All Episodes
Previous Next
June 29, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
55:19
Simon Dolan II
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
I love Danny Poe.
Come and subscribe to the podcast, baby.
I love Danny Poe.
Listen another time, subscribe with me.
I love Danny Poe.
Come and subscribe to the podcast, baby.
I'm very excited about this.
I know I always say this, but I am.
He was great the first time I had him on the podcast.
And so much has happened in that short space of time.
Welcome back to The Delling Pod, Simon Dolan.
How are you, mate?
I'm good, thank you, James.
Very good.
Very good indeed.
You...
I mean, since we last spoke, you have become, I think...
Well, you ought to be a national hero.
You probably haven't been a national hero because...
Our media doesn't really want to tell your side of the story as much as it should.
But you were partly responsible, weren't you, for knocking some sense into the British government regarding this crazy Covid lockdown?
Well, I'd like to think we were wholly responsible, to be honest with you.
I mean, I think it's accurate and fair to say that If it had not started the judicial review, then we never would have seen the SAGE Minutes because they released them after we pushed them.
And there was some interesting stuff in there.
And then, of course, we had the win last week or the week before, which was about the schools.
So we pushed and pushed and pushed on the schools point.
And then the government came back and said, well, we don't know what you're talking about.
We never close the schools.
That is...
What?
You did?
We've got video of you.
We've got you of Boris saying we're closing the schools, Gary Williamson saying we're closing the schools.
We've got, you know, you saying when we reopen schools.
And in their defence, you know, the legal defence, they actually accused us of being absurd.
That was a word they used, absurd, that you should say that the schools were closed.
And I think it was at that point when, you know, it's almost like going in the Twilight Zone, you know, you think...
I didn't see that coming.
I don't think anybody did.
So it's been a busy few weeks and on the whole a successful few weeks I think for the legal process.
Yeah, what you say is so true, that the government and the kind of agencies of government, well, I'd call them the deep state in a way, they have been shameless, haven't they?
I mean, that example you gave is fantastic.
They claimed that they hadn't shut the schools.
On the legalistic grounds that schools remained open for, what, about 10% of the population, for the children of key workers.
Was that their excuse?
Yeah, that was the excuse.
And that was why they said, well, it was absurd that you said that they were closed.
But of course, I think they admit it, or they said that the figure was 10%.
But of course, that would have been 10% if everybody had gone.
But you can't run school when there's only 10% of kids coming.
So there was a, I spoke to a few, you know, head teachers and stuff, and there was a dribble of kids coming through, and they're not getting any kind of education.
So, yeah, it's like you say, it's I think the deep state probably works a bit deeper than we see.
But on the surface, you can see that if they're offering up that defense, then they're obviously on very shaky ground or they think that they're on very shaky ground on the on the more substantive case, which is a good thing, a good thing for the case.
And then of course, you know, the next step they've been dragging their heels and asking and being given for as much time as they possibly can.
And the reason that they're doing that is because one of their, another one of their defenses, which is a technical one, is to say that it's an academic defense.
So what that means is, is that we're going to court over something which no longer exists.
So if the full judicial review comes, let's say, the third week in July, they can go to court and say, well, everything's open now.
We don't need a judicial review.
Of course, we've got a good defense to that, which is the judicial review might be, the lockdown might be over, but we've still got all the effects of the lockdown.
And actually, the legislation still stays on the books.
So, yeah, they are trying everything in the book.
So evidently, they believe that they have a very poor case.
What are you trying to achieve now with your judicial review?
I mean, obviously, you've shifted the Overton window of the debate.
You've got them slightly on the back foot.
I mean, as you say, if it hadn't been for your initial legal action, we'd probably, even now...
Be in the dark about the scientific rationale.
Is this right?
When they tell us that they've been following the science, we would have had no way of checking what that scientific advice was.
That's a fair analysis, isn't it?
We would have been completely in the dark if it hadn't been for your JR. They're absolutely accurate because they said at the outset they wouldn't release the SAGE Minutes until it was all over.
So now they have, you know, so absolutely.
And now, what's really interesting actually, they've just, in the last minutes that they released, which were just a few days ago, they put notice in there that they're going to start a, I think it's called the Joint Biohazard Division or something like that, which will replace SAGE. So SAGE is not only Ferguson going under the bus, but the whole of SAGE is going under the bus.
And someone sort of analyzed this a little bit and it looks like whilst SAGE was an external committee, joint biohazards is going to be an internal government thing and then they're not subject to the same transparency rules.
Right.
Make of that what you will.
It makes me feel really good as a taxpayer and somebody who used to live in a country which was well-ordered and one of the countries that we were supposed to admire as being the envy of the world.
And suddenly we find that they're behaving like some secretive banana republic.
If you're allowed to use that phrase, you're probably not anymore.
It strikes me as extraordinary, and particularly extraordinary, coming from a...
A notionally conservative government.
Has that taken you by surprise?
I think, like me, you're a natural conservative with a small C, if not a big C. Yeah, not a little bit disappointed.
Perhaps not entirely surprised, but not a little bit disappointed.
You know, would Corbyn have done any worse?
This is the one thing that I couldn't actually have imagined myself saying.
And I don't think Corbyn would have done any worse, which is an absurd thing to say, you know, utterly absurd.
