Welcome to the Denny Pole with me, James Denny Pole.
And when I say I'm really excited about my very special guest this week, I know I always say this, but I'm not lying.
Because I have been trying to get Laura Perrins since like the beginning of this Corona craziness.
And for various reasons, probably because Laura's a busy mum and stuff, we never got our act together.
But Laura, it's so great to have you on the show.
And I know that you've got six months at least of rage to the end.
Am I right?
I didn't think I'd have to ever speak to you again, but we have to do this now because it's a bore, but it's necessary.
No it's not a bore to be with you of course but yeah I didn't, not even I thought they'd be crazy enough to to start this nonsense again, but here we are.
Well, let's just go back to basics.
What is it about the situation now, in ten words or less, which... What is it about the state we're in now which drives you most insane?
Just sum up the craziness.
It's just unnecessary, it's cruel, and even if you were to have certain restrictions, of course, as a lawyer, you would always say they're completely disproportionate.
We're talking about the lockdown.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm saying.
Unnecessary, cruel, disproportionate.
For instance, even if you could have some restrictions, you don't need to close outdoor tennis courts, which is, of course, a personal issue for me, because we all play tennis.
So I can play tennis with my eight-year-olds in an outdoor court.
That represents zero, zero threat, right?
Zero threat to anybody.
But they just do it because they can.
It's vindictive.
To me it's vindictive.
People give them the benefit of the doubt.
I think that's a mistake.
I want to get on to that, about the benefit of the doubt, because I entirely agree with you.
I mean, I think we're going to agree on a lot in this podcast, but let me tell you one of my pet gripes.
My mum, You know, who's, I don't know how old she is.
She's a sort of mum age.
Clearly, she's going to be vulnerable if she gets coronavirus for various reasons.
I mean, she had breast cancer and stuff.
So yeah, she's probably got, you know, problems.
But she, her life in her, as she gets on, is playing golf every day.
It keeps her healthy.
It keeps her happy.
It gives her fresh air and stuff.
And some vindictive tosser.
I don't know who was in charge of the regulations, but it was a nasty little, little Gestapo, Nazi-like creep.
And he decided to change his life.
You can't play golf.
Why not?
I tell you why they've done it, and I assume you'll agree on this, is because some pollster or Dominic Cummings or whoever said, oh, but it'll look bad.
Yes, they represent zero threat, but you can't let these middle class boys play.
No, no, no, you can't do that.
We're all in this together.
So you all have to be punished, no matter how.
So ban the balls, ban the golf, ban the tennis.
Yeah, but it's just one person in the middle of the field hitting the ball.
Ban it.
Do they get enjoyment from that?
Yes.
Ban it.
But they've even banned... Okay, so they... You can fish.
I'm told you can fish, because it's not a sport.
Are you allowed to fish?
Because I've heard stories... I'm told you can do angling.
Yeah, because it's not a sport.
My son has got evidence.
My son's got evidence that somebody, he's at a university in the north, and he discovered somebody who wanted to go out on their fishing boat, you know, their hobby fishing boat, not their professional fishing boat, And they weren't allowed to do so by the port authorities or whoever it is that controls the... I mean, this is the extraordinary thing.
One of the, I think, the most shocking thing for me, Laura, this year, has been just how little freedom we actually have and how easily the state can take away what few freedoms we imagine we have.
As a lawyer, did you know this all along?
Or are you shocked by this?
No, I mean, I am shocked.
I'm shocked also by how much people have gone along with it.
I mean, that's obviously been disappointing.
I mean, I get that they're subjected to a massive propaganda campaign.
You know, you and I know that we probably avoid the mainstream media, but we have to observe it, but we don't consume it.
But if you're average Joe who likes to stay informed and turns on your six o'clock news and your ten o'clock news, You know, you will be scared witless because it has been an unending stream of propaganda that, you know, there are people out there that are 40 and in perfectly good health and think they're going to drop dead tomorrow if they go to the shops.
Yeah.
And that itself is wicked.
I mean, it's wicked.
Here's the terrible thing, though, Laura, there are just enough people dying out there of coronavirus, or with coronavirus, to provide the anecdotes that these people need to confirm the bias that's been instilled in them by the BBC.
