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April 11, 2019 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
58:49
Delingpod 15: Brendan O'Neill
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Ladies and gentlemen, it's Podcast Live and it's Delly Pod.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE That is really good.
So exciting.
Welcome, welcome everyone to the Delling Pod with my, I'm so excited about this week's guest, my very special guest, Brendan O'Neill.
Brendan, you are so solid and reliable and wonderful.
I feel really lucky to have got you.
You're a crowd puller.
And can I say that you are one of the few good men or women left?
You know, the analogy I often use is we're at Bastogne and we're being surrounded by various SS panzer divisions and we're holding the line.
And it's really important that every man...
Stays in his foxhole to guard the position for everyone else.
And a few weeks ago, Lidl, we lost Rod.
He surrendered to this notion that the...
Regretfully, that he was going to have to support Theresa May's glitter-dipped turd.
But you've stayed solid.
Tell me why.
Why?
Because Brexit is the most important issue in the whole world right now.
And if we lose on Brexit, I think it will be a massive defeat for all the things that people like us are interested in, which is defending freedom, defending...
Democracy, fighting back against the forces of political correctness, the forces of bureaucracy, all these kind of bad forces that are abroad in the world.
Defending Brexit, I think, is the front line in all of this stuff.
And it's funny that you mention the SS, because I am one of those people...
I'm always really reluctant.
You're always mentioning the SS. I'm really reluctant to use the word fascism And Nazism, unless you're talking about actual fascists and actual Nazis.
So I never use the word feminazi.
I know you do.
No offense.
I don't like it when words like Nazi and fascist are attached to people who aren't actually Nazi and fascist.
But the closest I have ever come to using the word fascist is in relation to Ramona's.
They are the most...
Unpleasant, authoritarian, anti-democratic, illiberal wankers in right at this.
And we have to really appreciate the seriousness of the situation we're in, which is that we have the reactionary middle classes marching in their thousands in the streets, calling on the government to dispense with democratic mandate and to rule by diktat.
That's a terrifying thing that's happened in the past.
We have the police last week calling on campaigners and journalists to tone down their Brexit rhetoric, lest anyone be kind of whipped into a frenzy of anger with a political class.
That's a dangerous precedent.
We have MPs saying, oh, we know you all voted for this thing, but we don't actually think it's a good thing, so we're not going to make it happen.
That's a dangerous precedent that we know from the past too.
So I feel like...
The great irony of Ramona's is that they go on and on about how people like us who support Brexit are far right and crazy and authoritarian and mental, when all those words are far better descriptions of them than they are of us.
So I actually feel quite scared about the period we're living in.
I think we're living through a petty bourgeois reactionary revolting assault on democracy and freedom Which people are talking about in this building right now, the new European and all those people.
And I think we have to stand up to it in any way we can.
I certainly have experienced horridness from various leading lights of the Ramona movement.
I mean, I saw Andrew Adonis on the corridor.
I don't want to diss him because I think this is a friendly atmosphere.
But they are quite underhand, and in a way that I don't think we are.
And this has been demonstrated by a survey, which showed that Remainers are much more intolerant of us than we are of them.
For example, Ramonas say, if my daughter were to marry a Brexiteer, I wouldn't have it.
I just wouldn't have it.
It's a bit like the old days.
People used to say, if my daughter married a black man, I just wouldn't do it.
How do you explain that gulf of intolerance?
You know, the thing is that they don't think that they are on the cusp of fascism.
They actually think they're good people.
They think they're nice, they think they're decent, they think we're the scum of the earth.
Because I think it's the self-righteousness.
I think when you're that self-righteous and you're so convinced you're right on everything and you're so convinced everyone else is an idiot, That you have no space left for self-reflection or reason, even.
So I think they've jettisoned all of that, which is why I think one of the great liberal values is to always entertain the possibility that you might be wrong.
That's a really important thing to do.
You should spend your whole life in a sense of self-doubt, in a way.
That's the beginnings of freedom of speech.
The argument for open debate is all premised on the idea that maybe I'm wrong, maybe someone else is right, so let's have the debate out.
They've completely lost connection with any idea like that.
They are utterly convinced they're right.
They're utterly convinced that people who voted Brexit are stupid, xenophobic, racist, uneducated, idiotic plebs.
I mean, they talk about these people in the most contemptible way imaginable.
And they think they're right.
And you could really see that on the People's Vote demo in London a couple of weeks ago.
The placards were astonishing.
I was there taking photos and laughing at people.
And you were on the stage talking?
I was on the stage at the pro-Brexit one, a week later, which was far more friendly.
As you say, we're a friendlier bunch.
But on the People's Vote one, People's Vote in quote marks, of course, because really it's just a forced second referendum to try and demoralise the electorate.
That's the longer description of it.
On this People's Vote demo, one guy had a placard saying, we'll always be a part of Europe, you idiots.
Trust me, I've got a geography degree.
Oh dear.
So's Theresa May, by the way.
So's Theresa May.
Look what happened to her.
Another placard said, oh look, correctly spelt Placards and correct grammar on our placards.
Isn't that surprising?
Translated into, we're clever and the rest of the country are a bunch of idiots.
So there is this haughty disdain for anyone who disagrees with them, which is the majority of the country.
And when you're in that position, when you have that kind of...
Unfounded self-conviction that you are the super clever, wonderful, morally correct person.
You just lose the capacity to make judgments and to reason and to engage in debate.
And I think that's what's happened to Ramona's.
While we're on the theme of dissing Ramona's...
My favorite theme.
Have you noticed, of course you have, That when you ask Ramonas why it is they want to remain in the European Union, they can never really advance a very convincing case.
It seems to me that their case is built entirely on how disgusting people who vote Brexit are.
They're really unpleasant.
