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April 18, 2019 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
57:53
Delingpod 16: Ben Cobley
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Welcome to the Delling Pod with my special guest.
I've been so looking forward to meeting him and talking to him about his amazing book.
His name is Ben Cobley and he's written a book called The Tribe, which I think Everyone, everyone who listens to this podcast certainly should read because it's a really, really great book.
I read it on holiday recently in Morocco.
I gave myself a little chunk to read each day because you can't read it like a beach novel.
It's quite a serious academic tome, wouldn't you say, Ben, in a way?
In a way, I guess.
Thank you.
My flat white's arrived.
Yes, thank you.
Yeah, it's not a beach read, is what I'm saying.
Yes, I mean, I didn't write it to be an academic book.
I did write it to be as accessible to basically anyone and everyone as possible.
But obviously, I mean, it does employ quite a lot of ideas, a bit of philosophy in there.
But I do my best, struggle away, to try and explain it in as straightforward a manner as possible.
So far from the readers, quite a wide range of readers has been quite a good response, even from people who are not normally readers who have got through it.
I tell you, I have probably not since my university days have I read a book where I've underlined so many sentences.
I think it's a really important book.
I think it deserves much wider coverage.
So maybe you can tell me, first of all, Why it's called the tribe?
Who are the tribe?
Well, the tribe, I guess, it comes from just the basic idea of different groups, obviously.
But a tribe is a bit stronger than that.
It's a group which has certain taboos, certain ways of doing things, of relating to each other, which are obviously different to other people.
And I thought, I mean, the full title of the book is The Tribe, the Liberal Left, and the System of Diversity.
So the tribe is the liberal left, or in its full nomenclature, the progressive liberal left.
Right.
So I think we all basically know who these people are.
I kind of come from this tribe myself.
That's one of the things that's interesting about you, isn't it?
That you're not like me.
You're not a natural conservative.
And you went to Cambridge.
And by the way, I think it is quite a Cambridge book.
Why would you say that?
Well, I think an Oxford book would be, if one wanted to make crass generalisations, would be the kind of thing that I would...
No, no, no.
Different.
It would be less grown up, more flippant, more polemical.
Whereas what you've done is very, very patiently analysed what I think is one of the most terrifying phenomena of our times.
Which is the way that the language, human behaviour, everything from jokes to how you can behave with the opposite sex or people of different races, has been taken over by this, what you call the tribe, who have imposed these rules on us.
What you're allowed to say, what you're not allowed to say, what you're allowed to do, what you're not allowed to do.
And your book is a very good explainer of the intellectual undercurrents Which have created the situation.
Yeah, I don't know if I would actually agree with that.
On the intellectual undercurrents, because that's something I actually think I tried to avoid doing, was explaining how it came about, who's to blame, who are the theorists, who are responsible for this sort of stuff.
I'd rather try to explain it as, this is what's going on now, and this is how it works.
So I mean, obviously there are intellectual aspects to it, but I'm not...
I'm not critiquing intellectuals themselves.
It's more everyday politicians, who not many of them we would probably define as intellectuals, and just everyday activists.
Well, funny, when you mention people who aren't intellectuals, I instantly thought of David Lammy.
David Lammy, the race-baiting Labour MP. I mean, tell me, Labour were presumably once your natural party.
Well, I was once, when Labour was holding its internal selection for the London mayor candidate, David Lammy was my man.
I was going to vote for him.
Was he?
I think I may have actually voted for him.
Because, you know, he has a great lot of qualities.
Around the London riots time, he wrote a book about that, which was quite full on, and, you know, took on a lot of the sort of groupthink.
So, you know, his vault fast, especially with Brexit, has been quite astonishing, quite interesting, and, you know, from my perspective, obviously disappointing.
Because, you know, I think he has a lot of genuine qualities.
Look, I think of David Lammy...
As the kind of person I would like to have on my team, because he's a fighter.
He's feisty.
He seems to be quite charismatic.
I mean, I can't stand him.
I think what he's doing with his politics is ugly and cynical and divisive and race-baiting.
But he plays a good game.
I'm sorry, I'm searching your book to try and find the David Lammy...
Well, it's quite early on, isn't it?
Page maybe eight, even if that's six or eight, of the introduction he appears, I think, talking about Grenfell Tower.
Yes, that was an interesting example of the problem you're describing.
That Grenfell Tower, which should have been a tragedy in which we could all feel sorry for the victims and so on, suddenly became a stick with which to beat a certain type of person, didn't it?
I mean, white people for one.
Well, it became really politicised in that way, over race especially.
And...
It wasn't just, you know, targeting white people.
Obviously, there was a bit going the other way as well, from traditional, like, racialists, sort of, you know, looking at all the people in the town, most of whom were immigrants and weren't white, and, you know, attacking on that basis.
But...
From what I observed, it was very much the progressive, liberal-left-led and activist-led response and attack at institutional white cultures being to blame for it was first and was a lot stronger.
And a lot of that old racialist reaction was partly in response to that, I think.
Well, indeed, I suppose when I talk about it being divisive, it's exactly that.
