No Bedtime for the Far Right feat. Daniel Trilling

Summary

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TRASHFUTURE Episode Summary

Episode: No Bedtime for the Far Right feat. Daniel Trilling
Date: June 16, 2026
Guests: Daniel Trilling (author/journalist)
Main Theme:
A critical, darkly humorous exploration of the UK’s proposed social media ban for youth, the political weaponization of “national bedtime”, Britain’s sinking defense spending logic, and the mainstreaming of the far right—particularly following recent far right violence in Northern Ireland. The conversation further unpacks how British (and international) political establishments have facilitated and enabled far right rhetoric and organizing, with Daniel Trilling’s new book as a focal point.

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Episode Overview

The hosts dissect the UK government's social media ban on minors, satirize Britain's cultural/political obsessions (including militarism and defense procurement), and pivot to an in-depth interview with Daniel Trilling about the rapid mainstreaming of far right positions in Britain, the exhaustion of centrist “anti-populism”, and the international dynamics driving recent rightwing mobilizations and violence.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Britain’s Social Media Ban and the “National Bedtime”

(00:16–14:03)

• Opening Satire:
  The show opens lampooning the notion of “Orb layoffs” (the Sam Altman iris scanner co.) as a symptom of runaway tech capitalism and hyperbolizes a future where “orbs” enforce the new child internet curfew ([00:28]).

  “If a child tries to go onto the Internet past their bedtime, the orb flies in through their bedroom window and kills them.” — Riley ([01:23])

• On the Ban’s Absurdity and Origins:
  The hosts discuss the UK’s new proposed total social media ban for under-16s, and a curfew for ages 16–18. They note, ironically, this “batshit” policy is an Australian import ([03:09], [03:24]).

  “There are two paths... good quality coffee, or the most insane shit that will never work. And we chose the second one.” — November Kelly ([03:09])

• Tech, Capitalism, and Phones Ruining Kids (and Adults):
  Debate over whether such bans will work (consensus: no), and acknowledgment that “the phones is fucking up the kids”—but also that “all age demographics” are similarly hooked ([04:32]–[06:27]).

  "We adults made it such that to navigate society you need to be on your damn phone." — Riley ([06:18])

• Generations, Digital Natives, and the ‘Boomer’ Gripe:
  The hosts reflect on their own generational luck, having “sniped the five years of Twitter you could use to get a job at Buzzfeed” ([07:24–07:31]).

• Ban as Moral Panic and Legacy Politics:
  They satirize Keir Starmer’s desire to cement a legacy by “making kids go to bed on time”, comparing it to David Cameron’s claims to have legalized gay marriage ([08:43–08:56]).

• Underlying Issues Missed by Policymakers:
  The hosts criticize the British tendency to address symptoms (screen time, radicalization’s transmission vector) rather than actual causes (austerity, the destruction of public social spaces, economic malaise).

  "You're trying to put out a fire by blowing away the smoke." — Hussein ([08:22])

• Superficial Diagnosis:
  Critique of Jonathan Haidt and similar thinkers for providing “shallow” liberal critiques of phones while ignoring the deeper, structural reasons youth turn to online life ([09:09–12:09]).

  “We still want tech companies to kind of like manage social relations. We just think we can kind of curtail them a little bit because this is Britain. We will just keep on banning things.” — Hussein ([12:09])

• British Social Pathology:
  Hosts suggest underlying social contempt for youth animates the policy ([12:48])

  “Britain considers every child to be an annoying subspecies of pest.” — Hussein ([12:48])

• Trans and Queer Panic as Subtext:
  Riley notes that much of the panic is directly tied to fear of children discovering queer/trans identities online, which is decried as “contagion” ([12:59–14:03]):

  “…there is a real horror of, like, queer kids, trans kids… because of social contagion. And specifically, this is a thing that TERFs come back to...that’s just an idea that you got off the Internet.” — Riley ([13:01])

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2. Britain’s Defense Spending Delusions & ‘Military Keynesianism’

(15:07–28:45)

• Defense as Legacy Politics:
  Ministers resign over perceived inadequate spending; defense hawks recycle platitudes about needing “more ambition”, but no one can answer “how to pay for it” without invoking “hand-ups not handouts” (i.e., welfare cuts) ([15:07–17:00]).

• Sunk Cost Nationalism:
  Riley describes the “sunk cost fallacy” of endless defense splurges as “an incredible insult”, and notes how British defense industrial policy no longer creates jobs or multipliers, just expensive purchases of American-made kit ([17:00–19:30]).

• Britain's World Power Delusion:
  Discussion of Britain's fantasy of regaining global military relevance, and the underlying emotional drivers:

  "[They] want Britain to be proportionally as militarily important as it would have been in, I don't know, somewhere between 1880 and 1942." — Hussein ([18:36])

• Liberal Internationalism, America, and Humiliation:
  Britain’s post-war strategy relied on the US “papering over the cracks”, now undone by an antagonistic American administration ([17:00–19:30]).

• Defense Spending as ‘Stimulus’ is a Myth:
  Riley and Hussein demolish the argument for “military Keynesianism”, noting that spending on modern kit (now made abroad) doesn’t stimulate the domestic economy ([24:44–27:03]):

  “All government spending has an economic multiplier. The economic multiplier for teachers, nurses, engineers is very high. ...For defense spending as it’s currently set up, it’s extremely low.” — Hussein ([25:36])

• Missing Referent—What Are We Defending, Exactly?
  The hosts query whether there’s any social cohesion left “under the Ajax fighting vehicle”. To truly defend the UK would require rebuilding actual civic life, not just hardware purchases ([20:43–24:03]).

  “If it’s supposed to be our values, democracy and liberalism, …we’re sort of hardly defending those from ourselves.” — Riley ([24:03])

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3. The Main Event: Daniel Trilling on the Far Right & the British Establishment

(29:52–64:36)

a) Introduction & Farage’s Recent Outburst

(30:27–32:16)

• Farage’s Radicalization in Plain Sight:
  Trilling summarizes how Farage’s recent rhetoric—in a Substack post expounding on ‘white victimhood’—marks a threshold. Once, such points were “pure Tommy Robinson territory”; now they appear as mainstream right populism.

  “He’s written 12 of the 14 words, where he says Britain is a two-tier state—against white people.” — Hussein, on Farage ([30:27])

b) The Smoothing of the Far Right/“Respectable” Divide

(32:16–35:47)

• From ‘Vague-post Führer’ to Explicit Racism:
  Farage’s longtime power lay in nudges, not shoves—playing at plausible deniability. But recently, even that veneer is gone ([33:52]).

• Pressure from the Right (and Elon Musk):
  Farage’s rhetorical shift is partly because he’s being outflanked by even more radical splinters (“Restore Britain”, with Elon Musk’s vocal support) ([35:47]):

  "Farage is operating from a position of relative weakness as well at the moment... Elon Musk has thrown his support behind Rupert Lowe and Restore." — Trilling ([35:47])

c) Farage, Technocracy, and the ‘Reform’ Party’s Contradictions

(36:36–39:22)

• Farage as Both Technocrat & Nationalist Showman:
  Farage merges appeals to modernization with ethnic nationalism, shifting presentation as required ([36:36]).

  “His ability to speak to several different groups of people at once and to say things that mean different things to those different groups... is why he's been so effective.” — Trilling ([36:36])

• ‘Reform’ Party’s Cuddly Face Drops:
  Initially ‘respectable’, with “Tory defectors” and even “eco-policy briefings”, Reform’s shift to hardline extremism (statements, proposals) was sudden and total ([39:22]).

d) How the Establishment Enables the Far Right

(39:22–43:30)

• Far Right as Radicalized Mainstream:
  Trilling details how the far right in Britain simply radicalizes mainstream reactionary politics/press tropes, especially around anti-immigration ([39:47]).

  “The far right …trade in radicalized versions of what exists in the mainstream.” — Trilling ([39:47])

• Mainstream Media Complicity:
  Trilling notes Farage’s endless mainstream airtime and lack of challenger, even when his base was “marginal” ([39:47–43:03]).

e) Populist Cruelty as a Substitute for Policy

(43:03–47:22)

• Bread and Circuses of Resentment Politics:
  The hosts and Trilling discuss the emotional logic: giving people “nothing real” but energized permission for cruelty, vengeance, resentment.

