All Episodes
Previous Next
July 28, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:04:05
Donal Blaney
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
I love Denny Poll, go and subscribe to the podcast baby.
I love Denny Poll, listen mother time, subscribe with me.
I love Denny Poll.
Welcome to the Denny Poll with me James Denny Poll and I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest but this one has been a long time coming.
He's an old, old mate of mine and he's amazingly successful.
He gets more successful every year.
I'm gobsmacked by his success and also he's a man so sound he makes me look like Owen Jones.
Donal Blaney, welcome to the podcast.
I got your secretary You very kindly provided me with some blurb about you.
It's really quite hard introducing people sometimes and I never know what to say.
Some of this is quite good.
Don't all blame me.
Blaney, former leader of the Tory Madrasa Young Britons Foundation, one-time godfather of young conservatives and founder of Griffin Law, which is a very successful law firm, described as the Rottweiler of the Right by Isabel Oakshot, and this is my favourite, the man who puts the cunt into contentious litigation.
Who said that, Donald?
That's really good.
I mean, you must be proud of that one.
One of my clients who also said, could you send one of your horrible letters, one of your bowel openers to someone?
You do have this quality.
If I met you and didn't know what you did, I'd think you were so gentle and mild-mannered, but I would so hate to be in any litigation against you.
I mean, it'd be a nightmare.
I can imagine that you're quite brutal, aren't you?
Yeah, I'd say I'm on the aggressive end of the profession, but that's, I think, what people want from a lawyer.
You don't go and see a lawyer because you want someone to pussyfoot around something.
If you're involved in a fight, you want someone to come in on your behalf and punch for you.
Yeah, if you want a great white shark, you don't want a pathetic shark, do you?
Right, exactly.
They're called great white for a reason.
They're not called feeble white sharks.
They're probably not allowed to be a great shark at all anymore.
You're free to say what you want on this podcast.
Now, hang on, what else do we say about you?
Oh yeah, that's the boring bit.
Oh yeah, Donal divides his time between Florida and England.
That's your house behind you, isn't it, Donal?
Yeah, that's the view from the back of the house.
Unfortunately, I'm not there, but I decided to put it on as background.
I'm actually in the office in England at the moment, desperately wishing I was involved.
Actually, show us where you really are, because this is quite like the contrast between taking the blue pill and taking the red pill in the Matrix.
So that's the, yeah, that's the red pill.
That's where you actually are.
That's the pool and that's the view down the dock.
Not everyone's going to be watching this because some people prefer to digest this show.
What was the word?
My brain's gone because without pictures, let's say.
But I've been getting complaints on my YouTube channel.
For people saying, why is your video quality so bad?
And why have you got the...
Don't you understand that you can't have a bright background behind you?
Because that makes your face appear dark.
All I was trying to do, you whiny people, was give you a nice view of my garden and occasionally you get the black cat appearing in the background and it's quite entertaining.
But all right, fair enough.
I'm going to give you a boring white wall now as kind of punishment so you can see my face.
Do you really want to see my face?
I don't think so.
I don't think I'm that excited to look at.
I think the background was better.
Anyway, you whined.
This is what you get.
I mean, do you think I'd be a good lawyer, actually, with that kind of attitude?
I think that a lot of people need to be spoken to quite directly.
I pride myself on giving my clients very blunt advice, and they're welcome to listen to it, and if they don't listen to it, they're welcome to go somewhere else.
Yeah, I can't put it in those terms, I'm regulated, but yeah, they are welcome to go elsewhere, is the polite way.
You, among the many people you've represented, you did Darren Grimes, who, I love little Darren, young Darren.
He's a hero, and the misery he went through.
And I'm glad that you were able to help alleviate that.
Yeah, I'm helping him in relation to something that's live at the moment, which was the BBC, yet again, smearing his name.
And, you know, you and I, if we get involved during a spat, we're old enough and ugly enough to deal with it.
And God knows you and I have both had Various kickings over the years from the cancel culture warriors.
But Darren, he's 22, 23, and the poor kid was facing financial ruin and potential imprisonment on the back of the referendum.
Yeah, yeah.
This is one of the things that bothers me about cancel culture.
You and I are these, well, we are like great white sharks.
You know, we're missing some of our teeth because we've bitten so many other creatures.
And we've been attacked.
We've got scars in our scaly skin and our sides.
And we've been around the block and we're kind of thinking, yeah, well, we've had a long life and we know how the enemy roll and we're up to dealing with it.
But for the younger generation, the kind of people that you were training at the YBF, people who want to go into Conservative politics or to want to articulate Conservative views, I worry that this current climate is going to put them off entering the fray in the first place.
And also, furthermore, cancel culture is not going to give them the ability to earn a living and earn enough money to be able to.
I mean, you need to survive.
You need kind of a degree of fuck off money, don't you?
I mean, you've got lots of fuck off money.
I haven't, but I'm all right.
But if you're up and coming, what incentive is there to To go out and fight the fight in this world which is increasingly controlled by the left.
Yeah, I look back, you know, doing the old fart thing.
When I was at Southampton University, what are we now, almost 30 years ago, I'm bloody glad they didn't have Facebook and video phones and social media back then because inevitably I would have said something that would have led to me being cancelled in today's world.
And if you are a young Gradually coming of age, conservative or libertarian, thinking, hold on, this leftist culture that my lecturers and the Students' Union have is just wrong.
There should, at the very least, be some conservative speakers or some conservatism on campus.
You are very brave nowadays saying that because there are so few lecturers who will stand with you, there are so few adults at the university who will stand with you in the administration.
And you risk being the next Darren Grimes.
And, you know, that guy really has shown himself to be a hero of the movement at a very young age in a way that a lot of others would just walk off and go, I'm not going anywhere near that.
