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Oct. 4, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
33:11
Ben Bradley MP
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Welcome to The Delling Pod with me, James Dellingpole.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I am.
I really am.
He's Ben Bradley, MP for Mansfield.
And I'm kind of hoping that one day Ben could be the saviour that leads us out of darkness.
Or he could be an epic disappointment, I don't know.
Ben, welcome to the podcast.
More likely the latter, I imagine.
Now the reason I got you on, I don't normally do MPs of any hue, because even my mate Michael Gove, who is one of the wittiest, most articulate people I know, but I know also that he would be effortlessly evading every question of any interest I pose to him.
Whereas I get the impression from your Twitter account, at least, that you kind of, you tell it like it is.
I get myself in trouble, you mean.
Yes!
Basically, yeah.
I think that's right.
It's a special skill that you learn as a politician to avoid all questions, isn't it?
But I try not to do that, at least in private conversation if nothing else.
Well, so you were telling me before the podcast started, you are the first Conservative MP in your constituency.
It's been Labour since 1918.
That's right, a Liberal before that, yeah.
So he never had a Conservative MP before.
You became a Conservative MP when?
2017.
And why do you think it was?
Was it your rugged good looks?
Yeah, no, I think it's been happening for a long time.
So you go back to 1997, there's a 20,000 Labour majority, and ever since it's been, you know, 11, 6, 5, 4, over that period.
And if you look around the seats, they've all had the same trajectory.
So Corbyn and Brexit kind of accelerated all that, but actually it's a long-term trend, I think.
That goes back to, you know, very unionised industries and stuff in the 80s and before that that don't really exist anymore.
So I imagine, did it used to be a mining constituency?
Yeah, so it was all built around coal fields and then big kind of hosiery and other manufacturing that is largely gone, to be honest, and the economy there has totally changed.
But it does mean, as I say, there's much more, I guess, independent thought and politics these days there than there used to be.
Yeah, well, I mean, I'm from the Midlands too, and I kind of feel, in a way, damn it, I think we Midlanders are more representative of where England is than, say, London, which is a kind of country of its own.
Yeah, it's totally different here, isn't it?
And this kind of metropolitan thought process is totally alien to most people in my constituency, I think, which, you know, is perhaps indicative of all the divides that we've got in the country at the minute from Brexit to COVID and everything else, just the way, totally different way that people think about things.
Yeah.
So here's my worry.
In fact, I've got lots of worries right now.
I look at the news every day and I just think, this is not happening.
This is like the zombie apocalypse for real.
In fact, I'm reading a book about zombies at the moment, World War Z, and I realised to my horror last night that I find that what is happening in reality now is scarier than fiction.
It really is.
I really feel like this is almost our World War II, that we've reached such a pitch where, for example, you've got Boris Johnson, the guy we elected, his party we elected, imagining that Boris was a cuddly libertarian, wanting everyone to have a BMW and a wife with large breasts.
LAUGHTER I don't think he ever said that in the campaign.
No, he didn't say it in the campaign, but he wrote about it before.
Instead, we've got him threatening martial law if people don't knuckle under and wear their muzzles and do all this nonsense because of some...
Sort of fake statisticoids cooked up by his tame house scientists.
It's a little bit mad, isn't it?
And I know what you mean about the comparisons with fiction.
I'm watching a thing on Netflix a minute called The Rain, which is like virus comes in the rain and kills everybody.
Yeah, you can't throw them in puddles.
Yeah, exactly.
And I do sit there thinking, God, this is the future.
I'm sure it's not.
But it's just such a challenge, isn't it?
And so different to anything that he could have expected.
I think he's always been more kind of centrist in his politics.
You know, the campaign was a very small C conservative, but I've always felt that Boris was kind of down a David Cameron line of politics as opposed to, you know, a libertarian, really.
I think it's certainly a challenge.
