Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Helen Dale's Brexplainer

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May 8, 2019 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

35:33

Helen Dale's Brexplainer

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	Yes.
	Right, so Helen, what do you think of what's going on at the moment, the current state of Brexit?
	How do you view it?
	The old joke from the thick of it, I think, comes to mind.
	It's an omnichambles.
	This is legitimate and fair.
	Both parties are in a mess.
	And they're in a mess.
	And I'm going to quote fairly directly a political scientist at the University of Kent, Matthew Goodwin, who puts it very simply.
	Brexit was the first time in many hundreds of years in the history of England, certainly.
	Perhaps if you include the other home nations, it's a bit more complex.
	Where people, a majority of people outside of Parliament, asked the people inside Parliament for something that the majority of people inside Parliament didn't want to give them.
	And that was the vote to leave the European Union.
	And this has created immense complexity and mess for both the major parties.
	It's worse for the Tories, of course, because the Tories are the government and government is much harder than opposition.
	Jeremy Corbyn has actually got the easy job being the opposition leader.
	Because believe me, and I'm not just saying this because I'm a Tory, I'm saying this because it's true.
	If he were Prime Minister, he would be in just as big a mess with his party.
	The Labour Party's got about, I would estimate between 20 and 30% that are leavers, and then the rest seem to be hardcore remainers.
	I'm not sure whether they're hardcore remainers.
	I think there's definitely a group of hardcore remainers in there who are properly remain, as in they don't even really want a second referendum.
	They want to remain.
	They may make public noises about wanting a second referendum, but if you talk to some of them privately, they just say, no, we should just bear the cost of revoking Article 50.
	And one of the reasons why they're privately frightened of a second referendum is that they're worried that they'll lose.
	I think that's a really, in fact, Diane Abbott said something very much to that effect, didn't she?
	Yes, she's not.
	You know, be careful what you wish for because you just might get it.
	And I could definitely see the British public having a streak of defiance about themselves regarding this, and regardless of what they actually thought about the issue, saying, well, no, we voted.
	And this is, frankly, the problem with the European Union, the repeated votes on things that should have already been decided.
	And also, it causes problems, particularly in the context of the constitutional architecture of the United Kingdom, where referendums are rare.
	There's a serious argument to be made that prior to the entry into what was then the European Economic Community in 1975, there is a serious argument to be made that until that point they were probably unconstitutional.
	And they only became constitutionally necessary.
	My tutor in constitutional law, Professor Vernon Bogdanore, he's gone to London now, but he used to be at Oxford.
	And he always maintained that the actual referendum should have been in 1993 over Maastricht.
	Because the way the system is set up in this country is we, the voters, delegate authority to the parliamentarians who represent it, who enforce that authority and represent us back to ourselves.
	They are not allowed constitutionally to take the power that they've been given, the legislative power, and then give it to a third party, in this case the European Union, without our consent.
	So he always maintained that the referendum was probably necessary then.
	But the difficulty, of course, was that John Major turned it into a confidence vote, Maastricht, and basically dared his own party to take him down as Prime Minister.
	And the Tories, they've even shown since the Fixed Term Parliament Act, that the Tories have shown that they will keep a zombie Prime Minister like Theresa May in number 10 rather than crossing the floor and voting with Labour and triggering a general election.
	See, now, I love what you're saying there about the power delegated from the people themselves to the representatives.
	Because that was always Tony Benn's argument, wasn't it?
	How dare we delegate this power that has been entrusted to us as representatives to an extra-national body like the European Union?
	And that was always his complaint.
	And I don't see why that seems to have fallen on deaf ears in the Parliament.
	Well, that is very much the argument of a minority group now in Labour, but they used to be the majority of the Labour Party, Tony Benn, Peter Shaw, people like that.
	The Lexiteers, the Labour levers.
	And, I mean, political parties in this country, because they're ancient, the Tories are the oldest, but the Liberals or now the Liberal Democrats in Labour are old as well, they're over 100 years old.
	They have certain things to do in society in this country.
	And the role of the Conservatives is to be the party of the nation.
	And the role of Labour is to be the party of the poor.
	The role of the Liberals was to be the party of markets.
	And they've all kind of lost their way.