  "It's about getting people riled up and telling them that national revival is going to come via taking revenge on ... enemies, both internal and external." — Trilling ([43:30])

• Spectacle Over Substance:
  Recent proposals (“detention centers in Green-majority areas”) symbolize this politics of performative punishment ([43:30–47:22], [49:52]):

  “...the being seen to punish is more important than the actual practicalities of the policy.” — Trilling ([43:30])

f) Resentment—From Austerity to Far Right Fuel

(49:52–52:44)

• Mainstream Parties Created the Politics of Resentment:
  Richard Seymour’s “Disaster Nationalism” is cited: resentment is universal, but the far right offers “the illness as the cure”.
  Trilling details how first Cameron/Osborne, then New Labour, refined politics of scapegoating, only to lose control of the forces they'd unleashed ([49:52–52:44]).

  "The politics of resentment and of diverting various frustrations in society onto convenient scapegoats is something that the mainstream has specialized in Britain for a long time." — Trilling ([49:52])

g) Labour’s Dilemma—“Why Did They Get My Valve?”

(52:44–54:07)

• ‘Safety Valve’ Capture:
  Both Labour and Tories now chase Farage’s method with diminishing returns, even imitating anti-immigrant spectacle ([52:44]).

• Labour’s Pitch—Broken Country, No Change:
  Trilling frames Starmer's 2024/25 direction as a contradiction: “Britain is broken, but nothing should radically change” ([54:07]).

h) Northern Ireland—Far Right Escalation, Ulsterization, and Internationalization

(54:07–62:09)

• Racist Pogroms in Northern Ireland:
  Recap of the violence—driven by British and loyalist far right actors, intensified by tacit or explicit encouragement from figures like Musk ([54:07–57:01]).

• Militarization of British Far Right:
  Distinctiveness of Northern Irish far right: more organized, militant, with longstanding ties between English and Northern Irish groups ([57:01–57:48]).

  “The English far right at least often looked wistfully at loyalism in Northern Ireland and thought, if only we could do that...” — Trilling ([57:48])

• International Feedback Loops:
  Social media, particularly X/Twitter, drive intensification and international linking of these movements; now local violence is seen as “the front line in the civilization race war” by Musk and US far right ([58:00–61:29]).

• Nationalism as the Core Problem:
  Trilling cautions against viewing Irish republicanism (or any nationalism) as an antidote: all national communities are susceptible, and the “far right international” is intensifying cross-border currents ([62:09]).

i) How Should a Serious State Respond?

(62:43–63:32)

• No Serious Response Forthcoming:
  Hosts speculate sardonically on what a ‘serious’ anti-far right strategy would involve (jailing, proscriptions, bans)—comparing the actual state’s ferocity against the left versus its inaction against the right ([62:43]).

  “You can see the British government defending itself from the left … with Palestine action and being absolutely sort of heedless… It has the ability to do that if it chooses to. And choosing not to.” — Riley ([63:08])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “[The] Orb flies in through their bedroom window and kills them.” — Riley ([01:23])
• “You’re trying to put out a fire by blowing away the smoke.” — Hussein ([08:22])
• "Britain considers every child to be an annoying subspecies of pest." — Hussein ([12:48])
• "He’s written 12 of the 14 words, where he says Britain is a two-tier state—against white people." — Hussein ([30:27])
• “He is kind of the king of vague posting.” — Daniel Trilling ([33:52])
• “The politics of resentment and of diverting various frustrations in society onto convenient scapegoats is something that the mainstream has specialized in Britain for a long time.” — Daniel Trilling ([49:52])
• “…the being seen to punish is more important than the actual practicalities of the policy.” — Daniel Trilling ([43:30])
• “If only we had the access to weapons that they do.” — Daniel Trilling ([57:48])
• "Far right violence is primarily a problem of nationalism. Any national identity is going to be vulnerable to this stuff." — Daniel Trilling ([62:09])
• “You can see the British government defending itself from the left ... It has the ability to do that if it chooses to. And choosing not to.” — Riley ([63:08])

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Important Timestamps

• 00:16–04:30: Opening skit, critique of social media ban origins, and UK’s penchant for “importing debacles”.
• 04:30–14:03: Dissection of digital culture panic, generational takes, and political uses of child protection.
• 15:07–28:45: Military budget politics, “military Keynesianism” myth-busting, economic analysis.
• 29:52–32:16: Introducing Daniel Trilling, Farage’s rhetorical escalation and the “14 words” reference.
• 32:16–39:22: Farage’s career arc, Reform Party’s shape-shifting, mainstreaming far right rhetoric.
• 39:22–43:30: How mainstream institutions enable/extremify far right themes.
• 43:30–47:22: Populist cruelty as policy, spectacle over substance.
• 49:52–52:44: The role of resentment in mainstream and far right politics; legacy of austerity politics.
• 54:07–62:09: Northern Irish dynamics, Ulsterization of the far right, internationalization, Musk’s role.
• 62:43–63:32: (Ironic) discussion of what a tough anti-far right response might look like—and why it’s unlikely.
• 63:32–end: Outro, promo for bonus content, and book plug.

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Tone & Style

• Tone: Acerbic, irreverent, deeply skeptical of liberal/conservative establishment narratives.
• Style: Dense with sarcasm and in-jokes, sharp analysis, sometimes absurdist, always critical of capitalist and technocratic logics.

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For Listeners Who Missed the Episode

This episode is a rich, caustic teardown of how British politics, culture, and media both inadvertently and intentionally mainstream far right thinking, all against the absurd backdrop of “bedtime” politics and the militarization boondoggles of post-imperial Britain. It balances humor and insight, with Daniel Trilling offering a powerful lens on how resentment, spectacle, and scapegoating have replaced substantive public policy—and how easily the establishment cedes ground to reactionaries when real solutions would be too disruptive.

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Further Reading:
Daniel Trilling, If We Tolerate This: How the British Establishment Made the Far Right Respectable

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Transcript

[Hussein Nova]

Okay. You ever see two things? No. And I've never. I've never seen two. You ever see two things?

[Riley]

Well, because the thing is, I'm a Marxist Leninist, so when I see two things, I know I'm really seeing one thing that's different from either of them.

[Hussein Nova]

So I saw two things. Number one, we have Orb down there is. There's. Or we are. We are experiencing Orb set as tools for humanity. The company that makes the Sam Altman iris scanning Orb is laying off. I don't want to alarm you. Laying off 500 people, my God, I

[Riley]

thought people could have a career for life at Orb, but now you're telling me that because, like, we don't have professions anymore. Like it used to be, you know, your father was a toolmaker. His father was a toolmaker. But now the fucking gig economy, you've got to be fucking like Prime Minister or like working on the orb or whatever, and it's all losing those traditions.

[Hussein Nova]

And so here's the thing, right? There are 500 orb experts currently going free and the UK is trying to implement the most well thought out and intelligent policy in history, which is the social media ban for under 16s along with the curfew based partial ban for 16-18s.

[Riley]

I see what you're cooking. What we do is we have the orb and that way if a child tries to go onto the Internet past their bedtime, the orb flies in through their bedroom window and kills them.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah, like a servo skull in 40K. Yeah, exactly.

[Riley]

And you know what that is as well? That is defense investment, which solves the other thing that we've been worrying about. So I think this is a solid plan. Britain could become like a net exporter

[Hussein Nova]

of orbs, like of child seeking first person view explosive orbs. Yeah.

[Riley]

Because previously the only other country that manufactures those at scale is Israel. So like we could seriously start to compete on the world stage. Anyway, it's Trash feature.

[Daniel Trilling]

Yeah.

[Hussein Nova]

Welcome to tf. It's Hussein Nova and Riley. We got Daniel Trilling in the back half whose new book, if We Tolerate this, How the British Establishment Made the Far right Respectable is eerily relevant, especially for the events of the last couple of weeks.

[November Kelly]

Yeah. And we're desperately trying to record before the national bedtime.

[Riley]

I mean this is the sort of difficult, the timing difficulty is we have to do it before the national bedtime and we have to get it relevant to. To the race riot that's just happened as opposed to the race riot that's just about to happen.