When you get...
I don't think there is much actual racism in this country, but if you really want to bring it out from under the floorboards, what you do is do what David Lammy does and really start goading people and start implying that...
One of the extraordinary things I thought about the Grenfell Tower business was when activists like David Lammy started demanding that only a black judge or an ethnic judge could be...
Yes, that's right.
He said on the lines of it's got to be someone who's black, I think he has an immigrant background.
Also, he said, which I found quite interesting, I wrote this in the book, he said it should be a woman.
As well.
Either or.
And how does that work?
And this fits into the schema that I put into my book, which is where the liberal left, progressive liberal left, politicizes various different identity groups and basically favors them.
It's politics.
It's very simple.
And that's why this sort of politics is so effective, because it's so simple.
You don't have to think very much about it.
We all know what you do.
You favour certain groups.
So for him, Grenfell Tower, when he's saying who the judge should be, it shouldn't be another old white man of the establishment.
He didn't just say, oh, maybe it should be a non-white person or immigrant background.
He said woman as well.
So that's bringing in the whole, almost the whole sort of favoured group side of the liberal left.
You know, I guess you could say mobilising it.
Yes, yes.
I was thinking about this, that what is it that, okay, David Lammy.
I'm not sure how clever he is.
He got into Harvard Law School.
I think he's probably quite thick.
The fact that Diane Abbott got into Cambridge isn't necessarily an indicator of great intellect.
She just may have played the system.
I couldn't possibly comment.
But taking a step back...
Why would somebody like David Lammy, or indeed Jon Snow would be another example, the Channel 4 news presenter, why would they adopt these positions which do not stand up to serious critical analysis?
I mean, there's no objective reason why.
If the law is functioning, a white male judge should perform any worse job than a black female judge.
I mean, by definition of what justice is, it's practising justice.
Yes.
That's what it's for.
It's not to practise racial favouritism.
So you really don't need to have gone to Cambridge to understand this.
Everyone understands that...
Justice is...
Well, I think that's maybe a point that actually that's kind of got lost.
You know, the basic ideas of what our institution should be for.
Yes.
The police should be to, you know, to stop crime and the justice system is there to, you know, prosecute crime and maybe you could say prevent crime possibly as well.
Those sorts of ideas, you know, you think about the media as well, that it's there maybe to tell the truth, tell us what's going on.
I think those meanings have really got diluted and lost in the sort of world that I'm talking about in the book.
It's very interesting you say that.
I don't...
You've actually taken me...
Also, of course, media, for example, to entertain as well.
Those...
Those aims have become subjected to other political objectives.
Possibly.
You and I could actually become lovers because I think we have a...
I don't think so.
We've developed a bond there.
You were actually thinking ahead of where I was going to go anyway.
Which was...
I don't know whether you actually used the phrase first principles or not.
No, I don't know.
But it seems to me that one of the things our culture has lost is to think through everything from first principles.
For example...
Time was.
The job of the police was to keep law and order with consent of the people for whom they administered justice.
The job of the entertainment industry was to entertain.
There's a very good section in your book on the BBC's new BAME policy, their diversity policy.
Oh, is that actually Channel 4?
Yes.
Channel 4, I think, operates something similar.
They've both got these diversity and sexuality and gender targets of the kind of people they want working in their organisation by 2020, I think it is.
And it's a quota system.
And you make the point in the book, very sensibly, that here is an institution which was originally designed for entertainment and whatever the Wreathian principles were that are...
Educate, inform.
But now, it's become about something else.
It's become another branch of the diversity industry.
Now, I think this should have more scrutiny than it's really had.
Absolutely.
I completely agree.
And I think they're sleepwalking into it.
They don't really quite realise what they're doing.
Or that, you know, maybe you could say, use the phrase, cognitive dissonance.
They still think they're doing all what they did before.
And what they're doing now...
In bringing all these quotas and also different priorities of what they should be covering.
They don't realise that those two aims of the organisation are sometimes in conflict.
If your aim is to represent, it's not necessary to tell the truth, for instance, or to tell the whole truth.
You see, I think the BBC knows exactly what it's doing, in as much as I think the BBC has become so, to use Vox Day's phrase, so SJW converged, that actually the people in the organisation...
The parasites have taken over.
They've taken over the host.
And they very much are in the business of enforcing the woke agenda and using, in Gramscian style, using the institutions to impose their left liberal hegemony over the country.
I mean, just briefly, that is an area where we do slightly differ, definitely, in that I do tend to see that it's not nearly with a lot of people nearly as conscious of that, in that a lot of people you might see doing that will never have heard of Kramski, for instance.
But you only need a small number of people to enforce that ideology, and everyone else goes along to get along.
Yes, once you manage to enforce the rules and get these things institutionalised, then, I mean, we all, you know, if we're going to stay employed, we have to abide by the rules and reproduce them, yeah.
Well, you've said in the book, one of the things that's so dangerous about the tribe or why it's so successful is that you don't need to opt in.
Yeah, that's crucial.
It's a default setting now for us all in public life.