	The Tories are terribly divided over Brexit, so they can't represent the nation.
	Labor was hollowed out by Tony Blair and lost its ability to represent the most disadvantaged in our society.
	And it's overwhelmingly now becoming a party of middle-class metropolitan liberals who are basically Tories, but they vote Labor because it makes them feel better.
	It's really quite extraordinary.
	I mean, I see all these people defecting from Labour and saying, oh, no, we can't vote for Labor anymore because Jeremy Corbyn's a horrible socialist.
	And I'm going, I agree with you.
	I'm a Tory.
	Join the Tory party.
	And because of Labor's role as the party of the poor, it was their job, and they are custodians, or they should be custodians, of the democratic tradition in this country.
	One of the reasons why the Liberals, the old Liberals, before that the Whigs, were outflanked politically in this country was because the vote was extended.
	The franchise was extended to working class men and to women.
	And that meant the Conservatives were strengthened because until relatively recently more women than men voted Conservative.
	But also Labour had a voice.
	It found its voice.
	So the Labour Party is the custodian of democracy in this country, much more than the Tories, much more than the Lib Dems.
	And they are derelict in their duty.
	I agree.
	I agree.
	I mean, it's amazing how they've, I mean, it's almost like they've turned against the working class in much of their rhetoric.
	I find the things that they're doing now just to be just pure identitarianism.
	It's not about actually defending the poor and the struggling in this country.
	And yet they'll still use sort of like inherently divisive slogans like for the many, not the few.
	I mean, how can anyone get behind any of this?
	Well, it's very, very difficult.
	The one area that Labour has done fairly well, and it's unfortunately not widely known outside Labour circles, is they have tried to defend disabled people against benefit sanctions.
	And they do have a point that benefits sanctions, when they are inflicted on people, and they're often imposed on groups and have a geographical effect, so you can analyse them statistically, that's when food bank use shoots up.
	And it's all been Labor pointing that out.
	And that's legitimate and fair, but the thing is they're not taking that analysis into other areas.
	And I mean, all some individual Labour levers are, or Labour re-leavers like Lisa Nandy.
	She has tried to say, look, it's not just a disability issue.
	This is a much wider issue about left-behind communities in the north and midlands.
	And we can't just blame the Tories because the Tories did it years ago.
	Now we're doing it too.
	Why should they have faith in us?
	She actually gave the Clement Attlee oration at University College, Oxford a couple of days ago, I think, and that was exactly the point she made.
	And so, I mean, what do you think is going to happen?
	Because, I mean, everyone's looking at the local elections, and it seems that nobody really knows how to interpret the results of these, and nobody really knows exactly where Brexit stands now.
	The Labour Party are chomping at the bit for another general election, as always.
	You can see the sort of rabid passion in John McDonald's eyes when he thinks.
	He thinks he's going to win.
	Oh, he does.
	And he's been very upfront about overthrowing capitalism and doing various other kind of anti-democratic things like harassing Tories in the street and things like this.
	Honestly, I do genuinely find the Labour Party quite a terrifying prospect at this point.
	Particularly as, and I'm going to quote a chap, Christian Niemitz at the Institute for Economic Affairs, Margaret Thatcher's favourite think tank.
	And he maintains and has always maintained, and he's one of the best zephologists I know in this country because he really pays attention to these things, that Corbynomics is very popular.
	And that we will have Jeremy Corbyn in number 10 get used to the idea.
	He's not sure when because the fight for Brexit has to happen before the fight for the general election.
	I think most people agree with that.
	It's not the timetable that Labour wants, but that's what they're going to get, I suspect.
	And so what exactly do you think the consequences of a Corbyn government are going to be?
	Well, the obvious, I'll just go through three that stand out to me.
	Foreign policy will change dramatically.
	Palestine will be recognised.
	There will be a ban on arms sales to Saudi Arabia, which I actually agree with, to be fair.
	You'll say me, yeah.
	I'm actually okay with that here.
	Yeah, that's one where Corbyn is right and all his critics are wrong.
	It's just you have to admit that.
	The other guy has a good point.
	So that's the foreign policy area.
	Domestically, unions will be empowered.
