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- [00:02]
Host 1
Don't you think part of the issue with our culture and our society as it is and the politics as a result of that, is we live in the age of delusion.
- [00:11]
Peter Hitchens
Yes. And people have been encouraged to be deluded. The problem that Andrew Burnham faces, that he's trying to do things which will fail because they're fundamentally unworkable, the most likely thing has got to be the currency which is losing value hand over fist as we speak. The great fear that I have that the money which we use simply ceases to exist. I don't know how a country in our current state will cope with that. The country is obviously finished. It's just a question of how and when this will become evident to everybody.
- [00:44]
Host 2
I sort of laughed when you said the country's finished because of the way you said it, but actually, I'm afraid both Francis and I, over time, come around to the idea that Peter Hitchens was right. This episode is sponsored by our friends at Hillsdale College. Right after this episode, go check out their incredible online courses, which are absolutely free at Hillsdale. Edu Trigger.
- [01:09]
Host 3
Peter, it's always a pleasure to have
- [01:12]
Host 1
you back on the show. I always look forward to it immensely. When you're looking at the UK at the moment, what is your diagnosis?
- [01:20]
Host 3
Where are we? How far do we have to go
- [01:23]
Host 1
till, you know, your predictions come true?
- [01:26]
Peter Hitchens
Oh, I couldn't. Predictions very easy to make, but it's not so easy to say exactly when they're going to happen. The country is obviously finished. It's just a question of. Of how and when this will become evident to everybody. The most likely thing has got to be the currency which is losing value hand over fist as we speak, but at a sort of normal rate. But if it actually gets into a really serious inflationary spiral, then that will make it evident, because everything we do at the moment is based upon an overestimate of how rich we are. And if the currency shrinks to the point where you can't make that pretense anymore, then everything, all the things that people don't dare reform, particularly the enormous amount of government spending, will shrivel away and will be blown away in a wind of inflation. I think it's quite possible that that will be the end of it. But there might be other things. There's a great determination in our elite to get us embroiled in a European war, and some people still want us, I think, to get embroiled in a war with Iran. So these also could tip us off the tracks. There's a film, a Very interesting film, which was made by the forerunners of the CIA, the oss, during the later years of the Second World War, showing how to derail a train, which is something they were then interested in doing, rather than stopping. And it's quite difficult. It's much harder than you think. I won't give you any hints, but as Alan Smith said, a country has a lot of ruin in it, so it can take quite a while, but definitely the direction is downwards at an accelerating pace.
- [03:02]
Host 1
What makes you say that? So there's the currency element of it, there's the economic element of it.
- [03:08]
Peter Hitchens
First, simple fact. This is a current country, which is where the government is borrowing money to pay the interest on its debts. If you knew somebody who was doing that, you'd expect trouble. Secondly, it's a country which has very little power of recovery because we destroyed largely in the Thatcher era, but other times as well, our industrial capacity. So the ability to rebuild is very, very limited. Then we have trashed our education system, so the talent pool and the proper use of the talents of the country is almost impossible. We haven't got the people who are trained either to do things or at the elite level, to think rationally. So there's an awful lot of irrationality and ignorance. Then we have a criminal justice system, a police force which might as well have been abducted by aliens and may well have been, I don't know, when did you last see one? And a criminal justice system which is obviously unable to cope the length of time people wait for trials, and the quality of the trials when they get them is atrocious. These all contribute to a general feeling that nothing works. And then on top of that, of course, a transport system which is utterly congested and falling to pieces. What more would you ask? If someone had cursed the country with a number of horrible things which would happen to it, those things would be quite near the top of your list.
- [04:30]
Host 3
Didn't you find it quite strange that
- [04:32]
Host 1
when people were blaming, it seemed to me, look, Keir Starmer was not the best of prime ministers, I think we can all agree on that. But he did seem to be blamed for every single thing that was happening.
- [04:44]
Host 3
When, if you look at it, you just go.
- [04:46]
Host 1
If you're in any way objective, you go. Our problems preceded Keir Starmer, yes, But
- [04:52]
Peter Hitchens
his claim that he made things better, which he made the other day in Parliament, is, I think, a bit. A bit of a nerve.
- [05:01]
Keir Starmer
And I am confident that Britain is now stronger and fairer than it was two years ago. Our economy is stronger Our public services are on the up with the biggest fall in waiting times for 17 years. Children are being lifted out of poverty every single day. Immigration is down significantly. Our defence and security are on a far stronger footing and our international reputation is greatly enhanced.
- [05:30]
Peter Hitchens
So, no, I think we, we sat and talked about the problems of Keir Starr. And my problems was that he, people thought that he was a sort of blank sheet on which they could project their desires, when in fact he was, he was and remains a dogmatic person leading a dogmatic party which is determined to do things which will fail. That's the problem that Andrew Burnham faces, that he's, he's trying to do things which will fail because they're fundamentally unworkable. You can't carry on behaving like that when there's no money.
- [05:58]
Host 2
Can you flesh it out? Because I think it's a really important point and it would be worth somebody who's as thoughtful about these issues as you are to breaking it down in a little bit more detail. When you say that the Labour Party and Andrew Burnham, as you call them, are determined to do things, what should I call him? Well, Andy Burnham. He wears T shirts for that very purpose.
- [06:20]
Peter Hitchens
I don't know him. I realized the other day I had met him once but had forgotten it. But I don't claim to know. Why shouldn't I call him by his name?
- [06:30]
Host 2
What is Mr. Burnham likely to do and why is it likely to fail?
- [06:33]
Peter Hitchens
He's likely to spend an awful lot of money he hasn't got. He has to satisfy a new set of backers who will desire a different pattern of spending, but fundamentally similar. But the real problem that besets this country is twofold. The first is it's extraordinary belief. It's much more important and much richer and much more powerful than it is, which causes us to, first of all to engage in all kinds of foreign policy, which is dangerous and expensive, and also to spend money on defending our islands, which is frankly misspent. There's this call for us to spend more. The question is not how much you spend, but what you spend it on. You spend it on a Cold War superpower submarine launched intercontinental ballistic missile deterrent force, then you will bankrupt yourself. If you're a small country off the northwest coast of Europe without many resources and it won't work. So that, that's problem one, and most conservatives live in that deluge. The other thing which governments have been trying to do really since the late 1950s and particularly since the 1960s, is to substitute the state for the family, yeah, the two things have gone on together. I think very few of the people involved have realized that they're even linked, but they are. The one is to enormously weaken the married family as an institution, so it almost ceased to exist in large parts of the country. And the other, to concentrate more and more and more on state provision for the raising of children and indeed for looking after the old, which are things of state, is not actually very good at doing. And it's also fantastically expensive. End of life care is enormously expensive, as we see. And the schools and the nurseries and everything which we provide to substitute for the mothers who've now all been conscripted into the workforce, don't bring up children anything like as well as a family and home used to do. So it's both expensive and bad. So those are the fundamental millstones grinding together which make running this country impossible. Until anybody turns around and said these things are mistakes, we must stop doing them. And also until there's somebody with the political courage to say to the people in this country these things that we need to do will be difficult. They will mean that there is less of a lot of things that you become used to and you will have to do more and the state will have to do less. And that is a hard thing for anybody to say and doesn't tend to win elections.