But, you know, even a while ago now, the Young Britons thing, but I remember you occasionally would invite me up to give...
Pet talks or rousing speeches, if you like, to the kids.
And I remember even being struck at the time that quite a lot of them were really quite career safe even then.
They weren't, to be honest, ideologically pure.
You know, they hadn't done their Thomas Sowell 101.
They weren't really Into Mises and Hayek and all the things that I think we really should.
They weren't pure.
Is that a fair...?
I think that there's a lot of people who get sucked into politics who do it because they want a career and that's wrong.
So the advice I give anyone, I gave and would still give anyone, is go away, make some money, do something with your life and if you truly want to go into elected politics, do so when you've got some money.
Because otherwise you'll be beholden to the wits.
But what I try people to do is read, think, challenge their ideas, not just with fellow people on our side of the argument, but most importantly, people on the other side of the argument who show some goodwill.
Obviously, there's no point debating with a troll, but there are people on the left and to left who will debate ideas in a fair way.
And that's the only way you're going to learn is by having your ideas challenged.
You're one of the few people actually I know that I can have this conversation with because you are like me.
You believe, I think, that to be a Conservative these days, you know, in the broadest sense, you need to be like a sort of Shaolin monk.
You need to dedicate yourselves totally.
You've chosen the hard path.
You've got to crawl up the mountain on your knees to the hermit's cave at the top.
You've got to accept that anyone, anyone can be a liberal lefty and do really well and never be challenged in their life, never have it rough, never risk being sacked from their job because, hey, they've got the correct opinions.
But being conservative now especially, it's hard, isn't it?
You say that, but as with all revolutions, the revolutionaries are eating themselves.
When you see people like Germaine Greer or Peter Tatchett getting attacked from people for not being leftist enough, you realise the absurdity of this revolution, just as all others before it, that no one is radical enough for the radical revolutionaries, and there's always someone more radical.
The new.
On our side, look, you're right.
There are so many safe, easy paths to take.
And you see this government and Theresa May's and Dave's before that, that will give in to the pressure the liberal media and the liberal establishment will try and encourage them to do.
And the minute you dare take a stand on a particular issue, whether it's Brexit, OK, we won that one, just about, but a whole host of other cultural issues, Where we're losing and in large matter that because what the left are brilliant at James is they'll pick us off one by one and knock us out of the battlefield.
You've just alighted on one of my favourite topics and I think it can't be mentioned often enough this one actually.
This habit that our bros have, our sisters I suppose to a lesser degree, but definitely our bros, they are always far too keen to chuck the likes of you and me off the back of the sledge to feed the wolves in the hope that they can escape.
We're not very good at picking up our wounded from the battlefield and making sure they get home safe, are we?
We leave them to the enemy.
That's 100% true.
Don't cancel this programme immediately, but I got a renewed respect for Ken Clarke in the last couple of weeks because I watched that documentary on Mrs Thatcher and Ken Clarke telling the story of when Ted Heath and his Chief Whip wanted to fire Mrs Thatcher when she was Education Secretary and Ken Clarke was the Education Whip and he said, no, no, don't do that.
Because if you do that, A, she'll be a nuisance to you on the back benches, but B, it's wrong.
She's a good minister.
And Ken Clarke actually showed a serious level of cojones to make it clear that he should stand up for someone who was, I think it was at the time of the milk snatcher stuff, a vulnerable person who could have been thrown to the wolves.
Our side are atrocious.
The first minute there's a chance for the left to pile in on someone, There are enough people on our side who'll join in the kicking, in part because they want to aggrandise their own careers and advance themselves.
But also, if they eat them, then they'll leave me alone.
And that's not how it works.
The left just keep eating.
Yes, yeah.
We could name so many names here, couldn't we, Donald?
I mean, actually, but we're not going to, because...
I've got enough enemies as it is but I really, I have to say, sorry, the reason I'm putting my arms up by the way is I've got this, I tore a muscle in my back below my trapezium, and what it means is that whenever the arm goes down it pulls on the muscle and just gives me agonizing pain so the only position I can,
so that's why I'm writhing around, it's not because I'm finding you unpleasant to talk to or Or because I find this topic uncomfortable.
I love this topic.
But yeah, squishy conservatives.
I mean, it is a bit like the Judean People's Front and the Popular Front of Judea, that we hate.
Is that too strong a word?
Yeah, I think it probably isn't too strong a word, actually.
I think we hate and despise people on our own side who've betrayed us more than we hate the enemy.
I mean, I look at the left and I think, well, you're just, you're prey to, I mean, you're basically, you have a mental illness.
Leftism is, I think, a mental illness.
It's an intellectual deficiency, which I think goes right back to the hunter-gatherer stage.
Leftists have not evolved properly.
They're still at the stage where if you kill the mammoth, there's only one mammoth to go around the community and therefore everyone must get their fair share and that's it.
They don't realise that in modern economies the mammoth is ever expanding.
That digression besides.
The left are mentally ill, but the right, people on our side, I think There are not words strong enough to condemn this behaviour.
What do we do about this?
You reminded me of that famous occasion where Jeremy Hanley, the former Conservative Party chairman, was giving a speech.
I think he'd just been elected to the House of Commons and Dr Ian Paisley was along the benches from him and he said, I didn't realise you were on our side, Dr Paisley.
And Dr Paisley said, never confuse sitting on our side, being on your side.
And There are lots of people who sit on the same side of the House of Commons as the side that you and I would naturally vote for, who are not remotely on our side, who are doing the left's bidding.
I thought for a while it was just people who were Romaniacs and obsessed about Remainer culture.
But you're seeing it with people who are just chipping away at Boris.
They're the mad, bad and the sad.
They're people who got fired by Boris when he took power.
