Welcome to the Dellingpod with me, James Dellingpole.
And my very special guest this week, I'm really excited about it and very flattered apart from anything else.
He's driven for four and three-quarter hours from Cornwall to get to me.
His name is David Isles.
Welcome to The Delling Pod, David.
Thank you, James.
And I came upon him...
Via Twitter, and thence to an article he wrote, which was just brilliant, and I quoted it in both Breitbart and in The Spectator.
I can't remember the title of the article.
Do you remember it?
It was May's...
Oh, crikey, I can't remember either.
No, it doesn't matter.
What it did, very, very intelligently, was sum up the bizarre political situation in which we find ourselves in Britain right now.
And if I can attempt to sum up the argument of your piece, it went something like this.
That since the Second World War...
British politics has been largely a fight between Labour and the Conservatives for the middle ground.
And if you were to draw a bell curve for those years since the war What you would find is that on the far left, there are kind of extreme socialists who want the government to run absolutely everything, to run the entire economy, to regulate people's lives at every last degree.
And then on the right, there are kind of libertarian-minarchist types who want minimal state.
And in between, you've got...
The peak of the bell curve roughly coincides with where the bulk of the people are.
People are not very extreme.
You quote Harold McMillan, who said that people don't really go for extremism in Britain.
Yes, that's true.
And so what you've found is that Labour and Conservatives have fought over this middle ground and sometimes...
That somebody like Tony, a shyster like Tony Blair comes along and is able to persuade people that, you know, a bit more left is what's wanted.
And sometimes Margaret Thatcher comes along and undoes some of the damage that the left has done previously.
And that's how it's always worked.
But now you argue, and I'm very persuaded by this, that there are in fact two bell curves.
One on the left...
and that the left is being contested i'll give you a chance to talk soon the left is the left is being contested uh rather almost all the main parties including the conservatives are are directing their their um their enthusiasm towards the left-hand group and completely ignoring the right-hand group which which are not just people who believe in limited government and stuff but also people who voted brexit in the right-hand group and that's what they're doing and that's what they're Is that a fair summary?
That's it.
Broadly speaking, the two groups that the country has now split into are...
Essentially, the Remainers and the Leavers, the Remainers all fall into a category which is essentially leftist in its main thought pattern,
and the right group are We're good to go.
The Conservatives feel that they are following the agenda of the Remainers.
So that...
Which is all mostly to the left.
So this explains why the Conservatives have suddenly gone all soft on things like...
They've engaged in all of the PC attributes that the left have presented to them.
So the Conservative Party has moved to the left and in the belief that that is where the centre is, they have...
They are dropping all of their policies and their soundbites and their virtue signalling on this group.
And the other group on the outside of this...
Nominally on the right of this is where most or much of the rest of the country is actually sat.
So what's happening is that the Conservatives are essentially giving us developing policies for a great big hole in the middle of the electorate.
Yes.
Where there aren't any people or very many people at all now because they've all moved either left or right.
Yes.
Yeah.
You've stated explicitly something that I don't often read said and I agree with and others would dispute this.
But there does seem to be a nexus between Remain and a kind of big state, politically correct ideology.
For example...
I would suspect that about 99% of the people attacking me on Twitter for my views on global warming are Remainers.
It seems to me that a belief in the whole climate change fairy and environmentalism goes hand in hand with Remain.
And in the same way...
Lots of those conservatives who are Remainers, I would not really consider them proper conservatives.
I would consider them to be, I suppose, social democrats.
And that would apply across the board to everyone from Nicholas Soames.
To people like Johnny Mercer.
A lot of the kind of the squishy members of the Conservative Party who you think, do you even understand what Conservative principles are?
Yeah, they're all incredibly muddled about it.
A lot of them describe themselves as progressive, quote, unquote.
Progressive conservative.
But that's oxymoron, isn't it?
Yes, it is an oxymoron because progressivism is on the left anyway.
I mean, that is far, far to the left.
Anyone who describes themselves as a progressive is in fact lurping over to the far left anyway.
That's where the title, the term progressivism comes from.
So if anyone is describing themselves as a progressive conservative...
They are in fact quite left-wing.
What are the origins of the progressive idea?
I don't know, to be honest.
Isn't it rather similar to the Whiggish view of history?
Yeah, I think it all comes from that.
But to go back to your earlier point about the nexus of the Remainers and things...
The ardent Remainers are infatuated with the European Union, not because it is any good at what it's supposed to do, but because it is big state.
And all of the environmentalists that you have so much difficulty with are also in that same place.
They all depend upon the big state for their, predominantly for their income.
Yes.
In one way, shape or form, even if they're so-called consultants, they are still dependent upon the big state form.
Well, especially if they're consultants.
I mean, come on!
I'll concede that.
I'll tell you what, David, the number of times, if I had a quid for every time, I've had somebody...
Somebody insulting me on Twitter.
And the proximate cause of their attack on me is never the real reason.
It's like one of those, I always say it's like one of those arguments you have when your wife is cross.
It's never about the thing that you think it's about.
It's always about something else.
There's something else deeply at the bottom.
At the bottom of it.
Exactly.
In the same way, whenever somebody attacks me on Twitter, all I have to do is go to their Twitter profile and see sustainability consultant or lecturer in environmental studies at the university.
Or whatever.
And they pretend that they are just...
Dispassionate people reacting to some bad thing you've done and there's no background reason why they should behave in this way.
It explains so much.
These are prisoners of their big state system.
Yes, they are.
It applies to environmentalists to a huge degree because they are utterly dependent upon the thinking that is done for them by By the big state.
