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Jan. 26, 2019 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:00:21
Delingpod 5: Lance Forman
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Welcome to the Delling Pod, as it's now known, and we've got a very exciting guest this week.
He's a guy that I've known for some time on Twitter, and of course I've eaten his product before.
His name is Lance Foreman, and he's proprietor of the world's oldest salmon smoking company.
Is that right, Lance?
That's absolutely right.
It was started by my great-grandfather back in 1905, and I don't think he would ever imagine that it would still be operating 114 years later, but there you go.
Yeah, no, I've just been to have a look at your, what is it called, a smokery?
Smokehouse, smokery, yeah.
The smokehouse, and I've seen people preparing the salmon, and it looks, a lot of wastage involved.
Well, it depends whether you call it wasted or not.
I mean, in our process, which is the traditional process, you lose a lot of weight in the product in moisture.
And that was the whole point of smoked salmon.
If you go back to how it all started, refrigeration was very basic 114, 115 years ago.
So the way you preserve food is you draw the moisture out and the smoke would then actually be a protective seal.
It was not a flavoring.
It was a method of preserving the food.
And so, you know, you lose about 20% to 25% of the weight of the product just in evaporation.
And when you're selling fish by the kilo, if you're losing 25% of the weight, you're losing 25% of your turnover.
And so all the modern producers nowadays try to sell you water for the price of salmon because it's good business, but you end up with very slimy smoked salmon.
Whereas our method here, it's a very modern facility because it's new, but our method is exactly the same as it would have been 100 years ago.
I suppose what I meant by the waste was I saw the everything is done by hand, which is really artisanal, which is nice to see.
It is.
And I was seeing them slicing off the sort of the crusty outside bit.
Is that right?
Yes.
It's technically known as the pellicle, but yes, it's the bit that comes into contact with the smoke.
And you can't eat that, or you can eat that?
Well, you can eat it, but if you've got a beautiful fresh fish, why would you want it to taste like an ashtray?
The whole point of smoked salmon was, again, when my great-granddad started this, when he arrived from Odessa in Russia, he didn't even realise when he came here that there was a salmon native to Britain.
So he was originally shipping in salmon from the Baltic in barrels of salt water.
And it was only when he went down to the fish market and saw these beautiful wild salmon come down from Scotland every summer, he thought, let's use the Scottish fish.
And when he started smoking the Scottish salmon, the quality of this product was so extraordinary, partly because the fish hadn't been in barrels of water for a few months.
You know, people fell in love with it.
And smoked salmon was born as this great gourmet food.
But it was about the fish.
It was not about the smoke.
The smoke was the method to preserve it.
It was about, you know, the fish.
And that's how it should be.
And we, you know, we haven't changed that technique at all.
So if you smoked a salmon and you hung it up in your larder or whatever...
How long would it last for?
How long would it be edible for?
It would be fine for two or three weeks.
Oh right, so not months then?
Oh no, not months.
No, but certainly quite a few weeks at a time.
Once you then cut through that outer crust and you sort of reveal the fish itself, then it's only got a shelf life of a few days.
It's like a fresh fish.
All you're doing by smoking it is you're slowing down the rate of deterioration.
Right, right, right.
Okay.
And I like the idea that you are the descendant of Odessa Jews in the East...
East End?
Is it the East End?
No, this really is the East End.
I mean, I think this is about as far east as the East End went, but it's very much the East End London.
But you're quite unusual, aren't you?
I mean, there are not many Jews left in the East End of London.
Well, funnily enough, I think quite a few young ones are starting to come back again.
Oh, are they?
Actually, yeah.
I mean, you know, if you look at sort of Shoreditch and, you know, all the sort of regeneration even now going on around the Olympic Park.
There's a problem for housing, for young people getting on the housing ladder, and there's so much regeneration happening in this part of town now.
Younger people, younger Londoners, and younger Jewish Londoners are starting to look east.
This is good, because as you probably know, I'm a bit like Julie Birchall, in that I'm not Jewish myself, but I kind of have this love, almost unhealthy love of the Jews, I think.
It can never be unhealthy.
It can never be too unhealthy.
I want good things to happen to you, and I want traditions to continue, and so I'm really glad you're here.
We were talking earlier, weren't we, about how the world has changed in the last, well, it seems to have changed quite rapidly, the rise of anti-Semitism in the UK, for example, which is of a virulence that I've never experienced before in my lifetime.
Yeah, I mean, as a child, and I'm also the child of a Holocaust survivor.
Oh, right.
So my dad was born in Poland, and he spent the war years, well, half of the war years in a Siberian prison camp in the forest in Poland.
And then was released and moved further west to Tashkent and was in a Jewish ghetto in Tashkent for the second half of the war.
And he was one of, you know, you see in the movies these little kids that sort of climb under the ghetto wall and trade a bit of bread for, you know, something to survive.
He was one of those kids.
Yeah, we can't let that one go by.
I want to hear a bit more about this.
So, son of a Holocaust survivor, I grew up in the 1970s.
There was a threat, you know, young Jewish people in London did feel a little bit of a threat from the right, you know, the National Front was sort of fairly prominent in those days.
But then that died.
And I think certainly when Thatcher came into power, you know, she was quite pro-Jewish.
Mm-hmm.
And, you know, anti-Semitism just wasn't really an issue at all.
But in the last few years, it's risen its ugly head again, and not from the right, but certainly, you know, very much from the left.
And, you know, Corbyn has been...
Personally, and I think he is anti-Semitic, actually.
I speak to people that have met him.
They ask him the sort of questions that you need to ask to establish.
When you see somebody face-to-face, you can see their reaction.
And he's done nothing to stop this dreadful tirade of anti-Semitism coming from the left.
And he could stop it, but he just doesn't.
Have you got any theories on why they are that way?
No.
Well, I think, you know, people often link sort of, I mean, you know, you're talking about the hard left here, and they often link sort of, you know, certainly wealthy Jews to capitalism, so on.
Marx was born Jewish, but one of the worst anti-Semites.
And I think so you get a lot of that coming from the left.
