shoplifting epidemic. Knife crime runs rampant, car crime, vehicle crime, all of that is off the Richter scale in many regards. And where are the police? Where's those police officers patrolling that might stumble across such a crime or might be hearing about it from the neighborhood? They're not there generally speaking.

[Connor]

They want that visible presence. I know. So when we started kicking up a fuss, we, we noticed they started to put some police occasionally in the town center and everybody appreciated the visible presence of police officers that they can stop them and have a talk to them or just see them wander around the town center. It made a big difference. And the thing was, is we, we know where a lot, not all of it. We know where a lot of the crime is. We knew the HMOs that had the drug dealing from. We knew the faces of the people who were shoplifting. We've given information to the police to help them with stuff. We've been doing what you've said, but we've been, rather than coming to us and us like pulling it from us, we've had to start pushing it to them. And I think despite whatever Sadiq Khan reports or a PCC reports, which they always tend to report really good data. I think the feeling across the country is there is a normalization of petty crime. We've just. It's a tax now, basically. It's a tax on us. You know, shops get shoplifted and they put the prices up and we've just come to like some lad late at night, walked onto our front drive through the bushes, broke into Connor's car, stole my sunglasses, his wallet, what was your headphones, headphones. 1,000 pound of stuff. We report it, nothing's going to happen of it. And we know that was happening where we live.

[Additional Commentator]

Didn't even get a response.

[Connor]

No, we didn't get a response. And it's happening weekly. It's just like normalization of people just can't steal stuff. I think everyone's fed up of it completely.

[Additional Commentator]

Bike theft is now decriminalized.

[Connor]

Yep.

[Peter Blexey]

And people pay thousands of Pounds for some of their bikes.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Peter Blexey]

Now, I'm going to pick you up on something here, okay? There is no such thing in my book as petty crime or low level crime. And let's build on this. Theft of bikes, for example, which some police would say to you is low level. If you've spent thousands of pounds on that bike and you cycle to work every day on it, or you. You take it to the station and then hop on a train and go to work every day, having that stolen is not low level. It is not petty. It is a very serious matter in your life. Same as having your mobile phone snatched as you're walking down the streets. That's not low level, it's not petty. It's very important. We live our lives on these phones. You can have your bank cards in your phone holder and goodness knows what else. I know a fella had his phone snatched not so long ago with cards in it, like so many people keep. Do you know what they even stole? The credits that he had on his coffee shop card. They went in and stole those credits. They stole his Nectar points. He shops at Sainsbury's. He has a Nectar card. Right. They stole those points. Cause they got into his entire life via his phone, which he was on when they snatched it.

[Connor]

So it was unlocked.

[Peter Blexey]

Yep. And nicked everything. Absolutely everything. And the likelihood of a prompt, professional and thorough investigation into that crime is zilch.

[Connor]

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[Connor]

Can go and read the books, but the truth is, it is the hardest money ever created. If you are interested in protecting your financial future, it's time for you to get on the bitcoin train. I have. I've been stacking bitcoin personally and through my businesses since 2017. It's protected me, it secured my family's future, and it also strengthens all of my businesses. So if you want to start stacking bitcoin, where do you do it? Well, for me, it's with Gemini. They're a fully licensed, full reserve, exchange and custodian. So they give you a secure way for you to buy and own your bitcoin. There's no risks and no funny business. So if you're serious about stacking bitcoin the right way. Head over to gemini.com, which is g e m I n I dot com. Yeah, it makes me think of, I read a lot on the broken windows police in New York. It made me think of that because I was like, it probably is impossible for the police to investigate every single one of these crimes, but if we start there, if we as a country say we're not going to accept graffiti all over our underground station, we're not going to accept knife crime, we're not going to accept phone snatch. If we can, if we go and deal with that, that will bleed out into having a more effective.

[Additional Commentator]

More.

[Connor]

Yeah, more disciplination. Safer, safer.

[Peter Blexey]

Nicer. Yeah, a bit more like how it used to be. But of course, uniform cops response cops of whom I have an enormous amount of respect for the ones who are committed and do the right thing and are decent people. I have a huge amount of respect for those cops on the front line. They do some brilliant work. But by and large they're in cars, you know, going to another call and then going to another call. They're not out on the streets patrolling. The police will tell you they don't have the resources to do that. And what we've got is the streets being surrendered and this plague of crime that is slow. Well, not actually slowly, but. But gradually making this place a worse place to live. Whether you're walking, shopping, traveling on public transport, whatever it may be, when you get out of your front door, a lack of police on the streets is making this place, this country, this once great nation, a worse place in which to live on a daily basis. And of course the police, when they launch their operations, we've had a crackdown on phone theft, right? And they splash it and they get airtime and column inches. Well, I just look at that and go, this is not a story. This is the police doing their job. But it's got such a state that when they do have a shoplifting crackdown, we searched 74 shops. We nick this and that and the other and we've seized tobacco and cigarettes and arrested, you know, prominent shoplifters, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This needs to be happening every day of the week, not in some big publicized splash where you get a couple of minutes from backside licking news outlets that want to stick it at the top of their half hour news show. It's not a story. Do it every day.

[Connor]

Is this is the problem that they've overthought policing and there's been Too much political interference.

[Peter Blexey]

Thank you. They're in the grip of academia.

[Connor]

There you go.

[Peter Blexey]

Policing is in the grip of academia. And part of the reason for that is 1997, thereabouts, when Blair got elected.

[Connor]

Here we go.

[Peter Blexey]

Yeah, here we go. Right, but, but I'll bring it right up to speed, if I may. And he said, education, education, education. Some of those smart ambitious police officers who wanted to climb that greasy polar promotion said to themselves, we'll have some of that. And you know what, back in those days they got sent to university in police time, they got paid to go to university and get their degrees. And of course they all came back to policing, didn't they? Right. And of course they're from that world of academia now. They've been completely brainwashed. There is a place for smart brains in policing sometimes, right. But not to be in the grip of academia like it is. So they then came back to policing with letters after their names as well as in front, like, you know, dcds DI wasn't good enough, they had to have letters at the end of it. Right. They came back with their heads full of pseudo intellectual clap trap, a lot of it which didn't have a place in policing. Some of them went off and did their MBAs, Masters of Business, accounting and came back and then suddenly loved sitting in front of spreadsheets doing budgets. Cause it got em a long way away from the rough and tumble of the front line, didn't it? And it's gone on, it's been perpetuated over the decades now. They've all got degrees. In fact, of course they came out with all this nonsense that every PC that joins has to do a degree course.

[Connor]

Really?

[Peter Blexey]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean it's been bounced around now and some people are pointing out the folly of it, including me as a police officer on the front line. And you will learn so much, of course, about policing if you spend any length of time doing it. First of all, you need to be a communicator and secondly, you need to have common sense.

[Connor]

Do you need to be tough.

[Peter Blexey]

Resilient?

[Connor]

I tell you why I asked this.

[Peter Blexey]

Yeah. Because if we're going to get onto women police.

[Connor]

Well, yes, but not in a. Not in the way you might think about it. So we have the. There's a number of women on the front line in Bedford. I've met some of them. Great.

[Peter Blexey]

I'm married to a woman who did over 30 years in policing as a detective and a frontline uniform.

[Connor]

And I think there's certain crimes you want to send a police, a female police officer over, a male police officer. Certain victims, probably victims of abuse, probably want to talk to a female officer more than a male. I get all that, but I just want to give you one example where we were at a boxing match recently. How many fights in the crowd, Connor? Eight dozen dozen. Every five minutes.

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[Connor]

All spilled outside. We left because it finished. Went to get in a car to drive off. The police turned up and it was two five foot five girls got out. And I just thought, this is nothing against women. It could be two five foot five skinny lads. But it was two five foot five skinny girls. I was like, if you put them in the middle of these aggressive, probably coked up boxing fans who all want to fight, they're not going to be able to stop anything. And I thought that, that to me was an issue.

