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Dec. 13, 2018 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
36:21
The Gravity of the Situation | Lord Pearson Interview
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Hello everyone, I'm currently interviewing Lord Pearson, who's the UKIP peer in the House of Lords.
Good morning.
Hello.
Lord Pearson.
Hi there.
So I suppose we should probably just jump right into the issues because there's so much going on right now.
You have obviously strong opinions on Brexit.
Would you like to tell us what you think is being done rightly and wrongly?
Well, the problem with Brexit is that our political class and all our bureaucrats, civil servants, and I'm afraid indeed the entire political media, none of them have ever done a deal in their lives.
So they don't understand how strong our hand is in Brussels and they don't know how to play it.
And underlying that, of course, there is a certain amount of treachery within the bureaucracy and some of the politicians that they actually want to reverse the will of the people.
And so the first mistake that our government is making is that we are dealing through the Commission, the European Commission, which is, as you remember, the EU bureaucracy which has the monopoly of proposing all EU laws, which it does in secret.
They then go through the Committee of Permanent Representatives, which no one's ever heard of, again in secret.
And when they emerge from them, the Council of Ministers just rubber stamps the things.
And 20,000 laws have been imposed on the United Kingdom since we joined by that method.
And the House of Commons and the House of Lords can do nothing about it.
So the government is dealing with the Commission, whose only aim in life is to keep the project of European integration going, because that's what gives them their lush lifestyles, their chauffeur-driven limousines, their new biotranslators, etc.
And under Article 50, we start off dealing with the European Council, the Council of Ministers, but they, under Clause 2, have turned the negotiation over to the Commission.
And what we should now do is we should say we've done our best to make it work through the Commission, but they've betrayed our trust.
And we are no longer going to go on negotiating through the Commission.
We're going to go to the Council of Ministers.
And indeed, the Luxembourg Court has just helpfully said that if we want to, we can resile from Article 50 single-handed.
So we come out of, we stick to clause one, which is that a country can leave the European Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.
Our constitutional requirements are a referendum of the people and a vote in both houses of parliament.
So we're coming out.
We then go to the Council of Ministers and through them we offer to the people of Europe, everyone seems to have forgotten about them, three things really.
We say to the people of Europe, look, we will go on giving you mutual residence.
Your whatever it is, 3.5 million people can go on living here, same terms, same conditions and all the rest of it.
And our 1.2 million people can go on living in Europe for a period of time.
And after a period of time, when we're in control of our own borders, we will treat new European people coming in in the same way we treat every other country in the world.
And every other country in the world treats us.
I mean, there's no big deal there.
So that is to the advantage of the people of Europe.
There are more of them than there are of us.
The big one then is trade.
And we say to them, we will go on giving you free trade.
We have free trade at the moment.
It works.
The Irish border problem disappears if we go on with free trade.
And we say to the people of Europe through the Council, we will go on giving you free trade.
And if you don't accept, the latest report from Civitas shows that EU exporters to us will pay an extra 13.5 billion in tariffs, and our exporters to them will pay 5.5 billion in extra tariffs.
And that means a nice little profit to us of 8 billion.
So we will offer them that.
And if they don't want it, we will go to the WTO when those tariffs will gradually come into being.
And when that has been accepted, we say to the people of Europe, when this has been accepted by the Council of Minister, generally speaking, the idiotic politicians in the corrupt octopus in Brussels, when they have accepted that, we will then talk about money.
And if you don't accept it, we won't give you a penny.
I think probably we won't give you a penny beyond the present EU budget, which runs for another two years and is probably, we're pretty much committed to that.
And that's 10 billion a year net.
A 10 billion a year net sounds an awful lot of money, but nobody understands it.
It is actually the salaries of a thousand nurses every single day.
So that's what 10 billion, that's what we're giving them, or policemen or whatever you want.
And it's really incredibly simple.
If you talk to any businessman who understands the European Union, that's what we do.
