Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Culture of Silence ｜ Brendan O'Neill Interview

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Nov. 10, 2018 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

01:37:48

Culture of Silence ｜ Brendan O'Neill Interview

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	Hi everyone, I'm interviewing Brendan O'Neill, the editor of Spite magazine.
	Brendan, how are you doing?
	I'm very well, thank you, Carl.
	When did you decide to join the far right?
	When did I decide?
	Let me think.
	Of course, I don't think of myself as far right, as you know, but everyone tells me I am.
	And I think they tell me I am because I support Brexit.
	I support freedom of speech.
	I support the right of ordinary people to have a say in politics.
	I don't like witch hunts.
	I don't like censorship.
	I don't like all those bad things.
	And bizarrely, for some reason that is genuinely confusing to me, having all those pretty liberal, libertarian, fair views now makes you far right, which I think is one of the great mysteries of our time.
	Well, that was actually one of the things I wanted to ask you about.
	I mean, how would you define far-right?
	Because like you, obviously, anyone who's against the progressive consensus is automatically deemed far-right.
	And I mean, you know, like Andrew Doyle is a far-right mouthpiece, of course, despite being a traditional socialist and things like this.
	And so, I mean, you know, just how do you, I mean, you know, it seems that it is people who are more libertarian, free speech is, frankly, people I call liberal who are being called far-right.
	I mean, what?
	Well, far-right used to mean people who were fascistic.
	So they wanted to completely crush liberty.
	They wanted to burn books.
	They wanted to ban certain organisations, particularly left-wing ones, which is what happened under Nazism.
	They were censorious, they were authoritarian, they were psychotic.
	Today, when you're called, you can be called far-right for believing the opposite things to that.
	So if you think it's bad to burn books, you might be a bit far-right.
	If you think it's bad to ban people from speaking on campus, or if you think it's bad to try to prevent newspapers from publishing columns that they really want to publish, those are the things that will now earn you the tag of far-right.
	So I'm really worried by the way in which the word fascism has completely and utterly lost its meaning.
	And George Orwell predicted that this would happen back in the late 1930s, early 1940s, when fascism was a real thing.
	Orwell said it's lost all meaning because people use it just to denounce their enemies and they use it simply to mean things I disapprove of or people I disapprove of.
	That has now got far, far worse.
	So anyone who dissents from the rather shrill, shrunken, censorious consensus can now be denounced as far-right and fascistic.
	So it's nothing more than an insult aimed at those who dare to think differently from mainstream politics.
	See, I find that the use of the term alt-right, especially in British media, is very much along those same lines.
	And when challenged with Tim Poole, a journalist from America, challenged another British journalist on this via Twitter.
	And the British journalist definition was simply alternative media that aren't progressive.
	And Tim was obviously, well, that's, I mean, you're normalising people who are genuinely the kind of far-right that in previous generations we would actually have considered to be far right.
	You know, ethno-nationalists, collectivists, identitarians, you know, with censorious tendencies and looking towards like totalitarian, identitarian state.
	Is there any chance that they're perhaps normalising dangerous views?
	Absolutely.
	I think, you know, I have a real, I have a problem with the term alt-right because I think it is used in the same way as fascists.
	It's just used to write people off.
	Having said that, I have a lot of problems with the alt-right, whoever the hell they are.
	I mean, it's hard to know.
	But I do have issues with the new right.
	I prefer to call them the new right or the kind of anti-PC right, by which I mean those who do veer into what you've just described, which is the ethno-nationalism, which is this reaction against multiculturalism which emphasizes ethno-nationalism, which is this reaction against the left which emphasizes white values or white pride and so on.
	I happen to think that's a very minority pursuit.
	And what happens is that anyone who is anti-PC or anyone who says I'm on the right or anyone who says I dislike the new consensus that's emerging in politics is lumped in with those people.
	And that has the dual effect of firstly trying to demonize anyone who questions the current political climate and, as you say, offering a real boost to those fairly minority figures who are genuinely ethno-nationalists and genuinely white supremacists by collapsing them into a broader political viewpoint.
	So I think it's a failing approach on both fronts.
	Firstly, because it kind of writes off people who have entirely legitimate political points of view and it empowers those who, in my view, have slightly illegitimate points of view, particularly in relation to race and nationalism and so on.
	I mean, I completely agree.
	One of the things that concerns me is they're creating a forest for the lone trees of the Nazis to actually be hidden in.
	So suddenly you don't know who, if you're a casual observer, you have no idea who you're talking to and what you're actually talking about, because now they've essentially given them cover.
	And it's almost like they want their enemies to grow.
	So what do you think about the sort of meta-political scene at the moment?
	How do you feel the ability to have a dialogue is right now?
	It's pretty bad.
	I think it's quite difficult now to have an open, free, frank discussion about almost anything, particularly about the important things like the nation state, the question of borders, the question of migration, the question of what is the nature of citizenship and how do we define it, the question of identity, all these things which have been the meat of politics for hundreds of years.
	Now anyone who raises questions or issues with those things is instantly shut down.
	So if you think that it's quite important to have nations, and it's quite important that nations can police their borders, and it's quite important that what then exists within that nation, i.e. a democratic populace, is a very important thing, you will be written off as a far-right nationalist.
	You will be written off as a borderline fascist.
	If you argue that the kind of narrow, divisive, identitarian politics of the new left is not a useful way to go through life and actually can pit one group of people against another and therefore is pretty destructive, you will be written off as dangerous and threatening and racist and so on.
	So what I find really worrying, particularly, I consider myself as someone who is left-wing.
	I consider myself as coming from the left.
	I still think of myself as left-wing, although everyone tells me I'm not.
	I'm particularly worried by the way in which the new left is firstly abandoning all the values that it used to hold to, and secondly, shutting down discussion on incredibly important issues to do with nationhood, citizenship, identity, the question of universalism and all those other things which I think are incredibly important.
	So in answering to your question, I think it's becoming increasingly difficult to have a serious discussion about those serious issues.
	So in the spirit of that then, how would you describe your political position?
	Because like I said, I mean, I'm actually not sure what your personal politics are.
	I mean, every time I see you on TV and you're giving what I would consider to be a liberal answer, just a fairly standard universalist, you know, liberty, free speech, equal rights, this sort of, these are the positions you seem to come from, and yet I read articles that tell me that you're a terrible person.
	Yeah, how do you describe yourself?
	See, I think of myself as left-wing.
	Now, I think of myself as left-wing while also recognising that that's a meaningless category now, because I think the politics of right and left are disappearing and they are being replaced by new divides between, I don't know, globalists and nationalists, or people who believe in democracy and people who don't believe in democracy, or between Democrats and technocrats.
	I think new divides are emerging.
	So I recognize, even while I'm about to say this, I recognise that right and left don't mean much anymore.
	But I've always considered myself left-wing.
	I mean, for example, I am pro-freedom of speech.
	I am pro-democracy.
	I believe that ordinary working people have a greater collective wisdom than bureaucrats and technocrats.
	I am pro-choice.
	I want to abolish the House of Lords.
	I want to abolish the monarchy.
	I want to abolish the European Union.
	I think they are fairly radical points of view.
	Some of them, yeah.
	Right?
	And I think they are democratic, pro-freedom views which trust ordinary working people more than elites and bureaucrats and technocrats.
	And I've always thought that that's what left-wing politics was about.
	I've always thought that left-wing politics was about trusting ordinary people more than priests and whoever else might be telling you what to do.
	I always thought that left-wing politics was about believing that democracy was valuable.
	I've always thought that left-wing politics, up until a certain period in history, was about favouring freedom over censorship, particularly for counter-cultural movements and daring literature and revolting art and everything else.
	Now I'm told all the time that that's not what being left-wing is about at all.
	And in fact, being left-wing is about being identitarian rather than universalist, is about being censorious rather than liberal, and is about being technocratic rather than democratic.
	Well, I'm sorry, but I don't know when that shift came about.
	And it's not my fault that it's come about.
	So the argument I use, which has been used by many people throughout history, is that I didn't leave the left.
	The left left me.
	And that's not my problem.
	Yeah, well, that's exactly how I feel about it, frankly.
	I was always, you know, centre-leftist Jon Stewart viewer, you know, big fan back in the day.
	I remember him chewing out Tucker Carlson on Crossfire.
	And now I'm cheering for Tucker Carlson.
	Because, I mean, one of the things that it seems to me is that the conversation has become almost irrelevant on a sort of surface level policy position.
	Yeah, you know, it seems that we need to go down to the axioms of the person's worldview to see where and likely they stand when it comes to something like freedom, free speech.
	The left is the cause of most censorship these days, as far as I can see.
	And so, you know, I consider myself very liberal, so I'm naturally against that.
	For anyone, no matter who it is, I want to hear those awful points of view because exactly as you were saying, I have faith that the general public will see that and think I understand where he's coming from, and I disagree with that, and some like being the best disinfectant.
	But I honestly couldn't tell you when the switch happened, but it can't be, it can't be much more than the last 10, 15 years.
	Yeah, I agree.
	I think it has been fairly recent.
	I think it's been a long time coming, but the kind of severeness of the severity of the switch has been fairly recent.
	I think, I agree with you.
	I think there are new divides emerging.
	And I think one of the key divides is freedom of speech.
	Because freedom of speech tells you almost everything you need to know about someone and everything you need to know about a political movement.
	Because freedom of speech is not simply the right to say whatever you want to say.
	It's also, as you say, it's about the question of trust in ordinary people.
	And this is a point that has been made by free speech warriors throughout history: that this is a dual freedom.