- [09:08]
Host 2
No. And this is why, you know, I sort of laughed when you said the country's finished because of the way you said it. But actually, I'm afraid both Francis and I, over time, sort of regularly, as we're talking about something else, eventually come around to the idea that Peter Hitchens was right when he said, you know, people should leave.
- [09:26]
Peter Hitchens
Most people do get it in the end, but it often, as always, I can't communicate my experience of life in the world to other people. I've had a uniquely privileged life, and not in terms of being rolling in money, but in terms of being able to see things, seeing how this country is run at close quarters when I used to be a political reporter and other things and seeing the country from outside when I lived abroad. And so I just happened. And also having a Marxist learnist training, so I'm just simply not credulous in the face of propaganda. So I see things differently from other people. It takes them a while to realize that I'm not joking. I'm not. I'm just not joking quite.
- [10:05]
Host 2
And I suppose one of the challenges you described there is I, and I think it was partly cultural, but partly also Technologically driven. You talk about that. I, I don't want to overstate the case, but I think it's definitely true. If you look even at the opinion polling in terms of what women say they would prefer to do given the opportunity, even in our society now, which has this sort of girl boss feminist ideology, lots and lots of women nonetheless say that they would prefer to spend lots of time with their children if they could. The challenge is, as you say, rightly, that even if you were at an, I mean, at an individual level, you literally have to be as a man in that situation, earning way, way above the average income in this country to be able to provide that for most people. I think that's true. But even if you were to find some way of doing that, you'd end up with, you know, your GDP would go down rapidly and all the other problems that, that doing.
- [11:00]
Peter Hitchens
I don't, I don't know whether it's even reversible. It was the most cynical pact since the molosoff Ribbentrop Pact, 1939, when, when the ultra left feminists of the sort of Betty Friedan type and big business got together and said, right, let's get every woman in the country we can out of the home and into the workplace, yeah, turn them into wage slaves and convince them, as was successfully done by the whole array of women's magazines and television programs and everybody else who preached on and on and on, it's work outside the home is the only respectable form of work. Working inside the home is demeaning slavery tied chained to the kitchen sink. And that idea has been so successful and I think a lot of women have found in practice that it's not true. But it's too late now because of the, the, the conscription of women and I regarded as conscription of women into the workforce is now more or less complete and it's very hard to escape from that cycle.
- [11:57]
Host 2
Yeah, absolutely. And so I'm, I, I was also.
- [12:00]
Peter Hitchens
It's also possible for men to discuss it. Well, immediately you're, you're accused of being, wanting to oppress women. I, if women want to go out to work, that's fine by me. What's none of my business if people want to, but if they come under immense social economic pressure to do so, then that's different.
- [12:16]
Host 2
Well, that's exactly why I made the point that all the polling shows that when asked, women consistently say that many, many women, not all, of course, but I think it's something like 80% say they would prefer more time with their Children. And like you say, that seems to me difficult to reverse, particularly in the current economic climate.
- [12:35]
Peter Hitchens
I wish I could think of a way of making it possible to reverse it, but at the moment I just. I just look at it and think, oh, heck.
- [12:42]
Host 2
And the other point you make, which is something we've talked about a lot, which I think is undeniable, is, you know, we're living way beyond our means. People want to pretend this isn't true. And yet at the same time, for actually the reasons you also articulated so well, you have a situation because government is seen as the ultimate provider of all things. If people feel poorer or are poorer, it's then automatically assumed that, well, that's
- [13:10]
Peter Hitchens
the government's, the government's fault, so they
- [13:11]
Host 2
don't vote for them and the government
- [13:13]
Peter Hitchens
should fix that so they vote for somebody else without checking very carefully what they're going to get. When we last discussed British politics, what I was trying to explain to people was that voting reform in large numbers was voting for the Labour Party, which turned out to be true, I think, in a fairly clear way. It wasn't very difficult to work out, and it was absolutely the case. How could anybody have thought, especially those people who voted for reform, that putting the Labour Party in office was going to solve any of the economic or political, social, educational or law and order problems which the country faces? I don't know. Voting is so irrational.
- [13:52]
Host 1
I mean, those people would say to. Would counter with, well, hang on a second, Pete. We've had 14 years of conservative government. They've effectively led us to where we are.
- [14:00]
Peter Hitchens
Oh, sure.
- [14:01]
Host 3
So why would I vote for him again?
- [14:03]
Peter Hitchens
No, tell me about it. I've been arguing against the Conservative Party since the early years of the 21st century, begging people to dump it. But the point came when the alternative was so bad that it was worth going down to the seashore and hauling the thing out of the sea where it had been dumped because it was better than what was coming. And I couldn't explain that to anybody either. My fundamental principle now, which I put to people, is if you understand what's going on, you must learn the art of voting against what you don't want, not try to vote for what you do, or you will never get what you want. But you might stop what you don't want, or some of it, by voting cleverly.
- [14:39]
Host 2
And speaking of avoiding things you don't want, you mentioned the currency, potential currency crisis. I mean, the fact that there's a looming fiscal crisis is something people have talked a lot about. On our show most recently, Nigel Farage made that point in the interview we just did. We had lots of people explain the mechanics of it. One of the hopes I know exists within some people is, and I sort of am tempted by this idea without being an expert on it, is it feels to me like if there is a chance to turn something around, I know you'll say there isn't, and I'll probably eventually agree with you ten years from now. But nonetheless, humor me for now. If there is a chance to turn things around, it's that moment when we are forced by the external circumstances of reality to confront the massive spending that we can't afford because we have a fiscal crisis. And bas people who actually own this country, which is the people we borrow money from, say, you can't do this anymore, you've got to do this. And then we're forced to confront that reality. Do you think there's any chance of that?