[Peter Blexey]

Unfortunately, two women police officers were both very, very seriously assaulted in Manchester in Sid Cup.

[Connor]

Okay, okay.

[Peter Blexey]

Recently it hardly got any publicity. I heard about the story. It wasn't in the media. I got it into the media.

[Connor]

Right, good.

[Peter Blexey]

There's another question as to why the police were sitting on it and didn't want it publicized. They were really badly injured, the pair of them. They went to a house, I remember.

[Podcast Sponsor Announcer]

I do know the one, yeah.

[Peter Blexey]

And were met by a very, very violent, dangerous man who assaulted them both extremely seriously. One has got injuries, I think that will take a very long time to recover from. And I wish them both nothing but the best, of course. And this man went to court in fairly short order, pleaded guilty and got a lamentably low sentence of only eight years. Bearing in mind he could do as little as three of that, maybe four. We'd have to wait and see. Perhaps, and I say perhaps, and I apportion no blame to anybody other than the violent brute that assaulted those two police women. Had they been armed with tasers, I don't know. Could it have been different? I don't know whether they were or whether they weren't, but I, during my police service, which I appreciate was a very long time ago, but my wife retired from policing a lot more recently. She did. Over 30 years, I have worked with some quiet, brilliant police women, absolutely brilliant. The best of detectives, undercover operatives, frontline uniform cops and all of that. And yes, some are perhaps better equipped to do certain roles in policing. Like there are some men, I worked with some men in policing who were the last people I would want alongside me if it started getting a bit lively and they'd be fine. They'd be found sitting in a van cowering. You know, it's not always about whether you can land a right hander. A lot of the time it's about common sense, communication that we come back to, to diffusing a situation. And sometimes they won't admit to it these days, of course, but sometimes if you got a shout to a fight and a boozer, you might just poodle there in second gear. Because if there's only going to be a couple of you rocking up and there's 40 blokes knocking seven bells out of each other in a pub, let.

[Connor]

Them finish it off.

[Peter Blexey]

Why should you make it 42?

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Peter Blexey]

You know, go and pick up the pieces, do some first aid, call the ambulance. Policing is multifaceted and very rarely straightforward. There's always some kind of a factor to it that makes it less obvious than what you might see on a social media clip, for example. So women in policing I'm a huge fan of. It's difficult to say whether two women would be suitable or not. Two women with great communication skills can sometimes diffuse a situation far better than two blokes who are a bit lively with their hands. That might make something worse.

[Connor]

Yeah, I see what you're saying.

[Peter Blexey]

You can never tell. Women in policing here stay thankfully, and, yeah, some of them are utterly brilliant. It. It's complex. Yeah, it is complex. It is difficult. What I do think is that if we had perhaps an entirely united police service that regarded every colleague as being equal and officers were willing to patrol with each colleague on the front line and when that shout went up, when that red button gets hit on the radio and that shout for urgent assistance goes up, everybody drops everything and attends. That, of course, would be a very good thing. It does happen in plenty of policing, but sadly, in some places we've got officers who don't want to patrol with particular officers because they're afraid of making a gag or something that might be misconstrued or saying something that might get turned on its head and then reported as a. As something or other, you know, but.

[Connor]

So that sounds like it's become. There's a new pressure on the police that wasn't there when you were there.

[Peter Blexey]

Oh, there's more pressures on police officers these days than there ever was when I served, most notably mobile phones. So everybody can film. Yeah. Cctv, all of that. Yes. It's transformed the job immeasurably and it is far, far more challenging, I would say now, than it was in my day. And I do have an insight because last year I went out on patrol with Bedfordshire Police.

[Connor]

Okay.

[Peter Blexey]

For a couple of days. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and we spent a couple of days with their, with the shift, you know, in the car, filming and what have you. And it was a great contemporary insight in how the police did it. I met some fabulous men and women, saw how hard they worked. But the one thing I took away from it was that there is, and this is not criticism of the officers that I worked with on the front line, or should I say I witnessed on the front line, it is a criticism of policing per se. And that was that they would go to incidents and essentially put a stick in plaster on an open wound.

[Connor]

Right.

[Peter Blexey]

They would apply a temporary fix rather than really gripping a situation which sometimes might involve arresting a number of people. So therefore going off the streets, being taken away, all that paperwork, all that bureaucracy, all that duplication, all those frustrations the cops have. Often there needed to be input from other agencies, other services, which was sometimes wouldn't arrive for goodness knows how long, might not arrive at all. All of that there was for me, I felt a fundamental lack of grip because they're under pressure to go at the next call.

[Connor]

Right.

[Peter Blexey]

And that was perfectly illustrated by one address we went to and the police officer told me, this is the third time we've come to this address in a couple of weeks.

[Additional Commentator]

Right.

[Peter Blexey]

So if they'd gone in on the first occasion and they had the time to grip the situation, to apply the resources to deal with it, in all likelihood they wouldn't find themselves getting called back. And I'm sure that's mirrored length and breadth of the country time and time again.

[Connor]

Is it the challenge also of prosecuting? Because again, spoke locally, prosecution for shoplifting is very difficult.

[Peter Blexey]

No, it isn't.

[Connor]

Well, they, they, they've said the process and the bureaucracy to take a shoplifter through the prosecution. Yeah, it's lengthy.

[Peter Blexey]

It's been made difficult. It isn't difficult, but it's been made more challenging.

[Connor]

Yeah, more challenging than it needs to be. Well, then. And then you go to the other end of the extreme. I've got a mate who works at the Met, talked a lot about the organized crime, large scale drug dealing, Albanian gangs, Turkish gangs and the guns coming into the country. He said, we know who every single criminal is. He said, our biggest challenge is proving they're a criminal.

[Peter Blexey]

Yeah.

[Connor]

In a way that the court will prosecute them. And he said, bureaucracy and rules have got in the way of us doing that job.

[Peter Blexey]

That's not changed from my Day.

[Connor]

Okay, okay.

[Peter Blexey]

Any experienced, pragmatic detective will tell you there's a whole world of difference between knowing and proving. And I would say to that officer, then you need to think, perhaps creatively, perhaps out of the box, as to how you are lawfully going to gather the evidence to prove what you think you know. And that's what we did. It's why we crept into places in the dead of night and planted bugs all out, all around the gaff. It's why we tapped telephones. Okay. More difficult now. Well, in some regards, but because of the volume of phones, in terms of mobile phones. But they can still be tapped into. Don't worry about that. You know, the spooks will deny it and the police will deny that they do it. But they do do it. Of course they do do it. You have to be more creative. Policing has got a little bit shy of handling informants and that's down to the university lot. Cause handling informants is a very challenging thing to do. They can be real horrible, duplicitous, slippery, conniving, scheming bastards. Right? But you have to rule them with a vice like grip, sometimes with an iron glove, an iron fist and a velvet glove. But handling informants is very, very important. It comes with grief and hassle and aggravation, but it's really, really important working undercover. No better informant in the world to have amongst an organized crime gang than a cop who's working undercover. Believe you me, I did it for over a decade. Right. More difficult now. Yes, granted social media world and all of that. Well, who are you? Are you on your socials? All that. And I get that. Right. Very much more difficult, but not impossible. So I'd say your mate who's in the Met, you've just got to think a little bit harder and apply a few more resources. You may have to go in to argue your case. Sorry, to put your case. You couldn't say argue now to a senior police officer to put your case to a senior police officer for laying out the deployment of greater resources. And I know budgets are stretched and all of that, but it hasn't. It's still the same. Get the evidence. Just think creatively how you're going to do that.

[Connor]

I'm sure he said to me, he said if they're following somebody in a car every time they cross into a new police jurisdiction, they have to get permission.

