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July 7, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:11:27
Calvin Robinson
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Welcome to the DellingPod with me, James DellingPod.
And this special edition is brought to you in association with Defund the BBC. Those magic words, don't they just make you happy?
Don't you think it's a cause you'll automatically want to support?
So I'm talking to Calvin Robinson.
Calvin actually contacted me and asked me to be on his pod.
And I said, well, why don't we kill two birds with one stone and do a kind of double effort?
So we're going to be fighting the fight together, aren't we, Calvin?
Absolutely.
It's a big fight that we've got ahead of us, but I think together we'll handle it.
By the way, can I say, I'm really happy to see the youth.
I mean, you know, I'm presuming you are youth.
You must be under 20.
I mean, under 30.
I'll take that as a compliment.
I'm not, I'm not.
I've never divulged my age on the internet, but I'm older than I look.
It's the genes.
If somebody had told me that you were one of the biggest boys in the school, you know, like, so you were 18 but looked old, I wouldn't believe them.
Oh, thank you.
But mind you, when you get to a certain age, when you get to be old and fucked like me, everyone looks young, apart from the people who are really old, who are even more messed up than you.
It just happens.
I'm a school teacher as well, James, so every now and then at parents' evenings, someone will say, are you looking for sixth form?
They're over there.
And I love that.
That makes me feel great.
Yes, no, well, long may it continue.
So let's talk BBC. I mean, there are so many issues around this.
It's a hot topic.
It's almost like a national cult, isn't it?
I know you've spoken about the NHS being held on a pedestal to that extent, but I think the BBC has historically been on a no-touch platform.
But we're getting to a point now where people are actually fed up of the bias and fed up of the bloat and the overspending and all these things.
Where do you stand on it?
What's made you think, actually, we need to do something about this?
Um...
I've been sceptical, that's quite a mild word, about the BBC for some considerable time.
But I do remember a period not so long ago when I thought it would be okay for somebody like me to treat with the BBC. Essentially, although they were annoying and left biased, they were an institution which...
Well, was part of the fabric of the nation and That one shouldn't reject it outright.
So as you know, I used to appear on programmes like The Daily Politics.
There was a time when I appeared on that Arts Review show, which was made in Glasgow.
And who did it?
Martha Carney, I think, was the presenter when I was doing it.
It's had a long history.
What's it called?
Late Review?
Something like that?
But that in itself is a thing that the BBC used to be good at, isn't it?
Arts and, you know, looking after things that other stations wouldn't necessarily promote.
Absolutely.
And that was one of the reasons I was quite pro the BBC, that the production values were good.
It took art and literature and so forth, the culture, seriously.
You can have conversations which...
One almost can't have any more.
Everything is now so polarized and so politicized that you can only talk about politics, pure politics.
Whereas back in the day, and really not so long ago, you could analyze movies and you could have somebody like Stuart McConey having his particular view and A.L. Kennedy having her particular view and me having...
My particular view and we'd all sit happily in the green room afterwards and I remember one One marvellous episode where Mogwai, one of my favourite bands, do you know Mogwai?
I don't know them, no.
Mogwai, well, they did the soundtrack to Les Revenants, The Returns, that weird, spooky French series, and I used to enjoy watching them play at Glastonbury and lighting up my split as their band.
Music came on.
And they were the band.
They were the band that night on the Late Review, and it was just fantastic.
I was sitting there.
They were playing there, and I was sitting over there, and I don't know why I'm telling this anecdote, except to say that the BBC was not the completely malign creature it is today.
Today the BBC is so monstrously evil, I think there is no question it should be defunded.
It has no purpose other than as a propaganda arm for the left and the big government and all the things that I utterly despise.
It's over as far as I'm concerned.
Well, this is it, isn't it?
Like you say, you were on panels with people of different opinions.
There was true diversity there now.
Now all they're looking at is diversity of a superficial form.
You know, they want people of different colours, but all thinking the same.
All part of the group think, as long as everyone's promoting social justice warrior causes and being politically correct, not stepping out of line, then they're fine.
But the moment you say something that they don't like or agree with, you're done.
I'll tell you another, there have been various signs and portents.
And I think this decline has happened quite rapidly.
It was, if you could draw a line, it would be sort of, of its decline, it would be going like this, and then suddenly, in the last two or three years, whoop!
Like that.
And among the signs of portents I've observed, Jeremy Vine.
Jeremy Vine, I remember when he used to have, when he started his Twitter account, and I used to often go on the Jeremy Vine show, and we were absolute mates, and he never, he never, oh, shut up.
Oh, no, I'm just getting on this call.
No, that's great.
So, Jeremy Vine.
I used to often go on his show when they needed a sort of token right wing person and he never really betrayed his politics and I thought that was admirable and I thought he was in the finest traditions of the BBC. I mean the BBC always pretends that its presenters are Unbiased.
And that this is part of this great tradition.
Although I think this has been more in the breach than the observance recently, it's...
I can't think of any BBC presenter who's actually genuinely impartial.
Maybe they're impartial to party politics, but they're certainly partial to the BBC politics, aren't they?
Wait a second.
What was that?
My card.
Okay.
Sorry, daughter.
It's alright.
Look at your list.
Um...
Yeah.
Jeremy Vine.
Um...
I remember when he started out on Twitter and his tweets were really quite unpolitical.
I mean, do you remember this world, Calvin?
There used to be a world where not everything was political.
Yes, I think it was just before Brexit, wasn't it?
Do you remember, for example, I still haven't worked out how old you are.
I've been on Twitter since it started.
Okay, GQ and Esquire magazines.
Oh yeah, I used to subscribe to GQ back before they went wet as well.
They used to be men's magazines, and they used to be genuinely for men.
And they used to be about things like where to buy the perfect leather jacket, and what it's like running the gauntlet of snipers in Sarajevo, and the worst great white shark attacks, and stuff that you actually cared about, stuff that mattered.
And now it's about, like...
What's the best dress you can wear to a party when you're gender neutral?
And Lewis Hamilton wets the bed on how the world is racist and transphobic.
And you think, this is not your job.
Your job was not to be left-wing political.
And I feel the same with BBC, that...
It used to be less bad than it was, and Jeremy Vine is an example of this, that in the early days his tweets were about the sort of things that old-school GQ and Esquire used to write about.
Not literally, but they were apolitical.
And then he started, I'll tell you what, I'll tell you that his race, he first started getting left-wing and edgy.
He's a bit of a bicycle Nazi.
And he started really getting on his high horse about, look at this driver who cut me up this morning.
