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- [00:02]
Matt
So what happened, mate?
- [00:03]
Mike Graham
They didn't like something that appeared on my Facebook page.
- [00:06]
Matt
Do you know what happened with that Facebook post?
- [00:08]
Mike Graham
I really don't. I said I didn't put it there and they wanted to investigate my phone. I decided it might not be the greatest idea to give my phone to a company that's been known to hack phones. They wanted access to bits of my phone that I didn't think they should be able to look at. As soon as I started talking to lawyers, they were like, don't give them your phone under any circumstances. I speak to people who are moving out of London now because London to them has become unrecognisable. It's different because it is now full of people from somewhere else and it didn't used to be. And the difference for me with New York and London was that all of the immigration in New York was people who wanted to be American. In London and in other parts of Britain, we've got these communities which are not British and they don't want to be British. It's hard not to notice it.
- [00:54]
Matt
Last summer, Francis and I spent a week with Rolston College students and professors in Greece. And learning about the roots of Western civilization in the very place they emerged was genuinely moving. If you like trigonometry, you'll love the fact that Rolston runs a one year MA in Humanities for anyone with a bachelor's degree or equivalent in any discipline. And there's genuinely nothing else like it. Today, the program begins in Greece where students spend two months learning to read and speak ancient Greek while studying the foundational works of the Western tradition, starting with Homer. From there it continues in Savannah, Georgia, with small, serious seminars on the most important works of the Western canon. Ideas are tested properly, arguments are sharpened. Nothing is spoon fed. This is education as it used to be and as it should be again. Full scholarships are available. Applications close on 27th February 2026. Apply at rolston.ac apply. That's R A L S T O N AC forward slash, apply. Mike Graham, welcome back to trigonometry.
- [01:58]
Mike Graham
Good day. I think this is my third time, isn't it?
- [02:00]
Matt
It is your third time. And you are now a fellow YouTuber. I am. Courtesy of some events.
- [02:06]
Mike Graham
Yes, indeed.
- [02:06]
Matt
So what happened, mate?
- [02:07]
Mike Graham
Very proud. Well, apparently I wasn't fired. This is. My lawyers tell me I was not fired. I was simply not taken back. I was never suspended either, according to News uk, but basically they didn't like something that appeared on my Facebook page. I said, I didn't put it There they said, well, you have to prove it that you didn't put it there, because we've had a complaint from inside the building, effectively from somebody at Talksport who tweeted out that I was a racist, effectively, or that I'd said something racist. And that sort of began a whole chain of events which went on for about a month, during which time I tried to prove to them I hadn't done it, which they weren't satisfied with. They wanted to see my phone, they wanted to investigate my phone, they wanted to investigate my iPad. I decided it might not be the greatest idea to give my phone to a company that's been known to hack phones with. With the hope that they wouldn't look at bits of my phone that I didn't want to see, which was not anything to do with my personal life, but was everything to do with my work life, everything to do with people I had conversations with. I mean, so it became a kind of a fight between two sets of lawyers in the end, which. In which. Which never goes well, whether it's the.
- [03:18]
Matt
Divorce or whether it goes well for the lawyers.
- [03:20]
Mike Graham
Goes well for the lawyers. They did very well out of it, I can tell you. Still paying them off.
- [03:25]
Matt
And so, so, so just to get back to this thing about. Something was posted on your Facebook thing, which was a bit of a racist comment.
- [03:32]
Mike Graham
It was a bit of a racist comment. It was basically, it was a picture of some people on a tube train which I didn't take, and another picture which I had taken which looked like it had been somehow doctored and put on the same Facebook post. It also went on Instagram because my Facebook and my Instagram are linked. And it was all about, you know, why there's so many non white people on the tube, words to that effect, you know, and, and, you know, the couple of swear words, and it was pretty offensive and.
- [03:57]
Matt
But you didn't post it.
- [03:58]
Mike Graham
But I didn't post it. And I was made aware of it on the morning of Monday, the 20th, I think, of October, and I looked in and I thought, christ, I don't know what that is. So I just deleted it. So it wasn't even really there for very long. And then I got a call after I'd finished my show, went home, got a call from my boss saying, you know, there's. There's been a complaint about this Twitter post. Do you know anything about it? And I said, well, I saw it this morning, but to be honest, I was doing my show right in the middle of when I was you know, told that it was there and I just got rid of it. And I didn't even see when it was posted. I didn't really investigate it. But what I can do is show you that it wasn't anywhere in my log that I didn't. You know, my log proves that I didn't post it. I haven't got the picture in my. In my cache of pictures, which I showed them. I was called into a meeting, I showed the head of HR and I showed my immediate boss that part of my phone. But then they wanted to go further. And as soon as I started talking to cybersecurity people and as soon as I started talking to lawyers, they were like, don't give them your phone under any circumstances. That's not. I don't. You don't work for them. You know, I'm an individual contractor. I'm not. I'm not on their staff. They didn't pay me a pension. They didn't pay me for being off sick. You know, I was a contractor. They said, you're under no obligation to do that. And they were asking eventually for access to my WhatsApp messages, for my emails. They wanted access to bits of my phone that I didn't think they should be able to look at. And I thought to myself, you know, they're going to hold all of this information, they're going to basically mirror the whole phone, forensically examine it, and they will be able to look at that no matter what they say to me.
- [05:28]
Matt
There's plenty of that to get you fired anyway.
- [05:31]
Mike Graham
Well, exactly. And some of the people I was talking to that I'd had conversations with on WhatsApp were people that, shall we say, they don't like very much. Right. Because that, you know, that's the business we're in. I'm a journalist, you know, and aside from all of that, there are sources, people I talk to, people that give me information. You know, my cyber security expert that I hired said, you know, the. They can find this stuff. They can look on your phone and see what's been deleted and what hasn't been deleted. They can still find it. So there's no point in even deleting stuff. So I then went and got my own forensic investigation done by a completely independent team up in near Manchester at the advice of this cyber security guy that I had. And they do stuff all the time. They work with the police, they work with, you know, law enforcement agencies. They're very reputable. I gave them that. And they weren't. They wasn't enough. They said, no, we want to do it ourselves. And I just thought, you know, when we got to the point at that stage, it was like two, three weeks in. I could just see I wasn't. There wasn't really any point. And from what was being said to the newspapers, there was a cohort of people at Talk Sport and also in the building who thought I was a bit of a bigot, a bit of a racist anyway, and they weren't very happy with some of the things I said every day, which I'd never been told about, you know, um. So it all kind of came to. Came to an end. And eventually I actually asked them to fire me, effectively, because I was like, you know, you're gonna, you know, shit or get off the pot, if you pardon the expression. Because four weeks had gone by, I wasn't making any money, and according to them, I wasn't suspended. And so my lawyers were going, well, if you're not suspended, you should be paying him. But no.
- [07:09]
Matt
Do you know what happened with that Facebook post?
- [07:11]
Mike Graham
I really don't, no. I mean, the best I can. I can imagine is that somebody accessed the account somehow remotely. We managed to find a few kind of logins from a year before, six months before, from places I hadn't been. I didn't have two factor identification the cyber security guy brought in. So I can't believe how unprotected your account was given how high profile you are and how high risk you are. You know, somebody from the cyber team at News UK gave me a memo when I was called in to say, this is how you can secure your account. And I was like, it was a bit late now. You know, maybe you should have given me that last year. So I really don't know. And nobody knows. I mean, everybody on Twitter, you know, the land of experts, like, it's easy to prove that you didn't do it. Just show them the login and that somebody will be shown to have logged in. Well, there wasn't anybody there. And I don't understand enough about cyber hacking. I do know that people get hacked all the time. People are always going. I mean, people are getting their Twitter accounts hacked all the time at the moment. You keep getting these messages from people saying, please vote for me on this podcast. And then something terrible happens. You know, major companies are getting hacked every day. And, you know, if I was to be a conspiracy theorist, I would say somebody was out to get me because, you know, a couple of weird things happened to me in the previous two months. I had my back window smashed in my car and nothing was stolen, for example. And there was a case of wine in there which, you know, might have been heavy for people to carry, but you think they might have taken a couple of bottles and taking nothing, it took an old jacket out of the back of the car, you know, stuff like that. And you just think this is all a bit strange.
- [08:46]
Konstantin
But it's so interesting that when we're talking about that, because I used to work for Talksport.
- [08:52]
Mike Graham
Yeah.
- [08:52]
Konstantin
And for people who don't know, Talksport is a radio station that goes out to predominantly working class men who, in their vans, driving around etc, or in factories, warehouses, all the rest of it. And the, and the idea that Talk Sport would be progressive, that they would be offended by something you said just boggles the mind really.