[Hussein Nova]

God, there's so much. Yeah. We're going to be talking a little bit about Northern Ireland with Daniel, but we are mostly going to be talking about the broader currents of, like, the British far right and their relationship with the British establishment. And I will tell you now, I say it then, it's worth repeating. I'm currently speaking with a couple of people who are journalists based in Northern Ireland to get more of an on the ground view from there. But I do want to start with this completely insane social media, genuinely batshit policy that I would say can only be cooked up by the British. But what was actually an Australian import to Britain, like Linton Crosby or Flat

[Riley]

Whites or calling it a Sando.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah.

[November Kelly]

There are two paths, right? One path is like, you know, good quality coffee. And the other path is the most insane shit that will never work. And we chose the second one.

[Riley]

Which, which set of Australian imports are you going to get? The ones that are annoying but good or the ones that are annoying and evil?

[Hussein Nova]

So for those of you who don't know, the UK has announced it's going to do a total social. Well, actually, sorry, not total social media ban under 16s because Telegram and Discord are not included. Yeah.

[Riley]

You can only get radicalized in one of two directions. You can get radicalized to the four guys who are left who are in ISIS on Telegram, or you could get radicalized into a Resist Lib on Blue Sky. And to be honest, the second one's way more dangerous. We're going to see Trump's going to do another state visit to Britain and every kid in the country is going to come at him like weapons.

[Hussein Nova]

And when we see the partial ban for 16-18s, what we mean, they're going to implement a curfew where you can't be on it past 8:30. I don't know if that's from Australia or if that is like Britain putting our own annoying spin on it.

[Riley]

That's just the absolute nanny state. Just like it's just kicking in for them. I think the thing is, right, we know that screen time is actually bad for teenagers, right? And so if this worked right, this might actually, in the most annoying possible way, be a benefit to them. It's just also not going to work at all.

[November Kelly]

I think this is also it, like, the reason why this ban is sort of so fucking annoying is that, like, it kind of gets some stuff right and the stuff that it gets right are like, the phones is fucking up the kids.

[Riley]

That's the thing.

[November Kelly]

Yeah, the phones is fucking up the kids. I know that. Well, in some circles that's a controversial opinion. But look, the phones is fucking up the kids. They are saying some, they are saying some dumb shit. The adults are kind of doing it as well. And like a lot of the research sort of suggests that, like the best way to like research from actual people who study digital culture and everything basically say that, like, if you want your kids to have like healthier screen habits. Right, if you want them to have a healthier relationship, because this is it. We've talked on the show a lot about like the kind of quagmire that the government, but also lots of governments have gotten themselves into, which is that they have sort of given up the state to tech companies and they've kind of realized that there are consequences to that because the tech companies aren't making like the fancy trains or like making stuff easier, which is what they promise to do.

[Riley]

They're just making all of us dumber. But it's, it's like that's like that anti smoking psa, right? I learned it from watching you. We're all on our phones past our bedtime.

[November Kelly]

Well, yeah, well, the thing is like, they've made like the tech company companies have made things harder, which makes you have to be on screen anyway for longer because you are talking to like, if you want to try get car insurance, you're spending like 45 minutes talking to a chat bot rather than an actual person while being on your screen. But also, like, the way in which society is built is one where like you are basically on your screen all the time and we can't, you know, and obviously we have a lot of the research to say that like, this is kind of done by design. But like every time I sort of like have read about stuff to do with this spam, like the thing that I'm sort of constantly thinking about is like, well, okay, yeah, I agree with the point that like kids do be spending too much time on their phone. But I also think that if you are basically of any age demographic, you do be spending too much time on your phone.

[Riley]

Yeah, we adults made it such that to navigate society you need to be on your damn phone. And all of us are on our damn phone because we have to.

[November Kelly]

And we also grew up at a time where like, you know, we also said like formative years of our lives anyway were ones where like we were sort of told, well, actually being on the screen is good for you.

[Daniel Trilling]

Right?

[November Kelly]

Like, you know, because everything's going to go to screen.

[Riley]

Everything is going to me, I Instead of having like an actual, like real life, what I did was I posted and I accidentally posted my way into a career. I am a contra positive to the idea that going on your phone is bad and yet I'm out here saying going on your phone is bad. Mostly because I want to prevent ever being all about eved by a younger version of me. I'm going full boomer mode on podcasts. You will never replace me. You'll be listening to me when I sound like David fucking Attenborough.

[November Kelly]

You know how you have boomer types who are got through university and everything and then now just like, well, actually it's really unfair that, you know, kids go study basket weaving and we have to pay for it. We're like that before, like for like slightly unfettered Internet access, right?

[Riley]

We sniped the five years of Twitter where you could use it to get a job at Buzzfeed and we are never letting anyone else have that opportunity again.

[November Kelly]

It's never happening again. Back in my day, I got loads of free avocado on toast.

[Hussein Nova]

It was crazy. Yeah, you could have parlayed that into a house, but you just ate it, you fool. Now, this whole social media ban, right, it is a relatively complex topic because it's true the phone is bad, but a lot of the reasoning behind it is that they're going to stop, say children being radicalized, accessing dangerous content. They're going to, they're acting on bully. Basically. Keir Starmer is trying to stop the plot of adolescence from happening as though the plot of adolescence wasn't happening before. The phones, the phones are just channels for the existing problems. You're trying to put out a fire by blowing away the smoke. And also, by the way, if you want to talk about radicalization, if you want to talk about the phones being a danger to democracy, it is absolutely not 16 year olds who are getting engagement far for money by Sri Lankan AI Farms. It's not 16 year old TikTokers, it's 65 year old retirees. That's who is getting. That's who has to be taken off the phone or the social media ban. Maybe it should just cover say radio Mil Collins, which I'm aware the government is still announced its social media ban on. They went on genocide radio and announced their social media ban for the benefit of the country. That would target the people who are least dangerous.

[Riley]

I think it's interesting that this is specifically Starmer trying to secure his own legacy. Right? And that's a great thing to be like yeah, they're going to remember me through the ages because I was the one who made the kids go to bed on time.

[Hussein Nova]

I think in 10 years, how David Cameron still touts, well, under me, I'm legalized gay marriage. Starver is going to be like, I implemented national bedtime. God, the abolished bedtime anarchists were right. They are trying to put a bedtime in place.

[November Kelly]

This is a really good point though, because I feel like one of the sort of, in terms of the demographics and the sort of obsessions with legacies. The thing that's similar with the David Cameron Sort of iPass, I pass gay marriage. And what this is sort of intended to be is that the core group of people who still support David Cameron or Keir Starmer are a particular kind of liberal who in my view also is kind of addicted to their phone in a very sort of blue sky way. Like, they're sort of very radicalized liberals who are very much like people who kind of fall under the Jonathan Haidt sort of understanding of like. And Jonathan Haidt, I think, is sort of really instrumental in sort of understanding the shape of these current social media bans. Because if we're talking about trying to blow away the smoke when the fire happened, Jonathan Haidt is that guy, right? He's the person who has basically said, yeah, the phones are bad, okay. Correct. I can sort of get on board with the opinion. But he doesn't really sort of go any deeper into what these phones sort of represent or what they sort of are designed to replace or like the tech companies that he is sort of adjacent to and the types of products that they are making. Very much like, it's very much of the model of very, very superficial and one, you know, sort of ticks a lot of liberal boxes but kind of refuses to go under the hood to sort of figure out, well, okay, how did this type of technology and how did these tech companies end up sort of subsuming so much of social life to the point where they could sort of direct, like, what, how we interact with each other. Do you know what I mean? And so, and this is what. And this is kind of like what, you know, to understand this band. This is sort of the way it is because, like, if you wanted to truly understand, like, okay, why are these kids kind of socializing entirely through their phones? You have to ask, well, what are people doing that? Why are like, we, you know, what, like, how. How is like, such a significant percentage of the population kind of, you know, it wasn't even that long ago like it was during COVID where we were basically being told that, yeah, like, you don't really have to sort of, you know, social life isn't a real thing. And also you can replace all of it with just like digital alternatives. Like, you know, you could do like a zoom meeting instead of like meeting up in real life. And that kind of is the same thing. And like, you know, talking about sort of reinvesting in like youth centers, it's like, well, austerity killed a lot of them. But actually what sort of did the death drive was Covid and the fact that these public spaces never opened up. There are lots of parks that have never really opened up post Covid. Lots of third spaces that don't exist and were justified on the basis of like, well, you know, Covid happened and we can't really afford to do it again. But hey, here's like an app, right? Library is a similar thing. I remember lots of kind of speeches from people like George Osborne saying, well, ebooks are sort of like a good alternative and we'll sort of make loads of them available. So you don't need the building and you don't like and what the building represents. Like, we have sort of been conditioned to believe that like these digital structures are fine, if not better than the sort of real life alternatives. And now we're sort of desperately trying to sort of like get to some of that, but not enough to sort of diagnose the problem. We still want tech companies to kind of like manage social relations. We just think we can kind of

[Hussein Nova]

curtail them a little bit because this is Britain. We will just keep on banning things. Nothing will ever get introduced or added. But also because this is Britain, you have to remember, and I'll say this before we go on, I'm sure this is not the last we'll talk of the social media ban for under 18s. By the way, November. I do want to say TF comes out in support of podcasting ban for under 35s.