Yeah.
You see MPs doing it a lot, even Conservative MPs.
They will always deplore any lapse in the rules of identity politics, don't they?
I'm trying to think of some examples.
But you see conservative, particularly conservative female MPs, very keen to show how on board with feminism they are.
Yes, yes.
And we've seen Theresa May has allied up with the Fawcett Society as well, which is, you know, it's a political feminist organisation which tells basic, I wouldn't say lies, but, you know, is dishonest, for example, about the gender pay gap, you know, tells half-truths about it.
You're talking about the power of slogans in the book, or rather the forcefulness of theory and how effective it is that organisations like the Fawcett Society are in...
Getting the culture to accept their theory as fact.
For example, I hear people like my daughter tell me that if you believe in equality, you're a feminist.
And that's a given.
And I think the Fawcett Society has promoted that notion that everyone's a feminist if you believe in equality.
It's only kind of evil chauvinists who don't believe in...
Yes, I mean, they've said that, yes.
Even though a survey that they commissioned...
Showed that not many women thought of themselves as feminist or liked it.
They said even despite that, or even because of it, they actually are feminist because they believe in equality.
Yes.
They've rigged...
They twisted...
Yeah.
And you see a lot of that type of rigging going on, you know.
And I link it a lot to the sort of progressive idea that, you know, history is just moving in a certain way.
So it has to be...
The way we're going because we're progressive, we're on the right side of history.
So therefore, you know, it's like with Brexit, it just can't happen.
Brexit can't happen because history is not going in the way of Brexit.
Are you familiar with a book by Christopher Booker called The Neophiliacs?
I'm afraid not.
Okay, so in 1969, it's actually the 50th anniversary, the mighty Christopher Booker, who, as you know, was the founding editor of Private Eye.
He was very much involved in the 60s satire boom.
But by 1969 he was starting to get a bit jaded is probably the wrong word.
He'd seen the truth about what was happening in Britain and he didn't like it.
And the reason that he didn't like it was actually because of something rather similar to what you analyse in your book.
This obsession with the new.
New automatically trumps the old.
Everything traditional is bad.
Everything new is good.
It's progress, and progress must of itself be a good thing.
In the same way, one of the big things you see at the moment is this...
Being promoted by Remainers in the Brexit debate is this idea that immigrants, they're great, they're so much more productive and vibrant than the stale, pasty, white, disgustingly white workers that...
Yes, there's something that, I mean, at least in this country, and I do in the book, I just talk about Britain, I narrow my science to Britain, But I think this stuff is relevant obviously to America, the Anglosphere and the rest of Europe to an extent, some places more than others.
But yeah, definitely.
It's quite interesting that you particularly are making this point because I can see that in a parallel universe, You, Ben Cobley, lefty Cambridge graduate, are actually one of those white people who endorses this idea of white privilege.
I'd forgotten what I was going to say there, which was, of course, sorry to interrupt, it was that there's a sort of a vibe, at least in this country...
The English people especially, British people to an extent, but it's more narrowed down on English, you see in a lot of the discourse, as a sort of diseased identity.
And they use Brexit very much as an example of that.
They'll never mention that Wales was majority Brexit either.
So it always narrows down on the English, and that kind of tends to align with the whole progressive ethos.
Of, you know, getting rid of regressive identities and anything that's sort of associated with empire, which you might think actually Britain might be more relevant to that, but no, they've narrowed down on England because...
I mean, you have, I guess, the Scotland, Scots, you know, nationalists at least, they consider themselves sort of victimised by the English and the Irish, obviously, as well.
But they can somehow get away with that nationalism, with that woad-painted Mel Gibson nationalism.
Yes, it's a progressive sort of nationalism, yeah, while English is seen as regressive, something that needs to be eliminated.
But this is all about branding, isn't it?
It's about the way that...
The way that the progressives very successfully promulgated this narrative, where to be English and working class particularly, is something to be ashamed of.
And you saw a classic example of that with Lady Niuji.
What's her name?
Emily Thornberry.
Took a photograph of a house with a white van outside and some English...
It was a big English flag in his window, I think.
Cross of St George.
And she tweeted something sneering about this.
And this is the contempt of the liberal elite, the Remainer class particularly, for ordinary working people.
And you and I are both champions of these ordinary working people, whether they like it or not.
Yes, I mean, with that, it was...
I seem to recall...
I don't recall exactly what she tweeted.
She may have barely said a comment.
It was...
I think it was just...
It spoke for itself.
It was a dog whistle.
And we could all just understand immediately what it meant.
It just summed up so much.
But this happens a lot.
And I think...
I think a lot of people...
Going back to why I think people should read your book...
There are a lot of people like us who are mystified and gobsmacked by what's happened in the world.
Things have happened very, very quickly.
Things have changed very, very quickly.
I love doing digressions on this podcast, and let me give you a brief digression.
I had never seen the film Sliding Doors.
You know the one?
Yeah, I don't think I've seen it.
This was from a period where Gwyneth Paltrow was not annoying.
She was actually quite fanciful.
We're talking quite a long time ago.