- [15:39]
Peter Hitchens
Well, I suppose it's possible the sun might rise in the west, but I don't see any likelihood of it. And I don't see anybody in British politics who's capable of A, saying it and B, winning an election on that basis. That's why cataclysms happen. I saw in Moscow when I was living there in the 90s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that middle class professional people standing by the roadside. You remember those little fake wood veneer tables everybody had?
- [16:12]
Host 2
Only too well, Peter.
- [16:13]
Peter Hitchens
Exactly. They were characteristics of the whole of the Communist block. And on them were displayed shoes, ornaments, cutlery, all the stuff of, of ordinary life on sale by the roadside to pay for bread. That's what people were selling their possessions to pay for bread. And these were people who five years before, thought themselves secure in their jobs, their children secure in their education. They thought they were secure in their accommodation. They saw a life ahead of roughly what they previously enjoyed and it came to an end. The problem with catastrophes is that rather than them being like that amazing painter who has his pictures in the Tate Gallery, where the sky falls in and everything turns red and the huge earthquakes and floods of lava and everybody dies, the cataclysm happens. You're still alive, but you're living in the ruins of your former life as a ghost of your former self. And that's what happens. And this is generally when money dies, which is the great fear that I have, that the, the money which we use simply ceases to exist, really. It just becomes paper and binary code and it doesn't pay for anything. And when Money dies, then that's what happens. But the problem is this is also accompanied by social disorder, and it's very hard to control. And I don't know how a country in our current state would cope with that. It's not something I look forward to. But if a modern Jeremiah was saying, this is what's going to happen. We're not all going to be carried off by the Babylonians for servitude, but we might well find ourselves in a state of severe hyperinflation and impose poverty of a sort we certainly never thought we'd see.
- [17:56]
Host 1
And also what we'll see in that kind of instance is the rise of political extremism.
- [18:00]
Peter Hitchens
Well, it's already rising, isn't it? The people are willing to listen now to people they ought never to listen to.
- [18:06]
Host 2
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- [19:12]
Host 1
And also what we'll see in that kind of instance is the rise of political extremism.
- [19:16]
Peter Hitchens
Well, it's already rising, isn't it? The people are willing to listen now to people they ought never to listen to.
- [19:22]
Host 2
Who are you talking about?
- [19:27]
Peter Hitchens
You can guess. I mean, it's not even worth raising names. I mean, there are people now becoming, I would say prominent but influential on the edges of politics who are very worrying indeed, want to help them at all.
- [19:41]
Host 2
Even by naming them, you're talking about both the far left and the far right, I'm guessing.
- [19:45]
Peter Hitchens
I don't think the far left has much to say. Frankly.
- [19:48]
Host 2
What about Zach Polanski, for example?
- [19:51]
Peter Hitchens
Well, he sort of imploded, didn't he?
- [19:53]
Host 1
I mean, there's still look. I mean, this is a relatively small sample size, but where I live, which is a, you know, Shishi borough of North London, it's covered in green. Green placards.
- [20:04]
Peter Hitchens
Well, that's a nice. The enthusiasm for the Green parties has been ever really since official communism collapsed. Collapse has been the resort of the left all over Europe and that's what they do. And you can't. When you see that the, the Labour Party is, is in government, no longer able to deliver because it can't. If you still want to pretend that someday there might be a government that would do what the left want governments to do, then Greens your party, isn't it?
- [20:33]
Host 2
Well, can I just come back to something which is, you know, you talked about the collapse of the Soviet Union. You and I both witnessed it with our own eyes. And those scenes are very memorable and it' and Francis, you know, his family background, being from Venezuela, I think it's one of the things that separates us from many people because we know that the status quo is not remotely permanent and can only be maintained by good policy. And if good policy ceases to be practiced, then cataclysm is what will follow.
- [21:05]
Peter Hitchens
Most of the things which happened, happened to people who five years beforehand would never have imagined that they could possibly.
- [21:10]
Host 2
University professors. They were university professor three days ago and now they were selling their belongings in the street. Yeah, that's what happened.
- [21:16]
Peter Hitchens
That's it. That's what happened. It also happened, interestingly, not so much in Britain, but happened in the United States during the Great Depression.
- [21:22]
Host 2
Yes.
- [21:23]
Peter Hitchens
Highly qualified professional people were begging from door to door.
- [21:26]
Host 2
Yes.
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Peter Hitchens
And they had no conception this, this, this lay ahead.
- [21:31]
Host 2
But the reason I bring this up is Russia is a, it's not the best example because, you know, with, with Putin in charge, it pollutes. People's thinking about this and, you know, he's obviously, in my opinion, a terrible, a terrible person.
- [21:45]
Peter Hitchens
Well in mind, too, so I agree on that.
- [21:47]
Host 2
Good. But if you take a country like Poland or indeed, like you say, the United States after the Great Depression, there is the possibility for recovery. There is the possibility to fundamentally change course and to let go of the terrible policies that have taken you to the place you've ended up to accept the pain and the suffering that comes and out of that, to have clarity about how to move forward in a
- [22:13]
Peter Hitchens
different way, but you don't know how, and it might turn out badly. What I wish people would do would be to see the possibility of catastrophe and act accordingly.
- [22:21]
Host 2
Me too.
- [22:21]
Peter Hitchens
It's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. Well, that's my fear.
- [22:24]
Host 2
We know it's not going to happen.
- [22:24]
Peter Hitchens
That's my fear. And it's not. If I had some way of entering the minds of people with speech and, and thought and writing than I would. Look, I'm in my mid-70s. I have nothing particular to gain left in life. I haven't got all that much longer to live. If it were possible for me to do anything to prevent this from happening, then I would do it. But I've tried and people don't listen, but they prefer to listen to more seductive voices. And I don't offer, I don't offer seduction at all. I can't. It would be dishonest. But people would prefer to be seduced than to be told the truth. And it's only when after catastrophes happen that it's possible. So there are other people I'm sure in this country who feel the same way, that things are going very badly and something ought to be done to stop it. But where are they? Where are they? They're not in the civil service, they're not in senior person universities, they're not leading the political parties. They're not by and large prominent in the media, particularly the broadcast media, which is that it's to anybody remotely informed or with any historical knowledge listening to our broadcast media is torture.
- [23:43]
Host 2
Yes, yes, it absolutely is. I guess what I'm trying to ask you is. And look, I completely appreciate your perspective and I think if you're looking at it in a 10 year timeframe, I don't see this country being better in 10 years. I just.
- [23:59]
Peter Hitchens
No, but I can't. It might in 10 years still have managed to teeter along like the train in the USS film. No one will actually manage to get it off the rails. It might still survive. You can't tell what I'm getting. Predictions are easy in general, but they're hard in terms of how long it's going to take.