And I... I've been pondering long and hard about the friends I've lost because of Brexit.
We've got this friend who lives on...
Why can't I mention it?
She has a sort of tied cottage on the estate where I live.
And naturally, in a small community, when somebody suddenly cuts you dead, when they're walking along the path where you walk your dog, it's a bit disturbing.
And the reason we've fallen out is...
Over Brexit.
And I was trying to think why it is that she could suddenly go from my friend to not my friend.
What is it?
And I think it's that thing that Remainers think that we Brexiteers are genuinely racist.
We are not forward-looking.
We're not progressive.
We are not modern.
We are reactionary and primitive and ugly.
I think that's a really important point because if you think back before 2016, before the referendum, these kind of people weren't going on about the EU very much at all.
I never heard anyone talk about it.
The only people I heard talk about the EU were people who were Eurosceptic.
Which included me, who were very concerned about the European Union and so would read a lot about it and would talk a lot about it and would have arguments about it.
But all these people who've suddenly taken to the streets in their thousands, kind of literally crying in the streets and their blue paint running down their faces.
They never talked about the EU before 2016.
You think, hold on, where were you people?
And that explains two things.
Firstly, that explains why actually Brexit voters tend to be better informed about the EU than Ramona's, which is kind of counterintuitive, but that's the case.
Because people who voted Brexit, or the people who were Eurosceptic for a long period of time, tended to follow EU affairs more closely.
They would read about it, they would get angry about it, they would talk about it with their friends and so on.
Whereas Ramona's never talked about the EU for years and years and years.
And the second thing it tells us is that you're absolutely right.
The reason they flipped, the reason they've suddenly fallen head over heels in love with the European Union is precisely as a form of, I can't remember, some French philosopher who referred to it as moral distinction.
This situation where you morally distinguish yourself from others, from other groups, from the scum of society.
So you have to always find a mechanism through which to exercise that sense of moral distinction.
That's what they've done with the EU. So really what they're doing when they say they love the EU, they don't know the first thing about the EU. If they did, they wouldn't love it.
You wouldn't love an institution that destroyed the Greek working classes.
You wouldn't love an institution which enforced an unelected technocratic government above the heads of the Italian voters.
You wouldn't love an institution which forced the Irish government to do economic things it didn't want to do.
You wouldn't love an institution which talks about having freedom of movement, but actually it's the racist elevation of one group of migrant workers, i.e.
European migrant workers who are 98% white, over another group of migrant workers, including Indian workers or African workers and so on.
And the one reason that one third of ethnic minority voters in Britain voted for Brexit is precisely because they were Worried about the racist unfairness of the European system of migration, which means a Bulgarian plumber can come here despite having no connections to this country, but their aunt can't come here despite having seven family members in Leicester or Bradford or London or wherever else it might be.
No one could possibly love this institution.
It's a foul, corrupt, deplorable oligarchy which is completely outside of the realm of democracy.
Their love for it is really an expression of their hatred for their fellow citizens and for the rest of the country.
It's the way in which they morally distinguish themselves We're the good members of British society because we're pro-EU. You're the bad members of British society because you're anti-EU. That's really what this boils down to.
I think one of the reasons that you're so good at articulating the case for Brexit is that you are a proper man of the people, aren't you?
I mean, you are actually a working class oik.
I am oik.
And you didn't go to university.
And you play the Marxist card.
The Marxist card, yeah.
Tell me, are you actually a Marxist still?
No.
I still say I'm a Marxist, really just to wind people up.
I was a Marxist for a long time.
I started my journalist career on a magazine called Live in Marxism, which was a wonderful magazine.
I was in the Revolutionary Communist Party, which I joined when I was 19 years old, and then it disbanded like two years later.
I hope it wasn't connected to me.
And I am a working-class OIG. My parents, my mum and dad, are Irish immigrants, working-class Irish immigrants from the west of Ireland.
To London.
I said on Politics Live on the BBC recently that I come from Irish peasant stock and people went absolutely berserk.
But it's true.
My grandmother was a peasant.
She used to ride donkeys, all sorts of things.
So it's true.
I can't help it.
So that's all true.
One of the things that...
But I argued this in The Spectator a few years ago.
I think that, like long before Brexit, I think one of the most fascinating things about the current climate, and this might be summed up by this stage right here, is that we have a chav-toff alliance.
Billy Connolly used to make this point in one of his stand-up gigs.
He used to say, working-class people and upper-class people have something in common.
They love drinking, they're a bit rebellious, they give their children weird names.
He talked about the commonalities between Poor people and rich and upper class people.
And he said the problem are the middle classes.
No offence, I'm sure there's lots of really nice middle class people here.
But they're the ones who tend to look down their noses of the working classes because they think they're stupid and racist and fat and unhealthy and all that kind of stuff.
They look down their noses at the upper class as if they think they're kind of debauched and disgusting and overly bourgeois.
And so they go through life with this constant snooty disdain for these two sections of society.
And of course, who voted for Brexit?
The poor and the rich.
That's really what it boils down to.
Brexit was an alliance in many ways between very working-class Labour voters And kind of home counties types.
It was a very strange alliance, but a very fascinating alliance.
Whereas everyone who went to university and lives in London or Brighton or the middle of Manchester or wherever else it might be voted Remain.
So yes, that's exactly the background I come from.
But what I find really interesting is that I do see myself very often these days having a lot in common with Very posh Tories, which is not something that I thought would ever happen.
So when I spoke at the pro-Brexit rally in London, I was sharing the stage with people who were far posher and far more right-wing than I am.
And I'm perfectly happy to do that because I think defending Brexit is the key issue of our times.
Can I just say, in the interest of truth and reality, I'm not actually that posh.
Just put it on.
It's a persona, I've assumed.