[Riley]

Yes, yes, of course, absolutely. Listen, we don't know what it does to the developing brain and it could cause them irreversible damage. I'm not here to be a part of a kind of a social contagion. You know, the thing is that every podcaster is a huge problem for a sane society. And so we have to sort of like keep the numbers as low as we can.

[Hussein Nova]

The other thing I was going to say is you also can't fully understand this policy and the contours of it without remembering that Britain considers every child to be an annoying subspecies of pest.

[Riley]

That and just as a segue from. From the, you know, podcasting being sort of a huge problem for wrestling society. I also think you can't understand this without understanding, understanding the homophobia and transphobia that British liberals of Starmer's generation have specifically directed at children. There is a real horror of, like queer kids, trans kids, or kids figuring out that they might be these things because of social contagion. And specifically, this is a thing that terfs come back to and back to and back to is that's just an idea that you got off the Internet. Right. I transitioned at 26. One of the reasons why it took me that long was because I barely knew trans people existed. Right. As rancid as sort of like trans communities on the Internet were at that time, I was nowhere near them. Right. And so I think there is a real determination on the part of people who are trying to push these kind of bans to make it so that you have to have your entire sort of adolescent without any access to any sort of view of queer or trans people, unless you are lucky enough to have it personally.

[Hussein Nova]

You get no view of anything outside print or broadcast media or stuff that's around you because you have no social media. You also don't have a library. You also don't have any third spaces to go see your friends. And so you are. What I see this as is going back to this idea in Britain that children are property. They're your property. They're yours to do with what you will. And this is giving you control of what your pro. Of what dangerous influences your property gets exposed to. Because really what they should be doing, like any child, is they should be reading Matthew Syed columns and getting angry. Yeah. Speaking of things that columnists like, I want to move on before we talk to Daniel, because would you believe it, Al Karns, the greatest labor stalwart of the last, oh, I don't know, 20 months or approximately, the Minister for the army, as well as John Healy, the Minister of Defence, have quit because of the failure of the British Army's greatest nemesis, historically, the British treasury, to invest enough to get our brave boys vibrated to death by enough Ajax fighting vehicles.

[Riley]

Yeah, yeah. It's as simple as that. I mean, the Strategic Defense Review is going to need another review. So I look forward to the Strategic Defense Review review and possibly the review of that where we once again confront the idea that there just isn't the money for this stuff. And the closest to any pushback anyone's had on. This is Al Karns guy I am thoroughly sick of hearing from got asked on tv, okay, where would you actually find the money for defence? And he couldn't help but go to a sort of thought terminating cliche which was changing welfare from handouts to hand ups, which, sure, man, whatever. But that is the program, right? Is we do an absolute sort of ram raid on benefits, but not on pensions, though, because that's too hard. And we use that to spend on the military. Now, we do spend very stupidly and inefficiently on our military, but in large part that's because of our own kind of sense of vaingloriousness, right? Like the two gigantic aircraft carriers, that sort of dubious necessity being a great example of this. Right? And so this idea that we need to have more ambition and therefore more money is this incredible kind of sunk cost fallacy. And the idea that we need to immiserate everyone else in order to deliver it is a huge, huge insult.

[Hussein Nova]

Hey, hey, can I. Do you want to have a little. You want to hear something fun? You know who else has said that they would cut welfare to fund defense?

[Riley]

I'm hearing the Stone Roses in one earphone and I'm hearing maybe, I don't know, like Oasis on the other earphone at two times speed. And I'm prepared to maybe do things a little differently here.

[Hussein Nova]

Oh, you know what? It's. Don't look back in anger and fund the troops. So this is, of course, Andy Burnham said, I'll cut welfare to fund defence. I'll do whatever. Manchesterism is about doing whatever you're asked by columnists.

[Riley]

I guess I'm sort of, I guess more hawkish than a lot of people on the left in that I think that there is a good case for funding a lot of stuff in defence, but I think it requires you to have some kind of relationship with consensus reality about how you do that. And, and I think in Britain and the British defence establishment, that has been lacking for a long time. And there are definitely efficiencies that you can make. And in fact, there are people even on the right or in the sort of like, you know, right. Part of the Labour Party who are making those arguments. But I just kind of know that the way that defence procurement is organized in this country, all of that money that you take off of people on benefits, right, that's just going to go into the hull, that's going into the fucking wishing well at this point, unless you do some real root and branch stuff, which no one wants to do whatsoever. And I think the thing is this is fundamentally right. And I said this on Twitter a while back, not to just do Twitter review, but this is a decades old problem about Britain's sort of status as a world power, which is as Atlanticists. We made the deal that America would paper over the cracks and that sort of dividend would allow us to do some fund some social spending and stuff and they wouldn't embed embarrass us about it. Right. And now we have the trigger. The libs administration of Trump and his dying brain determined to embarrass us about it at every possible opportunity. Right. And so even if we're doing what the Americans want and spending more on defense. Right. They're still going to humiliate us. And that's kind of intolerable to Al Khan's for instance, or Healy, you know, ultimately.

[Hussein Nova]

Right. What Al Carnes and John Healy want is they want Britain to be proportionally as militarily important as it would have been in, I don't know, somewhere between 1880 and 1942.

[Riley]

Yeah. Think of it as it's not really a matter of spending so much as it's a matter of grandeur or rank and that you can't really sort of buy that back. That's something that's just kind of gone now. And I would submit that significantly cheaper than spending infinity money on the armed fighting vehicle that vibrates your brain into goo is nice course of cognitive behavioural therapy for everyone involved in this delusion that Britain can still be a kind of, if not first rate, then second rate and punching above its weight, world power.

[Hussein Nova]

Just to put some figures to this. So Starmer said, well, what are you talking about? Our defense spending is already going up. It's going from 2.3% of GDP to 2.6 by 2027. And this is going to fund next generation fighter jets, drones, naval capabilities, long range missiles and so on. True, Karn, saying that, well, the dip this investment plan is neither transformative enough nor sufficiently funded. Armed forces are asked being asked to operate in a more dangerous world and a budget written for a calmer one. A serious country funds its defense to meet the threat it actually faces, not the threat it wishes it faced. But my question is, is any amount of spending that the British state is reasonably interested in doing going to move the needle in a conflict with anyone they think they're actually going to have to fight?

[Riley]

Fight, yes, if it were done well, which it won't be, is my sort of answer to that.

[Hussein Nova]

I don't see us becoming. What they want is they want us to become that first rate military again. And they're saying, okay, well, is there a way that you can take where we are? And let's say we're just like, you know what, we're privatizing nhs, we're eliminating all benefits except pensions. A teacher is now a voluntary position.

[Riley]

So part of the problem is that all of this is a kind of a false economy economy. Right. And this is again a military establishment that is failing to learn the lesson of the last couple of wars. Right? If you want to be a country that has a successful kind of defence complex, you need to get more like Ukraine in the good ways, right? And that's going to require you to actually be able to convince people that they are part of a society. Right? And that means doing less austerity and doing more spending and doing more valuing of things that aren't directly defense related so that you can then tell people, okay, cool, here is our society where we do the stuff. But we need to stop, you know, Putin, who is having another sort of neurological event, deciding that Conchita Worst is going to make Russia gay from like, from fucking with us. And in order to do that, in order to do any kind of credible defense of this country, said the words, you have to have people broadly aligned with that and you have to make people see the value of it. And you can't do that if you're just tearing strips off of it to sell for parts. You have to have some kind of civic engagement with defense. And that's something that we don't want to do. Because I think part of this is as well that, you know, especially in Khan's case, a lot of these guys are ex military, right? They like the stuff, they like the things, they like the prestige and it dilutes the prestige. If you then say, okay, well, we're going to start, you know, maybe opening these things up to people feeling, you know, more included in them. Right? And so, no, it's about having more and more like regiments and more and more in uniform. And it's not necessarily about that anymore.