	You may see the re-emergence again of no-ticket, no-start workplaces, particularly if Brexit happens, because one of the reasons why you can't have no ticket, no start workplace.
	Were you familiar with that no-ticket, no-start?
	If you're not a member of the union, you can't get a job at a particular workplace.
	Older people will remember it pre-1979, but young people are not familiar with it, obviously.
	I mean, I have worked in Australia in a no-ticket, no start workplace, because the unions in Australia are still relatively powerful.
	It will be a novel experience here for anyone under the age of 35.
	But is it positive for them?
	Because it just sounds like a way of giving a union control over people who have not agreed to be under their control.
	Well, no, that's the problem with it.
	And interestingly, the reason it doesn't exist in Britain is because of a European Court of Human Rights judgment that says you can't force people to go on strike if they don't want to.
	You can't force people to join the union if they don't want to.
	This is the ironic thing.
	This is why, and this is another reason why some of the democratic socialists and why Corbyn himself has been so fluid on this.
	I think fluid.
	It's a good euphemism, yeah.
	In the privacy of the polling booth, I think the man voted leave.
	I really do.
	I really do.
	I agree.
	And so you will see that.
	And the other thing, the most obvious and dramatic thing you will see, particularly if it is in a post-Brexit context where the European Union rules about state aid have been swept away, the railways will be taken into public ownership.
	And if Macdonald gets his way, there will not be compensation.
	It'll just be the end and those companies will be wound down.
	And then a dramatic, a dramatic increase in taxation.
	Yes.
	Corporate and income tax.
	And so that, yeah, and specifically in the post-Brexit context, I find that concerning, especially the corporation tax.
	I mean, obviously, I don't particularly want my own personal taxes to go up.
	But I also, I mean, it seems obvious that we're going to have to try and encourage corporations to come here after Brexit.
	And I'm no economist, but I would suggest that the best way to do that is to reduce corporation tax as an incentive.
	And Jeremy Corbyn is going to do the exact opposite of what's required there.
	So he's probably going to hurt the country in a post-Brexit scenario.
	Is that correct?
	Yes.
	I mean, well, I'm essentially a free market conservative.
	So I'm in the sort of classical liberal wing of the Tory Party.
	And we actually had all these arguments about these kinds of policies.
	We've had them once before in 1979.
	And one, unfortunately, because there has been a generational shift in politics, and also because Theresa May is a completely incompetent campaigner, blew a 20% poll lead over an antediluvian Marxist, you know, and gave us a hung parliament where she had to go into coalition with a bunch of Northern Irish nutters.
	I mean, it's just great.
	Fantastic, brilliant.
	Top job, Theresa.
	So we had these arguments in 1979.
	Thatcher won them.
	She won them in a way that has caused, to use the word that the kids love, is problematic in that it tanked the North and the Midlands.
	Yes.
	And we've now got serious social problems as a result of that.
	But it's once again, it's the people under 35 have no, the Tories kept banging on, remember the winter of discontent.
	I'm old.
	I can barely remember the winter of discontent.
	You need to talk to people who are 50 and older who can remember bodies going unburied and rubbish piling up in the streets and the experience of what it was like in the country.
	Well, this is why my father will never vote Labour.
	I mean, he was, you know, talking about the three-day work week, the lack of electricity, like you say, rubbish piling up in the streets, bodies unburied.
	I mean, it was like we were a third world country under the Labour government.
	Well, and to be fair, in the height of the sort of that long, protracted monetary crisis in the inflation crisis in the 70s, the United Kingdom was forced to go cap in hand to the IMF.
	You know, these policies were disastrously bad.
	And that's why Margaret Thatcher was elected and was able to sort of break the post-war settlement and move off in a different direction.
	Yeah.
	And that's genuinely, I think, a lot of people's fears.
	And it looks like it's going to come true, doesn't it?
	Well, yes, because Corbinomics is popular.
	But although, as Matthew Goodwin, going back to Professor Goodwin, the academic at Kent points out, Corbinomics is popular.
	There's no getting away from that.
	But it's Corbynomics combined with national populism, which a national populism is the sort of policies of UKIP and the Brexit Party.
	But not your economic policies, which are more free market.
	But in favour of protectionism, support for unions, heavy restrictions on immigration.