Or are resenting the fact that they haven't been promoted.
That's what drives them.
I don't think it's usually principle.
I don't think necessarily that they're wets and they hate Hayek and Friedman and Thatcher and all the things that we love.
I think it is as petty and pathetic as, I'm not part of Boris's gang, therefore I'm going to oppose him.
Well, interesting you say that.
I would say the problem is even bigger than that.
For example, yesterday, I don't know whether you saw it, Priti Patel, who we would have thought of as one of us, she made the most appalling speech, essentially surrendering to the whole diversity, the whole Marxist identity politics game.
Priti Patel at one time looked like our new Margaret Thatcher.
She's completely sold the past.
Why is that, would you say?
I think it's what's known as Hannan's first law of politics, which is the moment that a Conservative gets the opportunity to wield the levers of power, they cease at that point no longer to be a Conservative.
And so it is very easy for a weak minister to get captured by their civil servants or...
Or to think, well, I'm just a couple of steps away now from really being able to do something.
So I remember having a discussion with someone once who, you know, I worked with and they became an MP. And I said, oh, right, here's a chance for you to vote in favour of this tax cut.
Well, it's not a simple, old boy.
I'm not yet a minister.
So just bear with me while I climb the greasy pole.
And then they became a minister.
I said, here's a chance for you to do this sound thing.
Well, old boy, It's not quite as simple as that.
I'm not yet in the cabinet.
And then they reached the cabinet.
It's not pretty.
It's someone else.
And I had the same discussion.
I said, here is a chance.
Now is the moment.
You are the secretary of state.
You are literally the person who decides to do this wonderfully sound thing.
Well, oh boy, I'm not prime minister and I don't want to upset the prime minister because I might get fired.
And there is always an excuse for them to want a quiet life and to use people like outriders on the right Who are there to be patted on the head as the sort of the rather odd uncle who comes over at Christmas and drinks sherry before he's even had the scrambled eggs on Christmas Day.
And that's our role.
We're the nutters.
We sit over there, we get patronised and it makes them feel better about themselves that they are getting praise from the BBC, The Guardian and all of these people whose praise they should not be seeking.
Absolutely.
This was very much my experience in the days when I still used to break bread with the BBC, when I did any questions and I did question time once.
And a very common experience for me was you'd be all matey beforehand with the various panellists, including whoever the Conservative MP was, who you thought was going to be your ally.
But the moment the show started, what you realised is that what the Conservative MP was thinking is, oh goody, I've got James Dellingpole on the panel.
That means whenever the question comes up, I can position myself to the left of James Dellingpole and win applause from the audience and I can show that we are not the nasty party and I am a nice person.
It's cowardly, sick making.
It's feeble and it's the John McCain style of republicanism.
John McCain was the most popular member of the Republican Party with CNN and New York Times and the Washington Post.
That should have been a massive warning sign to every conservative activist in the United States that probably he wasn't going to be sound on very many issues.
Now, we could take a sort of more genteel collegiate approach here, James, and adopt Reagan's 11th commandment, thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Conservative, but of course it assumes that a lot of these people are actually Conservatives at all.
Yes, I may agree with seven or eight out of ten things that a wet Tory says, but actually the other one or two really are the important ones.
About the size of the state, us being an independent nation, and the culture war.
Those are the things that matter, truly.
Yes.
And, you see, the problem is, Dylan, having you on the podcast, I'm going to have to have you on again, because there's so much we need to talk about.
The culture wars, for example.
The failure of so many conservatives, and not just conservative politicians, but also the conservative media, if such a thing exists in our country anymore, which I'm not sure that it does.
And I'm talking about not just newspapers, but also magazines, which are notionally conservative.
Which have fought shy of even addressing the culture wars as though it was a kind of peripheral thing that was just going to go away and really, you know, who cares about what's happening on Twitter?
What matters is in the realm of politics?
And it struck me as extraordinary because we're now seeing the fruits of this foolishness, are we not?
That the culture wars are real and they have pretty much destroyed our culture.
From the perception of people like yourself or Roger Liddle or Claire Fox or Douglas Murray, there are very few people who are willing to say things that are A, true, but B, in the eyes of the left, provocative, or dare I say unacceptable.
And I think the reason for that is people want a quiet life.
The fear of being cancelled is so, so powerful.
And I've had clients come to me who have said or done things online that the left have found unacceptable that has led to them being reported not only to their regulators, but to their employers as well, where they've been fired, they've lost their jobs, they've lost their livelihoods.
And you can see why for the sake of a quiet life, A lot of people will just say, screw this, I'm just going to keep my head down and do exactly what they, the powers that be, the state and their apparatus want us to do.
And the march through the institutions begun a hundred years ago, they've succeeded.
They now control all the believers of power, ranging from the church, schools, universities, the police, the police service, the prison service.
The entire state and all of its organs are now in control of the other side.
And you can see why people just want an easy life.
And what made me feel sick, I think, I was away for the first 10 weeks of lockdown, but obviously followed what was going on back here in England.
And was the speed with which people were snitching on each other during...
Yes!
It just made me feel sick to watch.
Because we'd always told ourselves we could never do what they did in France when the French capitulated in 1940.
We would never have informed on each other.
We'd have all been terribly brave.
And I think René Artois in Allo Allo exhibited a greater level of braveness than most British people seemed willing to do during the lockdown.
It was shocking the way that people were snitching.
And threatening to dog people in.
And it's continuing now.
Absolutely.
I mean, this mask nonsense.
We're recording this a day before masks become compulsory in supermarkets and so on.
And a lot of my...
I have my mask that I will wear tomorrow, mainly just to provoke debate.
But, I mean, that's ridiculous.
I'm an asthmatic, OK? Wearing a mask isn't great for my breathing at the best of times.