[Hussein Nova]

More F35s, for example.

[Riley]

Yeah, great.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah, exactly. This is a big thing of what they want to promote. Let's say we're going to buy more F35s and build more Raytheon Paveway 2 bombs.

[Riley]

We're going to buy a plane that's designed for air superiority that has this huge, incredibly dependent on America logistics tail behind it to the point that we can just get a couple of them stuck in India for a fortnight because they're waiting on parts to move them. Right. And we're going to have those instead of anything else we could have for the same price because we think that that's the kind of thing that we think is going to be useful to us also.

[Hussein Nova]

What I want to ask as well is this is all about preparing for war, preparing for a dangerous world. Again, I don't think that in this current paradigm there is an amount of spending that wouldn't be, say society destroying that you could undertake that would make us that first rate power. But even if so, what does it mean to be at war? Well, maybe you're trying to change another country's government by force, achie, a diplomatic objective by the means, etc. In that way. What way are we not currently at war with Elon Musk?

[Riley]

Right, Yeah, I mean, I don't disagree and I think this is, this is interesting as well because it's been a kind of talking point in sort of like defense and security places, right. Of already being at war with Russia.

[Hussein Nova]

Right.

[Riley]

And this is something that I basically agree with, right, Is that we are in a state of kind of like hybrid warfare with Russia already. You can absolutely turn that around and go, yeah, we are in a state of hybrid warfare with Elon Musk and maybe the United States States.

[Hussein Nova]

And so like, I don't know if there's defense spending that countervails that, that doesn't involve building an actual society underneath the Ajax fighting vehicle. You need a thing.

[Riley]

Yes, you do. It's sort of, it's interesting as well because I think this is true of so many things about policy making in this country is that there's a kind of missing referent, right. In that we will sort of like spend more on defence maybe, but not really. Think about what it is we're supposed to be defending. If it's supposed to be our sort of values, democracy and liberalism, we're sort of hardly defending those from ourselves. If it's the physical territory of the United Kingdom, I mean, sure, I guess. But there are just so many vulnerabilities there that we don't seem to be addressing in the slightest, both internal and external.

[Hussein Nova]

And before we go on, there's also one last refuge of the scoundrel that I want to bring up, which is of course military Keynesianism. Well, we do have to spend all this money on defense. We do have to make all these bombs in Scotland because it's important to The Scottish economy. We have to buy all these F35s because we're investing money. We're investing. We're stimulating the economy, but with. With defense. And I just want to tell everybody who's listening now that when someone says that they don't understand what they're talking about. No. Because defense spending is in no way going to stimulate the economy if you're not America. And even then, if you are America, it's a whole different box of hammers. But if you don't have. The global reserve currency doesn't work the same way. And also the last time it worked for us was 1940. 40.

[Riley]

Yeah. And that was us running up the bill on sort of like, in a way that eventually necessitated decolonization. A thing that we did, kicking and screaming. Yeah.

[Hussein Nova]

And the thing is, it doesn't just matter how expensive it is. All government spending has an economic multiplier. The economic multiplier for teachers, nurses, engineers, and so on is very high. Economic multiplier for defense spending in the way that it's currently set up is extremely low. And I will explain why before we talk to Daniel. In 1940. 1940. Right. We had to produce Infinity Spitfires using 100% of latent civilian economic capacity in a command economy. And the Spitfires were being built to be shot down, Right?

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Hussein Nova]

And that required British steel, British motors, British instrumentation put together by British workers, British rubber. For the time it was the whole of a Spitfire used a huge amount of capacity that was generalizable enough that it was. You were able to just turn on every civilian civilian factory into making Spitfires. And a Raytheon Paveway is not a Spitfire because the value chain is almost 100% in the United States. We're basically assembling an American piece of kit in Scotland.

[Riley]

What's interesting is it would be weird if there had been a recent conflict that had demonstrated the both advantage and plausibility of making entirely domestic munitions. That would be wild. Right. Particularly if it had specifically shown the kind of danger of relying on the United States to do it for you.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah. So in any real sense, any money invested into Britain's defense industry and the way that it's currently set up now is not money.

[Daniel Trilling]

Yes.

[Hussein Nova]

That we've taken from funding a teacher, but that creates economic multipliers that allow us to employ even more teachers, for example. No, mostly that is money that goes to the States. There it is. We don't. We're doing. We're creating economic multipliers for teachers in Northern Virginia, maybe Right. But if you want to say that certain kinds of spending are economically, let's say, productive, that have high economic multipliers actually in the value chain is so incredibly important. Where it is is so incredibly important. And anytime any labor talking head says that, oh, we're going to boost the economy by increasing defense, defense prosperity, that is not how it works. That is absolutely. It has not worked like that since 1940. And that was a really, really, really, really, really specific set of circumstances. It was so specific, it is not coming back. And so we do not suck up excess capacity. We don't create full employment. Never let anyone tell you that it actively cannibalizes the productive economy, the economy that meets people's actual wants and needs. But if we actually ask these questions, then of course, like you said almost at the very beginning of this segment, Nova, we will have to ask the very uncomfortable question at the very highest levels of what is Britain for?

[Riley]

Yeah. We would have to completely reconfigure our society. And, you know, obviously there are a couple of ways we could do that. The good one or the bad one. Much like importing stuff from Australia.

[Hussein Nova]

Which way? Australian poster.

[Riley]

And that is why we're the best at this. And this is why no one under the age of 35 will ever be allowed to get a podcast again.

[November Kelly]

You hope you have two paths laid before you. One is good flat white and the other is war economy. If it doesn't work. And we're going to choose, we're going to choose Velasa because for whatever reason, we none of us want a nice flat white ever.

[Hussein Nova]

What if it has a woke milk in it? Anyway, so look, I'm going to throw over to our conversation with Daniel.

[Riley]

Before you do, I just have a quick prediction. I predict that there's going to be second half of this episode now.

[Hussein Nova]

All right, so let's. This is now the official scientific test. Is November Kelly a super forecaster? We're going to find out. You know what? Hey, stay tuned for a few seconds. Find out if November Kelly is a super forecaster. See you on the other side, everybody. Hello, everybody, from the first half. Welcome to the second half. The storied second half. Much, much discussed.

[Riley]

They were predicting that this half would follow the first half. And you know what? They were right.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah, it's, you know, this is. We make a lot of predictions on this show and I like when this kind of one is right. Nice, low stakes, easily provable, and that's it.

[Riley]

And they say we're not a data journalism podcast.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah, I've updated my priors, but the second half following the first. Now, in the second half we are joined by Daniel Trilling, making his second appearance on the show. In fact, third. Who is third? Wow. Oh, well, screw me, I guess I don't have any memory.

[Riley]

Sorry, you're out of data journalism, Quinn.

[November Kelly]

Yeah, we'll have to upgrade you to the special lounge.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah, that's right.

[Daniel Trilling]

Thank you.

[Hussein Nova]

So Daniel is a researcher, journalist and recently published a book called if We Tolerate how the British Establishment Made the far right Response Respectable with some cover art of a Lovely boiling frog, which I can't imagine has anything to do with the contents.

[Daniel Trilling]

No, just we thought it would be a nice picture.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah, just a nice picture. We are recording this several days after what can only be described as racist pogroms in Northern Ireland. And we're also recording this, I believe, the day after Nigel Farage released a polemic which I'm just going to describe in brief. I thought of it as. Yeah, he's written 12 of the 414 words where he says Britain is a two tier state EM dash against white people.

[Riley]

Well, he's written this on his substack, which means that the last two words of the 14 words you have to pay to unlock.

[Hussein Nova]

I wonder what they are. And he yet makes a number of proposals and suggestions that would have been pure Tommy Robinson territory even two years ago, including allowing police officers to explicitly racially profile minorities, eliminate all forms of diversity and inclusion in public life, especially police race action plans. The introduction of new quote, patriotic curricula which thanks for recolonizing the curriculum and to make it to so legally mandate putting pictures of the King fucking all over the place. And it ends with a statement of the great replacement theory that stops just short of saying the Jews are doing it. And I mean, this is the transformation. We on this show know, right, that the distance between Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage is, you know, a piece of paper. But I think to a lot of people this would be shocking. And Daniel, I think this is what a lot of your books speaks to.