	We're not just talking Australian-style, oh no, we won't have any dummies and we won't have any terrorists.
	We're talking very heavy restrictions on immigration, even skilled immigration.
	You know, that's his sort of true national populism.
	And that, combined with Corbinomics ideas, a lot of that quadrant of voters, if there were a political party that had some oomph and the media to get that message out, they would make bank.
	Because those sets of ideas in combination, I mean, they'd probably only win two elections and then they'd tank the economy.
	Those two sets of ideas in combination are very popular.
	So, how is Theresa May still the Prime Minister?
	Because I think everyone is really scratching their heads about this.
	Because, I mean, like, she looks like she looks like some kind of lynchpin that's just holding the Conservative Party in power at the moment.
	And they look like they're afraid to take her out just in case the whole thing collapses.
	I suspect she's been eating people's brains, to be honest.
	Well, she looks like it, doesn't she?
	Brains.
	So, seriously, I mean, how do we still have Theresa May?
	And how are we still in the European Union?
	How is this happening?
	Well, the second question I can answer, that's the Goodwin answer.
	A majority of people in Parliament were asked something by a majority of the people and they didn't want to give it, and that's unresolved.
	How Theresa May is still there is.
	I mean, a lot of it, a lot of the blame has to go to Michael Gove for knifing Boris straight after the referendum.
	I mean, and of course, now Michael Gove, there's this unwritten rule in the Tory party that he who wields the knife cannot wear the crown, which means Michael Gove is never going to be Prime Minister.
	He can't be because of what he did.
	I mean, and that certainly took the wind out of the sails of the broader Leave movement and the Conservative Party.
	And so, Theresa May, the reluctant Remainer, the Tory version of Jeremy Corbyn, although I think she was a bit less reluctant than Jeremy.
	Jeremy just disappeared.
	Yeah, he's been keeping his head down, hasn't he?
	Well, no, no, during the 2016 referendum campaign, I mean, they constantly, this was one thing Brexit, the uncivil war, the TV show did really well.
	They would constantly clear diaries for Jeremy so he could get up and do a big set-piece speech.
	And suddenly, he mysteriously had the flu or a cold or, you know, he just couldn't, he made himself unavailable.
	Whereas Theresa May didn't do that.
	She's a vicar's daughter.
	She's too dutiful.
	I actually went to a bunch of protests shortly after the referendum result.
	And there were people just walking around like huge, huge swathes of people chanting, where's Jeremy Corbyn?
	You know, why aren't you here fighting for Remain?
	And I mean, if you look at just any of his previous statements about the European Union in the past three decades, you know exactly why Jeremy Corbyn isn't there.
	And quit from the Brexit, the uncivil war, Jeremy Corbyn has never changed his mind on anything.
	He formed his political views 30 years ago and they haven't changed.
	Yes, no, I agree.
	I mean, that's another thing, isn't it?
	I speak to a lot of sort of working-class men, and there's a lot of genuine disappointment in Jeremy Corbyn for just being, well, spineless on the issue.
	He should have been the leave side, really, shouldn't he?
	He should have, but this is the problem.
	He's got the same problem that Theresa May has.
	Not as badly, not as badly amplified because he's the opposition leader and government is harder than opposition.
	But he's got this problem of a divided party.
	And a party also, the other thing that's made it worse for him is during the Blair Brown period, Labor's membership was hollowed out.
	The traditional Labour voters and supporters just left the Labour Party.
	And sometimes it was dramatic, chop up your party membership card and post it on Twitter, that kind of thing.
	But a lot of it was just drifting away.
	And it meant that Labor could a new party could essentially be formed because a different group, a different constituency came in and seized control of it.
	Not nastily, not deliberately.
	I mean, there's probably a bit of entryism amongst the momentum crowd, but not that much.
	You don't think so?
	A lot of it, they just joined because they wanted to.
	Right, okay.
	There were so many of them, they changed the direction of the party.
	I mean, that's the thing.
	Like, I follow a bunch of the momentum pages, and they're all I mean, they're all acolytes of John MacDonald.
	And I would consider John MacDonald quite a radical communist.
	Yes.
	So, you know, when I see momentum in the Labour Party, I mean, it looks like they are the anti-Semitic group.