When I last spoke to you, in fact, I would have agreed, you know, Britain was probably one of the best countries in the world to live, for all its faults, in a stable government.
And I actually felt at the time that Britain was probably the best place, the best place country in Europe to come out of this reasonably well.
And now I think we'll probably come out of it really badly, you know, really, really badly.
In fact, I struggle to see a way out of it in the near future.
And I think most economists are looking at that, you know, first of all, it's going to be a V-shaped recovery, and then it's going to be a W-shaped recovery.
You know, whether that second blip up ever comes, I don't know, you could be in a situation like Japan where it just flatlines for the next year.
Somebody annoying is waving at the door.
Knock on the door!
Right, okay, well that's fine then.
Bloody hell, annoying!
That's distracting me.
Have you personally been poring over the SAGE minutes?
I can't say I have, but one of the stories that seems to have emerged Which is quite unexpected, I think, that actually at no stage, at least as far as the records show, did any of these sage people say you must impose the lockdown.
Even I think Neil Ferguson did not say that a lockdown was necessary.
So in other words, this is government generated, not science generated.
Is that what you found?
Yeah, I think so.
I couldn't see.
I mean, bear in mind there's 50 people on that committee and about half of them are behavioural psychologists who have got nothing to do with the science of this.
But yeah, I think a lot of them basically said that a lockdown, because of course it's never been done before, a lockdown was unnecessary.
And yet, as you say, they just went ahead and did it anyway.
But what's interesting now is that there's quite a few members of SAGE saying that they're releasing the lockdown too early.
Well, what's changed then?
If you didn't recommend it before, why are you recommending it now?
It doesn't make a lot of sense and this is what happens, I think, when you have 50 people having input into a decision.
It's a committee, isn't it?
Committees don't build anything.
Yes, lots of things have been worrying me about.
Yeah, as you say, there are lots and lots of different scientists on the committee, so they've got lots of different cover.
I mean you're going to get as many opinions as there are people, probably.
But one of the things I've noticed, I don't know whether this has disturbed you as well, and actually The excellent Sherelle Jacobs made this point in her Telegraph column today, which is the narrative seems to have taken hold and has been very, very heavily promoted by the chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, that we cannot return to normal until a vaccine appears.
I don't know about you, but that terrifies me.
I mean, apart from the Bill Gates inflicting his kind of experiments on you element of it, it's just like what it's saying is we cannot get our economy back until the possibly unlikely event of a vaccine, a safe vaccine being trialled, which certainly won't be this year and possibly not ever.
How does that make you feel as somebody who wants to do business in the UK? Suspicious.
Because they know that it takes eight to ten years to get a decent vaccine, isn't it?
And the last vaccine that the government rushed out, I think it was for SARS. They paid 60 people a million dollars or a million pounds each in damages because it ruined their lives, basically, when they gave them this vaccine.
And subsequent to doing that, they changed the legislation that says that there will be no payouts in the event of a pandemic.
This is all in isolation.
No payouts to whom on the basis of what?
If there's a vaccine that goes wrong?
Yeah, if there's a vaccine that goes wrong and you're damaged by it, then there's usually compensation to a million quid.
And now they've taken away the necessity for them to give you a damages payout if there's a pandemic.
And this has been labelled a pandemic, even though it hasn't been a pandemic for, what, since March, I think, maybe April.
Yes, yes.
So you must have, look, I mean, one of the pleasures of doing this judicial review Must be that you've had an inside track.
You must have had deep throats and stuff telling you stuff that you wouldn't otherwise have learned.
Do you get the vibe that there is a resistance within the government or the administrative state at all?
Or are they all going along with this tripe?
There's a few.
There's a few.
How many MPs are there?
650?
How many of them have spoken out against it?
None.
As far as I can see, there was a couple, I mean, David Davis, Steve Baker, but they've gone very quiet.
I mean, they started off being a little bit, you know, sort of spunky about it, and then they've just been battered.
And whether they've been battered by the whip or whatever, I don't know.
But none of them are speaking out about it.
And then you've got the Labour lot that are saying, well, you know, you're risking lives by opening up the economy too soon.
There was, I forget his name, one of the lower echelon MPs.
Why are you endangering people's lives by opening up too early?
And you think, well, no Conservatives are standing up against it.
Nobody.
You know, I put a tweet out the other day.
It said, you know, if there's any MPs anywhere that, you know, don't agree with this, can you give me a shout?
And there's not been one.
Nobody at all.
So that worries me.
Every journalist I've spoken to, literally every journalist I've spoken to recognizes that it's an absolutely awful idea and they have to get lockdown finished.
Every single one.
From Breitbart to The Guardian to BBC, absolutely nothing.
Absolutely nothing about it.
It's all basically government propaganda.
And I never realized that they actually were a propaganda arm of the government.
You hear stories about it, but I never realized they actually were.
And now, categorically, I know that they are.
Yes, those of us who've been saying this for years have been dismissed as tinfoil hat nutcases, that of course the BBC isn't a propaganda on, you know, it's obliged by its charter to be, fair and balanced isn't quite the phrase, that's Fox, but nevertheless that's the principle.
These sort of Reethian principles, which are supposed to give equal space to all points of view.
Well, as you know, Toby Young is currently launching a judicial review of his own, I think, against Ofcom, asking them why they seem to have prevented Our broadcast media from giving the viewpoints of people like you and me and all those sceptical scientists, Dr John Lee or whoever, who don't buy into this lockdown Nazism.