But they'd never acknowledge this, would they?
No, no.
I mean, I'm not even sure it's dishonesty.
I'm sure they haven't even thought about it.
No, I think a lot of them haven't thought about it.
All of them probably haven't thought about it.
And in any case, they would think, even if they had thought about it, they would say, well, what's wrong with that?
Yes.
And the reason...
There is a kind of...
There's a great big gap in understanding with many of these people because they...
The reason they're going down towards the big state is that they cannot operate on their own.
They are not self-reliant people.
So they have to have a nanny state to look after them.
And they think that the nanny state is necessary for everybody else too, because everybody else must be like them, they think.
And anyone who's on the outside of that, who says differently, is clearly...
Well, I'm sure that if one were to draw this Venn diagram that I have in my head...
As well as having the people in the middle, the shaded area in the middle, including remainers and believers in climate change, you would also find that a remarkable proportion of them worked in the public sector rather than in the private sector.
Yes.
And believed passionately, also passionately, in the importance of a thriving private sector which pays their kids' school fees and their comfortable holidays in their second homes.
You mean passionately in a public sector?
Oh sorry, yes.
Passionate public sector.
Yeah, absolutely.
Oh yes, yes.
You've got to have that.
What they don't understand is that it's private money which is actually paying for that in the end.
Well David, let me just stop you there.
How stupid is that?
How stupid do you have to be?
I mean, well, it's clearly a problem because who was it who said in the Conservative government once that they tried to make this point that the government is not a magic money tree?
There's not a magic money tree that it can...
Yes.
And it seems to me self-evident that in order to generate revenue...
Towards generate tax revenue in order to splurge it on worthy projects in the public sector.
You've first got to have a thriving private sector actually creating value, creating products that people want to buy, creating services that people want to use.
And that value added is increasing our national wealth.
Yes, of course.
That's the whole problem with socialism, is that socialism gobbles up the value which is generated by the private sector.
In the end, the state is only ever a consumer of wealth.
It is the private sector which generates that wealth.
But the number of times I hear people...
I'm not really interested in the left, in the doctrinaire left, because some of them are never going to be converted.
But the people, there are people on the edge of the left and in the middle and towards our side who are probably natural, natural conservatives.
Did they but know it?
And they need things explaining to them and they need podcasts like the one we're doing now to sort of lay out the terms.
But quite often I hear people saying to me things like, you know, well, the government um should be able to generate its own revenue by by running the the national health service more more effectively and and and running the prisons and i i i say to them look It's not in the business of making profits.
If you want to generate revenue, you leave it to the private sector, which will always do a better job than government.
Yes, absolutely.
And my view having come from two industries which have only ever produced things which other people want to buy.
And that is how I define society between those people who produce things that other people want to buy.
That's the private sector.
And then the public sector is the stuff that consumes much of the wealth, far too much of the wealth of that private sector globally.
To do useful things, things that are important like defence and like security and health and education.
All of those things are actually value added into our society.
And they are essential in order to help the private sector move on and accelerate.
In itself, the public sector is not dead wood.
It is essential, but at the moment, it is seriously over-consumptive and inefficient.
And so there are things that we need to do to sort that out.
Just...
Going back a bit, tell us a bit about what jobs you did in the past that's given you your sort of insights into the world.
Well, I left school with some absolutely appalling A-levels and all of the universities that I applied to were absolutely correct in refusing my advances.
Because I would have blown it if I'd gone to university.
But you'd have walked in now.
You only need three E's to get into a university.
Oh right.
But that was in the days when, you know, only less than 5% of school leavers went to university.
So having left school somewhat shamefaced, I wound up starting work as a trainee quantity surveyor.
And I started work On the Thames Barrier in heavy civil engineering.
And throughout the 20 years that I stayed as a quantity surveyor, I was working mostly in civil engineering.
So it was all big stuff, big kit, rather exciting things, which has given me a liking for large bits of machinery and so on ever since.
So that's where I started.
It was a very...
Although I didn't like it in many senses of the word, I knew I wasn't going to wind up doing this for the rest of my life.
Were you one of those people who goes around in a hard hat?
Yes.
Oh, God, yes.
Even in those days.
Yellow hat.
We had yellow hats and we had donkey jackets and even boots.
Right.
And was this a public project?
Presumably it was.
Well, the Thames Barrier was very, very public.
So presumably there's lots of money wasted.
Yes, I mean it was basically because the welders were always on strike.
So there is the beginning of my political formation, if you like.
But essentially what the industry taught me was that...
Money and counting bricks or square metres of whatever, of formwork and cubic metres of concrete and so on, is ever so, ever so, ever so objective.
If you've either done it or you haven't, and there's no room for doubt, if you've laid three cubic metres of concrete, you've laid three cubic metres.
You mean a Thames barrier is quite visible and you know what it is, whereas social justice, you can go on chasing after social justice forever.
Oh yes, that's totally ephemeral.
Social justice is completely ephemeral.
So that was one thing that I did.
Then I did a number of...
After I'd left Nigeria, essentially, I did a number of things.
Well, hang on.
You've just jumped from the Thames Barrier to Nigeria without any explanation.
There was lots of things that I... Projects that I did in between the Thames Barrier.
All small, smaller projects that I did in between.
So that was all...
But Nigeria, what did you learn about the world from Nigeria?
I learnt that the world is very interesting, that the world is full of very interesting people, that there is a huge amount of variety in the human race.
And...
And that with patience and perseverance, you can achieve all sorts of things.