	You know, it looks like that's where the anti-Semitism is coming from.
	It looks like that's where all the radical, like, just loopy ideas that Labour are bandying around.
	I mean, maybe I'm wrong, you know, maybe I'm wrong that that's the source, but that just really looks like it's.
	Well, they've certainly just got the Labour Party, but there's so many of them.
	Yeah, that's the thing.
	They're just huge in number.
	I mean, I mean, you wouldn't.
	Labour is not a mass party the way it was in the 50s anymore, but it's the closest of any of the British political parties to a mass party now because it's just got so many members.
	All those people join.
	Yeah, and it seems very middle class at this point.
	Oh, yes, it is.
	Very bourgeois, socialist, university-educated.
	Well, this is the shift, the shift in Labour.
	It's been hollowed out by Blair and then taken over by a new constituency.
	This happens in British politics a lot, though.
	I mean, before the First World War, the Tories were an aristocratic party.
	And then, by the time of the coupon election in 1918, they became a party of business.
	And in the process of becoming a party of business, they ate the Liberals.
	I mean, and that's why you had all those books about the strange death of Liberal England and that kind of thing.
	Okay, so what else do you think is relevant for us to talk about before we start asking questions?
	Ask taking questions from people.
	Is there anything else to do?
	I will make a little personal statement here because I'm having to play my cards quite carefully so that I don't get thrown out of the Conservative Party, basically, because Carl is a UKIP candidate.
	So I'm going to make a few comments about the South West, but I can't tell you to vote for anyone.
	Well, I could tell you to vote for the Conservatives, but I don't know who is running for the Conservatives in the South West.
	I mean, it's very easy to.
	I'm not even sure if they're running anyone.
	I think they aren't they running dead?
	Oh, I'm not sure.
	Do you know?
	No, no, no, no.
	Because there were a bunch of constituencies in which the Conservatives simply weren't running anyone for the European elections.
	That doesn't surprise me.
	I have read that as well, and I'm just wondering if it's also.
	I would have to check, but I have to say, I've not heard anything about any Conservative MEPs in the South West.
	In the South Party, I mean, you've got Lord Adonis for Labour, you've got Anne Whittakham for the Brexit Party, and then you've got myself and Lawrence Webb for the United Kingdom Independence Party.
	This wouldn't surprise me.
	It's relatively easy to vote conservative.
	If you're a lever, it's relatively easy to vote Conservative in the South East because you have Daniel Hannan to vote for.
	Oh, yes.
	I mean, and I strongly suspect that the heavy leave vote in the South East, in the Shires, will probably hold up simply because Daniel Hannan is on the ticket.
	The South West is more complex, and one of the things, an observation I will make is if you are socially liberal, that is pro-choice, pro-same-sex marriage, that kind of thing, it is easier, even though UKIP is portrayed as a more right-wing party, to vote for you personally than it is for Anne Whitticomb because Anne Whitticomb is a traditional, old-fashioned, social conservative member of the Conservative Party.
	And that's just a simple.
	Well, I would describe her as a Catholic theocrat.
	She's very conservative.
	She's very socially conservative.
	Yeah, it's quite incredible.
	I mean, like you say, I'm a very socially liberal person.
	I think, I mean, since I've been in UKIP, it's been very obvious to me that UKIP are a very liberal party in those regards.
	They're not interested in telling you how to run your life.
	No.
	And I mean also too, there's starting to become more voices in UKIP and some of the people in the Brexit party as well speaking up for cannabis legalisation and sort of traditional social liberal policies, which, I mean, obviously the main deal is Brexit, which is why you have the Brexit Party is a single issue party and why you've got people in it like Anne Whitticomb and her polar opposite has to be the one who's been in the news a lot.
	Claire Fox.
	So we've got one over here on the far right and then we've got another one over here who used to be a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party.
	And she's a radical libertarian.
	Radical left libertarian.
	Right, yeah.
	Basically legalize everything.
	Yes, yes.
	Cocaine, heroin.
	And we've seen the headlines of child pornography and things like that.
	And the thing is, I just assumed that that was a smear because it sounds like a smear.
	Well, the stuff about the IRA is, to use Toby Young's expression, is offence archaeology.