And I'm almost spoiling for a fight tomorrow.
I'll probably go to the supermarket as soon as it opens not wearing a mask, just so I can get accosted, wave my asthma inhaler at someone and say I don't have to wear a mask.
It's frightening.
But that's the thing.
You're absolutely right.
It has empowered a certain type of person.
The kind of person who likes the snitch and snoop, and now somebody who's going to be given the chance to wag their fingers and take the moral high ground and say, you know, you're killing our old and vulnerable, you're irresponsible, you're selfish.
And of course the Knights Department, the black arts propaganda department that seems to have been the one branch of government that actually works, has been so successful in using these kind of psychological techniques to To bring the nation into line, haven't they?
By presenting this as a kind of an issue of selfish people versus people doing the right thing by the elderly.
The way they formulated it means it's quite hard to fight back.
I got interested in politics when I was nine, back in 1983, and that was the year that the compulsory wearing of seatbelts in cars was brought in.
And I remember at the time, obviously I must have been Encouraged in this view by my parents, but I remember at the time thinking, whose bloody business is it whether I want to wear a seatbelt in a car?
So there was obviously nascent libertarianism sort of coursing through my veins at a young age.
If there were any evidence That there was a widespread pandemic and I was infected and I was a risk to other people and that wearing a mask would protect every other person from me spreading my filthy germs, then of course, like anyone else, I'm not a dick, I would wear the mask and be...
Yeah.
We're getting a couple of dozen real deaths a day.
Public Health England, we found out, are counting people who once had COVID in February and then died...
Accident as a COVID death.
And you and I, I think, share a view on this, that this has been wildly exaggerated.
Don't get me wrong.
It is horrendous if you get it.
And if you get it and you're over 70 or 80 or you've got comorbidities, you're in a bit of a state.
But even people of our moderate advanced years are probably going to be all right.
And do you know what?
I also want to live.
I want to make the decision about whether or not I'm going to risk Myself, just as when I drive shortly, am I going to risk killing myself there?
Or I'm more likely to die in a car accident being struck by lightning and win the lottery on the same day than I am to get COVID and die from it.
Does it bother you?
I'm sure it does.
It's an open and shut question, this one.
That whereas Jolyon Fox Slayer mourn, Had no problem winning his judicial review against the government when he wanted to derail Brexit.
That when Simon Dolan tried to seek a judicial review against the government for their extraordinarily damaging and scientifically unjustified lockdown policy, it got thrown out of court by the first judge that examined the case.
I'm not surprised by that because I think the caliber of people who enter the judiciary now is a lot worse than it was 20, 30 years ago.
And the reason for that is it started promoting people on grounds of diversity rather than competence and ability.
And to be correct, if you are a bloody good QC earning one and a half to two million quid a year, why would you give that up?
Is that how much they get?
Yeah.
Why would you give that up?
To go and become a judge, earning a tenth of that.
And one QC I know told me a story that he decided for his civic duty to become a part-time judge.
And he attended a hearing and the clerk said, oh, this case has been dealt with so far by Mr Justice so-and-so, you know, one of his brother judges.
And the way he thinks this case should be going is as follows.
And my friend said, Well, with the greatest respect, I'm now the judge dealing with this.
I'll decide how today is going to happen on the basis of the arguments and the evidence before me.
And the clerk of the court said, just remember, you're a deputy judge and it's actually, you know, this isn't really your case.
And this guy was so appalled that he said, no, He resigned as a judge and returned to being a QC. That wasn't that long ago.
And there are too many occasions where I've seen cases go to court, whether they're mine or someone else's, where decisions go bizarrely.
And there is almost a predetermined outcome that suits a particular agenda.
And obviously it was the Supreme Court decision over prorogation of Parliament that was the worst example of that.
We all knew from the arts.
I mean, the Supreme Court never rules 11-0 or 9-0 or 7-0.
Yes.
Never.
Because, again, proper judges would sit there and go, well, there are some arguments both ways, and I'll write a dissenting judgment, maybe not of the calibre of the late great Justice Scalia used to, but there'd at least be a dissent.
Whatever that judge would call, 7-9, 11-0, you know it was a stitch-up from day one.
And then Elle made it clear that that was the case.
She didn't want us to leave the European Union.
That's outrageous.
That's improper for the judiciary to behave in that way.
I do very much get that vibe.
I mean, I grew up, probably as you did, thinking that English common law was one of the greatest adornments to our system, that it was one of the things that made Britain great.
And one of the reasons that people like to do business with us internationally, because they feel they're not in some kind of banana republic.
They've got this completely fair legal system.
I don't get that feeling anymore.
I mean, I've been, most of the court cases I've been to recently have involved Tommy Robinson.
I don't know what your view is on Tommy Robinson, but it seems to me, I very much got the impression that the verdict had been pre-decided, that regardless of how good his, I mean, sometimes he didn't get very good noise, but sometimes he did.
But regardless of how good his case was, they really weren't interested.
They knew what the line was going to be.
I think in any court situation, judges being busy people and unfortunately looking at things as black and white rather than shades of grey, will try and determine quite quickly who's the good guy and who's the bad guy.
So this is the advice I'll give my clients when they're involved in civil disputes.
Our job here is to make you the good guy and so that we get a very quick win on something on this case, might just be an application, but so that in the judge's mind there's already been a ruling in this case, You won it.
You're the good guy.
And therefore, the other guy's bad guy.
And my job as my client's lawyer is, as I call it, a bit like being a duck, you know, above the surface or a swan, maybe above the surface, serene, but underneath kicking furiously.
Because we want to be the reasonable one that the judge goes, yeah, let's make sure that that's the guy who's going to win this hearing.
There are too many situations where it feels that there's a predetermined outcome.