And I struggle with the comparison with, like, World War II because I think actually, you know, going and getting shot in Germany and having to wear a mask in a shop, I think, you know, pretty differently.
But I get it.
And I think ultimately, my own view is, as a small-scale conservative, is that actually we should be giving people personal responsibility.
We should be saying, look, you know, these are the risks.
These are what we think you should do.
This is what might happen.
Go and make your own choice.
In a Sweden style.
Yeah, and I think the restrictions where we've ended up at the minute aren't too far away from kind of Sweden in terms of, you know, it's not lockdown too, is it, what is announced today?
The worry for me is not where we are now, which...
You know, it's frustrating, but in many ways I think understandable when you're trying to balance the many people who've been locked at home for months and are scared to go out with all the people who've kind of carried on and want to be released.
I think there's no right answer there.
Mark, what worries me is what comes next in this threat of in three weeks, you know, if we don't manage to deal with this, then it's lockdown and it's everything else.
And I don't think there's an appetite in the country for that, to be honest.
But we seem to be experiencing a ratchet effect whereby, for example, I went to about the first anti-mask rally in Hyde Park.
And even then, I noticed that the police were turning up mob-handed, which, for what was, after all, a handful of people, some of them kind of...
We were a sort of raggle-taggle crowd.
Some of them are libertarians.
We were absolutely harmless, not damaging property, not blocking the public highway.
Compare and contrast the kid-glove treatments of Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter.
And this...
This injustice, which is the only word for it, has increased.
So last weekend we had another anti-mask, anti-lockdown rally in London, and the police charged it, clearly with a view to provoking a reaction.
This seems to me that the government does not like any criticism of its draconian policies and is perfectly happy to suck up to causes which I think as conservatives they should be rejecting.
One of them, extreme environmentalism, and two, the kind of race-baiting cultural Marxism of Black Lives Matter.
I mean, how do you feel about that?
I agree with your point on policing.
I think you have to separate it from government slightly because one of the daft things that was done a few years ago is giving that control over to police and crime commissioners, right?
So the Home Secretary has very limited powers over what the police do.
Is that right?
Yeah.
So if you look at London, right, Sadiq Khan controls the Met and he's in charge of the kind of direction of policing, although obviously Cressida does the day-to-day kind of organisational stuff.
But I think you're exactly right on the approach.
And we saw it with Black Lives Matter versus veterans coming down to defend statues, didn't we?
In the same way.
And it really winds the country up outside London.
Even on the COVID controls, right?
I can't meet six mates, but you can have a protest in Hyde Park, right?
So people are really fed up with that.
And I think there's a broader issue there.
I feel sorry for the police themselves in many ways because they're kind of stuck in that position where you know, and we all know, right, that if you...
You come under this societal pressure to do things like take a knee or back Black Lives Matter and all the rest of it.
And if you're the one copper on that protest who doesn't, the amount of hate you're going to come in for.
And that's the broader problem, right, beyond COVID and everything else, is this infiltration of this leftist ideology into all of those institutions where...
I keep talking about the Premier League as the obvious example, where I do not believe for a second that every Premier League footballer backs Black Lives Matter, but every single one of them took a knee...
Yeah.
To support defunding the police and bringing down capitalism.
Irony for Premier League football, right?
Yeah.
It can only be out of fear of what happens if you don't.
And that's the bigger issue that brings us round to all of our institutions.
We've heard about the British Library and them kind of editing history and taking out exhibits and things like that.
It's a huge problem that government has to tackle.
The British Museum as well, removing the statue, the bust, of Sir Hans Sloane, who was the guy whose collections were the basis for the collection at Kew.
The British Museum, I think the Natural History Museum, possibly the Science Museum.
So the founding father of museums is now rejected by the museum industry.
And you're right.
I'm not seeing any lead being given by this Conservative government on these cultural issues.
I mean, forget about coronavirus for a moment.
Why aren't they doing more?