1998, the film was made.
And it starts off, Gwyneth Paltrow works for a PR agency in London.
And in the early stages of the film, she gets sacked from her job.
And there are these males gathered round the table making sexist remarks and they sack her for some trivial offence.
I think she's borrowed some of their company vodka for a party and this is considered a sackable offence.
And I was thinking, this film could never be made now because no one would believe the premise of a female being so easily sacked and of men sitting round the table being able to make sexist remarks.
No, I'm not saying that we should go back to a world where men could be, you know, a pre-MeToo world where Harvey Weinstein could bless whatever actress he wanted because that's the casting couch and that's how it goes.
Nevertheless, the world has changed, I think, more dramatically, probably, culturally, in the last 10 or 15 years than probably it's ever changed at any time in history.
It's certainly a remarkable time that we're going through.
Yes, remarkable, crazy.
And...
The whole of our politics is just struggling to keep up at all.
Indeed.
In fact, it's just being sort of gathered up and sort of snowballed ahead.
No one's in control.
It's like I would say as a lefty, it's like capitalism, you know, a runaway train.
That's what identity politics and everything surrounding it is at the moment.
Yeah.
So there was another example I was thinking of more recently than the David Lammy Grenfell Tower one, which was, this happened last week or the week before, Jon Snow, Channel 4 news presenter, looking at the crowd who'd gathered at the Brexit betrayal rally looking at the crowd who'd gathered at the Brexit betrayal rally outside Westminster and saying in shocked tones, he was genuinely appalled, wasn't
He said, I don't think I've ever seen a crowd which is quite so white or so many white people.
It was a fascinating comment, yes.
But now...
Because...
Tell me.
Tell me why it's something.
Because, yeah, I mean, we could all see the basic hypocrisy in the comment, but there was some sort of other underlying truth to what he was saying, but it didn't come out in his words.
I mean, we could see on social media, you know, so many people were pointing out that actually, you know, the Remainers' March was virtually all white people.
Glastonbury, where he went and notoriously shouting, fuck the Tories, was, you know, very, very white.
And various other things as well.
I mean, you know, John Snow will know these people, a lot of these people are, you know, who he hangs out with.
A lot of white people.
So he wasn't actually shocked at white people all being gathered together in the place.
But he was insinuating something else.
Well, for one thing, he was laying it down that these white people were negative white people.
They were the wrong white people.
He was signalling to the group, wasn't he?
He was signalling to the tribe that even though I, Jon Snow, am a middle-aged white person and therefore not immediately eligible to high status within the tribe because of my white privilege...
Nevertheless, I am acceptable because I am displaying my knowledge of my white privilege and being embarrassed by it and therefore I'm okay.
Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily go that far in to talk about privilege.
I mean, it's kind of implicit there.
I mean, I would say in the terms of my book that I talk about, you know, the likes of John Snow being a sort of overseeing class.
That's the stance they're taking, and this is the liberal left I talk about in the book.
They kind of oversee society, and they hand out favour...
You know, informally in terms of that kind of comment, along with disfavour, of course, to the unfavoured groups, you know, by white people.
And this is kind of the way it works.
But yeah, it was a mighty...
It's a hypocrisy in a sense, but like I say, sort of really revealing in terms of that truth in that sort of the white people who would turn out for the pro-Remain march would be the right white people because, and it links in very much into immigration, you know, because Remain is the pro-immigration side and then Brexit is meant to be the anti-immigration side.
In that sense, the pro-immigration side is favouring a favoured group, which is immigrants, not often non-white people, non-English people, that type of thing.
So that's the alignment going on.
Sorry, I'm probably waffling and getting very dull here, but that's kind of how it works.
Now I've forgotten what I was going to say.
Because there's so much to talk about.
I mean, that's just one thing with the book, briefly.
I mean, I wrote it and I tried not to overplay it in the book.
But even then, I've realised since I finished it that really it's a lot bigger.
It's so big, the stuff that we're talking about.
It's winding its way into every sort of corner of our culture.
I mean, you say about your daughter talking to you at home.
It's everywhere, this stuff.
Yeah, girls, it's not as though they're not suborned by peer pressure anyway.
And so if these ideas are current, these intellectual memes going around where, of course you're a feminist because if you believe in equality, everyone believes in equality.
And also, of course, we've got very young children now coming out and telling their parents they're gay, when they have no idea of even what sexuality is.
Well, because there's power in being gay.
I mean, it's not as good as being black, and it's not...
In the Oppression Olympics, gay is now pretty far down the scale.
But it's quite a sensible career move for a white male.
It's about the best one, obviously, getting a sex change, but...
I mean, it has come to the stage now, you know, when people are applying for jobs, where you have to tick all the boxes of what you are, you're thinking, actually, why don't I tick this box, which I'm not, you know, to maybe give me a bit of a leg up.
Yeah.
It's so much a part of employment now, like we're saying, sort of every single area of our culture and everything.
Yes.
Do you think I might get more podcast fans if this was the transgender darling pod?
You could have a go.
I could have a go, yeah.