I mean, like... Yeah, or else they tested positive and then 28 days later died of something else.
There's always a story that somebody could say, yeah, but, you know, they're right, you know.
Because, did you hear about Joe?
Joe used to exercise every day.
He was really fit as a fiddle.
Blah, blah, blah.
Like you, I don't consume the mainstream media.
I mean, even the conservative newspapers.
Okay, so the Mail, remarkably, has turned around.
The Mail's turned.
The Mail's a very powerful institution.
I mean, I wonder whether the hysteria would have been anywhere nearly so great if the Daily Mail hadn't stirred it up in the early months.
Yeah, big part of the problem in the early months.
I don't know why they've turned.
Obviously, I'm glad they've turned.
I mean, again, I wouldn't necessarily assume it's for good reasons.
It may well be just blatantly financial reasons.
We've no idea.
I don't know enough in the background as to why they've turned.
But they certainly shouldn't have started it.
They were hysterical as the rest of them.
They were outrageous at the beginning.
Outrageous.
I've got a vague insight into this.
I'm not going to name names but I was talking to somebody at quite a senior level in the mail the other day and he was a skeptic.
He thinks that this is all massive overreaction and I said if you were editing the mail And this chap's got really broad experience in this area.
If you were editing the mail, would you allow your sceptical views to colour the news pages?
And he said, no.
You've got to go where the readership are.
You can't go against them massively.
And the reason that the mail supported the government line to begin with, well, for a long time, six months, is that that's where the readers were.
So the readers have been sort of frightened by this.
There is a sort of vicious, vicious circle, isn't it?
It's a death spiral.
Yeah, it's terrible.
The Telegraph have been pretty poor.
I mean, they're not as bad, but... Pretty poor for the Telegraph?
I mean, they're a global health editor.
Yeah, I mean, I can't even... I mean, as I said, Alison Pearson, who I know has been very good recently, but I do remember at the beginning she supported it.
And I remember when she was, oh, it'll be... I'm tweeting specifically, you know, a sort of sarcastic tweet back to her saying, when she said, oh, it'll be over soon.
And I was like, yeah, they said it would all be over by Christmas.
That was back in April.
Yeah.
And she, you know, unfortunately I've been proved right on that.
So a lot of people shouldn't have gone around with the first one, but I mean it's good that obviously people who've turned have turned.
Every convert's a win.
But also I don't understand, I know the polls all say they're for the lockdown, but anybody I speak to, literally anybody, says it's ridiculous.
Yeah.
So I think a lot of polling is, you know, they put so much pressure on them and people tell polls with all sorts of stuff.
You know, oh yeah, yeah, I'm for the lockdown.
But like, you know, because otherwise I'm painted as some kind of granny killer.
So, you know, it is really a sad state of affairs because before it all happened, I remember thinking to myself, well, I mean, Italy might go fascist and France might go fascist because, you know, they have form.
Yes, yeah.
But to see your adopted country do it, it was, yeah, it was sad.
It was tough to see.
I mean, we'd expect your non-adopted country to do it, your country of birth.
I mean, Ireland is just over, isn't it?
True believers.
True believers.
I can't tell you.
It's not easy.
Also, geographically, it's quite different.
It's much smaller.
There are a lot of grannies around.
So, again, you could maybe justify some restrictions.
But, I mean, they're so invested, it's difficult to explain.
It is.
It's not surprising.
You were right, you mentioned about how Italy might go fascist because it has form and so on.
But our country, this country, the United Kingdom, we've got a record of not going for extremism.
We had our civil war and we sort of Resolve things didn't we over the centuries thereafter and we're supposed to be the beacon the global beacon of parliamentary democracy and although we haven't got a written constitution we've got all these these sort of inbuilt checks and balances and an English common law which is again supposed to be the envy of the world and it seems to me that none of this stuff has worked.
Here we are in what month are we now we're in November 2020 and we are effectively living in the kind of country that we used to in the 1980s and 70s I remember growing up looking across the countries of the Iron Curtain yeah about the people trapped in their own countries not allowed to lead by the government and now this is where we are we are a totalitarian state
It's even worse than that because they're not even, I don't think they were, were they tracking their own homes though?