Yeah.
I think what brought it home to me was there was obviously the Brexit Judicial Review, Regina Miller.
So if you do a search on the BBC News site, type in Gina Miller and there are 150 plus articles about Gina in the Brexit case.
If you type in mine, there's nothing related to the judicial review at all.
Not one single article.
Now, that's not because it's not equally important.
I would argue it's massively more important, bearing in mind what's happened.
So that really brought home to me.
Really, really brought home to me.
We've been featured everywhere other than The BBC. So that can't be a coincidence.
That has to be a policy decision.
Or who feeds that?
It has to be the government.
And I'll tell you the other thing that gave it away was in the quarantine rules, the other ridiculous thing they announced, there were some exceptions about people who weren't obliged to do the quarantine.
There's a specific exemption for BBC employees.
Why?
Right.
Not Sky.
Because they're agents.
Not the Daily Tenant.
Nobody else.
Just BBC. So you think that's a bit obvious.
Who cares now?
You know, if they're going to lie and say, no, we never said we closed schools.
Yeah, they can just...
They're basically saying anything, aren't they?
Even though yesterday they said a completely different story.
So, you know.
Yeah.
Well, you...
You mentioned the double standards about Brexit.
You and I both rooted for Brexit.
But if the Remainers had any kind of credible case, it was surely that the economic damage that would be done to Britain as a result of leaving the EU would not make it worthwhile.
And yet, here we are suffering economic damage of an order of magnitude worse than anything, even the most hysterical Remainers predicted.
And suddenly, just like Tumbleweed, no one seems to, no one on the sort of government supporting Side of the argument seems to be bothered by this economic damage.
Do you know how much you must be keeping tabs on where we're going in terms of how far over the economic cliff?
What's the current thinking on how much we're going to lose?
I think it's 400 billion isn't it?
But that's kind of what's been spared so far.
That doesn't take into account the fact that seven million people will be unemployed by Christmas.
It doesn't take into account the enormous damage to tax receipts.
So they're going to be running at a deficit now forever.
And there's not going to be new jobs created.
Why would you?
The whole industries have been destroyed.
It's difficult to think what we're going to do in England that's going to create a new industry.
I know the government are now going on about bloody, you know, green revolution.
That really terrifies me.
Because it's so much money going down the drain.
And it's going to create jobs.
What jobs is it going to create?
You know, how many research scientists that are expert in creating energy, you know, green energy, how many of them are actually unemployed at the moment?
None.
So how are these going to create jobs?
What are people going to be doing?
You know, it's a nonsense.
It's taken straight out of the bloody Cortez's playbook or Bernie Sanders' playbook in the States.
Print a load of money, we can reset the world and we can all be sitting in some socialist utopia, which will probably work just as well as that Chaz place, whatever it's called, in Seattle that collapsed after two weeks or three weeks of them governing themselves.
Just do that.
Let all the socialists have all their little bit of land.
Let them farm it themselves and look after themselves and don't worry about there's no police or ambulances allowed in.
But it didn't work well with it.
Ben Shapiro said it lasted longer than most socialist countries.
Yes, on the subject of green jobs, I don't know whether you've come across the research of a Spanish economist called Gabriel Calzada Alvarez at the University of Rey Carlos in Madrid.
And he did a study which worked out that for every green job created by government investment, i.e., you know, taxpayer spending, 2.2 jobs were lost.
I think it was 2.2, it could be more, were lost in the real economy.
So you're killing over two real jobs for every Potemkin fake job that you create with this taxpayer-funded boondoggle for crony capitalists.
And it horrifies me, it clearly horrifies you, that this is the best Boris has got.
Yeah, yeah.
Only a government could do that.
Only a government could convert, you know, two jobs into one job by spending money.
That really takes some doing, doesn't it?
Yeah, it does.
It does.
Yeah, I've actually given up reading the paper in the morning because it infuriates me so much that even right-wing newspapers have gone left-wing.
But my wife reads me little bits of, and she was reading out to me today, some of the measures that are being introduced in this supposedly post-lockdown world.
So apparently, We are not allowed to talk to the barman.
You can't sit at the bar and chat to the barman when we go to these pubs.
There are just crazy, crazy bits of micro-managing.
I mean, they've relaxed the two metre rule, but it's now kind of one metre plus.
And the plus is mitigating factors like having your face mask, which we know is ineffective, And it's like living in a parallel universe where everyone behaves by these strange arbitrary rules which have nothing to do with science or empiricism or anything else.
And you're about the only guy fighting this.
I mean, or one of the few.
Yeah, that surprises me.
I've been really surprised, actually, that no one from business has joined or done something.
Well, there's Luke Johnson.
Who else has done it?
Yeah, but there's not actually, it's a little bit like Sumption, you know.
There's a few people that have written about it, but no one's actually really doing anything.
You know, there are a few, but I don't know why.
What it should be is trade bodies.
Trade bodies should be going to the government, and they're the ones that have real power because they've got a lot of members.
But where are they?
You know, where's the trade body for aviation?
Well, I'll tell you where it is.
I've got an aviation company.
I'll tell you where it is.
They just sat there with their hands out.