- [09:16]
Mike Graham
Well, that would have been true maybe 10 years ago, but not now because now the business of media is absolutely riddled with wokists, you know, people who have gone in who have completely changed the face, particularly of big companies, you know, I mean, that building is full of very, very different people. There's the Wall Street Journal which has got some pretty left wing people working for the Times is now a very left wing newspaper. Harper Collins, the, the book publishers, also riddled with kind of, you know, Gen Z, Gen X, whatever they're called. Gen Z, I suppose, who complained once about my radio station or my show which used to be pumped out in, in the elevators, in the lifts. They actually complained about it because they said all he does is talk about migrants and we find it offensive. So they stopped broadcasting in the, in the lift, in the building. Right. And they started putting Virgin on instead. Some nice music, you know, and these were people who didn't work for like 18 months while Covid was on, just didn't bother coming to the office, you know, and they're all these kind of trust fund kids. They're all kids who could work for hardly any money and they're all woke. And I suppose that's what's happened to Talk Sport, you know. And yeah, you can understand people not wanting to work with a racist, but I mean, I've been working there for 18 years and nobody's ever called me racist, nobody's ever said I was a racist. I've never done anything. I've had a few run ins with a few organizations and I've had a few spats with people on social media, but you know, I'm not a racist. I'm sorry, you know, but it got to the point where I suddenly thought, if they. If they say you can come back to work, what will happen then? You know, what. What kind of, you know, safeguards will they put on me? You know, will they give me a series of things I can't talk about? You know, the station was under a lot of pressure from Ofcom. We were kind of. I was moving the station further and further to the right every single morning. And I was. And I was, you know, pissing all over Kia Starmer every single day. And they didn't like it. Downing street used to complain about me all the time, you know, officially, and say, you know, would Mike Graham please stop calling the Prime Minister a liar? Well, no, because he's a liar. I'm sorry. And so then I started asking other people if he was a liar. So I got Kemi bednocking and I was like, do you think Kirsten's a lie? She said, yeah, absolutely. Then every single guest, I got it. Do you think Kirsten was a liar? Yeah. So, you know, there was. There was kind of things going on that were suggesting to me that we were, you know, we were not going to be as free, perhaps, as I wanted to be anyway. And so. And sometimes you just, you know, I've been fired five times in my life from various different jobs, you know, never for being a racist. And in fact, I always say to people, well, actually, I didn't get fired for being a racist. I got fired for not giving them my phone. And they put out a statement, which was pretty brutal, actually, after 18 years, which basically said that they were gravely concerned that I didn't want to help them out and with their inquiry, and I reneged on it and I didn't renege on anything. You know, they say that I agreed to go and see somebody to give them my phone, which I never actually did because we never, ever got to the point where I said, I'm happy with the parameters of this. You know, I didn't want them to have my phone for. They wanted for nine hours to basically, you know, they didn't want to give me a substitute phone so that I could use that while they had my phone. And I'm thinking, so you're now going to give me another phone, which once I give it back to you, you're going to go through as well, because that's what you do. Right. So I felt like they were sort of out to get me. And none of that was helped by the fact that they weren't paying me. And they sometimes would take days to respond to emails from my lawyers, you know, and I think they were in a real quandary. I think there was people that didn't want me to go because I was 50% of their output, you know, in terms of the money, I was making a lot of money for their YouTube channel and all of that's gone now. But the woke is one.
- [13:06]
Konstantin
Isn't it bizarre in a way that you see media companies and a lot of companies as well, they prioritize what certain parts, very certain minorities of their employees think over profitability. You just, you just look at talk radio now. It's been undeniably damaged by you leaving.
- [13:28]
Mike Graham
Yeah.
- [13:28]
Konstantin
And you just think to yourself, this doesn't make any sense from a business point of view.
- [13:33]
Mike Graham
No, I mean, what makes sense from a business point of view is to make it into a right wing outlet, you know, which is what it started out as. You know, we kind of made our bones initially with the Brexit referendum and then the subsequent rouse and you know, the summer or summer of, I GUESS it was 2019, you know, that stalemate summer when we went down into College Green and we were literally like the rebels, you know, we were like the bad boys of Westminster. We had this tiny little tent. I scored the tent of shame and we had these two really good looking Spanish producers who would stop all the politicians as they were walking towards the great big edifice that was the BBC and Sky and you know, all these foreign outlets and. And they would sort of managed to get them to come and sit in this tent where I would give them an absolute roasting, you know, which they would never. I'd never seen anything like it, you know, and it was great and it was fantastic. And they had to walk past us both ways. You know, at one point as to Campbell, I was actually broadcasting and I was sitting with my back to parlor and I heard and I saw as the Campbell. And he leaned in and shouted in my ear, stop talking bollocks. You know, so we were really getting to these people. Michael Hesseltine accused me of being impertinent. And I said, well, I'm sorry, Lord Heseltine, but if I'm going to be impersonate to you, then you must be superior to me, which I don't think you are. And he looked at me like, nobody's ever spoken to me like that.
- [14:57]
Matt
The plebs are talking back.
- [14:59]
Mike Graham
And I was. And I kept saying to them and I had, I had a great argument with Lisa Nandy about whether or not we had a, you know, all this stuff still on YouTube. So we kind of made our bones by being a bit punk rock, I suppose, when it came to politics, you know, which was brilliant. And that was where we. We made our nation. Then GB News came along and they kind of took an awful lot of our people away. A lot of producers, some of the presenters tried to set up in a similar way, but they've now had to kind of, you know, calm themselves down a bit as well. And they've gone a bit kind of vanilla, seems to me. I'm still glad they're there. But, you know, as time went on then, then we got into Covid and we were really. Before GB News was even thought about, we were the only people saying, you know, what's this lockdown all about? You know, why we've been told to wear a mask? Why? Why when you stand up in a pub, is it different? So when you sit down, you know, you know, what's a Scotch egg? You know, all of that stuff. Nobody else was asking the questions. Not anyone. I mean, you guys might want to be, but, you know.
- [15:53]
Matt
You mean not in the mainstream?
- [15:54]
Mike Graham
In the mainstream. Nobody was doing it, you know.
- [15:56]
Matt
Well, this is an interesting part of the conversation because I see you, you've been forced out or whatever, not renewed, whatever the. The term.
- [16:04]
Mike Graham
Yeah, they fired me, basically.
- [16:05]
Matt
Right. But now you've got your own YouTube channel. It's crushing. You're doing really well, mate.
- [16:10]
Mike Graham
We're doing so well. And I mean, I'm in all of you guys, because I don't really know.
- [16:14]
Matt
Much about YouTube, you know, neither do we, man. We have young, younger people.
- [16:18]
Mike Graham
You don't need to worry about it. I mean, your numbers are spectacular. And when I first met you, I don't know how many years ago it was, you had that little studio in Highbury and I remember coming up there to talk to you and I just remember thinking, this is quite, really a cool thing, you know, But. But, you know, you have the kind of arrogance in a way of the mainstream media when you're in it, you know, and now I'm learning from the other side what it's like to build something. It's actually really exciting, you know, I'm loving it. I mean, you guys have done spectacularly well and I take my hat off to you because I can see also how difficult it is as well. But, yeah, I mean, I can't quite believe how quickly we shot. Up we go, you know, it's again, nothing compared to some of the numbers that you guys do and others.
- [17:00]
Matt
Eight years.
- [17:00]
Mike Graham
Yeah. So I mean, we've, we've, we've got nearly 6 million views in full five weeks. You know, we've got 128, 000, I think, subscribers. We're working on trying to build, you know, there's tricks of, of how you build all that up. But, but the reaction has been amazing. You know, we, we, we look at the. And I know that talk has got different, you know, outlets, not just YouTube, you know, so it's not really fair to compare. But, you know, we're, we're doing four, five times what they're doing just on the live, on the live shows, you know, and so we're, yeah, very, I'm really excited about it.
- [17:32]
Matt
Well, this is the thing is, you know, talent is talent and the big platforms, the big mainstream media organizations, they used to have this lock on, well, doesn't matter how talented you are, if we don't put you on our show. Yeah, you're not going to get seen and you're not going to get heard. It's not really the case anymore.
- [17:52]
Mike Graham
No.
- [17:52]
Matt
And so this whole thing about, like, canceling people, it's just like, is it like. I'm sure you saw with me in Question Time, there's all these morons on Twitter running around trying to say, oh, I can't believe they've had him. Like, Question Time need people who have an audience.
- [18:09]
Mike Graham
Well, you've got a bigger audience than Question Time. Right. You know, and these people, these bozos who kind of see themselves, I don't know what they see themselves as. It's kind of media commentators going, you know, why have they got him on again? He's always on and, well, because he's actually rather good and entertaining to watch. And he has a view. He doesn't just sit there worried about what, you know, his party's going to say, you know, when he gets back to the office, you know, and, and Question Time needs people like you. I mean, I was watching some sort of promo the other day for, I can't remember why I was on itv, but they put this promo on for some new game show they're doing, hosted by Rob Bryden, and you go, you know, is he the only guy that works in television? You know, everything seems to be involving Rob Dryden or that other bloke, Bradley Walsh. You know, it's all the same people. You know, how Ed Balls has got a job working on breakfast television, I'll never know. And they're so, they're just so really. I mean, I can't think of a reason to watch regular tv and I really don't, you know, I'd rather watch an old episode of Vera, which says a lot more about me probably that I should give away. But, you know, there's literally no reason to watch breakfast TV in, in mainstream media. There's no reason to watch. I mean, I watch Laura Kunsberg just because it's kind of cringe and you can't quite believe what people are saying on it. And, you know, this week's was particularly funny with old Zach Polanski, you know, and I've never had a drink and I've never taken any drugs. He runs in a very weird way is all I know. But you're absolutely right because, you know, now the ordinary people, because of COVID because of the Brexit sort of fit up because of the way that politicians now lie to us all the time as a matter of course. People have seen through all that and they've seen through the mainstream kind of Westminster bubble and they're not interested in. In watching the questions that come from journalists anymore. Because, I mean, I was, I was on Liz Truss's show the other day and I was saying, you know, they're not curious. Journalists aren't curious anymore. They don't ask questions that people want them to ask. They just kind of. They just kind of parry things and, and kind of knock things around and it's all like a bit of a kick about and then they'll go to the pub later, you know, they're all mates. I don't want to be mates with politicians. I really don't, you know, don't really like them. I'd rather just ask them difficult questions and watch them squirm, you know, and it's quite funny because there's, you know, an awful lot of mps who used to come on my. My old show who are still kind of nervous of coming on the new one because they're not sure if I'm a racist or not. And it's like, well, maybe you could make up your own mind. You know, you used to come on my show. What's. What's the difference?