I just think, if I'm being honest, that they're almost kind of snowed under with battles on Brexit and Covid and everything else.
And it's a really, really kind of challenging time policy-wise.
I hope when we get out the other side of December that, you know, while you've got an 18 majority in Parliament to change some of this stuff, you can really take that on.
I think they are doing things, for the record.
I think they're doing them quietly.
So you look at the civil service, four, five, six permanent private secretaries gone, DFE, Cabinet Office kind of shipping out civil servants who, if you look down the list, they're broadly kind of lefties, changing those things internally.
I think you've got, you know, Kemi Badenoch in the Equalities Office, his minister, who's pretty sound on this stuff.
Kemi is sound, you're right.
So I think, you know, there are changes that are happening quietly.
My argument is, you know, if you want to go out to the country, you should shout about these things because actually people want to see it happen.
And I hope, and I keep pushing to say actually we will.
I think they probably just need to clear some things off their to-do list before they go into another battle.
Yeah, you see, okay, so I'll have to take your word for it that a few things are happening behind the scenes, because from where I'm sitting, I think I'm probably a natural conservative, if natural conservative means basically a Thatcherite.
I mean, is that where you are roughly as well?
I'd say so, yeah, probably.
I'm not comfortable with this kind of Blair and Cameron centrists, you know, faffing about around the edges.
Oh, that was unbelievable, wasn't it, when Cameron called himself the heir to Blair?
Yeah, well, basically the same politician, weren't they, in many ways?
Yeah.
And I think, I'm not sure that Theresa May wasn't continuation Cameron.
I just think, I struggle, and I shouldn't say this, but it's nothing I've not said before.
I struggle to find what her, what's Mayism, right?
And you can kind of see with Cameron, it's a bit like Blair, and there wasn't that much difference, but you could see...
What he was kind of about and what he was trying to do.
Theresa May talked about these...
I forget the phrase now.
The kind of unfairnesses and...
Burning injustices.
Burning injustices.
Things she wanted to tackle.
And that was fine.
Nick Timothy's phrase.
Yeah, which is fine.
But actually what...
What is your ideology?
What are you about?
What kind of country do you want to see?
I still don't know.
You know, and Boris needs to spell out his, doesn't he?
I think he did a good job in the election, actually, of things that caught people's imagination.
But what we put across in the election was that small C, kind of Thatcherite agenda.
We've got to follow through with that or people aren't going to be happy.
that depressed me um because i've heard it a lot elsewhere and i fear it may be true which is that the people that voted for you and your constituency are probably center left on the economy and what they care about is cultural cultural values um I mean, it's sad, obviously, because I think what we need is a low-tax, low-regulation economy.
I think you probably agree with me on that.
But...
Even if they can deliver...
They're not even delivering on the culture war stuff, are they?
I mean...
We can, though.
So in Parliament's four years, right?
We've got time to do this stuff.
And I think by the end of that, I would like us to be in a position where we've made fundamental changes to the way our institution will work, right?
We've seen with, over the summer, exam results, things like that, where you've got all these external bodies like Ofqual and people like that, that just absolutely blow the lines of accountability to pieces and nobody knows who's responsible for anything.
That's wrong.
mention the money that goes into all of these crangos and you know so we can slim down government and obviously you know Dexu and all that can kind of disappear you would hope and we can make a lot more efficient and effective kind of systems here in Whitehall and you can do the same further out as well whether that's local government reform and you know two-tier local government doesn't make any bloody sense and all sorts of kind of structural changes that we can make in four years
But I think you're right, I'm right because you're quoting me, that people broadly in my seat are quite happy for us to invest in public services.
So you're using that evil word, invest.
It's not investment, it's just spunking taxpayers' money.
You can make a conservative argument for it.
So I've always felt like I would like to see a country where when you're an adult we leave you alone and we let you get on with your life.
I think we need to put that investment in intervention into education and into early years and into that support so everybody actually has the opportunity to be an independent adult.