- [24:20]
Host 2
What I'm getting at is something else which is my hope. And I, I only express it as a hope, not as a belief about what's likely to happen is that the inevitable cataclysm can produce the, the conditions for recovery. Not necessarily recovery, but the conditions from which recovery is possible.
- [24:38]
Peter Hitchens
Very Marxist.
- [24:40]
Host 2
Tell me more.
- [24:41]
Peter Hitchens
So like, well, all my comrades in the, in the late 60s and early 70s rather hoping for a collapse out of which might Arise the. The longed for revolution with the leading role of the party and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. That was the theory. It was all going to go wrong. And I have to say te. The in the early 70s made it look very much as if we were right. Well, kept trying to shut the country down, pick huge fights with industrial unions and so nothing worked. Blackouts. Fantastic. He was a great. I remember the, the recruits pouring into the international socialists in, in the early 70s about that, about that time. Ted Heath was a great recruiter for Marxism Leninism, so. But in the end he let us all down, sadly losing an election.
- [25:28]
Host 2
Harold Wilson, I, I mean I am not hoping for, for. I like you.
- [25:33]
Peter Hitchens
No, no, no, I'm just telling you this is the, this is the formula that I don't myself believe that catastrophe is justifiable. I'm a. No, I'm saying or, or, or even, or desirable or even.
- [25:48]
Host 2
Nor am I saying that conscionable.
- [25:49]
Peter Hitchens
I, I think you have to say if there's good, if, if it looks as if there's going to be a catastrophe, do whatever you can to prevent it and warn against it.
- [25:57]
Host 2
But Peter, you and I have to be honest. We have all been making these arguments. We've been trying to say we're heading towards a cliff. No one wants to listen because they're much more comfortable spending money we don't have. So they're not going to listen to us.
- [26:09]
Peter Hitchens
Okay, so we're going to go and go and build.
- [26:11]
Host 2
We are going off and build a shelter in New York. We are going off the cliff.
- [26:13]
Peter Hitchens
I don't know what you're supposed to do.
- [26:15]
Host 2
We're going off the cliff.
- [26:16]
Peter Hitchens
Go up and find a monastery in a high mountain, Shangri La. I don't know it's you if you can't influence it. But I very much doubt whether catastrophe will produce at the end of it, by some kind of baptism of fire, a better world than the one that was before.
- [26:35]
Host 3
So.
- [26:36]
Host 2
But the examples you gave, like we said, the collapse of communism, it had been very beneficial to many, many countries in Eastern Europe.
- [26:43]
Peter Hitchens
Collapse of communism has. But on the other hand, they've had a recovery.
- [26:48]
Host 2
The US after the Great Depression had a recovery. Even World War II, terrible as it was, there was a recovery after that.
- [26:54]
Peter Hitchens
Well, that's true. All these things are true. But this is, this is a different thing.
- [26:59]
Host 2
Why?
- [27:00]
Peter Hitchens
Well, first of all, everybody knew. Everybody knows when you start wars that there will be terrible destruction and everything will change as a result. And there's an opportunity for reconstruction. Though I have to say that the. There were quite a lot of peoples in the world who'd been affected by World War II who didn't get all that much reconstruction afterwards. Lucky old Western Europe did quite well. A lot of other people didn't. Everybody knew the. I've just been reading Robert Service's book about the August 1991 push. Everybody knew in the Soviet Union it could not go on. They knew it had to be fixed in some way politically and economically. Gorbachev, alas, was not an economist or even remotely skilled in economy. He tried to do what he could in ignorance and also he was faced with Western leaders who continued to have a profound mistrust of him as a Soviet leader and so would not help. He would repeat it comes up very much in the Service book and the number of times he goes to Western leaders and says, look, we're on the verge of economic catastrophe. What we need is some sort of new Marshall Plan. I'm saying, well, not until you've denationalized the sugar industry or some such. And they kept making conditions, they never did. And one of the reasons for the piratical rape of what was left for the Soviet economy was the unwillingness of the west to enter into a proper serious reform program. I think you won't find that in Poland. I think a lot of effort was made and it's been a fantastic success, I might say, to turn Poland into a modern, well off, civilized, law governed country which I think the world should be really pleased about. But I do often wonder why the same thing wasn't done in Russia. Could have been, I think.
- [28:44]
Host 2
Well, but this is my point.
- [28:46]
Peter Hitchens
Fantastic resources, incredibly well educated people, of course, but, but, but, but thrown away and, and the place turned into a, into a, a declining salaman and dictatorship.
- [28:58]
Host 2
Very good point, but a bit of a side point.
- [29:00]
Peter Hitchens
Well, you mentioned it. I mean, it doesn't, it's, it, it's, it's.
- [29:03]
Host 2
My point is something else.
- [29:04]
Peter Hitchens
So material things of to some extent recovery. They're not by any means for everybody, I don't think. I think there's still people living very badly in Russia.
- [29:11]
Host 2
Yes, there are. What I'm saying is there is in a cataclysm which you and I, well, I think the three of us think is kind of inevitable. There is the opportunity for recovery. The opportunity for recovery.
- [29:23]
Peter Hitchens
Okay, well, I accept that.
- [29:25]
Host 1
You do?
- [29:25]
Peter Hitchens
Yeah. Of course you can't, you can't be, you can't be certain about the future.
- [29:29]
Host 2
There you go. Note of sunshine From Peter Hitchens. We got there.
- [29:32]
Peter Hitchens
No, you can't be certain. I think it's unlikely. But it is possible. But never know. You can rule things out which are plainly impossible. But what you can't rule out is something which is theoretically possible. Why do that?
- [29:44]
Host 1
Don't you think part of the issue with our culture and our society as it is and the politics as a result of that is we live in the world in the age of delusion.