And a lot of that has now been sort of, you know, has switched into anti-Zionism.
And, you know, that's the fashionable term.
I'm not into submitting.
I'm just anti-Zionist.
Exactly.
And the whole Palestinian cause thing is, you know.
Do they really love the Palestinians?
And so, you know, this is certainly the new form of anti-Semitism.
And it's not being shut down.
And you see it, you know, you see it certainly in social media.
I was at an event a few days ago for the Holocaust Educational Trust.
And I was...
You say you had Rachel Riley there?
Rachel Riley was...
Can I just ask you, is she as hot in real life as she's on TV? Because she is pretty amazingly...
She is absolutely stunning and very intelligent too.
Fantastic combination.
That's almost a dangerous combination.
Dangerous combination.
I mean, she gave a very...
Out of all our league.
Absolutely.
But she gave an extraordinarily powerful speech.
And she's, you know, she has a Jewish grandmother.
Both of her parents aren't Jewish.
But she was, you know...
And it's not an issue that she didn't really grow up in a religious, with any sort of great religious background at all.
She knew she had Jewish blood.
And I think she said that about a year ago something caught her eye on social media and she thought this was a little bit unfair.
And so she just spoke out against it.
And literally week by week, month by month, she has come under extraordinary attack from the left because she stood up against anti-Semitism.
And she said the whole thing is, I'm sure you can find on social media her speech, but some of the stuff that she faces is absolutely vile and hateful, and she feels completely threatened now.
This is a crazy state of affairs.
I felt for a long time that one of the big problems with social media is the anonymity.
Yeah.
I'm very happy to have my name out there.
I'm proud of what I say.
I never hide behind anything.
You're the same, James.
But on social media, you often see a picture of a cat or a cartoon figure, and obviously people don't put their real names.
And it's very easy to bully and to attack people and to threaten them and so on when you have that anonymity.
You don't get that with, you know, the written press.
If you write a letter to a newspaper, you know, you've got to provide your address.
Same on the radio.
They phone you back.
So it's traceable.
And social media, it's not.
And I raised this with some of the people at this event.
And I said, you know, wouldn't it be better if social media, you know, you had to give your, you know, there was some way of enforcing that.
You had to have your You know, your real name or there was traceability back to an address.
And I was absolutely bowled over and completely surprised when I was told that a lot of these attacks are coming from people now with their identities and people are not afraid to be anti-Semitic in public.
And it's absolutely shameful that Corbyn hasn't closed that down.
Absolutely shameful.
Yeah.
No, the reason I ask that question about what is it that motivates people is because I'm puzzled.
It's a line that to me is...
Hating Jews just because they're Jewish seems to me to be absolutely irrational.
And the only way you could justify it is if you had some kind of grand overarching theory, one of which is the one you mentioned about Jews being kind of arch-capitalists and exploiters of the proletariat or whatever it is that...
But then you have many Jewish communists too.
I mean, Jews don't fall into one political category.
I was wondering whether it was that or whether it was more the Palestinian thing, because there is that element, isn't there, of sort of identity politics.
It's what Charlie Kirk calls the oppression Olympics, and I suppose fairly high on the oppression Olympics medals table are the Palestinians, at least if you believe the world's media, which takes a complete bollocks line, doesn't it?
Well, you know, the Palestinian issue wasn't an issue at all until even 1967 at the very earliest.
And yet, the PLO was set up in 1964.
So, you know, Labour, the left are saying, well, we should go back to those 1967 borders.
But the Palestinian Liberation Organization...
When they even had those 67 borders.
It was always about erasing Israel from the map.
It was always about that.
You know, there could be peace tomorrow if they just accepted that Israel is there and is going to be there forever.
There will be peace tomorrow.
Israel has yearned for peace from day one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, you go to Israel quite a lot, don't you?
I would say probably once a year, once every couple of years, although my eldest son has just moved there, actually.
So he's living in Jerusalem now.
Do you worry about him being in a country which part of the world has vowed to erase from the map?
No, I think he's more worried about us at the moment.
Actually, good point.
Yeah, it's really funny.
Whenever there are troubles in any part of the world, you always have foreign relatives in some far-flung place saying, oh, is everything okay?
And of course, it's absolutely fine.
I mean, Israel is a very safe country now.
And actually, most of the lessons that we're learning over here about security have come from what they learned in Israel.
Even the drone attack or not attack at Gatwick airports, you know, it was Israeli technology that was able to, you know, to prevent it.
I was going to actually ask that.
This is my theory on Israel, that...
Besides the reasons we've mentioned, I think that the reason the left really hates Israel is because it doesn't buy into any of the politically correct shit that has taken hold of our societies in the West.
The Israelis are much more hardcore about, there's a terrorist problem, you deal with it.
You build a wall.
There's a drone problem, you get better technology.
You don't spend your whole time apologising for being who you are.
Well, you say that, and I wouldn't disagree with you, but I would say one of the strongest LGBT communities in the world is in Israel.
Without question, the strongest vegan community is in Israel.
If you want gourmet vegan food...
You know, Tel Aviv is the place to go.
So, you know, there's a multitude of different politics across Israel, and it's a thriving democracy.
You cannot put Jewish people into one camp or another.
Or, you know, you have a large sort of Arab population in Israel too, and they live perfectly happily alongside their Jewish neighbours.
Sure, sure.
I... I see your point about how it's a remarkably liberal society given its kind of reputation, but I suppose the point I'm struggling to make is that there is something hardcore about the way that the...
The Israelis think about the world.
Yeah, it's a don't mess with us.
You know, just don't mess.
You know, we've been persecuted for a few thousand years.
You know, everybody's tried to attack us.
And now we have our own state.
We will defend ourselves to hilt.
And that is why Netanyahu is so popular in Israel.
You have a very strong sort of liberal left Jewish community in Israel, and yet even many of them will support Netanyahu because he is absolutely firm on security.
It's not about the economics.
It's not about...
You know, the sort of social issues.
Yeah.
For Israelis, security comes first.
And unless you have somebody that's absolutely strong on security, you haven't got a country left.