But I also learned, particularly in Nigeria, that one of the things, another formative political experience, was I saw the waste of British taxpayers' money being paid.
Being used, consumed and enriching al-Hajis who were running businesses because they had their fingers on the money and they all took their cut out of it.
How did you know it was British money being wasted?
Oh, because not far away from where I was working there was a sugar factory being built with...
With overseas aid, British overseas aid, and it never did a stroke of work.
It was surrounded by fields in a lowland plain which were all designed and destined to produce sugar and it never produced anything.
This was what, in the 70s or the 80s?
This was late 70s.
Right.
Late 70s, very early 80s.
No, I was out there during the Falklands crisis, so that was 1981.
So...
I doubt much has changed since then.
I doubt that the foreign aid system has become any more efficient.
I doubt it very much.
I've been listening, looking at some of the things that they're doing.
Basically what they're doing is they're handing a lot of it.
Some of it might actually be useful, but a lot of it will be going to very wealthy people.
And those wealthy people will often be educating their children privately in this country because they've got their fingers on the money.
You've made me think of something that we were discussing before I turned on the tape recorder and I said, no, we've got to stop this because you're wasting all your thoughts.
But what you told me was that you spend a lot, now you've retired, you spend a lot of time thinking on your car journey.
You didn't listen to the radio because the BBC is so bloody annoying and because you like to think.
And one of the things you think about is that The way a lot of people in this country profess to have empathy, but actually don't give a damn about ordinary people, about the plight of the suffering that goes on behind the scenes.
And you suggested to me that a lot of people contract out their morality by voting for left-wing parties.
I support Jeremy Corbyn, therefore I care about...
Yes, absolutely.
You've vested all of your care and empathy into Jeremy Corbyn, who is going to give it to the greater good.
And clearly, Dave Cameron's 0.7% ring-fenced foreign aid, 0.7% of GDP, foreign aid budget, was very much part of this virtue signaling.
Never mind what the money's actually going to do.
Never mind whether it's going to be spent on sugar factories, which never actually produce sugar.
The point is, we're showing the world that we care.
Sort of empty gesture politics.
Yes, there is...
The counter to foreign aid and to doing it in that way is to say, well, it's actually better to trade with people.
Trade, not aid, is, in my view, far less wasteful.
But yes, there is this phenomenon where people feel, or politicians in particular, feel the need to virtue signal.
Yeah.
In order to display this empathy that we're talking about, and having virtue signalled, they then say, well, that's it, I've done that.
It's box ticking.
It's absolutely box ticking.
But they're also doing that virtue signalling for all sorts of other reasons as well.
And principally it is raising their own profile in the eyes of the public.
They think...
That the public are so easily conned that the public are going to swallow this.
And what people do is to say, oh yeah, boring.
He doesn't mean that.
It's just a politician.
And this virtue signalling, in my view, is one of the many things which is diminishing The politician in the eyes of the public, because we can all see that it's utterly false.
Yes.
Do you think that this is a new phenomenon?
No, I don't think it is.
Because I'm sure, had one gone back to, say, Harold Mullen's day, I'm sure you'd have found...
But maybe the opportunities for doing so were fewer, because news got around less quickly and...
Yes, I think the point is that now we have the internet, we have the 24-hour news cycle.
We are in fact very, very much better informed.
About the doings of our political classes than we have ever been because that information is coming straight to us almost as soon as they have spoken it.
So the scandal of, shall we say, the upcoming scandal of Gavin Williamson having been sacked is being disseminated and dissected almost within...
Within an hour, you can pick up stuff on Twitter where it's happening almost instantaneously.
People are looking at this and they're now saying, well, there's some things really, really fishy afoot.
And so it is a function of the speed at which things are happening.
The other thing that distresses me is that...
What about this kind of thing, about the virtue signalling, is that the politicians think that we are so stupid we are going to swallow this.
Yes.
And it's all bollocks.
Although they've got away with it for quite a long time.
Yeah.
It reminds me of that saying about the stock markets, that the markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
So I've been looking at politics for some time.
In fact, this goes right back to...
There was a sort of precursor to all the kind of conservative home and all the sort of the websites and mini homemade internet TV channels and stuff called something Doughty Street.
I forget what the number Doughty Street was.
And Tim Montgomery was involved and Ian Dale was involved.
And I remember Ian Dale did a show with me.
And I remember saying to Ian that actually I wanted the Conservatives to lose the next election because they'd lost all touch with what their Conservative values were and it would be better for the party to have a shake-up and rebuild itself on properly Conservative lines.
And I remember the look of horror in Ian Dale's face.
Yes.
Because he is what I would consider...
I mean, I like him, but he's exactly the wrong kind of...
He's the kind of person whose thinking is...
Certainly the type of media commentator whose thinking has helped create this awful situation in which we find ourselves now, which is that...
They think that the job of the Conservative Party is to triangulate and to find the squishy centre and not offend anybody and be nicer and be more pro-gay marriage.
And I think, no, absolutely not.
Actually, this is...
Gay marriage, whatever you think of it, was the beginning of the end for the Conservatives.
Yeah.
Because it's a virtue signalling exercise.
For Cameron, that was definitely a virtue signalling exercise.
It is where the kind of thing where they think...
They sit down and they think, well, what can we do which would be attractive to the electorate?
Which is inexpensive.
Yes, which is inexpensive.
It doesn't cost anything, preferably.
That's their dream policy.
And so they think, what can we do to attract the electorate?
And actually what the electorate want them to do is to get on and do their bloody jobs and get the country secure and run properly.