[Daniel Trilling]

Yeah, that's right. I mean, I suppose I was trying to explain two things in the book. One is the kind of, I suppose the slow burn process of these ideas being made mainstream, which I think has been going on in earnest for at least 15 years. And then the other bit of it is just the kind of rapid collapse of existing standards around rhetoric in mainstream political discourse, which I think has just accelerated over, over the last sort of two to three years really. And I think farage's move to kind of open far right rhetoric, as we've seen, is a symptom of that.

[Riley]

Yeah, it's something we've seen across Europe, Right, with various far right parties, but in some of those places there's been an explicit sort of cordon sanitaire between the respectable right and the far right that's then collapsed. We've not really had an explicit one of those in this country, have we?

[Daniel Trilling]

I guess. I don't know. I'd say we have in certain ways. So I think actually why, you know, Farage has been the figurehead of. Of right wing populism, which is the kind of. The bit of far right politics focused on winning elections. And, you know, historically that's had a commitment to democratic processes, at least. At least in theory. Whereas. Whereas more extreme bits of the far right have been hostile to that to varying degrees. And Farage, I think, has been really successful long term because he's been very good at shredding that fine line between mainstream respectability and things that are regarded as extremist or scary by much of the population and by the political mainstream. You know, his usual way of moving the discourse in his direction is to do it with a nudge and a wink. So you think back just two years to the period after the murders in Southport in the summer of 2024, in that intervening period of a few days where there were rumors going around about the. The identity of the perpetrator and, you know, calls for violence coming from some quarters. Farage took, I suppose, a more measured, seeming approach where he just made these posts saying there's something the police aren't telling us, but not really spelling out what he meant by that and leaving others to fill in the gaps.

[Riley]

He's a vague post fuhrer.

[Daniel Trilling]

Yeah, basically he's kind of a. I mean, ironically, given that he's got this reputation for being plain speaking and so on, he is kind of the king of fake posting. But even he's dropped that now, you know, if you think his interventions over the last few months have been much more explicit. So there's that substat post just now, but only two weeks ago we were dealing with another outburst of mass racist disturbances and violence in Southampton around the murder of Henry Novak. And again, there, Farage said something that I think was markedly more openly extreme than what he'd been doing even in the recent past. And I think there's a couple of reasons for that. I mean, one is, is that, as you've probably noticed, stuff is getting worse. I think that's the nature of this kind of politics. You give it space and it will radicalize and get worse and get more extreme. And we're seeing that dynamic for sure in Britain this year and last year. But also actually something that I think that's been missed in a lot of the analysis is that Farage is operating from a position of relative weakness as well at the moment because he has been under pressure from his. His right. You know, we've had this chunk of reform led by Rupert Lowe, the former Reform mp, break away to form Restore Britain. And Lowe has taken a more radical position in relation to reform. You know, he's campaigning on the claim that reform are actually sellout moderates and Farage is too weak and that he, Rupert Lowe, is the true standard bearer of right wing populism. And just as important, Elon Musk has thrown his support behind Rupert Lohan. Restore Musk, for the last 18 months has been attacking Farage as what he says is weak source. Farage isn't extreme enough for his taste. And I think what you can see in Farage's repositioning recently is an attempt to keep up with all of that and keep people on side who might otherwise peel off to his right.

[Riley]

Very embarrassing for us as a country that Elon Musk has been in some ways unable to get the political influence that he wanted with money alone in America, but has here.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah, he didn't even use money here, he just used posting. Oh, gosh, he couldn't get enough money to buy the American political process, but he could get enough clout to buy the British political process, which is frankly embarrassing for all of us involved. I was going to say, though, there is, I think that the best way I understand Farage, and I've described him thusly on this show before, is he's always positioned himself as a right wing technocrat who is going to fix all of the institutions that have kept, whether it's good working families, which is dog whistle for white people, or white people explicitly said from reaching their full potential. I mean, how do you rate that as a sort of way of seeing him?

[Daniel Trilling]

I guess there's some truth in that, in that I think the kind of technocrat aspect of it is a big part of what he does. Although obviously I think he would never describe it himself as technocrat, but I guess he sees himself as someone who can fix the system and restore Britain's national pride and everything else that he promises. I think really though, it's his ability to speak to several different groups of people at once and to say things that mean different things to those different groups. That is why he's been so effective historically, you know, so he trades primarily in right wing nationalism, and there's no escaping that. When you do that, you're making an appeal to ethnic identity, for instance, and, you know, that's now coming out more on the surface of what he does. You know, he explicitly talks about whiteness in a way that I think he wouldn't even have few years ago. But what he's been good at historically is also, you know, taking positions that appear to draw a line between himself and overt racism. So, you know, he made a big thing when he was leader of UKIP that former members of the bnp, the British National Party, were not allowed to join. His political endeavors have always tried to make a show of how ethnically diverse they are, at least at the top. And, you know, Reform UK is a very good example of that. If you look at who its prominent MPs and officials. And Farage has always kind of managed to keep all of that together. But I think it actually risks coming apart now because the contradictions between the different bits are really starting to show. I mean, Reform began this year being talked up as the potential future party of government, which they may well be. It may be that they come out as the largest party at the next general election and are able to form some kind of government either in coalition or by themselves. And so all of their presentational offerings at the start of this year were around how relatively moderate they were. In fact, the fact they'd brought across some Tory defectors, one of whom, Robert Jenrick, gave this big speech trying to reassure the financial markets that a reform government would be responsible and so on. Before the local elections, they made this big pitch, or they tried to make a pitch on conservationism, which was briefed. They'd hired in Ben Goldsmith, who's this right winger, ecologists, to write their environmental policy. And this was briefed to the Daily Telegraph at the time. As you know, this is our effort to win over current Conservative voters who so far have found reform a bit too radical and are a bit wary of us. And we want to show that we're kind of nice and cuddly and about more than just bashing immigrants and so on. And then suddenly, over the period of a few weeks, even that all seems to have been ditched and they're just kind of out saying much more hardline things than they were pretty previously.

[Hussein Nova]

Let's talk about the subtitle of your Book, right, which is how the British establishment made the far right respectable. Because Nigel Farage obviously, we know, didn't appear in this position. He was placed into this position. And so let's start like broadly the relationship between national establishments and national far rights. We can use examples from the 20th century modernity, but let's like, let's lay the table broadly.

[Daniel Trilling]

Yeah, well, I mean, I think you have to see the far right broadly as trading in radicalized versions of what exists in the mainstream. So, I mean, a classic sort of perennial example from the UK is that obviously anti immigration politics is a central part of the far right here, as it has been for decades, but the themes within that and the language is taken in no small part from the mainstream right right wing press. So, you know, if you talk about asylum seekers, for example, there have been repeated moral panics over asylum going back to the turn of the millennium. And, you know, there were ones before that, but let's just stick with that period. The drivers behind that at each kind of outburst have been mainstream outlets like the Daily Mail, you know, the kind of the classic, as it was then called, bogus asylum seekers moral panic in the early 2000s was driven by mainstream outlets like that. And what the fuck far right has traditionally done is sort of latch onto it and try and turn things in its direction. And over the years, the far right's role within that setup, I think has grown where you've had a kind of, I suppose, a growing normalization of far right ideas and themes and its figureheads. So again, Farage is a very good example of that in that he's been given a very easy ride by the media over the years. He's one of the most frequently featured politicians on the BBC's Question Time, for instance, and has been even when his political endeavours were far more marginal in terms of the votes they attracted. But at the same time, right wing populists, in particular his wing of the far right, have been able to take the initiative and actually lead the conversation a lot more effectively than they were say, 20 years ago. And I think that's also result of, you know, the way our media landscape has changed completely, the way that they're able to build up their own audiences and base of supporters to whom they can communicate with directly. It's also because their most entrepreneurial figureheads have been very good at a form of, you know, online grifting. I think, again, Farage is a very interesting example in that, in that he is in some ways a completely old school politician. You know, he got his start in the 1990s when Euroscepticism, which was the cause that he attached himself to, was really unpopular, really unfashionable, and he cut his political teeth making speeches in person to relatively small groups of people meeting around the country. You fast forward 20 years or so and he's. Well, he was at one point in the last few years Britain's most popular politician on TikTok. You know, he was running a very nice sideline in earning money from Cameo until he had drop it recently because it was revealed that he was being paid to give messages for anybody, even if they were asking him to say completely extreme and shocking things. So he's somebody who has turned all of this new opportunities for building up a political audience online to his advantage. And I think that's quite emblematic of how far right politics works in our time, really.