That's the point.
It's worse.
It's worse here.
The micro control that's going on is, is worse here that, and it's not, you know, the anxiety and constantly checking.
Am I allowed to do this?
Okay.
Is my friend allowed to go over?
Can we go to the garden?
Can we not?
It's crazy, but as I wrote in my recent speech, I think the anxiety, that's the point.
The point is to make everybody, you know, an obsessive compulsive cleaner.
Suspicious of all your neighbours.
You know, as I said, just constantly anxious.
Unable to plan anything.
Can I go and see my mother at Christmas?
Can you see a friend down the road?
Constantly on edge all the time.
You know, in terms of what do they intend?
I don't give anybody the benefit of the doubt.
Maybe they're not as bad as I think, but I always start off with a very low opinion of human nature and then prove to me, prove to me you're better than, you know, my baseline, which is most people aren't that great, you know, including me.
That's because I was at the criminal bar.
That's because also, you know, Christianity says you're pretty average.
Prove to me you're better.
Right, so I think Boris Johnson, he's either being manipulated or he's a puppet.
I think Matt Clang-Hancock is loving it and I think the gruesome twosome are loving it as well.
Oh definitely, yeah yeah yeah.
Oh and Cummings is, I mean I don't, I mean Cummings, there's all sorts of stuff going on there.
I don't want to be, you know, you wonder.
And I also think, you know, for me, I'm not a classical, but I feel like they've gone for the culture first.
So they've gone for, so I watch a lot of classical music concerts on YouTube.
There's loads of people have recorded, of course, BC, before Corona.
And, you know, we're so far from getting that back because, you know, violin one and two are right next to each other.
And I know they're supposedly doing, you know, you can't socially distance an orchestra.
It must, it must compromise the sound, right?
You can't socially distance Swan Lake.
This is, never mind the audience.
We are so far from getting that back.
As I said, it's actually upsetting.
And I feel they've gone for the culture first.
They've gone for all religions first, to really kind of crush your spirit.
Now they're coming for sports.
You know, as I said, you can't play golf.
You can't really do anything.
So they're going for, in a way, things people think they can live without in the short term.
But in the long term, we can.
It's what makes us human, right?
That's what makes us human.
Animals don't go and watch other animals do beautiful dancing or play Beethoven's 5th.
You know, only humans do that.
This art is brilliant on an incredible scale.
What these musicians do, what these dancers do.
I bet the gruesome twosome, they don't care about the culture.
They probably can't play any sport.
They were probably the nerds that were picked last at the sports team in school.
Just guessing.
You know I was at school.
Well, and was he, how was his forehand?
He was just kind of complete nobody.
He was absolutely, nobody knew anything about Witty.
He was just a kind of some rat, one of those random boys.
He wasn't good at sport.
Well, fine, neither was I. He wasn't good academically.
He was a nothing.
He was an absolute nothing.
And now this guy is in charge of your life and my life.
And by the way, Valence, Toby Young told me this the other day, Valence is really, really hard left.
He's a Corbinista.
I'm fucking shocked!
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.
But what about people like... I wrote a piece the other day about the people I'd expected to save us have not done so.
In fact, they've been off on the old part of the problem.
So two of the examples I gave were Michael Gove.
He's a friend of mine.
I never liked him.
Never liked him.
Fair enough.
And maybe you've got better judgment than me.
Start low.
Start low.
I like him on a personal level, but I have to say, I always thought that if there were ever a great historical inflection point like we're experiencing now, where you go from freedom to fascism in the space of six months, I thought Gove would be in the foxhole next to me, fighting for this, you know.
I'll tell you who else has been disappointing.
Jake, I almost want to swear.
You're a Catholic girl, so I won't swear, but Jacob effing, effing re-smoked.
Who is a Catholic?
He should get this stuff.
Where has he been?
Tell me.
Look, I'm telling you, again, the thing about these people is, The fact that they're even in politics, I'm sorry James, apart from a few people, you've already, they already have something within them that just means they're very rarely, they're just, it doesn't fit well, right?
Yeah, basically.
Something about Theresa May, I always think that she has a big sense of duty.
I wouldn't put her in that category necessarily.