	There's the freedom to express yourself, which is incredibly important, but there's also the freedom to hear all opinions and to make a moral judgment as to the value of those opinions.
	And I think a lot of the left-wing promoters of censorship and a lot of the kind of Twitch hunters and a lot of the people who want to just simply shut down opinions that they find disagreeable or offensive or horrible, what they really are expressing is a profound lack of trust in ordinary people, in the audience.
	It's that aspect of freedom of speech they are most uncomfortable with.
	The freedom of ordinary people to make up their own minds through using their mental and moral muscles about the value of an opinion.
	They simply don't think we are capable of that.
	And so as a consequence, they talk themselves into this incredibly paternalistic corner where they see it as their role in life and their aim in life and their task in life to protect us from offensive opinions, to instruct us on what is the right way of thinking and to stop us from ever hearing or seeing or experiencing anything that might disrupt our way of thinking.
	So that's, I think, one of the key problems I have with the growth of left-leaning censorship is the way in which the left now posits itself as the protector of public morality, as the protector of individual self-esteem, and as the controller of public debate.
	And I always think to myself, that is surely not what the left was born to do.
	Well, I think you're exactly right.
	I find the prescriptive nature of the left now very interesting.
	Because it used to be about breaking down barriers, it used to be about liberation and about the idea that, you know, there is so much of the initial premises.
	I genuinely agree that there genuinely are oppressive social structures and political structures and institutional power that can be negatively used to suppress people, to suppress their ideas, to prevent them from fully actualizing as a human being.
	And now it seems that the left has just said, well, that's a great idea.
	Why didn't we think of this sooner?
	Yeah, because we can get rid of those problematic elements like racism, sexism, transphobia, etc.
	And it's become almost like a crusade.
	Like, I hear racism being talked about as if it's the worst thing a human being can possibly experience.
	And I'm just saying, like, racism is an opinion.
	That's what it is.
	When someone says, I don't like you because you're black or you're white or you're whatever, that's an opinion.
	And yeah, it might hurt your feelings, but there are far worse things than this.
	Well, you know, the left used to speak, as you say, the left used to speak in the language of liberation.
	If you go back to the particularly the 1950s and 60s when there was this countercultural left, it was the last burst of left-wing radicalism, really.
	They talked about national liberation, they talked about gay liberation, they talked about women's liberation.
	The emphasis was on liberation.
	The emphasis was on expanding people's ability to decide for themselves, to think for themselves, to engage in public life in a way that they previously had not been allowed to do.
	It was about liberation.
	Now, you fast forward 40, 50 years, now it's about control.
	It's about controlling how people talk about certain issues, controlling what people think, controlling how people, how the races relate to each other through the race relations industry.
	And I think that is an utter abandonment of what the left used to stand for.
	And I think it's corroding social values, it's corroding freedom, it's corroding the natural interaction between different groups of people.
	But I think, you know, on the racism question, the way I see the racism issue at the moment is that I think one of the great things about Britain, and actually other Western countries as well, is that there has been a dramatic decline in racism.
	So, you know, if you go back 30, 40 years, I'm old enough to remember when there were, you would see people being racially abused in public.
	It was relatively common.
	Our immigration laws used to be pretty racist, right?
	If you were white, you had a better chance of coming to the country than if you were black or Asian.
	Racism was a genuine issue.
	It was a genuine problem.
	People lived in fear of it.
	But that has changed dramatically.
	As a consequence of people's campaigning, as a consequence of people thinking, actually, this black dude I work with is just like me.
	As a consequence of all those things, those racist attitudes have declined enormously.
	But what we have now is a situation where, on the left, in particular, the more that racism declines, the more they see it everywhere.
	In every piece of culture, in every tweet, in every aside, in every conversation starter, which is now referred to as a micro-aggression.
	So they have this kind of misanthropic, myopic belief that racism is still a serious problem in Britain, when it simply is not.
	And that's, I think, that's one of the most poisonous things, I think, about the new left, which is their tendency to see racism everywhere when that is clearly not the case.
	One of the things I loathe about this approach as well is it's so vitriolic.
	I mean, Britain is an actively anti-racist society.
	Yes.
	And it has been for, like, if not in practice, in spirit, for quite some time.
	I mean, I was doing research for a video that I had to do a lot of research on fascism.
	And I was just listening to Oswald Mosley in the 60s justifying, or trying to justify how he wasn't an anti-Semite.
	And, you know, in the 30s, obviously.
	And, you know, I'm not saying I agree with him, but the point is, even back then, that was the matter for public debate.
	Were you being a racist?
	You know, even back in the 60s, this was, and it's completely consistent with the sort of liberal axioms the country is generally run like.
	Yeah.
	But the individualistic worldview that the English have had for a long time now.
	And I think the reason this is even permitted and even carries on is because of our willingness and susceptibility to it.
	We want to not be racist.
	And if the left has redefined racism as a new slew of institutional and that incorporates a whole new swathe of things that nobody considered racist before.
	And the charge can be levelled with moral authority, then that is honestly a kind of weapon against the regular person.
	Yes.
	What has happened is that the left, this is the most unforgivable thing that the left has done.
	They have rehabilitated racial thinking.
	They have rehabilitated the racial imagination.
	See, I think the great turning point, I think the great turning point in relation to racism was the end of the Second World War.
	Before the Second World War, there was a lot of open racism, right?
	There were eugenic gatherings of people who would talk about the problem of Jews and the problem of the underclass, the problem of too many black people and Japanese people being born and the necessity of white procreation.
	I mean that was a pretty open, respectable opinion to have.
	It was normal, wasn't it?
	It was normal.
	I mean, yeah, like thinking in racial terms.
	It was normal.
	It was completely normal.
	It was completely normal.
	It was completely respectable.
	And a lot of respectable, leading British politicians and commentators held those views.
	What happens is the Holocaust.
	And as a consequence of the Holocaust, and as a consequence of that experience in the Second World War, that old-fashioned biological racism becomes unacceptable.
	You can't, after 1945, you can't go around saying openly at least, you can't go around saying, oh, the Jews are a problem, we need to breed them out of existence.
	That suddenly becomes incredibly unacceptable.
	I'm glad it becomes unacceptable, of course.
	So that's the real turning point.
	But what happens is that instead of saying, great, this is our real opportunity to defeat the racial imagination, to defeat the categorization of people according to skin colour or according to racial origins, what happens bit by bit is that we have the growth of the race relations industry, particularly in the 1960s and the 1970s.
	And then from the race relations industry, we have the growth of multiculturalism.
	And then from multiculturalism, we have this growth of this very poisonous new identitarian politics, which actively encourages you to judge people by race.
	So you as a white man, if you're talking to a black person, you need to think about that.
	You need to think about the racial, right?
	You need to check your privilege.
	You need to think about the racial dynamic.
	So this is, I think, one of the great tragedies of the post-war period, which is that what ought to have been a resounding defeat for the racial imagination, which was the Holocaust and the proof that that provided that racism leads to unspeakable horrors.
	Instead of that being the lesson that we took from the Second World War, we start to take the lesson, well, relations between the races need to be managed, preferably by clever, well-educated, technocratic people.
	And then we get multiculturalism, and we end up with the rehabilitation of racism, but in PC language, so that now it's not simply, it's not that we say that certain races are inferior, but that we say that, you know, well-educated, clever people need to constantly manage interactions between the races.
	And that's incredibly destructive.
	Now, I'm glad you brought that up, because this is something that I can't help but hear Frederick Hayek whenever we're talking about a subject like this, because he was very concerned with the concept of social planning, the idea that society should be managed and planned to ensure certain kinds of outcomes.
	When in his opinion, obviously, he thought that people should be left to their own devices and trusted to be responsible adults and manage the society in their own personal way, productively.
	And this is exactly the problem that he was predicting almost 100 years ago now, that we're actually genuinely seeing come to fruition, a kind of technocratic, highly educated.
	I mean, like so many middle-class people who have gone to university, got their degree in something often quite asinine, and you end up creating a kind of bureaucratic class of technocrats who think they can actually manage the world to their liking.
	Yeah.
	Which is terrifying.
	Yes, it is.
	It's absolutely terrifying.
	I mean, they genuinely think they can socially re-engineer people.
	They genuinely think that it's their role to make us healthier, to make us more PC, to change our attitudes, to change what we think, to change how we speak.
	They really believe that.
	I mean, it's astonishing.
	Can you imagine being so colossally arrogant that you would go out into the world and think, oh, I have to correct the way these people think?
	I mean, it's...
	Especially in your mid-20s.
	In your mid-20s.
	It's astonishing.
	It really speaks to an extravagant sense of entitlement.
	It's like messianic, isn't it?
	It's messianic.
	I find it chilling.
	I find it chilling.
	You know, I would far rather live in a world in which there were dodgy opinions and even a few racists and people with difficult points of view than a world in which I presumed the moral authority to tell people what to think.
	I find that such a horrific idea.
	Well, it's no different to the Catholic Church.
	It's exactly the same principles they're operating along.
	And I mean, recently I've been doing research for a big project I'm doing.
	I have had to go into the Inquisition.
	And it's so similar to watching the way that the far left operate on Twitter.
	It's the idea that secretly you do hold problematic opinions.
	We just need to get these out of you.
	Get them out of here.
	And so they're constantly looking, yeah, constantly looking for proof.
	See, he said this one thing, and I'm sure now that this is, you know, extrapolate from that to make you a narcissist.
	I completely agree.
	We live in an inquisitorial climate.
	Now, if you say that, everyone will say, oh, but we're not burning people at the stake.
	That's not the point.