Yeah.
So, you know, that's why Netanyahu keeps winning.
Because he's, you know, he's firm.
Yeah.
So we...
In Britain, we've got our own problems, haven't we?
Opportunities, I call them.
Look, we're on the same page politically, and you're a fierce Brexiteer.
Just tell me why, because you're a businessman, and you think that we're going to be better off out of the European Union, you know?
Well, I'll tell you why I was often quoted during the Brexit campaign about being a Brexiter, and then I'll tell you why I'm really a Brexiter.
So it's very hard on media to get a sensible explanation out because all they want is a 10-second soundbite.
So I do these half-hour interviews and then the bit that they would always grab was when we came on to talking about sort of mad regulations.
And I explained that a couple of years ago we had to spend literally tens of thousands of pounds reprinting all of our smoked salmon packaging so that a packet of smoked salmon would have an EU warning sign on the back which said contains fish.
Okay, that's absolutely true.
Okay, so you now have to have contains fish on the packet of smoked salmon.
And I joke that, you know, maybe the EU should have a warning sign on it saying contains nuts.
But that's the bit the media took.
Why am I really, you know, pro-Brexit?
I'm very worried about Europe.
I'm seriously worried about Europe and, you know, the direction Europe's heading.
And I've felt this for the last, well, 15 to 20 years since the single currency first came along.
I've always believed that economics trumps politics.
You know, if you look at communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union, it wasn't the communist philosophy that brought it down.
It was the fact that people were starving and they couldn't get bread.
You know, these breadcues, that's what brought it down.
It's always economics that drives it.
And the problem with a single currency, you know, this one-size-fits-all currency...
It doesn't allow countries or economies in Europe to move at their own pace.
So the only way you can keep things in balance, you know, it's like a seesaw.
If you can't move the pivot, the only way you keep things in balance is transferring weight from the heavy one to the light one.
It's the same with economies.
The only way you can keep Europe in balance is by having wealth transfers from Germany, the richer countries, to the poorer ones.
But the problem, you know, the problem that you then get is that once there's an economic negative cycle in the wealthy country, they start thinking, well, hang on a second, you know, why are we transferring all this money to the poorer country when we've actually got issues of our own?
And, you know, we're doing 18-hour days and these guys have three siestas and so on.
And if we're going to start transferring all that wealth, we want to lay down stricter rules to how that's going to happen.
And you've started to see that happen in Greece, in Italy now and so on.
And then on the recipients end, you know, they've had this dependency culture, there's no incentive for them to be more efficient, because they've been getting the handouts.
And they start seeing these new rules coming along and about how they've got to have these budget constraints and austerity and so on.
They think, well, that wasn't what we signed up for.
We don't like that.
And that builds resentment.
And resentment, then, the more this goes on, resentment leads to extremism.
And if you look across Europe now, we have more extremism on right and left than we've had at any time since World War II. And I believe that the longer this goes on, the greater the risk of chaos in Europe.
And, you know, potentially even war in Europe.
You know, I'm really scared about it.
And it all comes from the single currency.
And the problem is that if the EU leadership won't get rid of the single currency, which they won't because they want a federal Europe, they won't get rid of it.
You have to torpedo the project.
So for me, Brexit was about...
Britain pulling out, doing well outside the EU, and others saying, hey, we don't need to be in this anymore.
We don't need mass youth unemployment because the euro doesn't work for us.
We can do what Britain's done and leave and have our own currency back and rebalance.
And that's really what it was all about.
You know, it was about the economics.
Yeah, I think a lot of the damage has already been done, hasn't it?
I remember going to...
Going to Berlin for some conference and flying back to the UK and sitting next to me was this young Spanish guy and he was talking about how he was working in restaurants in the UK. And he told me that none of his generation live and work in Spain.
That seems to me an awful side effect of this European project, that Spanish kids are no longer able to live a Spanish life in Spain, in the land of their forefathers.
Right.
Absolutely.
And it's all driven by the currency.
They're not all coming to the UK because of the weather.
They're coming because they can't get jobs in their own countries.
And that's not going to get any better whilst you have a single currency.
The only country that really benefits massively from a single currency is, of course, Germany.
Because they then have an artificially devalued currency, which makes their exports...
Far, far cheaper across the world than they should be.
It's not just exports within the EU itself.
This is exports around the entire globe.
They are exporting with an artificially subsidised currency.
And it makes it impossible for anyone else to compete.
So again, it's absolutely crazy.
It has to end.
This thing is not sustainable.
When you talk about war, who would be fighting whom?
How would it work?
Well...
Would it be us against Germany again?
Well, don't say that for a smile.
Well, I don't know, because I quite fancy our chances.
A, on previous form.
And B... Third time lucky maybe on their part.
They're really fat at the moment.
They're really fat.
And they've been beating themselves up about the previous two wars.
So they've got this kind of peacenet culture.
Look, if you saw some of that footage, was it last year or the year before, in Greece, when there were the riots in Greece, there's a lot of anti-German feeling there.
And you could very easily see that same thing spreading around the rest of Europe if this continued.
If you had austerity and people really struggling in certain parts of Southern Europe and Spain, Portugal and so on.
You know, who knows where it could lead?
You know, these things can, you know, inflame very, very quickly.
What I don't want is chaos.
I would much rather the thing be managed in a peaceful way.
And I think the democratic way in which we've done it in this country by having a vote, not being forced back in.
I think, you know, these are the sensible steps that we should be following.
And I think if we do it, I think we will see other countries in Europe wanting to follow our lead.
Luckily, this interview is on the morning after my absolute car crash horror show of an appearance on the BBC this week with Andrew Neil.
Andrew Neil was in kind of inquisitorial terror interrogator mode and I wasn't prepared and so he sort of hammered me on No Deal.
But you probably know more about No Deal than I do.
No Deal is going to be I have no issues with no deal at all.
If you look at our business, we've been in business for 115 years.
70 of those years, we weren't even in the EU. I cannot think of one great benefit that we have had, having been in the EU over the last 40 years, that we didn't have before.