[Peter Blexey]

Right. Well, if they cross a county boundary, yeah, okay, that might be the case. It certainly wasn't in our day. I suspect it might be. But Even so, that's just a call into the boss, right? If you're there in the car and you're doing that surveillance and they cross a boundary, well, it's only a message or a call in the boss. That's their job.

[Additional Commentator]

Well, I think the point is that's one thing. Who knows how many little nuisances like that there are now. Which just makes it all. Just adds up, right?

[Peter Blexey]

Bosses get paid. What was their job? You deal with that. Leave our team on the front line and do what we want to do. You want us to follow Joe Bloggs? We'll follow Joe Bloggs and he won't have a clue that we're up his jacksie. Right? We'll follow him using all our training, all our skills, all our determination and the resources you've given us. And he won't know we're there. Right? But you just deal with the admin, the bureaucracy. That's your job. You're the governor. You get the big bucks. You deal with that. Let those on the front line do the frontline job and they'll deliver for you. It's what they're trained for. It's what they love, it's what they're. It's what they do.

[Connor]

Do you think there's a. There's been a growing lack of trust and respect for the police among the public? Yeah. Yeah, it's a shame.

[Peter Blexey]

It's a shame. But again, the police are to blame for that and I'll tell you why. It comes back to this surrendering of the streets and the non investigation of crime. Let's rewind. And I know this is going to sound like a bit of a history lesson, but it's very relevant and appetizing. And I'll bring it up to speed, if I may. Let's go back to the late 70s, early 80s, when I was in uniform. Okay, well, no, we'll actually skip to when I went to Kensington in 1985. So 82 to 85. I'm a detective. You come into the morning, into the office, first thing in the morning and what you go for is the crime book. Right? I'm that old. It was paper and pen. All the crimes were recorded in different crime books. But burglary book, what was called Beat crimes, serious crimes and so on and so forth. And you go in and you get there bright and early in the morning because then you can sign for the best crimes that you fancy investigating. Right, okay. All those lazy wankers who rock up at 9, 10 o'. Clock. Fine. I've left you the crimes I don't want to investigate. I've signed for my half a dozen and I'm off out to do it. Get the burglary book. Right. Sign of the burglaries, scenes of crime officer. Yeah. Jump in the van with a socko and off you go to do the burglaries. Right. And you visit the scene of every burglary, whether it be residential or a shop or a warehouse. You go to every burglary and investigate every crime. You've got the scenes of crimes officer with you. Okay. It's the 80s, so by and large it's fingerprints, maybe a shoe mark you're looking for. Okay. It was forensic science, was a shadow of what it is today. But still you do it and you go there. And even if you go there to a domestic burglary and the likelihood of you solving that might be pretty slim, you have still shown the victim you care, attended the scene of the crime, knocked on the neighbors doors. Did you see anything? Did you hear anything? Yeah, funnily enough, I found a glove in my garden which isn't mine. Did you really? Socko, kindly go and recover that glove, send it up the yard, see if we can do anything with it. Or alternatively, and it didn't happen all the time, but it happened occasionally. Yeah, funnily enough, I found a screwdriver between my shed and the fence and I'm sure I never put that there. Did you really? Thank you very much again, socko. Fingerprint it, send it up the yard. Has it made any marks on the edge of the screwdriver that can be matched with marks found elsewhere? Is it a tool that's been used in a series of burglaries? We would also perhaps photograph if there was, if a door had been jemmied, if a window had been forced, photograph it. Because the marks made could sometimes be matched to marks made with a similar implement which you might find in a burglar's house if you go and search it. So all those things, so the victim, even if they knew you might not solve the crime and burglary can be very difficult to solve. You'd also, and you'd also given them some, some crime prevention advice. Door windows, door locks, all that kind of stuff. An alarm if they could afford it. There weren't very many residential burglar alarms in those days. But you know, if you're in Kensington J, you know, there were some rather, you know, very good security companies. In fact I saw a couple of vans from a well known company Outside this morning, all that stuff. So the public felt that you cared and they knew your name, they had your telephone number, they had the crime book number and by and large they, when you left, I'm entirely confident they felt they felt a bit better about a very unpleasant experience. And you did that loads of times that day. So you were actually doing really good community policing, if you will, engaging with the victims, making them feel like you cared. Likewise with car crime, theft from a car. Okay, the window's been smashed. You go with the SoCo, can you dust it? Have they tried the handle before? They broke the window. Dust it. And sometimes you got results. You got it back from the lab and they said, yes, we've got a match with this fingerprint. And you go, great, where do they live? Let's go there at six o' clock in the morning and take their frigging door off the hinges and handcuff them and drag them down the neck. Happy days. Love it. And the public really felt that you cared. And we did care. I knew back in like 78 or 82 when I was at Peckham and you had the burglary book, the home beat officers that I spoke about earlier, awash with tea, biscuits and information, they would come in in the morning and look at that burglary book and if there was a burglary on their beat, they were livid. They really took it personally. We hated crime, but in particular we hated criminals.

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[Connor]

Cared that and they still do. But this sounds different, but it is.

[Peter Blexey]

Different because they don't do what I've just spoken about.

[Podcast Sponsor Announcer]

But the academics, Peter, they'll be like.

[Connor]

Oh, you're just old fashioned, you're living in the past.

[Peter Blexey]

And, and if we, if we look to measure the effectiveness of your burglary investigations, we will find that you only returned a 12% success rate and this and that, well, it's better than the zero some police services return now in it and it. And we met all those people and they liked us and, and they felt we were doing something for them and therefore they supported the police, they trusted them, they had confidence in them and you know what? They even liked them.

[Additional Commentator]

That's the bit. Yeah, the 12% doesn't matter. I think it's the feeling of, oh yeah, you've actually come to do something. I would never report an incident again after what happened with my car. I didn't even get an email back saying, like, I would have been fine with an email saying this isn't enough of an incident for us to cover. But I didn't even get that. I was just left, there you go. So why would I report.

[Peter Blexey]

And consequently you think the police don't give a shit and you don't give a shit about them.

[Connor]

Am I right? And the funny thing is locally, when the PCC put out his stats, no one believed them. It was like, well, don't believe it. And if you ignore the Liberals who disliked our private security, the amount of people who got to say thanks for being here or thanked us as it, it's so nice. I feel safe coming into town. And then when the police started patrolling the town, we all felt great.

[Peter Blexey]

Yeah.

[Connor]

Visually seeing the police there made such. It made a much bigger difference than whatever came out of the office of the pcc, which, by the way, I met him and he was a very weak character who had a 2.7 million pound budget which was spent on strategy, PR, comms and whatever. You know what, once they announced the closure of the office of the PC, I was like, yes, thank you.

[Peter Blexey]

Well, so was I last week when I saw the Policing Minister. So I'm there watching her announcement, she's speaking in the House of Commons. She said, so we're going to abolish the roles of police and crime commissioners, which started in 2012. The Tories bought them in. And I went, yes. Oh, this labor government's doing something I agree with. And in the same breath she went, and we will divulge those powers to elected mayors.

[Connor]

I know.

[Peter Blexey]

And I went, have you not heard of London you work in? Here's The Commons have a look at London and see how that's going with that. Appalling, lamentable, very easy to dislike. Sadiq Khan.

[Connor]

You're not a fan of him.

[Additional Commentator]

It will save 100 million, though.

[Connor]

Well, yeah, but where does that just.

[Additional Commentator]

Be spent on more frontline officers?

[Connor]

No, it won't. Connor, come on. No chance. You think they're gonna. Do you think they've gone, right, we'll save 100 million. But that would work, right, if the.

[Peter Blexey]

Money was to be diverted. But of course, the elected mayors will have the responsibilities, so they'll set up their policing office, like Khan's got. He's got his office of policing with a deputy mayors and this, that and the other. Better not go there. Let's just say I'm not a fan of them.

[Connor]

No, no, you're not.