- [20:39]
Matt
You know, the news doesn't just tell you what's happening, it often tells you what to think is happening. And these days, the biggest red flag isn't what's said, it's what gets left out. That's why I use Ground News. It's the only app that compares how the same story is covered across the political spectrum and show you what whole audiences are not being told the Blindspot feed is one of my favorite features. Every day it flags upwards of 20 stories that are being ignored either by the left or the right. Follow along at Ground News Trigonometry like this A new study from UC San Diego found that climate change cost almost twice as much as we thought because earlier estimates left out damage of the oceans. That's a pretty big update. And yet no coverage, literally zero, came from right leaning outlets. All this A recent Gallup poll found trust in the media has hit a record low with just 28% of Americans saying they trust newspapers, radio and TV to report the news accurately and fairly. That's a staggering result. But if you only read left leaning news, you likely never saw it at all. Go to Ground News trigonometry to get 40% off their unlimited Vantage plan, the same one we use, and stop being managed by the media.
- [21:49]
Konstantin
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- [24:12]
Mike Graham
Well, I think a lot of it has to do with the different kinds of media and the way that people now consume it and the fact that you don't really buy a newspaper now unless you're probably over 60. I mean, my kids who range in age from 19 to 35, they don't buy newspapers. You know, they wouldn't know. I mean, I think a newspaper's putting in the fire and lighting it, you know, and I think also the nature of the, of the power of those newspapers has, has kind of rescinded. You know, the sun used to be the paper that made prime ministers. Now it's not really politically particularly powerful because the whole business is fragmented and the, and different people are in it as well. You know, when I started, it was a very working class job to be a newspaper reporter. You know, you didn't go to Oxford, you didn't go to do a PPE degree and come out with, you know, a load of your mates and end up working for newspapers with a very posh accent. You know, people were tradesmen. They didn't go to university, they went to, they left school when they were 16. They went and trained to be journalists. They'd go to a journalist college, they'd learn shorthand, they learn the law, they'd learn, you know, all sorts of other tricks of the trade that they would have to then use. And they'd be paid as a kind of slave, practically. It's an indentured, you know, slave.
- [25:35]
Matt
It was a better time.
- [25:36]
Mike Graham
It was, it was. But they learned about how to do the job properly, you know, and you. And they'd get sent out with, say, the chief reporter. They'd go and cover the local courts. Nobody does that anymore. Right. You know, literally there are no local newspapers. You know, where my kids grew up down in Sussex, the local newspaper office is now one of those storage units, you know, for, for, you know, putting your stuff in when you get Thrown out of your wife's house and middle aged continent. Those are the early people. Although my daughter actually once had to put stuff in. She broke up with a boyfriend and she was moving. And I heard some amazing stories from the woman who was running the storage facility, including one where a guy used to come in every Friday night into his storage unit, open the door, go inside, come out dressed as a woman and then go out and then come back sort of in the early hours of the morning dressed back into a man and go home anyway. That's progressive. Very, yeah, very by the by, but. And so I think as, as newspaper barons, I mean, you know, the Murdoch empire for example, is, is still incredibly powerful, but not really because of newspapers anymore, because of the Fox TV network, you know, basically that makes so much money both from the football and also from, you know, the news and the politics. You know, the British operations become slightly irrelevant. You know, it's still there, but the sun isn't as powerful as it used to be. The Times seems to me to be a kind of apologist for the Labour government. Doesn't really ask very many questions at all. And it's all become a bit middle class and it's all become a little bit kind of twee, I would say. And I think most people in Britain don't like that. Most people in Britain, and I don't actually mind Giles Curran, you know, he's quite a funny guy and says some quite outrageous things. But most people would not like Charles Curran if they met him. If you saw him in a pub, you wouldn't expect to have a long conversation with him because he's quite posh. You know, he comes from, you know, quite a wealthy background and all the people who work for, for those kind of broadsheet type newspapers and even some in the tabloids now have been, you know, over educated. They've never really experienced much in, in terms of life. I mean, when I worked even at the Daily Mirror, they had a massive operation in Manchester, you know, because the north of England was important place. Now they have hardly anyone. They've probably got one person in the north of England. And so, you know, it's all become very London centric. It's all very kind of managed decline, feels like. Managed decline. It feels like they're just kind of trying. Every year there's more budget cuts, they sack more people, they try and save more money. You know, they just. Their business is dying.
- [28:10]
Matt
It is dying. And one of the things though is you talk about the middle class thing. I think there's so much of that. Like, when I was on Question Time, the thing that actually shocked me the most was there was a point at which one of the panelists said, well, America's a democracy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, like, a good third of the audience just openly laughed.
- [28:31]
Mike Graham
China is a dictatorship. The US Is a democracy.
- [28:34]
Konstantin
It remains our closest. Remains. It is. It remains our closest military ally.
- [28:38]
Matt
And I go, well, you probably don't like Donald Trump if you're acting that way. It's fair enough. People are allowed to not like President Trump, but he won the last election with winning the popular vote, the Electoral College, every swing state. I mean, it is a democracy. Yeah, but in their heads, they're so, so brainwashed into this way of thinking. And then there was another girl who was like, oh, yeah, no, we shouldn't do business with America. We need to do business with China. I'd rather be looking at China right now than I would America. At least China.
- [29:11]
Mike Graham
We know what's going on with them.
- [29:13]
Matt
America. It seems like Trump, especially every day.
- [29:17]
Mike Graham
Something wacky comes out, you know, whether.
- [29:19]
Matt
That'S buying Greenland or the stuff happening with ice. So, personally, I'd much rather be in China's bed at the moment than America's.
- [29:29]
Konstantin
Like.
- [29:29]
Mike Graham
But is that a generational thing as well, with these younger people? I mean, there was. You've probably seen it. There's. There was a thing going around yesterday on Twitter from America where they were asking youngish women, supposedly feminists, you know, whether they thought that women's rights were better in Iran or in America. And without question, they all thought Iran. And you're going to. I mean, is. I used to say when I was doing the old talk sports show that I think that the world is actually evolving in reverse and people are getting stupider instead of getting more intelligent and more kind of, you know, sophisticated people is really stupid and thick because they're driven. There's an old George Carlin clip, which you've probably seen, where he says, if you're driven, if you identify yourself by an ideology, then you've already lost the plot because you're no longer actually being true to your own self. You don't really have any beliefs. You just kind of have read some and you think, oh, that's good, because all my friends agree with that. So I'll just say that. And there's a bit of that in the media. I think that's, again, where you get, you know, I would go on. I would go on the radio and piss all over the Times Front page, because they were talking about some kind of clean air campaign, you know, which everybody knows is a complete con. Right. And I would say so. And, you know, that didn't make me very popular in the Times building, you know, and people didn't like it, but I was like, I'm not going to be part of this media conglomerate where everybody's supposed to think the same thing. Obviously you're not going to be really awkward about it and start, you know, dissing the products and all of that, but surely, Christ, you can have a disagreement about what they're saying, you know.
- [31:01]
Matt
Well, you know that the thing about ideology, I always say ideology is how you know what to think about. About things that you don't understand, about everything that's. But, but especially about things you don't understand.
- [31:11]
Mike Graham
Yeah.
- [31:11]
Matt
It gives you a template for what you're supposed believe about something as complicated as climate change. Right. And by the way, that's an interesting one, because net zero, I mean, the tide is turning so quickly on. Suddenly everyone's talking about how net zero is total stupidity, industrial suicide, as I call it. Like that. That whole agenda is going away in a heartbeat.
- [31:36]
Mike Graham
Yeah. But yet so many politicians like Douglas Alexander, who was on with you, are still clinging to it like it's some kind of wreckage going over a cliff. And they're kind of going, yeah, but this is, this is what we have to do. Because everybody knows. I mean, I was listening to. Because of the time I get up now. You like this farmers farming today because it's, it's, it's, it's probably better than Times Radio that time in the morning, but they had some woman on talking about how there's a problem with raspberries and strawberries. And, and she said, you know, obviously the thing that's most important is we have to know what the carbon footprint is of growing fruit in this country. And I'm kind of going, well, it isn't actually. You know, what's important is how much fruit you're growing and how much fruit you can grow and whether you can, you know, be competitive. You know, it's not, you know, the carbon footprint of strawberries is ridiculous. I mean, what are you talking about? You know, but if you try and tell them that it's all about sustainable this and sustainable that and, you know, driving electric car, I mean, it's fury now about people who are having to pay, you know, road tax for an electric car, I find hilarious, you know, because we said it at the time, you know, when people stop buying Petrol, cars, they'll be out of pocket, so they'll need to come after you for the money. Well, I'm still getting an electric car because it's the right thing to do. And now they're all going, oh, you know, I'm getting taxed. Welcome to the real world, you know.
- [32:55]
Konstantin
But the thing that I find particularly frustrating, look, net zero and all of this, but it's also as well, it's just a very powerful symbol of how they ignore ordinary people's concerns. Most people in this country do not care about net zero.