[Hussein Nova]

When we talk about the relationship between the establishment that creates this guy, right, they get something out of it, which on the show in the past we've talked about as well. You need to give people energy for a political movement and you don't want to give them anything real. So what you give them is the ability to be cruel to people they think are less than them. But history tells us that the far right, Franz von Papen, never is able to tame Hitler, if you get my meaning.

[Daniel Trilling]

Yeah, yeah, totally. And I mean, you bring in the comparison with fascism from the interwar period. And that's something that I write about in the book. And my take on all of that is that I think quite often when we talk about right wing politics today and the rise of whatever you want to call this new movement that is now there in most liberal democracies around the world, we get very hung up on arguing over whether how much is this like fascism from a century ago. And that conversation can tend to go around in circles because there are good arguments to say, well, it doesn't share lots of features of, say, Mussolini's fascists in Italy in the 1920s, therefore it can't be the same kind of movement. And lots of good reasons to say, oh, yes, but actually look at what they're doing or look at how it relates to the mainstream or look at the effects it's having and so on. And for me, what's important is that you kind of spot the similarities in a way that's actually useful to understanding what's happening now and ideally, like how you can then actually stop it succeeding. And I think the kind of key overlap between far right politics today and that kind of classic historical fascism of interwar Europe is in the way it appeals to the emotions above anything else. And I think that above all, what it's trying to do is appeal to a very destructive form of resentment that like, as you say, it's about getting people riled up and telling them that national revival is going to come via taking revenge on a series of named enemies, both sort of internal enemies and external enemies. You know, so it's always about the external threat in combination with the treacherous actions of an elite or some other kind of enemy within. So the discourse around immigration in Britain and in the US and in Western Europe is just full of this. On the right, there's a civilization threat or like, as Tommy Robinson is now putting it in, in terms of like that great replacement conspiracy theory. And that's not only about culturally and ethnically threatening outsiders migrating to Britain or to the west, but it's the claim that elites have connived in this, that they're all allowing it to happen. And the remedies offered are always some kind of punishment where the being seen to punish is more important than the actual practicalities of the policy reform, particularly on matters of immigration, trade in this constantly. A really good example of that comes from just before the local elections where, again, I think, because they weren't getting as much attention as they had hoped during that election campaign, just before polling day in May, they came out with this announcement that not only were they going to build more immigration detention centres to achieve their policy of mass deportations should they ever be elected to government nationally, but they that those detention centers would be cited in areas that voted for the Green Party. So it wasn't just about looking tough, it was also, and we're going to make these people over there really squeal as a result. And I think, again, you hinted at this. What makes that so dangerous is that it is by definition incapable of delivering on what it promises. Because the promise is we are going to make you feel better about your lives and also materially make things better around you, you by punishing other people symbolically that that can't deliver what it promises. And so for any movement that is trading in these things, I think there's only really two paths open from, from that point on, and one is to disappoint people and flop, and the other is to get into a spiral of radicalization where you're trying to outdo your previous promise to, you know, keep people's blood up, keep people expectant and so on.

[November Kelly]

I think one thing that we've mentioned on the show, like, a bit, is that if you're sort of polit politics is sort of anchored in resentment and anger and frustration. And that has a lot of purchase in a sort of political culture where it feels like basically most political parties aren't promising people anything by way of, like, here is how we're going to sort of make your lives better. Even the Labour party during the 2024 election were very insistent on emphasizing in what was basically the easiest election to win. We're sort of just being like, yeah, we're not actually going to promise anything substantial to actually help people materially. The changes that will happen will be very gradual. We're still sort of committed to a form of austerity. We're also still committed to a type of vengeful politics that is very much like something that, as you sort of mentioned, reform and restore and the Conservatives are very much, very much adhere to. And I think one of the things that's sort of interesting about the reform sort of political promise is, is that even though they're sort of saying superficially that, yeah, we'll kind of improve your lives by punishing other people and by letting you enjoy the punishment, because we'll sort of make it like a big, fun spectacle. Looking at examples of the Trump administration, they have a very easy run in the sense that they don't really. They have a media that kind of sort of doesn't really take them seriously enough to be. To point out, as you've mentioned, like, all these things that you're promising, they're not workable, they're not really fundable. Basically, there's no way that this is actually going to happen. And so all you can do is sort of promise more and more punishment. But that almost gives them permission to be like, well, if the deportation camps don't work, then we'll sort of just promise something more sinister and cruel. We'll punish like, we'll promise different types of camps. We'll promise capturing people in the night and just flying them off to anywhere you throw something at the wall. And as long as it's kind of like vengeful and spectacular particular enough, that's sort of good enough for them. And I wonder whether you had any thoughts on just the way in which part of the sort of image, not the image laundering per se, but the way in which it feels like reform and restore have quite an easy run in this sort of political cycle, comes from both the dismissal of what they're trying to do, allowing them to Sort of just keep on promising more and more sort of cruel and vengeful things, but also a broader political culture in which promising anything materially beneficial to anyone is sort of seen as worse than promising the establishment of British Guantanamo and Milton Keynes.

[Daniel Trilling]

Yeah. So a couple of things on that, I think, first of all, resentment. And I draw in a book on some really, what I thought was really useful writing on this by Richard Seymour, who's got a book published a year or so ago called Disaster Nationalism, where he kind of lays out this argument in more detail. But he makes the point that resentment is a. First of all, it's something we all feel. And it's not that politics shouldn't draw on people's resentments because actually, you can resent things because they're unjust. You can resent the fact that food is becoming more expensive, and yet a small minority of millionaires and billionaires are having it easier and easier and so on. The question, though, I think politically is what is done with. And I think, like any political movement that I would want to be part of is one that takes resentment and frustration and says, well, there are reasons why you would feel this, and here are things you can do to actually constructively improve conditions for yourselves and for people around you and so on. But as you say, what the far right do with it is just offer this. I suppose they offer the. They present the illness as the remedy. You know, they say, well, actually just wallow in this stuff and enjoy us punishing other people on your behalf and so on. But crucially, that's not something invented by or practiced by the far right itself. The politics of resentment and of diverting various frustrations in society onto convenient scapegoats is something that the mainstream has specialized in Britain for a long time. Something else I write about in the book is, you know, the 2010s and the role that the period of austerity pushed out by the coalition government of David Cameron and Nick Clegg played in all of this. And that's a very good example, or at least it was for the first few years in the 2010s of how the political center is actually normally, or has been historically pretty good at playing the politics of resentment and keeping all of this stuff contained. So you might remember, well, those of you that are as old as me, at least, Osborne making speeches to justify. So George Osborne, David Cameron's chancellor, making speeches to justify austerity back in the early 2010s, where he gets one famous speech, for instance, about, you know, we need to make cuts to benefits because it's not fair that people who work hard get up early in the morning to do a hard day's graft and they see their neighbor's curtains closed because they're sleeping off, you know, a lifetime on benefits, or however he described it. That kind of language was echoed liberally in much of the press, particularly the right wing press and so on. But what's happened is that the political center has got decreasingly able to profit from all of that and to keep it all together as a project. And so what you have instead is a collection of far right entrepreneurs really taking that and running with it and going somewhere else.

[Hussein Nova]

So effectively, it's not that Starmer parrots reform, it's that Starmer is wondering why reform took his. What should rightfully be his tool.

[Riley]

Yeah, this is supposed to be my safety valve.

[Daniel Trilling]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, and you could see, I think in 2025, there was, you know, when Labour kind of panicked at the start of the year because reform were rising in the polls, what they did was lean into a whole load of political communication techniques that Labour and the Conservatives have been using for decades. So they started going hard on how many people they were deporting per month, using the Home Office's media channels to release video footage and photographs of people being raided and deported and so on. Well, that's something the previous Conservative government did, the coalition government government did it, New Labour did it, and so on. And I think what we have at the moment is both with Starmer is a combination of thinking, well, these are our techniques. Labour would say they've got maybe a slightly nicer version of doing it than the Conservatives have had traditionally. But really, it amounts to very similar things. Labour thinking under Starmer. This is how we do politics. This is how we contain resentment at the same time as having this very strong message of Britain is broken. But also nothing should change that radically. Which was essentially Starmer's pitch for power.