But most people, especially if you're really climbing to the top, by definition you've done nasty things.
By definition you have compromised on lots of values.
You know, so you expect them to be able to stand up in the middle of this and lose all of the privileges and the massive egomania, the power that these people have?
No, no.
That's true.
People don't do that.
And might I add, James, where are the feminists?
The gruesome twosome, Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock.
Feminist people, I mean, you have a big problem staying at home.
They are literally telling you to stay at home.
That's the actual order.
I don't care.
I mean, I like staying at home.
But, I mean, they're shockingly quiet.
You can't find them anywhere.
I mean, they're just, you know, where's a feminist when you need it?
It's just, it's ridiculous.
It's true.
Do you know, I'll tell you the weird thing, Laura, that I've noticed.
I've been to a few rallies and...
The only people who've been really committed in fighting back this are the kind of the David Icke tinfoil hat brigade, the people that you and I would kind of want to distance ourselves from because of, you know, his very gross conspiracy theories.
But my goodness, they've got the energy and the commitment.
You know, look at Piers Corbyn.
I mean, some of the things Piers says are crazy, particularly on things like Palestine and stuff.
But at the same time, he's the guy getting himself arrested.
So what is this about?
They're not part of the establishment, so that's the thing.
What would Jacob Rees-Mogg have to do to give up to do that?
He's Speaker of the House, right?
Yeah, he's made it.
So think of the amount of perks, the privilege, everything that he would have to sacrifice to say, I'm resigning over this.
This is wrong.
I'm not, I'm not doing it anymore.
Same with that foreign secretary.
Go on.
The Speaker of the House is a bauble.
I mean, OK, it's nice, it's... They love baubles!
That's the point!
Sorry, sorry.
Leader of the House, I meant.
He's not Speaker.
But what I said in that particular piece that I wrote for my Patreon and Subscribestar,
was that the point about, the whole point about Jacob Rees-Mogg, the reason that classical liberals, straight whatever, like myself, sort of revered him and thought he was not damaged goods, was because of his enormous private income, because of his investment company, which you would have thought, and of course his wife is worth gazillions as well, you would have thought that, and plus his Catholic faith, his, you know, he's confidently old-fashioned,
would render him immune to the blandishments of this corrupt establishment.
He's his own man.
He's an argument for every MP having hinterland, every MP having to do a proper job before him.
And yet he's completely blown that theory.
Well, I know, but he was always part of the establishment and he wants to stay.
He wants to stay part of the establishment.
It's not... You know, yes, having the money obviously gives you a certain amount of protection, but he doesn't want to be outside.
He's always been onside and he'll... I mean, the other, of course, depressing thing is that he might just really believe it, which is probably an even worse conclusion.
But I mean, I find it... Do you think any of them believe it?
Well, I do think you can be convinced of your own brief.
I mean, how wrong?
It's hard to say.
It's hard to say.
I mean, do they really believe there's 4,000 deaths?
As I said, even if they do believe some of it, going back to the first point, it's not proportionate what they're doing now, right?
They don't have to be as hardcore as they are.
They're being as hardcore.
For political reasons, for optics, because Dominic Cummings hates the Shires.
I don't know.
You know, who can figure them out?
The bigger problem is also, as I said, why are people going along with it so much?
So then we can start our face mask rant.
Why are people wearing face masks?
People now wear them outside.
That shows how deep the problem is, right?
Is that you can take your face mask off outside and some of them either can't be bothered or literally think they're going to fall down dead if they do.
A face mask they probably have washed in about maybe two weeks.
A face mask that they touch all the time.
A face mask that they like to wear on their chin a lot.
A face mask that goes there.
I just... I've been in my local town centre about five times the last few weeks because, you know, you like to top up.
And I take a good look around.
I'm just like, what?
Why?
What is... Why are you wearing this?
And it's all self-enforcement because I never wear it.
And in fairness, no one has said anything to me once.
I know you had a bad experience on a train.
But no one has said anything to me.
And then the other thing is, James, is I see mothers, as you can imagine, with babies, young babies in prams and obviously the baby's looking up at them and they're wearing a face mask and I just...
It's difficult to stay calm.
Do you know how important it is for babies to see their mother's face and they're smiling?