We're not going to go on talking to the Commission.
We go through the Council, we go direct to the people of Europe.
This is what we offer.
And if you don't want it, it'll cost you 8 billion a year.
Incidentally, part of that profit, that 8 billion, we can use to subsidise any of our exporters who get hit under the WTO terms.
I don't know, we haven't done much work with the WTO, but it exists to promote free trade.
So it really is as simple as that, and they can't see it.
And the political will is lacking, of course.
And poor Theresa May, poor darling, I mean, she's just a very nice woman, but she's simply not up to it.
And she's got surrounding her some really clever, nasty civil servants who are determined to keep our membership of the European Union.
They love it.
They go to Brussels once a week, lovely lunches, again, you know, you name it.
This was something that struck me from the very beginning of the Brexit process, is the natural strength of Britain's position.
And one of the things that I constantly see represented, and I guess what I can just call the Remainer media, is the idea that the European Union is a giant, indestructible monolith to which the poor tiny Britain has no hope of resisting.
And they seem to conveniently ignore all the riots across the European Union, the rise of right-wing populist parties across the European Union, the almost open revolt that places like Italy, Poland and Hungary are in at this point.
And then, you know, you say to them, well, if we don't give them the 39 billion they're asking for, the net 10 billion a year, where are they going to get it from?
And then you realise it must be the French, German, Italian taxpayer.
So, I mean, it seems that the European Union is actually a dreadfully fragile organization right now.
And why don't we leverage that?
Well, I mean, I've asked the question several times in the Lords in the last few years.
I've asked the government, what is now the point of the European Union?
Why do we need it at all?
What does the European Union do that we could not do by collaboration between consenting democracies, for God's sake?
And you never get an answer because you see they're all blinded by this mirage of peace.
They, all those people in Brussels and all the idiots here, actually think that the European Union has been good for peace.
Can you believe it?
Actually, I can't believe they believe that.
They do.
No, they have to believe it, because otherwise, what's the point of them?
And you go back, you see...
Sorry, I went to the European Parliament, and just to corroborate exactly what you're saying here, they would give the pragmatic arguments, and then they would always default back in every section that I was in to European Union is preventing war in Europe.
And I think that World War II has actually prevented war in Europe.
Well, it's nonsense.
I mean, after the war, NATO kept the peace in Europe, not the European Union at all.
And France had the bomb and Germany didn't.
Entirely NATO, nothing to do.
And the European Union wasn't born until 1957.
But they have taken this position that they are responsible for peace.
Actually, if you look at it, if anything, by breaking the promise to Gorbachev after the war came down, the promise was that we, the West, would not expand to the East, we jolly well did it.
And we tried to annex the Ukraine.
And I mean, I could give you the whole story of how we've mishandled.
I'd like to be aware of it, but, sorry, yeah, let's...
Another time, perhaps.
I would love to, yeah.
The sort of founding statement about the European Union was made by Jean Monnet in 1956.
And it goes as follows.
Europe's nations should be guided towards a superstate without their people understanding what is happening.
This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will irreversibly lead to federation.
It's all there.
Beautiful.
And you can very easily trace that pattern with the various treaties.
The single European African Americans.
And the fact that they weren't voted through, you can't vote and through.
And then you've got the flag, the anthem, the borders, the desire for an army now.
And at every stage of this process, the Romaine establishment have poo-pooed the idea that any of this is happening.
It's obvious to anyone who has eyes.
Well, they believe in, I mean, you know, sitting in the House of Lords, which is very strongly in Romania.
I mean, there are an awful, I mean, your affiliate is like a sort of illness.
Really quite nice people catch it.
And in the laws, these people rarely believe that the European Union is a good thing, that in some way it helps us.
It doesn't.
Even on the trade front, if you look at the analysis, we'd have been better off outside the single market than in it from 1976 onwards.
Well, of course, it's a shrinking percentage of GDP.