Especially if you're dressed up.
I could do that.
I could do that.
Did you have a sort of road to Tarsus moment where you transform...
It was a steady thing.
I mean, I've always been a bit of a sort of contrarian, a bit of a rebel, you know, like to think that I think for myself, you know, since, I remember since I was very young, I've been a bit like that.
But, I mean, certainly, I mean, what happened with me is I, in 2010, when Labour finally lost an election.
Yeah.
And I thought, well, you know, the left's in a mess.
I've been sitting in pubs, whinging about the left for God knows how many years.
Surely, you know, why don't I sort of get my hands dirty and get in there and sort of see what's going on?
You know, maybe do something.
I don't know.
So I joined the Labour Party, which I left in 2016 during the referendum campaign.
Finally had enough.
But yeah, it was eye-opening being in Labour, and I loved it in a lot of ways.
It was terrific, being a member of a local party and having that route into your local community.
But from the beginning, I started to see this remarkable stuff.
Like one of the first meetings I went to, a colleague, quite a senior colleague in the local party, wonderful person, love her dearly.
And she said, we were talking about immigration.
I raised it, I think, as a topic to talk about.
And she said, yes, we should be in favour of immigration because immigrants vote Labour.
Oh, she said that.
So it was just sort of, it's like zing.
There you go.
But also you could see all sorts of, you know, how strong feminism was.
It was kind of, it was awesome.
And I, and I... Can you remember any moments that were particularly, where you felt like an inferior species?
No.
Well, there was one.
I don't quite remember exactly how it happened, so I might sort of garble this or not explain it right.
But it was going down the pub after a meeting afterwards, and I was hanging out with the younger people and having a nice time.
But I thought, you know, I should get to know some of the other people as well.
So I went up to two older ladies who were standing at the bar.
And I said to them, I can't remember if I said hello ladies or hello girls.
You didn't say, oi oi oi, hello darling.
I didn't quite say that, but they got very offended.
Did they?
At me saying like hello girls or hello ladies.
And then I tried the other one.
I sort of, you know, if I said hello girls, I went hello ladies and that didn't go down well at all.
And then I was just stumped.
I went, well, what do I say?
Because I don't know your names yet.
And they got very offended.
But of course, I mean, I tried to sort of just play it down and all that.
And we ended up sort of talking, you know, quite nicely, sort of sharing a cigarette outside later.
And it was just that strange sort of double life thing where they were genuinely offended.
But if you are genuinely offended, surely you would actually genuinely hate me.
Yes.
But of course it's ridiculous to do that on the basis of some just throwaway comment like that.
And, I mean, that was kind of indicative, but...
There was another moment as well, which was when they held a selection for a London Assembly candidate, for the local London Assembly candidate.
And it was given an all-women shortlist, so we were given a shortlist of women to vote for.
And then two turned up to speak to us locally, and one was dreadful, the other was kind of okay.
So the one that was okay won.
And she was the candidate last time, and she was also the candidate the next time, after she had lost this time.
And it was just like, well, hang on, what is going on here?
This is kind of fixing.
This is fixing selection process so certain people get in.
And it's using...
You know, the all-in-shortness to do that.
So you could see how it's working its way into the institution of the Labour Party and kind of moulding it to keep out sort of outsiders.
So I saw this type of thing going on and I started writing about it.
And luckily, you know, a Labour blog would publish some of my articles for a while.
For a while.
And I've been quite critical about this.
Yeah.
But yeah, obviously as time went on it was like, hang on, I'm getting more and more uncomfortable with this stuff and genuinely don't think it's all good.
So yeah, that's basically my sort of journey.
In your political phase when you were a member of the party, do you think you would have broken bread with somebody like me?
Would you have been suspicious of me?
I've always been, you know, like I say, a bit rebellious and a bit contrarian.
So I probably would, but I would have been wary.
Yeah.
Definitely.
Breaking bread, I wouldn't have voluntarily come and spoken to you.
But, you know, I've never been someone that's completely sort of, how do you say, sort of no-platformed or sort of...
How do you say?
Completely excluded.
You're quite below the radar, and that's probably where you'd prefer to be, given the amount of shit that one gets if one puts one's head above the parapet.
I mean, try being me, or Claire Fox, or Brendan O'Neill.
Absolutely, yeah.
I mean, I've experienced a bit in the past, and it's really genuinely harrowing.
What was it over?
What was it over?
It was over, well, several things.
The biggest one was over, I used the word, well, I criticised the use of the word patriarchy in a few blog posts.
So some of the feminists got onto me and they really came after me.
This was on social media, on Twitter.
And one of them, who I later found out was only 16-year-old, an activist, said that she wanted to throw a knife in my face.
Yes.
And you know that this is not completely serious.
To be fair, she's a girl, so she wouldn't have thrown very well.
Well, you could say that.
I did.
Indeed.
I mean, I genuinely found it, you know, harrowing.
Disturbing and threatening.
I would never have sort of...
I never even knew of hate crime at that time.
But I would never have done that.
I don't see people on my side of the argument using it.
I would...