You know, basically they said, well, if you introduce quarantines, we just need more handouts.
And that was their, you know, that was their retort to it.
Then they came up with the threat of the judicial review when the quarantines were introduced.
And the government said to them, well, it's not going to last long and your judicial review will be out of time.
You know, we'll be flying again by then, so don't worry about it.
And they said, oh, okay, we believe you.
Why?
Yeah, these are corporate guys and they're going to have a job, whatever happens.
It's not them that's going to lose their job.
They'll still get their bonuses.
They'll still get their big salary.
Company goes bust.
They'll just walk into another job.
The poor, you know, BA, for example, 12,000 people that have been laid off, they're not going to get another job.
You know, aviation is finished the way it was.
And there can be far more streamlined operations now.
So, yeah, I don't know.
You've got money in.
You're exposed to the aviation industry, are you?
Yeah, not in the same way, though, because we charter planes out rather than sell seats, which is a completely different ballgame.
It's not that it hasn't hurt.
It has a lot, but not in the same way.
Not in the same way.
And we've no debt, so that kind of makes a big difference as well.
But aviation's not the only one.
The entire hospitality industry, for example.
Yes, yes.
Just tell me briefly why the aviation industry can't come back from this in the normal way.
Is it because business flights?
I imagine they're going to be really jeopardised by this.
I can't see people going on international business flights again because they've seen they can do it perfectly well on Skype.
I mean, on Zoom.
Yeah, there's partly that.
I mean, I don't know how you find it, but for me, Zoom, you probably get 5% of the value of a face-to-face meeting.
So I think you won't, you know, you'll only do the really necessary ones.
But you would imagine if you were taking an international flight, then that probably was a necessary meeting anyway.
It just depends on how many, you know, how many, say, you go through.
I think the long-haul passengers, just people going on holiday, they're not going to sit and wear a mask for that whole time, so they'll probably sit at home and go on holiday, staycations, which will be great for the internal economy, but not so good for everybody else.
Businesses, they're simply going to be less business people.
Therefore, less business people.
And airlines work, you know, they need to be, it depends, but it's sort of 70% full, 80% full on flights to start making money.
So it's not a big margin.
So if there's few people go, then all of a sudden the flights are losing money.
And there's no quick way out of aviation.
You know, it's enormous capital costs.
So then that goes down the whole supply chain.
There's a massive amount of different suppliers that supply aviation companies, which will all get taken out.
So let's say BA goes bust or something, then that's another thousand companies underneath them probably gone bust.
And on and on it goes.
Do you know what?
It sounds to me, Simon, like you're not recommending that airline shares, even ones that are kind of people have been tipping like Delta, are a buy right now, even at these prices.
Funny enough, I didn't buy myself, but I tipped American Airlines when they were about, I forget now, $8 or $7 or something like that, on the basis that they're never going to be allowed to get bust.
And you know in America that the American government can't take a stake in them.
So you knew they were going to be bailed out and it wasn't going to dilute the shareholders.
So they were probably a good pun.
But in the UK, it'll be different.
Anywhere across Europe, they're just going to get nationalized.
And I know they say, oh, we don't want to nationalize businesses.
You do.
You do actually want to nationalize businesses.
That's exactly what you want to do.
So, no, I wouldn't buy any airline stocks now.
Maybe my own, but then I know stuff.
Yeah.
What you say, I think, is true, that everything is going to be nationalized.
I mean, we've got an announcement today that the railway...
The railways in Britain are going to be semi-nationalised, aren't they?
They're going to stop putting out the different franchises out to tender.
And I see in the paper again, glancing at the paper, trying to avoid reading it because it triggers me, but I see that various theatres, theatres are demanding to be bailed out.
Well, I'd say, look, if we had theatres in this country, Country, producing stuff that people wanted to go and see, then I would be, I'd be thinking, yeah, great.
You know, we've got to keep the theatres on life support because they're so important for our culture.
But it seems to me that the way that, I mean, I'll give you an example.
I live just down the road from the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-on-Avon.
I will not go and see any RSC production ever again, because it has now been so gripped by the forces of Woke, you know, the diversity casting and, you know, people sort of cast not because they're the best actor available for the job, but because, you know, Because they push the right, you know, because they're transgender or, you know, the BME, AME or whatever.
And I'm just thinking, why should I pay with my taxes to have this kind of socialistic or worse agenda foisted on me by the artistic establishment?
But it seems like COVID-19, I mean, if you had to invent a conspiracy, you would say, would you not, that COVID-19 has been the best way of bringing in communism across the world imaginable?
Yes.
And I know probably when we last spoke, I don't know if we did conspiracy theories, but since we last spoke, I've really come to the conclusion that there is something a lot bigger going on.
You know, this is not...
You know, possibly it was a knee-jerk reaction at the start, but everything I've seen now is pushing me towards, even if you didn't engineer it, and I don't think you did because I don't think they're bright enough.
But they've certainly taken advantage of it.
And there's certainly been a decision made that's gone, well, you know, we're kind of fucked anyway.
So we may just as well hang on to power a bit longer and basically introduce Marxism, you know.
And that really clicked in.
I was out walking the dogs or something.
I couldn't work out.
There was a piece of the puzzle that was missing for me, which was why on earth they would close churches.
Churches, no one goes, right?
And they're big buildings and they're very well aired, if you've ever been to a church, you know.