I went to the village school in the Midlands, in Birmingham, and I used to have a Midlands accent.
I'm not sure I ever said it.
But definitely, I'm not at all.
But I do hear what you say.
One of the curiosities I find about this Brexit propaganda war, this idea that somehow it's all the fault of the Etonians.
Well, actually, most Etonians I know are bloody Remaintards, or whatever you want to call them.
And when the boys voted on Brexit, I think the split was...
34, 66, something like that.
Because, obviously, Pater, with his large estates, which probably benefit from various European grants, Pater doesn't want the boat rocked at all.
I think it's the sort of yeomen of the shires who are generally in alliance with the...
Yeah, that's true.
I actually think that's true.
I've spoken at Eton a few times, and I'm always quite shocked at how PC has become...
Oh my God.
They've always got people in from everyday feminism stuff to educate the boys about not to be such rotters.
And so it's becoming increasingly PC. And whenever I've spoken there, there's always this small gaggle of boys who come up to me and ask for advice on how to negotiate such a politically correct atmosphere.
But I think that's right.
I also think the idea that it's all down to Etonians, I think...
I find that such a hilarious argument because it presents itself...
As an anti-establishment, anti-posh, sticking-it-to-the-man kind of argument.
You know, we really hate Etonians, we hate the privileged, we hate super-posh people.
That's what these Ramonas are saying.
But in truth, what they're really saying is that ordinary voters are such idiots.
We're so suggestible, we're so stupid, we're so gullible that we can be led astray by Jacob Rees-Mogg saying something on TV or by an advert on the side of a bus, whatever else it is that they blame it on.
What all of that boils down to is their belief, and they really hold strongly to this belief, that voters can't be trusted because we're really thick.
That's what they're saying.
So every time they bash Etonians, actually they're bashing people in Stoke or in Wales or in Essex where there were huge numbers of Leave voters.
That's who they're really bashing because what they're saying is these people are so ill-educated and so ill-informed and so unlike us.
That they can be led astray by these kind of shiny, posh demagogues.
The really interesting thing is precisely the argument that was made against the Chartists when they were arguing for the right to vote for working-class men in the 1840s.
Literally, the exact argument that was made was that working-class men didn't have sufficient education to be able to resist The temptations of demagoguery.
It's exactly the same argument that was made against women having the right to vote in the early 20th century, that all the anti-suffragettes' arguments were that women were too visceral rather than rational, and therefore they wouldn't be able to resist the temptations of demagogic dictatorship.
So we're just seeing the rehabilitation of all these kind of old, historic, poisonous, anti-democratic arguments happening And I think the more that we can do to expose that and to reveal the fact that these are not progressive, decent, good, liberal, democratic people, but actually the opposite, the better.
Can I say another thing, of the many things I love about you, Is that you still go on the BBC and stick it to them, which I won't anymore.
I mean, I've decided...
I don't know whether you listened to the podcast I did with Dick the other day, but I really have gone BBC fry in my life now.
There's only one programme left that I can listen to, which is the...
The Rock Show on BBC One with Daniel P. Carter, because there's no politics in that.
But everything else on the BBC is absolute relentless SJW anti-Brexit shite.
I don't actually get invited onto the BBC that much.
I do a few things, I guess.
Well, you do Sky, which is the BBC. And I do Sky, which is a bit like the BBC. But I think it's really important to go into the lion's den and to stick it to them, because otherwise it would just be them lot saying their usual crap.
And I think audiences are really tired of that.
Whenever I do TV things or radio things, I get loads of emails.
I'm not on Twitter, so people are always super angry that they actually have to go to the effort of writing me an email.
It makes them even angrier as they're going through this process.
They can't believe I have to use so much of their labour to send me a hateful message.
Why are you not on Twitter, by the way?
I hate Twitter.
I can't even bear the thought of being on it.
It just makes me feel ill.
So I get lots of angry emails from people saying, I wish you were dead, and who are you, and why are you on TV, and I'm going to tell them you're funded by the Koch brothers, all this kind of stuff, which is just relentless abuse, and I just delete it all.
Or sometimes I respond saying, I fancy you too, shall we meet up?
And then that really drives them insane.
But then I also, the thing that's far more interesting than that, Is that I also get emails from people up and down the country who say, thank God someone's saying what I was thinking.
And literally from people who are at the end of their tether, politically speaking, not in life terms, at the end of their tether, politically speaking, who cannot believe, I mean, we can't believe it, and we're in the lucky position of having different, various platforms from which to express ourselves, so imagine how they feel.
They can't believe that every time they turn on the TV or the radio it's the same stuff.
And it's the stuff that doesn't reflect whatsoever what they think or what their neighbours think or what their community thinks.
They feel like the media is out to get them.
And that's actually what Donald Trump, who I'm not a huge fan of, but one thing he was very successful at was tapping into an anti-media sentiment and a feeling among ordinary people that the media was just another wing of the establishment, didn't reflect their views, and in fact was quite hostile to their views.
So I always think it's quite important I can understand your reluctance to do it, and so often it's just an attempt to stitch you up.
I've had that experience many times, but I think the point of connection with people who don't feel that they've been represented on any level is something still worth giving it a go.
Yeah, I'm starting to model myself on poor Joseph Watson, who just won't.
I just think if you're in control of your...
I believe that you shouldn't fight battles on terrain of the enemy's choosing.
You're even braver than I am, and I'm quite brave.
I mean, I really totally ruined myself taking a jump while I was out fox hunting that I really shouldn't have done.
LAUGHTER And I thought, you don't want to do it, you're terrified, but if you don't do it, you're not a real man.
And if this had been a war, you wouldn't have charged the machine gun post and possibly got a VC. You've just been a loser.