And if we do that, you know, actually you can see government focusing on, right, let's turn everybody out of school in a position to look after themselves.
And then we can leave them alone and we can be libertarians, mostly conservatives who let people go off and live their lives.
But somewhere you've got to kind of level the playing field for kids in my constituency whose parents don't support them, who drop out of school with no qualification.
You need to give them an opportunity somewhere.
So that's kind of how I see it.
Put your money in early doors.
Let's help kids so that they can be independent as adults and we can...
Yeah.
Before I lambast you with the failure of your government, your party, to do all these things, just tell me a bit about where you came from.
Did you grow up imagining you were going to become an MP? No, I wanted to be a PE teacher, to be honest.
That was always my goal.
I was just a sports nut.
I was hockey and football and rugby when I was a kid.
And I went to uni to be a PE teacher.
Did you?
Yeah, I went down to Bath to uni.
But I was only really there to play hockey.
I was trying to get into the kind of England junior stuff and never quite made it.
I ended up dropping out.
I was a landscape gardener.
I was a recruitment consultant.
All sorts of other stuff.
And in the end decided I would go back to uni to do something really vague that wouldn't kind of railroad me into particular.
Gym studies.
Yeah, not that vague.
So I chose politics just because it's interesting.
But while I was there, you know, work experience and all that kind of stuff, I ended up, when I graduated, working for the Conservative Party as a campaign manager.
So, yeah, accidentally got elected to the council in a big argument about bins, which people are really passionate about, by the way.
Yeah, and kind of fell into politics that way.
What was the argument about bins?
We had a six-month-old at Christmas, and they didn't collect...
Our bins for about a month.
So you can imagine Christmas rubbish, nappies, like rats and all sorts of things.
I bet it was eco-reasoning, wasn't it?
It was snow, actually, as it happened.
But yeah, so they just didn't plan it properly.
Anyway, I ended up going around knocking on all my neighbours' doors going, oh, it's not good enough.
And even now as an MP, people get most passionate about bins and potholes, the things that affect your everyday life.
So yeah, we ended up winning some council seats off the back of it that we'd never won before, or not won for a long time.
And I kind of got hooked then.
You get into bins and then you want to deal with stuff that's slightly bigger than bins.
Yeah.
Yeah, so the rest is history.
You're white and male and Thatcherite, basically.
How on earth did you get onto the selection committee?
LAUGHTER There are some questions about the candidates list and things, aren't there, that exist?
Yeah, I'd go back to charm.
No, I don't know.
I think it was an interesting process.
It worked out quite nicely for me, actually, because I ended up getting on the list in December 2016, just before the snap election was called, obviously, in the 17th.
So I didn't have to do the, you know, checking around the country, kind of, you know, selling my soul to the parties.
You sort of slipped in through the back door.
Yeah, in many ways.
Or at least the timing was really good.
I think probably relationships are really important and all this stuff, aren't they, in politics?
And having worked for the party and worked for a lot of MPs around North Knotts and stuff.
I see that, but at the same time...
I know that the list is in the hands of basically the Cameroon wing of the Conservative Party, and they don't like Thatcherites.
I mean, that's one of the problems, isn't it?
That a lot of your colleagues, what do you call them colleagues in the...
Colleagues, yeah.
A lot of your colleagues in the House are basically...
Borderline SDP, frankly, in their wetness.
There's certainly a big challenge, isn't there, in a big, you know, call it broad church.
I find it quite challenging that, you know, there are lots...
Well, not lots.
There are a handful of people in the Parliamentary Conservative Party that I've never heard express a Conservative view.
Ooh, Johnny Mercer, for example.
You know, there are some.
But I also think, you know what, there are some really kind of sound folks in there.
And particularly in the new intake, actually.
So you've got a lot of people in 2019 from those kind of Red Wall constituencies who believe in this stuff and are much more sound, I think, than some previous intakes who actually I kind of believe in.