And he didn't say he should be strung up, but that was the implication.
We really should ban all cars now because they're evil.
And frankly, all us cyclists, we should be made saints because that's what we are.
And he's got much, much more...
Nakedly woke and left wing.
Partly maybe it's a survival mechanism, but partly it's a reflection of just how left wing that organisation has become.
I was just trying to find a tweet that he sent this week, but it seems he's deleted it.
I wrote an article for Spiked saying, you know, I grew up with Auntie Beeb.
I loved the BBC. You know, I used to watch Doctor Who.
I thought it's fantastic.
Sci-fi, wishy-washy fun, but nothing serious.
And now it's all lectures on how I need to live my life and how I need to be a woke person who believes in gender neutrality and all these things.
And he tweeted back saying, yeah, I've read it, completely disagree.
The BBC's not like that.
He seems to have deleted it now, apparently, but doesn't seem to stand by his words.
But I get what you're saying, that there's been a complete shift from this impartiality to a left-wing basis.
And the BBC, you know, has been criticised for years.
People on the right have said it's biased.
People on the left have said it's biased.
And I really don't think it's pro-Labour or pro-conservative or anything.
It is just pro-woke BBC. They've got their own political agenda.
Yes.
Yes, I suppose that it would be...
But given that left and right don't really make it, it's not about political parties, is it?
It's really about what you might call the deep state.
And the deep state is irredeemably liberal left.
And unfortunately, the BBC is very much part of that.
It's the propaganda arm of the deep state.
It's interesting, you mentioned Doctor Who, which is obviously a very good example.
But even...
Even in the early days, the lefty scriptwriters were inserting political messages against Margaret Thatcher and so on.
But they look like amateurs, like naive fools compared with the scriptwriters today who are so blatant about it, not least from turning Doctor Who from a man into a woman.
Yeah.
Which is, why?
Why would you do that?
It's not as though, apart from anything else, It's not that children are exactly short of female role models, because most of their teachers are women.
Gone are the days when boys used to be...
Boys need to be taught by men, really.
We do need more male role models, absolutely.
I mean, I've got no problem with the doctor being a woman, though, James.
I think that's fine, because in that universe it makes sense.
What I don't like is the overt lecturing, you know, about the environment, and they have to have companions of every tick box.
You've got to have a mixed race one, a black one, an Asian one, a white one, or maybe not even a white one these days.
And it's just so over the top in your face.
They shove it down your throat.
They're not subtle at all.
It's the only area where we're going to agree, Calvin, because I do think Doctor Who should stay the man.
There were so many...
Do you ever see the Sarah Jane adventures?
Yes.
Sarah Jane adventures were fantastic with Elizabeth.
Was it Elizabeth Staden?
Anyway.
They were great.
They weren't actually as good as Doctor Who.
And they didn't need to, you know, it'll be the same when they turn James Bond into a woman.
No, surely not.
Surely not.
That series has got, that franchise has got so well.
I don't think I want to run around with that anymore.
I don't want to waste time.
It's disappeared up its own bottom thanks to Sam Mendes.
But what was I going to say?
Doctor Who is a facet of a broader problem with the BBC's drama, and you touched on that with the issue of the tick-box casting.
And it's interesting, I wrote a long essay for an American magazine, which I occasionally put up links to, because I'm quite proud of it, because it was an epic, it was about 2,000 or 3,000 words long.
And I wanted to analyse why it is I find diversity casting so incredibly annoying.
And I wanted to, I think it needed length in order to show that, look, it's not that I'm a white racist who can't bear to see people of colour or whatever on TV.
It's much more basic than that.
I'll give you an example, actually, and I don't think it's even a big...
No, it's not.
It's Sky, but Sky's going woke as well.
Well, Sky News is actually more woke than the BBC. Completely.
Have you seen that new series, Gangs of London?
No.
No, I stopped watching it.
But it's about these gangs in London, and old school gangs.
And there's a gang that is a black gang.
And they're sitting round at a table with the old school East End white gang and stuff.
And you're thinking, this is just bollocks.
This doesn't happen.
There isn't a black gang like this.
It's not how it works.
There are different kinds of black gangs, but they don't sit down round tables with all East End gangsters talking about...
It's just rubbish.
It's false, isn't it?
And that's why it's so annoying.
I think in our population, ethnic minorities, black and ethnic minorities make up about 13%, especially, you know, in London metropolitan areas.
On the BBC, in their shows, it's 23%.
So they're doubling it.
They're overcompensating and it just looks fake.
It doesn't represent real life.
It doesn't represent real life.
And, of course, it's not enough.
I mean, you know, if it was bad then, you know, like last year, think how much worse it gets now that they've got...
It's...
I think it supports my thesis that the BBC is a sort of branch of the deep state, because you see it, for example, in the fact that BAFTA, which doles out all the awards that directors and producers and writers want to win, Now itself has a diversity rule, which means that basically if you don't push the right diversity buttons or transgender buttons or gay buttons or whatever, you're not eligible for an award.
So God knows what.
We saw it in that contentious, poor old Lawrence Fox got into trouble talking about this, Sam Mendes' 1917.
Where he got in trouble when he was talking about the implausibility of a Sikh cavalry officer being in this truck, which he was right on.
But what was even more implausible was the scene at the end where you've got this Devonshire regiment, a county regiment in 1917 about to go over the top.
And you see dotted along the lines, these black faces.
Thank you.
But I mean, when you raise this, you must get shut down, like, instantly.
They say, oh, he's a racist because he doesn't want to see more black faces, etc.
That's why I'm trying to stand up more for this kind of thing as well, because they can't automatically assume that I'm racist.
But I don't need to be overrepresented on TV, you know?
Yeah.
If it's a period of trauma...
You will never be black enough for them.
Well, that is the other problem.
Even if you were sort of Nubian black, even if you were from southern Sudan or somewhere, they would still say that basically you were an Oreo or whatever, because no real black person would think the way you do.
The amount of racism I've received, James, over the last few months from black people for not thinking the same way that they do.
Just because I'm black, I have to automatically vote the way they do, speak the way they do, and think the way they do.
That is racist, but they don't understand the irony of that.
But it's interesting you say that.
These black people, I mean, I don't think they're representative, but they're a kind of...
They're the spearhead of this lefty You know, cultural Marxist revolution.
But I'm sure that actually if you've met normal black people, they probably think as you do.
But it's not just...
Okay, so there's the incredibly annoying issue of The war on verisimilitude, which seems to have been lost.
It's like those of us who believe that art should be about truth and that good art is ultimately about truth.