So why would people not be allowed in?
And then I thought, you know what?
Churches, schools, entertainment, family, you've been stopped from seeing all these.
What have you got left?
The only thing you have left to share ideas with is the state.
That is every totalitarian government in history.
Get rid of the schools, get rid of any peer, anybody that can give you an alternative view or a different view to the one that's being sponsored.
It's been got rid of.
And even getting rid of religion, you know, the solace that people find from that.
That seems sinister to me, really sinister.
I don't disagree with you.
It's quite interesting, isn't it, that that part of the country, which seems to be still the majority at the moment, that part of the country which is gripped with this COVID-19 terror, the COVID bedwetters, I call them, the people who think that they're locked too soon during the lockdown, they seem to have spent their time religiously watching these What are they?
Where you have different government ministers appearing in association with members of the SAGE committee and holding press conferences.
I haven't watched a single one, I'm proud to say.
Why?
Why do you want to be fed propaganda?
But lots of people seem to have been watching this stuff quite religiously, like this is where they get their information.
Yeah, you know, I think since Celebrity Big Brother got kicked off, maybe this is the next thing.
It's some sort of weird reality TV show that they're living in.
And, you know, they're now at home.
They're being paid, paid on furlough up until October.
Or if you work in the civil service, you know, you're getting paid anyway.
You know your job's safe.
If you work anywhere in government, you know your job's safe and you can just work at home.
If you're an MP, in fact, you've got a £10,000 bonus for working at home.
And so why would it be a bad thing?
Why would you want it to end?
Which is what fascinates me when it does end come October.
You know exactly what's going to happen.
All these people are out of work.
They're going to blame the government.
And what are the government going to say?
Well, yes, because of COVID, we really ought to help you out a bit more.
So maybe we ought to extend benefit, do this or do that.
We will make you more and more reliant on us.
Yes.
Again, so...
Before I move on to your answer to that, tell me what your favourite, you know, you're talking about how you're being more inclined towards conspiracy theories.
What's been particularly bugging you on that line?
Is it the vaccine thing or what?
Constantly trying to figure out whether Bill Gates is actually some, you know, evil madman.
Or whether...
I don't actually think he is, right?
So maybe I'll change my mind in a few weeks.
But I actually think that as a mathematician, let's say, you know, as a guy who likes numbers and likes computation, I think he realised that vaccinations probably save more lives around the world than they cost.
And I don't think that's a controversial thing to say.
You know, it might lead to other things.
But generally speaking...
They have saved, you know, wiped out some illnesses and they have saved a lot of people, I think.
So he's put all his money into vaccinations because he thinks that's how he can help the most amount of people for the, you know, best return, bank of the buck.
So as wealthy as he is and a foundation as big as it is, there's no real conspiracy that his name's all over everything to do with vaccinations.
He funds everybody in that.
So I know it appears as though everything goes back to Bill Gates, but I just think it's the wrong way around.
Everything comes from Bill Gates because he funds everything to do with vaccinations.
But it's compelling.
It's compelling when you look at it.
So I can see really easily how people can get dragged down into it.
But I'm always a bit of a contrarian anyway, so I always look for the opposite side.
And that was where I came down on it.
You can give me some insights here, Simon, because you're not short of a few bob yourself.
I mean, you're obviously not Bill Gates rich, but you're definitely rich enough, I'd say, not to need to work again unless you wanted to.
So tell me, When you get to that level of richness, why do people still want more?
Why does Bill Gates want to get richer?
Why doesn't he just kind of settle back and just, you know, kick his heels and, I don't know, watch Netflix?
Because past the number, like you say, when you know that you don't have to earn any more money, you have a choice.
And I always liken it to, you know, you imagine a footballer.
And he loves playing football.
And he's won the World Cup.
And he's won the FA Cup.
And he's done this.
Why would he ever want to play football again?
Because he loves playing football.
He's going to be gutted when he gets to 35 and has to retire.
You know, that isn't...
It's not a nice thing for him.
And I think it's the same with business people.
You know, I really love doing business.
It's not a question of the money.
The money, of course, is the equivalent of goals in football.
You know, the money is the score.
So I guess that's what drives...
That drives people.
It's all you know as well.
So I get that drive.
I do.
I think he's gone wrong.
I think the whole altruist thing is terrible, but that's a completely another discussion for another day, I think.
You know what we've got to talk about?
We've got to talk about one of your particular concerns, which is this issue of the new regulations regarding insolvency.
You're very worried about this, about the government making it harder to be declared Bank insolvent for the duration of the lockdown.
Well, when you say hardy, you mean impossible.
Companies cannot be insolvent.
And it's not for the duration of the lockdown.
It's for ever.
So this has been an end date of legislation.
They're changing the insolvency rules.
What they are saying is that if the potential insolvency, if the business upset was caused by COVID, then you fall under these new rules.
But of course, it doesn't take much imagination to see that anything that happens in business for the next 10 years is going to be down to COVID, isn't it?
In 2020, we had that, which caused this, which went that.
And that is, you know, in and of itself, that's quite a worrying thing because, you know, at the top of an insolvency, you've got a company that can't afford to pay its debts.
Underneath all that, you've got the poor sods who are owed money, you know, the creditors.