Okay, so I got in trouble this morning for a...
I worked this morning to find I'd been temporarily suspended from Twitter for a tweet from 2016.
Somebody had been engaged in offence archaeology and they'd gone through my old tweets looking for things that they could report me for.
And there was one that said...
God, they must be employed to do that.
I mean, that must take...
How long must it take?
That must take, like, days to do it.
Go back to that.
It was something like...
Look, we may as well finally admit it.
We've got to kill all the young people.
And I think even a sort of nanoseconds analysis would have told anyone with any brains that this was not a serious tweet and that actually, having children of my own, I don't want to kill all young people.
Nevertheless, Twitter solemnly issued the order that I could not carry on until I deleted the tweet, which I did.
But I don't see people on my side promoting violence.
I mean, you asked me on the way here, what was the tweet that got me into trouble?
I tweeted something disparaging and snarky in relation to the paratroopers shooting...
Yeah, well, don't you think it's a good idea for the armed forces to be training against anti-Semitic, communist, terrorist-supporting revolutionaries?
It didn't even occur to me that this was going to get into trouble.
I just thought it would get a few likes from the home crowd.
And instead I found myself being reported.
I had George Galloway reporting me to the Met Police, the Metropolitan Police, for inciting violence against...
And you're thinking, what?
And loads and loads of momentum types have been joining in Galloway to report me to the police.
And I'm thinking...
If we're entering an age where people cannot differentiate between genuine threats of violence and genuine endorsement of violence and a flip-tweet having a go at a kind of overrated magic grandpa...
But I think it's more than that, though.
It's the act of criminalisation of your political opponents.
And, I mean, you making that comment, definitely I wouldn't say that.
Yeah, but you're not irresponsible like me.
Yeah, but people need to be irresponsible.
We need to have people saying that type of thing on Twitter.
Because it's life on Twitter, isn't it?
It's banter, innit?
And this is picking up any excuse, really, to target your political opponents.
And, I mean, that's one aspect of...
You know, writing the book and preparing it and realising that actually this stuff is a lot more serious than a lot of people take it for.
You know, that's where it's going.
And it's very easy to laugh at this stuff because it is ridiculous.
But these people are actually winning.
You know, the police are investigating the likes of you for saying comments like that.
I'm so glad you said that.
It's something that I have trouble explaining, even to Breitbart, even to The Spectator, who ought to be about the two organisations most capable of articulating these problems.
I don't sense that they get why this is the primal issue.
Problem of our times.
This goes into the heart of everything.
Never mind what's going on in politics.
That can be changed every four or five years.
When you've got a situation where...
Private behaviour is being policed by these new commissars, whatever you want to call them.
I think commissars is just the right word.
It's very worrying.
Much more serious than, even than Brexit actually.
Definitely.
Brexit's just a manifestation, an outward manifestation of this.
Well, it's an issue which, like all issues are nowadays, has been appropriated into the same sort of schema.
Yeah.
So we've seen Remainers take it that, you know, Brexiteers are unfavoured groups, you know, they don't just associate them with, you know, nasty English people, but with white people, and also with men.
You see, even though, you know, the stats show, it's about half and half Brexit votes is men and women.
Yes.
Progressives have gone on a large effort to politicize it as being an old white men sort of phenomenon.
So appropriate into what I call the system of diversity, which is how they see the world, how they relate to the world.
So you can see anything going on according to this sort of schema.
So it means you don't actually have to think about it.
Do you think it's...
Do you think it's...
Partly a product of the dumbing down of our education system that people have been, and combined with the brainwashing people get at schools.
Is it that people are now just too thick to understand what's going on?
Or do you think it's people are too lazy to want to think things through properly and see what's going on?
I think there's a bit of that, and I wouldn't sort of have a massive go at people for being lazy, because we just are lazy, and also most of us are just busy.
Having kids, we're just too busy doing life to sort of get properly worked up and to properly...
You know, think and understand it.
I mean, I consider myself very lucky to have the time, and I was full-time writing on this book, to properly look at it and think about it and work through my ideas on it.
Because it, although, you know, the basis of it, of the, you know, favouring different groups is very straightforward, how it kind of works itself out in different ways is really, really complex.
So, like I say, I wouldn't have a go at people like that.
And also, I mean, when I talk about it being like a system, what I mean by that is that there are, in our lives, it's convenient to go along with it.
Yeah, it is.
And in that way it becomes habitual.
We're used to getting approval or if we...
If we step outside of these ways, we know that we could come under attack.
So we don't, a lot of us.
And that's what I mean by becoming very systemic in society.
Yes, I'm just flicking through your book.
There's so many examples in it, but here's one.
Cambridge Fire and Rescue Service, and their policy on employment is, they say, there is a historical and present need to diversify our workforce.
The number of women operational staff has been under 5%, and black and ethnic minority people are underrepresented in all parts of the service, operational and support.
The proportion of staff who identify as gay is also negligible.
Now, any rational person would say, so fucking what?
If my house is burning down and I'm on the top floor, I don't care whether the person who rescued me is gay, whether they're black or white.