	I mean, they've deliberately found a view that Claire Fox no longer holds and they're beating her over the head with it.
	But there is no doubting the fact that people in the Revolutionary Communist Party did used to believe those things.
	I mean, people looked at them and they had, well, they're a bunch of trots.
	They were mad.
	But I agree.
	I agree.
	But I mean, Claire Fox is also a formidable organiser.
	She runs the battle of ideas and she's the one who's always on moral maze and tripping people up because she just thinks of things in a very sideways kind of way.
	It's just very different.
	But yeah, so Brexit Party is a single issue party.
	So I'll just put that part out there.
	I'm not telling you who to vote for, but I am suggesting that you think about more than just the single issue of Brexit because if people do finish up sitting in the European Parliament until October, that's five months of sittings you'll have to do.
	You'll have to be in that big building in Brussels.
	I appreciate that.
	Being driven up the wall.
	Oh, I'll be doing my best to drive them up the wall, I think.
	But so you will have to sort of confront that reality.
	And so you've got things, you will have policies you have to vote on.
	And you will have issues you have to vote on.
	And someone like you, I mean, the obvious thing to campaign on because you know about it, is something like the Copyright Directive, Article 13.
	You'd be silly not to.
	Of course.
	a policy issue, but they also, hello, his phone's gone on.
	Yeah, sorry, I thought I was on silent.
	Apologise for that.
	That's okay.
	Everyone will get a little bit of music.
	So leave that from...
	Yes, the copyright directive is a severe concern.
	And anyone who's interested in using the internet in future and the sort of way you use it now, you're going to be directly affected by this.
	Yes, yes.
	Because what they've proposed in the Copyright Directive is to make social media, particularly Google and Facebook, liable for their users' copyright violations.
	Now, this is the rule that applies to the BBC, to a newspaper, Torregraph, Times, Guardian, whatever, to LBC, whatever.
	Any standard media organisation that is a publisher has liability for its columnists and artists and the people who make content has liability for their breaches of copyright.
	But it also has liability for other things.
	I write for The Spectator.
	I was just in The Spectator this last week.
	If I write a piece for The Spectator that defames someone, yes, they can sue me, but I probably don't have enough money to satisfy a big defamation claim.
	So they will sue Apollo Media.
	They will sue the spectator as well.
	And the copyright directive doesn't mean that yet.
	But the traditional indicia of being a publisher is that the entity is liable for its users' harms.
	So this is the, and in the case of YouTube and Facebook, that means that you've got a situation where there is not technology available for those companies.
	It doesn't exist.
	It's like the Irish backstop.
	The technology does not exist.
	To somehow figure out who is breaching copyright on their platform.
	This technology is not yet available.
	The only way to make it work with existing technology is to treat YouTube and to treat Facebook as publishers, to treat them as though they were the BBC.
	And as soon as that happens, I mean, in a way, it would probably make reality what, it would enact into law what is already real.
	They are publishers, but they're not treated as fully as publishers yet, although the EU is heading there.
	But it would reintroduce, they would not be able to do what they do currently.
	It would reintroduce media gatekeepers.
	You, because you're popular, you would probably find yourself in an editorial role.
	So people at YouTube would be going, right, new up-and-coming right and centre-right YouTubers, Mr. Benjamin.
	Could you be looking out for them, please?
	You would be like the video production, the people who do those productions and roles.
	Yeah, this is what I mean.
	As soon as you treat these entities like publishers, all the rules change.
	They have to hire armies of lawyers to make sure they haven't defamed people.
	They have to exercise editorial control.
	And also the existing political ecosystems present in those social media companies will become baked in.
	So Twitter will be left.
	Facebook will be centre-left.
	YouTube will be centre-right.
	So basically, they will become like the bias that exists everywhere else in the media.
	BBC is centre-to-centre-left.
	The Tory Graph is centre-right to right.
	The Times is centre-right.
	The Guardian is left.
	All of those things that exist in media will just apply to social media as well.
	And the ability for a startup, a new person, to find their voice will be destroyed unless they can be besties with someone at one of these entities.
	Are they one of Mr. Benjamin's best friends?
	Yes, exactly.
	Exactly.
	And then we end up with the sort of problem that we have with the media now.