- [29:54]
Peter Hitchens
Yes. And people have been encouraged to be deluded. It's been going on for a very long time. This is part of the point where I harp on about my Bolshevik training. I mean the fundamental thing that we were told apart from some basic Machiavellianism. And how many people in modern world have read Machiavelli's the Prince? It's very short, it didn't take long, but people don't read it. They don't know what it's. They think they know, but they haven't read it so many books of that kind. But the other thing we were told was how to tell precepts from motive and distinguish pretext from reality. And we're constantly bombarded with politicians giving us pretext for actions they are taking which are fundamentally unbelievable, particularly in foreign policy. People don't see through them. Then again, we have an education system which is instead of challenging the intelligence of all classes to understand more and know more, encouraged them in a child centered myths of unknowing. They're never actually compelled to learn things they didn't know to find out that the books they've heard of contain things they didn't realize were in there. And so we have a huge number of untrained minds among us. That's one of the reasons why it's so easy. It's one of the reasons why it's so easy to fool people into doing absurd things. The COVID panic was such a warning of the, the general level of skepticism and, and trained minds in our society. If the government had decreed that to reduce the spread of the disease everybody had to wear a 5 inch long pink extension on their nose, people would have done it. They very nearly did. I mean there's those, those masks that they wore which, how should I put it, Were of doubtful use were also. The other thing about them was it was, to me, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was forced, forced conformism. If you instructed everybody in the country to wear a Make America Great again red baseball cap, they said, well, I can't do that. I don't agree with it. By wearing one of those masks, you were especially under pressure, you were endorsing an attitude towards the COVID panic which a lot of people didn't share. It's one of the reasons I objected to it so much, was forced conformism to an opinion. Not just a silly action, but the level. I mean, there were people, I mean, a lot of them got in touch with me and some people still do come up to me in the street about it. There were people who resisted it, but enormous a majority of people were happy to accept it.
- [32:45]
Host 3
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- [34:45]
Host 1
and more broadly, all of these hysterias that have inflicted our society impacted upon it. The thing that I found most shocking above all was the British public's desire for big government and to be looked after.
- [35:02]
Host 3
I thought that was fundamentally un British.
- [35:05]
Peter Hitchens
Well, it used to be. But Paul Convent, who was the French ambassador in London before, during and after the First World War, said after it was over that he believed that between 1914 and 1918, this country had undergone a revolution as profound and significant as the one France had undergone in the 1780s and 1790s. And that was the moment at which government became big and interfered in everybody's lives in almost every conceivable way. The second dose, 39 to 45. Of course, the third dose of the Atli government has completely changed that. The idea that the British are fundamentally independent minded, stand up on your own two feet quite like the Americans, is actually not true.
- [35:51]
Host 1
And that's a very dangerous place to be because we've seen that big government simply doesn't work. And what we have now is we're going broke. But yet people have been indoctrinated to believe that big government is what is needed and they need to be looked after. And ultimately we're gonna come in for a pretty rude awakening, aren't we?
- [36:12]
Peter Hitchens
Big government isn't always wrong in wartime. You need big government to be effective for a start. I mean, there's some things. When I used to argue about nationalization, privatization with, with, with conservatives, I said, well, you, you, you, you say you don't want state control of anything. You actually think you can privatize the Royal Navy that could run. And they, some of them, to my amazement, said, well, yes, of course, all we need to do is hire a lot of people with privateers. I said, okay, well then, then we're in the realm of madness here. But they, they resisted the idea that anything was better run by the state, though some things are. So I'm not, I'm not, I'm going to let the free market rip person. For instance, I would really like it if they properly re nationalized the railways rather than the ridiculous porridge they're making over at the moment. Because I think there are some things which are just better run that way. So, yeah, no, but there's no point yearning for British people to be as they were before 1914, because amongst other things, you have to remember until 1916, the British army, which, which went to France and, and was mown down in the mud was composed of volunteers and These volunteers were people who'd been persuaded that this was a vital war for civilization in which every, every man and spirit had to take part as a matter of conscience. So what did you do? You lost the best people in the country in many cases before they could get children. So it didn't just change the way that people behaved, it actually changed the nature of the whole British population. Hundreds of thousands of men who were the best of their generations of every class were just mown down by German machine gun fire and eaten by rats before they could marry and have children. And this affects the country. I mean, you have similar catastrophic effects. Of course, in the European countries they're not quite the same because of the volunteer nature of the British Army. I'm absolutely sure that the post1917 civil war in Russia either drove out of the country or killed huge numbers of the best people. And it made it very, very difficult. And then the great purges of Stalin by their nature also selected the best people. So you do make it difficult to, for a country to recover when you kill so many of your best and,
- [38:38]
Host 1
and well, and that's a real concern. And that was a shocking for me from COVID and like I said, everything else is I expected more people to stand up and challenge and push back. I remember being a kid in, in the classroom and being taught about Nazism and going, look, I understand the chronology of events.
- [38:57]
Peter Hitchens
Yeah.
- [38:57]
Host 1
I don't understand how so many people
- [39:00]
Host 3
could find, fall for this.
- [39:01]
Host 1
And then you see, I mean, the trans hysteria was one example, you know, people saying, you know, you can change your sex. And we both know that is palpably and scientifically false. And I just remember and I saw this happen, I was like, oh, I get it now. I get it how you could deny a fundamental reality.
- [39:18]
Peter Hitchens
Yeah, but propaganda can be very effective if it's well aimed and if it, if it targets the righteous. Contents A lot of German people were simply told that this is, this period of unemployment and chaos and fighting in the streets must come to an end. And they were told this. We are the people who will do it. And in many cases they didn't ask too many questions about how it would be done. In many cases you can easily understand how people, you know, could have done that. I think people pretend now that they would, they would all have seen it coming. But I, from what we know, I'm fairly sure quite a lot would not.
- [39:52]
Host 1
And it's also as well, and you know, there's an, there's with all of these things, there's always an element of self interest.
- [39:58]
Peter Hitchens
There is nothing wrong with self interest. People have to be interested in themselves to some extent. It's just, it's. It just. It can be taken too far.
- [40:07]
Host 2
Peter, you touched on something very important about which you wrote a book actually, that I think. Was it called the War We Should Never Fought?
- [40:14]
Peter Hitchens
Well, the War we Never Fought is the one about drugs.
- [40:18]
Host 2
No, that's right. I meant the one who.
- [40:20]
Peter Hitchens
The phony Victoria Victory.
- [40:21]
Host 2
Yes.
- [40:21]
Peter Hitchens
Which people keep telling me is called the phony War, which is absolutely. Is not. That's a different subject. But the phony Victory is. I've heard it. I was trying to be too clever. It does, if you think about it, explain what's going on. We came. Everybody's heard of the phony war, and we sat around doing nothing for the first. What was it, nine months of war, and then suddenly we were engulfed in blitzkrieg and. And the next thing you know where the victors at Potsdam? And I thought, how do you get from the phoney war a defeated country, Dunkirk, bankruptcy. How do you get from there to being one of the victor countries? And you don't. The truth is we and France began the first. We in France began the Second World War by declaring war on Hitler. You could say he began it by invading Poland. But it was a positive decision on our side to make that the issue. But we weren't prepared for the war that we declared, particularly France. We had all relied. People don't realize now just how much people believed in the strength, the military strength of France in 1939. They thought that it was colossal and unchallengeable, this vast army which had been victorious in 1918 and was the army of a great and valorous country. They were amazed that it collapsed. It was like. It was like some great cathedral being wiped off the map. People had no idea this could conceivably happen, and we certainly didn't. We were left with a war which we were not equipped to fight. And so we ended up handing over the war to other people. We handed over the war to the Soviet Union, to the United States, and we were on the winning side. But in my view, we were not the victors.