So I took this jump, and I smashed up my collarbone and crapped several ribs, and then I got a pulmonary embolism and almost died.
So I am quite brave, but I'm not so brave that I go into a situation anymore where I'm just going to get shot on by...
Left is?
Yes, but I found that it's actually really easy to call these people out.
What's the secret?
The secret is just to expose that...
The useful thing for me is that I come at it as a kind of Marxist.
They find it difficult to know what to say to me because I always try to out-left them.
Even to something like the European Union, I say, how can you as a leftist support an institution which has willfully drowned thousands of black people in the Mediterranean Sea?
Then they kind of fall off their chairs because they don't have that argument put to them very often.
Or I say, hold on, there was a report by Amnesty International about three weeks ago showing that the European Union has financed prisons in Libya which has been torturing aspiring migrants to prevent them from going to Europe.
How can you support that?
They don't hear those arguments very often.
Usually what they have is some...
Toff from the Daily Mail saying, you know, bloody Europe is bananas and all that stuff.
And so they can handle those arguments, but then I find that they often put on the back foot by some of the things that I say.
Also, I've been on TV recently with quite a few Corbynista media people.
What, not Ash Sarkar, who fucks like a champion according to her Twitter feed?
I mean, imagine!
No one who fucks like a champion actually says they fuck like a champion.
I'm just saying, like, you know, so that always makes me laugh.
I was on Politics Live with Ash Sarkar, and it was a really...
I probably shouldn't say this, but what the hell, I will.
No one's listening, don't worry.
It was a really weird experience, because she was sat next to me on Politics Live.
It's an hour-long show, and she had a notepad So I glanced at her notebook and there was a whole page of meticulously written notes about me and also about what to say to me.
She fancies you.
No, and things that she was going to say to me, none of which she said, which made it even funnier.
She couldn't get around to saying it.
But the point with all of these people is that Particularly with the Corbynist media types, who I actually think are very good on TV, but only because right-wing people are often very bad on TV and often feel very defensive or look very defensive.
They present themselves as radical Marxists and edgy and a threat to the state and the status quo.
It's complete bunkum.
This is the woke section of the bourgeoisie, They've never met a working class person.
They have no connections with anyone outside of their tiny bubbles inside London.
That's why they hate Brexit so much.
They go along completely with the Ramona idea that Brexit was a cry of the racist, or maybe a cry of the left behind, which I think is an even more patronising idea.
As if voters in Stoke couldn't possibly be politically opposed to the European Union.
They were really just making a cry for help.
Come and help me, I need a job.
It's such a disturbingly patronising view of those voters.
It robs them entirely of their agency.
So it goes along with all of those arguments, and it's really easy, in my experience, just to prick that, to prick those bubbles and say to them, Stop dropping your tea.
Stop pretending to be down with the kids.
Because, in fact, you're a painfully middle-class, over-educated, PhD-obsessing idiot who despises the working classes, has absolutely no connection with them whatsoever, and thinks that the right of a woman who was born a man to take a piss in a woman's toilet is the most important issue of our time.
I mean, that's literally how...
That's literally...
So you have...
We live in a situation in which millions of working-class people have just made the most rebellious blow in living memory against the status quo, and you have these woke Corbynistas saying,''Ah, but what about this man in a wig's right to go to the woman's toilet?'' What kind of world are we living in?
And so that's what I say to them, and then they go crazy.
Or they stop talking, which is even better.
I think you're right.
I think we can learn from you and we can learn from the Americans in this respect.
Both Charlie Kirk, the guy who founded Turning Point, and Ben Shapiro say that the best form of defense is attack.
You have to go in hard with these people.
Because what they try and do, always with people on the right, loosely on the right, It's that they try and make us seem like moral pygmies, and they always try and claim the moral high ground.
So you have to reverse the position, don't you, by showing them to be the dodgy ones.
That's exactly right, and you don't just do that for the hell of it.
You do it because they are the dodgy ones.
I'm not a huge fan of many people on the right, except, of course, James.
And good people like him.
But in terms of where the most questionable political ideas and policies and arguments are coming from, it's undoubtedly from the left, who I think have completely and utterly lost the plot.
A really good example of this is knife crime.
And I was thinking, I think I'm doing a radio thing on knife crime next week.
And I was thinking, the idea that's been pushed by leftists and Corbynistas and others is that it's all down to austerity.
So you make cuts to social services or to social work or to youth clubs, and that's why people are going out and stabbing each other to death.
And when you think about it, you think, hold on, that's a really racist, classist argument.
Because what they're really saying is that without...
Without all this expertise in their lives, without the scaffolding of all this kind of middle-class experts who run the welfare state, unless the poor of inner-city London have all of this protection around them, they'll turn into wild animals and go cutting each other's throats in the middle of the street.
So you boil it down and you think, that's a really obnoxious, classist, racist, awful argument.
And what you want to say to them is, hold on, there have been far graver periods of poverty and austerity in the past, particularly in the 1930s, again in the early 1970s when my parents came here and didn't have a penny to bless themselves with, and they weren't out in the streets stabbing each other to death.
What a bizarre argument.
The more that you break it down, the more you can actually turn it on them and say, hold on, the prejudice is not coming from those of us who say we're worried about the fact that a large majority of these knife crimes are committed by black kids, we're worried about what that tells us about black communities and possibly about the decay of black families, and also working-class white families increasingly.
These are, I think, very legitimate moral concerns to have.
The prejudice is in fact coming from those who say that unless there's a youth club at the end of your road and a social worker to tell you how to behave, you'll turn into a wild animal and kill your next door neighbour.
That's where the prejudice is.
That's the racist argument.
That's the classist argument.
So I think what we need to do more and more, and by we I don't mean the right, I mean people who are just interested in progressive, good, Liberal, democratic ideas is that we've got to expose that they are the moral pygmies.