I mean, this is the point I made in the essay, that...
Comedy.
How do you judge whether comedy is effective?
Well, does it make you laugh?
Or to give another example, which really annoyed me.
Did you ever see the Les Miserables, Andrew Davis's adaptation of Les Miserables?
Andrew Davis is the dwayne of BBC classical adapters.
He was the one that got Mr.
Darcy with his wet t-shirt coming out of the lake.
Was this the one last year?
So you had a West African looking Inspector Javert.
Well, it's set in 1830, with the best one in the world, there was no such diversity there.
And people say, yeah, but it's fiction.
And I say, yeah, okay, well, if it's fiction, then would you mind if there were TV aerials?
Attached to the houses or that the streets weren't cobbled.
You could see kind of parking meters.
Of course you wouldn't.
Period detail matters.
It's not science fiction.
It's not fantasy, is it?
It is a period drama, like you say.
It should be set in that period.
Otherwise, it's fake.
You break the illusion.
Otherwise...
Exactly.
But I can't remember who it was who was saying to me, and this was a good observation.
I was having a chat.
Maybe it was on a podcast.
Maybe it wasn't.
About...
The BBC's flagship drama of the moment, the one about the lesbian serial killer.
Oh, Killing Eve.
Killing Eve, okay.
So, Killing Eve is typical of this new politicisation of the BBC, where even drama that pretends to be The men in it are much, much weaker than the men.
The women are sort of gender fluid in a way.
They're quite sexually voracious.
And this is the kind of...
the mix of...
On the one hand, the war on the patriarchy, the war on traditional roles.
On the other hand, this kind of Decadent perversion that you see in totalitarian regimes.
The Nazis, the communists, they all sort of...
Their culture becomes quite decadent and disgusting.
Right.
And that's the BBC in excelsis.
This sort of ultraviolence, but it's okay, the ultraviolence is okay, because all the women are lesbians.
Right.
It's all caricatures, isn't it?
It's supposedly my job as one of the spectators' TV critics to review this stuff, but really, unless I'm ordered to in a nice way, I'm asked nicely to, I tend not to review BBC programmes anymore because they annoy me and insult me.
Well, I was going to say, did you ever see Noughts and Crosses, that Mallory Blackman, no pun intended, BBC drama, where society is supposed to be reversed in that black people are in the privileged position and white people are the working classes, which is completely misrepresenting our society, anyway, to suggest that only black people are underclass and white people are naturally privileged based on the colour of their skin.
They're saying it's an inverse of that.
And it is...
Completely horrible to watch.
I don't know if you've seen any of it, but I couldn't get through it.
I did.
I saw the first, I mean, apart from anything else, Mallory Blackman is a really shit writer.
There is a sort of a market which has been cornered by people who can't write very well, but as long as they push the right work buttons, then they get bought up wholesale by state schools particularly, and they put on a recommended list.
Mallory Blackman is classic, that, you know.
Because the book is supposedly didactic, it teaches children about racism, it teaches them to think about it from a different perspective.
But I noticed one of the things she gets wrong in that, that, I mean, maybe the character develops in subsequent episodes, I don't know, but I remember...
There's a scene where there's a black academic and he's talking about white people and he's talking about them in a kind of demeaning way, you know, about this is what white people do and they're just not like us.
And I was thinking, actually, Mallory Blackman.
If your satirical point was going to have any meaning, if it really was going to be a version of the world we live in, then you would have that black academic taking the side of the white underclass.
He would not be preaching hatred or anything.
He wouldn't dare.
That's where she messed up there.
Sorry?
That's where she messed up, isn't it?
Because she didn't draw the parallels at all.
Yeah.
Well, because she didn't need to think, because she's not a very sophisticated writer.
She knew that she just had to...
Her audience was left from schoolteachers, which is quite a big market.
James, I thought it was race-baiting.
I thought it was stirring up antipathy under the pretense of attacking racist attitudes.
I don't think it did what it was supposed to do at all.
It did the opposite of it.
She shoehorned Stormzy into the show as well.
And here's another one.
I mean, as a schoolteacher myself, the debates we've had around, you know, should we replace Mozart with Stormzy?
Obviously, getting rid of all dead white men now.
I know we're kind of...
Going off topic here, but the whole idea that anyone that's white, bad.
Anyone that black, good.
So this guy storms, he's got lyrics, you know, shut up, fucking shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up.
How does that compete with a classical piece of Mozart?
It's just not on the same level.
And the idea that we should wipe one part of our culture out, replace it with another just to virtue signal, it makes me sick.
Well, also, I'm not sure that Stormzy is as good as Dizzy Rascal.
I don't know any Stormzy songs that are as good as Dance With Me.
Maybe that was Calvin Harris that made that song so special.
But it seems to me that That Stormzy sort of put his finger in the air and sensed which way the wind was blowing and realised that actually his musical output was far less important than sort of Virtue Signalling about Whatever,
about racism or about, you know, tower blocks being burned down and it all being white people's fault or whatever.
He's become a political figure.
And I suppose one can salute his low cynicism, but that's about it.
But I don't think he...
Is he any good?
I mean, I don't like him, but I have eclectic tastes anyway.
My son saw him at Glastonbury and said his set was fantastic.
And my son's got quite good taste, but I don't see it.
I haven't heard any Storms of music that I like.
There's a difference between making a popular pop song and being a fantastic musical artist that should be studied in education, though, isn't there?
There's a very big difference there.
Yeah, I suppose so.
I suppose...
I'm not sure that...
I did musical appreciation classes at my prep school, and I'm not sure that it did much for my appreciation of classical music, actually.
But there was this gay music master who molested us all, so that may have been slightly off-putting.
He used to kind of try and fill me up in my piano lessons.
Oh, the hell.
Wow, okay.
Yeah, let's...
Let's move back to the BBC. What would you like to see happen, James, with the BBC? Just...
forced to survive on the...
in the open market.
I don't think that...
You see, my worry is that even if it were defunded, as it should be, I don't think that the license should be compulsory, I think it might still do quite well, which would be a shame, because I think it needs to be destroyed and rebuilt, and I'm not sure how that's going to...
For example, the BBC has got a very, very, very valuable back catalogue, doesn't it?
Just think about how wonderful it would be to go back and look at, say, the episode with Doctor Who and the Master, when he was played by Roger Delgado and the Morris dancers, the Sinister Morris dancers.
I'm sure you won't remember that episode, but I'd quite love to see that one again.