You or I, I mean, if you could place bets on court hearings, we'd probably make a fortune because we'd just go down to Ladbrokes, put a grand on, oh, this case involves Tommy Robinson or this case involves...
This accountant or that lawyer, they're going to lose.
Let's whack money on them losing.
Oh, there's a surprise.
Yet again, the state has wielded its power.
And Mrs Thatcher had a holy trinity, didn't she?
Freedom, democracy and the rule of law.
And the most important, she said, was the rule of law.
And we do not have rule of law in this country anymore, to the level that you and I grew up believing that we did.
Yes.
How are we going to get that?
In fact, before you answer that question, I don't know whether you follow me on Twitter.
I can't remember whether you're on Twitter or not.
You are, aren't you?
I am, yes.
As you know, I am...
We are rather than a...
Yes, you're a lurker.
Yes.
You're known as a lurker.
As you know, I am Professor Dr.
Sir James Dellingpole QC. Now, one of the things I didn't put after my name was VC or MC or DSO because it seems to me that those awards have not been tainted.
They are still valuable and they are still won through great heroism in extremis.
So I wouldn't want to devalue those by putting them after my name when I hadn't earned them.
But I had no qualms whatsoever about calling myself QC because Was Ron Paul of the Bailey ever at QC? I can't remember.
But back in the days when Ron Paul of the Bailey was on TV, QC really did mean something, didn't it?
It was a badge of accomplishment.
You were part of the establishment and you were a force for good.
I now look at the QC's on Twitter and elsewhere, Jolly and Foxkiller Maugham being an example, but that woman, what's her name?
When you mean over at Dowdy Chambers, Simon.
Yes, yes, yes, that one, yeah.
And I think these are political activists.
They have very little connection with the fair functioning of the law and everything to do with activist politics.
How did that happen?
Because they were desperate to stop the only people who were becoming QCs being Old Etonian Oxbridge types and they wanted to create a level of diversity.
But I think it's more pernicious than that.
There has been a movement to make sure that people of non-conservative views, as we talked about it earlier, the march through the institutions, they needed to make sure That these people became law lecturers, and then some of them became judges,
and some of them became senior partners in law firms, and some of them became heads of chambers, so that they could then, in turn, bring through other people of like mind and stop people with a more conservative viewpoint, people who take the view that courts are there to apply the laws made by Parliament, not to enforce the law themselves to fit some kind of modern social mores.
The separation of powers works wonders in the US. We don't have it as clearly codified here.
We should, but in the meantime, what our side should be doing is what the Federalist Society does in the United States, which is identify young lawyers, educate them in principles of the rule of law from our point of view, and nurture them through the profession so that we do our own version of what the left have done so brilliantly over the last 30 or 40 years.
You've answered my question.
So we need a federalist society.
But that needs a lot of money, doesn't it?
As with all things, they require money.
There is a nascent organisation in this country that brings together lawyers of like minds to try to work for at least holding back the ever-continuing tide towards greater state power and greater regulatory power.
But it's a bloody difficult process.
And what we don't have in this country that they have in the States are conservative-inclined donors who are willing to give money to fund conservative-inclined projects.
They'll give it to the party, but they won't give it to conservative causes.
Whereas in the States, you know, you get your billionaires over there who will support the movement rather than wasting it by giving it to the GOP. Which indeed, all the money I would say that has gone into the Conservative Party I think has been wasted.
I mean, the Conservative Party has completely betrayed Conservatism.
Boris Johnson, you're with me on this, surely.
Boris Johnson looked at the disaster that was Theresa May, looked at the disaster that was David Cameron and said, hold my beer.
And actually has eclipsed them in uselessness.
He was, let's be fair to him, he described himself as a Brexity hezzer.
He has delivered the Brexity bit, just about.
He's now delivering the Hezza bit.
You and I would never have been Hezaltinis or Hezaltinians.
It says a lot when David Cameron can be described as being a sounder Conservative, even constrained as he was for five years by the Liberal Democrats, than Boris is being on a huge range of issues.
You know, things like the abolition of Entrepreneurs Relief in the last budget.
Reducing from 10 million down to 1 million, the amount of money that an entrepreneur can take and only pay 10% tax on.
That was introduced by Gordon Brown as a policy, right?
Because even Gordon Brown realized you need to incentivize entrepreneurs.
Gideon increased it to 10 million because Gideon understood the need for people to be entrepreneurs.
And then what does Rishi do?
His first budget listens to HMRC, cuts entrepreneurs relief, And in one fell swoop encourages entrepreneurs to say, well, fuck this, then I'm going to go abroad and become an entrepreneur instead of staying here.
That's extraordinary.
That's your clientele, isn't it, who are being hit by that?
You're here this first hand.
Yeah, I have a large number of clients who have decided to up sticks and leave the country because why would you stay here if you are going to get penalised as a business owner?
And now what we're hearing is there's going to have to be tax increases.
You and I, I think, probably both realise it's going to be a wealth tax.
That's what's going to come in.
It'll be set at 1% initially of assets of £1 million or more, perhaps, initially.
They might even say, if you don't have the money to pay the wealth tax, we'll take a charge against your house until you die or you come to sell the property.
But of course, as with income tax in the Napoleonic Wars, once it's in, it will never go and it will creep up from 1% to 2% to 3% and the million will fall lower and lower.
That's what's going to end up happening.
So what does one do about that?
Where are the safe havens that one can go to to escape all that?
I don't realistically think there are very many because if you remain UK residents, the revenue will get you.
Your only option is to up sticks and migrate for a period of at least five years, which is what's required.
The usual places, the Monaco's are the places where wealthy Individuals will go.
But what a sorry indictment that it's a Conservative government that's driving people out of the country.
We would have expected this under Corbyn.