They are the ones making the obnoxious arguments about everyday people.
You've got the sort of Mrs.
Jeleby attitude, which is very prevalent among the kind of the liberal elite, the Remain voting types.
They like looking after poor people from foreign countries.
They like patronizing them.
As long as they're in the client zone, that's fine.
They don't like it when these poorer people have agency of their own.
Absolutely.
I'm in favor of the welfare state in the sense that I think it's quite civilized that a society doesn't let people go hungry.
If you can't find a job...
For a period of time, I don't think it should last forever, then it's right, I think, that society assists you during that time and helps you out.
What I do have a problem with is welfareism, which is the growth of the welfare state into this kind of ideology of its own, which now, welfareism expands into almost every single person's life.
At so many intimate levels.
And also the food bank argument, which you see being wheeled out every time.
If you build them, they will come, won't they?
Yes, I think that's a really...
But, you know, I did an essay for The Telegraph a few years ago.
This is the first time I... People hated this essay so much that someone printed it out from the internet, which was bizarre because it was in the newspaper, so they should have just got it from there.
Did a poo into a bag...
Yeah, you should be gasping because it was a horrific thing to receive in the post.
Put my article into the bag of poo.
Sealed it.
They sealed it really well.
With a kiss.
That was a relief.
It was very well sealed.
Put it into a jiffy envelope.
And this is the most scary thing.
They hand-delivered it to the spiked offices, which meant I was for a few days really worried in case the poo man was around the corner waiting for me.
That's how horrified they were by the argument I made in this essay on welfarism, which is such a simple argument, which is that when the welfare state was founded, this is kind of going back before Beveridge, in fact, to the early 20th century when the first expressions of welfarism came into existence.
So you had the shift from the poor houses and everything else towards something a bit more institutionalized.
The people in that time who were most against institutionalising welfare were working class people.
And the arguments they made were explicit.
They said, we are worried that this will naturalise unemployment, that the state will use it as an excuse to say, well, you haven't got a job, it's not our fault, here's three bob a week or whatever it was.
They were the people who were most antagonised by this.
And in fact, if you look at recent opinion polls...
On people who are most anti-welfare state it tends to be people in working class and poor communities whereas the middle classes love the welfare state which makes perfect sense because the welfare state employs the middle classes millions of them to look after Poor people...
So, of course, the middle classes love it because it gives them a sense of purpose and power.
The poor hate it because it gives them the opposite of a sense of purpose and power.
And what you create is this neo-feudal racket where one section of society is charged with looking after almost every single facet of another section of society's lives, including economic, therapeutic, social, how you raise your kids, every aspect of it.
So I think the...
That's another way in which you can really chip away at the presumed moral authority of the modern left, which is just to say to them, look, this welfare state...
Because if you look at Corbynistas, it's fascinating.
They never argue for full employment anymore.
The left in the 60s and 70s, their great rallying cry was, full employment, everyone must have a job, work is good, it's great, everyone should be employed.
Now they just say...
Don't cut back on the welfare state.
You think, what a dispiriting, pointless rallying cry, which is certainly not going to get any poor people on your side.
It's only going to get middle class people on your side because they love the welfare state.
I think in the same way that the environmental religion It was partly invented as a make-work scheme for otherwise unemployable middle-class kids who've done their completely worthless degrees in environmental sciences from the University of Easy Access and places like that.
Or they've done ecology or marine biology.
Yeah, right, I want to go and dive with whales and dolphins and justify my fun by saying that I'm helping to save the Barrier Reef.
Thank God.
It's some...
The clerisy.
Yes, the clerisy.
You're lucky, Brendan, that you are an OIC and that you didn't go to university.
Because actually, had you been a contemporary of mine at Oxford, I think you'd have been actually pretty good.
You'd probably got a first.
I just got a 2-1.
But you'd have been at a college like Univ and you'd have worked really hard.
But generally, I think that people who've gone to university have been...
The opposite of educated.
They've been brainwashed.
That's the fascinating thing about university now.
It does the opposite of what it's supposed to do.
It doesn't broaden your imagination or make you a critical thinker.
It does the opposite.
A lot of Ramonas will often say the biggest divide in relation to whether you voted remain or leave is whether you went to university.
They think that's their trump card.
This proves...
Super clever people love the EU and you think, hold on, it might also prove far more realistically that the university now actually dulls your critical sensibilities and it has become this kind of factory line turning out people who have the correct way of thinking, who are politically correct.
Who are pro-bureaucracy, who buy into all the snowflake stuff like the mental health crisis and the problem of freedom of speech and all this other crap that they've voiced on you the minute you get there.
That's far more realistic.
Whereas the 18 and 19-year-olds who refuse to go to university because they want to learn a trade or they want to get a job or they want to have children and set up their own home or whatever else it might be, Are the ones who tend to be quite critical.
So they are the ones who voted against the European Union, which was a pretty rebellious thing to do in 2016, when the entire establishment was on its knees begging us not to do that.
That took a sense of, you know, well, I'm really committed, so I'm going to do it.
That section of society is far more open to critical thinking now.
So I think we live in a society in which the moral divide...
I mean, it's like Disraeli referred to the existence of two Englands.
You know, there was an England of a kind of political set, a kind of well-connected set, and then there was the other England of people who thought differently, behaved differently, and acted differently.
I think we're in that situation now, but in an even more pronounced way.
And even people like us and people in this room who presumably have a kind of instinct for critical thinking or maybe being anti-PC or whatever else it might be, even I think we can sometimes lose sight of just how different these two Englands or really two Britons are.
Like if you go to Stoke, right?
Stoke had a huge leave vote.
I was there doing any questions on BBC Radio 4 shortly before the referendum.