[Hussein Nova]

And I mean, just sort of pulling that into sort of, let's say, what's going on right now. You know, immediately before Farage published his 12 of the 14 words, obviously, we had a sort of widely publicized pogroms in Northern Ireland that were encouraged, whether explicitly or tacitly, by parts of the British far right, explicitly encouraged by Musk, their greatest cheerleader. And I think just for a moment, wanting to recognize also the Northern Irish far right is different from the Britain far right.

[Riley]

I think it was instructive that we had these riots in Belfast and then sort of aftershocks in Glasgow and Edinburgh, because that's where there are sort of networks of unionist and loyalist extremism or terrorism that are sort of like, able to coordinate these things. I think it would be a mistake to think of them as overly spontaneous. It has been very funny, on the other hand, to watch Americans try to run the grift on this and be like, oh, these are sort of proud Irishmen who just think that Ireland should be for the Irish about people who are absolutely psychotic about ensuring that they are perceived as British.

[Hussein Nova]

It's the inverse of what usually happens when like, Boston guys meet Sinn Fein people and are like, why don't you just drop a nuke on Dublin on the north? Excuse me. But anyway, so this. But the Northern Irish far right, as Nova said, right, it is much more militarized. And I think that's. You could actually see a much more militarized and organized far right that is distinct from the, let's say, posting by other means far right mobs.

[Riley]

Yeah. Well, I think also there's something instructive here in that the guy who was attacked, which sparked off these sort of race riots and Belfast had more or less all his life been a kind of perpetual victim of loyalist paramilitaries who had sort of tortured him at length for whatever sort of combination of reasons they could confect. So I think that's a sort of obvious example, more obvious maybe than some others, that these are not people who care very much about the people that they purport to or the communities that they purport to, but who are very, very keen to increase their own power through as much sort of violence and as they can.

[Hussein Nova]

It's. What's quite apparent is that there's nobody who has a good response to this. I mean, if we want to talk about the British establishment making far right street violence respectable, the reason that these paramilitary organizations exist in Northern Ireland is in large part the British establishment, the security services collaborating with them and so on and so on. And, you know, all of a sudden it's oh, hey, the. These guys are supposed to be rioting against Irish national. They're not supposed to be the kind of best trained vanguard shock troops of this larger sort of white nationalist movement in the whole country.

[Riley]

Well, I mean, you know, many, many cases in sort of nationalism and fascism of the tail coming to wag the dog. And I think you can look at this maybe, and I'm curious, Daniel, whether you agree with me on this as sort of a process of the British far right experiencing a Kind of Ulsterization of becoming more Northern Irish, more unionist, more loyalist.

[Daniel Trilling]

Yeah, it's an interesting point. I mean, actually, what it makes me think of is the English Defence League back in the day, which is obviously the anti Islam street movement that Tommy Robinson emerged as the leader of. One of their frequent chants was no surrender, which is adopted from loyalist political culture.

[Riley]

It would be crazy if there are any overlap between loyalist paramilitaries and football in this country. I say living in Glasgow.

[Daniel Trilling]

Well, quite. And I think the English far right, at least, often looked wistfully at loyalism in Northern Ireland and thought, if only we could do that, or at the very least, if only we had the access to weapons that they do. So, you know, even I know that from research in my first book, which was, broadly speaking, on the history of the far right in Britain in the post war period. There was frequent contact between groups in England and groups in Northern Ireland and, you know, the groups from England going over there to kind of make links and learn and the rest of it. But I think it's probably a bit more chaotic. I see it as a bit more chaotic than how you characterised it there, in that there are all of these different things going on. And so with the riots in Belfast, you don't need anything in particular happening in Westminster politics for there to be political violence in Northern Ireland, obviously. Secondly, lots of things that happen there are mapped onto sectarian divisions. So, I mean, I think that's kind of very obvious from, from the recent rioting, that it was, you know, it was happening in loyalist areas where loyalist paramilitaries are still active, whereas in Catholic and Republican areas there was next to nothing happening. But then also, it clearly relates to UK national politics in that these events in Belfast came hot off the heels of the disturbances in Southampton a week before the United Kingdom march in London, London a few weeks before that, and so on and so on, and all the events of last year and the year before that, that there is a sense from anyone with a stake in far right politics at the moment, that we need to stir things up and keep momentum going and so on. So I think that's all feeding off each other. And then the other thing that's really, really important, I think this is kind of the newest bit of the picture, if you're looking at it historically, is the international dimension. It's the fact that this stuff gets really refracted through X and Elon Musk and the American far right and all of these other things, and that creates a kind of feedback loop where you know, I think in the early 2010s, I remember reading, you know, hope not hate monitoring racist violence in Northern Ireland then. I remember there were stories about families being perhaps even being burned out of their homes or having, having their homes vandalized. But it was regarded as a localized story then, whereas now Elon Musk regards it as the front line in the civilization race war that he thinks he's fighting, or however he puts it, the far right in not just those bits of the British right in Scotland that have got direct links to what's going on in Northern Ireland, but people all over England as well, seem to think that it's part of the same struggle. And the other thing there is actually it tells you something about the workings, or rather the dysfunction of the British state, because Northern Ireland has seen more immigration in general in the last decade or two, much like the rest of the uk but it has also been directly affected by the breakdown in the UK asylum system and the breakdown in Britain being part of an EU wide asylum system in that the Home Office has, you know, as it's looked for cheaper places to house asylum seekers, has increasingly sent them to Belfast and elsewhere in Northern Ireland in the last decade. And then you have it in issue with the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland now being a border between the EU and the uk and that's been in the news this week, people arguing over whether that means it's a porous border that allows illegal immigration and so on.

[Riley]

I think there's lots more to be said about Ireland, lots more probably on trash future as well, although maybe not by us. The one thing I would sort of caution against is I think there's this kind of idea from some people on the left that Irish Republicanism is inherently a sort of curative to this sort of thing, which is, I would suggest, not the case, not least because you have the Irish Republican Socialist Party attempting to try and sort of take some points away from Sinn Fein at the moment by sort of like murmuring about migration. But also you've had race riots in Dublin in the last few years. So as you say, it's part of this sort of far right international in a way that I find sort of profoundly disparaging.

[Daniel Trilling]

Yeah. And I mean, I would just say that, you know, far right politics and far right violence is primarily a problem of nationalism. And so any community, any national identity is going to be vulnerable to this stuff, which is why it's always got to be fought, even when it seems relatively marginal. And I think, well, you take the differences between the UK and Ireland at the moment. Far right politics is clearly far more more advanced in the former than the latter, but the latter is also experiencing many of the same things, partly because of that international pressure you were just talking about.

[Hussein Nova]

And so just by way of wrapping up, I mean, it seems as though I always like to think of this in terms of what would a serious response to this actually look like from a state that wanted to defend itself from the far right. And it seems as though anything less than jailing Tommy Robinson as terrorist, prescribing the Reform Party, referring everyone who follows UK aesthetics to prevent blocking X the every everything app from song Pie is

[Riley]

illegal, essentially kinda the football illegal. No, I mean, seriously, I think you do make a good point in that you can see the British government defending itself from the left with Palestine action and being absolutely sort of heedless of the sort of, you know what, it's running roughshod over there. It has the ability to do that if it chooses to. And choosing not to.

[Hussein Nova]

You actually should be sent to jail for holding up a cardboard sign that says I support the bin men being hard. I support the Reform Party. Jail. You should go to jail for that. Anyway, Daniel, I want to thank you for coming and talking to us today and remind everybody that if we tolerate this, how the British Establishment Made the far Right Respectable is available from many fine book retail outlets. Thanks a lot and thank you everybody for listening to this free episode of tf. We will be back on the bonus episode in a couple of days and I am working on. I'm speaking with someone right now who's a journalist in Northern Ireland, trying to work out if there's a way we can have her on to talk in a little more detail about, like, the specifics of what went on sort of last week. So do look out for that. Anyway, thanks very much everybody again and we will see you in a few days. Bye, bye, bye.

[Daniel Trilling]

Satisfaction.