- [33:12]
Mike Graham
No.
- [33:12]
Konstantin
That is a preserve of the upper middle class who, quite frankly, don't have enough to worry about. I talk to ordinary people, regular people who watch trigonometry. They come up, they always want to have a conversation with me. When they talk, what they're concerned about is they can't afford to buy meat in the supermarket. They've got a family of three, they have a regular job. Both people are working. Once you paid rent, once you paid gas, once you paid your bills, your council tax, the road tax, what are you left with? That's what actually concerns people. And we're not having an important conversation, which is affordability.
- [33:45]
Mike Graham
Yeah, Well, I say this a lot. You know, nobody talks about food inflation. And when they do, they say, oh, you know, food inflation is really bad. That's 5%, you know. Is it bollocks? You know, if you look at the prices just, just as I just go to the supermarket, you know, you know, things that used to be, I don't know, a packet of pasta for 50p, it's now like 125. And you go, well, when did that happen? You know, it's literally gone up by, you know, a factor of more than twice what it was. And it's things like that that people say to me, and they used to say it to me a lot when I was on talk, you know, the sort of weekly shop has gone from 100 quid to 200 quid. And they're not buying anything extra. In fact, they're buying less. And so you're right. And, you know, one of the things that one of the great labor lies is, you know, you know, we've got wages going. Wages have gone up since we got in. Well, no, they haven't. They've gone down. Unless you happen to work in a public sector, you know, if you're a train driver, if you're a nurse, if you're a doctor, if you're a copper, all of you have been given a Pay rise. But, you know, in the private sector, people are worse off than they've ever been, you know, and everything costs more and more. More and more people are contributing nothing to the economy and fewer and fewer of us are paying tax to pay for all of them. And it's not a sustainable. I mean, it's all about sustainable economy. That is not sustainable. Right.
- [35:02]
Konstantin
And that's it. And that's it. And that's what ordinary people feel. They feel as if their concerns are not being addressed. So the elites are talking about net zero and bringing and being carbon neutral. Well, the guy who drives a van, he just wants to be able to pay his bills on time and make sure his kids don't go hungry. And more and more ordinary people are looking at their wages, looking at their outgoings and going. The maths, they're not mathing.
- [35:30]
Mike Graham
And look at Rachel Reeves, you know, the world's most useless chancellor today. And I don't know when this is going out, but this week anyway is the beginning of a new alcohol tax. The alcohol tax has gone up. We talk to pub owners quite a lot, and on something like a 7 pound 50 pint, your landlord's making about 47 pence, because everything else is going out, either in tax or in overheads or in supplies or in staffing. You know, all of the, the things that contribute to you running a business. And yet what she's doing is squeezing it even more and then making out that she's doing them all a favor by not imposing extra business rates on them. And some of the business rates now are outlandishly ridiculous. And, you know, people running businesses are saying to me, I think I'll just chuck it in and just not have a business anymore because it's too complicated, it's too expensive, and the tax is ridiculous.
- [36:19]
Matt
You know, you sum it up in the two parts of what you said there. Because, say, I mean, the government puts a tax on sugar, on cigarettes, on alcohol, with the claim, I mean, it's about raising money, obviously, but the claim is if we put up the tax on these things, consumption of these things will go down. Right. So what happens when you put a tax on business? What happens? Business goes down, the economy goes down. And the reason, as you say, the reason that all of this is happening is, and more and more taxes will carry on is because we actually can't afford the lifestyle that we have. We can't afford the welfare spending. We can't afford to have millions of people not working. We just can't.
- [36:55]
Mike Graham
No. And the Highest unemployment figure in five years is going to be announced this week. Right. Because more and more people are getting laid off, fewer and fewer young people are able to get jobs. I was listening to something on the way down here. The student loan business is now also in crisis. There was a woman saying that she'd gone and done a degree, taken a loan out for 39,000, done another postgraduate degree for another 11. So 49,000. She finished in something like 20, 22. But she now owes them, despite having paid them back money since she had a job, 67,000. And you go, well, how does that work? So you are now owe them more money than you did when you finished your university, sort of, you know, education, and yet you've been paying them. So they're literally ripping everybody off every single stage. And I'm, I'm, you know, I'm old enough to have been fortunate enough to go to university when it was free, and I didn't even take advantage of it because I only did two years. I got kicked out of there as well. But, you know, my youngest son isn't going to university, he's got a job. He came back on Friday night with a new BMW Z4. And I went, where'd you get that from? He said, I just traded. He had a Mini traded in, he's got a job and all of his mates have gone to uni again, I'm the one getting education. You seem to have all the money, you know, how's that working? And he's not making a fortune, but he's working. And so in three years time, when his mates are all coming out of uni with £50,000 loans that they are, and they're going to start jobs for nothing, they're all going to be in the crap, you know, and he's going to be flying high, probably by then, a little better car, I don't know. But, you know, there's, there's. If I was advising anyone's teenage kids, don't bother going to university. What's the point?
- [38:44]
Matt
There are some subjects where, you know, if you're going to do advanced mathematics or whatever, there's definitely some subjects that you would. But Blair's idea that you need half the country to go to university to do media studies and, well, he just.
- [38:57]
Mike Graham
Made it into a business, didn't it? I mean, that's effectively it. And then when the foreign students stopped coming because they couldn't bring seven members of their family with them, they pulled the rug and now they're all moaning that they haven't got enough money. Right. Well, how about you don't pay the vice chancellor, you know, 700,000 a year for doing bugger all. The whole. The whole country just doesn't work. I mean, I've never seen it so bad. It's absolutely hopeless.
- [39:18]
Matt
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- [40:51]
Mike Graham
New year, new me.
- [40:52]
Matt
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- [41:07]
Mike Graham
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- [41:10]
Matt
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- [41:19]
Konstantin
Experian.
- [41:21]
Matt
Speaking of which, I mean, that is if you want a ray of sunshine and hope. A ray of sunshine definitely doesn't apply to one. But I have to say, but some hope is things are so bad now, you see, politically, I mean, it's all moving in one direction, isn't it?
- [41:37]
Mike Graham
It is, yeah. And I find it fascinating how it's kind of fragmenting up as well, because you've got the left fragmenting up into the Greens, who are probably the most bizarre party I think I've ever seen. I don't even know. I mean, talk about net zero. They never mention it, you know, especially the Green Party. You go, haven't you got some policy on climate change?
- [41:55]
Matt
It's mostly about Gaza now.
- [41:56]
Mike Graham
It's mostly about Gaza and it's mostly about the rich and, you know, giving everybody free drugs and a free house, you know, and you kind of go, really? Okay then. And then the right.
- [42:07]
Konstantin
What about your party?
- [42:08]
Mike Graham
Your party? Yeah. I mean, that's hilarious, isn't it?
- [42:11]
Matt
Is that still around?
- [42:12]
Konstantin
They're adorable.
- [42:13]
Mike Graham
Yeah, they are adorable.
- [42:14]
Matt
Is it still around though?
- [42:15]
Konstantin
It must be, yeah.
- [42:16]
Mike Graham
But nobody knows who's running it though.
- [42:18]
Matt
Because I don't even know if it still exists.
- [42:20]
Mike Graham
I think it does.
- [42:20]
Matt
It does, yeah.
- [42:21]
Mike Graham
Well, Zara Sultana still exists. She exists and she still gets up in Parliament and talks absolute rubbish. Yeah. Which she did, I think a couple of weeks ago. And I think she was. Was she not booed somewhere where she got up and said something. I can't remember.
- [42:34]
Matt
Your point is the left's fragmenting, so.
- [42:36]
Mike Graham
The left's fragmenting. So labor are basically finished in, in, in. In my sense, I mean, Keir Starmer reassured us all at the weekend that he's not going anywhere. To which there was a sort of collective groan around the country. But the guy is, is literally an out and out liar. He went to China, nobody knows why he said that. We've got billions and billions of pounds worth of investment coming into Britain, which isn't true. He went to Japan to see the motorcycle riding former heavy metal drummer who's now the Prime Minister and didn't seem to get anything out of that. I don't, you know, I don't know what he's for. They're going to lose. They're not even going to come second in the by election up in Manchester and these young people like that. There was that sort of smelly looking woman on Question Time who came out and said that she was for the Green Party. Right. Sitting Next to another bozo who was. Also looked like he needed a good wash. And these young people, you can.
- [43:30]
Matt
See why they sacked them.
- [43:32]
Mike Graham
They think it's the answer, though. They go, yeah, you're rich. So we're going to take your money and we're going to give it to these people who haven't got any money. And we're going to take the house that you. That you rent out to some people because, you know, it's a little bit of extra income for you. We're going to make that impossible for you to rent out. So actually there's going to be a housing shortage before anything else happens. And so. But labor haven't got any answers here. You know, watching Douglas Alexander with you, you just think you don't know what you're talking about. You're so far off beam.
- [44:00]
Matt
And he's one of the good ones. Yeah, no, smart guy, very talented in many ways, I would say. But I guess what's. I think Francis mentioned that when you were in his show, Francis Foster sorts your life out, which people should check out.
- [44:13]
Mike Graham
That was great, by the way. You enjoyed that. Yeah, I did, yeah. I was a bit worried, though, because when I sort of got home, I said, I didn't say anything bad, you know, I don't think I did.
- [44:21]
Matt
Not as bad as the things you've already said or said.
- [44:24]
Konstantin
No.