	Yeah, well, they're burning their Twitter accounts and they're not.
	Well, that's exactly right.
	I read a piece recently in which I said, of course, they don't want to visit death upon heretics, but they do want to visit social death.
	They want to expel them from public life.
	They want them not to have jobs in government.
	They want them to be out of the university.
	So is that progress?
	The fact that they want social death for heretics rather than actual death?
	I don't think this is.
	I suppose.
	It's a progress.
	People will survive, so there's an element of progress.
	The things they want to do, this is something that drives me crazy all the time.
	They're like, well, and they've been dragging payment processes like Stripe into it, bank accounts.
	The co-operative cancelled a TERF group's bank account because they were TERFs.
	And it's like, where does this end?
	Yeah, this is one of the things I find most hilarious about the new left, which is that they are constantly marshalling the power of capitalism to punish their people they disagree with.
	You see this all the time.
	They want to shut down bank accounts or they try to get advertisers to stop advertising for Nigel Farage's LBC show or in certain tabloid newspapers.
	And I just think this is where we've ended up.
	We've ended up with a left, which is trying to exploit the unaccountable power of corporations and capitalist bosses to silence people they disagree with.
	And I just think this is a terrifying situation that we have.
	And this speaks to a left that has abandoned all of its traditional principles.
	But I think one of the issues I have with the current climate we live in is, you know, for people like me and you, it's relatively straightforward, right?
	We have certain opinions and we express them.
	And we're known for expressing them and that's fine.
	But there are so many people out there who have similar opinions to ours but who feel they cannot express them.
	And I find that so depressing.
	There's a philosopher in Germany, I think, who refers to it as the spiral of silence.
	And what happens is that people pick up these signals in a very rational way that there are certain things you cannot say in public.
	There are certain things that if you say it on Twitter, you'll get in real trouble.
	There are certain things that if you say it, you might lose your job.
	Like, for example, if you believe that a man cannot become a woman, which I believe very strongly with every fibre of my being, that a man can never become a woman.
	I believe that as much as I believe that this is a table, and it's fine for me to say it because people expect me to say it.
	But there are millions of people out there who agree with me, but who don't say it because they know that their workplace has certain speech goes against transphobic speech.
	Or they know that if they said it on one of their social media accounts, it might be shut down.
	Well, the police might get involved.
	Or the police might get involved.
	They might actually be genuinely arrested.
	So the thing I find most depressing is, you know, people always say that people will sometimes say, oh, you guys are playing the victim.
	I genuinely don't care about being victimized.
	I don't care about getting flaked.
	That's fine.
	I don't see most of it.
	So that's absolutely fine.
	What I do care about is the fact that there are significant sections of the population in this country and also in America and other parts of Western Europe who I think feel in a real palpable way that there are certain opinions they hold that they cannot express because the consequences will be too severe.
	And that leads to an unhealthy, undemocratic, illiberal, backward society.
	It's repression.
	It's repression.
	And the reason I brought up the Inquisition is because this is precisely what happened under the Inquisition in sort of 13th century Languedoc.
	You would have underground networks of people who had a certain belief who were constantly under the watchful eye of the Inquisitors.
	And they would, you know, you would bring in people and they would give long statements and they would go through looking for contradictions.
	And it's exactly how the far left operate on social media now.
	And the consequences, like I say, you know, they're not quite as dire.
	But I mean, at the end of the day, once you've been made jobless, homeless, bankless.
	That's pretty bad.
	Exactly. I mean, it's pretty bad.
	But the thing is, you know, people always focus on the way in which the Inquisition dragged people in front of it and made them answer for their speech crimes and sometimes executed them.
	And that's all true.
	That all happened and that was unspeakably bad.
	But then there's the consequence that the Inquisition had, which we don't often speak about, which is the ripple effect of indicating to people that if they hold these views, they really shouldn't express them because they will get into trouble.
	So if you are a Jew or if you are a bit iffy about the papacy or if there are other supposedly heresy type views that you hold, then you just keep them to yourselves.
	And I think that's the more destructive effect.
	And that's the unmeasured effect of the Inquisition, in fact.
	The unmeasured effect of the Inquisition.
	We all know, I'm sure that there are statistics and numbers.
	We know who was killed and why they were killed.
	They were very diligent, in fact, in that way.
	Exactly.
	The unmeasured effect is the impact it had across those parts of Europe where people thought, okay, well, I'm going to deny publicly any point of view or any religious belief.
	And I think what the contemporary left forgets, this is another thing I find very depressing about the left, is that the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which I think were very positive moments in human history, they emerge as a reaction against the Inquisition.
	So some of their founding principles, particularly by John Locke, who was one of the great British Enlightenment thinkers who then had to flee the country because his views were so radical, they were incredibly counter-inquisitional.
	So their views were basically no one should ever be tried in public for what they think.
	No one should ever be punished for what they believe.
	They said you can try and change people's beliefs.
	Absolutely, that's part of being in a free society, but you shouldn't never punish them.
	I think the left forgets that its origins, which I think come from that enlightened moment when humanity breaks for a kind of more liberal, free way of living.
	They forget that that was all about allowing people to think whatever they wanted to think, to say whatever they wanted to say, to express themselves in whatever way they chose.
	And they've reverted to that inquisitorial mindset, which thinks that certain opinions are so dangerous and so destructive and so potentially polluting of men's souls that they have to be controlled.
	I agree.
	And that's incredibly dangerous.
	I completely agree.
	And I really do think the problem with the left is that it's a strange embrace of socialism.
	And I can't believe how openly proud they are to be socialist, given the problems with socialism.
	How do you feel about it?
	Well, I was a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party.
	Now, you laugh, and I would be disappointed.
	No, no, no, you didn't laugh.
	I read Capital when I was in my 20s, or at least two-thirds of it I read, and I was thinking, well, there's a lot of good points raised.
	But no, I still sometimes call myself a Marxist.
	And I call myself a Marxist libertarian, which always irritates people because I think it's a contradiction in terms.
	Yeah, no, no, it's not.
	Which we might come to.
	It's not.
	It really isn't necessarily a contradiction in terms.
	But the reason I say all this is not to revisit my strange youth, but simply to say that even when I was a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, even when I was writing for Living Marxism magazine, even when I was calling myself a Marxist, and I still do sometimes, we always had a problem with socialism.
	We always had a problem with socialism because in our view, because we conceived of ourselves as radical and following, you know, Marx and Engels, if you read the Communist Manifesto, which many people haven't, it's not even very long.
	It's not even very long.
	It's a really easy read.
	Everyone should read it.
	The first 10 pages are devoted to praising capitalism.
	That's what leftists always forget.
	It says capitalism has achieved enormous wonders.
	Burst all the boundaries.
	Yeah, exactly.
	So it's very, it's pro that development, and then it says it doesn't go far enough.
	But the thing is that we still had a problem with socialism because we always associated socialism with the state.
	And we always associated socialism in particular with the Soviet Union.
	Of course.
	And I think, you know, that divide that emerges in left-wing politics in Europe in the 1930s, 40s, and then particularly after the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, which is between the Stalinists who still cleave to the Soviet Union, this bastard, authoritarian, ridiculous state, and the Trotskyists who were more in favour of Trotsky, who was anti-Soviet Union and generally pretty radical.
	I think that's one of the most important divides of recent history.
	But the great tragedy, and I think you are pointing towards this, the great tragedy is that so much of the modern left speaks of socialism as the saviour.
	And what they really mean is state socialism.
	And when we're talking about state socialism, we have a situation where the state is entrusted not only to organise every aspect of economic life, which I think is a mistake.
	Terrifying.
	Terrifying.
	And not going to work.
	But also to organise every aspect of public life, every aspect of personal life, and every aspect of what you can say and how you can express yourself.
	You know, the fact that we now have Corbynista Twitter moms who want to shut people down for expressing a certain point of view makes me absolutely terrified about what will happen if these people ever get to power.
	Oh, yes.
	So I think you're absolutely right.
	The fact that they wear the socialism badge with such honour speaks to a certain historical ignorance because there are many of us on the right and the radical left who recognise that socialism was always a way for the state to increase its power over the economy and the individual.
	Oh, absolutely.
	I guess the recent scandal regarding the effigy of Grenfell Tower that was burned and then uploaded to social media.
	I mean, I'm not endorsing doing this, obviously.
	I think that it's utterly tasteless.
	And I'm a connoisseur of 9-11 memes and I find that tasteless.
	It's too far.
	But it's the reaction from the state has been really worrying to me.
	I mean, because of the outrage on Twitter, the state has been responding to this as if it was some kind of terror attack.
	We have to find this person, we have to bring them to justice.
	They haven't really done anything wrong.
	No, they've done something tasteless.
	I completely agree.
	I think it's, I mean, I think it's more than worrying.
	I think it's terrifying.
	I agree.
	I think the fact that these people, six people have been arrested over the Grandfell bonfire effigy, they've spent time in police cells.
	Their house has been searched for two hours.
	You think, what are they looking for?
	They're looking for like prick stick and cardboard.
	What are they looking for?
	It's absolutely terrifying.
	And I think as a consequence of the virtue signalling mob that rose up in response to this thing, I agree it was incredibly distasteful.
	I agree with a bad stunt.
	I don't think it was funny.
	I feel that some of the people involved were probably racist.
	That's my instinct, but I want proof before I make that judgment.
	But the thing is, you know, what people forget, and this is such an unpopular thing to say, I probably shouldn't say it, but I will.
	Tasteless humour is part of British life.
	Absolutely.