And in fact, what I can think of is we've got tons and tons of costs that have arisen as a result of being in the EU. So I really can't see what great benefit the EU has brought us as a business.
But, you know, again, what you have to ask businesses is, do you, you know, if you're a business producing anything, widgets, whatever, do you think, right, where has my country got trade deals?
That's where I'm going to try and trade.
No one thinks like that in business.
What they think is, where can I find customers of my products?
Yeah.
And, you know, you look, you know, you produce stuff that people want to buy, and those customers might be in China now, or Hong Kong, or anywhere in the world, you know, with the internet, you can trade with anybody at the press of a button.
You look for customers that are most likely to buy your product.
If your country happens to have a trade deal with a country in which that customer is based, great!
There's one less form to fill in when you send the goods over.
There might be less duties.
But it's not trade deals that drive trade.
Britain exports, you know...
Well, I export more to the USA than I do to the whole of Europe.
And yet customers in the USA have to pay 5% duty on my smoked salmon.
In Europe, they don't have to pay any duty at all.
Right.
America exports almost double to the EU what Britain exports to the EU. And America's not in the single market.
They're not in the customs union.
Because in business, it's not all about the price.
There are many, many other factors.
It's very hard to sell British food to a French chef in France.
They're very loyal to French produce.
They don't particularly want to buy British food.
Whereas, you know, in America, they love British products.
You know, they think we're fantastic over in the States.
So, you know, price isn't everything in business.
I think, you know, people fail to understand that.
And it's, you know, you don't need a trade deal to trade.
Again, I think that the public might not be aware.
They think that, you know, they...
You know, if you listen to all these politicians, you think, oh, you know, we can't trade and our whole country is going to stop trading if we haven't got a trade deal.
You don't need a trade deal to trade.
It's just the icing on the cake.
And when you look at what you need to do to get the export to a country in which you don't have a trade deal, it's literally a piece of paper.
You know, if it's food, it's a health certificate.
It takes about 15 seconds to tick a few boxes and you're done.
And you're delighted to tick that piece of paper because you've done the business.
It's no harder than producing an invoice or a packing list or anything else.
The effort isn't going out and finding the customer, making sure they pay their bills, making sure that you produce it exactly the way they want it and so on.
That's the tough stuff.
Yes.
You mentioned earlier, you made a very good point about the currency fluctuations that have taken place since 2016.
Well, since the Euro came into being.
So, you know, you often hear now people say, oh yes, but farmers are going to have to pay 30-40% tariffs.
Since the turn of the century, or the millennium, you know, when the Euro first came into being...
The pound to the euro has been at both 105 to the euro and it's been at 180 to the euro.
So the currency has fluctuated by 75%.
So even if you had a 40% increase in tariffs, that is smaller than the fluctuations that we had.
Did the farmers completely stop selling any product into Europe when it was 180?
I don't think so.
You know, prices adjust and people adjust to prices.
And in a competitive world, you know, all your competitions in the same boat.
So, you know, that's business.
In the last, you know, three years ago, the price of raw salmon went up by almost 100%.
In the last year, butter has gone up by somewhere by 50 to 100%.
You know, has our economy seized up because of, you know, price changes?
Of course they don't.
You know, people just adjust their prices.
You might sell a little bit less or you might sell a bit more or you find another market for the product.
But that's the nature of business.
What we really need is business certainty.
We never have certainty, of course.
We're in an uncertain world.
Nobody has a crystal ball.
But you want to try and remove as many political uncertainties as you can.
And the quickest way to do that is to have a no-deal Brexit.
You know, if you have no deal, we know where we stand.
There is no deal on the 29th of March.
We're leaving, we're trading with the rest of the world on WTO terms.
If you have Theresa May's deal or something similar, there's this two-year transition period where, again, you're negotiating.
Nobody knows how it's going to work out and so on.
And there's more uncertainty and people are lobbying for this and lobbying for that.
No deal is the cleanest.
It's the quickest.
Yeah, some people might suffer on day one, but by day two, they'll have sorted it out.
Lance, let me tell you, next time I'm asked on this week...
To talk about no-deal Brexit, I'm going to say, look, you need a Jewish businessman.
You don't need me.
Look, I can do other stuff.
I can talk about climate change, why Trump's a good thing.
But if you want the economic facts, yeah, that makes sense to me.
Well, you know, business is business and businesses have to deal with these sorts of issues all the time.
Price changes, delays, you know, these sorts of things happen.
In our experience, the biggest challenges we face in our business and have faced over the last, certainly since I've been at 25, 30 years, It's all stuff that's thrown at us by government.
The normal business challenges are finding customers and making sure the product's the way they want it and then paying their bills.
That's the easy stuff.
It's always the government stuff that throws the biggest challenges in our way.
Government, I've just been watching this series on Netflix called Murder Mountain.
And it's about the county that produces the most, Humboldt County in California, which produces the most of America's homegrown, illegal and probably legal marijuana crop.
And what's interesting about it is it captures the transitional moment when all these hippies who've been growing their weed in disguise between the redwoods so that the feds can't come and get them and they've been doing quite well since the 1970s probably.
They're now being brought into the system by the Californian state government.
And it's fascinating watching these hippies come up against what actually big government looks like.
And they thought of themselves as kind of...
But actually, this is what happens.
They're suddenly so heavily regulated that they can barely make a living anymore.
And I was reminded of this when you told me a story about around where you are.
It reminds me of Bristol or somewhere like that.
You've got loads of graffiti.
You've got loads of artists.
You've got loads of cafes and barges with sort of fancy writing on the side, advertising, sort of cinemas and things.
It's very hippie-ish, but you were telling me about how you saw the meeting point between left and right.
Tell me about that.
Well, yes.
I mean, there are, you know, tons of artists around here.
They all tend to be very lefty.
You know, I'm a sort of ex...
You're the Antichrist.
Absolutely.
That's right.
Libertarian, free marketeer.
And yet, there is a sort of meeting of minds where neither of us like to be controlled.
You know, we're all sort of free thinkers.
Artists are very creative people.