To move from what I perceive to be a tyrannical superstate governing Europe to a real-life example of the tyranny of the superstate governing Europe, I am a YouTuber, as you're aware, and the Article 13 that's just been passed, YouTube themselves are actually having an active campaign against it because they're aware that it's probably going to prevent Europeans from actually accessing YouTube, at least under the terms of it at the moment.
So I guess this brings us on to free speech.
Now, you brought up something to me regarding free speech in this country that I wasn't previously aware of.
Would you like to tell me about it?
Yes, the law in this country gives us complete freedom of speech, religious speech, anything you want.
And it's an amendment passed in the Lords by Lord Waddington to the Public Order Act 1986.
And it's the famous section 29J.
And it reads as follows.
It's a bit dense, but it's worth listening to.
Nothing in this part shall be read or given effect in a way which prohibits or restricts discussion, criticism or expressions of antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse of particular religions or the beliefs or practices of their adherents or of any other belief system or the beliefs or practices of its adherents or proselytizing or urging adherents of a different religion or belief system to cease practicing their religion or belief system.
Now that is free speech.
That could not be more categorical.
So, how have we arrived at a position where in 1986 we had a codified law that guaranteed our free speech to thousands of people per year going to jail for their naughty opinions?
Well, arrested, sorry, not necessarily arrested.
I don't know about thousands.
Oh, no, no, no, no, absolutely.
Really?
Oh, absolutely.
I'll send you the question.
Well, you see, what's happened is that the Crown Prosecution Service, when it was under that left-wing woman, I can't remember her name now, and the police, have got a different definition for identifying hate crime.
And that goes as follows.
It's any criminal offence, which actually it isn't.
And I've got the government last week to say there is no criminal offence in the UK of hate speech.
The government has said to me from the dispatch box, it carries the force of law.
Nevertheless, where we are with the police and the Crown Prosecution Service is any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person to be motivated by hostility or prejudice based on a person's disability or perceived disability, race or perceived race, or religion or perceived religion, or sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation or transgender identity or perceived transgender identity.
There is no legal definition of hostility.
So we use the everyday understanding of the word which includes ill-will, spite, contempt, prejudice, unfriendliness, antagonism, resentment and dislike.
So that's what they've done to section 29J.
And last week, I had a question in the laws on the 5th of December precisely to ask whether 29J remains in force.
And if so, what is the basis in statute for the offence of religious hate speech?
And you can see it.
And the answer is: 29J still holds.
Okay?
There is no criminal offence in the UK of hate speech.
So I then went on and asked, I said, well, okay, so a Christian who proclaims that Jesus is the only Son of the one true God, can he be arrested for hate speech if a Muslim feels offended?
And by the same token, of course, can a Muslim be arrested for preaching the supreme divinity of Allah if a Christian takes offence?
And you've seen this judgment from the Strasbourg Court, which upholds Austria's criminalization of a lady who said that Muhammad was a paedophile.
And Austria upheld that as ant has upheld Austria's decision on that.
So I asked the government if we're to have a new law of blasphemy that prohibits discussion of Islam.
And the answer was to say the least woolly.
Well, what do you mean by bully?
Well, what was it indeed?
The noble lord asked me a hypothetical question in an unspecified situation.
The CPS and the police agreed definition of hate crime is used for purposes of identifying and flagging only.
And then the definition I read you out.
It'd be an operational decision, both of the police and the CPS, based on the specific circumstances whether to prosecute.
Well, it's there, it's in Hansard.
The 5th of December.
And on the Austrian situation, the judgment does not raise any issues which require any further consideration by this government at this time.
So just for anyone listening, I want to just make sure that you're aware that, as I understand it, the canonical history of Islam and Muhammad, that is widely accepted by Muslims, is that he married Aisha at six and consummated his relationship with her at nine.
Yes, I mean, and that's what leads people, as this Austrian lady did, to say that Muhammad was a paedophile.