- [42:04]
Host 2
Well, I was going to ask you to go broader than that. And you've written so much and spoken so much and thought so much about Britain and its history, particularly in the 20th century. What is Peter Hitchens, sort of the Peter Hitchens take on the 20th century for this country and the trajectory of it during the.
- [42:21]
Peter Hitchens
Oh, the gravest mistake ever made by any British government was to enter the First World War in 1914. We should never have done that. There was no reason why we should, why we. Why we needed to, and many, many reasons why we should not have done it. It cost us almost everything we had and we continue to pay the price for it.
- [42:41]
Host 2
But just flesh that out for people who may be less familiar with the argument you mentioned. Obviously losing hundreds of thousands of the best people.
- [42:50]
Peter Hitchens
We did. Yeah.
- [42:51]
Host 2
But beyond that, how do we get from World War I to where we are today?
- [42:54]
Peter Hitchens
Well, at the beginning of World War I, we were a creditor country. We had huge foreign investments. We. We spent what we earned and we had, as it were, savings. As a nation. We were also a stable, more or less contented country. I mean, there were problems, problems with Ireland and other things, but we were a solid society likely to last. We were a Christian country, whether you like that or not. It was important to the existence of a shared morality. We were a country which people were monoculturally one. Everybody knew the same things. Everybody had read the same Bible and prayed the same prayers, sang the same hymns, read the same novels, the works of Charles Dickens University known people could quote them to each other. And it was. We were a society of people holding together so economically and culturally. We were also a very peaceful society because of the huge success of Robert Peel's policing reforms of the. Of the 19th century, and also because of the huge success of the Sunday schools, which had spread morality right through society. So we had all these enormous advantages. We were also military strong in the only way it was counted, that is to say, no one could attack our islands because we had the strongest navy in the world. And we then entered, for reasons which remain baffling, a Russo German war which was basically about Ukraine. Hang on a minute. Sounds familiar. Why did we do that? It's very difficult to find out. And there was a strong war faction, but it was quite a few people like Sir Henry Wilson, who were trying pretty much to get us into war. But most politicians were unaware of the planning that had taken place. Most of the Cabinet, most of Asquith's Cabinet, didn't know how much military planning had taken place. Joint military planning between Britain and France, for instance, before 1914, it had been kept from them. As for Parliament, it was completely ignorant. And then the thing advanced with immense speed and people will say, well, what about Belgium? Well, that's just very sad about Belgium. But the truth is that Britain, when confronted with the conflict between its own interests and morality, has in the past dumped other people in the mud and most particularly we did so in 1864 when Prussia attacked Denmark and we promised to go to their aid and Palmerston said, oh actually sorry, we're busy at the moment, we're not coming and it's a horrible thing to do. But it was very wise decision because there's nothing we could have done to save Dover. Most people in 1914 believe when war was declared that it would be a naval war, that we would just enter it as we would send the navy to help the French in various ways and that would be that no one had any idea we were going to create a huge continental sized army and lose hundreds of thousands of people and have conscription and rationing. It never crossed their minds.
- [46:03]
Host 1
Doesn't it speak to also the arrogance of the political class at the time? Because I can see you're going to disagree with this. But wasn't the narrative, that is, I
- [46:12]
Host 2
don't think we've ever said anything.
- [46:14]
Peter Hitchens
Political classes are always arrogant, that's why they do it. But you should know better than I, one of the most arrogant people I know. So that's not in itself necessarily a criticism. You have to be a bit arrogant if you want to do some things and the politics is one of them, I think.
- [46:30]
Host 1
But I mean, but then there's a fundamental disconnect from reality or getting a decision so disastrously wrong that hundreds of thousands of people die. Because the narrative at the time was, well, this is all going to be done and dusted by Crimbo.
- [46:43]
Peter Hitchens
Well, some people said that I think there were three people in the cabinet who were worried about it. Two of them were John Burns and John Morley. John Morley, probably the most intelligent person in British politics at the time who actually resigned secretly, Asquith Arsen, to keep it secret over preparations for war, trying to prevent it. But Asquith I think had some serious doubts about it himself because again he was, he was a clever man, but he was afraid that if he didn't declare war then his government would fall and a pro war coalition was formed between the pro war elements of his own party and the Tories and that he was panicked into it. It wasn't a rational decision. It was, it was largely a panic and made on partly on the grounds that things had got out of control, which they did very rapidly. Barbara Sukhman's the Guns of August is probably the best description of how, of how this happened. It wasn't. No one sleepwalked into war, absolutely not at all. The Germans quite deliberately Deliberately encouraged Austria into a, into a confrontation with Russia in the hope that it would lead to. And that was the, the idea it was an accident is untrue. But the, the different events which followed particularly between Britain and Germany basically matters getting increasingly out of control because we didn't realize that we were, we were talking to a Germany which was absolutely set on war. Fritz Fisher's great book makes this quite plain. There's no doubt in my mind Germany wanted a war but they wanted war with Russia. They, they felt they were probably. They would have to knock out France. France was also frantic for war. They wanted revenge for 1870 and they, and they conducted the war in the initial months almost insanely sending waves of men in bright red trousers that go straight into German gunfire. The casualties were colossal and the military effect disastrous. It was crazy war and we got involved in it. And for what? What was our interest in if Russia and Germany and Austria Hungary have a
- [48:55]
Host 1
conflict, what was the conflict between those three?
- [48:57]
Peter Hitchens
Basically Russia with the backing of Austria, Hungary, sorry Germany, Germany with the backing of Austria, Hungary wanted to expand eastwards particularly into what is now Ukraine. And you can see the shape of the ambition in the 1918 piece of breast de toss which Germany signed with Bolsheviks which actually created modern Ukraine amongst other things. One of the things that it did and also it transferred all the Baltic states from Russian to German control and shifted Poland. That is the crucial people think of it being Belgium and France but that's gone. The actual cockpit of war in 20th century Europe and now in 21st century remains Ukraine. This is a hugely important piece of territory and that's what they were worried about. Do you know where Lenin is when, do you know where Lenin was when the war broke out?
- [49:52]
Host 1
No.
- [49:53]
Host 2
Paris wasn't it?