	I remember in 1987, when I was at school, a long, long time ago, and I was very young, there was the Zebrugger disaster when a ship coming from Europe to Britain overturned and lots of people died and it completely flipped on its side.
	And the joke at school was, what song were they playing on the Zebrugger ship dancing on the ceiling?
	Now, that's really off colour.
	It is.
	And shocking.
	Yes, it is.
	But we were eight, nine, ten, eleven year olds, and we thought it was hilarious.
	So, and this is the point, you know, this, I don't mean to be facetious about this stuff.
	This is a point that someone far more important than me, Joan Rivers, made shortly before she died.
	She was dragged before the court of not, I was going to say public opinion, it's not public opinion, the court of PC opinion.
	The Twitter artist.
	The Twitter artist.
	She was dragged before the court of PC opinion because she made this, what I think to be one of her best lines on her TV show, Fashion Police.
	They showed up a picture of Heidi Klum, the German supermodel, and Joan Rivers said, A German has not looked this hot since they were shoving Jews into the ovens.
	Now, I think that is number one, close to the bone, and number two, very funny.
	Yes, it is.
	That's a clever joke, proving that Joan Rivers was a clever writer of jokes.
	Of course, she got it in the net, she got a lot of flagging.
	She did a TV interview in which she refused to apologize, and in which she said, One of the great things about humour, one of the great things about comedy, is that it allows you to address things that are incredibly uncomfortable.
	It allows you to introduce a lightness to things which are just unbearable.
	Now, my view is that if she, as a Jewish woman whose husband lost his entire family in the Holocaust, if she can make jokes about the Holocaust, then we can make jokes about the Grenfell Tower calamity.
	And that's one of the ways in which society deals with awful tragedies.
	Now, that's, I completely agree with you on that.
	Like, I hate to sit there and go, yeah, well, we agree with each other loads.
	But I really do think that you've struck on the most important point about humour.
	And this is something that the British have been kind of famous for, is their dark humour in the face of tragedy.
	And one thing that, to me, that it really speaks to is it's about not letting the tragedy defeat you.
	It's about saying, look, you know, no matter how bad it is, I'm going to make a joke about it.
	And so that I have control over the way I react to this tragedy.
	And the freedom to do that.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	And this is one of the things in the trenches in World War I and II.
	You know, it was people would say, you know, the British dealt with this the best because of the dark humour.
	And I think that it really does give you a kind of ownership over a tragedy.
	And if we strip that away from each other, then we're left with perpetual victimhood.
	Yeah.
	You know, all you can do is cry in the face of a tragedy.
	I don't want to be like that.
	You know, one of the most sinister things in Britain at the moment is the way in which not only is speech and opinion being policed, which is awful, but humour and humour is being policed.
	So we have this policing of the Grempel effigy, which I do think was an attempt at humour.
	I think the people were prejudiced.
	I think they were awful, but I want more proof before I make that final judgment, because I believe in due process.
	We could be in some kind of Count Dankula situation.
	Exactly.
	I was just going to say, the other example is Count Dankula.
	So you have this situation where it's obviously a joke that a pug does a Nazi civic, which is very funny.
	It's just funny.
	That's just the way it is.
	And he's arrested and convicted of a crime and fined.
	And I find that simply terrifying, where we cannot even take a joke anymore.
	And I think sometimes we don't.
	Well, not us, but some people don't appreciate the magnitude of what is happening.
	And the magnitude of what is happening is that people have been arrested for making jokes.
	A young man spent 56 days in jail a few years ago for making racist comments on Twitter about Fabrice Muamba, the footballer who's the black footballer who suffered a heart attack on the pitch.
	A woman was convicted of a crime because she posted gangster rap lyrics on her Instagram page, which included the M-word.
	And she was only 19.
	And she was a young woman.
	And then in addition to these legal clampdowns on so-called offensive speech, we have the informal mob policing of what you can say and what you can joke about and what opinions you can hold.
	And the magnitude of that is that the parameters of acceptable thought are being shrunk all the time, which means that people like you and me find ourselves further and further outside the parameters, not by any choice of our own, but simply because they are shrinking.
	Yeah, just because we haven't moved, but they have.
	They haven't moved, but they have, and then in addition to that, it creates, and John Stuart Mill writes about this in On Liberty.
	He writes about the way in which the more you clamp down on eccentric or difficult or progressive or offensive opinion, the more you destroy any possibility that society will progress.
	Because it's only by having daring individuals and difficult individuals and pain in the arse individuals who are saying things you shouldn't say and pushing the boundaries of acceptable opinion that you can have a society in which you might make a brilliant discovery.
	Or you can have a society in which you might suddenly find out that actually women are just as capable of men of having the vote.
	Unless you have the space in which people can express things which are seen as unnatural or unPC or just blasphemous or offensive, unless you have that space, you are never going to have the ability to discover a new way of thinking.
	That's the really dangerous thing.
	Well, yeah, I completely agree.
	And the way that I see the identitarian left operating these days, I just think, okay, imagine a society ruled by these people.
	It's going to be, you know, it's going to take whatever exists and start constricting it and push more and more people to the margins and start turning into a purity spiral.
	It is genuinely the people who are almost religiously correct, like the most perfect people who will get to say, right, I am the moral authority.
	And when you get to that point, it wouldn't be so bad if we didn't live in a world that was so well connected.
	Like, I use the term like the social media panopticon, because at this point, anyone in the world can see almost your entire online life, going back for years and years.
	And anything of this can be mined, dug up, and used to condemn you in the present day, even if it's an offhand comment, a joke, whatever it was.
	And it's a genuinely terrifying world we're kind of sleepwalking into.
	And then the corporations become excessively responsive to this, and it's all being guided.
	And these people are an industry.
	But the diversity industry is, I mean, we've got a Winning Equalities Commission in our government.
	I'm sure the Soviet Union must have had something very similar.
	I don't feel like we're living in a free country.
	No, I agree.
	I agree.
	And we clearly are because people are being arrested for what they say.
	I think sleepwalking is a very good word because I think that's what's happening.
	Yeah, I don't think people are.
	And people don't realise that.
	Or sometimes they realise too late.
	I found this thing, often I will write a column saying, you know, this person really should not have been arrested for this.
	And everyone will go mental and say, I'm a fascist and everything else.
	And then six months down the line, they will suddenly discover that that arrest was a bit of a problem.
	And you think, well, that's just too late.
	Because it's been established, the precedent has been set and the problem has been risen.
	The problem has risen.
	I love the way you put that.
	You'll say, I don't think someone should be arrested and they'll call you a fascist.
	Fascists argue for not arresting people.
	That's what fascists do, of course, right?
	Historically famous for it.
	They want everyone to have the freedom to say whatever they want to say.
	So I think, yes, we are sleepwalking into an authoritarian state.
	But the authoritarianism that we currently live under always denies being authoritarian.
	They will always say, we are not being censorious.
	We're not calling on the state to ban this person.
	We're just going to use our pressure to prevent them from saying what they want to say.
	It's such incredible ignorance because every single warrior for freedom of speech in history has recognised that if there is anything worse than state censorship, it's what John Stuart Mill referred to as the tyranny of wisdom.
	It's the social pressure to conform.
	And you know, the thing I keep coming back to a lot these days is Frederick Douglass.
	Frederick Douglass was a freed slave in the US who went on to become an abolitionist and went on to become one of the greatest warriors for freedom of speech.
	And he wrote a short article called A Plea for Free Speech, which is one of the best things ever written about freedom of speech.
	And he wrote that in response, not to state censorship, but to a mob that invaded a meeting of abolitionists and shut it down because they thought it was offensive.
	They thought it was offensive to the natural order to suggest that black people should have equal rights to white people.
	And Frederick Douglass's point was simply his point was that it's all well and good for the government to give us freedom of speech, which in America they did.
	But unless it's a lived experience, it's pointless.
	So all these modern day mobs who consider themselves progressive and radical and leftish and all this kind of stuff, they actually have far more in common with the kind of people who persecuted Frederick Douglass than they do with Frederick Douglass.
	Absolutely.
	And this is the thing they don't understand.
	They don't understand that censorship is not simply something that's done by the government.
	It still is done by the government, but increasingly it's being outsourced by the government to mobs.
	So very often the government doesn't have to, in fact, clamp down on a certain point of view because they know that mobs will do it on their behalf.
	Absolutely.
	And I find this all the more pernicious than state censorship, to be honest, because the state is a limited entity.
	There is a limited size and scope to the state.
	And you can often, frankly, get away from the state.
	I mean, we're not being watched by the state now, but you can never get away from society.
	We are the society.
	We live in it.
	We, in our expressions, form it.
	You can't get away from that.
	And, you know, like Tucker Carlson got his home mobbed by a bunch of anti-far protesters.
	The state had nothing to do with that.
	You know, when Google and YouTube and Apple are on the same day mass deplatforming Alex Jones, and like the state had nothing to do with it.
	I find that really terrifying, the rise of corporate censorship.
	Unpersoning of people.
	Because I think what's happening is that I actually think that the state is increasingly backing out of the kind of censorship it used to engage in.
	Oh, absolutely.
	Religious censorship, political censorship, the clampdown on radical leftists and so on.
	The state doesn't generally do that anymore.
	It has new forms of censorship, like hate speech and so on, but I think it's backing out of that explicitly political censorship.
	But what has taken its place is this informal, mob-enforced censorship where it takes the form of pressure.
	If you say exactly.
	And I think what the rise of corporate censorship is a very good example because the way I view social media companies, Facebook and Twitter and others, is that they are now an incredibly significant part of the public space.
	Totally.
	They are the modern day public square.