Or, there was a brilliant series once, I'm not sure, it's probably been erased from the archives now, but there was a series called Hawkmoor, which was about a Welsh rebel called Tumsian Cutty, and he was fighting, and there were lots of people in gibbets and stuff, and it was...
It was good.
Stuff like The Sleepers on the Hill, brilliant, spooky children's series.
The BBC has such heritage.
Not just their entertainment, though.
Not just the entertainment, you know, the education and informative side of their programmes.
I used to like programmes with John Benjamin talking about churches and all kinds of things that no other station would do because they wouldn't touch it because it wouldn't make them any money.
That's what the BBC used to be great at.
Yeah, absolutely.
So, but we've seen already in the recent purging of the airbrushing from history of certain programs, like, I mean, embarrassing Little Britain chats.
Walliams and, what's the other one called?
Oh gosh.
It's gone.
It's gone.
Yeah, yeah.
I find I get terrible aphasia when I'm doing these.
Because you're on the spot.
Yeah.
I know what you mean.
But...
You would have thought that...
The job of any artist is to stand up for his art and say, look, this is the deal.
This is what I did and it was funny and it was right for its time.
Matt Lucas.
Matt Lucas.
I've got no regrets because that was then and this is now.
Which is more or less the line Harry Enfield took.
And John Clears.
Who else?
John Clears as well.
John Cleese.
Yeah.
I mean, these people's names should be actually inscribed on a plaque.
The heroes of the Cultural Revolution.
People who stood up for...
Who was that?
Who was the first footballer?
Matt Letizia.
Yes, yes.
Wasn't it?
Yeah, it was.
Who refused to wear the BLM. Quite right, too.
I was quite impressed by that.
Is he from Senegal?
I'm not very good on my footballs.
He was apparently the first yesterday to refuse to wear a BLM badge for Sky.
Yeah, because the stations are pushing them, aren't they?
As well as the Premier League.
They're getting pressure from every direction.
It is that deep state thing again.
It has its tentacles in every institution, as Gramsci intended.
Yeah.
But, where was I going with this?
The BBC, if the BBC thinks that its back catalogue is the property of Woke BBC, Inc., Then it deserves to be punished for this, because actually it's part of our national heritage, our cultural heritage.
And I don't mind paying for that, but I do mind very much paying if the BBC is going to censor its past and give us an incomplete picture of what entertained us in the old days.
Well, I don't believe in censorship.
If the BBC engages in censorship, I hope it will be...
I wish that it could be punished by the market.
I mean, that's the first job.
Our first job is to put it in a position where it is punished by the market.
I'm with you completely on that.
You know, from tearing down statues to removing programs from iPlayer and Netflix and all these things, I worry so much because once they've got rid of the TV and the statues, it's our books that are left and, you know, we get into serious danger when we get to that point.
But also the logistics of the BBC, I think, the criminalisation of people that don't pay the licence fee, and we've talked about the bias, but also I don't understand why their charter covers all live television.
I get it when they first started and they were all live television, but now we've got hundreds of channels.
Why should I pay the BBC if I just want to watch Sport on Sky or something else on YouTube?
Just because it's live, why do they get money for it?
And why am I under threat of prosecution if I don't pay them?
It makes no sense in the modern day.
That's another problem, of course.
It's a quasi-monopoly.
It's protected by...
It's got an historical advantage, which is a barrier to entry to new, more agile organisations.
I mean, how would you...
It really has cradle to grave coverage.
And I think back in the past that, you know, how we used to Growing up as kids in the 1970s, the amount of children's TV was quite limited.
So in the morning, in the school holidays, you would get things like The Crusaders and Robinson Crusoe and The Flashing Blade.
And then in the evening, you'd get Animal Magic with Johnny Morris and you'd get The magic roundabout would always close the evenings, you know, when somebody would say it's time to bed and that was time for you to probably go to bed as well as a chopper.
But the BBC, what I'm saying is the BBC's had this grip on our culture.
And then, you know, when I was travelling in a car with my father, he would always put on the BBC News, on Radio 4, on the hour.
And so you'd listen to that.
So the BBC's...
We've controlled our culture.
That's awful now as well, isn't it?
Radio 4, that's gone very woke.
I can't listen to it anymore.
I'm on talk radio all the time.
Oh, come on!
I won't even do that.
Even talk radio is too left-wing for me.
I say that.
I was being slightly mischievous.
I now have completely given up all forms of BBC radio.
My last holdout was the Rock Show.
But Radio 1 is just unbelievably woke.
And here's that.
Again, some of the DJs you know have been chosen not because they're the best available, but because they push the right diversity buttons.
I'm not going to mention her name, but she recently...
I think she had a nervous breakdown recently on her show.
You've got this fantastic gig.
I don't know what the salary is for Radio One DJs, but you can earn all sorts of money on the sides, cutting ribbons or whatever.
The salary is another issue, isn't it?
They get paid far too much for a public service.
Look at the The BBC has a market distorting effect.
So, for example, why are so many comics left-wing?
I think it's partly because the BBC pays you if you're a left-wing comic.
Of course.
There's any number of panel shows.
Oh, that niche guy who's not even funny.
It's just propaganda, isn't it?
And it's not so much that they get massive appearance fees, but they get promo.
This promo is worth a lot to be endorsed by the BBC. And this was always my dream, going back full circle to the beginning of this conversation.
Yeah.
There really was a time in my earlier career when I thought, yeah, one of these days I'm going to get some kind of show, a documentary series on the BBC and it's going to be great and no one's going to care what my politics are because I'm just going to tell an interesting story.
You were never that naive, were you?
Do you know what, Calvin?
I am really quite sweetly innocent.
People think I'm a hard bastard because I don't take prisoners in print.
But actually, I'm very, very naive and gullible.
I suppose because I believe in...
I believe in social justice, man.
The true sense of it.
Where we are all equal.
Meritocracy is what we're talking about, isn't it?
I wouldn't want to job at the BBC because I'm mixed race.
I would want to job there because I'm bloody good at what I do.
And that's where they trip up all of the time.
I would be insulted and people around me would resent me if I got the job for the colour of my skin.
And you so know that that would be the only reason.
Of course.
I'm not saying I'm not talented, I'm saying that that is why they would recruit you, and you know it.
And it sucks.
I totally, totally agree.
It completely sucks.
I just don't understand why we can't live in a world where...
You know, you and I can chat without having to worry about treading on eggshells or that there's some sort of weird power imbalance going on when there clearly isn't.
You know, we're just blokes shitposting.
This is it.
Actually, elevatedly shitposting.