[Peter Blexey]

And. And of course, money will have to be spent on those. And if they've got responsibilities for budgets, then they'll say, well, we need to employ people to examine the budgets and the such like. So I very much doubt that there will be that net £100 million saving. And they'll go to each of the 43 police forces in England and Wales and Scotland. Go, there you go. There's a cutler mil each, for example.

[Connor]

God, I think of it like a swimming pool and you get a bucket and you go down the deep end, you fill up the bucket and you pour it in at the shallow end. That's all that's going to happen with that money. It's not going to be saved. I mean, look, I'm glad the office is gone, but I would personally. I even thought of running for pcc. My campaign would have been, is, I'm going to do nothing, I'm not going to employ anyone, I'm not going to take my salary and I'm going to give all the money to the head of police in Bedford and say, use it how you need. I think police should run policing. I don't think politicians should be anywhere near policing personally.

[Peter Blexey]

No, but there must be accountability. Sure. And the police will say that, but they have accountability.

[Connor]

Right.

[Peter Blexey]

Well, the pn, the police and crime commissioners were supposed to hold them to account, but the overwhelming majority of those PCCs were elected political sops. So, of course, politics came into policing.

[Connor]

There you go.

[Peter Blexey]

And it was just. It was. It was a daft idea in the first place. I said it then. Say it now. It was just a ludicrous idea. Of course, before that, generally speaking, you had local police authorities.

[Connor]

Yes.

[Peter Blexey]

Which were largely volunteer run by local people who held their police to account. The trouble is with that sometimes people cozy up to the local police. They're not as robust in their, in their examining of them as they should be. And sometimes those police authorities got filled with local counselors who are well intentioned people, but invariably they come with a political leaning and they cozy up. You see a relationship between whosoever it is who is tasked to hold a Chief Constable or the Commissioner in London to account should be a robust and sometimes prickly one because you've got to be able to say to them, well, justify this, I don't agree with you. And just strip out the ego. It's why you need real people fulfilling those roles. But you'll never get it in this country. It's the same as you. Like you need real people on the sentencing council but all you get is legal types. Yeah. You haven't got a bloke on the sentencing council who had his van broken into last week, have you? And had all his tools nicked and couldn't work for two days and lost 3, 4, 500 quid as a result of that. You don't get real people on these committees into these roles. They're always sops and other likes. Which suits the establishment to have on there.

[Connor]

So everything's got a bit soft.

[Peter Blexey]

No, everything's just. It's the establishment. The establishment just looks after the establishment.

[Connor]

But I, I agree, but I think with that it makes everything a bit soft. I think we're soft on crime. Soft on sentencing. Oh, depends on depends. It might be a mean tweet. We might be tough, but I think we're soft on sentencing. I think we have too much empathy for the criminal.

[Peter Blexey]

Oh, agreed.

[Additional Commentator]

Soft on prison cells themselves.

[Connor]

Yeah. Soft on prisoners.

[Additional Commentator]

Have you seen them now?

[Peter Blexey]

Which are almost full TVs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't. Okay. Punishment without rehabilitation is frankly a waste of time. Okay. Because somebody will just come out and pick up their same behavior patterns that they had which led to them going into prison in the first place. Some people beyond rehabilitation and we don't have to worry about them because they're the people that are going to die in prison. Right. The worst of the worst. And I'm not even going to give them any credit by mentioning them, we all know their names. But a lot of the time people that have committed very serious crime and get sentenced to 16, 18, 20 years of which they'll probably, or you'd like to think they'll do 10, they can often come out rehabilitated. Because they've missed a lot of Christmas days and a lot of birthdays and a lot of weddings and all those kind of things. And they don't ever want to go back. And they realize that in order not to go back, they've got to confront their offending, accept their responsibility, apologize to victims if they've created victims, learn a trade, educate themselves, and then come out equipped to reenter society. And I know people that have done that. You know, I've spoken to people many years after they've been released and they're still straight runners and they're grafting and paying taxes and they've, they contribute to society. They all understand the wrongdoing of their past and they don't want to go back to that. And I've got no problem. You've done the time and you've done your crime and you come out and reinvent yourself. I have nothing but respect for you. Nothing. Absolutely.

[Connor]

So how would you fix policing?

[Peter Blexey]

That's a very good question. I would do everything I possibly could to ensure that there was a policing presence on the streets. Once again, that would be my absolute priority.

[Connor]

And I think if you did that, if a politician came out and said that, I think the, the public would support it, they would.

[Peter Blexey]

But of course, policing will say, well, we've got to take resources away from elsewhere. So what are you going to sacrifice? What are you going to take away? Well, the Met Police admitted last week at that meeting that I spoke about at the start of this pod that one in five police officers are not frontline operational. 20% of police service is not operational. Now, managerial sickness, okay, Some suspended, other disciplinary proceedings, all that kind of stuff. Well, I think I'd probably start on that 20% and say, right, if they're non operational, if I'm all of a sudden, and of course I never would be, if I was, say, for example, Commissioner of the Met Police, I would say, right, that 20%, I want it gone or I want it patrolling the streets. The ones that are gone, we recruit.

[Connor]

We heard that with the Prison Service the other week when they kept releasing prisoners early by mistake, that the, the prison in Milton Keynes, on any given day, one third of the, the prison.

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Staff are not there because of sickness or various.

[Connor]

Is it too easy to find a weak reason not to work and still be paid?

[Peter Blexey]

I think we can take that conversation way beyond policing, can't we? Look at, look at the size of the welfare bill in this country. What is it, 110 billion a year? I mean, it's a Completely different conversation. I'm willing to go there, but it's.

[Connor]

Kind of the same conversation really. I think, I think across the country, I mean, look, so many people I know are leaving, but across the country, I think we've shifted too much power to those who want to either grift the system, who want to use excuses not to work and who want to and then still want to give all the blame and responsibility to the government. We just. I don't know what we'd lost as a. We've lost so much or have a.

[Peter Blexey]

Grievance in some way shape or. Yeah, right. I'll tell you what's happened as far as I'm concerned since 1997 when Blair started off with his political correctness campaign, okay, which did a little bit of good in that certain words were consigned to the dustbin forever.

[Connor]

We can all agree with that.

[Peter Blexey]

And that's all great. I should think there's anybody who's in disagreement over that. But what has happened is that the pendulum swung and swung and swung to the left. And it started with the political correctness, but then it became far more deep rooted and far more pernicious than just that. And you saw it in HR departments, for example, that used to once upon a time be called personnel, didn't they? Yeah, well, that wasn't important enough for them. They can't just be called personnel. So then they became Human Resources, you know, and that sort of gave them greater status and what have you. And then of course, as they all so many of them went and got their qualifications or their allegiance to movements like Common Purpose and stuff like that, and their importance kind of grew and grew and grew. I heard one department somewhere the other day is now called a Human Capital Management. Right. Because they've just got to give themselves an even more grandiose, important name to justify the fact that they don't make anything, they don't sell anything and they just grift. So what's happened? And it's shame on the Tory party for those 14 years in power when it did nothing to readdress that balance of the pendulum swinging ever more leftwards, more liberal, more fluffy, more woke. It did nothing to strip it out and it could have done. In fact, they were so liberal, most of that lot, it went even further to the left.

[Connor]

It did.

[Peter Blexey]

And now of course we got Starmer and his lot and they're loving it because their tentacles run so deep from 1997, they are so entrenched on the left. It's why you've got so many people who are aggrieved. They're aggrieved about everything, aren't they? They've got to have a moan or something, something to have a complaint about. Right, yeah. And they're over there. And I won't come to work then. Okay, if you say, I'm a bloke in a dress, I'm not coming to work ever and I'll sign on, or many a myriad of other reasons that people will find to not rock up at work every day to claim benefits and a flop about on the sofa in their urine stained jogging bottoms, being funded by the likes of us in this room now, all right, of course we have people who are genuinely disabled.