They don't like being told what to do.
And there was a period, you know, well the reason they're here, the reason in this area is because, you know, these were old sort of post-war industrial sheds that had been disused and they sort of moved in because it was very cheap, cheap property for them.
And they'd moved into this area and indeed over the last few years this area became the, I think, the highest density of artist studios in the whole of Europe.
And they were afraid that with the regeneration coming on board...
Property values were going to go up and they'd be forced out.
And I'd say to some extent that's happened.
So they, together with the local authority, tried to make this area a conservation area.
Now, it's crazy to think of it as a conservation area because you haven't got beautiful buildings and architecture of any great merit that you might expect in a conservation area.
These are old sheds.
And I was explaining to the artist, I said, look, you know, is this really what you want?
You know, if you look at the buildings that you're in, you know, you've knocked holes out of it, you know, randomly for windows and doors and you're graffitying all these buildings.
Do you realise how controlling this area would be if it was a conservation area?
You wouldn't be able to do any of that stuff.
And they, you know, suddenly sort of started to get it, that actually they want their freedoms.
So do I as a free marketeer.
Government just gets in our hair and...
But the other thing I would say, certainly we're talking more about rules and regulations at EU, is that, and I have a theory, that we certainly enforce the rules much more here than I believe they do in Europe.
And I have a theory about that, which is that we Brits, and being Anglo-Saxon, we're very law-abiding.
We're very law-abiding, and when we see a law, we enforce it, and we make sure that we are law-abiding citizens.
Whereas in Europe...
Their legal structure is different, and they are much more bureaucratic, and they have all these regulations.
And instead of thinking, right, I've got to follow these regulations, their approach has always been, how do I get around the regulation?
That's how they live their lives, about getting around the regulations.
And I think what's happened is that since joining the EU, we have treated these regulations as that they're absolutely strict legal doctrines that we have to follow.
Mm-hmm.
Whereas that just doesn't happen in Europe.
So we're actually self-harming by doing this.
I remember 30 years ago, I used to be Peter Lilly's special advisor.
And he told this fabulous story back then, 30 years ago, which is as relevant today as it was then.
And it's a fantastic story.
So he has a farmhouse in Normandy.
It's a little holiday home in Normandy.
And travels backwards and forwards.
And one of his neighbours was a farmer, a French farmer.
And one day Peter saw him slaughtering a sheep, just for his own personal use.
And Peter was looking at the way this was being done.
He thought, this doesn't seem right.
So he approached his friendly neighbour and he said...
Are you allowed to slaughter the sheep like that under French law?
And the farmer said, yes, not a problem.
It's okay.
So he said, well, I know certainly under EU law there's no way you'd be able to do this.
So the farmer just looked at him.
He says, huh, EU law, that's just for the British.
It's a great story.
And that's the thing.
I'll tell you another extraordinary story.
I mean, this is just...
You will laugh.
Okay, so I explained about contains fish on the back of our packaging.
So we had a warehouse full of new packaging.
Now, last year...
And I was accused of being a huge hypocrite for doing this.
But last year, our product, London Cure Smoked Salmon, was given an EU award.
I'm not sure if you're aware of that.
So we won a very special status, something called PGI status, Protected Geographical Indication Status.
And that relates to foods or drinks that are produced in a certain geographic location, have a heritage method behind them.
So, for example, champagne has PGI status, Gorgonzola, Palmer Ham.
Now London Cure Smoked Salmon has it.
We're actually the first ever London-based food or drink to get this special thing.
I applied for it five years ago, so before anyone knew there was going to be a referendum.
It took five years to come through.
It should have taken three months, you know, but so on.
Anyway, we won this award.
I was accused of, you know, being hypocritical and so on.
But having got all this packaging in our warehouse, we thought, well, we want to put this logo on our pack.
So we thought we can't reprint all the packaging again.
So we'll get some little labels made with this little yellow and blue sort of seal.
And we had all these labels printed, and every packet of smoked salmon we were dispatching, we stuck this label on.
Anyhow, Defra came back to us, and they said, Mr.
Foreman, terribly sorry, you can't stick these stickers on for the PGI status.
And I said, well, why is that?
And they said, because your packaging says right in the middle smoked salmon.
And in the top left-hand corner, it has another little logo saying London Cure.
And they said that your award is for London Cure smoked salmon.
And the four words have to be together under EU law.
It has to say London Cure smoked salmon, not London Cure at the top and smoked salmon at the bottom.
So, again, this is absolutely nuts.
And DEFRA are going to enforce this rule.
Can you imagine the Greeks?
You know, if somebody had Greek olive oil with the status, and they put olive at the top and oil at the bottom of the...
The Greeks would, they say, get on with it.
You know, it helps promote Greek exports.
But here we are, stopping me doing that.
So again, we had to reprint our packaging.
You know, it's mad.
Just pause for a moment there.
One of the things that really bothers me is that...
The number of parasites on the economy who produce nothing of value, don't create value, they do nothing that any of us would actually want to happen if we were asked.
If we were asked, do you want a fraction of your hard-earned money to go towards paying a guy to ensure that Lance Foreman does not put a star sticker on his packets of smoked salmon?
Because, I mean, somebody's...
That person is on a salary.
They've probably got a pension.
They've got workers' rights and stuff.
They are nothing but a drain on the economy.
What are they actually producing?
They're producing nothing.
They are a complete drain.
And it's not just in the public sector.
It's in the private sector.
There's a whole industry that's been built up around this.
So we, for example, have food hygiene audits by clients.
And they're making sure that you're following all the sort of EU rules and regulations and so on.
And, you know, these, so, you know, it could be some well-known hotel group that says we want to send our auditor around.
And they charge you for the privilege, okay?
So they'll charge you £500 for somebody to come around for a couple of hours to sort of have a look around.
And so we, you know, we sort of rather sneakily say to this auditor, we say, oh, by the way, we have our own suppliers.
You know, we think you're doing a great job.
You know, would you be interested in going to audit our suppliers?
And they say, oh yes, yes, absolutely, more work and so on.
We say, well, what do you charge for these audits?