My conversation's been quite highbrow.
But, you know, we get along and it's not...
We don't need to be policed by I'm not sitting here thinking, James has got privilege over me because of this and that and that, which is what they want me to be thinking.
They want me in that victim mentality mindset of saying, actually, this guy's oppressing me right now, you know, on the airwaves or however, because of his skin colour.
And that's, as long as people continue to believe that, people are oppressing themselves, they're holding themselves back.
Well, of course, except, you know what, people who are doing this are mostly white, middle-class university graduates.
That's the irony.
Wasn't it one in six Black Lives Matter protesters were black, the rest of them were white, middle-class, typical hippies, weren't they?
That so doesn't surprise me.
Yeah, I mean, certain members of my family, I'm not going to...
I'm not going to go there because it's just too sensitive.
Yeah, best not.
Best not.
I just get in trouble.
But yeah, it's...
Again, going back to what you said at the beginning, people say that the National Health Service is our religion, but...
We shouldn't be distracted from the mission of destroying the BBC as well.
I say, why not destroy both of them?
I think the BBC and the NHS are the twin pillars of cultural Marxism.
Somebody, actually, somebody was saying on Twitter or somewhere else today, actually, and that's right, it's a friend of mine, was saying, We shouldn't call them Marxists because they love being called Marxist by by conservatives and they wear it.
We should call them what they are, which is fascists.
I mean, that so they are fascists.
I think the twin pillars of fascism in the in the United Kingdom are the BBC and the NHS. And I think that We're not going to solve this country's problems until we knock those pillars down.
And it's one of the few areas where I can identify with ISIS at Palmyra.
Because when I think of those pillars as being the NHS and the BBC, suddenly I think, yeah, get out the Semtex.
Now!
Now!
I was going to compare it more to something a bit more civil, like Brexit, because you can't reform from the inside, can you?
You've got to smash it down and start again.
You know, we tried for 40-odd years to fix the EU. It doesn't work.
And people saying, well, we'll fix the BBC from within, or the NHS from within.
Okay, people have been trying to do that.
These are mammoth organisations that have grown too big for their boots.
We need to whack them back down to shape and start again from scratch and do it properly.
I think you're absolutely right on that.
I think...
Everything, only connect.
Everything is part of the same problem.
I think that...
Who was it who said this?
Orwell, I think it was, who said that something to the effect that there's an awful lot of physical courage in the world, an abundance of physical courage, but virtually no moral courage.
And I think that people...
Even though a lot of people may start, like us, being open-minded, free-thinking, that's not a given, but I'm saying there's a possibility that's the case.
But by the time people start knuckling under for their working lives and they start thinking about mortgages and their children's future and stuff, They are all too willing to buy into the status quo rather than challenging it and they'll mouth the right politically correct pieties.
And whether they end up wasting their talents, if they have any, As, I don't know, environmental scientists, you know, that's a complete waste of life.
Or whether they go into the World Health Organization, or whether they go into some woke law firm dealing with human rights.
They're all ends of the same giant, giant, stagnant turd, aren't they?
It's just they...
I think you hit the nail on the head when you call it the deep state because I see this in schools.
I see this left-wing indoctrination by teachers to young people.
They don't even realise they're doing it.
They think because they're so self-righteous, they think they are naturally right and everyone who doesn't agree with them is naturally wrong or evil.
They're happy to push their views on young people and that goes with them through academia until they leave school and then they've got the BBC telling them this is right, that's wrong.
So it's throughout their whole life this deep state is pressuring people How on earth do you teach with your political views?
It's not like you're shy of...
No, it's a good question.
I've got into so much trouble over the years.
I kept my politics separate for a while.
You know, I talked about politics for the first time in the 2015 general election in the staff room and someone said to me, so how are you voting?
And I didn't realise, James, they were being rhetorical.
The correct answer to that question is Labour.
But I said, yeah, Conservatives.
And people were aghast.
They were literally jaws dropping.
What?
But you like children.
You don't hate children.
Why would you vote for Conservatives?
You're not an evil guy.
And that's when it all started.
It went downhill from there.
You know, I've...
I've written a few pieces about...
I've seen so much indoctrination around the EU, for example.
You know, the day after the referendum, I got to school.
I was so euphoric because we actually won it.
And I never thought in a million years that we'd win it, that people would vote leave.
And they did.
I got to work, ready to teach.
Such a good mood.
I got pulled aside by the headmaster and the vice principal.
They said, Calvin, now we know you're a Brexiteer.
Like, very accusatory, like it's a bad thing.
Whatever you do, don't mention Brexit.
And I'm like...
Yeah, okay, fine.
I came here to teach kids.
I wasn't planning to talk about Brexit.
I do, you know, I study computer science.
Okay, fair enough.
Whatever.
So I go on with my day, teaching my subject.
All around the school, I'm hearing teachers saying, I know, it's awful.
Oh, it's terrible.
And we've seen the same thing in America with Trump.
And then there's announcements on the PA system.
We're opening the chapel for anyone that's upset about what's going on in Europe and with the country leaving the EU, etc.
And people are saying to me, oh, we've got a lot of European kids, what are we going to do?
I'm like, first of all, you're missing the point.
This is not anti-Europe or anti-European children, but the fact that you're telling me to not speak about this, but everyone else is allowed to speak about this from a completely different perspective, is a bias that you're not recognising, and you need to check yourselves, because this is left-wing indoctrination, this is Remainer indoctrination.
So obviously I didn't stay at that school after that, but...
It is tough to find a place where you can be free and open-minded in education in this country.
There are very few places where, without getting into it too much, I worked at your friend Toby Young School, fantastic place, lots of diverse, and I mean true diversity of thought and opinion at that school, but not many of them exist in the state sector, unfortunately.
Have you been to Catherine Birbalsing's school yet?
I'm a director, I'm a governor of that school, yeah.
Catherine is fantastic.
I've been a fan of hers for a long, long time.
You know, there's Michaela, there's West London Free School, there's Bedford, there's a handful of schools doing amazing things, but I hope the rest of the state sector can look at them and copy what they're doing and emulate it because, you know, we need more of it.
The education system is in dire straits at the moment.
And I've completely gone off a tangent.
You what, sorry?
I've gone on a complete tangent there, but that's the state of education.
No, no, no, Calvin, we like tangents.
I think they're really important.
Because I'm interested in this.
Look, it's not often I get to talk to actual school teachers at the sharp end.
And so you essentially got booted out of the school or sort of forced to leave because having wrong politics on Brexit, you know, it was too uncomfortable for you in the staff room.