A whole load of us would have gone, Jesus, right, I'm out because Corbyn's won.
But it's happening under Brexity-Hezer.
Yes.
No, I mean, I find it extraordinary how tone deaf they are, this government, how little feeling they have for anything to do with Well, not just economic conservative values, free markets, small government and so on, but also social conservatism either.
I mean, that Priti Patel thing was an example of that, that conservatives ought to believe that everyone is equal, regardless of their skin colour or their religion or whatever.
And yet Priti Patel was actually arguing that people of some races ought to be privileged by the system.
Given advantages.
You'd expect that from a Jeremy Corbyn minister.
Right, but then who'd have thought so many years on from their principal activism that it would be people like you and me extolling Martin Luther King and actually the post-prison Nelson Mandela and that it's the left that are damaging statues of Mahatma Gandhi And Abraham Lincoln.
I mean, Lincoln literally gave his life for the cause of racial equality, and yet his staff is being defaced and he's being called a racist.
Mahatma Gandhi, who helped free hundreds of millions of Indians from the yoke of imperial oppression, as they saw it, is tarred racist as well.
I just find that astonishing.
And what's tragic is where are the Martin Luther Kings, the people in You know, BAME, as we now must call them, communities, who are saying, whoa, you are not speaking for me.
This woke nonsense is hardcore leftism.
You are not speaking for me.
What I want is to be treated equally and provided I'm treating equally.
Yeah, I might become the next senior partner of Clifford Chance or I might end up as a bin man.
Who cares as long as I get a chance?
Didn't I read somewhere that BAME, B-A-M-E, black, what is it, black, Asian and minority ethnic or something, was actually a coinage of the socialist worker, I think, which has now become government, you know, conservative government parlance.
Isn't that an extraordinary indictment?
Right, but if you or I are supposed to use the term BAME rather than black or Asian or ethnic minorities, then why are we talking about Black Lives Mattering?
Why are we not talking about Asian and minority ethnic lives mattering?
Do they no longer matter?
You and I both know that this is, in reality, a far-left agenda that has been captured by well-meaning people who don't want a racist society.
None of us want a racist society, but what all of us want is precisely the society that Martin Luther King extolled, which is where you're judged on the content of your character and not the colour of your skin.
Where the hell is that society now?
Are you feeling any...
Because of your sort of transatlantic lifestyle, you've got a foot on either side.
Are you getting any...
I mean, I'm worried about Trump.
Do you think he's going to win?
No.
No, my money is unfortunately on whoever his opponent is, whether that's Biden or if Biden has a brain fart, someone else.
And I think the reason for that is because in June, you saw...
What they did differently in America is everyone got fired.
And then in June, people started getting hired again.
So you saw two or three million people get their jobs back and the economy grew by, I don't know, 10%, let's say, in that month.
That's a good news story.
And on the back of that, other people were like, oh, this is great.
Okay, I'm going to start spending.
I'm going to start hiring.
And what would have happened during July, August, September and October is the economy would have continued the uptick.
More people would have got their jobs back.
Feel good.
The left cannot risk that happening because...
Trump's biggest card is I am Mr.
Business.
The economy did well before coronavirus.
Coronavirus hit and now look, it's going well again.
Re-elect me.
Ignore all my crazy shit, but re-elect me.
And hey, presto, he gets re-elected.
The left, therefore, have to have the narrative that COVID is, oh my God, it's terrible.
Infections are going up because testing's going up.
And come the 4th of November, when Biden wins, on the 5th of November, no one will talk about coronavirus.
It will have gone as an issue.
Why could Trump, who's normally quite canny, not see he's been played by the left, by Fauci, by the WHO, by the Democrat governors, by...
I mean, it's obvious to you and me.
We've been following it.
Trump's not stupid.
He must have advisers who are savvy.
So why did he fall for it?
Why was he pictured wearing a mask the other day, the idiot?
I don't know.
Look, some of it may be exhaustion on his part.
I can't imagine being president's much fun.
And, you know, you do rely on advisers.
You do particularly rely on experts.
This is Gove's misquoted comment in the referendum that we've had quite enough of experts.
Thank you very much.
But we've seen what these so-called experts, whether it's Fauci over there or the Public Health England clowns over here, they say what is in their own interests.
It's in Public Health England's interest that this pandemic goes on for as long as it can so that their budget continues to swell.
It's in the left-wing media's interests.
That the economy is suppressed in the United States and that Trump loses and that, bluntly, we keep talking about the disaster of Covid because like Piers Morgan, it just leads more people to watching your show.
You're suddenly relevant.
When Piers Morgan goes back to talking about, you know, celebrity gossip on Good Morning Britain, no one will watch it.
But at the moment, people watch, they're either going, oh my God, I'm petrified.
The world's going to end.
Or it's people like us watching it going, You're a complete arse.
Why am I watching?
And that's the thing.
You find yourself watching someone you hate.
Let's both wave to the trolls who'll be watching this.
They will be watching it get angry that two right-wingers are having a conversation.
Why?
Why are you finding yourself doing that if you're a leftist?
I don't think they'll have got this far, because I think so many people are going to be annoyed by my arms going up and down, like I'm one of the damned in hell.
And I think, well actually, having said that, I think a lot of the trolls might enjoy that.
I do get that occasionally on Twitter, like when I tweeted out how much pain I was in, and a couple of people sort of tweeted out to the effect that they hadn't got a violin small enough to show how little they cared.
So this could be a very popular video with our enemies.
Do you know what, James?
The cruelty of the left I found fascinating.
So these are people who cloak themselves in virtue and assume that they're the good guys and we're the bad guys.
And yet we're the ones who will show some semblance of humanity towards people who are in difficulty.
People on our side very rarely pile in and kick the shit out of one of them.
When they're in difficulty.