When you say sound, do you mean on the social aspects or economic as well?
I think a bit of both, mainly the social side, because, you know, people are broadly reflective of the places they come from when I say that, I think...
You know, if those constituencies are broadly kind of economically centre-left, I don't think it's as much that way.
I think it's more cultural, but there's certainly an element of that as well.
I think, you know, and they're also in a powerful position, actually, in the party at the minute, given that's our kind of key target audience and stuff electorally.
They've got a strong voice, and some of them are quite good at using it.
But, you see, OK, so what we've got at the moment...
I think there has been a coup by a very narrow section of the Conservative government.
I mean, you know, a few people in the Cabinet with the medical advisers have effectively taken charge and bypassed the parliamentary process.
I mean, nothing has been subject to scrutiny.
You've got this Coronavirus Act, which seems to be a sort of catch-all to railroad through whatever policy that this cabal at the top wants.
Where have you backbench MPs been allowed a say in any of this?
Back at the time, it seemed like emergency powers and things where we needed to act fast, we needed to get things done, and that made sense.
David Davis, it might have been at the time, was saying we need to have some curbs on this and we need to have some time limitations.
Obviously, it comes up for renewal next week.
The 30th of September.
Do you reckon it's going to get voted down?
I don't.
Well, there's a lot of conversations happening.
Graham Brady's obviously got this amendment at the minute and the way that all these things tend to work is, you know, somebody will go, I'm going to do this big flagship amendment and then actually have lots of conversations and tend to come to some kind of compromise that means you don't end up doing anything quite so bold.
But I hope that over the course of the next week, I know they've had lots of conversations this week and Boris alluded to it in a statement yesterday, you know, there will be more opportunities for MPs to have I fear greatly that it is not going to be voted against.
It's going to be voted through again.
So we're going to get six more months of this extraordinarily Illiberal governance.
I mean, the most illiberal governments, I think, in the memory of anyone who probably...
OK, maybe those who lived through the Second World War and all those restrictions on freedoms are tough.
But since then, never...
And the difference was, of course, that...
In the Second World War, Hitler was kind of real.
The threat posed by Nazi Germany was not illusory.
Whereas you've now got this imaginary...
I mean, OK, some people have been affected by it, including Boris.
But basically we know that it's no worse than seasonal flu.
Bad seasonal flu.
And we don't close down the economy for seasonal flu.
So what is happening?
Where is the resistance coming from?
I don't think it's imaginary.
I think we need to get to a stage where...
We come to some conclusion about what's normal with this, right?
And I agree with you that, actually, we're not going to be in a position where it just goes away, all of a sudden it's gone, and we can go back to...
We're going to have to learn to live with it, aren't we?
And I think this is the battle now, is at what point do you say, actually, it now is what it is, and therefore we need to kind of open things up and crack on.
I do think the bulk of the Conservative Party and Parliament...
I think that that time is sooner than later.
I don't think anybody...
There will be some.
I have no doubt there are some.
But certainly in my kind of group of friends, so to speak, actually there isn't an appetite for long-term kind of restrictions.
But we've been told six months.
Yeah.
I'd call that long-term.
I think that, oh, longer term than we would like.
I certainly think we've kind of reached a point with a lot of those people and you see it through the Brady Amendment and that kind of discussion where it's kind of this far and no further, right?
I think there will be a real problem for government if they start to try and push for kind of second lockdown and all the rest of it because there'll be a line that a lot of Conservative MPs won't want to cross, including myself.
You see, I think we're already into second lockdown except not in name.
There's been a few...
There's modifications whereby, okay, so you're not literally imprisoned in your own home unless you've got to go to the supermarket.
But in pretty much every other respect, we're as oppressive now as we were during the lockdown, particularly the mask thing, which is a new development, masks went around.
It's a little bit more en masse, but I don't think it's true that we are where we were before.