	These are the spaces in which you express yourself, in which you engage in debate, in which politicians speak to us, in which we speak to politicians.
	This is the public square, really.
	So if we are allowing unaccountable Silicon Valley billionaires to determine what may or may not be said in that space, then we are empowering them to judge what can be said in the public square.
	And there was a really interesting case in the US in the 1940s.
	There was one of these company towns.
	These are towns that are built by private companies.
	So they're not really public.
	They're owned by private companies.
	And one of the inhabitants of one of these public towns was the Jehovah's Witness.
	And they argued for their right to distribute Jehovah's Witness literature.
	And the private company said, well, you can't do it.
	And also, the First Amendment doesn't apply here because it's private, not public.
	So fuck you.
	It's basically what they say.
	The Supreme Court overruled this private company and said, when a private company has such an important influence on public life, when it has such an important role in facilitating public discussion, when it has such an important role in how people walk down the street or how they express themselves, then there's an expectation that it should adhere to public values.
	And the great public value in the US, unlike Britain, is freedom of speech.
	I would say the same thing to these Silicon Valley companies.
	I would say to them, you are more than a private company.
	You are a space in which billions of people expect the ability to express themselves.
	And therefore, we should call on you to respect the greatest freedom possible.
	I agree.
	And the US already has legally the concept of a privately owned public space as well.
	It already has that concept.
	Okay, so let's shift hack to an easier conversation that I'm sure you're looking forward to having.
	Islam.
	Islam.
	Don't get me started on Islam.
	So you're a...
	I'm an Islam-a-foobe.
	I think we all are.
	Yeah, we all are.
	Everyone is.
	Well, unless you are a Muslim, you are an Islamophobia.
	Well, Majid Maz is a Muslim Islamophobe, so it can happen, kind of.
	Let's talk about the concept of Islamophobia then.
	Do you know what kind of definition the Meta working with?
	Yes, it's terrifying.
	It's absolutely terrifying.
	And I think to my, you know.
	Would you like to tell people?
	Well, they basically adopted the Runnymede Trust's definition, which came around in 1997, I think, which it was.
	93.
	Which is this idea that anyone who is too judgmental of Islam or who thinks it's inferior to the West or who thinks that it's too static or too misogynistic and so on is potentially Islamophobic.
	Someone with an opinion can be Islamophobic.
	Someone with an opinion.
	And you are not allowed.
	Imagine someone telling you how to make a value judgment on the ideology.
	That's right.
	You know, if you have a, like, like as if I'm communist-a-phobic.
	Yeah.
	Because I feel that communism, you know, if I was to make a value judgment of communism versus liberalism, and as if that makes me a bigot.
	It's astonishing.
	I can't believe we're actually tolerating this.
	And I think, and so the Metropolitan Police and other police forces have adopted this definition.
	And what I find terrifying, you know, after Salman Rushdie was accused of blasphemy by the Iranian regime in 1989, there was a period of time when the Metropolitan Police was responsible for protecting him.
	And then eventually he got his own private protection.
	But I think to myself, what would the Metropolitan Police do today?
	Because they now have a definition of Islamophobia that includes any judgment whatsoever that Islam is not particularly a great religion.
	I think we're now in a situation where the very police force that was once tasked with protecting Salman Rushdie from Islamists would now potentially arrest Salman Rushdie for offending Islam.
	Well, I mean, I think he would genuinely have committed a hate crime.
	He would have committed a hate crime.
	He would have been an Islamophobe, not only by the Ayatollah's definition, but also by the Western left definition.
	Which is just like the Ayatollah.
	Which is just like it.
	And I think the terrifying situation we find ourselves in in the British experience in particular, because Salman Rushdie was here, so we're intimately related to this story, is that the Ayatollah, he lost the battle, right, because Salman Rushdie still lives, thank God, and also his book is still widely available.
	So he lost the battle, but he won the war.
	And he won the war in the sense that he has established, well not just him, but him and people in this country have established, either by law or informally, that it is wrong to criticize Islam, that it is wrong to mock Muhammad, that it is wrong to say anything disrespectful of this religion.
	And the consequences of that are dire.
	And I think the most profound consequences so far have been the massacre at Charlie Hebdo.
	Because I have always understood the massacre at Charlie Hebdo as being not this kind of terrible foreign imposition on Europe, which is how some people on the right tended to see it, but as actually being the natural progression of political correctness.
	Because those two mass murderers, they grew up in a country, France, in which there are laws against insulting religion, in which Michelle Welbeck, the famous French novelist, was arrested for saying that Islam is the most stupid religion, in which Bridget Bardot, the actress turned animal rights activist, has been fined for saying Islam's treatment of animals is barbaric.
	They grew up in that country.
	They grew up in a country in which it was made clear by the authorities and others that criticising Islam or mocking Muhammad is unacceptable.
	That's what they were infused with.
	So if they then go out and execute people for mocking Muhammad, we can't say this is really shocking and alarming because in a sense it's a natural, horrifying, bloody progression of the culture that we ourselves created.
	Well this is how I felt frankly when it back in 2014 when the Rotherham report was released.
	I frankly called it a British problem.
	We allowed this to happen.
	We were permissive of this.
	Even if every single policeman in this country was a raging racist, even like unbelievably, openly racist, it doesn't matter how racist you are.
	When you enter a room and there's an adult man molesting a 12-year-old girl, you know who the criminal is.
	It doesn't matter how racist you are, how everyone's going to perceive you.
	Your job is to arrest that man.
	And yet, instead, they would demonise the young girls as prostitutes.
	That's right.
	And I think the Muslim grooming gang problem speaks to a really serious problem in 21st century Britain, which is this inability to talk about the cultural tensions that have been created by multiculturalism.
	So the way I see it is, I know there are some people on the right who say that the Muslim grooming gang problem is a direct product of Islam and Islam's belief system.
	I don't buy that because there are a huge number of Muslims out there who don't do this.
	So that doesn't compute for me.
	But what I do think it's a product of is the ideology of multiculturalism, which does two things.
	Firstly, it tells people that you should live in your own community.
	Your value system is just as good as ours.
	It's all fine.
	It has this very relativistic approach to people's belief systems.
	And the second thing it does is it encourages certain minority groups to have a contemptuous view of mainstream society.
	So it tells them mainstream British society is racist.
	Mainstream British society is Islamophobic.
	Mainstream white people, particularly white men, but also white women, are scum.
	I mean, this is the message it sends.
	So it does this dual thing of firstly saying, go and live on your own, these kind of separate communities.
	Validating these beliefs.
	Validating their beliefs and validating their sense of some people's sense of contempt for mainstream society.
	Now, it seems pretty clear to me that Rotherham and Telford and Oxford and all 20 plus cities, huge amount are a direct product of that because what you have there is these groups of people in minority belief systems who look upon white women in particular as slags, scum, and treat them as scum.
	And I think that is a product not of Islam.
	I'm a real stickler for religious freedom.
	So I have a real problem with those on the right, like Geert Wilders and others, who want to ban the Quran or who want to banning books.
	I cannot abide that because, you know, if we're going to be pro-freedom, we have to be consistently pro-freedom.
	I think the genuine problem here, the real underlying problem is the ideology of multiculturalism, which is not diversity, diversity I think is sometimes, I mean I am the child of immigrants.
	parents aren't British so I recognize that diversity can be a good thing but when you institutionalize it and separate people off that's when it becomes well I hate the term multiculturalism I really hate it because what they mean is multiracialism.
	Yes.
	And I'm for that.
	I mean, I'm a child of mixed-race descent.
	My grandfather on my dad's side came from the West Indies.
	He came over in the 60s, married my grandmother, so he was a very dark-skinned man.
	He wasn't from sub-Saharan Africa, but he was a very dark-skinned man from the West Indies with straight hair.
	And naturally, my dad is obviously a mixed-race man.
	And he obviously had to deal with a lot of racism in a council estate in Yoval in the 60s.
	But they got on with it.
	Society got better and things changed.
	But they weren't against the idea of being British.
	They were very British.
	That's why they came from.
	Absolutely.
	They love the idea of being British.
	And in fact, I used to live above a restaurant called The Jewel in the Crown, which is run by an Indian chap.
	It was an Indian restaurant run by an Indian chap.
	Called The Jewel in the Crown.
	You can see where this is going already.
	He rages against mass immigration from the Labour Party in the late 90s, early 2000s.
	Because in his opinion, he had to work to get the status of a citizen.
	It meant something.
	It was valuable.
	Well, the thing is that the people who are most concerned, in my experience, the people who are most concerned about mass immigration over the past 10 years or so tend to be immigrants.
	And I include in that my own family who came here from Ireland.
	And the thing is that, but you know, the issue here, I think, is that this is where there's a real commonality between the ethno-nationalists of the hard right and the PC left.
	Because what they share in common is this view that normal, everyday interaction between the races, multi-racialism, as you call it, is either undesirable or impossible.
	This is where they are actually of a piece.
	They agree with each other.
	So the ethno-nationalists say it can't happen.
	It won't work.
	We are instinctively, biologically programmed to hate each other.
	So we can't have blacks and whites mixing.
	And the left agrees with that completely different.
	And the left agrees with that.
	Let me control that.
	Exactly.
	So the left agrees with that and says, well, we can't have Asian Muslims running around because there are so many dangerous white people.
	So we need to manage these relations.
	So that's where the commonality is.
	The commonality is between that hard right, which is openly racist, and the PC left, which is kind of in a very underhand way quite racist.
	What I'm more interested in is the middle ground, which I think most people cleave to, which is this idea that anyone can be British, regardless of their skin colour.