- [49:54]
Peter Hitchens
No. He was in Austro Hungarian controlled Poland where he was quite valued as it turned out by the Austro Hungarians because of his role in fermenting anti Moscow sentiment in what was to become Ukraine. He was arrested by the local policeman because he was obviously Russian and an alien. He looked sinister anyway. But within a couple of days of him being arrested in this small country town he was hoikd out of prison by the Austrian government with the intervention I think of the, of the army high command and put on a train to Zurich. So Peter from which eventually he went as you know to, to with huge tons of German gold to overthrow the Russian government. That's, this is what was really going on. It's, it's, this is what we bizarrely got ourselves involved in.
- [50:47]
Host 1
Let me say this Because I know I'm not alone.
- [50:50]
Host 3
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- [51:37]
Host 1
did a few years ago.
- [51:38]
Host 3
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- [53:02]
Host 2
you describe Britain, the British Empire, in the terms that you did solid economically.
- [53:09]
Peter Hitchens
I was talking about Britain. The empire is a different question. How much longer the empire could have survived? The empire had weakened itself quite badly with the great folly of the particularly the second Boer War in which we'd hugely lowered our international Standing by our by, behaving extremely brutally towards a small country. I mean, nobody, nobody has any sympathy for the Boers now because obviously they were the people who brought the world apart. But at the time, quite a lot of people did. And also we established the famous concentration camps in South Africa which were not. I mean, the phrase is the same, the reality is not by any means identical, but they were horrible. And Emily Hobhouse exposed their horror and the world knew that we'd done a terrible thing, we'd done enormous damage. It was in some ways the Second World War was Britain's Iraq war, the moment at which our world power began to decline.
- [54:00]
Host 3
But we didn't.
- [54:03]
Peter Hitchens
Empires come and go. It would have been perfectly possible for this country to quietly relinquish most of its empire, much of which was expensive to maintain and brought us no benefit and become a major country in its own right. We were still a huge manufacturer and exporter with enormous foreign investments, especially in South America and all that went. We could have managed the transition to being a secondary A much more readily and successfully if we'd stayed out of that stupid war.
- [54:34]
Host 2
And what happens this way we started this portion of the conversation with Britain is, as you describe it, is very solid economically, culturally, etc. You have this war that takes the lives of hundreds of thousands of the best men.
- [54:49]
Peter Hitchens
It also costs us all our money
- [54:51]
Host 2
and it costs us a lot.
- [54:52]
Peter Hitchens
By. By, I think late 1915, we were, we were in severe debt to the United States. It took very once war isn't fantastically expensive. The same thing was true of 1939, 40. It took no time at all for us to be in debt. And do you know, we've never paid off our debt to the United States the First World War. You did.
- [55:09]
Host 2
I did not know that.
- [55:10]
Peter Hitchens
Most people don't. In fact, when I tell them, they say, no, it can't be true. We paid it off the other day. What we paid off the other day was actually our Second World War debt. Yes, the First World War debt. We stopped payments solid in 1934 and we haven't paid a penny since, or any interest. We actually defaulted on it. It's one of it. It's the most, one of the most undiscussed scandals in modern history. The Americans absolutely remember. We. You can, you can get the treasury to admit it if you try. And there has actually been a. A book about it, rather good book called the Long Shadow of Default, which I recommend to anybody. But we actually remain in debt United states for the First World War.
- [55:47]
Host 2
And 100 more years later, soon after.
- [55:50]
Peter Hitchens
Good, eh?
- [55:51]
Host 2
Fairly soon after you get into World War II, which we've already talked about. And what happens in your assessment in the post war period that contributes to where we've arrived at today?
- [56:02]
Peter Hitchens
Well, it's all one road, isn't it? Once you go to war in 1914 and you cease to be rich, you cease to be powerful. And again, look at. There's another tremendous book, I can't recommend it highly enough, called the Deluge by Adam Tooze, which describes amongst. It's full of stuff about the First World War which most people don't write about, but it describes what happened between Britain and the United States over naval power, which was. This was our power and it was the equivalent of nuclear power at the time. And the Americans forced us to limit our naval forces. They forced us to both limit the size of our navy and the size of our ships. They forced us to break our crucial alliance with Japan, which enabled us to. To remain secure in the Pacific. And the arguments between the admirals of the US Navy and the British Navy grew so tense at points, fistfights nearly broke out between them over this. And that was again an aftermath. And you see from this the long slope lying ahead of decline, which was dictated to us by our voluntary bankruptcy of 1914.
- [57:12]
Host 1
And I think part of the problem as well is that we still going back to the idea of delusion, we still have this idea of us being this kind of great nation which has a huge impact across the globe. And the reality is there are much bigger nations who are much more powerful, who have a far more significant impact, who don't necessarily care what we say
- [57:34]
Host 3
or do a lot.
- [57:35]
Peter Hitchens
So one of the first things you discover if you go and live in the United States, of course you think you expect to find special relationship and everybody loves us, but I found myself being accused of being Australian. What's that accent? And also I found that you would read the American newspapers and watch American newspapers and our country to me wasn't mentioned.
- [57:56]
Host 2
Well, no other country.
- [57:57]
Peter Hitchens
It might as well have been the Falkland Islands. It just wasn't. It just wasn't. Nobody cared. And I searched Washington D.C. for two years for any sign of the special relationship and not really was the nun. I actually watched this country being ruthlessly squashed on the Irish issue by the U.S. government. Bill Clinton, they just crushed us like a beetle over that. And if there is a special relationship, it's especially nasty one. It was amazing to watch, but they don't. This is, this is A fantasy. So we're nowhere important normal likes and it's important people to realize this, but they won't. They want to believe it's the great compensation actually for having made and it was the colossal sacrifice of the Second World War as a country. Years of rationing, privation, the deaths of many, the bombing of our cities. Surely we had to have something as a result of all that sacrifice and pain. And people really wanted to believe that it was our finest hour and that we had emerged from it as a great and powerful nation. Well, it was our finest hour, I don't dispute that. And we fought very bravely and movingly against very large and dangerous forces and we suffered a great deal and my parents went through it, but we didn't emotionalize great power. But people don't. It's like your own manhood. People don't like admitting that.
- [59:24]
Host 3
And it's also like you see it
- [59:26]
Host 1
with the policy on net zero where people go, well you know, we're going to set an example to the rest of the world.
- [59:32]
Peter Hitchens
Britain should lead the world by blowing up all its coal fired power stations which China is building about 10amonth. Yes, I know it's in the sanity, but it is. We blow them up too. We don't cautiously say oh this might be a mistake and mothball them. We blow them up. Millions of pounds worth of valuable plant blown up, dismantled. So no possibility that anybody might admit it was a mistake ever.