Precisely.
I'm much more worried about several other tenets of Islam than that one.
Because nevertheless, by our modern standards, that's unarguable.
Well, that's my point.
And yet this woman in Austria was arrested, and presumably she's serving time for this.
And this is a demonstrable fact, at least by the scriptures, that the Muslim.
Well, I think it's generally accepted, but I don't get too excited about it, I'm afraid, because it was fairly normal in those days.
Well, no, no, I actually agree with you.
You can't really apply the modern criteria of paedophilia to the seventh century.
Well, I completely agree, but I'm more concerned that this lady can say something that is demonstrably true, at least according to the Muslim interpretation, and then still be considered to be committing some kind of hate crime.
Yeah, well, that's why I asked, are we to have a new blasphemy law that prohibits discussion of Islam?
because she's been criminalised for saying this in Austria, and the Strasbourg Court, not to be confused with the Luxembourg, the European Court of Human Rights, has upheld Austria and said she is a criminal.
So I say, well, then, does that...
You know, there's no question of this against...
I mean, you can say what you like about Christianity.
You can say what you like about the virgin birth, the miracles, the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Nobody turns a hair, I mean, least of all the bishops.
Well, Christianity, of course, has a habit of turning the other cheek and all that, which is wonderful concept, you know.
A new commandment I give you that you love one another.
And that was everyone.
Whereas within Islam, as I understand it, the peaceful bits of Islam apply towards other Muslims and not to the Kufa, which is us, the rest of it.
Right, so going back to the Public Order Act and the police definition of hate speech, I find the definition of hate speech, the perceived intent, to be the most pernicious aspect of it.
And it seems that it's in direct contradiction with Communications Act Section 127 about uploading grossly offensive content, what Mark Mietzhem was caught under.
Because surely that contradicts what is written in the Public Order Act.
Well, indeed, in fact, in this question I had on the 5th of December the other day, the Labour spokesman did get up, and this one reason I was worried about paying and saying, hey, shouldn't we change Section 29J?
Because surely it goes a bit too far.
Do you know what I mean?
But I think one could easily define the stuff that is genuinely pernicious and genuinely criminal and out there in the areas you mentioned.
But all I want to be able to do in all this, my aim is to be able to talk about Islam, to learn about Islam and to talk about Islam.
The first step with this home, as far as Islam is concerned, is to be allowed to talk about it.
And for that, we need at least that much free speech, which is what I was looking for.
And I think the idea of being able to criticize Islam is, I'm sure it's very uncomfortable to some very devout Muslims, but unfortunately, we have to be able to do it, whether they like it or not.
And we have millions of Muslims here, so it is important that we do have an understanding of Islam.
Well, I don't think the Archbishop of Canterbury said actually nearly two years ago now, he said that it's wrong to go on pretending that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam.
He said it's time for our religious leaders to stand up and be counted, by which he meant the Muslims.
And basically that, really, and that we will never defeat Islamism if we don't understand Islam.
And really the whole initiative now, the push, what I'm trying to do, is to reach out to the Muslims in this country who do want a different kind of Islam, who do want to deny, for instance, the Muslim tenet of abrogation, which holds that the later violent verses of the Quran cancel the ayah versus the Quran.
We need the Muslim community.
We need a new movement within our Muslim community.
Just for the United Kingdom, I think many of the other countries of Europe are probably too far gone now.
But we've got to try here and get on the side of our Muslims and get our Muslims to do exactly that, to reform their religion.
But it's not good at the moment.
I mean, only 8.6% of the tip-offs to our prevent and anti-terrorist services come from within our close-knit Muslim communities.
So at the same time as reaching out to them, I am saying, oi, could you get off your burqa a bit and help us a bit more?
You'd rather have a civic duty, I would suggest.
What?
They have a civic duty.
Well, yes, except that it goes against, you see, it goes against these.
I'm not an expert, so I want to talk about them.