Let's use Derek Draper as an example.
So, you know, Dolly Draper, left wing activist in the old days, married that presenter on Good Morning Britain, Kate Garroway.
The poor guy's been in hospital in a coma with coronavirus for the last eight weeks.
OK, flip that around and imagine that was someone on our side.
Let's let's imagine it was you.
And it was you that was in hospital in a coma for eight weeks.
Because you see what happens when you've just got a bad back.
They're sort of piling in and hoping it's the first signs of, you know, bone cancer or something.
And they hope that you're dead within weeks.
That's what would be happening.
And you saw it when Mrs Thatcher died, the glee, the utter glee, these sordid parties that took place in some cities around the world.
And I've never understood it.
I've never understood the utter hatred that the left have for anyone on our side and the contrast on our side.
Look, the left are wrong.
I think intellectually they're wrong.
Do I think that all of them automatically are evil?
No.
Do I think there's a couple of very evil ones on the left?
Yes, obviously.
But am I sitting there, stewing with anger, you know, literally spitting and unable to contain myself, bashing away hate-filled I think it's partly that people like you and me are really interested above all in ideas and If a good idea comes from somebody,
no matter who they are, whether previously we thought of them as just kind of completely wrong and ghastly, we will always applaud them and always take their side if they are speaking the truth.
So Graham Linehan, for example, Graham Linehan, the guy who co-wrote Father Ted, One of the nastiest, most aggressive and unpleasant people on Twitter, who was constantly orchestrating pylons, just really cruel.
And I mean, I could tell you a story, but I won't because I don't want to kind of bring it out into the air again, but it was really unpleasant.
And the moment that he found himself embroiled in a turf war, you might call it, Where he argued that, you know, in order to be a woman, you had to possess, you know, a vagina or so on.
You know, he got on the wrong side of the transgender people.
I was fully supportive of him.
I wasn't, you know, I wasn't thinking, ah, yeah, well, serves you right, getting a taste of your own medicine.
I was thinking, yeah, poor chap.
But that's the key, you see.
In the States, when it was first founded, the American Civil Liberties Union would...
Defend people across the board on issues of free speech.
Now they don't.
You know, it falls to new organization.
Toby Young's Free Speech Union is an attempt to try and enter this sphere.
You know, the left have public interest law firms who see it as their goal to engage in lawfare as a form of political warfare.
On our side, we don't do that.
I mean, there are very few lawyers like me.
I mean, obviously, I have a Commercial practice, which is what generates income, but I will at least act for people on our side who are engaged in difficulties because there's no one else out there to do it.
What we need is a broad-based movement of conservative and libertarian lawyers who are willing to try and fight back, even though obviously we disagree with the concept of lawfare.
For as long as it's there, we need to be on that battlefield.
And then part of our argument must be to get rid of judicial activism, to get rid of Politicisation of the judiciary in one direction and to make sure we really have a rule of law again.
I agree.
Is what you're describing likely or possible?
I think it is, but it is very difficult to do while people remain in the profession.
So bearing in mind, I mean, I get loads of emails and things from my regulator, very few of which actually relate to the law.
But there's lots of things about trans rights and the rights of disabled lawyers and quotas in law.
It'd be nice if my trade body, for want of a better phrase, and regulator, actually focused on what actually matters to consumers and clients and defends the interests of the legal profession.
If you have a trade body, that's what it's there for.
And most things in life, the pendulum's gone too far.
20-30 years ago, was the legal profession prejudiced against people from alternative backgrounds?
Probably.
Now is it the other way, that it's now too prejudiced in their favour and against other people's interests?
Yes.
And like most pendulums, it needs to find a balance, but that pendulum needs to be pushed back towards the middle, otherwise it's going to permanently stay on one side and that side is not right.
Yes, but you see, I don't see how it will happen.
So take the example of the various London chambers.
Back in the day, it used to be a bit like Oxford and Cambridge colleges, where there would be, for example, when I was at university, there were sound colleges, like the House, where I was, and there were really unsound colleges, like Hertford and Wadham.
Cambridge had the same.
I think Peterhouse was immensely sound.
So if you were a sort of hearty type or you were conservative, you'd go to one of the sound colleges.
And if you wanted to destroy Western civilization, you'd go to, you'd obviously end up at Wadham.
This is no longer the case.
And I fear it's rather the same with London chambers, that even the crustiest chambers with sort of QC's who went to Westminster and Eton and so on.
They're sort of our age or older now and they're thinking, well, I'm coming close to retirement.
I really don't want to rock the boat at this point.
The way the wind's blowing, it seems to me that I need to get somebody from a BAME background and I must reject all the Etonians who apply for this Position in my chambers.
If even the sound chambers are doing that, how can there ever be...
Because once these activist lefty types are in there, they're not going to start recruiting Etonians, crusty Etonians, are they?
They're going to go on recruiting more and more lefties.
And so how do we have a reverse long march through the institutions?
I think it's something that's going to take probably 10 to 20 years at least of identifying young People who at least believe in the rule of law and not advancing a political gender that is monochrome in design.
And we find a way of helping those people get into law firms, get into chambers.
If they have to be sleepers to do that for a while, in the same way that the left were for generations, they're going to have to do that.
But we need a balanced legal profession.
We need a legal profession that actually believes first and foremost in the rule of law.
And not in using the law to engage in politics by other means.
The irony is that the way that the left have conducted the culture war over the last 10-15 years led to Brexit, it led to Trump, and it led to Boris Johnson winning.
And it's ironically led to the rise of populism as a reaction to the left's utter intolerance of more mainstream Culturally conservative, socially conservative viewpoints.
So they overreached.
They've given birth to this movement of populism and sort of Trumpism and Johnsonianism in that sense during the Brexit and Dominic Cummings' approach to politics, which is not the same as Boris Johnson's.