Yeah, absolutely.
So how...
I don't want to expose you or anything, but your current job, how do you get on that?
So I've gone down to part-time teaching now because I was a candidate in the election and I wanted to have a good run at it and help a secure Brexit.
That's done now, so I'm not really involved in much politics other than, you know, this defund the BBC thing.
But I teach a couple of days a week, I go into school, I do my teaching, I look after the kids and then I come home and then I do the politics and try and keep them compartmentalised as best I can.
But, you know, it's challenging.
But okay, so being a teacher, there has to be...
There's a staff room, right?
There's always a staff room.
And there's downtime where you sort of...
Because I spent...
I've taught...
In three short bursts, twice at Radley and once at my old school, Morgan.
And I thought it was the most exciting, fulfilling thing I've ever done, but also actually more intense than fox hunting.
Just, you feel...
And I'm sure I was doing it wrong.
I'm sure that...
There's no way you could survive as a regular full-time teacher putting that much energy into your classes because you'd die.
So obviously I would have found a more laid-back formula if I'd stuck with it.
But I remember the sort of...
The relief when you go and have your coffee and your much needed cakes or whatever, and you circulate and you make small talk.
How do you do that if you're a pariah like yourself?
I think it's all about finding the right setting.
I couldn't do that where I was with the school I mentioned around the EU. It's impossible.
You are ostracised, essentially, for having views that are not in line with groupthink.
So I had to do different things.
I left and I ended up at Toby Young School, which was fantastic, and I got on with everyone there and everyone's from a different place.
And that's what you've got to do.
You've got to find the right setting.
And it's not just about diversity of thought and opinion.
It's also about the right educational setting.
So these schools we've talked about, these few good schools, are looking at behaviour, making sure that kids are on track because you can't get a good education unless you're behaving in your class.
So many kids in our country are missing out on learning because they've got brats who are doing whatever nonsense, distracting everyone else.
And even that's a woke issue.
It's like, oh, let the kids learn through play or, oh, they're trying to communicate something to you through their misbehaviour.
No, they're just being bad.
Kids need boundaries.
They need guidelines.
They appreciate that and they love that.
They want some respect and that's how we give it to them.
We're there to teach them and pass on knowledge.
I'm not there to, you know, wipe their noses and keep saying, shut up, sit down, get on with it.
That's not what I got into teaching for.
And this is a part of that woke progressive agenda.
Are you quite strict?
What are your techniques?
I'm fascinated by how you keep control when you've got kids who've maybe come from backgrounds where they haven't been subject to discipline of any kind.
What do you do?
So the greatest kindness that I can give a kid in my class is to be strict.
Actually, I'm not going to make different expectations for you just because you come from a disadvantaged background or you're an ethnic minority or this and that.
These are people lower the standards and it's patronizing.
What I'm going to do is say, you are going to achieve this.
You're going to get the very best because I am the expert in this room.
I'm going to pass on my knowledge to you, but you're going to sit there quietly, pay attention and do your work.
And at the end of the day, you're going to learn a lot more than if I was one of these patronising types that says, oh, you know what, you don't have to do your homework, you've got a tough home life.
No, you've got a tough home life, that's awful, but you've got to work extra hard.
You've got to work harder than everyone else because you want to get to the same level as them.
Have you had any kids who've done really, really well in the field of computer science?
Because, I mean, that's the route to success, isn't it, these days?
Yeah, yeah.
So I've not been teaching that long, but I've got to the point now where I'm starting to get messages from kids that I taught years ago that are saying, yeah, I'm at university studying your subject, and that's heartwarming because you know you've inspired them, you've seen that spark in them, and it's flourished, and that's what we're there for, isn't it, really?
Yeah.
So do you teach them how to learn to code?
Yeah, indeed I do, yeah.
It's, you know, back when I was in school, we used to use computers, and now we make them work, and we program them, and kids love it.
It's fantastic.
And do you do Python?
Yeah, that's probably the main language that we use most of the time.
It's very accessible.
What do you know about Python?
Ah, we're onto something here.
James has got some programming experience.
Well, no, the thing is, I have a little brother who is a tech entrepreneur.
Oh, I see.
Yeah, he works in Python.
All his team work in Python.
And...
Well, I mean, I understand he uses it, his techies use it to create algorithms which search databases and mine them for information.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, it does.
I mean, data is the biggest currency in the world right now, and the shame is that most people don't even realize it.
Our data is more important to companies than any other thing, including how much money we have.
So people who can farm data and monetize that are onto something very special.
Yeah, I can see that if you have the kind of mind for it, that your classes would be actually the most important things that your kids in that school could do.
At the same time, do you not think...
Maybe you don't, but I think that there is too much fetishisation of STEM subjects in that having perhaps there was a bias, a cultural bias towards the arts, you know, that this is what Watson's face outlined in that famous Two Cultures speech, that the sciences were undervalued.
But I think we've gone...
Too far the other way now.
Look at the way, for example, our old enemy, the BBC, fetishizes science, the science, and anyone with a science degree or whatever field is revered and put on a pedestal and given a...
A BBC half-hour radio programme and we're supposed to think that his word or her word is gospel.
And it's not the case.
What's missing, I think, from the STEM subjects is that, yes, they're about logic and so on, but...
They don't teach you the art of critical thinking and actually critical thinking or rather the lack of critical thinking is what has got our culture into this massive mess at the moment.
People are not capable of standing inside and looking at things from first principles and saying well hang on a second we're told the scientists are telling us that the planet is warming at an unprecedented and catastrophic level but actually what evidence do we have for this?
How can we be sure?
How do we know What is knowledge?
How do we decide what is true and what is untrue?
And so on.
And I think that whenever I hear a politician talking about STEM subjects, I reach for my brownie because it's yet another false idea, another sort of meme of the times.
I think you're onto something in that it is pushed a lot and it is this whole, you know, science is the most important thing in the world and the arts are forgotten in schools.
We need to put so much more emphasis on the arts.
But saying that, and I'm proud to say that all the schools that I've taught in computer science has been the most popular option.
So students are picking it.
So we're doing something right.
So I do some consulting for the DfE as well in trying to get computer science into more schools because the problem is not enough places are teaching it.
So yes, we're emphasizing how important it is, but only a handful of schools in London are teaching it properly because You know, people with a computer science degree, they go work for your brother or they go work at Goldman Sachs and they get paid a lot more money than they were doing teaching.
So we need to try and get more computer sciences into schools, as well as pushing the arts as well.