I mean, we were in a position where literally the only reason you could go running was one person for essential shopping, the only reason you could go out, one person for essential shopping, or going for exercise.
I mean, we're not in that position, are we?
The restaurants are open, they can't go out and shop, go out and do what you want to do.
Just, you know, there are things like masks, as you say there.
Yeah, but the fact that you're having to argue this case at all, you know, these things, we ought to be...
You're suggesting or implying that these freedoms which we used to take for granted are now something we should be kind of grateful for because, you know, think how much worse it could be.
Whereas I'm thinking it's really bad.
Yeah, and I guess, you know, I'm trying to balance in my own mind my own ideology, which is very similar to yours, and the kind of pragmatic point of it.
And I think the key thing is...
The government's caught in a rock and hard place, right?
There's no right answer because whatever they do, they'll be slated.
So if you're in a position where you've got half the country that's been isolating or is still fearful and doesn't want to go out, and you've got half the country, like yourself, saying, I don't want any of these restrictions, I want to crack on, how do you square that circle?
How do you balance that in a way that, you know, because one way or another, you're going to get...
But that's not the only circle that needs squaring, is it?
It's not the James Dellingpole tinfoil hat wearers versus the kind of bedwetters.
It's also, looming over this, is the imminent economic collapse.
Once the furlough is lifted...
The unemployment figures are going to be epic, because at the moment they're disguising the job losses that are just waiting to come.
A friend of mine on Twitter, Mark Miller, was saying that he'd just taken a taxi journey, and the taxi driver had told him that he'd been having 20% of the normal...
A chap who runs a business opposite me...
Has lost 200, wedding business, lost 200 grand this year.
I mean, imagine, 200 grand.
Shooting school, the same, 190 grand lost this year.
That's just a random sample.
I think you're right.
In hindsight, I think that original kind of lockdown, if you were asked to Be in that position again.
I don't think we do it the same way again for that reason.
I think it's become quite clear in my view that since then, actually the economic impact, which leads frankly also to health impacts and other issues as well, is going to be far worse than the impact of COVID. And those lessons have got to be learned, right?
Which is why I think and I hope that the PM is really, really not wanting to go back into a kind of second lockdown scenario.
And also why I don't think the Conservative Party would let that happen quietly.
I have no faith whatsoever in Boris Johnson or any of the people at the top level of this administration.
I think they are absolutely fair.
What would you say to people like me who say...
They've said it before, but this time they mean it.
I would never, ever vote Conservative again.
I cannot see any reason.
They've absolutely so screwed things up, so badly.
What we want is a sign that there is anger within the parliamentary party, that you backbenchers are saying that you are seething behind the scenes and that on the 30th of September you're going to vote against this shit, because we're at the end of our tether.
We're real Conservatives.
LAUGHTER I think tomorrow, and I'm quite happy, whether it's on Twitter or in conversations with whips or whatever, I've said, look, I'm not happy with the idea of second lockdowns, I'm not happy with long-term restrictions, and we need to move beyond that.
Richard Drax was on telly yesterday saying, look...
He was good.
Yeah, I was just saying, look, we're going to have to learn to live with this, and I think that's true.
And I think over the course of the next few weeks and months, the Parliamentary Conservative Party will be making that case.
Graham Brady has actually done us a favour, because what he's done is opened up this conversation where the whips are now coming to us and saying, what's your view on this?
And that's going to get fed in.
I think that's probably led to much looser changes and restrictions this week than we might otherwise have seen.
That's terrible in itself because it's looking pretty draconian to me.
And as we mentioned earlier, you've got Boris Johnson saying...
We may have to go martial law.
We may have to bring in the military.
That's what worries me.
I'm not seeing quite enough...
OK, Drax made a good speech, talked a good game.
But I'm not really sensing that there's going to be a kind of...
Did you read Brendan O'Neill's piece in Spiked?
He said, this can't go on.
This is...
You brought to my comparison with Second World War.