They say, oh, I charge £300.
So, of course, the whole thing's a racket.
You know, the clients are using these audits to actually, as a profit-making exercise.
So, you know, there's a whole industry that's built around this, and then they come up with this sort of, you know, extraordinary stuff.
So they come along, they go onto our factory floor, and they say, can we see your floor cleaning schedule, please?
And we say, well, we don't do a floor cleaning schedule.
We haven't got boxes, you know, somebody that's ticked saying, I've cleaned the floor.
We just clean the floors.
You know, we'd rather spend the time cleaning the floor than ticking a box to say we've cleaned the floor.
Yeah.
You've seen down, you've looked down at our factory, it's spotless.
You know, we have this viewing gallery, so people can come here morning, noon and night.
We have a restaurant here, they can look down.
We are always spotless because that's how businesses, you know, food business should be.
We're not doing it because the EU tells us we've got to do it.
We do it because that's the correct thing to do.
So we said to this person, I'm terribly sorry, but we just don't do floor.
Well, if you don't do floor cleaning schedule, they said, well, you're not going to be able to supply us.
And we said, well, if that's the way you feel, you're not going to be able to have our amazing smoked salmon.
So...
Oh, really?
And we stuck to our guns.
That's fantastic.
You know, we stuck to our guns because, you know, we...
How many times have you been into a...
You might go into...
I don't know if you've ever been to...
I don't know.
Any sort of fast food chain, you go to the toilet, and on the inside of the toilet door, there's a little tick box saying, I'll clean it, wherever.
And, you know, they tick that they've cleaned the floor at sort of 2 in the afternoon, 3 in the afternoon, 4 in the afternoon.
It's still the morning!
Because if there's a tick box, somebody will just tick it!
You know, these rules, you know, I believe that actually nowadays social media is far, far more effective than rules and regulations at making sure that businesses behave.
First of all, regulations take years and years to work out and so on, and then everyone's got to work out how they're going to be enforceable and so on.
Social media happens instantaneously.
You know, if businesses behave badly, Customers won't buy from them.
Have the same set of rules than a small business like ours that's artisanal, that changes a recipe every single day, you know, produces literally thousands of product lines.
And we might get a client saying, oh, can you tweak that recipe?
Well, if we do, it's not just the recipe that we've got to tweak.
We've got to produce a new label.
We've got to work out the nutritional values.
We've got to send it off to a lab to get the shelf life.
This is hundreds of pounds every time you change something.
It is crazy.
Which, of course, is why business, as it's...
Misleadingly build on the BBC why business is so pro-Europe.
And they don't mean business like yours.
They don't mean the small businesses which are really the engine room of our economy.
They mean global corporations like Siemens that was in on that secret meeting with Philip Hammond the other day and Airbus.
And all your kind of mega, mega competitors, the really big companies which produce kind of slimy shit salmon on a massive factory farm scale.
Because they can wear these extra costs, whereas you as a small producer can't wear them so easily.
Well, absolutely.
You know, they are bureaucracies themselves.
It is these big businesses that lobby EU bureaucrats to come up with these rules that protect their businesses.
Is it really?
Is that bad?
Well, it is.
I mean, you know, bureaucrats don't just sit in their gleaming offices in Brussels thinking, all right, what rule can I come up with next?
It's business that actually comes up with rules and proposes it to these bureaucrats saying, oh, you know, you should put in place this particular rule because it'll be much safer for the public knowing that it protects their business.
In the months before the EU referendum, there was a letter that was written to the Times and it was signed by, I think, 36 CEOs of these major multinationals saying we've got to stay in the EU. Now, I'd read somewhere, I can't remember where, that in the year leading up to that letter,
those 36 FTSE companies had spent 20 million euros lobbying the EU and In that same year, they had received, between them, €120 million in grants from the EU. So, brilliant investment, you know, 600% return on their investment, first of all.
But just think about this.
You know, taxpayers across Europe are really struggling.
Everyone's hard-pressed at the moment, you know, with austerity and so on.
People are hard-pressed.
And yet the EU has just handed out €120 million to 36 of the wealthiest businesses.
You know, we're all talking about Amazon and, you know, Starbucks and these companies not paying tax.
What these guys have done is worse than not paying tax, they're taking money out of the pot.
It's atrocious.
It's absolutely appalling.
There's not many of you though, are there?
There's you, there's Tim Martin, Weatherspoons, and there's the guy from JCB, I think.
Actually, there's a friend of mine who was at school with me who runs a business in the rag trade in Shropshire, and he's on the right side as well.
But there are many businesses on the right side.
I mean, I mix with entrepreneurs all the time.
Entrepreneurs welcome change.
You know, big businesses are, as I say, they're often very bureaucratic themselves.
They want to prevent change because they want to preserve the status quo where they're in charge.
They're afraid of new disruptive sort of businesses.
But entrepreneurs often welcome change because opportunity comes from change.
But, you know, in my own business, you know, we had this absolutely terrible period of five years where we had three major catastrophes.
We had a fire which burned down three quarters of our factory.
We then refurbed it.
Within a year of refurbing it, the local river overflowed.
Our whole business was a metre underwater.
We then had to build a new place.
We built a brand new place.
We had a tiny bit of grant funding from the London Development Agency, built this fantastic new facility, and within a year of moving in, we were told, sorry, you've got to move out, because that's why we wanted to build the Olympic Stadium.
Told by the same London Development Agency.
So, we had these three catastrophes, and I could talk for hours about them.
I've written a book about it.
But, every time we had this disaster, we...
We actually, rather than going off and sucking our thumbs and pretending the thing hadn't happened, we grew from it.
And we found that we were able to actually benefit from every disaster and every change.
Because, and the reason for that is that, you know, change is happening every day of our lives.
But it's very small, incremental change.
You don't notice it.
You know, you're on this sort of treadmill.