When I'd been having arguments in London, and I also did a talk at Cambridge University...
Where?
Cambridge and Oxford and various other places where I was arguing for Brexit.
I did a series of talks saying, please vote Brexit, because the EU really stinks.
When you went to these places, people would look at you in horror.
They couldn't believe what you were saying.
It was like you were an alien.
Then I went to Stoke for any questions.
It was unbelievable.
The audience was full of school teachers and taxi drivers and builders and all sorts of people, professionals too, all sorts of people who I couldn't believe the people on the panel who were saying pro-Remain things.
It was the most extraordinary experience and then everyone hung around afterwards and I was talking to them and I'd never been in a room of so many critical thinkers.
I'd never been in a room of so many Eurosceptics.
And it was an entirely different world to the one that I'd spent the previous few months in talking about Brexit.
And it's really important that we don't lose sight of that.
It's really important that if you're bogged down on Twitter or if you're reading The Guardian or if you're switching on the BBC and all these increasingly limited means we have through which to express ourselves or to connect with people and whatever, it's really important that you don't...
Convince yourself that because everyone is saying Brexit is a disaster or because everyone is saying no deal is the worst thing ever, that other people out there think the same.
They absolutely do not.
And so there is a groundswell.
There are millions upon millions of people who disagree with the entire establishment, who disagree with the entire media class.
And it's really so important to remember that.
Can I tell you another thing that's worrying me?
It's sort of related.
I was watching this Netflix series the other day called Sabrina.
Do you know about Sabrina?
The Teenage Witch?
I don't think it is.
She is the Teenage Witch, but she's from a comic series.
Okay.
And it's designed for, I imagine, sort of late teenagers and...
Whatever.
And in this episode I saw, there was a girl who decided that she wasn't going to be a girl anymore.
She was going to be a boy.
And she wanted to be in the basketball team, even though she was a girl.
And all the jocks said, but you can't be in the basketball team because you're a girl.
And then Sabrina did a magic spell on her, said that she was really good at basketball.
And actually, as my son very sensibly pointed out...
This is actually a very anti-feminist statement.
What it shows is that women are going to be really shit at basketball unless they've got a witch doing magic on them.
But the broader point I'm trying to make is that every aspect of our culture now seems to be steeped in the values of identity politics.
How do we get out of this?
I thought that watching an episode of Glee about three or four years ago where there was this...
Large, I guess that's the PC word, large, young, male, black student who decided that he was actually a girl.
And the great struggle of his time was his right to use the girls' toilets at school.
And on Glee, they refer to him as like a modern-day Rosa Parks.
And I just thought...
This is really, really a repulsive argument.
The idea that, you know, Rosa Parks, who fought for the right people to be treated equally in everyday life, was comparable to the right of an eccentric teenager to go and take a dump in a girl's toilet.
I mean, it's just so deeply offensive at every level.
But that's what passes for contemporary culture.
And I think...
See, the trans thing is a good example of the kind of thing I'm talking about, which is, if you only followed the media, if you only were ensconced in that world, you think it's the most important issue of our time, but no one else is thinking about it.
Across the country, no one else is thinking, well, you're not.
I think about it all the time.
You think about it all the time.
I write about it far more than I should, but only to say, why am I writing about it, really?
But the thing is, it's like no-one else is saying to themselves, oh, we have to make gender-neutral toilets, or we have to let little Johnny wear a dress to school, and all this stuff.
No-one's thinking about that.
It's just this kind of...
But the problem...
I don't say this to suggest it's not a problem.
The problem is that the kind of people you're talking about have an enormous amount of influence on...
Over politics and over media discussion and over the kind of bourgeois ideology, as us Marxists used to call it in the old days.
And one of the things they're pushing is the trans thing.
The reason that's a problem is because I find the trans idea incredibly Orwellian, in fact.
Because I don't think a man can ever become a woman.
Sorry, you can take as many hormones as you like.
You can change your name.
I will call you by your new name because I'm a polite person.
I was raised to be polite.
But I don't think you're a woman.
I think it's a sham.
And also I think the opposite can't happen.
A woman can't become a man.
So that's my opinion.
But the thing is that when you look at why people are pushing this, particularly the political class and kind of influential people, it really does start to look like a way of chipping away at the values that most people hold dear, which is the values of family life and the idea that there are mothers and fathers and the idea that men and women possibly play different roles, particularly in relation to children.
All those things which...
Huge numbers of society hold onto as a core organizing principle of their lives and their community's lives and life in general.
It's just constantly being chipped away at by these people who studied queer studies at Goldsmiths University or somewhere, who've never met anyone outside of, not even London, but central London.
And it's just constantly those people, in a very unilateral, quite dictatorial fashion, are chipping away at this.
It's the point George Orwell made.
George Orwell said, the control of language is always about controlling thought.
His obsession with newspeak was not simply because he thought it was bad to make up new words, because he recognised that controlling language was a means of controlling how people think and, by extension, how they behave.
So when people are inventing all these bullshit new phrases like Z instead of he or she, and all these kind of gender fluid terms, gender fluidity always sounds like incontinence to me, such a bizarre phrase.
When they're inventing all these things, it really is actually about changing how people think About everyday life, and then eventually how they behave.
That's why I think it's really important to push back against it.
I hesitate to make this point, but isn't it a bit like Marxist dialectic?
The way that the kids are being trained to think now, it's in terms of victimhood and power relationships.
Yes and no.
Yes in the sense that I think the use of the education system to push a lot of these ideas is really, really worrying, which is why I'm in this really curious position.
I'd like to know what you think about this.
I find myself feeling incredibly sympathetic to those Muslim parents in Birmingham.