- [44:24]
Matt
Yeah, but. But he mentioned that you were talking about how basically the left's given up on the country. The left hates, basically the country and the West. They think we're all evil, racist, you know, bigoted, whatever. Yeah, but the right's also given up because, you know, it's had so much mass immigration, the country's countries ruined, whatever, which, to be fair, the country's in a bad shape.
- [44:42]
Mike Graham
Yeah.
- [44:43]
Matt
But I guess your point is we can still recover.
- [44:45]
Mike Graham
I hope so. I mean, I think if you. If you take the view that we can't recover, you'd have to be one of those people who just leaves, you know, And I know a lot of people that have, and a lot of people that are planning on doing it. A lot of people are just sadly going, you know, I can't take it anymore. And there is, you know, the only kind of. The only thing that. That can save it, I suppose, is for people who do pay a lot of tax to stay here. But the only kind of insulation from the madness is to make a lot of money. And the more money they take, the less you feel like hanging around, you know? Um, but yeah, I mean, let's Face it, I mean, there's no doubt the Conservative Party ruined Britain, you know, from when, from the 14 years when they got in. I mean, Blair had set it up pretty well for ruination and he recreated all of these, you know, kind of shibboleths, the, you know, the Supreme Court over here and closeness to the EU and all of these migration sort of targets and all that. And then Tories came in and just completely it even worse, you know, for years. And, and people say Boris Johnson was, you know, a great Prime Minister.
- [45:48]
Konstantin
Do they?
- [45:49]
Mike Graham
Yeah, they still do in the Tory party. Oh, yeah, some of them still say.
- [45:53]
Matt
It in the Tory Party, yeah.
- [45:55]
Mike Graham
And they, I mean, at one point, when he wrote his latest book, I think it was a couple of, maybe six months ago or so anyway, he was, he was knocking around and people were saying, maybe, maybe it's time for Boris to come back. And I was going, no. The ordinary people who actually voted for him and liked him actually think he ruined the country. You know, he screwed up on immigration, he screwed up on Brexit, he screwed up on lockdown. Everything he did basically just turned to, you know. And so when Starmer got in, I mean, I have some sympathy for him, which you'll be surprised to hear, because everything was broken. There's nothing working. You know, the Home Office doesn't work, the NHS doesn't work, trains don't work, the roads are crap. There's literally nothing. But they're making it worse, making it far worse. And so I think people see reform as the only kind of saving grace. I mean, yes, there's that splinter off to advance uk and there's, and there's the Rupert Low people. But, you know, reform really are the only hope. And I don't even know if that's going to work. I think we have to give it a chance. I think you have to kind of. I mean, I'm not party political, I never really have been. I've only voted once in my life, and that was in 1979. And I voted not for Margaret Thatcher, believe it or not, I voted for labor because I was at university at the time. And so I've never voted because I think actually it's a bit like, what's his face? He used to say, voting only encourages them. But, but so I, I, I'm, I'm not happy. I'm not a sort of bedfellow of fandom. I don't like to go. These people are the answer. You know, they must get in because that's the only future we can have. I do think they're the only thing that are likely to be the answer. And I think Nigel Farage genuinely is a decent guy and I think he's a great leader and I think he would make a great Prime Minister. But I sometimes wonder if he even wants to be Prime Minister because you know, he talks about his life now being completely impossible. And if you saw those idiots up in Newcastle the weekend, you know, banging on the window of the restaurant he was in and you know he gets death threats every day. He's got a security detail. I have to go check out everywhere he goes before he goes in there. You know, when James Whale was still alive, he went down to see him and when it was going to go to this pub and they had to send these security guys in two hours ahead of time to make sure he was going to be safe in the pub. So I mean, you know, and you do worry because the leftists are so deranged. You saw those people in Newcastle, a bit like in America, you know, they're violent, they're nasty, they're horrible. They genuinely believe that they're on the right side of, of God and anyone on the right is somehow satanic. They actually believe that. And I worry about that as well, you know, in terms of my kids future, what it's going to be like here in 20 years, I don't know.
- [48:39]
Konstantin
But I thought if we look at causes for optimism, I think that the emergence, emergence of reform is a good thing. I'm going to be honest with you, I think the emergence of the Green Party is a good thing. There is that side of the political left who I think are nuts, whatever you, whatever else, but at least their politics are being catered to.
- [48:58]
Mike Graham
Yeah.
- [48:58]
Konstantin
And I think what we're seeing now actually with the emergence of these news parties is a more representative form of politics because in the old days you had Conservative or Labor and you go, how much does, I don't know, a right wing libertarian have to do with an old school, traditional, dyed in the wall Tory and you know, the old school lefties with progressive liberals. So maybe what we need are these more kind of smaller parties as it were, but are actually more representative of people in general.
- [49:27]
Mike Graham
Yeah, well you might say that if they get in though because you know they'll have this place off you, you know, be felt you full of illegal migrants living here, you know, might be able to have a recording shoe. We're going to make any money, you know. Yeah, I mean it's interesting. I mean I saw Jeremy Corbyn as one of the people leading the charge on facial recognition cameras, which would be something, I imagine that we would agree with him on that. You know, we don't want these facial recognition cameras all over Britain, you know, because that gives it a lot of power to people that probably shouldn't have it. I don't agree with Jeremy Corbyn about pretty much anything, but, you know, maybe there is that kind of, you know, genuine place where if people are proper politicians and they do believe in something. Trouble is, I don't think Zach Polanski is the answer, though. I don't think he believes in anything. I mean, he's a very strange character. But, yeah, I mean, I don't have a problem with having a wide choice. And I think that the two party system doesn't work. I think we know that. I saw it in Scotland, actually, interestingly, because I worked in Scotland for about five or six years, maybe more, and labor had had a lock on Scotland forever. You know, I don't think. I think the Tories had one mp, famously every now and again. But before the Scottish National Party came along, labor basically guaranteed that they would always get minimum 48, 52 MPs, almost all of them for. For Scotland. There'd be a couple of Lib Dems, you know, old. What's his name, Kennedy, Charlie Kennedy was up in the sort of the, the very yellowy huge area, but hardly anybody lived there apart from a load of cows and sheep. But they took it for granted, you know, the people who came from the Scottish labor machine, people like George Robertson, you know, had constituencies in Glasgow, some of the poorest places in the world, and they did nothing for them because they just took it for granted that every day when they went down a polling station, they'd vote Labor. And then suddenly the SNP came up with the idea of independence and they suddenly went, oh, I know, let's have devolution, that'll be good. And then they lost control. And now labor in Scotland are in a terrible place. You know, not least because Westminster labor are doing so badly, but because the SNP are now the sort of main power in Scotland and they're not very good, but you can see that things can change. And, you know, if reform manages to bust open the two party system, who knows what happens after that?
- [51:48]
Matt
Well, that's an interesting question, isn't it? I saw Jeremy Clarkson wrote a piece. I never thought I would say the words. Jeremy Clarkson wrote a really interesting piece, but he did. No disrespect to Jeremy by the way, I just don't think of him as a writer primarily, but he wrote a piece which I thought was really interesting. He kind of said, a lot of people think with reform get in, they think the data reform get in, Britain is going to turn into an Enid Blyton postcard. Yeah, it's not going to happen.
- [52:13]
Mike Graham
No. Well, Britain again, it's too far gone for that, to be honest. I mean, I speak to people who are moving out of London now because London to them has become unrecognizable. You probably also saw the piece of video from Richmond at the weekend. We played it out this morning on the show of these two guys. One's got a hammer smashing in the window of a jewelry shop, and they literally just tear the window out and just start lobbing a load of jewelry into a bag. And then they run off down the street and, you know, yes, of course. And people will say, oh, but, you know, there was always that kind of thing going on. And yes, there was. You know, crime was always a thing in the middle of London. And, you know, the first time somebody tries to mug me, I think it was, you know, it was in the 70s. I was walking home from seeing my girlfriend. But, yeah, but it's different now. And London is different.
- [52:58]
Matt
How is it different?
- [52:59]
Mike Graham
It's different because it is now full of people from somewhere else. And it didn't used to be, you know, it used to always have, as every big city has. It had an attractive kind of immigrant aspect to it. But now white people are in the minority. 38, I think, of white English in London, you know, and I would say in the last five or six years, it's become noticeably a different city. And not just because of the color of people's skin, but, you know, you. I mean, I. I go. I live in southeast London, and I'll go to the big supermarket there, and I can walk through the entire supermarket, spend about 30 minutes there, and not hear anybody speaking English. You know, they could be speaking Lithuanian. They could be speaking, you know, Ukrainian. They could be, you know, it's not a question of whether they're all not white, but you. You don't see very many English people there anymore. And a lot of people find that difficult to cope with because it's, you know, you look at the old shows like you look at the Beatles, for example, for the 60s. And this is when I started, when I. When I first was aware of, you know, what London was like. And when they filmed that show on the top, you know, they Filmed Let It Be or whatever, on the top of the Soho rooftop, you know, and you see all the people down below, and everybody's white. And I know that that might be an unfair comparison to make, but, you know, I went to New York in the 80s, and the difference for me with New York and London was that all of the immigration in New York was people who wanted to be American. You know, it was people who said if you asked them, you know, where are you from? They would say, new York. You know, famously, I got into. I used to know. I used to work for the medical organization back then, and we used to use these cars called Skyline cars, and quite a lot of Russians used to drive them. And I got in. There was a guy called Charles Bremner, who had been the Moscow correspondent for the Times. And he. And I got in one of these cars, and he was very kind of quite pompous because times people tend to be. And he. Obviously, you could tell by the way this guy was speaking that he was Russian. And so Charles Bremner said to him, so where are you from? And he went, New Jersey. And that was where he was from. He wasn't from Russia anymore. And so their kind of the American dream for them was to go to America, become American, you know, get a house, get a car, put your kid through college, put a. You put a flag of the Stars and Stripes outside your house, and it didn't matter where you were from. Whereas in Now, I think in London and in other parts of Britain, we've got these communities which are not British and they don't want to be British. And it takes us back to that argument you made about Rishi Sunak on.