	It's all a closed club and you have to be connected to people to get into it.
	And just the scale of social media.
	I mean, these platforms have billions of users.
	They will have to start restraining just the number of people who can even use their platforms, just in principle, for their own protection.
	And I mean, it's a really, I mean, it would be an absolute tragedy because the beauty of social media is that anyone can do it.
	You know, that was the beauty of it.
	That's what makes it.
	It took away gatekeepers and gave us this extraordinary moment where anybody could have their say and if they were good at it, they could become popular and build an audience.
	The example I like to give, I'm a lawyer, so I mean, to give a nice concrete example to people, if you were a funny comedian who told offensive jokes in the 70s and 80s, A, you had to be very good.
	B, you had to have friends at comedy clubs and bars so that you could get gigs booked.
	And C, you had to be able to piss in the right pockets, excuse my French, of the gatekeepers so you could keep getting booked.
	But with social media, with Facebook and YouTube, Jonathan Pye was able to come from nowhere.
	He had not had any gigs in comedy clubs.
	He started on Facebook and YouTube.
	And that's what the removal of gatekeepers facilitated.
	He didn't have to do what Dawn French did and what all the sort of traditional BBC comedians did, which is where they had to literally piss in the right pockets.
	And again, I really think that's the beauty of it, because it unlocks the talent of the regular person.
	Like you say, you know, the ability to come from nothing without any kind of institutional community support and actually make a success of what you're doing.
	I mean, that is surely the best of what people are, you know, the best of what social media can unlock.
	And the alternative is cutting off the good parts of social media and then still remaining with the bad parts, which is the kind of the political isolation, the kind of channels that people get run into and never the twain meet.
	I mean, it means that social media is probably going to end up dying, doesn't it?
	It could certainly require legislation in the United States as well, I think, for that to happen.
	But if you get a government, say Trump, I'll pick on Trump because he's the president, who is sufficiently angry about the banning of right-wing commentators from Facebook in this case.
	And he does seem to have picked up on this.
	Yes, he has.
	Now, in the US, there is a piece of legislation, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, that at the moment protects social media companies and all ISPs.
	To a very large degree, there are minor statutory carve-outs to do with human trafficking in sex work, which I won't go into, but protects them from suit on copyright grounds and defamation grounds, misleading and deceptive conduct, all of those things.
	They're protected from suit.
	Now, that legislation will only be good for as long as it's in force.
	If you get enough Republicans angry about it, it's relatively, you know, and you get through the House and the Senate, particularly if Trump wins, and he's likely to win the next election by a larger margin because the Democrats are doing their standard thing of forming a circular firing squad.
	Yes, they are.
	And so if you get a Republican-dominated House and Senate, then that legislation may be repealed or dramatically amended.
	And if that happens, that would kill social media.
	That would be the end.
	And it would also be the end of the internet as we know it.
	But always remember that the European Union, even without the United Kingdom in it, all of those trading, and this is a remainder argument, but it's a legitimate remainer argument.
	That big trading block is huge.
	It's a larger economic entity than the United States.
	So they can get very, very nasty and they're more inclined to use the law to bully because the tradition of Europe is different.
	They have a stronger tradition, it's that simple, of authoritarianism more recently.
	The Americans haven't had that kind of terrible authoritarianism since the 19th century.
	Whereas in Europe, it's obviously more recent, as we all know.
	Yeah.
	So, right, okay, so I figure we've got another microphone.
	If Johnny would like to take it around and we can take questions from anyone who's around who happens to want to ask us anything.
	Any subject at all, if we can't answer it, we'll be straight up and say, well, we can't answer it.
	If I can just suggest, I mean, I'm a lawyer and commentator.
	Those are my novels there.
	There's a video.
	I did a long chat about Kingdom of the Wicked, two of the books there, with Carl on his Sargon of ACCAD channel.
	So have a look at that.
	It's definitely worth your time as well.
	And I can't really answer, apart from the kind of historical context and background that I've given.
	I can't give you political advice and I can't tell you who to vote for.
	So if you're those questions have to go to him, and I will just sit here and keep stumbling.
	I'm a candidate for the Southwest MEP for UKIP, so I can tell you exactly who to vote for me.
	I'm not going to be shy about that.

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