Well, I'm torn because on the one hand, I think the fact that these Muslim parents are saying, you know, Get LGBT stuff out of our schools, I think actually speaks to one of the problems with multiculturalism, which is if you create these kind of very distinctive communities and say to everyone, go and do your own thing, it's wonderful, we love it, then eventually you'll be in a situation where people don't adhere to the core values of our society.
And one of the core values of our society, since the 1960s anyway, is that homosexuality is fine, not a crime, so calm down.
So if there are significant sections of society that don't adhere to that, I think that is a function of the divisiveness of multiculturalism.
So that's the first point.
But the second point is, these parents in Birmingham have a point, which is that when it comes to sexual matters and moral matters, I think parental sovereignty should be more important than the educational establishment's desire to inculcate the right way of thinking into five- and six-year-olds.
Who the hell do they think they are?
So...
So you're right that I think the use of the education system to kind of train people to think in the correct way is going to make for a far less intellectually curious, PC, boring, conformist society, and that's got to be challenged in any way that we can.
And if those Birmingham parents are doing it, then more power to them, in my view...
But I wouldn't call it Marxism.
And in fact, the point I make to right-wing people, so I'll make it to you as well, is that if it's Marxism you're worried about, which is fine, that's fine to worry about Marxism, I actually think you should be really chilled out about what's happening in relation to the contemporary left and their embrace of identity politics and their embrace of woke Pro-trans, divisive, identitarian, racially aware politics.
Because in my mind, that really reveals how uninfluential Marxism is.
Because Marxism was entirely about class.
Now, you can be a Marxist or you can be an anti-Marxist.
I really have no beef about that whatsoever.
But Marxist politics and most of left-wing politics was about class.
It was about economics.
It was about who owns the means of production and who doesn't own the means of production.
It was quite narrow.
The thing about the contemporary left is that they don't give a damn about class.
They have no interest in class whatsoever.
They're obsessed with race.
They're obsessed with gender.
They're obsessed with sexuality.
They're obsessed with Genitals and toilets and all these bizarre things.
So I think actually what that new left speaks to is a shift away from questions of economics and class towards questions of culture.
So I think the right should...
Calm down about Marxism, because I really do think it's dead, and it's not coming back, so that's fine.
It belongs in the 20th century.
But it should get incredibly exercised about the new left, which is incredibly divisive and authoritarian and conformist and all those other things.
So mixing those two things up, I think, is sometimes unhelpful.
In the nicest way, you did actually make the point I was trying to make, which is simply that I said it was like Marxism.
I didn't say it was Marxism.
Because I think that's what's happened.
I think that class has been replaced by different forms of identity.
It's still about victims and oppressors, but this time the oppressor is, well, the top dog is the white man.
Then you have a hierarchy of victimhood.
Yes, I don't necessarily disagree with that, but I think class is different to all other identities in the sense that class can be transcended.
And I think that's why they hate class politics.
Because if you look back to radical class politics in the 1800s in particular, it kind of lost its way in the 1900s, particularly with Stalinism.
That was dodgy.
But if you look at the kind of...
With Marxism, I'm like...
When people say about rock bands, I like the early stuff.
I'm like that with Marxism.
I like the early stuff.
The later stuff, not so good.
But if you look back at the early stuff, it was...
The point was to end the working class so that you'd create a world in which there was no longer a working class.
And it's worked, pretty much.
It wasn't about the celebration of the working class identity.
It was about finding a way to end the working class identity by having greater production and growth and equality and all those other things.
Now, people couldn't say that's a pipe dream.
I don't care.
You can say whatever you like.
It's a free country, almost.
But the point is that the difference with identity politics now is that it's about celebrating inherited traits, things over which we have no control, things over which you can't actually make that much of a difference.
And so it's very fixed and rigid and, as a consequence, incredibly divisive.
Class was actually...
The aim of class was to be a universalising...
Identity.
So we're all working class together.
Let's gang up and kill the rich.
That was the idea.
Whereas I think what we have now, what's replaced it, is these increasingly fragmenting identities.
Not only do you have, say for example, you don't just have the trans identity, but you have the black trans identity, who are more oppressed than the white trans identity.
And it just goes on and on and on.
And so they're fragmenting more and more.
And what you end up with...
What I end up with is an incredibly fragmented, divided, destructive society.
Believe it or not, that's not actually what Karl Marx wanted.
Brendan, we've now got a very, very exciting moment in the Delling pod.
Our guest is going to turn up.
Where is the guest?
Who is it?
Come here, guest!
There's only one person on the Delling pod.
You haven't met him before, have you?
No, never.
No.
And we're going to play a game.
Hello, Brendan.
To which, Dick's arrived, everybody, and we're going to, by popular request, we're going to play a game.
Special edition Yes No Game.
Yes No Game.
Is that all we're allowed to say, yes or no?
Can we give an explanation?
The rules are a yes or a no, not necessary with an explanation because we're tight on time.
It's different, but they should be self-evident.
Just a warning, some of them may not be real people and some of them are definitely dead.
And the first one is kind of like a lie detector test to see whether or not the system's working.
Okay.
Shall I go?
Yes.
And is it just Brendan answering?
Well, I think we'll both answer.
Both, yeah.
Okay.
Jacob Rees-Mogg.
Is it a yes or a no?
No.
Oh, yes.
Right.
Okay.
Eric Idle.
Eric Idle.
Yes.
Um...
No.
No.
John Cleese.
No.
No.
Roger Daltrey.
Yes.
Mervyn King.
Yes.
Brendan, it's...
There's kind of a Brexit theme running for us.
Brendan's struggling here.
You've got your pythons in the wrong order.
One's a lever and the other's a remainer, but that could be a whole new discussion.
Gina Miller.
What's worse than no?
I like the way the audience joined.
The special friend, it feels so partly about this.