[Connor]

Of course, and we want to help.

[Peter Blexey]

Them who are genuinely poor more than we do now, more than we do now, give them more, make their lives better. But there's a proportion that are enjoying that pendulum swinging ever more leftwards because it gives them the opportunity to chance their arm and part of my language, take the piss. Now what we have to do is get that pendulum swinging back somewhere, back towards the center where common sense may reign, where people can say, bosses can say, you haven't come in for six months. We don't really think you're very well, you're very poorly. Rather, we don't think you're necessarily poorly. So we're letting you go and whereby they can then. I mean, if this, if this new employment law came in, Angela Rayner's freaking baby, if that comes in, there'll be no such thing as probation period.

[Connor]

I know, it's a disaster. It's a disaster waiting to happen. You know, I always say as an employer, generally for me, I get rid of people for one or two reasons. I can't afford you or your shit. That's it. If I can't afford you, then I.

[Podcast Sponsor Announcer]

Should be able to get rid of.

[Connor]

You because you want the business to still be profitable. Yeah.

[Peter Blexey]

People pay your taxes and if you.

[Podcast Sponsor Announcer]

Shit, I want to get rid of you because you're no good for my business.

[Connor]

And you know what the best thing for you is for me, I was to go. If it was, say, connor, I'm getting rid of you because you're shit. And then you have to go and face the fact that I've told you your shit and you have to go and go, why? What did I do? Well, I. I was late three times a week and when I was, I was mucking around on my phone. Maybe in my next job. And if you keep losing jobs because you're shit, then you're going to have to change your ways. But if you keep being told, well, every time they get rid of you, it's their fault and you can have a tribunal and you can get money off them and not work. You're conditioning people that they can be a permanent victim. I hate it, Peter. I hate it. It's. You know, I grew up having to work. I had paper rounds and a milk round and I worked in a shop and then in a factory. I had to work. That boy has had to work.

[Peter Blexey]

Yeah.

[Connor]

You know, and I'm sure when you. Everybody had to work and you did anything, you worked.

[Peter Blexey]

Yeah, yeah. But seeing as we're slanting this somewhat, perhaps towards younger people.

[Connor]

Yeah, let's talk about it.

[Peter Blexey]

This is very. I'm very passionate about what I'm going to say next.

[Connor]

Okay?

[Peter Blexey]

Okay. Our youngest two are 23 and 24 y. The 24 year old finished uni, worked for a year because his girlfriend was finishing off uni, worked for a year up north. Then the two of them did that very indulgent middle class thing and they weren't traveling, as I called it. You know, we're going traveling. We're going to discover ourselves. Piss off. You're going on a long holiday. Right. That's what I called it. And whenever I hear these kids saying traveling, they get the same response. Anyway, they went off and did that, then they came back and they're now having a long distance relationship. They're still together gratefully, but she's gone and got a job in Leeds. Terrific. And she's loving it. She's loving working. And our boys just got a job. And he starts at next Monday. Fantastic. But had a long, arduous route to getting a job like so many young people are these days. And I find this out because I spend time with my kids, other boys a year younger, I spend time with them. I know the travails and the challenges they're facing and getting jobs and all that kind of stuff and how difficult it is. And of course, we speak to our friends who have got kids the same age. So I've pretty much got my finger on the pulse in a certain regard about all this. And the youngsters, by and large, have my sympathy. The ones that find an excuse to flop about and do nothing and get benefits, of course we touched on. But now politicians who are not in power are increasingly saying, we're going to have a crackdown on benefits because we want these young people to go back into work. Okay. Fine, if the crackdown is on the justified ones and all that, I'm fully supportive of that. But get them into work. Doing what? Have a look at the amount of people that are unemployed and then have a look at the amount of jobs there are. The unemployment number dwarfs the amount of jobs that are available so not everybody's going to be able to get a job. And of late I've been asking some questions of people who work in the financial services sector, banking, accountancy, financial advice and the such like monitoring people's portfolios, but predominantly banking and accounting. And I have found a number of companies that have outsourced what would be entry level jobs to India because it's cheaper. So things like in the accounting world, what one accountant called said to me was the grunt work, right? So the physical going through the receipts, kind of reconciliating the numbers and all that kind of stuff all outsourced to India. Cheaper, right? Banking. So much of their work outsourced India. Now why have they done it? Through rapacious greed and their craven love of money. That's why they've done it because it's cheaper. So anybody from the financial services sector that wants to talk to me about their patriotism, how they're patriotic, right, we'll stop outsourcing work to India, you greedy bastards.

[Connor]

Well there's another.

[Peter Blexey]

And give entry level jobs to so many of the kids here now who want them. And I will finish in just a minute. Right, I understand that in some years to come those jobs may not exist because I might do them. But I'm told that is a little way down the road as we speak. So why not show your patriotism bin off cheap labor in India and offer entry level jobs to young talented people who will work hard. And through that pool you might just identify some talent that is going to lead your organization or manage in your organization you in 5, 10, 20, 30, 40 years time.

[Connor]

I half agree with you.

[Peter Blexey]

Okay, let me tell you why you don't agree with.

[Connor]

So the half I don't agree with is the bit where I don't. I'm not fully against the outsourcing of jobs. A company wants to be profitable, has to, but I think some are being forced into this. So I was chatting to a chap I know runs a business, he said look, I can take people in on in the UK but, but the minimum wage now for an 18 to 20 year old is say it's 10 pound, that's actually 40% higher accounting for inflation from when I was 18. The minimum wage is higher, but it's not just the minimum wage, it's. I have to give 12.7% time to holiday sickness, maternity, paternity. They have full employment. You know, if these new employment lawyers. It's like, it's so hard to find good people and. But if they're not good to get rid of them, I'm much better off. Outsourcing saves me a lot of hassle. And I think the problem is that we've had successive governments now through the Conservatives and now Labour government, who aren't actually pro business. They don't understand the unintended consequences of everything they do. And so that.

[Peter Blexey]

Back to the pendulum.

[Connor]

Yeah, back to the pendulum. But I think it's. I think we can look at all of this through the lens of government, because it's not. I think the problem of recruiting people is the same with. The problem with the police, probably with the nhs is the pendulum, the academia and just the sheer size of government and how much they want to get involved in. They don't. There's this great book, I think Frederic Bastiat wrote, called the Law. It's all about the unintended consequences of government. And they come up with, they think are great ideas that have a destructive result for us and our economy. I think so. I think there's that. But then I would throw in education. Education has become indoctrinated.

[Peter Blexey]

Yeah.

[Connor]

Like we. I put a thing on Facebook discussing education. I was like, I think we should be teaching kids to understand the economy, think critically. But we're not. We've started infecting education with liberal indoctrination. And it's like, yeah, some of the people who cut. You have some great people. I work for me and I've employed some great young people. We have some morons who come in, whose world view is ridiculous. So I just. I think it's all the same problem, which is the government.

[Peter Blexey]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Connor]

But I feel sorry for young people too. I mean, they are. There's not as many jobs out there as you would like. But then. Then this is where I have sympathy for the immigration argument, because we have had high levels of immigration and people coming in who are working and could those have been jobs that young people have done? Because I don't know if you worked before you became a police officer, but I certainly did.

[Peter Blexey]

Yeah.

[Connor]

We all did shit jobs. I did some shit. Milk ground was a shit job. Hammering handles on umbrellas was a shit job. But you just did a job. And I think kids should be out there doing really Shitty jobs for shitty pay. So they're incentivized to go, I want to do something bigger and better.

[Peter Blexey]

Yeah.

[Connor]

So I think the jobs can exist.

[Peter Blexey]

So learn. Go to night school.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Peter Blexey]

You know, all that sort of night school. I've never heard anybody mention the expression night school. Decades.

[Connor]

Yeah, I remember that. Yeah, my mum did it. Yeah, my mum did it.