	But that means something.
	And that means being loyal to certain values.
	And that means one of the values being that Britain is an independent nation, which should have control of its own borders.
	And the question of who comes in and who doesn't.
	Here comes the far right.
	Brexit here.
	Britain should be a sovereign nation.
	That's the racist.
	That's fascism now.
	Even though what everyone forgets, of course, as you will be well aware, fascism was not pro-nationalist.
	It was the opposite.
	It overrode nation-state sovereignty.
	Absolutely.
	Constantly.
	It was totally expansionist.
	Completely.
	So you're saying that there is some kind of defined British identity.
	And this is the way that we have to kind of combat multiculturalism.
	Because I genuinely don't think that you can have multiple cultures coexisting.
	I think what you have to find is a kind of fusion and creating a new culture.
	And this is not a unique idea, the idea of different races living together in a certain area for whatever reason.
	I mean, you've had this in every capital of any empire in all of history.
	And people have to learn to live together, even if they come from different backgrounds.
	But what there always is, is a kind of universal overriding culture.
	That's right.
	And in fact, the very notion of a British identity is actually that.
	You've got the English, the Scots, the Irish and the Welsh who have been on this island for over a thousand years next to each other.
	We have so many bloody wars and so many battles.
	But eventually we come to the point where we understand that there is a kind of identity that unites us, often in opposition to one another, through banter, frankly.
	No, no, it genuinely is, though.
	The banter identity.
	Well, it kind of is.
	And if anything, I was thinking about this a lot.
	Like, banter is the way that we kind of normalise the differences between one another.
	It's like a Welshman can mock you for being Irish, and you can mock me for being English, I can mock a Scot for being a Scot.
	But at the end of the day, everyone gets it.
	And so it's a kind of, you know, equaliser, you know, there's no...
	Although Irish is not part of Britain.
	Well, Northern Irish, you know what I mean?
	Well, that's true.
	They still pass themselves as Irishmen.
	But the thing is, no, I agree.
	I particularly agree that what we need is what is desirable, I think, is an overarching national identity.
	But what I find really interesting about the time we live in is that every single identity is acceptable apart from the national one.
	So you can have your own gender identity, you can, I could click my fingers and claim to be Brenda, and everyone would have to respect me, otherwise they'd be in serious trouble.
	My lady.
	You know, you can have the black identity, the gay identity, the transgender identity.
	You can have any identity you want and anyone who criticizes you is in big trouble.
	But if you cleave to the sense of national identity, then mainstream political society will call you a racist and a fascist and a scumbag and a nationalist and just like Hitler.
	I find that fascinating where every identity is celebrated apart from the one identity that could potentially override all the divisive identities.
	And bring it all together.
	And bring it together, which is the national identity, which is this sense that for all our gender differences and sexual differences and racial differences, there's something bigger than us which brings us together.
	I spend a lot of time in New York.
	I do a lot of work in New York.
	And the thing that most amazes me about New York, New York ought to be an incredibly divisive, tense place.
	It has Koreatown and Chinatown and Little Ireland and Italy and all these groups thrown together on these small islands.
	But it works and it works.
	It doesn't work all the time, but it works most of the time and it's a wonderful place to live because of the overarching identity, which is firstly a New Yorker and then also an American.
	And so it works.
	The reason Britain doesn't work at the moment is because that overarching identity or any sense, even the word assimilation is now seen as a racist word.
	If you were to suggest in public discussion, as I have done on a few occasions, that it would be a good thing to assimilate immigrants, it would be good both for Britain and for the immigrants, you're written off as a racist.
	So not only do we poo-poo the idea of a national British identity, but we actively, not us, but some people, actively agitate against it.
	We as a country seem to have a kind of aversion to it.
	And like you say, you know, it's seen as racist.
	This drives me crazy because the idea of the British identity, I mean, it's not based on a race.
	There are four contingent ethnic groups broadly, and then that's not when you drill down into these sub-ethnic groups of Yorkshireman, Cornishmen, you know, all of these subgroups that all have their distinctive identities and ethnic languages and accents.
	And so the idea of a British identity, it can't possibly be based on race.
	No.
	And no one ever thought it was.
	No one ever thought it was.
	No one ever thought.
	It was always based on a system of values.
	It was like pluralistic, tolerant, individualistic, and frankly, very liberal.
	Yeah.
	And I don't see why we can't promote that.
	That seems like an entirely positive thing to me.
	And it seems that the only people who really object to that are the identitarians of, say, the Islamists, who, for them, the identity of Muslim is supreme to everything.
	Or the far left, where the identities of race are supreme.
	And I really think that we should find our moral spine when it comes to combating this.
	Because, I mean, I was thinking the other thing, what is an identity?
	And really is a system.
	It's an expression of values.
	You're saying, I believe a certain set of things.
	And I guess that the reason the far left hate the British identity is because they genuinely don't believe these things.
	They're not pluralist.
	But you know, it's the far left, but it's also the political mainstream.
	They might not express hatred for the British identity, but they certainly express discomfort or confusion, or they're not quite sure what it is or what it should be, or even if it's a good idea.
	But the reason this is a very pressing problem, and it's not simply academic, is because of Brussels oligarchy and the role of the Brussels oligarchy inactively weakening national identity and weakening national sovereignty and weakening the idea of borders.
	Now, the thing, this is another, we're coming back to, well I am coming back to the question of how the left has abandoned its principles because in my mind, there has been no more radical, progressive, beneficial idea in history than national sovereignty.
	National sovereignty, I think, has done more possibly than any other political idea in terms of shoring up people's rights, defending democratic rights, and ensuring that people have a real say over their lives and the communities they live in.
	I think national sovereignty is probably the most radical idea humankind has ever come up with.
	It's the way in which people have broken away from empires, it's the means through which people resisted the Nazis, it's the mechanism through which people have argued for their right as individuals and as a community to have say over their lives.
	So the fact that the left and the technocrats and the Brussels oligarchy and Theresa May and just about everybody else is instinctively hostile to the idea of national sovereignty and prefers the idea of this amorphous, ill-defined, anti-values technocracy as we have in Europe at the moment is very interesting and very telling.
	And that's why I think the great, you know, coming back to what we were saying earlier about the left-right divide being pretty much meaningless now, the great divide of our time, I think, is between those who define themselves as democrats within a nation, which includes 17.4 million people in Britain, at least, maybe more, and those who are generally in the elites of society, who prefer sovereign power to be outsourced,
	who prefer big political decisions to be made by these unaccountable organisations in Brussels or Strasbourg or somewhere else.
	That's the real conflict now.
	The conflict is between those who cleave to a sense of national identity because they recognize that it affords them with democratic rights, and those who are horrified by the idea of national identity because they recognize that it stands in the way of their ambition to override democracy and express their own influence.
	That's the really important divide.
	I really like your point about the nation-state as a mechanism of organization to resist certain events and occurrences.
	I completely agree with you.
	And it is genuinely about a structure.
	And again, the idea of a national identity, what you're saying is you express a system of national values.
	And I think that it is important that people have common shared values.
	Because otherwise you end up with circumstances like Rover and like all of these other, where communities don't gel together, they come into conflict and end up.
	One community will end up doing something predatory to another community.
	And normally that provokes a remarkably aggressive response.
	But in the current situation we're in, the people who make up the majority of the country are being kind of hamstrung.
	You know, what I find most repulsive about the Muslim grooming gang issue is the way in which mainstream society and feminists and the left have utterly abandoned working class girls because they need to keep quiet for the sake of right.
	But they need to keep quiet.
	They don't care about these young women.
	And we live in a country in which if a politician puts his hand on a middle class woman's knee, it is on the front page of the papers.
	It causes a parliamentary inquiry.
	you literally will not hear the end of it for months on end.
	But if a predatory gang of people who happen to be from largely Muslim backgrounds prey upon and rape working class girls and drive them into the countryside and say to them, we're not driving you back home until you agree to give us a blowjob, they don't care about those girls.
	And in fact, not only do they not care about those girls, they see their complaints as a problem and they see their complaints as a threat to the multicultural fabric.
	So I find that abandonment of the working classes and women as really highlighting every single hypocrisy you could ever imagine existing within the contemporary left.
	Now, of course, the problem is that as soon as you say, well, I care about these working class women, I grew up with women like this.
	I was raised, I'm related to women like this, so I'm very interested in their safety and their happiness.
	But if you raise those problems, you are denounced as a racist and Islamophobe and everything else.
	So I just find, so the problem of the ideology of multiculturalism, which as you have completely rightly said, is not multi-racialism.
	I don't have a problem with diversity.
	I have a problem with the institutionalization of diversity to the extent that it causes tension between groups.
	And what we live under at the moment is an ideology of multiculturalism which not only says that every group should live on its own, but which also denies the existence of problems between groups.
	And that means that working class, young working class white women are completely and utterly thrown under the bus by people who would normally claim to care about women.
	And I find that sinister.
	It's always the most vulnerable girls as well.
	The girls who don't have fathers in the homes, or loving parents, parents who are always working or are just separated, who are looking for male influences in their life and find predatory men who are looking for young girls.
	And I mean, I can't imagine that posterity is going to treat it lightly.
	That's right.
	I think that's absolutely right.
	And in fact, the BBC of all places published a pretty good piece online a few weeks ago making the point, precisely that point, that these are very vulnerable working class girls.
	They are the ones without father figures.
	They are the ones without much family security.
	They are the ones who grew up in homes where there's not much work or stability, who then hang around taxi ranks or takeaway joints.