And we want a proper rule of law which applies to everybody and not just selected favoured groups.
Yes.
So none of this is working.
As we talked about earlier, these kind of things, for better or for worse, the gay marriage thing, the LBGT, MGBT, whatever it is, that's all dropping right into the abyss that that's all dropping right into the abyss that has been created by the fact that these two parts of the,
the country have in fact moved apart away from where the centre was and it's now falling on stony ground completely.
Yeah.
Well, one of the reasons I so loved your piece was because I sensed that here was somebody who is as upset as I am by what's going on.
I suspect we're not alone at all.
No, no, no, we are not.
But I suspect that lots and lots of ordinary, decent folk think exactly as we do.
And yet their views have hardly ever represented in the mainstream media.
I mean, I look at the television.
Look at the Telegraph, for example.
Yes.
The Telegraph, the House Journal of the Tory Shires, formally.
And I read a piece by Ambrose Evans Pritchard in the business section saying that actually we need a fourth industrial revolution.
We need to go on a massive scale for renewable energy.
And this will somehow, this massive Keynesian style project, will reboot the economy.
And I'm thinking, this in the Daily Telegraph, this is dangerous left-wing nonsense.
Yeah.
So many wrong things seem to have happened to our country, which, it seems to me, have not been given the attention they've deserved.
I'll just give you a couple of recent examples, well, recent, ongoing examples.
The rape gangs.
The mass rape of underage white girls in towns and cities all over Britain by organised Muslim gangs.
How did that carry on for so long and why even now do we feel awkward talking about it, number one?
Number two, the hijack of the justice system by, what was her name, the director of public prosecution, Alison Saunders, whereby you had...
A number of young men going to prison or being threatened with prison or having their careers destroyed forever, their reputations trashed, because the rules had been changed in order to secure more rape prosecutions.
The police were no longer taking into account mitigating evidence like, for example, the phone conversations that showed that actually, no, the girl was making it all up.
Yes.
That our justice system, which we are, we've always been taught to celebrate as the envy of the world, English common law, was actually banging up innocent people.
Yes.
With the approval, the tacit approval of the director of prosecutions, who was a feminist, who was, I believe, appointed by a conservative administration.
Yes.
I look at this stuff and I think any one of these things is material for a whole book, but almost like a book set in a sort of dystopian version of Britain, not the one that actually exists.
Yes, it all is happening.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is one of my favourite writers.
I'm sorry about this, James.
No, he's good on Europe.
He's very, very good on Europe and about the impending implosion of the Eurozone.
So he's worth listening to on that thing.
But he is...
He has somehow fallen into the trap of being infatuated with electric cars and things.
And my journey today is a good example of where electric cars are not much good at all because I shall be able to go...
From Cornwall to here and back again on one tank of diesel.
So...
Diesel.
Yes, diesel.
Yes, unfashionable, isn't it?
Horrid.
God, I must be killing thousands of people on my journey.
But that's...
So Ambrose has his weak points.
But...
You're right in the sense that where, for example, we now have a justice system which was geared towards acquiescing to the rape gangs.
It was basically allowing them to get on with it and there are...
In my view, a very large number of senior policemen and social workers who are ultimately culpable in that because it was their decisions which allowed these things to continue when in fact they should have been stopped a long time ago.
Now there is a It's come about because of political correctness, because of what Ben Cobley describes as the favoured group, the favoured group being the Muslim population.
And because this phenomenon is coming from the Muslim population, or predominantly, not exclusively, but predominantly from that group of people, because it was coming from them, nobody did anything about it until 20 years had elapsed, and then finally they were shamed into it.
And a lot of this has come about, in my view, because of, I think it's the Equalities Act.
Which was passed just as David Cameron took office.
So it was invented by Harriet Harman perhaps?
It was invented by Harriet Harman.
And then there is a particular clause in there which means that you have to...
The BBC, for example, has to undertake quotas.
You haven't got...
You can't take the BBC to court for their blatant racism in saying that white males need not bother applying for this job.
And in my view that is a racist comment.
Yes.
Because they have quotas to fulfil and the quotas are allowed in that particular section of the bill, of the Act.
So there's all sorts of things.
Like that, which are happening, which have been driven in, into our legal system and our public discourse, primarily by Blair and Brown.
Yes, I agree.
They are the authors of many of our ills.
But let's go bigger picture here, because I think...
My dear friend Christopher Booker, quoting Isaiah Berlin, says that you're either one of those people who believes lots of little things, who understands lots of little things, or you understand one big thing.
And I'm in understanding one big thing, which is I think that there is a grand universal overarching theory that explains everything.
And you make this point, so you're not going to be surprised by this.
What is it that links the rape gangs, the imprisonment or ruination of young men on trumped up rape charges?
We could think of numerous other examples, I'm sure.
It is The diversity agenda and the gender agenda, which comes from identity politics, which is essentially a post-modernist leftist thing, which has infected our entire culture, our discourse, and has infected areas that it shouldn't have infected, notably the Conservative Party, the Conservative government, who are just as bad on this as the left are.
Yes, they're now...
They've now joined.
They're where the Labour Party probably were 20-odd years ago at the beginning, where Blair started.
The Conservative Party now are.
The country has remained the same.
The country is not moving left with the Labour Party or even with the nudging of the Conservative Party.
The country has remained the same.
We still want the basic things of the family unit and taking care of that.
And jobs.
Family, jobs, our community, our country.
All of those things are fundamental to where people see themselves and as long as the state gets on and provides them with the ability to be able to nurture those things...