[Peter Blexey]

That's what people did to improve their chances, improve their knowledge and get on well.

[Connor]

That's why I talk about going soft, I think. Have we gone too soft? Does it need just to be a little bit harder?

[Peter Blexey]

Yeah. I think we are undoubtedly far too fluffy as a nation than we ever used to be. And look how expressions like stiff upper lip have gone. Britain used to pride itself. We all said, britons have a stiff upper lip. And that was because we'd. Yeah, well, we'd just deal with it and get on with it, wouldn't we? To a certain degree. And those kind of things have gone.

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[Connor]

D G-E-R.com that is Ledger.com you must look around at this country and think, we've gone mad. It sounds like it, yeah.

[Peter Blexey]

I do think that politicians for decades now have fundamentally failed us. I think the grip on our public service of this fluffy woke liberal bullshit is massively detrimental. And when they talk about growth, this government and its obsession with growth, growth. Well, imagine if so much time wasn't taken up with employment tribunals, grievance procedures and all that kind of stuff, and people were actually at their desks doing some work. Imagine what that might do for productivity. I bemoan the lack of manufacturing in this country, we've still got some manufacturing and it's brilliant.

[Connor]

Our energy costs are too high.

[Peter Blexey]

Oh, yeah, don't. Don't get me, sir. Because that draws me inevitably towards moribund Miliband.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Peter Blexey]

And all of that. And I'm not a climate change denier, but I went to Hun Stanton.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Peter Blexey]

A couple of months ago. Sunny honey, as somebody told me it's affectionately known as. And we had a lovely time. And their cliffs are very interesting to look at. They've got. I think it's the Cretaceous period. Okay. Somebody will tell me that I've mispronounced that. And I'm just an uneducated oaf who left school at 16. And I'll take that on the chin.

[Connor]

I think you got it right.

[Peter Blexey]

Did I? Well, thank you. And if you look at Hun Stanton's cliffs, they are different colored, there's different colors, and that is according to the sea levels as they were many millions of years ago during the Cretaceous period, when the sea level was massively higher than what it was and the Average temperature was 25 degrees. The average temperature.

[Connor]

Sounds nice.

[Peter Blexey]

So. Yeah. Doesn't it just. Where do I put my jacket? So, because the planet has been entirely different in terms of its climate in the past. Yes, of course, I'm not denying mechanization and the industrial age may have had an input, but I do tend to think that Mother Nature is a very wise soul and that she will probably find a way. Yes, we can do our bit, but we don't have to have it as some kind of national obsession that's costing us a lot of money making our standards of living lower and thereby making life just a little bit more shitty. What's the point of doing that? Surely the whole object of being here is to make life a little bit better.

[Connor]

When did the government last improve something? It's a really tough question to answer.

[Peter Blexey]

We got.

[Connor]

It's a tough question to answer. When did it. I mean, I. I was too young to. To understand what Thatcher faced when she came in and what she did. But my dad, we had a conversation this weekend. He said when she first came in, it was tough. The nation was not in a great place.

[Peter Blexey]

I wasn't.

[Connor]

But she rebuilt it. He can say objectively the. The country got better under Thatcher. She improved the economy, she improved our respect on the global stage. And then, I think, since then, well, it didn't get better with Blair, it didn't get better with the Tories, and it's not getting better with Labour now. So We've had essentially continual decline since the announcements of the poll tax.

[Peter Blexey]

And of course, no politician and none of their policies are entirely perfect. We could talk about things that Margaret Thatcher did that have found out to be pretty bad ideas, but that said, she was a commitment politician. She was a principled politician and she stuck with her principles and she committed to those, whether you liked her or whether you loathed her. And for that she has my respect. I don't like politicians that get blown around by the wind. I like politicians who are principled and who are committed, even if I'm not necessarily in agreement with them. But for politicians making things better, look at Blair, okay? They will say supporters of Blair who have probably now got promoted to be head of Human capital Management, they will say, oh, look at the schools, look at the hospitals and all of that funded by PFI private finance initiatives, there are still, and this one slipped under the radar, I think that many, many people are not aware of. There are still a considerable number of fire stations that were rebuilt during Tony Blair's era through public finance initiatives. Those fire stations were then leased to the fire service who now pay huge rents for those fire stations in which they eat, slip, drink and dash out and save people's lives. Okay? They are charged, the fire service are charged if something breaks again by the landlords. These private finance initiative people who built the fire stations and then lent them on a lease back to the fire service. The fire service has got such expenditure on these places. You think when you're the fire service owned fire stations. No, no, no, no. So, Blair, and now in London, in these fire stations that are leased to the fire service, what the bosses do is they say to all their men and women, look, if something is wearing out, right, If a door handle is wearing out, it's coming a bit loose away. Let me know, let me know. Because the, the owners have to replace something that's wearing out. If however, a heavy handed firefighter goes bump and the handle snaps, it's then classified as broken and the fire service have to pay for it to have it replaced. I mean, it's bonkers. There you go, Blair. Thank you for costing our fire services. Now all these years after you've left power costing our fire services lots of money. Just a small example, let's get onto hospitals and schools and all that. But I bet the same rules apply. If it was a PFI built hospital, you know, if it breaks, the hospital has to pay. If it wears out anyway, well, that's got worse.

[Connor]

But can, can you Think of anything that's got better in the last 20 years.

[Peter Blexey]

Courtesy of the government.

[Connor]

Courtesy of the government, yeah.

[Peter Blexey]

Because I might need a very, very long time to think about this.

[Connor]

I've really tried and I've tried.

[Peter Blexey]

I know something.

[Connor]

Go.

[Peter Blexey]

I know something. Right. And it's not really down at the government, but it was commissioned and construction on it began under whatever government it was.

[Connor]

Channel tunnel, the Elizabeth Line, I'll give you that. It's brilliant. Yeah, it is brilliant.

[Peter Blexey]

It is wonderful. I can jump on an abbey wood, which is about a 15 minute drive from my house, and go all the way to Reading on one train. And Heathrow, of course, and all of that.

[Connor]

And it's a good train.

[Peter Blexey]

Yes, wonderful. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's terrific. So I would say the Elizabeth Line. See, when we do, big, major infrastructure in the uk, okay, it'll overrun and it will cost a lot more money, but we do do it well.

[Connor]

Well, I like the Eurotunnel, I do.

[Peter Blexey]

Yeah.

[Podcast Sponsor Announcer]

You know, the other week I had.

[Connor]

To go to Paris.

[Podcast Sponsor Announcer]

Yeah.

[Connor]

And the weather was going to be bad and I booked the train ticket and. And you know, we are 40 minutes from St Pancras. I got on the train in the morning. That was great. And I know overrun, probably lost loads of money, but it was pretty good.

[Peter Blexey]

Yeah. Oh, it's a wonderful thing. Still to this day, it's brilliant. Go in your car. I mean, we've been on holidays in France where we've took the car when the kids were young, pack it all up with stuff, you know, so you can have a relatively inexpensive holiday. We didn't have a much money at all when they were. When they were tiny. Yeah. And have relatively inexpensive honesty. You drive on this train and whoosh, it takes you.

[Connor]

Off you go. But if you look at services, the NHS has not improved. The policing appears. It's not improved. I don't know about the fire service. I've got to say, I don't know on that. I still. I'm still confident with the fire service and if I have a fire, they're going to turn up. Border security is not as good.

[Peter Blexey]

Have we got any?

[Connor]

But we've got some.

[Peter Blexey]

Have we?

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Peter Blexey]

Well, they're all on holiday at the moment.

[Additional Commentator]

The.

[Connor]

Our legal systems got a lot worse. Everything's too slow and too expensive. I just. And this is where I come back to the conversations I have with people is like, at what point do you realize, like, swapping a party might not be ever going to fix this? It's the mechanics of Government now, I think are fundamentally broken. I try and look, I try and go, will that new party and that new leader, are they, are they going to actually be able to do anything or.