	And that's when they come into contact with predatory, largely Muslim men who then think that they can gain something from these girls in terms of sexual exploitation.
	So the unholy marriage that exists between.
	Just to be clear, I mean, it's and for anyone watching, it's not just the idea of sexual gratification either.
	A lot of the time these women were trafficked and prostituted, sorry, women, these girls were trafficked and prostituted.
	And dozens of men per night for hundreds of pounds, thousands of pounds, and it would become an industry.
	But yes.
	And what I find really, it's the fact that even speaking about this, even when I speak about it, I feel uncomfortable.
	Because I know that people will say, oh, you hate Muslims or you're racist.
	And that's the level we've reached.
	We've now reached a level where if you speak up for working class girls or if you speak up for Asia Bibi, the woman in Pakistan who was imprisoned for nine years for disrespecting Muhammad, if you speak up for any of these people, you run a very serious risk of being branded a racist.
	You run a very serious risk of being called Islamophobic or being called prejudiced.
	And now, we come back to this point.
	For me and you, it doesn't make much difference because we'll say it anyway.
	We've got public profiles, people.
	So it's fine for us, we'll be okay at the end of the day.
	But there are many people out there who want to say these things about Rotherham, who want to say, who want to offer solidarity to Asia BB, who want to raise these issues about the impact that kind of Angela Merkel's virtue signalling introduction of migrants to Europe had on their communities, but feel that they can't.
	And that's the culture we live in.
	We live in a culture at the moment where there are millions of people who feel that they cannot raise problems that emanate from identitarian politics.
	That's terrifying.
	And they wonder how Tommy Robinson can get 20,000 people in front of Downing Street.
	They wonder and they don't know why.
	And it's like, look, when 20,000 working class people come down from Sheffield and protest outside of Downing Street, that is a deep-seated problem.
	These people haven't got cash to burn.
	They work a lot, they've got their own problems.
	But if they're willing to travel all of that way, spend all of that money to chant in the street, woe, Tommy Tommy, you should start listening to what they're saying.
	I think I've written a few pieces defending the Football Lads Alliance, and I don't agree with everything the Football Lads Alliance says.
	I particularly don't agree with everything Tommy Robinson says.
	I have a number of issues with these people, but it seems pretty clear to me that they are a direct product of the culture of silence.
	They are a direct product of the culture of censorship.
	They are a direct product of what happens when you say to certain communities, well, you can't raise this problem.
	You can't talk about this problem.
	People have to find a way to express themselves.
	And the more that the left kind of shrinks the space in which you can raise certain questions or shrinks the space in which you can make certain criticisms, the more they're feeding into other groups and other outfits, some of which are really problematic, like the really genuinely hard right, who will come along and say, well, we will talk about these things, so come to us.
	Well, that's been the entire problem.
	And now they're going on a witch hunt on social media saying, well, anyone who speaks about any of these problems might be a Nazi.
	Because they just can't know and they can't control everything.
	I find it astonishing that if you were to say, if you say, I care about working class girls not being raped, and I care about a sense of British identity, and I care about immigrants having something to assimilate into, all those things which traditionally would have been seen as pretty good, decent, liberal, progressive values to hold are now seen as racism.
	And that's the terrifying situation we find ourselves in is that things have shifted to such a dramatic degree that an opinion which would have been considered pretty progressive 30 years ago, which is that, you know, let's integrate everyone and make them all equal.
	Let's make them make them all British, is now seen as evidence of a fascistic tendency.
	And that's the shift that has taken place.
	It's wild as well, because if you think how multicultural the British Empire was, and how, I mean, we've got so many minorities from India, like Sikhs, Gurkhas, Indians, Hindus, you know, we've got so many people, and obviously from the African colonies, who...
	who came to this country understanding that there was a way that we operated that wasn't actually racial, you know, that there was actually something here that could be embraced.
	Yes, but you know what I find...
	I mean, my family were part of that, you know.
	And so to have that thrown in their faces and say, no, this is actually no longer acceptable.
	I mean, one of my best friends, his father was Indian, and you will never find a bigger advocate of the British Empire than this man.
	But you know what I find Really fascinating is that if you go back to the Windrush generation or some of the Indian people who came after that, they were really willing to integrate.
	Now, it wasn't easy.
	No one's saying it's easy.
	I know this from my parents came here in 1968 and they experienced a lot of hostility, particularly in the 1970s when there was a conflict between Britain and the Irish Republican Army.
	They experienced a lot of hostility as a consequence of that.
	So their willingness to integrate was often shut down.
	So I'm not saying it's easy.
	It can be difficult.
	But there was an instinct to integrate and there was an expectation on the part of Britain itself that if you were an immigrant you would try to integrate.
	And that's what's disappeared.
	So I think the thing that I find fascinating now is that very often it's the third and even fourth generation of immigrants who are really unwilling to integrate.
	So for example, if you look at Pakistanis or Indians, right, they come here in the 50s and 60s and 70s and very often they will make a very showy display of display wearing Western dress and speaking in the right tones and so on.
	Now you have a situation where their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren are wearing the niqab.
	Or I speak on universities quite a lot and there are always.
	The audience always has a huge number of young British men in smocks, looking like they just came out of Saudi Arabia, and I find that really fascinating and that's why I think that's what tells me that the problem is not necessarily immigration, which can be done in a perfectly reasonable rational, good way, and very often immigrants want to integrate, they're keen to integrate yeah,
	but it's the political ideology of multiculturalism.
	So you have a situation where people who were fresh off the boat in the 60s and 70s said okay, we're going to integrate, that's a good idea yeah, and their great, their grandchildren, are now saying well, fuck British society, we're going to wear the nicarb and we're going to wear the smock and we're going to start quoting the Quran at every opportunity.
	So something has shifted in Britain itself and it's the politics of identity, it's the sacralization of multiculturalism as an ideology rather than simply as a lived experience of multiracialism, and what that gives rise to is tension, conflict.
	I think there's.
	There's another component, the the.
	I think the component that you've left out there is the the, the lack of moral fortitude on the part of the British.
	You know, I mean I I, I am all for tolerance.
	I'm completely for tolerance, totally for it, but I'm also for a promotion of our own, what we consider to be the moral good.
	I completely agree this is.
	And the idea that we can look at the, the moral philosophy that has come out of Britain, and say this is flawed is, is the is blows my mind.
	Yeah, they're dressing as if they live in Saudi Arabia and you're just sitting thinking okay well, I can't, you know, but I've said that in public meetings and you don't get a very good response.
	It's crazy.
	I completely agree with you.
	And and the thing, but the thing.
	But I don't think you need to have a butt in there, because I think one of the key aspects of tolerance people, people mistake tolerance for relativism.
	Yes, so people think tolerance means just nodding along to every way of life.
	That's not actually what tolerance means.
	And if you read John Locke, in 1689 he wrote a letter concerning toleration and it's one of the founding documents of the Enlightenment.
	He had to flee the country pretty much on the basis of that and he basically says, everyone should have whatever religious beliefs they want, except Catholics.
	He was a bit genuinely wanted.
	Well, at the time they were a problem at the time.
	I guess you can say that as someone from a Catholic background.
	They were a problem at the time.
	But he basically said, let people think what they want to think, let people believe what they want to believe.
	But he makes it so clear that tolerating their right to believe what they want to believe doesn't mean that you can't criticise them.
	It doesn't mean that you can't try and change their mind.
	It doesn't mean that you can't look at them as inferior and stupid and backward.
	And he makes that, that's a really key part of tolerance.
	His definition of tolerance, which ought to be our definition of tolerance, is that you accept the right of anyone to think whatever they want, right?
	Because who are we to tell people what they should think?
	That's ridiculous.
	You don't have to like it.
	Right, you don't have to like it.
	But at the same time, everyone needs to accept the right of everyone else to mock your beliefs, to ridicule your beliefs, to try and change your beliefs.
	And that aspect of tolerance has been lost.
	So I think, you know, when you have these young lads at university wearing the Saudi Arabian dress and I've heard them say anti-Semitic things, I've heard them say things that I think are grotesque.
	The problem is that there's so little pushback.
	The problem is that there are so few people who are willing to say to them, you look ridiculous, you're saying ridiculous things, it would be far better for you and for us if you just accepted a British identity rather than this foreign identity that you've probably invented anyway.
	There are so few people willing to say that.
	And the reason they're unwilling to say that is because they know they will be accused of Islamophobia.
	They know that in a multicultural society you're not allowed to criticize minority groups.
	And so you have this spiral where the ideology of multiculturalism encourages silence on difficult matters.
	And then we wonder why there is the rise of these tensions and these sexual tensions in Rotherham or racial tensions in Oldham or cultural tensions on university campuses.
	Those tensions exist because you have forbidden us from addressing them and from tackling them.
	Well, no, I completely agree with that because in my opinion, the way that this, this is the reason that I think, and I will keep stressing this until people listen.
	I think banter is genuinely important because I genuinely think it normalizes the differences and that's important.
	It's really important.
	I'm laughing because I agree.
	Yeah, I know, right?
	But it's something that you never really think about.
	And it kind of came to me as an epiphany a while ago where it's just like, oh, God, we had such sectarian and ethnic conflicts on this island until we got to the point where, I mean, after Locke, where it became, look, all we can do is talk to one another.
	Well, let me tell you what I think then.
	And that's fine.
	Yeah.
	That's absolutely fine.
	Because suddenly everyone gets to hear everyone else's raw, unfiltered opinions, but everyone also changes.
	I mean, this is the kind of synthesis where, you know, instead of these two, instead of these groups being armed camps, and this is exactly what the identitarians do.