Then that's fine.
But what we're now finding is that the state is increasingly interfering with that process and getting in between people and their families to the point whereby we now have children worrying about their own sexuality at an age of, what, seven, six or seven or something like that.
And that is, you know, there's enough problems with being a seven-year-old Without inducing another set of little worries about whether they're a boy or a girl.
So the state is doing all of those things.
There's something else I've forgotten to say, but basically, yes, we're in a mess with conservatism.
But...
The point is about postmodernism is that it has come from a philosophical root Which goes back to the conflict between the Enlightenment values of rationality with
what were then the deeply held Germanic beliefs of religion.
And what happened was that Kant saw Saw the conflict of where rationalism was going to call into question God and all of the basis of religion.
So what Kant did was to offer up a defence or a destruction of the rationalist arguments.
And he started...
He started a rabbit away and sent this rabbit or this hare off, which in fact wound up with the whole of the Germanic, with Wittgenstein and Nietzsche and all the rest of the whole Germanic thing, which then swapped over into the French world.
Into the French line of philosophy post Second World War and we wound up with Foucault and Derrida and the rest who are essentially anti-rationalist.
Yes.
So where the UK, in Britain and the United States, we have tried to remain rationalist in our basis, we have this Franco-German set of ideas...
Axis.
Axis, yes.
The Axis powers.
The Axis powers.
Who are saying that all of this rationalism is nonsense, that everything is relative to another, that you have to be able to deconstruct the meaning of everything...
And the only hardcore thing at the bottom of this is that it's the white male, phallocentric, whatever he calls it, which is responsible for all of the world's ills.
Yes.
You can see why...
Everything you know is wrong, is what they're saying.
Don't trust the evidence of your eyes.
Don't trust everything that history and tradition has told you.
It's all wrong.
You can see why this point of view would be very seductive to, at that age, when you were 18, 19, you're going up to university...
Your frontal lobes haven't formed and you're looking for a sort of radical idea which is going to enable you to rebel against the system.
And what better than to be told the system is completely bust and actually all the kind of rationalism and logic and tradition and hierarchy which you're supposed to revere is actually something you can smash.
Isn't that really exciting?
And also, so that would appeal to any adolescent brain.
But then you've got, if you belong to a racial minority, if you belong to, if you are a woman, you're told as a woman that you're a minority, even though you're probably 50% of the population.
Or if you've got even a hint of colour in your skin, if you've got a wacky religion, if you're non-Christian, you can...
Suddenly you become...
You're elevated in the power hierarchy.
Yes.
So you can see why so many people have bought into this irrationalism.
Yes.
But it's destroying our civilization.
Yes, it is.
There are two things about this 18-year-old's frontal lobes not having been formed.
Yes.
Basically, the great joy of this is that it's easy.
It's easier than doing logic and rational argument and looking for evidence and finding evidence to either refute or to confirm a hypothesis.
And speaking as I was then, an extremely lazy 18-year-old, That would have been very, very appealing.
Yes.
So you're dead right on that.
But there are all sorts of ways.
Why are we...
All sorts of questions which arise from this.
And to my way of thinking is the question of how we actually overcome, how we defeat this...
This attempt to dismantle Western civilisation.
I hope you've got the answer.
I bloody haven't, no.
I'm going to need another journey home to work it out.
Well, yes, well...
You've got four and three quarter hours for that.
But I know that you have been thinking about stuff.
And one of the things I wanted to talk to you about was you were thinking about how...
All left-wing thought operates according to the same principles, whether it's about animal rights, whether it's about climate change, whether it's about the economy, all the kind of liberal left's preoccupations.
You identified how they roll.
And I think it's really important...
If you want to defeat your enemy, you must first understand his thinking.
Absolutely.
First rule of warfare.
You must have his picture on the wall of your caravan, if you want to.
Yes.
I don't know whether he did, but he should have done.
And so tell me what you've discovered about...
Because I think it's quite helpful to people.
A lot of people on our side of the argument are baffled by...
They find it very difficult to argue with leftists, partly because of that reason it identified that the left is about anti-logic, and therefore if you try using logic to people who are essentially irrational, it's impossible to...
You're talking parallel language.
Yes.
But tell me what you've discovered about how the left rolls in their thinking.
Right.
As far as I am concerned, having worked through in my humble little way...
It boils down to the left need two groups of people to operate.
The first group is a hate group.
This hate group are the people that they simply do not like.
Whether they're bankers or capitalists or people who work in the City of London or whether they're Hunting people.
Hunting people.
Farmers.
Farmers are coming in for a lot of stick at the moment.
So farmers are your hate group.
So then what you need...
So there's the people that they've decided that they don't like for all sorts of reasons.
And farmers are wonderful from their point of view as a hate group because farmers control a lot of land.
Even if they don't own it, they tenant it.
So they've got lots of land and there is...
Ultimately, there is envy there.
So that's your hate group.
And the second group that you need is a victim group.
And this is somebody who...
This group of things are people or things which are affected by the hate group.
So in the case of a farmer, the victim group is obviously going to be farm animals.
So the farm animals become your victims.
And even though the farmer and his animals get on perfectly well together, and they go through their cycle, and for as long as the farmer is there, the animals are there.
Okay, you can argue that they go off to slaughter, and you can feel very sorry for that.
There is part of the sympathy that the left pour upon these poor, defenseless creatures who go off to slaughter every now and again.
But of course, the fact, what they forget, conveniently, is the fact that if those animals didn't go off to slaughter, the...