- [55:34]
Matt
Thanks for bringing that up on Question Time.
- [55:36]
Mike Graham
Yeah, but I didn't even make it. So the distinction is good, though, because you see, I'm, for example, my parents are both Scottish, right. So I don't really see myself as English. I was born in London. But I do see myself as British, but I kind of see myself as Scottish and British rather than English and British. And I think that's an interesting distinction.
- [55:53]
Matt
Well, see, one of the. I mean, there's. So first of all, there's so much lies about it. So first of all, I didn't bring up British. I don't go around going, he's English, he's not English. He's like, that's my job. That's Francis, right? Fraser Nelson brought Rishi Sunak up, and he said, well, I think Rishi Sunak's like the most English thing that's ever existed.
- [56:14]
Mike Graham
Yeah.
- [56:15]
Matt
Is he. He's a British Prime Minister. No disrespect to him. He was a pretty terrible Prime Minister. He's British. He's very, very culturally British. I totally respect that. And I am British too. I wasn't even born here. I'm way more British than I am Russian. Russians look at me and they go, who the fuck is that guy?
- [56:31]
Mike Graham
Right.
- [56:32]
Matt
So that's the first thing. The second thing is they keep bringing it up, like, out of context and they keep saying. They keep acting as if I was trying to say Rishi Sunak doesn't belong.
- [56:41]
Mike Graham
So this proves that you're a racist, in other words. Exactly right.
- [56:44]
Matt
Whereas I said in that very same conversation, my son, born to two immigrants in this country, is also not English. Am I being racist against my son? So they're taking an opinion about the difference between ethnicity and cultural identity and nationality and making it into a race thing. Right. But I think your point is. And look, the thing is, when someone who looks like you says it, everyone sort of goes, ooh, cringe. I have friends from all over the world who land at Heathrow. I go and pick them up at the airport. They're black, white, brat. And they all say the same thing.
- [57:23]
Mike Graham
Yeah.
- [57:24]
Matt
What happened? Yeah, that's what they say. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. That offends people, but that is what they say.
- [57:29]
Mike Graham
Absolutely. I mean, I go to a gym, believe it or not. Now, this is how I know. Well, I thought when I was making seriously good money, I thought would be really, really rude of me to drop dead and not be able to spend all that money on my kids. So, yeah, anyway, so I started going to the gym, like last night, around the back of Selfridges. And Oxford street now is actually more Arab than Dubai.
- [57:52]
Matt
Right.
- [57:53]
Mike Graham
I literally. And I mean, you know, these are all law abiding people. I'm not complaining about the fact that they're here. It's an observation. Right. You see more and more Arab families, you see groups of women wearing the full burqa, you know, five wives walking behind a guy, you know, it's there for everybody to see. Yeah. Always walking behind. And it's there for. It's hard not to notice it and I'm sorry if people don't like it, but I'm not going to live in a world where I'm not going to say something about it, because when I used to go to Oxford street when I was a teenager, it didn't look like that. You know, people Were walking. They were always foreigners, they were always fun. My parents used to, used to delight in taking us to, you know, different foreign nationality restaurants. Once every week we would go to a Polish restaurant, we'd go to an Italian restaurant, we go to an Indian, there are swamis we went to. In the old days, you know, we go to Chinese restaurants, go to Jewish restaurants. You know, it was great because that was part of being in London. It was a melting pot. But now it's not like that anymore because now it's a kind of. It feels oppressive to me that there are so many people here from somewhere else.
- [58:56]
Konstantin
And what people don't realize is when we're talking about immigration, as somebody who was born in London, lived in London, grew up in a fairly working class part of London and has seen it change. The area that I grew up in is now very much more. Way more middle class. But you lose something when you have that amount of immigration come in because that sense of community, that social cohesion changes. It dies when you have that level of immigration. And people don't seem to accept that or want to accept that because, I'm going to be brutally honest, it's. Because it's not. No, it's not their communities that are being affected.
- [59:33]
Mike Graham
No, exactly right. Although that may happen soon because apparently there's a plan from the Department of Defra, Environmental Fisheries and whatever they're called now. They want to make the countryside more diverse. They say that it's too white and that they want to put more people from different nationalities and different ethnicities into the country. And they particularly want to populate the Chilcot Hill area because it's around Luton. And they said, they literally have said, we want to put more Muslims into, into, into the, the Chiltern Hills and we want to put more Muslims into the Cotswold. It's a story in the Telegraph today and you're kind of going, why are they even doing. What's it got to do with the government department? You know, they're not supposed to be changing, you know, the demographics of the country, but that's what they're actively doing and people don't like it.
- [60:18]
Konstantin
And they've got, and they've got every right not to like it. Look, let's talk about an unpleasant subject. The cockneys.
- [60:25]
Mike Graham
Yeah.
- [60:26]
Konstantin
Do cockneys even exist?
- [60:29]
Mike Graham
Well, look at Whitechapel. I mean, Whitechapel, which used to be, you know, home to a very big Jewish population. That was where the craze used to hang out. You can still go to the blind beggar, people will say, that's where they shot him, you know, over there.
- [60:39]
Konstantin
Bullet hole still in the wall, bullet.
- [60:41]
Mike Graham
Holster in the wall, you know, but it's. Yeah, it's, it's unrecognizable. And, you know, I get the fact that things change, but as I say, I lived in America in the 80s under Ronald Reagan, when it was a very, very interesting and, and wide ranging and changing place. But it always changed with one sort of, you know, central tenant, which was, this is America. You know, you want to come to America, you become an American. You, you, you recite the, you sing the Star Spangled Banner. You know, you pledge allegiance to the flag, and your kids will pledge allegiance to the flag every single day when they go to school. That doesn't happen here. And I think that's a problem.
- [61:19]
Konstantin
And it is. And what it seems to be as well is a sort of tacit acknowledgment that what they're doing is obliterating a culture.
- [61:26]
Mike Graham
Yeah.
- [61:26]
Konstantin
And not only that, they're celebrating it. They're going, diversity is our strength. And you go, well, what about the previous communities that live there, their culture, their heritage, like the Cockneys? Well, no, that doesn't matter. Get rid of them. And you go, well, I mean, do you want to actually understand what you're doing to the literal fabric of this country?
- [61:45]
Mike Graham
Yeah. And if they start making it sort of, you know, a kind of blanket situation at the moment, it's mostly cities, isn't it? I mean, you know, if you go, even as I say, to where my kids went to school in Sussex, you know, it's a very white area and it's a very English area, and there's not that many foreigners there. But even that's now beginning to change. And you're starting to see the old vape shops popping up, you know, organized crime, which is, which is nothing to do with ethnicity as far, but it has everything to do with, you know, an awful lot of people coming from foreign countries and setting up drug businesses and setting up, you know, the Albanians, for example, biggest drug dealers in Europe, you know, pretty much have a lock on every single part of the cocaine business from here to Turkey, you know, and it's been allowed to happen. And nobody really knows why. You know, nobody.
- [62:30]
Matt
But the thing is, this is.
- [62:31]
Mike Graham
And then suddenly there's a bunch of barber shops and there's a bunch of, you know, clearly, you know, money laundering.
- [62:37]
Matt
Businesses, and nobody's stopping them, and nobody voted for this. And this. I find Frustrating because, you know, as you know, I'm an immigrant myself here. When I came to Britain, none of it was like this. This has all happened in my life.
- [62:50]
Mike Graham
It's accelerated massively in the last 10 years.
- [62:53]
Matt
And it's not my fault. I didn't do it, even though it has happened in that time. But, you know, so many things I always say this are a question of speed and scale. Yeah, I like ice cream, but if I had ice cream every day for breakfast, lunch and dinner, I'd be fucked.
- [63:07]
Mike Graham
Yeah.
- [63:07]
Matt
And immigration is the same. If you choose very carefully the types of people that you allow in, if you're very selective, if you're careful, if you say, well, you know, we've got to make sure you're culturally compatible. The numbers are kept to a level where people, as you say, come, they integrate, they become British. Rishi Sunak is very British. Yeah, he's totally integrated. I'm gonna make that clear. Right. Just like other, you know, myself, I've done the same thing. It's perfectly possible for people who come here to integrate. What is not possible is for millions and millions of people to come in the space of a few years and then for us to expect them, for them to integrate, especially when we are incredibly shy about A, what it means to be British and B, about insisting that you do actually integrate.
- [63:54]
Mike Graham
Yeah.
- [63:55]
Matt
And these are like, these are just, they're not even controversial things to say. They're things that everyone around the world, including billions of black and brown people too, just go, yeah, of course.