Where are all the child development people?
They didn't even ask for an exemption for this.
I know they've exempted like, you know, newborn babies from the plus two rule or whatever it is.
Woohoo!
I thought they weren't even recommended for children under seven.
Are they?
Yeah, yeah.
No, they are doing something for preschool children.
So basically, mom and a preschooler can meet up with mom and preschooler in a park.
Right?
Whereas, strictly, I can meet you in a park, but the exemption would be, yes, we can bring our two preschoolers.
Whereas, you know, a couple of days ago, we couldn't have.
All this nonsense.
The fact that we're even taught, it's just not, you know, let's check the rules.
Can I bring Sammy to the park and meet, you know, Mary and her son and we better bring the face mask but we can't get a coffee because, you know, that will kill everybody and I mean it's just...
It's just, what's there to say?
It's unbelievable.
It's unbelievable.
Aren't I right in thinking that the difference between the English legal system and the Roman legal system is that in English common law you're allowed to do what you like unless it's expressly forbidden.
Whereas in Roman law it's the other way around.
You do things with permission.
And now they've flipped it.
They've flipped it.
We are now living under Roman law and the government can...
Decide whether or not you have Christmas or not, which hasn't been in its power since the Commonwealth.
And if you listen to what they say, they're exactly the words they use.
We'll see if we can allow you, how many we can allow you meet up with people at Christmas.
We'll see what we can permit.
It's all what we can allow you to do.
You know, as I said, and people are sitting on their couches every night watching this stuff.
I'm like, what, what is, you know, what is wrong with you?
Why aren't you complaining about this?
It's just like, they're telling, oh, oh, what's essential.
They're going to tell you what's essential.
So in Wales, buying a jumper for your kid from the supermarket in the middle of November, that's not essential.
You got to cover that aisle up.
We'll tell you what's essential.
We'll tell you what's essential.
We'll tell you what's essential to buy.
Well, if I want to buy it, then it's essential, right?
This isn't... Then they'll be telling you, all that's essential is bread and water.
That's all you need to keep alive.
So there's your daily allocation of bread and water and please go home now to your hovel or whatever.
By the way, it's not your home anymore.
You have to sell it to us.
You couldn't pay the massive tax we're putting on it.
So actually, by default, we own all your home.
Oh, funny you mentioned that.
I mean, it could go anywhere.
It could go anywhere.
No, listen, you've put your finger on something of great concern to me.
Because, of course, we're just at the beginning of this problem, not the end.
How are they going to pay for the furlough, for the government, i.e.
the taxpayer, paying loads of people who want to work, not to work, and extending this period for far longer?
OK, so it costs £2bn a day, doesn't it, every day of lockdown.
£2,000,000,000.
That's £2,000,000,000.
We can't really even comprehend, right?
I mean, let's say we can, nobody can comprehend the money involved, the numbers involved.
So they are going to start resorting to fairly quickly, I think, to confiscation, probably private property.
So, so there we really are living under, you know, you don't have property rights anymore.
That one of the most fundamental bases for a civil society.
Yeah.
No, I just, I mean, the thing is, where is the opposition going to come from?
Because so far, all of the companies, you talk about the Royal Ballet, all of these have all gone with it, because of course they had to, because that was the press.
If anybody said, actually, you know, I'm not going to go along with this, you're the granny killer, right?
This is the problem.
But when are you need... First of all, I mean, so the Catholic Church has come out against... I mean, it's linked to your private property, but your Catholic Church has come out against the banning of, say, public mass.
You know, they need to start saying now, this is an attack on property rights.
This is an attack on people's fundamental right to work, because working is a matter of human dignity under Catholic social teaching.
You know, it's interfering with people being able to raise children.
Oh, let me get into self-isolation in a minute.
You know, so we need the churches to come out against it.
We need people like the Royal Ballet to say, right, you know what, we've paid our dues now.
You know, we need to, culture is really important.
We need to, when are we getting back?
And I'm not talking to face masks and all this ridiculous social distancing.
Where is the opposition going to come from?
It's not, me and you, I'm afraid, it's not enough.