These fundamental tenets of Islam.
For instance, well, there's obviously abrogation.
Al-Hijrah, which is following the example of the Prophet, after he moved Al-Hijrah from Mecca to Medina in 622, and by 627 his religion was strong enough to, you know, but he lay low during the whole of that period, until he was strong enough to say to them, look, either you join my religion, or I will find some of them.
I'll fine the people that booked the Jews and the Christians.
I'll kill the rest of you.
And he killed 600 Jews in one afternoon.
And Islam went on to conquer most of the known world.
And the Crusades were, of course, historically a response to 400 years of Muslim aggression.
I completely agree, I'm right.
But I mean, what I want to talk about is how it's working today, and how do we reach out to our Muslim friends?
How do we get them to do more?
And actually, in the end, they've got to deny, they've got to issue a fatwa against abrogation, taqiyah, al-hijrah, the greater, certainly the lesser jihad, which is the warlike jihad, and the greater jihad, which is the struggle with each one of us.
That has got to be promoted to be the meaning of jihad and nothing else.
And also, they've got to deny the pursuit of the world caliphate.
And it would be a start if they signed the United Nations Fundamental Declaration of Human Rights, which Muslims won't sign because they contain equal rights for women and it contains, as I say, the freedom to change your religion.
And Muslims won't sign that.
So they've got a thing called the Cairo Declaration, which is go along with all of this, but right at the end they say, providing it doesn't conflict with Sharia law.
So we've got a long way to go, and their birth rate is 10 times ours in the United Kingdom.
It's going up 10 times faster than us.
In 13 years' time, 10 or 11 of our English local authorities, including Birmingham, will be majority Muslim.
I don't know what happens then.
I think we should talk about it in the meantime.
Well, this is the question I try to put to left-wing men.
I personally, I'm conflicted on the Burqa question, the niqab.
I mean, I think it's a deeply ingrained cultural, well, a belief, but form of expression that we talk to one another face to face.
British people find covering the face an act of a distrustful thing to do because we and the natural thought is why are you covering your face?
You're obviously up to no good.
And so there's this inbuilt desire to see one another face to face in British culture and Western European culture generally usually.
And so I personally, on a cultural level, find the burqa to be offensive in this regard because I can't see their face and I find it difficult to form a kind of proper connection with those people.
And then you listen to the people who want to wear the burqa and they say, well, I'm doing it for my veneration for God.
And it's very clearly religious extremism that is in many places in the Middle East isn't even encouraged.
I mean, on the other side of that, I'm a liberal, so I don't want the government telling people what they can and can't wear.
But at the end of the day, if many Muslim states are banning the burqa, if France, Denmark, and I think possibly the Netherlands, somewhere, other European states are banning the burqa, what's your position on it?
Well, I'm afraid I may have coined the expression, ban the burqa, about 25 years ago.
And with all due respect, you know, to all the lovely Muslim women who wear it out of genuine religious faith and all the rest of it, you have to acknowledge that in Islam the instruction is merely to dress modestly.
And in fact, you've got a recent Grand Mufti of Egypt who said that the burqa is anti-Islamic.
Nevertheless, there it is.
I completely understand the lovely Muslim women who want to wear it for the right reasons.
But you can't get away from the fact that it is representative of radical Islam.
In fact, it goes further than radical Islam.
And it is a security risk.
And therefore, you can't wear a balaclava when you walk into a bank or in public thing.
You can't cover your face in a sheet and all the rest of it.
And so it does spill over into that area, unfortunately.
And I think it's probably not possible to, I don't know, to ban it in public places, although actually I would.
And if they want to wear it at home, they can and all the rest of it.
But when people are out and about in the street and so on, people, it's an essential thing.
We have to see other people's face.
We have to be able to look into their eyes and their face and see the whole thing.
But this is the thing I was trying to, I'm trying to put across to the sort of left-wing men who's really the people I'm talking to.