I just want the best person for the job, and it's probably going to be male, because he's probably going to be built to rescue me from burning buildings better than a woman.
And yet, here is the Cambridgeshire Fire and Rescue Service saying, Stating as a kind of unimpeachable truth that everyone accepts, there is a historical and present need to diversify our workforce.
And there's another example you gave about the civil service, which has the same recruitment policy, that diversity is really important.
I was quite staggered when I just went on the civil service website, I think something about their diversity policy...
And I saw that they used the word progressive, that we are a progressive employer, which is an overtly political term.
And that's under a Conservative government as well.
And that's just one of these indications of how deep...
This sort of politics has gone into the fabric of our society and our major institutions.
And being spoken by people who really should know better, for example, is it Lord Kerr or Lord Carr?
I don't know how to pronounce this.
Yeah, I don't know how to pronounce it.
But Lord Kerr, the civil servant, obviously a distinguished legal thinker, Who actually formulated Article 50, our exit route from the European Union.
And he actually said this.
It's almost unbelievable that somebody can actually say this and not be embarrassed by it.
He said, we native Brits are so bloody stupid that we need an injection of intelligent people, young people from outside, who come in and wake us up from time to time.
I mean, it's racist.
It's the opposite of xenophobic.
It's one of these comments.
I mean, I think there is an aspect of flippancy to it, but it's become so common...
This sort of thing.
I mean, I used to say that type of thing.
Well, not maybe to that extent.
But I used to sort of go on about, oh, maestro and pale, that type of thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I don't anymore because I've just realised how...
Actually, these things are meaningful.
And if it is just a flippant remark that doesn't really have any consequence, well, sort of fine.
I'm not too bothered by it.
But actually, no, this fits into a whole politics.
That is really what his politics are.
Yes.
And, you know...
You know, this aligns a lot with, you know, general establishment, which is both on the right and left, sort of advocacy for large-scale immigration, which on the left is pro-diversity and on the right is pro-economic expansion.
And those two tendencies are remarkably found a lot in common.
Which is why you get among the Remainers, you get...
Look at George Osborne, the likes of him, he fits in very much to that, and he's very comfortable in it.
Yes, which is a very unlikely and slightly dangerous alliance between the...
That chunk of the Labour Party which is against Brexit and the chunk of the Conservative establishment which wants the cheap Labour.
And they accept each other's excuses.
The myth you talk about about how Britain is a nation of immigrants which...
It's not historically accurate.
You know, when I used to hear this back in the day, I'd just think, oh, it's just harmless.
It's kind of a nice thing to say.
But actually, when you realise how it's as serious, this is an element of real politics and of real propagation...
That you find all over in our society now, you know, from mainstream media.
And it's just a basic untruth.
You know, it's not even a complicated untruth.
And, say, used to, you know, in respect to America, it makes a lot of sense.
You know, America, you know, United States, to a large extent, is a nation of immigrants, you know, with a nod to the Native Americans.
Yeah.
But here, politically it serves as a signal to people.
Like you said earlier, a dog whistle of I'm a member of the group and we're all together in this.
So the truth aspect is entirely skated over.
They're not interested in truth.
It's about the narrative.
Yeah, I mean like...
Like I've said in the book, I think, it's not about lying, this.
It's about telling what is considered to be a more general truth, you know, a kind of abstract truth, which is aligned again to the way history is going.
So it all kind of, the actual truth, just sort of melts into the air, as Marx might say.
Is that what Marx said?
No, I'm paraphrasing Marks.
I mean, he said something like that.
Sorry.
No, no, don't worry.
I just wanted to close, because unfortunately I'd love another half hour with you, but I've got a lunch date.
One thing your book helped me to understand is why Brexiteers get so much hatred from snooty Remainers.
Because we've seen in surveys that Remainers are much more likely to say, I would not like my daughter to marry a Brexiteer, I would not like to break bread with her.
They're much more intolerant than Brexiteers.
I mean, I didn't give a toss.
I'd like to have Remainer friends.
I don't want to have riffs.
Yeah, me too.
Remain is a particularly...
It's a respectable political position.
I don't have a problem with that.
But one thing you explain very well in your chapter on unfavoured groups is how...
Brexit has been associated by Remain propaganda and in the Remain mindset with racism, xenophobia, anti-immigrant, sort of rejection of the new, rejection of progress.
And so you suddenly understand why it is that Remainers look at people like me and they think, well, how could James Dellingpole stand up for this worldview which is against progress, which is against immigration, which is against everything that we ought to be fighting for?
And I think that's rather disturbing that they've got away with that.
When, you know, the people in Sunderland, say, or the people in working-class communities around Britain, or indeed middle-class communities, their motive for voting Brexit is far more honourable than the kind of pastiche version that's been dumped on them by Rowan.
Again, it comes back to, you know, truth and honesty, doesn't it?
And reducing everything to a single factor that we can understand and we can deal with in the way we do politics.
And the liberal left, as I talk about it, this is now...
The standard way of it doing politics.
This is its most comfortable position.