I have to say, just briefly, Laura, for those of you who don't know who you are, because I'm really rubbish at my introductions, you're the co-editor of a really splendid website called Conservative Woman.
And it's interesting, you are about the only bloody genuinely conservative website in the country.
I mean, okay, there's a few sort of branding themselves as vaguely conservative, like what, unheard and whatever, but I think even Conservative Home, The House website of the Conservative movement has been pretty feeble, I think.
Your Conservative woman has been the only strong voice of opposition.
Why is that?
Why have Conservatives so failed to resist?
Well, I mean, obviously, again, the Conservative Home is part of the establishment, so it's going to be difficult for them to go against it.
I mean, just people are, I think, afraid of being shamed.
You know, I think that emotional blackmail that you must do this or you will hurt others was incredibly effective because they have all their mind dudes in there.
They do.
As well as Prudent and Tootham, they have the behavioural scientists, right?
And they have their polling people.
And unfortunately, I think people are easy to manipulate.
And going back to the furlough and private property rights, I call this the pacification scheme.
So the Americans did this to the Vietnamese during the Vietnam War.
So you shame people and then you buy them off with compensation.
So that's your population pacification scheme, the furlough.
But, I mean, it can't go on.
And who knows what they could do with taxes?
But unless big institutions start standing up and saying this is an attack fundamentally on human dignity and our basic liberties, People are going to go along, because I guess they've given us just enough comfort, right?
And just enough freedom for people to go along with it for a while.
But it's a drip-drip, you know, the face masks, the inability to work.
Because people want to actually work, right?
And this is the difference between... For socialism, it's fine, right?
They just throw money at the problem.
But for most people to have a sense of dignity, they actually want to do the job.
Okay, this is a really important part of who they are, to prove themselves, or whatever it might be, or provide for their families.
Even if they don't like the day-to-day job, they're providing for their families, etc.
So, the fact that a conservative government is crushing that, and just, well, you know, we're paying them.
They were paying them to sit at home and watch Netflix.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
You're just constantly, what I would call, degrading the populace all the time.
And don't talk to me about how badly I think this is going to go for 20-something-year-old men, many of whom are still living at home, right?
Now they have to nearly stay at home all day.
They can't work.
It's so emasculating.
They can't go and find mates.
They kept crushing the young men, of course.
If there was going to be any real pushback, it's going to come from, you know, young 20-something, 30-year-old men.
But they have been so emasculated from feminism and lots of other things over the last decade or so.
And this is only going to make things 10 times worse.
Oh yeah, so I'm listening to the radio in the car because I don't listen to it at home and it's a phone in and a guy comes in, calls in and he's in, I know he's in his 20s and he's still living at home with his mom.
That's problem number one.
And this was before this lockdown and he was going to be due to go back to work but because he was facing customers and had asthma, his words, he was terrified to go into work.
Terrified.
This is from a 20-something-year-old man who has asthma because he's been told again he's going to drop dead from the black tape.
And there'll be thousands of these people.
When you and I were at school, we'd have called him a wet fart.
We'd have given him wedges and he'd have learned that you can't be a wet fart because you're not really a a valuable member of civilization.
That attitude doesn't work.
And now, of course, we've bred a generation of wet farts.
Well, I mean, that's true.
It's definitely been a lot of safetyism.
And we are now living in the tyranny of safetyism.
It's definitely been a long time coming.
I could see it, you know, don't climb to the top of the climbing frame.
It's all the time.
Better to be safe than sorry.
I'm like, is it?
Not all the time.
Maybe it's better to take the trip to wherever godforsaken hellhole you want to go to.
Maybe you should take the trip.
Maybe you should climb the mountain.
It's not always better to be safe than sorry.
Yeah.
You know, but this is the thing, if they're crushing courage, they're crushing, it's so, as I said, they've gone for the arts, they're going for human dignity in terms of work, they're crushing families.
It's nasty.
You know, what they're doing is nasty.
People shouldn't be under any doubt.
These aren't good people with the best intentions.
Oh, I really didn't, I didn't want to have to do it to you.
Yeah, with a heavy heart.
But you deserved it because you didn't abide by the rules.
This is what wise beaters say, right?
Yeah.
You made me do it.
You made me do it.