And before this bill, and I don't think it's not become law yet, but it will, of course, the creditors had a say over how the company was then managed, how the money that was left in the company was then managed.
So the creditors would be able to vote on a repayment plan.
So let's say a BA, just because I've got it written down.
Let's say BA go bust or go on to insolvency.
And then all the creditors say, well, okay, then we want 60p in the pound or whatever.
If 75% of the creditors agree to that, then that would go through and they'd get their 60p in the pound over a period of time.
Now, with these new rules, Even if 75% of the creditors don't agree, BA or whoever can just go to court and then the court decides what's best for the company.
Not for the creditors who have been working for nothing or will be working for nothing.
So that's pretty bad.
You know, you're taking the decision away from the people who have actually lent it money or put goods into the business or put services into the business.
You take that away and give that to a court.
The really scary thing, which I couldn't actually believe when someone pointed it out to me, Was that during this period, it's called like a moratorium, I think they're calling it, when you're not allowed to sue them.
Suppliers are compelled to continue supplying to the company that's in trouble.
Compelled?
Yeah, you see?
Look on your face then.
You can't believe it either.
And it's absolutely true.
They are literally compelled to do it.
You can't.
And they have to supply goods or services on the basis of which they've already supplied them.
So let's say that I have a contract with BA and we have to supply them, you know, let's say five planes a day for the next six months.
And then all of a sudden they don't pay us and say we're in this moratorium.
We'll have to continue supplying them the planes on whatever credit terms we originally agreed.
In aviation, typically with a big company, they'll screw you on credit terms as much as they can.
So that might be they might not pay for 60 days.
So we would then have to supply them for 60 days, knowing full well that probably you ain't going to get paid at the end of it.
So what do I do?
I then kick the ball down to my people I owe money to and say, well, I'm going to go insolvent now as well, so we'll do the same thing.
And on and on and on it goes until it gets to the small company who are exempted from these regulations so they don't have to supply.
No, no.
The only thing this will do is kick the ball down the road for a month or two months and take more people out of the equation.
Now, why would anyone in their right mind do that?
Well, they would probably do it if they didn't want the numbers to look absolutely dreadful as soon as they came out of lockdown.
So what this will do is, is it will flatten the curve of insolvencies, if you like.
So the insolvency will be more measured rather than a huge spike.
And that for me is the only, unless they are, the people who do this are absolutely commercially retarded.
There's no other reason that this could come up.
It's the worst thing I've ever seen in terms of legislation.
It just really is.
Yeah, shocking actually.
Do you know who invented this, who proposed this bill?
No, I don't actually.
That's a good question.
It does strike me as bizarre.
Do they not have people, you know, with calculators or people with business experience or whatever to say, I've got this idea that we can reduce insolvencies.
Should we just blue sky think this scenario and just, you know, run it around the team and see whether...
Whether there might be any pitfalls in this.
How does it go from idea to bill to act of parliament, whatever, without scrutiny?
Well, it goes through very quickly because it's a national emergency, doesn't it?
Someone comes up with the idea.
They have their, you know, their sage equivalent of economic people who go, you can't do that.
That's a terrible idea.
And they go, thank you very much for your input.
I'm doing it anyway.
And then they go ahead and do it and it will get rushed through because it's emergency measures.
And that'll be that.
And then it's on statute.
And you know what they say, you know, the closest thing in life to, well, the closest thing on earth to eternal life is a temporary government program.
And this will be it.
Yes.
And that will mean also they're doing away with wrongful trading.
So if you trade knowingly insolvent, the directors can be done personally.
That doesn't exist anymore.
So you can know that you're insolvent, you can take a whole load of credit from people, even though you know you're not going to be able to pay them and you can't get done for it.
When does this legislation go through?
I don't know.
I think it's going through the Lords at the moment, but I've not heard a blip about it.
I was amazed I've not read anything in the papers about it.
But are you pursuing them on this?
Are you JRing it or whatever, or what?
No, because there's only a bill at the moment, so it's not law, so you can't really do anything about it.
It would be up to politicians to go, no, this is a terrible idea, you really need to rethink this.
Maybe the Lords will knock it back, but let's face it, no one's there.
You know, everybody's at home.
Has nobody...
I mean, you've become quite a thing.
I mean, I know you're in Monaco with your guitars, with your guitar collection.
I've seen the door doin' at the moment.
We've moved out to the countryside.
Oh, have you?
And how is it in the Dordogne?
It's hot.
It's about 32 at the moment, but beautiful.
And it's a nice, we've got a big place here, so it's really lovely to have the space and stretch out.
I mean, what I meant was compare and contrast the lockdown with here.
And I know the French were quite strict.
Have they relaxed it now?
Yeah, Macron basically said, fuck it, that's it, we're all done.
I'm not having any more restrictions anymore and we're never doing this again.
You know, as much as I can't bear Macron, he's an awful human being.
He was strong on the way in, actually.
He made it quite clear what was going to be done, and he's been strong on the way out.
And he actually said, that's it, we're not doing it again.
So everything's fine.
Yeah, there's no...
It's normal life.
It's funny, isn't it, that these topsy-turvy times have had a very strange effect on who one thinks is okay...
And who one thinks is bloody awful.
So we went into this thinking, Boris Johnson, he's great.
He's just like a character.
And of course, he's much better than Jeremy Corbyn.