- [64:08]
Mike Graham
Yeah, exactly. But of course it's true for anyone who has got any nationality of any kind of you go to any country in the world, you know, if they were going through what, what we have been going through in the last 10 years in terms of immigration, they'd be up in arms, you know, they'd probably be taken to the streets, you know. Yes, of course, Brazil is a, is a, a multi ethnic society. It's quite a racist society as well, depending on what color Brazilian you are. Right. But I can be pretty sure that there aren't thousands and millions of people coming there from, from European cultures to change the way that they live. Whereas we've got that situation here. And I think also the other sort of major part of why it's happened is the welfare system here, because the welfare system has encouraged more and more Brits not to work. It's also encouraged more and more immigrants to come here because they can also get welfare. We are now going to be, I think, the biggest G7 country for spending on welfare. I think it's 2% of GDP that we will now be spending this year on, on welfare of one kind or another. And, you know, again, it's a failed political system. It's a failed political kind of theory that's been propagated ever since the days of Tony Blair. Then into David Cameron, you know, where hug a hoodie was a thing. You know, he didn't want to, you know, punish anybody for doing anything bad. You know, talk down to people, make out that they're too stupid to understand the, you know, the machinations of the state, let the state take over and become bigger and bigger and bigger, which is what it's done. And all of these things have conspired, I think, to just ruin the country. And it's not just one thing, it's not just immigration, but it's a big part of it.
- [65:46]
Konstantin
And to me, it comes down to something. I went to a dinner where there was a very famous politician being interviewed by journalists. And it ties back into what you were talking about. All the questions that the journalists gave the politicians, they were just nice questions. Nice. And I thought to myself, everybody, practically everyone in this room has had a better education than me. No doubt they're smarter than me, but there's no courage or balls. They don't want to shake things up. Why is it that we just don't want to be uncomfortable, we don't want to have an uncomfortable conversation. We don't want to have a. We don't want to have conversations where we go, look, we need to limit immigration. And it just seems that this has just been pervasive throughout our society to the point that we avoid discomfort for so much that we find ourselves now in the most uncomfortable of places because.
- [66:38]
Mike Graham
People are frightened to be seen as wrong. They're frightened to be seen as, you know, right wing. And again, this is the establishment. The establishment is now in no way shape or form right wing. The establishment is now left wing. And everybody who runs this country is effectively left wing, from the civil servants to the politicians to the, the people in the media, to the school system, to the educations, the higher education, to the universities, even companies. I mean, look at what the banking sector is like now. You know, my sister worked in, in the big bang days of the 80s, you know, and funnily enough, Nigel Farage was working there as well. She worked with him at Drexel Burnham Lambert before they got done for, you know, Michael Milken's, you know, chicanery, where he went to Jail for insider trading. But, you know, it was, you know, it was balls out. It was going to make as much money as you can. You know, used to quit hiking when you get somebody to have to do a deal that they didn't really want, but they'd have to buy something off you and then you'd sold it to them and they'd have to take, you know, delivery of it and people would, you know, it was like the Wild west and it was unregulated to some extent, but they were very far from left wing. Whereas now you get the bank of England and it's, you know, where are the gender neutral toilets? They're on the seventh floor. Oh, that's all right. Then, you know, and they debunk people like Nigel Farage for having views that they don't like. And it's all very kind of nice. It's changing back again now in Wall Street. Wall street has kind of given up under Trump. They've kind of come back a little bit and they've reclaimed a bit of that kind of, you know, right wingery, if you like. But, you know, I don't know when it all happened, People in the real estrus asked me, she said, when did it all happen? I said, I don't really know. Kind of happened in the last 20 years. And maybe we're all to blame for not seeing it.
- [68:18]
Matt
I'd say 30 years. I think what people didn't realize, because Blair was fresh faced, you know, the Conservatives were tired, he came in and also in before the war in Iraq, it sort of felt like everything was great because they pumped a lot of money, public services, they improved education, they put money into health care, blah, blah, blah. But what nobody realized is in the background, they were introducing all of the, all of this legislation which has been with us for the last 30 years, which has ruined. Absolutely.
- [68:47]
Mike Graham
And it was kind of almost time bombed, wasn't it? So that nobody would really see it happening and it would only be suddenly when the Supreme Court popped up.
- [68:53]
Matt
Yeah.
- [68:54]
Mike Graham
And everyone went, when did that happen? Yeah, you know, I thought, you know, when I was studying politics, you know, the House of Lords was the highest court in the land. You know, we didn't even pay any attention to. To Europe. To Europe at that point. And now suddenly, you know, the House of Lords is pretty meaningless as a legal entity, you know.
- [69:10]
Matt
Well, the same thing with the whole diversity agenda under the labor government. They basically made it legal to discriminate against everybody who wasn't a minority. That's what they did. They said there are protected charact, which means that these groups of people, because they're minorities or women as well, they get to have special treatment. So then the diversity agenda flows from all of that. If you look at the boats coming across the channel, that's all to do with the Human Rights act and the fact that basically you're not allowed to deal with people who are coming into your country illegally as illegal immigrants, all of this stuff. So it's been happening. But the thing is, as you say, the Tories came in, and I don't think they realized what the hell had happened.
- [69:55]
Mike Graham
No.
- [69:55]
Matt
And then before they knew it, they were balls deep in Brexit. And then. And then, you know, that took years. And then the moment that's finished, you get the war in Ukraine, you get Covid. Sorry, the moment Covid's wrapping up, you get the war in Ukraine. Before you know it, 14 years have gone and nothing's changed.
- [70:11]
Mike Graham
Putin sits there laughing, of course, and going, you know, well, you're weak. And this is why we're doing what we're doing. Because you're not going to do anything about it. That's right, because you're too busy making sure that the soldiers that you're now recruiting don't use words like manpower. Because, you know, I actually had a call from a. From a soldier who said that he was asked. He got a phone call, he was in a barracks, got a call from sort of the Department for Defense, and he was asked to go around every single notice board in the barracks to make sure the word manpower wasn't used anywhere. Right. And that's what they're doing, you know, and equally, you've got this whole situation where Cameron and then Theresa May tried to make the Conservative Party nicer, you know, when she said, you know, we. We're known as the nasty party, we need to change that view. And, you know, suddenly hostile environment was a thing you couldn't say about the immigration police, you know, well, we wanted hostile environment so these illegal immigrants don't come here and they don't want to come here. It should be a hostile environment. You know, if it's not a hostile environment, more of them are going to come. It's a pretty straightforward equation. And yet the Tories have spent the best part of the last, I don't know, probably 14, 15 years trying to be nice, and it's backfired horrendously because they've been stuck basically by everybody else.
- [71:25]
Matt
All right, Matt. Well, let's hope Zach Polanski can Fix it.
- [71:28]
Mike Graham
I mean, I keep expecting something just very odd to come out about him because, you know, one we know it's not his real name, even though he claims that it was his family name before, you know, the Second World War. Bloody blast. He kind of reclaimed it. I just think he's, he clearly is not what he says he is. He's meant to be coming from quite a wealthy family when he pretends to be this kind of, you know, crusader for justice. And I just, I just. My prediction for the year is that Zach Polanski will self destruct. How about.
- [71:57]
Matt
That's interesting. Yeah, that's interesting. I actually studied hypnotherapy, so I'm very familiar. They're all, oh, mate.
- [72:05]
Mike Graham
Well, again, he claims that that's a sort of made up story by the sun, says that, you know, they kind of took a story that he was talking about and kind of ran with it. The thing is, there is a video of him talking about it, so he can't completely deny it, but he's, he's sort of saying that the son kind of took advantage of him and kind of put that question to him and he ended up coming back. But, you know, the trouble with, you know, he's managed to fulfill the first law of politics, which is still lies. You know, if somebody catches you out, just deny it, like Lord Mandelson.
- [72:37]
Konstantin
I mean, one of the interesting things actually touching on Polanski is just his economic illiteracy.
- [72:41]
Mike Graham
Yeah.
- [72:42]
Konstantin
And when he was asked about what should Britain do about the debt, he said that we needed to be more like Japan, which is to effectively double our national debt.
- [72:50]
Matt
Japan is 200% of debt to GDP, if not more.
- [72:53]
Konstantin
Yeah. And he was saying that's how we get better public services, print more money.
- [72:57]
Mike Graham
Yeah, well, that's what we've been doing though, and that's why we are where we are. Well, when he was on with Laura Kunzberg on Sunday, he was asked about this whole business of, of sort of fair rents and, and how to, to make it easier for people to rent for less money. And he said, well, obviously, you know, what we need to do is look up countries where it's been a success. And Laura said, well, all the countries that have used it, it hasn't been a success. And he said, well, that's not entirely true. But then he couldn't name a country whose system he would adopt because it would work better for landlords and for tenants. There isn't one. Because soon as you put, you know, the so called fair Rent act in. Landlords will just pull the properties, there'll be more shortages of. They'll be more homeless.
- [73:38]
Matt
But in terms of your plan, then.
- [73:40]
Mike Graham
You would not dictate rent controls.
- [73:42]
Matt
You would give the power to mayors to set rent controls if they wanted.
- [73:45]
Konstantin
That would be the way you would do it.
- [73:47]
Matt
Exactly.
- [73:47]
Mike Graham
Based on local incomes, based on affordability, based on housing. Housing stock. Because we need to build more houses, too. I should say, though, if national government wanted to do this on a national level, I wouldn't oppose that either. Just someone needs to do that.
- [73:58]
Konstantin
And whether it comes at the most.
- [73:59]
Mike Graham
Local level or the national level, that's a conversation I'm open to. But the problem that we need to fix is the spiraling rents that are getting more and more expensive. The only system that works, it may not be perfect, is capitalism. Can't do it any other way.