We do have cultural fabric in this country.
And covering our faces damages that cultural fabric.
I can't form significant emotional bonds with something I can't see.
And the one thing, the way I try to approach them is, well, how many women have to be wearing burqas in this country before you speak up about it?
I mean, is it one in five?
Is it one in four?
Is it one in two?
What happens when every woman in this country is wearing a burqa?
Is that okay?
Well, I don't know about every woman, but I mean, that depends what happens when Muslims form a majority in, as I was mentioning, some English local authorities within 20 years.
And don't forget the great statement which was made by one of the top Muslims in the world to a friend of mine recently, which is, you know, we really don't need to go on blowing you up.
It's a complete waste of time.
We are going to take you and your culture over through the power of the womb at the ballot box.
Now, Gaddafi said it too, actually, although it's less respectable, perhaps.
But nevertheless, there is that danger, and that's all this area is why I want to talk about it.
You know, this sort of interview is extremely rare.
I mean, it doesn't happen because nobody wants, everyone assumes that they're lovely and mild people.
Islam is a religion of peace.
I don't know, is it?
Well, Have you looked at the, what's it called, the religion of peace website?
I recommend that.
That is not challenged, any of that.
So I'm not taking a position one way or the other because I don't know enough about it.
I'm never going to be an Islamic scholar.
But I am advised by three or four people who really are.
I mean, who can recite the Quran from beginning to end?
And they're all very worried about this.
So I think we've got to talk about it.
We've got to get it right in the open.
We've got to understand the basic tenets of Islam that we're worried about.
And we've got to talk to our Muslim friends and we've got to get them together and get behind them and back them up and have a different kind of Islam in this country at least.
And we may be helped in that initiative by what may happen in Europe fairly soon.
I think the city of Brussels, I think, nothing to do with the EU, may be majority Muslim really fairly quickly.
And you've got Paris, you've got Holland, you've got Sweden, you've got, you know.
There is a definite concentration.
So if we can't talk about it, you know, and we can't talk about it, the moment as soon as I touch it, I mean, I'm a complete para, guilty of, God knows what, hate speech.
I'm a bigot.
I mean, just look at what I have to put up within the laws.
Actually, I don't care.
I quite enjoy being intensely disliked by liberal democrats.
It doesn't worry me at all.
And I like some of them personally, and they're all decent people.
But en masse, when they come together in Lord's Questions, which you can look up, it is quite uncomfortable.
And it's very, very worrying.
Why is our culture not prepared to look at this thing?
Well, let me just add something to what you've said, because there was an Eritrean translator, Christine from Eritrea, spoke Arabic.
And she was working in the refugee camps in Germany.
I can't remember which one it was off the top of my head.
But she went to the German authorities saying, look, there appears to be a plan hatch in this camp to Islamize the West.
And they're saying how they actively, when you're not around, they say in Arabic, which they think I don't understand, that we are going to try and frankly outbreed them.
We're going to try and Islamize Europe.
We couldn't do it previously, but we can in the future.
And then when you see in France particularly terror attacks against monks and priests and nuns and smashing of the statue of Virgin Mary, things like this.
I mean, I'm not a Catholic, so it was hard to object, but you can see their intent in the way that this is expressed.
And this is not the entire thing.
It's not that every single one of them is doing this, but there is clearly an undercurrent of intent and a facet of the migration into Europe that has that intention.
And like you say, nobody can talk about it, even though we're getting multiple reports and incredible reports about that.
Well, we could talk about it, but what you're not allowed to say is that they're Muslims.
And you see, because this comes from within Islam.
And you can say they're Islamists and therefore they're completely different.
Yes, no.
But actually, much of what they do, as I understand it, I mean, even the grooming gang scandal, which has been incredibly hushed up in this country by the political class and is the greatest.
I mean, we're looking at a quarter of a million white Sikh and Hindu girls raped in the last 15 years by Muslim men.