And now we've realised, actually, Corbyn would have been no worse.
He really wouldn't have been.
And in the same way, we went into this thinking, little, little tosser, tosser character, Macron, he's so annoying.
He's, you know, he's like, he's like those Frenchmen in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, you know, sort of, your mother's spells of elderberries, yeah, and all that.
You know, typical bloody annoying Frenchman.
And now we think, Macron, he's kind of, he's kind of our guy, despite everything.
He went for it.
I mean, he tried to draw France back a little bit from, you know, essentially far left.
He tried that by suggesting that they might increase the pension age by a year.
And, of course, they rioted over that.
That was what the whole gilet jour and the yellow vest thing was all about.
So they rioted for a year about that.
And I think then when the COVID thing came in, he realised that he was never going to change France.
He was never going to take them to the right, even in a small measure.
So he said, well, OK, then I'll just take power by taking you to the left.
So let's just give all that money away.
They're here.
They've got the furlough scheme for two years.
And everything's basically nationalised.
All people work for the government.
So it's essentially full-on socialism there.
So I asked you this before because I think it's kind of key.
Where do we escape to?
When all this is over, because we haven't even talked about the Black Lives Matter bollocks yet, but where is going to be Sort of relatively normal.
Who's handled this well?
I mean, you know, we don't want to go to Sweden, do we?
Grenade attacks in Malmo.
Where is there?
I've thought about this a lot, and I think England is still, you know, a pretty good place to live.
Probably one of the best places to live in Europe, certainly.
And then, you know, you're never going to go and live in India.
You're never going to go and live in the Middle East.
Well, at least I'm talking personally, but...
China.
There's whole swathes of continents that you would never ever go to.
So there's not actually that much choice, depending on what you want to do.
You know, for me, I like commercial life, so there needs to be some opportunity there.
I think the country that will come out of this best, and of course that's a really relative term, that's kind of hardest working Frenchman, isn't it?
But the country I think that will come out best will be the US, simply because they're self-sufficient.
And I think with China closing down, all the manufacturing jobs are going to come back into the US, so I don't think the unemployment will be such an issue.
In Trump, you have a capitalist, whatever you might think of it, so they're not going to go down the socialist route.
The money that they put into the economy to businesses was in the form of grant rather than loans.
Everybody was just given the money rather than loaned the money, so you're not going to have some enormous debt bubble coming up.
So assuming Trump wins by a landslide, and I can't imagine anything other than that happening, We've got four or five years of that, whatever that may bring, but it will certainly...
You imagine, I mean, we were talking about Corbyn earlier, but you imagine you had Clinton in.
Now America would be some...
It would have been handled so differently.
It doesn't bear thinking about.
It really doesn't.
It really doesn't.
So, yeah, America, I think, will come out of this best...
How best that is, I really don't know.
Yeah, I mean, even with a red meat kind of conservative in the Oval Office at the moment, even then, we've still got America slightly enthralled to this very dodgy geezer, Anthony Fauci, and the whole kind of big farmer deep state, as it were.
There's always one character, isn't there?
There's always one character.
In every country, there's always the evil villain guy.
And you don't know whether he's a good guy or he's an evil guy.
Funnily enough, they always look evil.
But you never know quite sure whether they're fighting for the people or not.
But now, the science is pretty much settled.
This thing isn't that bad.
It's not that infectious.
It's not going to kill most people.
And, you know, it's no worse than a seasonal flu, a bad seasonal flu.
So why is everybody still in a flap about it?
You know, we had bloody riots and everything and people going down the beaches.
You know, lots of people congregating for all sorts of different reasons.
Two, three, four weeks ago, there's no second wave.
There's no loads of people getting it.
You know, there's a few spikes in America now because everything's got back, you know, pretty much to normal.
But it will.
People have been locked up.
so when they go and mingle again they're going to catch colds and stuff so yeah they're all do you have a theory on why given what you just said i mean given given that it's obvious to anyone who is capable of reading an article on toby young's lockdown skeptics anyone who's who's heard the conversation with dr john lee or or um and the other people who've spoken out against this stuff
I mean, the evidence is there now.
It's clear that this is no worse than bad seasonal flu, which is bad but not worth shutting down the economy for.
Why do you think that Boris Johnson and co are still pretending that this is really bad?
Because they're weak.
That's all.
That's the only thing I can really think.
Unless they are...
You know, really evil or really intent on bringing Marxism into the UK, which I really don't believe.
I think they're just weak.
They cannot possibly admit that they made a mistake.
And if you can't admit that you've made a mistake, then you have to make it appear as though there's some really scientific reasons for why we're coming out.
And I think that's why you get the whole two-meter bollocks and one meter and this and that and the other.
Because, you know, if you say, like Macron did, well, you know, Yesterday, we had a home at the beach just outside.
One day you weren't allowed on the beach and the next day the beach was packed.
Well, what happened in that two minutes at midnight that enabled everybody all of a sudden to be safe?
Well, of course, nothing happened.
It just had to be some arbitrary deadline.
I think people would recognise that.
But this constant, well, we have to be really vigilant and second wave and this and that and the other, it makes it worse.
It's taking the sticking plaster off more slowly, isn't it, rather than just going, ah, that's it, all right, we're done.
We made a mistake.
We probably hung on a bit too long.
You know what?