So there's a balancing act that we're not quite getting right, but I think we're working in the right direction.
Well, London is quite a good tech hub, isn't it?
I think that in Europe, we are the leader.
I suppose we're not as big as...
After Israel, maybe.
I think Israel's...
After Israel, maybe.
Yeah.
So I think...
They do fantastic stuff.
But I was in technology before I went into teaching, actually.
And London is great.
London is good.
There's a nice hub there.
But there's a cultural difference.
So I've spent some time in Silicon Valley.
San Francisco.
They love success.
They celebrate success.
They thrive off it.
If you're doing well, yes, go you!
In Britain, we love an underdog.
We celebrate the underdog.
But the moment you reach success, it's that everyone's waiting for you to fall.
Or they're waiting for you to fall over and kind of wait for you to fail.
They don't like success in Britain as much as they do in America, in the tech scene at least.
That's something that I've noticed.
Oh my God, you've just opened a can of worms there, Carmen.
You must tell me, how...
When you were working in Silicon Valley, I mean, how oppressive is the political correctness there?
Oh, that's a good point.
So I never really, at that point, raised politics at all.
I wasn't that involved in politics, so I kept it shtom.
But since coming out, you know, since standing for election and writing a few articles here and there, I've had people from the tech scene, you know, particularly the video game scene, actually, really, really aggressive attitudes towards me.
This guy is, he's a dangerous influence.
This guy is evil.
Like, really hyperbolic words, just for stating my opinion.
Yeah, apparently.
All I'm doing is, you know, trying to educate kids and trying to do the right thing, but apparently that makes me evil and dangerous, so...
But why is the world of gaming so woke?
Because, I mean, gamers aren't woke.
No.
Why is the tech side of gaming so woke?
How did that happen?
That's a good question.
I don't know how it's happened, but it has become very much like the BBC. It's all over-representation.
Video games need to have a female lead character or a black lead character.
They've got to tick all these woke tickboxes They can't do anything controversial, say anything controversial, swearing and stuff like that.
You know, Grand Theft Auto is the exception that proves the rule, really.
I don't know how it happened.
Everyone who works in the industry is so ridiculously woke, but people who play games are, you know, they're shit posters of the internet.
They're the most oppressed people online.
Do you think, is it possible that the people in gaming are on the spectrum and are not very good, not very socially well adjusted, so that when an idea comes along, a sort of powerful idea of how they think that they ought to behave to be normal, they're susceptible to it and they lack the powers to I've discerned that this is a false idea.
I mean, it's just a theory I've just imagined on the spot, but is there anything in that?
That might make sense because, you know, they're kind of adapting to the environment that they're in.
Because I got flown out to LA last summer to play a new Star Wars game that was coming out.
Really, really amazing opportunity.
Fantastic game.
Went with all these games journalists, just me as the right-wing person, the token right-wing person, with all these left-wing games journalists.
Everyone was really nice.
Everyone was fantastically pleasant and smiling to my face, having conversations about...
You know what, Calvin?
You're actually a decent guy.
Or, you know, you should be able to have conversations like this, that we're having, and not get hostile.
But the moment we got back to the UK and people are back on Twitter, back online, it's, oh, this guy, this evil guy is posting this in the Telegraph.
Or, oh, he's writing for the Daily Mail.
What's wrong with him?
As soon as they're out of that environment and back into their bubble, they get taken over by the wokeness again.
So I think you might be onto something there.
Yeah, I do...
I mean, so we've had Gamergate.
Yes, yes.
Comics.
Gate.
Have there been any others that...
Milo Iannopoulos was another one from the tech scene before Gamergate and before he got all controversial.
Who is this, sorry?
Milo Iannopoulos.
Oh yes, Milo.
You see, it's interesting, isn't it?
Milo.
I keep meaning to have him on the podcast to find out what's...
to catch up with him, really, because a lot's happened.
Yes.
But somebody said to me in one of the private chat groups I'm in, they said that he...
they thought that Milo had done more to set the seeds for the Trump victory than any kind of high conservative commentator I think Milo was on his game he's really really good He really gets the culture wars.
He's our Achilles in some ways.
So I haven't spoken to Milo for a long time, but we used to talk a bit when we were both in technology back in the day, and I think he's always been a contrarian.
He likes to stand out for the sake of standing out.
He likes to jump on a bandwagon.
So I don't know if he always believes what he's saying.
He likes to get a reaction out of people.
But he definitely made a difference for Trump in standing up saying, I'm gay, but I don't believe in gay marriage or, you know, that Trump isn't a racist because of X, Y, and Z. Really saying things that a lot of people weren't saying at the time and paved the way for other less controversial figures to come up and say similar things.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I think that's a reminder that I must speak to him, although he is a psychopath.
I don't know.
I think even he knows that.
You know, you suck with a long spoon.
I think he's the most charming, fascinating company, but at the same time, he's dangerous and fickle.
Yeah, absolutely.
So, just going back to the teaching thing, because, again, I don't get to talk to teachers, especially not conservative teachers.
I'm just...
Does it pay?
I mean, can you make it the money?
Absolutely.
It does pay.
Without going into personal things too much, the progression can be quick.
Within a couple of years, I was a head of department.
A couple of years after that, I was a senior leader helping run a school and built a new school.
You can progress financially at the same speed if you're good at what you do.
It's easy to prove results.
Everything's very tangible in school.
There's so much bureaucracy that you have to demonstrate everything you're doing.
So if you're good at your job, absolutely, there's money in it.
But the financial side of teaching has been blown way out of proportion because everyone's always begging the government for more money.
Schools don't need more money.
Schools are doing fine.
There's lots of mismanagement, like the NHS and like the BBC. You know, you've got people overspending, lots of middle management, all kinds of nonsense that could be cleared out and get back to simple basics.
Teacher at the front of the room, blackboard, chalk or whiteboard, pen.
That's all you need.
And some textbooks and exercise books.
Yes.
It's often the case, isn't it?
I've noticed this.
When I sent my son to, he got a scholarship to a prep school.
And I think that the prep school was using lower tech than my daughter was getting at her state school.
They had interactive whiteboards at the state school.
I think chalk and blackboards, which is what you need.
Do you see anything to give people like us any sign of hope at the moment?
Yes, I mean, Michael Gove's new reforms in the curriculum were fantastic.
They shaped the way for a knowledge-rich curriculum, focusing on the learning and less on all the extra fluffy stuff that was clogging up schools for so long.
And there was a lot of backlash around that, but we're finally getting to a point now where we've got enough evidence.