They are men of Asian origin or Pakistani or whatever.
But the common denominator is Islam.
And my advisors tell me that the rape, etc., of non-Muslim girls is sanctioned in the Quran under the whole title of what your right hand possesses.
And it runs right through the Quran.
Don't ask me, but that's what I'm told.
So I think we should talk about it.
And we should talk about the grooming gang scandal a hell of a lot more.
Well, I like it.
Instead of pretending it sort of doesn't matter.
Well, yes, and this is a distinct concern for me because one of the things that we've learned from the trials that eventually we actually actually had for these people was that they were definitely doing it for religious reasons or inspired by religious reasons.
They saw these girls as being un-Islamic.
They're not modest, they're not tightly connected to a family structure, they are worthless white horse.
Hence the Manchester bomb.
All those underdressed teenagers having a good time.
Absolutely.
Yeah, it doesn't work with his arm, I tell you.
No, no, absolutely.
So let's finish with political correctness, because I'm very much of the belief that Dr. Alexis Jay's report on Rotherham demonstrated to us very clearly that political correctness, the fear of being called a racist, was what prohibited the police and the councils and anyone else involved from wanting to talk about this, wanting to go public with it.
And you've got people like Sarah Champion, who is a Labour MP.
I'm not a fan, obviously.
No, no, she's been very brave.
She's been very brave.
She stuck to her guns on this.
What can we do about political correctness?
Oh, dearie me.
Well, I was sort of slightly in at the start of political correctness because during the 80s I sat on the body which validated all our teacher training courses in this country.
It was the Council for National Academic Awards.
I did it, you know, pro-bona warrior for nothing as it were, but I did become its treasurer, so I had a certain influence in the end.
And I managed to get myself onto the committee, I think this would be in 1984, of the committee that validated all our teacher training.
And if you want to attack a culture, as Moscow did, they spent a lot of money, the Soviets did, you go for teacher training.
That is the root of a culture.
And I was deeply shocked to find when I eventually infiltrated myself onto this committee of open Marxists.
I mean, on their CVs, they all said, this is in the polytechnic sector, although the universities, the polytechnic sectors did all the teacher training.
And our mission statement was that we had to permeate the whole curriculum with issues of gender, race, and class.
And that had been running for 10, 15 years before I joined it.
And it was one of the reasons I got close to the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, because I reported.
And she was absolutely horrified.
And she actually wanted to close teacher training down completely in the whole country.
But she was removed from office before she could achieve that.
And I'm afraid that it is from out of that, really, that comes politically.
Just think of it.
Gender, race, and class.
It's brilliant.
It's absolutely brilliant.
We can see the effects all around us.
Yeah, we can.
And it's metastasized and society.
But that's why it's so important to go back to free speech, be allowed to say what we like, even if it's wrong, in good faith.
And for goodness sake, get a confidence.
And nowhere is the curtailment of free speech more dangerous than in the prohibition to talk about Islam.
That's, I think, the number one project.
And of course, equally civilized behavior dictates that one isn't rude about gays or LGBTs or whatever.
I personally couldn't care less about any of them.
I couldn't care less about gays, although the left-wing media have accused me of being anti-gay over the others.
To which I've replied, anyone who went through Eton in the 1950s is most unlikely to be anti-gay.
And they shut up.
They haven't done it again.
It's trying to caught me off guard.
But no, but I completely agree with you.
I think that there is a pernicious alliance between radical leftism and political critics and using that as a public weapon via the media and institutional pressure from activists to protect Islam because they view Islam as some kind of victim class.
And this has created victim every single time.
And it's pernicious because it's using your own good intentions against you.
And some of it may be very unpleasant towards them.
I mean, I'm not defending all of it, but if we can't talk about it and talk about it with them, and we can't get them to join us in a conversation about what Islam is, I think our culture is in trouble.
I agree with you.
Thank you very much, Olga.
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