I mean, you can see that.
And one of the wonderful things that was terrible also about social media is we can see all this stuff going on in real time, day to day.
And how...
Matters of trivial comments, people saying something apparently offensive, is what these people are most keen on, most interested in, most keen to jump on and attack, rather than dealing with other issues out there in the world.
Yes.
And serious issues of which there are lots going on.
And from the left-wing point of view, you would think after having nine years of Conservative government, you know, the left should maybe have a few things to say about what's gone wrong beyond identity politics and calling people racist.
Yes, indeed.
So, by way of closing, what's the solution?
How do we deal with this?
This is one thing.
I had my last chapter in trying to address it.
To be honest, it felt a lot like looking at the pyramids.
How do we dismantle those?
How do you even conceive of...
I mean, not that you obviously want to dismantle the pyramids.
Maybe it's a bad...
You know, I've climbed the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Or just you?
Yeah.
I had to get up before dawn and sneak past the guards.
And they are big, big rocks.
Big burly fellers.
No, no, no.
The rocks that you have to climb up.
And at the top, you see graffiti put there by Napoleon's soldiers.
Of course, they were there, weren't they?
You know, back in the day, they did do some really good graffiti, really good inscriptions.
They put serifs on the letters and stuff.
It's great.
Anyway, that's by the way.
But I understand what you're saying.
Solutions.
It's just, it's so, it's so big.
It's like, where do you start?
And I try to address this in the book in terms of, it must be to do with addressing institutions.
And you mentioned Gramsci earlier, you know, the march for institutions.
It's got to be something like the other way around.
But this stuff has taken decades for them to do progressively.
And I don't see sort of any, even the beginnings of a movement, a political movement or otherwise, to reverse any of this stuff.
So, I mean, my favourite approach would be actually to set up new institutions for which you need money.
You need people to fund new institutions which are focused on doing proper work.
Valuing, like we were talking about earlier, say if you're in the media, actually producing news which is trying to tell the truth, just doing the basics, or producing entertainment for entertainment's sake.
Yeah, interesting you say that.
I see that Netflix to a degree is doing that.
I think Netflix is terrifying.
Just briefly, you've also got to nowadays, because you're always going to be under pressure, you've got to come up with a way of dealing with this stuff and resisting the pressure from the activists because they're always on the case now.
Despite Netflix being less awful than the BBC, are you aware of this rule that...
Maybe you mention it in the book, actually.
If you want to win a BAFTA award, you have to be compliant with the BBC's ME thing.
So it's really scary how the gangrene spreads.
That even if you wanted to make a not-woke film, if you wanted not to have token ethnic casting in it in implausible roles and a sort of transgender cameraman and stuff...
The system is already working against you.
You're not going to get an award.
Well, if you're not going to get an award, you may not care about baubles, but then that means that you're less likely to get financing for future projects, less likely to get viewed.
So it's very insidious.
Yes, I mean, it's a weird one because there is one element of just basic, there is some goodness in it, you know, the fact that, you know, if you have a lot of non-white people in the country and women who are in the workplace who want to work in these areas, it would be quite nice, actually, if they had, you know, they had some part in making films.
And that's fair enough.
But the problem is this has become an organising principle, hasn't it?
And it's gathered around this word representation so that the purpose of activity, of work now, is not actually the end product to produce, say, a really good film.
I mean, you know, don't get me wrong, you know, hopefully that's still in there.
But a large part of it now, no, is to represent properly.
I don't think it is still in there.
I think once you cease to accept that the primary, indeed only duty, of a filmmaker is to make a film of quality, of artistic quality, be it in terms of its entertainment or in terms of its visual effects or whatever...
Then you have surrendered the past to this kind of relativism.
Yes.
You cannot have...
And if there are no barriers towards what activists, which is what they're looking to employ, if someone is meant to represent, say, having a job in a film company, you're effectively employing someone who's meant to be an activist, who is meant to represent their group, In a certain way.
And how are they going to do that?
They're going to do that by following the other political activists.
Yes.
So that's going to...
And if there are no...
How do you say it?
I don't know if barrier is really the word, but any sort of mitigating forces towards that sort of favouring that person.
I mean, by nature, their view is going to prevail in the film, or at least have a veto on how the film goes.
Is it not akin?
This is just...
A thought that just occurred to me.
You've watched The Sopranos.
You know how when there's a new building project, that Tony Soprano makes sure that two or three of his men are employed on the scheme.
And they don't do any work, they're just there...
Because that's the way the system works, that you've got to have mafia people attached to the project.
In the same way, this is the function of...
It's very sad.
This sort of thing makes me angry.
That's just the basic logic of it.
That's the way it's going.
It's wrong, and we should call it out as wrong.
And thank you, Ben, for Ben Cobley, author of The Tribe, which I really recommend, for coming to talk to me about this in this cafe.
And I'm sorry we can't talk for longer, maybe another time.
So thank you very much for listening to this.
Thanks very much for having me on.
This was The Dunning Pot with me, James Dunningpole, and my very special guest, Ben Cobley.
Thanks for listening.
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