The core group which breed these animals are still there.
So after 50 years of farming you still have a herd of cows or a flock of sheep even though hundreds have gone off and been eaten.
So there is your victim group.
And what the left do is they try to separate those two groups.
They push a wedge in between them so that even though those two groups are perfectly happy and subsist perfectly adequately, the left push them apart.
And in occupying that space between those two groups...
They have established a position of power.
First of all, they've established the power over the victim group because they are pouring their sympathy upon the victim group.
And the victim group is supposed to feel grateful for all of this attention that they're getting.
And secondly, the left are pouring their opprobrium onto the hate group And so consequently they have also elevated, taken on the moral high ground above this, the hate group, and they are now effectively...
And they are now controlling both of those two groups in a metaphor.
So they've got the sort of patronage of the victim group.
Yes.
And they've got power over the hate group, both in their ability to bully them and drive them out of their jobs, but also, surely, to try and subvert their behaviours...
But encouraging them to act against their own interests in order to try and make themselves more likeable by the leftist bullies.
Yes.
In effect, my two groups I've discovered are...
Synonymous in many ways with what Ben Cobley calls the favoured group, which is the victim group, and the unfavoured group, which is the hate group.
So we've arrived at similar conclusions independently.
So...
That's what's happened.
And the whole point of the left driving this wedge between those two amicable groups, or formerly amicable groups, is that it gives them the power.
It means that they are now In the centre ground, they're able to manipulate both of those things.
Right, I've lost it a bit.
But essentially, the whole point of this exercise is not to resolve the problem or the apparent problem or the alleged problem.
It is to elevate the left above everybody else so that they get the power and, importantly, all of the money.
So the money flows from government to give to this active interest group so that they can carry on being divisive, basically.
And you can find that pattern happening A lot in the environmental world where, for example, some conservation organisations, the RSPB springs to mind, does a lot of divisive, promulgates a lot of divisive information about, shall we say, grouse shooting.
Yes, yes.
Where they say that the grouse shooters are being horrid.
But actually, when you look at it, the grouse The grouse moors have higher biodiversity than a similar moor run by the RSPB, because the RSPB don't do the gamekeeping, the predator control, in the same way.
So we've got all sorts of things there, but essentially the RSPB is trying to heave out the grouse moor shooters because they want control of the land.
Yes.
And once they've got control of the land, they then say, well this is a very important conservation that we're doing, so we need more taxpayers' money to do this.
So you can see that there is a strong financial incentive for them to continue to do that.
It's interesting what you say about their modus operandi, because I think it...
I'm trying to think of an issue where it doesn't apply.
So, for example, you think of how Joe Cox victim group...
Is used as a stick to beat everyone on the right with essentially.
Or I'm trying to think what else.
I mean victim groups, victims of banks, bankers.
All sorts of...
Ah, crikey.
Now that I've got here, I've forgotten all of the little things there.
Jo Cox was interesting because her murder was politicised immediately.
Yes.
In a terribly cynical and ugly way.
Oh, it was extraordinarily cynical.
But not as cynical, perhaps, as the way it's being used now.
I mean...
You know...
It's...
It reminds me a bit of...
All totalitarian movements have their martyrs, don't they?
They have their heroes who...
The Nazis, for example, had Horst Wessel, the young Nazi thug who's...
Not that I'm at all suggesting that Joe Cox was a Nazi thug.
I just mean that there does seem to be this tendency among totalitarian groups to disguise their often malign behaviour by portraying themselves as innocent victims of a much nastier enemy.
Yes, there is a, it comes back to, I think, part of that modus operandi is to lie.
And to be hypocritical.
Lying and hypocrisy are not something to be ashamed of.
No, it's Takiyah.
It is.
It is the equivalent of Takiyah.
It is the equivalent of Takiyah.
Yes, in fact, that's a very good analogy.
It's something that they've used ever since the October 1917 revolution.
The NKVD and the Bolsheviks were basically...
This was how they operated, was to lie and cheat as long as...
Because the overriding thing for them was it doesn't matter what happens as long as the revolution is completed.
So everything is justified by the end goal of the revolution.
By the way, you mentioned Kant, but...
Isn't Hegel really the sort of author of most of our ills?
Didn't he sort of formulate the dialectic whereby gradually we move ever further leftwards by synthesis?
Yes.
Hegel came after Kant, I think.
Am I right?
Or is he just after...
Don't talk about Hegel if you don't want to.
But it's...
Yes, I mean, Hegel is the formative thing of the argument of the dialectic of...
It's basically a bastardization of Newton's laws.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
So all of that stemmed from Hegel.
So yes, that's a German philosopher again, and that's part of where this...
The thing about philosophy, not that I'm deeply read in the subject, but it does seem to me that ideas spark off in different directions from one particular source.
So you will get a diversity of things that come off that.
But I think I'm right in saying, according to the book that I've been reading, his author I can't remember, that it really started with Kant and moved out from him because he was reacting against the Enlightenment values.
So he's a right cant, basically.
Yes, he was a bit, yes.
A very clever one.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Stupid.
No, it's not a stupid cant.
A clever cant.
Now listen, before David and I go on, I just wanted to interrupt our podcast to ask you, special friend...
If you will vote for me in the British Podcast Awards.
Because it strikes me that since Breitbart...
Here's my problem.
Since Breitbart dropped the podcast, I lost absolutely shed loads, shed loads of listeners because they didn't give me the feed.
And I mean, they're probably just too busy or something.
I'm sure they're not doing it deliberately.