You know, I don't know what, as I said, do not give them the benefit of the doubt.
And I mean, if you really want me, I mean, I'm just thinking, I'm sorry, James, but perhaps we shouldn't take, next time, let's not put in the multiple adulterous, you know, couldn't keep a promise to anybody, narcissistic, abortion paying for lunatic in number 10.
You know, because the gods are doing the right thing.
They're not great.
Don't do it.
Laura, you're so right there.
In the past, because he's quite a seductive character, you know, I've known Boris.
Yeah, there's lots of women who can control that.
I've known Boris since university and I always gave him the benefit of the doubt just because I sort of bought into that kind of Cuddly, sort of distressed, little boy, lost game that he plays.
And I often made the case that it didn't matter about his immoral personal life.
What mattered was what he did, you know, how he used his power.
But now I realize that his moral failings go to the heart of his political failings.
Yeah.
Is that fair?
Yeah.
I mean, well, I think so.
I think so.
And we, and again, I'm sorry to say, we never liked him.
We, a conservative woman, we never liked him.
The blogs are there.
I mean, obviously I voted conservative for the last election because the choice was him or the chair of Sympathizer, right?
So, I mean, again, you have to ask yourselves the question, why?
Why was that our choice?
Um, but it was, it was, I, although I'm not a member of the party, so I can say I never voted for him to be leader.
Um, and I remember coming up to the election, obviously you get a, because of the name of the website, you get a lot of calls.
Will you do this media?
Will you do that media?
And I just didn't do any of it because I just said, you know, I just can't go out there and back for this man.
I'm just not going to do it.
I'm just going to, I'll vote for them, but I'm not going to do anything else.
Was it the philandering or what?
What puts you off?
Well, I just never... I can see why... I'm sorry, I can see why the men like him because he's one of the lads.
Right, I'm sure he's great down the pub.
I'm sure he has you rolling in the aisles.
But yeah, the philandering is bad.
Just all of it.
You know, and also his lack of professionalism.
I do think he changed a little bit coming up.
He was definitely, I will say, you know, he looked slightly more professional.
Yeah, he got a haircut.
So people say, well, Trump.
I mean, Trump was the same.
You're like, well, yeah, the elements of Trump were the same, sure.
But, you know, how long did Trump campaign for?
Both the election now and the last election, right?
He was coast to coast.
He was putting in the hours.
And I just never I'm sorry, but Boris Johnson, he's a product of the public schools here, which I'm not hugely invested in, and it's similar to David Cameron.
You know, I quite like that job.
Actually, Laura, I think you're right on a lot of things.
I'd say that actually, Boris Johnson, interestingly, isn't one of the lads.
He's very much not.
He's like a lot of... Oh, right.
To be a philandering man, to be a successful... I mean, you know, Boris wants And he can't afford it, as opposed to Trump who can.
Boris once confided to a friend that he had not needed to have a wank since he was 14 because he'd always had sex on tap.
That's Boris for you.
Now, to somebody, when you dedicate your life to having sex with as many women as possible, regardless of the consequences, It's kind of a full-time job.
You can't hang around, you know, what lads do together is they get drunk, they exchange banter, they go hunting, shooting, fishing.
These are proper pursuits for a man.
Boris never did any of that.
He's not actually very clubbable.
He's agreeable when he's in the room, but actually what he wants to do is he wants to bugger off and be with his next floozy.
So just a point on the record.
He has no, well, he has no personal discipline.
None.
None.
That is an issue if you put him in number 10.
I mean, it's a big issue.
So, I mean, that's all, yeah, as I said, it's one thing to break up, you know, your first marriage and maybe, look, it really wasn't working out and you obviously, you started your second marriage, but the philandering, I mean, You think he might give it up when he was leader of the world's fifth biggest economy?
You can't break a habit like that, right?
No.
That's the thing.
This is a difficult habit to break.
It's the same as if you really like alcohol.
These are difficult habits to break.
It's not an easy thing to do.
And then you can get really psycho in terms of why was he doing it?
Well, probably because he wasn't hugged enough when he was young.
So it all comes down to what happens when they're a kid.
To feel that void inside all the time.
I mean, I'm sorry, but that kind of level of aristocracy is the same as Diana and Charles.