And it's only after 20, 30 years, or in the case of the EU, 40 years, you look back and you think, how on earth did we get into this rut?
is forced upon you it allows you to step off that treadmill it allows you to step back and sort of re-evaluate your entire situation and say there's a lot of crap here how do i get rid of this i'll keep the good stuff and move forward and and that is how i see brexit you know it's a fantastic opportunity for britain to actually say look let's just stop stop what we're doing stop the way we've been doing things keep the good stuff get rid of all the you know the the trash and move
And I really think change should not be seen as a leap into the dark.
Change is an opportunity.
It's like moving house.
You have all the stuff in your loft or in the cupboards that you've built up.
You get rid of it all, and you take the good stuff with you, and you start again.
And I think that is how Brexit should be seen.
Yeah.
One of the lines I got last night from one of my fellow sofa people on the Andrew Neil show was this idea that, look, we've been in this relationship for 40 years and you can't unravel a relationship like that.
In a trice.
Which I suppose is trivially true.
There are going to be some teething issues.
But it seems to me that one of the great misconceptions that Remainers have is that without the benign spirit of the European Union's bureaucrats...
That somehow everything would collapse because businesses wouldn't know what to do.
That's so great.
I mean, the profit motive, that is the strongest incentive of all to make sure things get done.
Businesses are not going to say, oh my God, this is a catastrophe, I'm going to pack up.
They'll say, ah, things have changed.
They might have a problem getting the delivery across the channel on day one.
But day two, they'll realize what they need to do to get it across smoothly the next time.
Yeah.
I have no doubt that in no time at all, you know, literally, and I'm talking weeks, not years, people will say, oh my God, what was all the fuss about?
And we're not going to see instantaneous change.
We're not going to suddenly wake up on the 30th of March and say, you know, the world's changed.
Yeah, it'll still be the same.
You know, we'll still be going to the same jobs and the grass will carry on growing, the sun will shine, hopefully.
But, you know, this is, you know, what we're saying is we want to break with the way we've been doing things.
And Brexit's only the first step.
We now need to shake off this bureaucratic mindset that we've developed over the last 40 years in our own civil service.
We need to deregulate.
We need to be a lean, mean economy.
Isn't that almost...
The bigger worry.
That you and I are both what we believe in limited government, personal freedom, free markets, all the things that conservatives should believe.
But you look at the current Conservative Party.
Well, I think it's not just the Conservative Party.
Look at the political class.
Look at the way they have behaved through this Brexit process.
If that isn't sufficient evidence in itself for saying we should get politicians out of our hair...
What a complete hash they've made of it.
You know, I think that is, you know, what this process has shown us more than anything is that we need to be free and have smaller government and be free of politicians in our lives because they really, you know, they just really don't understand how it works.
Well, they don't.
And I wonder why they even go into politics.
I was giving old Sam, whose son I can't pronounce, I was giving him a hard time in the green room beforehand.
I was saying, look at you lot.
I mean, this didn't help me afterwards, of course, because he was probably more determined to destroy me on the programme itself.
But...
I said, look at you people.
You're not conservatives, most of you.
You've got these nice jobs with these ring-fence pensions.
And he said, don't you say that I could do much better in the private sector?
I said, yeah, okay.
I'm not saying you became an MP for the money.
But nevertheless, why do these people...
If I were going to become an MP, I'd do it because I wanted to roll back, shrink the state, to increase people's freedoms, to get rid of red tape.
But none of them have those...
No, that's because you believe in something, James, and these people don't believe in anything other than the fact that they think they can manage things better.
It's about management.
They're managers.
They're middle managers.
And they really don't believe in anything.
And, you know, that's where leadership is lacking, you know.
You know, we're in this world where, you know, politicians do focus groups and they think, right, what does the public want?
And that's what will deliver them.
And leadership's not about that.
Leadership is about having a vision and actually selling your vision and convincing the public to go with your vision.
And that is what we're missing at the moment.
And we miss it quite some time.
And also having skin in the game.
look if you've got if you've got billions coming into the exchequer and it's just free money it comes in whether you whatever you do because you just yeah it's very easy to spend other people's It's really, isn't it?
And that's what frustrates me about this £39 billion.
It's a lot of money, £39 billion.
That is £1,450 for every single family in Britain.
I guarantee you, if you said to every family...
Right.
We have a choice.
We can leave with Theresa May's deal and pay the EU £39 billion, or we can leave with no deal and give your family £1,450, which is the same thing.
Everyone will go for no deal.
And it's the same cost.
Oh my god, you're a genius.
Lance, you just solved the...
They should.
They could write out...
The government could write for that same £39 billion they're giving the EU. They could write a check out to every single household in Britain for £1,450.
Say, we're writing you a check...
Spend it as you feel free.
Tax-free as well, because this is post-tax income.
You could write our cheque for £4,450, but it's going to be no deal.
Everybody would go for no deal.
There is but one problem with this.
Go on.
The government doesn't want to leave the EU. The parliament doesn't want to leave the European Union.
You're right.
You're right.
But I think we will leave.
I'm confident that we'll leave.
I don't think we will leave for no deal though.
My view is that we will end up with a, you know, you're going to have to, we'll have to redo this at the end of March.
But my view is that Europe is very, very fearful of no deal.
The EU are petrified of no deal because if we do leave with no deal and we succeed, which we will because none of these catastrophic events are going to happen, and we succeed, it sets a precedent.
Yeah.
And others will follow our lead and then there's no need for the EU anymore.
So the EU have to do a deal with us because they just don't want to have a precedent of somebody having left with no deal.
And they will want to enforce that 39 billion because they'll want to show others if you leave there's a penalty cash payment to pay.
And so I think what will happen in the end, providing the Prime Minister holds her nerve with no deal, that something will be cobbled together where the EU will just get rid of the backstop and the deal will be done with no backstop.
If that situation arises, and if the EU do panic at the end, and I think we're starting to see sort of cracks, chinks just right now.
Poland, Lithuania.
Absolutely.
It's starting.
Even some words out of Germany, too.
If that happens, then I think that what we should do, if we start to see them collapse, we should then say, fine, this is great, we'll do the deal with you.
But you get that 39 billion...
But only on the basis of a fair trade deal, not on the basis of just signing the withdrawal agreement and then we have to negotiate a trade deal.