But it means that there are loads of people out there who subscribe to my podcast and are probably wondering why I gave up doing the podcast.
Because people are too lazy to go searching on the internet.
And anyway, it's quite hard when it's called Delling Pod.
And actually, if you do a search for my podcast, what you get is links to my dead podcast.
Anyway, I don't know how I can possibly win the British Podcast Awards because probably there's lots of sort of podcasts backed by commercial ventures that have many more listeners.
But I thought, if all my listeners, all my special friends, although, of course, there's only one of you, I know really.
If all my special friends voted...
So, please, will you do it?
Go on.
Go on, do it.
It's called BritishPodcastAwards.com.
It takes about five seconds, I think.
Go on to the internet.
BritishPodcastAwards.com.
And just vote for the darling pod, okay?
It's very simple.
Right.
Back to David.
David, um...
We've outlined the problem with the Conservative Party in particular.
And they've embraced identity politics.
They've embraced post-modernism in the pursuit of people who are...
Of mythical voters.
Yeah, mythical voters.
Exactly.
Do you see any...
Hope whatsoever of them realising the mistake they're making before it's too late?
Or can you see only Armageddon at this point?
I've been predicting the demise of the Conservative Party now for about two years.
Have you met Peter Hitchens?
Peter Hitchens has been saying that they're dead for a long time.
He's right.
But yes, it's difficult to know quite how things are going to pan out.
Well, in fact, it's impossible to predict how things will pan out.
There are...
There are a lot of ifs in this, but basically the first thing that the Conservative Party must do if they wish to do anything in the way of recovering some level of voter loyalty, given the amount of damage that they have done to themselves, it's entirely self-inflicted.
The first thing they've got to do is to get rid of Theresa May.
She has to be given the bullet and hoofed out of number 10.
ASAP. The second thing, I think, is looking at the quality of those who follow up.
Behind her and are in the parliamentary party at the moment.
There is only one person who is going to win or come anywhere close to winning an election and that is, in my view, Boris Johnson.
If you look at all of the others, I think Rory Stewart was busy saying, oh, he will be a uniting candidate.
Yeah, no, he's Remain.
Well, he's Remain anyway.
He is avid Remain.
And he is also a massive virtue signaller.
So he needs to be hoofed out at the first suggestion of anything.
And there's a number of other hopefuls who are sort of climbing up.
And there are genuinely, still within the Conservative Party, there are genuinely people of...
Clarity of vision and intelligence who could conceivably lift the country out in the, what, two years we've got to go before the next election?
I mean, I know who these people are.
They're people like from Jacob Rees-Mogg to Andrew Bridgen.
I mean, there's some solid people.
Steve Baker, of course.
He's been touted as...
Mark Francois.
Mark Francois.
Marc-Francois, Priti Patel.
I'm liking the stuff that Liz Truss is saying.
Yes, she's...
Even though she's a Remainer, she's playing clever.
She's very straight.
Yeah.
Liz Truss and...
Suella Fernandes.
Who else?
Oh, crikey.
Andrea Jenkins.
Andrea Jenkins.
We like...
Andrea Jenkins!
I had tea with her.
She's a solid Yorkshire lass.
She's very sensible.
Yes.
And she's responsible for defenestrating Ed Balls as well.
Yes, yes.
Oh, I think that's wonderful.
I mean, that's got to be worth it.
But we've just...
Okay, so probably if we put our minds to it, we could name 20 people.
Yes.
But that's out of 300?
315, I think, officially.
Well, that's where it started, before the Tiggers defected.
But that's of no...
They're of no consequence.
So it's roughly 310, say.
So...
You see, I had a conversation with a few of the ERG members the other day, and it was essentially on the theme of, do you realise how fucked you are, guys?
And the biggest surprise came from Marc Francois, who was quite prickly.
I mean, I admire some of the stuff he says about Brexit, but he was a bit prickly, I thought.
And when I said to him, do you not think there needs to be a massive purge of the Conservative Party?
He gave me this boilerplate speech about how when Margaret...
Sorry, that's right.
He said, the father of the House is Ken Clarke.
And Ken Clarke and I disagree on many things, but he's part of that big tent.
I don't know whether he actually used that nauseating phrase, but he may have done.
And the Conservative Party has to be about embracing all sorts.
And I was thinking, any idiot could have said this.
And that idiot might have made sense 10 years ago.
They'd have had 10 more years of Tory survival.
But now you're talking in a situation where you really are about to implode.
You are about to lose all your votes and here you are saying, la la la, it's all still fine if we just keep wishing on a star.
Better to be inside the tent and pissing out rather than outside.
Every cliche you imagine.
I was thinking, if that's what Marc Francois thinks, Marc Big Ball's Francois, then the party really is stuffed.
Well, there is a...
I can...
Yes, OK. We can probably come up with a list of 20 people.
I mean, I'm surprised to hear that from Marc Francois, but...
I was gutted.
That's very disappointing, because he too is talking to this abyss that we keep talking about.
So that's very gloomy, but...
My view is that if the Conservative Party, if Boris actually had the balls to go for it and get in, and there is a strong...
I'm told there is now a strong movement within there that Boris is probably not the worst person in the world.
Yes.
There has been a shift, hasn't there?
There has been a shift.
So we can probably say that Boris probably will get in.
But the big question is...
Is Boris actually going to do the things which are necessary?
So, for example, forget about Brexit for a minute.
Is he going to stop this nonsense where we have soldiers being prosecuted once again for something that was committed 40 years ago when there's been an inquiry, etc, etc.
All of that.
Are we going to go down that route?