I think he would have so much, or he would have had so much respect if he'd have actually done that.
Guys, it would have been so easy.
We listened to scientists.
Actually, we probably overreacted.
The great news is, thank you ever so much, we did save the NHS. Maybe we saved some lives, but now we can crack on.
You know, everybody go back, you're really safe, it's okay.
If you're really old and poorly, stay inside.
That's all you needed to say.
Yeah, yeah, I think you're right.
Have you got, finally, have you got anything else up your sleeve?
I want you to get medieval on this administration's arse, Simon.
I really do.
I think we need you to really, well, and I don't want to get too graphic here, but there are things I'd like you to do to the government which are indescribable on a family podcast.
Are you going to do these things?
Are you going to please me by doing these things?
Well, we could maybe do a late night podcast one day.
But yeah, I do think win-lose-draw on the judicial review.
I think we've had a lot of wins as we've gone along.
So I think that's been pretty good.
I would be very surprised if Hancock keeps his job.
Williamson, I think they've been particularly poor.
Boris, does he really want to keep his job?
You know, I actually think if they lost the judicial review, it probably suit them quite well.
You know, they all make an excuse to go a bit like Theresa May, really, you know, just, oh, well, bollocks, then I won't do it anymore.
But no, I honestly believe there's a case for misfeasance in public office.
I really do.
I really do.
Because the evidence is so strong, but what they've done has been wrong.
It's a high bar, and Boris has been up for it once before over something quite minor.
That's it?
Yeah, yeah.
If you type in Boris Johnson misfeasance or something like that, it pops up.
He never actually got criminally charged with it, but it did go away.
So I really do think that's an avenue to explore, and I don't think many people would argue, to be honest with you.
And that carries a lot of seconds.
Misfeasance in public office carries a life sentence, would you believe?
Does it really?
Well, he wouldn't get his end away, would he, anymore if he was banged up in a maximum security prison?
Well, he might get his end away!
Not in the way he'd like.
I mean, I don't want him to go to prison, and yet at the same time, he really has destroyed the country.
Just...
I mean, we're not even there yet, are we?
We're not even there in the world of pain.
That's to come.
October, you reckon?
Well, what's really annoying is that he won't be around in public life, I don't think, when the ship really is there.
You know, it's a bit like when Labour bankrupted the country and left that little note, you know, sorry, the money's run out, that kind of thing.
They know that they're not going to be here when the real nasty stuff happens.
So, yeah, that annoys me.
And I think that the whole reason I got into this in the first place was thinking to myself one day, how the hell do you bring these people to account?
They're doing such a poor job.
And democracy actually is really flawed because they're in and you can't get them out.
Literally, there is nothing you can do to get them out.
And that was really where the whole judicial review thing came from.
You know, you could see an avenue of actually making them stand up and justify themselves.
And evidently they haven't.
You know, they've done things very poorly.
So the next step, I guess, after the judicial review is a misfeasance thing.
And I must admit I've not explored it any more than, you know, simple Google search.
But you would consider that?
Oh, for sure.
If I went to the lawyers and they said there's a case, I'd be all over it, yeah.
And I would crowdfund it.
And we would get...
We would get thousands of people, I think.
Absolutely thousands of people.
And the other thing I want to do is to start trying to repair some of the damage to the businesses.
You know, these people have been forced to take loans out.
That's a protection racket to me.
You know, you can't trade, but here's a loan.
Okay, the interest rate is low, but you've still got to pay it back.
So I want to start doing something on that.
And that will depend on...
I'm not aware of this.
Tell me what the deal is here.
Well, I believe that if we win the judicial review, that will turn out that everything the government's done is illegal.
If what the government done is illegal, if you've been forced, if you've been legally closed someone's business down, but you've forced them to take a loan out from you, i.e.
the government, and you have to pay that loan, there must be some claim that you can make to have that loan waived.
So that's what I'll be exploring as well.
I think the whole, you know, I've set this thing up, keep Britain free, which has got a huge amount of support, actually, because the lockdown is one thing, but it is a...
It was kind of a...
What's the word for it?
It's kind of the pinnacle of the way everything was going, you know, more and more of a nanny state.
More and more trying to interfere in everything you do, more and more regulations, more and more restrictions on free speech and so on.
And this just accelerated it by five years or maybe a bit longer.
So I see the way out of this is getting enough people to see what's actually happened, i.e.
you've been locked up, you're told that you can see where you can go, you can have sex with, what you can see, what you can read, what you can think.
How do we get here?
We need to fight back against this, otherwise the next step is a really dark place.
So yeah, there's lots to do, lots of work to do.
Yeah, that's a good place to end.
Can I just say to anyone who's enjoyed this podcast, as of course you have, don't forget to support me on Patreon or on Subscribestar because some people say I won't support Patreon because they're way too woke.
Well fine, you've now got an alternative.
Thank you Simon, that's really good.
I'm glad that some people out there are fighting the good fight because we are few and they are many.
Do you think so?
I actually think we're the many.
I think we're the many.
I just think there's not enough people that are actually speaking up.
I really do.
I hope so, anyway.
Yeah, I hope so as well.
Alright, well, good luck, mate, and enjoy the sun in the Dorloin.
Lucky you.
Thank you very much.
Alright.
See you soon, mate.
Okay.
Bye.
See you, James.
▲
Export Selection