[Peter Blexey]

Well, now I think whosoever wins at the next election will need at least two terms to strip out the tentacles that were sown in 1997 and have now got so deep and have captured so much of British society. Certainly all the public services, health, policing, education, universities, all of that, they're entirely captured. To strip that out would require commitment and a principal politician and I think two terms, because the pushback against all those people who have built careers on, on basically espousing nonsense and making life more difficult and not so good needs to have balance. I don't care if you're a bloke who wants to wear a skirt at work, right, That's a matter for you. But you go in the gents toilet, right? You don't go in the same toilet.

[Connor]

As my Mrs. You sound so old fashioned.

[Peter Blexey]

I know, I mean, call me old fashioned, but if, if you've got the tackle you were born with, mate, you going in the chance with me and I promise not to laugh at you, right, if you want to stand next to me and have a piss wearing a skirt, that's a matter for you. But you're not going to stand next to my wife or go in a cubicle next to my wife, you know, that's. That. Those kind of sort of things I think should, should hold. But of course, we've got an ongoing court case, haven't we, with all those nurses who are actually battling their own hospital who felt it was okay for somebody with male equipment to use the same room as females. Shame on that hospital. I mean, absolute shame on that hospital. They've just gone roughshod over the Supreme Court's ruling. Let's bring that pendulum back, shall we? Let's bring it back to a common sense kind of position where. Yeah, common sense.

[Connor]

I feel like that is coming back though. We saw the International Olympic Committee about bloody time. I mean, it should never have got there. We all saw it in the Olympics, young girls boxers being beaten up by fellas. Yeah, we saw that and I think the pendulum swung back on that. We can talk about it without being attacked or canceled. I think we've got a back to a rational place on that. But I think that pendulum on government has to swing to so far back, I'm worried they can't, they physically can't do it. It's going to be so difficult well.

[Peter Blexey]

Again, because you've got generations of civil servants. Yeah, excuse me, senior civil servants who have espoused all of that and loved it and built careers on it, and they'll need pulling the line by the government. I actually, because I spend a lot of time in green rooms of various broadcasters and what have you, I tend to get some. To meet some people which I would never otherwise have done in my life. One of whom was. And I'll name drop him. And I'll name. And shame, because I'm not bothered. Lord Frost. Okay. Who was such a big cheese in all the Brexit negotiations. Right. It was very nice, by the way, very pleasant. And we had a very convivial conversation in a green ranch. And I asked him a simple question. I'm generally speaking a simple soul, but I didn't think it was a stupid a question as it might sound to some. I said to him, isn't it very difficult to run the country? And he said it is. He said, which is exactly why you have to keep politicians as far away from it as you possibly can, verbatim. That's what he said.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Peter Blexey]

And that's a very, very senior civil servant. So that gives that. For me, that was just a window into the senior ranks of the civil service. They will frustrate the politicians. And they're there, aren't they? The civil service. They're not known for being way out here. They're not being out there. So they need hauling over the coals or bringing in a line.

[Connor]

We need better politicians, really.

[Peter Blexey]

We do. We need. I mean, can you imagine what we got nearly 70 million people, haven't we? In a country. And out of that 70 million, you look at some of Starmer's cabinet and.

[Connor]

You think, all of Starmer's cabinet.

[Peter Blexey]

Is that the best we've got out of 70 million people? All right, I know there's millions of kids and elderly people and all that kind of game. We just take the. The middle 40 or whatever. Is that the best you can come up with? Do me a favor.

[Connor]

It's not. It's all of his cabinet. It's every single person within there. Ed Miller band, Angela Rain, well, she's not in the cabinet anymore, but Rachel Reeves, vet Cooper, David Lammy, they're all morons.

[Peter Blexey]

Yeah, well, you see. Let's go back to Blair, if we will. I know I keep dragging it back to him, right?

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Peter Blexey]

But those tentacles he implanted in 1997, he was able to do it so effectively and basically hoodwink us all. To such a degree, because we didn't know how fundamentally he wanted to change the nation, because he had, actually. And it grieves me to say it, but he had some smart people on his team. When you think of the names you've just mentioned in Starmer's cabinet, look who Blair had. Smart people. Good. Brown.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Peter Blexey]

Love him or loathe him. Very smart fella. Chancellor for 10 years. Jack Straw.

[Connor]

Yep.

[Peter Blexey]

Very smart fella. Robin Cook, a principled politician who resigned over the Iraq war.

[Connor]

I had to tell my son about this. I told him. He. He. What was the question you asked me? Why does everyone.

[Additional Commentator]

He's still got so much respect and.

[Connor]

Obviously saying he doesn't. That's the thing. But he does in certain areas within political circles. But I had to go back and explain because it. You know, the sad thing about Tony Blair is everything he did in Northern Ireland was incredible. Him, Bill Clinton, Moham Old, even Jerry. I mean, Jerry Adams risked his life to. They brought peace to Northern Ireland in a very, very violent place. You probably know it better than I, but, like, it was something that was a credit to him to be involved in. And then everything since then has been awful.

[Peter Blexey]

I think the history books have been very unkind to the man who actually kickstarted the entire thing, and he's been largely forgotten. And I know he had his flaws and all of that, but he gets zero credit for it. John Major. John Major really set the ball rolling, and Blair was able to build on it.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Peter Blexey]

And of course, we all want to be hugely grateful that we don't live in fear of bombs going off like I did for so much of my life. Yeah. You know, getting on the tube and every bus and every train looking. Is there an unattended bag somewhere? And if so, raise the alarm. I still do it because it's ingrained in me.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Peter Blexey]

But not perhaps with the fear and dread that I did during those times. Of course, I was working on B division when Harold's bomb went off, you know, and all that kind of stuff. So.

[Connor]

But.

[Peter Blexey]

But to be grateful.

[Connor]

But I think what you're saying is, is that. I mean, I would never vote Labor. I fundamentally disagree with them, but I understand why people voted Labor. I don't know.

[Peter Blexey]

Oh, the last election.

[Connor]

No, no, no, no. Back when it was blur and.

[Additional Commentator]

And.

[Connor]

And whilst I wasn't a Labor supporter. The names of their heavyweights. Jack Straw was a heavyweight.

[Peter Blexey]

I didn't mention Margaret Beckett.

[Connor]

Margaret Beckett. But these.

[Peter Blexey]

These were people.

[Connor]

I disagree with them, but I think they had principle Yeah. I look at this front bench now and I'm like, oh, I don't respect any of you. I don't. When. When you talk, I think you're an idiot. I don't think you're intelligent. I don't understand what you're doing. I'm just so lost how. How our political class has become so weak and ineffective in such a short period of time.

[Peter Blexey]

Yeah. Yes. I'm afraid the. The incumbents are not great. And who knows what the. See, that's what I want from a government. I want you to employ smart people. Please. When I turn the telly on and I see a politician on telly, and I know I'm setting the bar rather low, but I do want to be smarter than me. Because they're running the country.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Peter Blexey]

And I couldn't do that. So, please.

[Connor]

And.

[Peter Blexey]

Yeah, yeah, you turn on, you go.

[Connor]

Maybe you could. Well, listen, is anything giving you optimism?

[Peter Blexey]

Yeah, I am. Generally speaking, I'm a. I'm a sort of sickeningly optimistic kind of bloke, really. I always like to think that, you know, the sun will rise and there'll be a brighter day tomorrow and all of that, even with my increasing years. And of course, I'm a lot closer to death than I am birth these days, but I'm still optimistic. There's a lot of very bright, smart young people out there. There's also a lot of young people who are going to vote Green at the next general election. Right. And that's a terrifying thing because, of course, so many of them, after the old 50% have to go to uni. Nonsense. Complete tripe. Utter, utter cobblers. So many of them have gone there and been indoctrinated. And now, of course, as they move away from the Labor Party, they're going to go for Zach Polanski and his bunch of unhinged lunatics who. I remember the Green Party when they were concerned about environmental matters.