- [74:13]
Konstantin
And that's the real issue, is that. And it's not just. Zach, there are plenty of people in politics who are just. They're just not serious.
- [74:20]
Mike Graham
No.
- [74:21]
Konstantin
And you saw that on Question Time. You. I was looking at these people and they were talking, you going, you're just not serious politicians. You. There's not serious. They're just peddling narratives. They're just saying things that sound good and make you feel good. But the unfortunate and unpleasant reality is they're not going to. The ideas aren't going to work. And if they're not going to work, then they're pointless.
- [74:41]
Mike Graham
Well, this is one of the things that people say about reform, isn't it? And some of the people that have, you know, kind of, you know, defected from the Tory Party, if you like. And that guy, Jake Berry, I think he's got a mention on Question Time, didn't it?
- [74:52]
Matt
I feel bad for him because I've gone at him pretty hard. It's not because it's personal towards him.
- [74:57]
Mike Graham
He'S not a bad guy.
- [74:58]
Matt
But. But he was in the Conservative Party, arguing with me on Question Time, saying, Net zero is brilliant.
- [75:04]
Mike Graham
Yeah.
- [75:04]
Matt
He's now part of reform.
- [75:05]
Mike Graham
Yeah.
- [75:06]
Matt
You can see why people have questions.
- [75:07]
Mike Graham
Exactly right. I remember having James cleverly on once, and I was taking the mickey out of. I think it was Rachel Reeves, who, it was revealed, had charged her electricity to the taxpayer from her second home, you know, even though it wasn't that far away from London. And I could see him kind of squirming a little bit. And I said, this is outrageous, isn't it? I said, especially if you don't live that far from London. I Said, you live in Essex, don't you? Yeah. Well, you don't charge your. Your second home electricity to the taxpayer, do you, James? And he went, well, actually, yeah, I do. And I was like, well, then you shouldn't be doing it. Just stop. You know, you're making a pretty good living. You don't have to. Just because it says in the book that you can do it, you don't have to do it. Same goes for that sort of, you know, hatchet man that they've got, Pat McFadden, you know, who's also an ex, Blair, Right. He actually moved house to this house next door from the one that he owned because he couldn't claim mortgage relief anymore since they changed the rules. And he moved into the house next door so he could rent it, so he could claim the mortgage on that. So he could claim the rent on that, therefore could pay the mortgage. I mean, because he rented out his. His other house, right? So he sort of did a double dip. And when I had him on, I said, you know, how do you explain to people that they should trust you? And he just went, everything I did was within the rules. And that's what they say, and it's ridiculous.
- [76:31]
Matt
Well, see, this is. I mean, I am actually, believe it or not, a little bit sympathetic on that, because what happened for many decades is we basically never were allowed to pay MPs properly relative to what you want, someone the caliber of the people that you want in power or in those positions. So what happened is they said, well, you can't be paid properly, but we will give you this, like, expensive slush fund where you can make as much money as you want.
- [76:58]
Mike Graham
Right?
- [76:58]
Matt
So really it's double the salary that we're paying. And then they all got caught when the expense of scandal came out. And, yeah, my view is, actually, I think MPs should be paid way more than they are at the moment. I. I'd pay them a quarter of a million pounds a year, but if you get caught. Caught fiddling the books, we chop your head off.
- [77:16]
Mike Graham
Yeah. Would you give them expenses on top of that?
- [77:19]
Matt
No, no, no. You just give them a flat amount and then you, you know, do whatever. But what I'm saying is you just need proper salaries because then that's you. That's how you attract proper people in it. Like in any business, Right. If you want to hire somebody to do a talk show, you're gonna have to pay them a lot. Yeah. Right. Or even if you don't, if they get a big audience, then you're gonna have to pay them a lot. Right. So if you want to attract the top caliber people to politics, you have to pay them well, because it's a shit job, let's be honest.
- [77:44]
Mike Graham
Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't want to be a politician.
- [77:46]
Matt
People keep asking me if I want, I'm like, are you insane? Why would I want to do that? Right. But on the other hand, no expenses and very, very, very severe accountability.
- [77:54]
Mike Graham
Yeah.
- [77:55]
Matt
If you misbehave.
- [77:55]
Mike Graham
Right.
- [77:56]
Matt
But I mean, that's a good deal.
- [77:58]
Mike Graham
People, ordinary people in this country, who have never seen a salary like 96,000, which is what they get now, of course, will say, but they already are getting a load of money. I know, and I know that for, for people living in London, they'll say, well, actually that's not a massive amount, blah, blah, blah, blah. But they're not badly paid, let's face it.
- [78:14]
Matt
I mean, it depends on what you want, Mike. If you want a bunch of mediocrities.
- [78:17]
Mike Graham
Yeah, well, that's what we've got that.
- [78:19]
Matt
But what I'm saying is, look, if you were running a business, right, and that business was the most important business in the country, it was important for national defense, it was important for planning, it was important for running the NHS properly, it was important for all sorts of things, you would hire the top people. That's why the person, the chief executive of the nhs, I don't know how much he or she earns. I would guess it's millions.
- [78:40]
Mike Graham
I would imagine so. Right, Certainly, certainly. Big high six figures.
- [78:44]
Matt
I would think so. Right. So you want the people who are running the country to be that well paid as well, otherwise you're going to get this bunch of non entities that we have.
- [78:53]
Mike Graham
But unfortunately that disproves your theory, though, because the people running NHS don't know what the they're doing. And so I don't know why they're getting paid, the amount of money they're getting paid.
- [79:01]
Matt
That's fair.
- [79:02]
Mike Graham
You know, and the other thing is, I just want to mention this, is, I don't know if you saw at the Weekend, the Sunday Times had the list of people who pay the most tax in this country.
- [79:11]
Matt
Yeah.
- [79:11]
Mike Graham
And I would show that to Zach Polanski and go, you know, you talk about, you know, people not paying their fair share of taxes. Rachel Reeves says it all the time. It turns out she's going to now punish the people who make about 48 grand a year. They're going to get taxed the most by proportion. But when you See the likes of some footballers, you know, sort of captains of industry, hundreds of millions of pounds worth of tax they're paying and so make out. And, you know, the top 1%, I think, account for something like nearly 50 or 60%, 30%. Top 10%, isn't it?
- [79:40]
Matt
So top 10% is 60.
- [79:42]
Mike Graham
Yeah.
- [79:43]
Matt
And the 1% is.
- [79:44]
Mike Graham
And so, you know, that is a massive, you know, sign, I guess, that the system works because they collect much more tax from the people who make money than they do from the people who don't. And you might say that's as it should be, but I don't see any reason to change it, is what I'm saying. They don't need to pay more because if you make them pay any more, they'll just disappear.
- [80:04]
Matt
Which they are. Yeah, which they are. Mike, great to have you on. Glad to see that you're doing really well.
- [80:10]
Mike Graham
Thank you.
- [80:10]
Matt
Where can people find your.
- [80:12]
Mike Graham
Your show, the Microme show, on YouTube? We've got a substate which I don't understand, but we're working on that. That's the microgramshow.com and, yeah, we're just. We're hoping to do more shows as time goes on. We're a pretty small operation at the moment, so we're just kind of running, you know, constantly running ahead of ourselves, trying to get stuff done and trying to improve. We're trying to get to a point where we can take calls, trying to get to a point where we can do voice notes, things like that, and really replicate what a mainstream morning breakfast show could do, you know, And I think it's going to be a very exciting year.
- [80:45]
Matt
The last question.
- [80:46]
Mike Graham
Yeah.
- [80:47]
Matt
What's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be?
- [80:49]
Mike Graham
The one thing we're not talking about that should be. Now, you see, you always come up with a good question at the end, don't you? The one thing we're not talking about. Yeah, yeah. Well, I've told you a few things that people don't know about. I mean, there are things that people will never know about me, I suppose. I wonder if we should be talking about Iran and where that all goes, because it's going to go somewhere bad, I think. I think Trump's going to drop some bombs on them or something, and I think that will. That'll kick off. So I don't know what that's going to mean for the rest of us. But the thing that worries me about Iran is that. And I know that many people have escaped the Iranian regime because it's so horrible, but, you know, it takes that long to get 30,000 Iranians out on the street demonstrating how many Iranians are actually living here. And what will happen if the regime gets removed? Will they all go back? Will they all stay living in Hackney? You know, I don't know.
- [81:39]
Konstantin
We shall see.
- [81:40]
Matt
All right, head on over to Substack where we get to ask Mike your questions.
- [81:46]
Konstantin
She says the one thing that she doesn't agree with you on is your animosity with Tommy Robinson. He's been proven right on so many fronts. Could there ever be a truce between you? I don't say this lightly. Last summer, Konstantin and I spent a week with Ralston College students and professors in Greece, and it's genuinely something that needs to be seen to be believed. I couldn't recommend it more highly. If you love trigonometry, you're gonna love this. Ralston College runs a one year MA in the humanities unlike anything else. Students begin in Greece, spending two months learning to read and speak ancient Greek while studying the foundational works of the Western tradition, starting with Homer. From there, the program continues in Savannah, Georgia, where students take on the most important works of the Western canon in small, serious seminars. Ideas are tested properly, arguments are sharpened. This is education as it used to be and should be again. Raulson accepts students with a bachelor's degree or equivalent in any discipline. Full scholarships are available. Apply by 27 February 2026 at Raulson. AC apply. That's R, A L, S, T O, N.AC apply.