Obviously, every kind of great epic historical moment in history is different.
It seems to me it's one of those times where all our assumptions that we've had about our lives, our freedoms and stuff, have been thrown into disarray.
And that it looks like some of us are going to have to do things like risk getting arrested or worse in order to stop this assault on our freedoms going any further.
I never wanted to be in that position.
I don't want to be bloody arrested.
Especially not under a Conservative government.
So, you know, I think shit's got real.
I think, I mean, you're certainly right about all those kind of assumptions being thrown up in the air.
And I think that is a really worrying thing.
You know, nobody wants to be in that position.
And I guess from my own perspective, you know, I'm like, well...
I can fume and I can see, but actually I'm in Parliament, right?
So I've got to be pragmatic about this and I've got to say what internally can I do to try and make a case for, you know, as Richard Drax put it, you know, we've got to live with this as opposed to keep clamping down on it.
And I think there's a lot of people doing that behind the scenes.
But equally, we're in a position, you know, of national crisis where we've got a PM in a really difficult position.
And I do, I want to back him.
I want to help him.
I want to...
Not to lock everything down, and I think we'll have those arguments, but there's no sense from a political perspective of us all standing up and slating the government at this particular point in time, right?
Because it's a mad situation, totally unprecedented situation.
And lockdown back in the spring was a kind of global reaction, right?
And I think in hindsight, it was totally over the top, but that was what the world was doing.
So we now need to be in a position where we're talking in Parliament and colleagues are saying, look, WIP's office, look, number 10, actually, we need to get out of this scenario now, right?
We need to move towards opening things up, opening up the economy, you know, not into a position where we're locking everything back down again, because I don't think there's an appetite in the country for that.
Yeah, I'm not...
I have to say, Ben, I'm not feeling like my prayers are going to be answered here.
I think the situation is direr than you are acknowledging.
And I think that we...
Those of us who understand things like...
Britain's traditions, its history, the very nature of the relationship between the state and the people, what we fought a civil war for.
All this stuff seems to have been thrown out the window in 2020 by cuddly Boris Johnson, I want you to have BMWs and a wife with large breasts.
I think we need to make sure, right, and on the broad, you know, cultural point, we talked a little bit about it before, I agree with you, right, we need the state to get out of the way, we need these kind of leftist influences in our institutions gone, we need to do something radical over the course of this parliament to change the way the country is run, and I think that's really important.
Where we are now, I think we need to make sure this Covid thing is a Covid thing, not a long-term change to the way things happen, because you're right, nobody wants the government interfering in their lives to this extent.
But you see, the thing is, Ben, it's not really a COVID thing, is it?
It's a government thing.
I mean, you talk about it as if COVID were the problem.
That was maybe the case...
When we knew less about it in February, March, April.
But now we know it's a known quantity.
There are lots of eminent scientists who know damn well that this is not a catastrophe, an epidemiological catastrophe.
On the contrary, no one's dying virtually.
The flu is killing more people than COVID, and yet we are still acting, still, even now, as if this is Spanish flu.
The hope then, right, over the next three weeks, because what the PM's done at the minute is looser restrictions, right?
We've got, it's brought us some time, right?
So over the next two or three weeks, I hope that you are right, and I hope that the scientists, you know, Witte et al, are wrong, and that we're in a position in three weeks where we haven't seen that spike in deaths, we haven't seen, you know, what the worst fears kind of lay out, and then we can be in a position to say exactly what you've just said, actually.
And that's certainly what I'm hoping for.
And assuming that we end up, you know, with not in those worst case scenarios, then I'm kind of, we'll push for, but trust the PM to do that.
Okay.
Well, look, I mean, obviously you've got a career to think of.
I think you should commit career suicide by leading the resistance because somebody's got to.
And I think, you know, sort of the energy of your PE teaching, hockey training youth is, Anyway, whatever.
It was great talking to you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, Ben.
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