- [59:55]
Host 2
Peter, when you started making some of these points initially, were you more optimistic than you are now?
- [60:01]
Peter Hitchens
Yes.
- [60:01]
Host 2
You've been ground down by the reality that no one listens to your warnings.
- [60:06]
Peter Hitchens
When I wrote my first book, the Abolition of Britain in 1999 I did so in the belief that it was possible. What I began to think was writing. I then wrote for the Daily Express. Writing a weekly column frankly in the Daily Express was not going to have much influence. What I really wanted to do was particularly was to get into national broadcasting war. And I was advised by a friend that you can't get anywhere very much in national broadcasting if you haven't written a book. And so I wrote the book with the purpose of extending my the reach of my ideas. And in fact it was quite interesting the some of the initial reviews of it although, although uncomplimentary accepted that something serious was being said. In general it was very hard to get it published. I had to struggle very hard to get a publish. Most publishers refused to have anything to do with me and a major agent who I approached wouldn't touch me, let alone the book. And eventually I got it published and actually by a publisher so small that my family had to do all the work of getting into bookshelves. And it ended up, it still sells even now, what is it, 27 years later. But it was a real struggle to get it out. But some of the reviews understood that something was being said. Wow. And I did begin to get a certain amount of opportunity in broadcasting. At one point I'm in Channel four, let me make documentaries and I would get on the big opinion programs and I thought there is some point at which there might be the sprockets of what I think and what is talked about in politics. We'll mesh with each other and we'll get somewhere. And then it became more and more obvious that this wasn't so.
- [61:51]
Host 3
And
- [61:53]
Peter Hitchens
the time went by and the crucial moment for me remains when I was in the fort when David Cameron took over the Conservative Party on behalf of the Blairites. I can put this more clearly now than I could then, but I was quite clear about it at the time. If people allow this to happen, if people endorse this Blairite takeover of the only major opposition party, then it is the end. You mustn't do it. Don't just vote Tory because you want a Tory government, because you won't get a Tory government. One of the points I can make now more clearly than then was actually Gordon Brown was probably more conservative than David Cameron, particularly on things like the European single currency. And it was and is a more conservative person. But I was just trying to say, no, it's vital that this doesn't succeed. And I couldn't get anybody to listen to me. And I remember going around some other supposedly right wing columnists and saying, if I keep saying this alone, I'll get nowhere. If anybody else joins in, it might actually make some impact. And they wouldn't. And it was at that point that I despaired. And once the Cameron government came into office and everybody imagined that the Tories had won the election, which they hadn't even done, and the coalition settled in, that's it.
- [63:13]
Host 1
Isn't that quite dementing in many ways? Oh, you must. I mean, it's a hack.
- [63:17]
Peter Hitchens
That's not the word I choose. It's dispiriting. But for me, what it is above all, because I have that kind of tolerance, infuriating. And there are two ways of reacting to it if you're furious, and one is just to have total contempt ever afterwards for everything, everybody involved in what resulted from what I Tried to prevent. So I do.
- [63:44]
Host 1
But it's also because what you're fundamentally talking about is it's a tragedy, I think.
- [63:50]
Peter Hitchens
So I think it might have been avoidable. It would have been worth trying to. As I think. I think 2010 was the last moment at which it might have. Might have been doable. But it was just. It just. It's just got me nothing except. Except abuse.
- [64:06]
Host 2
Well, and plenty appearances of trigonometry, of course.
- [64:09]
Peter Hitchens
Well, that, of course is. Is a. Is a great compensation.
- [64:14]
Host 2
Your sarcasm is much appreciated.
- [64:16]
Peter Hitchens
No, no, no, no, no. You should hear me being sarcastic. It doesn't sound like that at all.
- [64:23]
Host 2
Peter, it's always wonderful to talk to you. We're going to ask you some questions from our supporters in a second. But the last question, as you know, is always the same. It's on the mug that you were looking at earlier. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be?
- [64:35]
Peter Hitchens
We haven't really talked about the attempts to create war. When I wrote the. The Phony Victory, my purpose was actually to make. To make a strong case against what seemed to me at the time a drive for war which I thought would emerge either in Iran or in Russia. And I thought these countries were both being prepared to become enemies. And I thought if I could only spread the idea in some way, a mature idea that this is that as a country we shouldn't be beguiled into war by this constant repetition of the idea that every single world conflict is repeat of 1938, therefore, that anybody who opposes it is Neville Chamberlain. Anybody who continues to oppose it after it started is Lord Haw Haw. That everybody who's in favor of it is Winston Churchill. I thought, first of all, I show that what we thought about Neville Chamberlain was not absolutely true. And also that the whole development of war in late 1930s Europe had no parallels with what's going on in the Europe of today. And for all the good it did, I might as well have stayed at home. But it does alarm me. We constantly tell people we're constantly coming. Intelligence chiefs come out and say, we have to prepare for war. Russia is a great threat. Well, you can believe that if you want. Though I find it a struggle. I always remember going to Moscow. Was it in 2008? I know it was. It was the first big parade of the new Russian army. They decided they're going to restart the Red Square parades. And I'd watched the Last one in November 1990. And so my office said, why don't you Go out and watch it. And I watched it with my old friend who got a monastery, whose father had been a Soviet nuclear submarine commander and he knew his military stuff. And we stood on the balcony of the hotel watching it as close as we could get. I enjoy Good parade as much as the rest. And at the end of it, Igor turned to me and said, what did you think of our great display of strategic scrap metal? And he was quite right. I mean, it was the big new weapons. They probably had two or three of them. Most of the stuff they were able to put out was probably old. Much of its Soviet era, we knew. We still know the Russian military is fantastically corrupt and incompetent and the training of soldiers is a disgrace. It's a terrible army and it can't, after four years, they haven't managed to take Kharkov 20 miles from the border. To term this into a great bogeyman, which is. Which is about to turn up at Dunkirk with its tanks pointed at the British coast just doesn't seem to me to be realistic. But the intelligence people, retired generals, ex defense ministers, NATO chiefs, are constantly trying to prepare us for war. And the last thing I noticed was some suggestion we might all start hoarding food and medicines in case there was a war. There's a real attempt to try and get the British people to become war minded, which I think can only end sadly.
- [68:05]
Host 1
Peter, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Make sure to join us over on Substack, where we carry on the conversation and you get to ask Peter your questions. I've always greatly admired Peter's books, but upon finishing them, I always end up feeling rather hopeless about Britain's future.
- [68:22]
Host 3
Is Britain doomed to disintegrate?