But we just need to find these people and help get them into the profession.
It's what the left do brilliantly.
We need to do the same.
It's the only way it will change.
It's a long process, James.
Because I always believe that ultimately markets and the truth, and the way markets are a reflection of the truth, would be our salvation.
So, for example, in your case, you're a completely out conservative lawyer.
Representing the kind of people who've been shafted by this council culture, among other things.
You help people who are victims of the left.
Now in these times it ought to be a field day for lawyers of your persuasion, no?
I mean you ought to be rewarded massively financially and there ought to be an incentive for more lawyers to come onto the market of your persuasion.
Does it work like that?
Maybe I need to use crowdfunding or Patreon as means of raising money because the problem is of course for every poor student who finds themselves being victimised On campus, they haven't got any money.
The university that's victimizing them has a shitload of money, and you already started inequality of arms.
I'll use it in the example of regulators.
If you are regulated by the FCA or any other regulatory body, and you beat your regulator in regulatory proceedings, so bear in mind your regulators destroy your right to practice.
If you beat your regulator, You don't get your costs.
So you've got regulator in your pocket.
You've got little old you, the regulated individual.
You only get your costs against your regulator if the regulatory investigation has been, quote, a sham from start to finish.
Which is, as you might imagine, quite a difficult test.
So what happens there is people are too scared to go up against their regulator, their master.
Because they know that if they do, even if they win, it's going to have cost them five to ten, twenty, thirty thousand pounds that they'll never get back.
Whereas the regulator knows it can just throw as much money.
This was the problem with the Electoral Commission.
This is the problem with the Charity Commission, HMRC. All of these bodies have way more power than the nationalised industries had back in the day.
So we sit there thinking, oh, we won.
We privatised everything.
Well, we didn't.
They've got more power Regulating private companies than they ever had nationalised trying to run the buses and the GPO and all the rest of it.
Yeah, do you remember David Cameron telling us he was going to have a bonfire at the Quangos?
Whatever happened to that?
I think a Quango came and told him to put the fire out because it was polluting the environment.
He defended the environment agent.
Someone came out and levied a fine and He was cancelled, so he wasn't able to start that bonfire or it was put out very quickly.
That's what needs to happen.
A true bonfire of the quangos and all we ask for is a level playing field.
If a regulator comes after you and the regulator loses, they should pay costs, just as any normal person would, because otherwise the state and organs of the state have a grossly disproportionate level of power than the poor sod citizen does.
That's why I say we don't have a real sense of justice or rule of law in this country at the moment.
And also, we haven't mentioned these two massive elephants in the room, the Equalities Act and the Human Rights Act, which seem to render this country systematically incapable of doing anything conservative because automatically the presumption is in favour of left-wing causes.
Well, and then, of course, it's very easy for us to say, ah, with Brexit, we can have our own Bill of Rights.
If we try and sit, you know, you and I can sit down and write a Bill of Rights.
Actually, all we need to do is to get a photocopier and to photocopy the US Constitution and pretty much start from there and use that as the template.
But if you try and sit down now...
Ooh, let's have the guns as well.
Yeah.
Can we have the Second Amendment?
Yeah, well, we did have the right to guns and they were obviously taken off us after Hungerford had done Blaine.
And when you explain that to Americans, they find that soul destroying.
But if we tried to write a bill of rights now, it would contain, you know, the right to transgender surgery as a child, the right to free housing, the right to free food, a whole series of things that are literally unaffordable.
They are not basic human rights.
That should be guaranteed by the state and paid for by other taxpayers.
So we are stuck with the Human Rights Act.
The best we can do is have judges, if we get decent judges, applying that in the context of what was agreed in 1950 when the European Convention was written.
Yes.
Can I just ask you, because I loved your politically incorrect point early on about the quality of judges.
Do you think the caliber of lawyers has plummeted now that people are not chosen purely for their kind of fine legal minds, but for reasons of diversity or gender or sexuality or whatever?
I think that a lot of people I know who were at university with me, you know, 25, 30 years ago have left the profession.
Because again, why stay within a regulated environment where if you make one small mistake or say the wrong thing, you're cancelled when you can often earn a fortune as a management consultant or a hedge fundee or a private equity person.
So a lot of very bright good people who would have entered the profession 25-30 years ago have left it and gone on to do something more lucrative that's less hassle and you don't have to work as hard In an environment where you're banging your head against your desk because the outcome may be predetermined against you.
Yes.
So you're a man of the rich world where people like us who want to make money and don't want to be subject to kind of Politically correct codes and stuff, and you know, HR departments inflicting diversity on them.
Is that where they go, private equity and hedge funds?
Are those kind of immune to that PC interference?
There's obviously regulation from the SEC or the FCA in the UK, but I get the impression that life's a lot more fun doing something in that kind of environment than something like the legal profession.
I try and dissuade people from entering the legal profession.
Because it's not what they think it is going to be when they come into it.
It's a deeply unpleasant experience, and we need to find more good people who want to come in.
I would very happily continue this conversation for another hour, but my arm is giving me hell.
So what I'm going to say is, Donal, please come back on the podcast.
I've loved having you on.
And to all you lovely, dear listening people, don't forget, if you want early access to my podcast, don't forget to support me on Patreon or Subscribestar.
You also get access to my weekly, weekly note, not my spectator column, which is really good.
And you get to hang out with like-minded people and probably I might have a party one day for the bigger spending Patreons and yeah.
Oh and Daniel, you're a Patron, aren't you?
I've forgotten about that.
I am.
I'll look forward to seeing you at that party.
Yeah, excellent.
Good.
All right.
Thank you very much.
And keep sticking it to them, Daniel.
Okay, bye.
▲
Export Selection