Are we going to continue down that route?
Or are we going to stop that?
Now, if Boris actually has the balls to stop that kind of thing from happening and to make absolutely certain that there are changes, fundamental changes,
In the system so that we get rid of this idea that, for example, policemen now spend all their time chasing those of us who've been horrid to each other on Twitter, for example, instead of you ringing up and saying, my house has been burgled and, oh, well, we can't spare anyone to have a look, but we'll give you a crime number.
Instead of doing that, instead of pursuing the freedom of speech, they start pursuing criminals instead, the real criminals.
then if Boris can turn that situation round, then he stands a chance of at least not being beaten into the ground at the next general election. then he stands a chance of at least not being Do you know what my fear is?
What?
Okay, so we'll dodge a bullet, we'll dodge a Corbyn sized bullet if Boris Johnson does take on the party leadership and probably it will save the Conservative skin.
But my fear is that Boris and the party will do just enough and no more to save their skins.
They won't have the ideological vigour.
That is the problem.
Boris, for example, in his articles has been singing the praises of One Nation Toryism.
Well, that seems to me a council of despair.
One Nation Taurism actually is really just another name for Blairism, for the big society.
Yes, that's basically carry on as before.
It's that...
Mythical, now mythical centre ground.
Yes.
Which people no longer inhabit.
I can't, for example, see Boris reversing the Climate Change Act.
He'll probably put bells and whistles on it.
Again, it's all virtue signalling again.
So, okay, if we get Boris in and he carries on with a slightly...
More acceptable business as usual agenda.
It means that the Conservatives will still wind up being, in my view, completely trashed.
It'll kick the can down the road.
Yes, essentially...
In 1997 John Major lost 171 or thereabouts MPs after the 1997 election and I think they're well on their way to losing the same again to the same extent.
Now the interesting thing is what will cause conflicts in the mind of the average voter Is that in 1997 there was in fact an apparently strong and what was looking like an increasingly capable, competent Labour Party in the form of Blair and Brown together because they were actually doing quite well.
And so people had an alternative to vote for because what I think a lot of what people are looking for is competence.
Now what they have at the moment is It's two incompetent parties.
Labour are just as incompetent as the Conservatives and so people are going to be split.
So if Farage decides to come through and to stand in the next general election as a party, if the Brexit party actually gets off its backsides beyond the Euro elections,
Then there is a possibility that Farage winds up being, shall we say, leader of the opposition or at any rate holding the balance of power between the other two.
I think there is now the Liberal Democrats and the Greens and things, the Liberal Democrats...
I don't see them as coming through and doing better on the strength of this.
Why would anyone vote for the Liberal Democrats?
Well, people do, apparently.
Yes.
We have to acknowledge that.
They've got a core vote of lovies, of people who think that they're okay.
But, you know, it's the open-toed sandals and worry beads market.
And that's fine.
But I don't think that's going to be substantial money.
So there's substantial votes in the Lib Dems.
So my view is that if Farage comes through with a...
A sensible national philosophy or policies which are backed up by a central philosophy which is going to sort our problems out or have a go at sorting our problems out, then he actually stands a very, very good chance of doing well.
I think you're right.
I think that if...
If sense is to be restored to the Conservative Party, it will only be through the threat of the Brexit Party.
They're not going to reach those conclusions themselves.
Even Jacob Rees-Mogg, who is really a classical liberal in many ways and understands many of the economic and social issues and shares our beliefs, He's so much a party man that he will go along with the consensus rather than trying to drag it in a direction which it resists kicking and screaming.
I don't think he's...
I think his sister's probably got a little bit more.
She's quite clued up.
But Jacob himself is...
He would make an extremely good Chancellor of the Exchequer.
He would.
He'd be bloody good.
And sort of stayed out of the real areas of conflict that we have.
But...
The Conservative Party are in a real mess.
I think it's terminal.
I think this is coming to the point where by the 200 years old party is going to come to an end.
I think it's terminal.
And it's an unforced error.
Absolutely.
They're really, really shit.
There's no other way of putting it.
They are just absolutely shit.
What is also fascinating to me is to sit back and contemplate the level of competence that our modern politicians have betrayed right away across the board.
And in fact, all of this problem, starting with Theresa May and the weakness of the Conservative Party in failing to throw her out...
A long time ago.
Has come from, I think, a lack of fundamental intelligence and capability.
It is competence that they're lacking.
It is a complete...
Lack of thought, of being able to contemplate what is actually happening to the world.
Largely empty and vacuous people.
They're in a bubble.
They are.
And they're quite happy.
They're perfectly happy staying in their bubble because their bubble is well paid.
They get all sorts of privileges and it pays them at the moment not to think out, to think beyond their bubble anymore.
And that's our problem.
We have a whole political class in Westminster who have got really no idea how the country functions.
And so that is why, in my view, we are where we are.
Because they don't understand the electorate.
They don't understand that politics is not actually decided in London.
Politics in this country, Westminster, is decided in the rest of England.
Wales and Scotland and Northern Ireland, to a lesser extent...
But mostly it is decided in England because those are where most of the constituencies are.
And so that's where most of the MPs come from.
And if they don't understand things beyond the M25 barrier, then basically we're all fucked.
And on that cherry note...
You're listening to the Delling Pod with me, James Dellingpole, and my very special guest.
And by the way, I hope there's some Tory MPs among my special friends here.
My special guest, David Isles.
Thank you very much.
And don't forget to vote in those podcast awards.
You've got to make me win because this podcast is great and it's my life and it should be bigger.