[Connor]

That's what you wanted them for.

[Peter Blexey]

Yeah, yeah. Now, I, you know, I'm glad about, you know, you get charged for a plastic carrier bag and all that game. And I'm Charles. I'm pleased with many, many of the green initiatives around recycling, et cetera, et cetera. But now they're bonkers and they're attracting more people to them. Well, I mean, that's labor for you, isn't it? That's this labor government for you. I'm optimistic. I think that. Well, we have to be optimistic, don't we? Or else why are we going to get out of Bed. We just pulled a duvet back over our heads and just go, oh, I'll stay here until the stench gets so bad. I have to get out of bed.

[Connor]

You can live on a beach somewhere.

[Peter Blexey]

No, I'm staying here. Yeah, this wonderful. Well, this once wonderful nation is worth fighting for. It has many, many, many challenges. This whole open borders policy is utter, utter abject lunacy. In fact, it's very dangerous, as we see, because the increasing number of victims of crimes that are being created by people who have come to this country illegally. The first job of the government, and these are not my words, they are actually on the government website, is to keep its citizens safe and the country secure. That's the number one job of government. And they're not doing it. They are fundamentally not doing it, so utter shame on them for that. Secondly, people are rightly concerned about the rise of Islam, fundamental, extreme Islam. Absolutely. And they are very, of course, entitled and I think, with much justification, concerned about that. I put myself among their number. There are now more Muslims in the UK than there are people living in Wales. Of course, that's a cause of concern for people. These matters have to be addressed. They cannot be ducks, they cannot be swerved. These kind of matters have to be addressed. A lack of integration, open borders, all that kind of stuff has to be addressed. And we've seen the Home Secretary apparently making an announcement today about that, well, Denmark style immigration. Exactly. Well, talk's cheap and this government's pretty good on talk. We'll have to see. Right. Talk is cheap. Let's see. Let's see if she can get it past the lunatic left who govern so much of what this. Or obstruct so much of what this government perhaps might otherwise do.

[Connor]

Well, that was. I was reading about it on Sky News last night. It's. They were saying it's all well and good, her having these policies, but will she get it past the backbenches?

[Peter Blexey]

Exactly. Like welfare reform, they couldn't get that passed, get that through now, could they? No, that's scuppered. So we'll have to wait and see. But someone's going to have to tackle it, because you simply cannot have. We're up to 39,000 this year have illegally come here on boats and let alone the back of vans, let alone all the other nonsense like the Boris wave that allowed millions of people to flood in here, who essentially now are going to end up costing tens upon tens of billions as they become eligible for benefits and such like. This country has changed. This city, my home City has changed beyond recognition from what it was when I first started traveling in London alone as a young teenager going to watch my football team. Changed beyond compare and not all for the better. I fully understand why people have a nostalgia for Britain, London of the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, even people who are now in their 60s and 70s and such like. I completely understand that I have nostalgia for those times. I understand why they have concerns, I understand why they long for some of that. Or if of course, knowing that we can't turn the wheel back, can't turn the clock back, that can we just now draw a line and preserve what we have. I long for those days of after you, madam. Excuse me, would you like my seat? All of which I still do because it gives me a buzz and I love doing it. And my old mum, who's still with us at 97, drummed it into me that manners maketh man. And they do. And I love all of that queuing. Used to be we used to queue at the bus stop pretty civilly now, okay, you watch some people trying to get on a bus these days. It's appalling. I long for. And then of course you'll get some lunatic lefty on the radio going, well, what are British values? Okay, go on, name me British values. I hear it on phonings sometimes. I do listen to loony lefties because it's good to know what the opposition are thinking, right? You need to know what the enemy are thinking so you can tackle it if you ever end up coming up against them in a debate or a discussion. It's true, you've got to know what the enemy's thinking is how we won a second world war, right, by knowing what the enemy was seeking. And it works for me in terms of if I have to debate with someone.

[Connor]

This is your enigma.

[Peter Blexey]

So I do something. Yeah, it is, yeah, yeah, yeah. So sometimes I do listen to the left. Sometimes I'll flick through the garden, you know, the Guardian, you know, until I get headache, right? And so it, it is important, and I say, you hear the particularly pious ones on a phone in, if they get someone phoning in who's whose views are rather contrary to the lunatic lefty radio presenters say, well, what are British values? Go on, name me British values. Well, I think eating food that has been eating animals that have been humanely dispatched is very much a British value. It's what we always did. It's why we developed the processes over the years to make them more and more humane, to make them as humane as we possibly could. I think that's a perfect example of a British value that we've altered over the years and many, many millions of people treasure. For example, shove that up your pipe and smoke it. Mr. Looney, left, radio presenter.

[Connor]

Are you talking about James Lebron?

[Peter Blexey]

Oh, yeah. He's not the only one.

[Connor]

I know, but he's the worst.

[Peter Blexey]

He is not the only one. Yeah. Right now you've got me on at, well, bc, Right? Yesterday morning, okay, I'm doing the invoices on my laptop, and I'm thinking, right, I'm gonna listen to one of the really unhinged ones, right? Matthew Wright, okay? He does a breakfast show on. On LBC at weekends. Please do not waste your life listening to him. I do it for you so you don't have to. Right, I'm listening. And at one point, he's talk. He's talking about why relationships fail. Okay? I'm thinking, okay, let's have a listen to this. The first one of the first callers was a lady of Nigerian origin who spoke about how our relationship with the man she was with who was of Jamaican origin, right, Fell because of familial pressures. In other words, racism. Right? They were racist. The Jamaicans were racist towards the Nigerian. The Nigerian family were racist towards the Jamaicans. Would Matthew Wright call it what it was?

[Connor]

No.

[Peter Blexey]

Would he call it out and call it racism? No. No, no, no, no, no. Because in their lunatic world, the only form of racism happens is when a white person says something about someone who's not white. Then the next caller, right, you can imagine I do shout sometimes when the radio's on up until my wife tells me to shut up or she said, what?

[Connor]

You.

[Peter Blexey]

What are you getting hot under the collar about? The next one, right? Absolute gifts. These were a lady of Bangladeshi origin, okay, Ringing in to tell why her relationship with a man of Pakistani origin didn't work. Because of. Yes. Pressures from both families about who they were, who their partner was. In other words, racism. And what do you call that out? You don't have to answer, obviously, you know, and that's. That's the left. They don't like inconvenient truths. No, they really don't.

[Connor]

Well, that's why I think I struggle to get lefties onto this podcast, because their arguments don't stack up to scrutiny in LBC's favor. I do like Nick Ferrari sometimes.

[Peter Blexey]

Yeah. I'll listen to him in the morning if I'm. If I can't plonk myself in front of the telly. If know and I'm getting ready. He's. He's my getting ready and doing jobs. Listen to.

[Connor]

He'll hold them to account a little bit. Yeah, well listen, look I think it's good we can talk straight and honest these days and I think you're about the most straight talking person we've had on it. Anyone else? God no. And I think it's good. I think we have to have these conversations. I. I worry about the future of this country for my kids. I've got a 21 year old Connor over there. We've got a 15 year old. I want them to have a country like I had growing up which is one where they have to work hard but they're rewarded and the government doesn't interfere with everything they do. I think the pendulum swinging back. I'm confident of it. I hope it does otherwise we'll leave. But, but yeah, I. Look, I hope it does and, and Peter, look it's great to meet you and I hope we fix the policing as well. I 100% support your idea. We should have more visible policing on the beat.

[Peter Blexey]

Visible, known, contactable, will equal trusted.

[Connor]

Exactly. Thank you. Appreciate your time.

[Peter Blexey]

Thank you very much for having me.

[Connor]

Thank you and thank you everyone for listening. We will see you soon.