Schools like Michaela at Catherine Burblesing School that have...
Have naysayers since day one.
They've got outstanding in Ofsted.
They've got best results in the country at GCSE. So we're starting to see results from what Michael Gove put in place so that people can't argue against it anymore.
The progressives can argue all they like, but we're showing that it works.
Right.
Okay.
Well, thank you for that.
And look, finally, I want to...
Well, I've got you because you're a computer techie.
You know, I'm on Patreon at the moment and not on Subscribestar.
And I hear different things.
Some people say, oh, they're going to cancel you one day and then where will you be?
And...
I sort of think well that's a bit worrying because like there's not much freedom of speech already and that would be much worse if the world is deprived of me.
How much sense would it make to create my own website Where people, you know, just did the same thing as Patreon and Subscribestar?
Or would the complications be so...
Are there too many chinks in the armour?
For example, the payment processing, is that where they get you?
Or...
Do you see what I'm feeling towards?
Tell me, what's the answer?
So I would say, first of all, I've got to plug gofundme.com forward slash defund hyphen the hyphen BBC if people want to support the cause.
Oh, they should!
They totally should.
I think it's, what could be a finer cause?
Yes, defund the BBC and support.
Oh, actually, before you answer my question, tell me how defund the BBC started.
So James Ugel, he's a young conservative on Twitter, part of the YC movement, started a hashtag and opened a Twitter account that started gaining momentum.
He got myself and Darren Grimes on board to kind of talk to people about it and be champions of the cause because, you know, we've done a lot of campaigning in our past.
And, yeah, just a natural grassroots movement that's gaining some good traction.
So hopefully we'll see something come of this, I think.
How many members have you got?
So there's just four members involved on the campaign team.
No, no, no.
I know you had a massive load of followers on Twitter.
Let's have a look.
I'll bring it up real quick.
So I can say we've raised £14,000 so far.
We've got 80,000 followers on Twitter.
That's a lot.
That's good.
That's more than I've got in a much shorter space.
Popular cause, yeah, okay.
We've tapped into something here.
I think in this country, like I said, we support the underdog.
People like the little man.
And we are the little man.
We are the everyman.
We're fed up of being told what to think and what to do by the big dogs in the BBC. And it's like with Brexit, you know, people want to be heard and they don't want to be trod on.
So I think we're onto something.
But to answer your question...
I think do separate yourself if you can.
So I got cancelled on PayPal once.
They locked my account with thousands of pounds in it.
It took me a long time to get that back.
We've seen people getting banned from Twitter, people getting banned from Facebook.
GoFundMe have banned some people as well.
Patreon have.
If you're right wing or on the right of the extreme left that is now the centre, you're in trouble.
You kind of Always on eggshells about when you're going to get cancelled from the latest lefty platform.
So if you can, get a web team, get something set up that's independent.
It's a lot of work, but it's worth doing in the long run.
Well, I won't be doing it.
I won't be doing it.
I'll pay somebody to do it.
The question is, is it worth paying somebody to do it?
And what are the pitfalls?
Because this would be a service to other people as well, I'm sure.
Where can they get you?
Because wherever the weakest link is, that's where they'll get you.
So, I mean, are there...
Are the payment processing people who are not going to throw you to the wolves, for example?
What are the other pitfalls that I need to look out for?
I think if we're talking about the most accessible route, I would say probably diversify.
So have a GoFundMe and a Patreon or have a PayPal and a Skrillex or something else as well.
Have different multiple options for people to pay.
So if one does get locked while you're battling that, you've still got another revenue model that's going on at the same time.
There isn't really anything that's It's not okay to be shutting down anyone because we don't like it when it happens to us.
Did you say I need a Skrillex?
I think it's course.
I like Skrillex.
Not the band.
I saw him at Glastonbury.
He's fantastic.
What's actually interesting is...
One of the best gigs I've seen, actually.
So I didn't realise that Scrillex was also a thing.
Well, what you might find interesting, PayPal was actually started by quite a sound group of individuals.
You know, Peter Thiel is one of the few people in technology who's working with Trump, and he's been like, you know what, we want to get stuff done.
We're not going to say, no, he's evil because he's right-wing.
And he's been great on that.
But now PayPal has obviously come a long way since those days, and it's just another woke organisation.
I think I'm so lovely and warm and cuddly and sweet.
I'm like a little kitten.
You'd think that this would protect me.
I'm not just a lovely kitten.
I'm not homophobic.
I'm not racist.
They don't care.
They don't fucking care, do they?
They just want to...
It's not how nice you are or how reasonable you are, it's just like...
Are you one of them?
Yeah.
If you're not them, you're the enemy.
It is an invasion of the body snatchers.
Either you're a pod creature or you're a human, and if you're a human, they want to convert you into a pod creature.
There it is.
Absolutely spot on.
So I think we've come full circle in this.
Kelvin, it's been a great delight meeting you.
I mean, given that this only happened like when you sent me an email this morning and I said I vaguely recognise you.
You know, I do recognise you.
You're sort of...
I see your face, rad.
Cheers, cheers.
But it's great to meet you.
I'm sorry that I mistook you for a child.
It's a compliment, James.
Honestly, it's been great to talk to you because I think we agree on pretty much most of this, but it's still been an engaging conversation, which is, you know, it's always a challenge, isn't it, when you're talking to people that are so like-minded?
Are you just going to say yes, yes, or is there going to be something there?
So it's been, yeah, it's been fascinating.
I don't mind...
I tell you, one of my bugbears, my bête noire, is people who say...
I don't want to be in an echo chamber.
And I say to them, look, fuck's sake, take a look at the world.
Take a look at the world that the left has created.
And, okay, so you don't want to be in an echo chamber.
You want to be in the world where as soon as you venture any kind of opinion that is not left-wing, you're going to get shot down and cancelled.
Is that your preferable alternative?
Because I can tell you an echo chamber is a much nicer place to be in.
What people are trying to say is, look, I'm very diverse, I'm very inclusive.
That's what they mean by that, isn't it?
Again, they're trying to tick those woke checkboxes.
Not the word I've used, but...
No prisoners, I say.
Anyway, Kelvin, lovely to talk to you.
Absolute pleasure.
And I'm looking forward to people enjoying this podcast.
Oh, by the way...
If you enjoyed this podcast, of course you did, don't forget to sponsor me on Patreon and Subscribestar until they cancel me.
I don't think they will, actually.
I don't think they will, but this could be my famous last words.
Anyway, thank you.
Oh, and defund the BBC, of course.
Good morning to that as well.
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