It should be on the basis of doing a fair trade deal with us that's, you know, good for both parties.
Yeah, that's if you were negotiating.
Yeah, that's what I would do.
Unfortunately, you aren't negotiating.
The people who are negotiating are not, they haven't got their head screwed on like you.
Well, they do hear voices from all directions, you know, and we've got to keep shouting, you know, you can never, you know, you can never give up.
And, you know, I have been vocal because I've been passionate about this for a long time.
It is, you know, it's not always been easy.
You know, you asked about, you know, why are businesses, you know, you know, why do we only hear from three or four?
Since I've been doing this, I do every now and again get an email from somebody saying, we're never going to buy your smoked salmon again.
Do you?
Yeah, no, it happens.
Or we're never going to come to your restaurant anymore.
I think it's crucial that small businesses are vocal because most people in Britain are employed by small businesses rather than the multinationals.
This is where the employment happens.
And if people like me don't speak out and don't explain what it really means, then how are people going to know?
So I've always felt that it's worth speaking out when I have had these emails.
I always make a point of contacting these people Because I just don't want them to think that I'm some sort of mad xenophobic moron Yeah, yeah, so I I know I phone them and say look can I you know, can we have a chat?
Just because I want you to understand really where I'm coming from and I reckon that in 75% of the cases They might have started off Remainers, but they've actually come around.
Oh, fantastic.
Well done.
That's good.
Just before we go, because I know you've got a meeting with somebody, because you actually have a job.
Tell me about your dad.
Yes.
So, has he explained to you how he survived?
What was his secret?
Well, he was...
God, this is...
How long have we got?
This is...
I love these stories, though.
You've got to give me a flavour.
Well, so he was, you know, he was a child.
He was born in 1934, so five when the war broke out.
He was born in a town south of Krakow in Poland.
Yeah.
And a few, well, I think it was about a year before the war broke out, his family could see that there was sort of, you know, there was trouble brewing.
And he and his, or his dad and his uncle clubbed together and they bought a car.
And they agreed with their wives that they would drive across the border to Romania and stay there for a few months and just to see how things settle down because they thought the women and children are always going to be fine but they don't want the husbands being taken off to some kind of camp or whatever.
Anyhow, the wives corresponded.
They said everything's fine.
So the husbands went back, and they stayed there for another few months.
And then just suddenly, the middle of the night, one night, sort of the bell in the town square is sort of ringing, and everybody's shouting, get out, get out.
The Nazis are literally miles away from the town.
They'd sort of come down south.
And so the two families just jumped into this car with everything they could find.
They started heading east.
They eventually got to Lvov in Ukraine, or it was Lemberg during the war.
managed to rent a flat somewhere and then with literally then a few months bang on the door in the middle of the night russian guards um saying what are you doing here where are your passport you don't have you know proper passports and so on and they literally took all these families stuck them on these cattle trucks um from uh the west of uh russia ukraine then all the way to siberia is a six-week journey literally in cattle trucks many people died on the on that journey they were crammed and couldn't sit down uh they would you know
once a day the train would stop they'd give them buckets of you know slop to eat um and they survived that They ended up in Tomsk in this forest.
They basically said, you know, here's some tools.
If you want somewhere to live, you know, top down some trees and build your little huts and whatever.
And two families, you know, if you imagine your garden shed, two families literally shared a garden shed with a sheet hanging down between it in the freezing cold of Siberia.
And they survived that for a few years.
And then, as I said earlier, they thought, you know, once the Germans had turned on the Russians, the Russians set them free.
But they had to stay within the bounds of what became the Soviet Union.
And they thought, well, let's go to somewhere warmer.
Let's thaw out.
And they ended up in Uzbekistan in Tashkent.
And in a Jewish ghetto.
And actually, that turned out to be the worst decision of all because many people were, you know, dying with dysentery and disease because of the heat and so on.
Yeah.
Whereas at least, you know, Siberia is freezing cold.
Disease doesn't spread in those temperatures.
And his family were very lucky.
They survived the war.
And then he and his younger sister were sent over to Britain because they had some family that managed to get out before the war.
And the parents basically waved goodbye to their two kids, sent them across as orphans.
It's the only way they could get them out for safety.
Can you imagine doing that with your children waving goodbye and never know if you're ever going to see them again?
Did they?
They did see them again.
They managed to sort of work their way out a couple of years later, and they were reunited three years later.
But, I mean, just horrific.
And there are thousands of stories like this, James.
I was going to say, there are so many books.
There are.
There are thousands of stories.
And, you know, we're now hearing the last testimonies of these Holocaust survivors.
Yeah.
You know, people like my dad, he's now sort of given sort of...
Test me like we're doing now.
You know, it's gone on records.
And, you know, these are really important lessons.
Do you ever wonder what you would have done in those situations?
Do you think you would have made the clever decisions in time?
You know what?
Maybe it's in my family genes.
I talked about these three disasters we had as a business.
I'm convinced that I have survival instinct genes.
If I ever play chess with anyone, I'm far better at playing black than I am white.
I'm very good on the defensive.
You know, when somebody attacks me, nobody's going to get past me.
But when things are going well, I'm never quite as good as I should be exploiting that opportunity.
And I don't know, maybe there's some kind of survival gene there.
There could be some Darwinian thing.
Who knows?
It could be.
It could be a sort of super race of super surviving Jews out there who are just...
Well, the ones that are left, absolutely.
You know, having faced persecution for thousands of years, I guess we must have these survival genes.
We're here today, telling the story.
Oh, that's great.
Thanks, Lance.
That was a fascinating podcast.
You're listening to the Delling Pod with me, James Delling Pod, and my very special guest, Lance Foreman, who runs the world's oldest salmon smokery.
And is author of, what's your book called?
Foreman's Games.
Foreman's Games, which is about your battles against the...
It's about the, against Ken Livingstone, about the Olympics and talks about government corruption, the dishonesty and incompetence of government and how we dealt with that.
And it's a fascinating tale.
Thank you.
And thanks for listening.
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