Can we say fuck no?
You can.
She can kind of be credited with saving the whole situation.
But still no.
Yes.
Again, another bit.
Big no.
John Bercow.
Oh, no.
Special friend, what do you think of John Bercow?
No!
As it said, one of the placards on the pro-Brexit thing said, bollocks to Bercow.
Bollocks to Bercow, yeah.
Good sticker.
I'll get that as a t-shirt.
Alice Vidal.
Oh, she's the co-leader of the AFD. Oh, no.
No, no, she's great.
Check out her speech.
She's a lesbian.
I'm still saying no.
She's quite hot.
I've found the fault line between you two.
You found quite a big fault line pick.
I think this could be war.
I mean, it could be that Brendan never, ever comes on the podcast again.
That would be a great shame.
Thanks to the yes, no.
Everyone would agree that would be a terrible shame.
So I'm saying ya to Alice Vedel.
Dr.
Alice Vedel.
Frankie Boyle.
No.
No!
And he used to be yes.
He used to be, yeah.
A lot of these people did.
Steve Baker.
Yes.
Oh, so yes.
Matt Ridley.
Big fan.
Yes.
Yes.
James Dreyfuss.
Yes!
We loved that series, didn't we?
Gimme, gimme, gimme!
Very good.
Fiona Onasanya.
No.
Oh, no!
Popular with the audience.
Criminals Against Brexit.
What's it called?
Ankle Tag.
Ankle Tag, yes.
Definitely, no.
George Osborne.
Lovely George.
No.
No, no!
Ramsay Bolton.
Yes, yes.
Come on, he's terrible, Ram.
Yes, but in a kind of, in a so-bad-it's-good kind of way.
Oh, I don't watch Game of Thrones.
Sorry.
You'll be laughing for the name.
We're on our own here.
Arya Stark.
Oh, yes, yes.
Arya, I hope she gets the Iron Throne.
Is that a bit feminist of me?
Who plays her?
That's the question.
Was she...
Maisie...
Maisie Williams?
Yeah, I don't like her.
No.
You don't like Maisie Williams?
No.
A lot of these have great characters, but they're awful people in real life.
They probably went to one of those stage schools where they get invited.
My next one is a case in point.
Cersei Lannister.
Well, as a character, love her.
Okay, but then Lena Headey.
I'm guessing...
Rabid Remainer.
Well, they all are, aren't they?
Apart from...
Who?
Last three coming up.
Oliver Cromwell.
Yes and then no.
Yes to begin with.
And no when he was killing the levellers.
Next question, John Lilburn.
The biggest yes.
That was purely for you of my whole life.
If you were a no, I was going to walk out.
But when Dick looked up the levellers, he got the bloody pop group.
Yeah, that's right.
Like New Model Army, if you look up New Model Army.
We like the levellers, but you wouldn't have been a digger, would you?
I think diggers...
The problem with diggers is that they were just lazy.
They just went and lived on land, whereas the levellers were incredibly politically engaged.
They were populists.
Lil Burn is the greatest ever English man who ever lived.
Resounding yes.
You've found his G-spot, Dick.
John Rees, who was in the SWP, so we're not inclined to like him, has written a fantastic history of the levelers, which I recommend to all of you.
Really, really, really good.
Well, we'll wind up finally with Titania McGrath.
Yes.
Oh, yes!
Yes!
Yes!
Yeah, she writes a column.
He writes a column for Spike, of course.
Yeah, don't presume her gender.
I think, thank you, Dick, for giving us a happy finish.
You're welcome.
As nice as it's known.
Right, I'll leave.
And thank you also.
Well, you know, Dick, you can stay somewhere.
Stay, stay.
Thank you to our lovely, lovely special friend.
Is that it?
We've got two minutes.
Maybe we can have time for one question?
This lady here.
Hello, lady.
One second, one second.
I've been a head teacher in a school and I'm used to addressing assembly.
I work at the UN. The UN are very worried about Brexit because they're worried about workers' rights and women's rights in particular.
And they have asked the UK government, which they have called callous and misogynistic in the way it treats women, to bring on board UN rules for women and No matter what happens with Brexit, to try and make sure that those rights are not undermined.
We have a petition on the government's website at the moment asking for that to happen.
And we have a way to help the women born in the 1950s who've been so discriminated against, and that's who I represent.
How would you reply to the UN? Well, I'm very worried about the UN, which I think is quite...
I think it's an increasingly authoritarian, anti-Zionist slash anti-Semitic and murderous institution.
Let's look at what they did in Somalia in the 1990s, what they did in Yugoslavia in the late 1990s.
I will not take, not from you, you seem like a perfectly pleasant person, I will not take moral lectures from such an immoral institution as the United Nations, ever.
But more...
But more importantly than that, I've heard this argument many times that we need to protect workers' rights and women's rights, and leaving the EU will undermine those things, and Remainer say that all the time.
I think that's a real insult to the generations and generations of working-class people and women in the United Kingdom who fought and secured those rights long before the EU ever came into existence, which was in 1993.
It's an insult to Sylvia Pankhurst of the suffragettes.
It's an insult to...
The Indian women in their saris at Grumwick in the 1970s who went on strike for the right to equal pay and so on.
It's an insult to the women of Dagenham who went on strike for the right to equal pay.
It's an insult to Barbara Castle.
It's an insult to generations and generations of British people who actually fought tooth and nail for workers' rights and women's rights.
And just because they've been codified, actually in a way that...
It undermines them by the European Union.
It doesn't mean we should stick with the European Union.
British people are more than capable of defending their own rights.
They've done it for generations.
We don't need Jean-Claude Juncker and other drunks and lunatics and bureaucrats to do it for us.
I agree with Brendan.
Thank you for being a lovely audience.
Thank you.
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