	They sit there and go, right, okay, here's a demarced area that you can't cross.
	And then the other group says, well, we're Irish and now we've got our own sacred cows.
	Oh, we're this group and we've got our own sacred cross.
	And so everyone is looking at each other suspiciously, saying, well, don't you dare say something, I'll get you with a hate speech law.
	And it turns the world into a place not worth living in.
	It's absolutely terrible and it's racism.
	it is a new form of racism it doesn't necessarily mean that they don't necessarily think that certain races are inferior to others but they certainly think it's almost like everyone is it's It's kind of a form of cultural supremacy.
	Whichever camp you're in, you're culturally supreme to everyone because you are allowed to have your demarked area and nobody's allowed to cross that threshold.
	It's the, I think the great problem we face today is the ideology of race relations.
	This idea that people, that the relations between the races need to be managed and policed and censored and controlled.
	Because not only does that prevent people from expressing what they want to say, which is a problem, but it also institutionalizes a sense of divisiveness.
	It institutionalizes a sense of tension.
	And as soon as you introduce an ideology in a country like Britain which says that you should live over there and the reason you should live over there is because mainstream society doesn't like you because mainstream society is kind of fucked up, you instantly create a sense of tension.
	You instantly invite conflict.
	You instantly invite difficulty and strain and everything else.
	And that's not how.
	Yeah, and you legitimise it.
	You legitimize people's sense of grievance.
	You legitimize Salman Abedi who blew up the Manchester Arena in 2017 on the basis because one of his beliefs was that British people were Islamophobic.
	Now, and you think to yourself, where did he get this belief from?
	Because it's obviously not true, in my view.
	He got this belief from literally every single mainstream outlet, which will have communicated that to him for the whole, I think it was, I can't remember who it was, but someone pointed out that he killed one person for every year that Britain gave him refuge.
	So he was 21 years old, I think, and he killed 21 people.
	Now, the reasoned part of humanity would say, okay, we need to work out what made this person blow up 21 people, including an eight-year-old girl.
	We need to think about that.
	We need to talk about that.
	We need to work out how this happened and we need to ensure that it never happens again.
	But of course, you're not allowed to do that.
	Because as soon as you do that, as soon as you say there's a problem with identitarian division, as soon as you say there's a problem with encouraging certain communities to embrace a victim culture, as soon as you say if you tell everyone they suffer from Islamophobia, you will create a grievance mentality which could potentially turn violent.
	As soon as you say any of that, you're written off as a racist.
	And the consequence of that, this is how serious the consequence is.
	The consequence is that people die.
	Right?
	Now, we talk about Rotherham and everything else, where the consequence is that people get abused and raped.
	That's bad.
	Terrible.
	The consequence is also that people die.
	And there's a reluctance to discuss the situation, the reasons for that happening.
	Well, the problem is you've backed yourself into an ideological corner.
	Because as soon as you say these groups can't be criticized because they did no wrong, because they are the victims, the victim is essentially sacred, they are faultless, then the problem must be wider society.
	That's the only option you've got left.
	And you can't blame, then you're blaming the victims of the terror attacks.
	For being sex.
	That's right.
	It's like, you know, when it's always revealed that lots of Western Europeans, Muslims, have gone to Syria to join ISIS.
	People, there will always be people who will say, you know, it's because they were oppressed or they were unemployed.
	And you think, you know, since when has going to Raqqa in Syria and driving around with a truck dragging dead bodies behind you, since when has that been a reasonable response to unemployment?
	I mean, when did that happen?
	So he's driving along this road in Syria going, if they'd just give me a job, I would have cut this man's head off.
	It literally makes no sense.
	But my concern is that I'm increasingly coming around to the point of view that the reason we have an Islamist terrorism problem in Western Europe, which we do, you know, hundreds of people have been killed.
	Oh, yeah.
	You know, people will say it's because we're Islamophobic.
	I think it's because we're Islamo.
	We are too flattering of Islam.
	And now the problem that that creates is that it creates a victim mentality, it creates a sense of entitlement, it creates this culture in which it's seen as a bad thing ever to criticize Islam or mock Muhammad and so on.
	And what that does, it imbues certain radical Muslims with a sense that anyone who criticizes Islam or any society which they consider to be Islamophobic, and Britain we're constantly told is an institutionally Islamophobic society, deserves to be punished.
	So I see the London Bridge attack and the Westminster Bridge attack and the Manchester Arena attack and Charlie Heddo and the Berlin Christmas market attack and the Nice Bastille attack.
	I see all of those as semi-direct consequences of a climate in which we are discouraged from criticizing Islam, which then has the knock-on effect of convincing radical Islamists that anyone who criticizes their religion deserves punishment.
	And that's the problem I think we face at the moment.
	Yeah, and one thing I'm particularly concerned about is the fostering of what I would consider to be religious extremism in Britain by the government and I don't mean jihadis, you know, I mean people who are just extremely religious.
	And as in the people wearing the thobes and the niqabs and this is protected by our government.
	And this really, I mean, it drives me crazy because it used to be that Britain was the country where religious extremism came to die.
	You were going to be tolerant whether you liked it or not.
	But these people are not tolerant at all.
	And we protect their intolerance with our laws and our culture.
	And I can't understand why we're allowing radical Islam from mostly from Pakistan, which is an incredibly radical country that has some of the most regressive laws you can imagine.
	And we treat them as if they have the correct interpretation of the people.
	But you know, the thing is, at the moment, as we're speaking, two pretty serious things are happening.
	The first is that Asia Bibi has been released from prison in Pakistan at last.
	She's currently in hiding in Islamabad, apparently.
	Now, that's the thing.
	She's in hiding.
	She's in hiding.
	She has to be in hiding.
	Because people want to kill her for what she said about Islam.
	At the same time, Roger Scruton is not necessarily in hiding, but he's keeping a low profile because people want to punish him, partly because of what he said about Islam.
	So we have this situation where in Pakistan, which I think has incredibly embarrassed itself to an incredible degree over the past few months and few years with its treatment of Asia Bibi and other incidents.
	So we have a situation where in Pakistan, this woman, this Christian woman, a lowly farm laborer from Punjab, who was accused of disrespecting Muhammad, which she's always denied doing.
	She was sentenced to death.
	She's in hiding.
	She's been released and she's now in hiding because people still want to kill her.
	And we think, oh, that's really weird and screwed up.
	But at the same time, in Britain, right, Roger, at the exact same time, Roger Scruton is under attack, partly because of what he said about homosexuality and what he said about various other PC issues, transgenderism and so on, but also because of what he said about Islam.
	And he questions the idea of Islamophobia and he thinks that Islam, that Europe has covered up some of the sexual crimes committed by Muslim immigrants is true.
	Demonstrably true.
	So it's completely true.
	So we have this situation where you think to yourself, okay, so 21st century Britain actually has a lot in common with Pakistan because both countries to differing degrees are intolerant of criticisms of Muhammad or Islam or Muslims.
	And that I think ought to be, it probably won't be, but it ought to be a moment of reckoning for British liberals because what they should recognize is that at the exact same time that Asia Bibi is desperately seeking some safe space, some safe country.
	Not even a safe space.
	Not a safe space, a safe country in which she might actually not be able to live without being killed.
	At the exact same time that that's happening, we have a twitch hunt or a kind of PC mob which is seeking to punish Sir Roger Scrooge, who I think is one of our most serious philosophers.
	Agree.
	In part because of what he has said about Islam.
	And you just think there's got to be a point at which you recognise the commonality between your intolerance and their intolerance, between your restriction on any form of Islamophobia, as they call it, and their restriction on any form of blasphemy.
	There's got to be a point at which you recognise the similarity between those two things.
	It's hard to even call it just a similarity.
	The same thing.
	Yeah, how are they not acting in the same way?
	Yeah, it's the same thing.
	If I get in the same kind of trouble with the British government that I get with the Pakistani government over my criticisms of Muhammad.
	It's the same thing.
	Exactly.
	At what point do we just say, well, okay.
	The difference is they won't.
	They're good and they won't kill you.
	That's the difference.
	Now, people say that's an important difference.
	And of course it is, in a sense.
	It's just the difference of scale.
	But you know, exactly.
	It's a difference of degree.
	So the European Court of Human Rights, a few weeks ago, a couple of weeks ago, agreed with the Austrian court, which fined a woman 480 euros for calling Muhammad a paedophile.
	Now, a 480 Euro fine is preferable to a death sentence, which is what Asia Bibi got for insulting Muhammad.
	But you're absolutely right.
	What they have in common is far more important.
	And what they have in common, Europe and Pakistan, 21st century Britain and Pakistan, is the idea, the legal idea, that it is wrong or immoral or unacceptable to insult Muhammad.
	That's what they have in common.
	And the consequence in both parts of the world, both in Pakistan and Europe, is that you inflame extremism.
	So the reason there are mobs of people in Pakistan who have caused 900 million pounds worth of damage with their protests calling for HB to be hanged, the reason they exist is because there is a law in Pakistan which forbids the insulting of Muhammad and they are following through that law.
	The reason we have Islamist attacks in Europe, including at Charlie Hedder and other places, is that it is forbidden or wrong or immoral to criticize Islam too harshly.
	Absolutely.
	So I think anyone in Europe who considers themselves progressive and a Renaissance man and someone who believes in freedom, and also anyone in Pakistan who believes that, and there are many there, ought to recognise that the commonalities between these two parts of the world is a really serious problem.
	I think we'll probably leave it there then, because we've given your critics enough to come at you with.
	Thank you very much.
	That's been a real pleasure.
	Thank you.

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