It's just a bottomless pit of needs.
They were never shambolic families, dysfunctional families.
Yeah, they're not all like that, you know.
No, I know.
I don't mean all that.
But those few examples, you know, it is sad in a way.
But unfortunately, it seems that it's kind of morphed into this nightmare that we're all having to live through.
Yeah.
Thing is...
Okay, we've chewed up and digested and spat out Boris.
Well, he's not Boris.
He totally deserved it.
But look at the people around him.
I mean, look at Cummings.
How evil is Dominic?
He is just evil.
He is just evil.
At the beginning of the year.
At the beginning of the year I wrote two of the worst, the most culpably wrong pieces I've ever written.
One of them was, like we're talking about almost January the 1st I think, one was in praise of Boris Johnson because I thought that he was going to deliver Brexit and he pulled off a blinder.
He'd actually negotiated his way through that extraordinary impasse.
I mean, let's not, before we beat ourselves too much about having, you know, voted for this government which has gone fascist, let's not forget that Like in, when was it, September last year, the country was in chaos.
It was in, it was lockdown, wasn't it?
Parliament was hopeless.
We weren't going to get Brexit.
Anyway, so Boris is a disaster, but the other one I praised to the skies was Dominic Cummings, who I thought was, I bought into the line that because he'd effectively delivered, found a way of getting us to vote Brexit, you know, which is what he wanted to do anyway.
But I also thought, I'd read his stuff on civil service reform, and I thought, my God, yeah, Dom, you are so right.
It needs a hatchet man like you to go in there.
But what I didn't realise, or rather what I ignored, we turn a blind eye to our hero's faults, don't we, until we realise that the faults are actually defining, was he is a technocrat.
He believes in a lot of stuff that doesn't work.
Like DARPA, the American government science and technology quango, which actually did nothing to advance technology or science.
It just sucked up huge amounts of taxpayers' money.
And Dominic Cummings thinks it was great and he wants more of it.
He's dangerous.
Well, he's dangerous.
He's a planner.
He's a technocrat.
Yes, he likes to think, you know, he's not part of that establishment.
He's not part of the elite, but he would just set up another elite, right?
He's not interested in letting power drip down to the lowest level.
He just doesn't like the current elite so he wants to get rid of all of them and then set up his own nice planning elite that they're literally can plan with a computer which is what they're doing with all the modeling and the predicting which is just a fancy word for lies or guessing I'm just guessing and bamboozle everybody with you know medical techno language and we all we all just we all just go along with it
You know, so he is definitely, he's just, I mean, he's evil.
Matt Hancock is just, in any other walk of life and in a normal society, would be a little man somewhere.
He might be, I don't know, I don't know what he'd be doing.
He might run a small business or something.
Nothing wrong with that.
Perfectly respectable.
They're trying to kill all those small businesses now.
And now he's just this jumped up power mad.
You know, he's particularly irritating.
He's the person you avoid at a party.
I mean, you're walking the other way, away from him.
And amazingly, he's, as I said, literally planning our lives.
It's really shocking.
But in terms of, I know that you call yourself a libertarian, but No, I don't actually.
I really don't.
No, God no.
Can I just say, officially, I am not an effing Libertarian.
I think Libertarians have failed us this year and failed us utterly.
All the people who call themselves Libertarians, they've been crap.
Yeah.
When people say, and I say, well, why did you oppose the lockdown?
It's very libertarian.
I laugh.
I'm like, do you know how un-libertarian I am?
I mean, seriously, read the website.
You know, if you're a conservative, you should want to conserve things.
That's your basic status quo.
You know, there might be problems with them and you can try and fix them slowly, right?
But you should want to conserve things like traditions and culture and small businesses and the ability to be able to go out to a restaurant and eat and the economy and, you know, the Royal Ballet.
These things that took generations to build up.
Not so traditional roles, men and women, you know, like boys doing boys' things.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, but we're so far from that.
The problem with Dominic Cummings always was, and it's always why I was always a little bit unsettled about Brexit, although I did support it, is, you know, again, if you're a Conservative, your status quo should be no revolution.
You keep things as calm and as structured as possible, and then you can look to change things.
But you do not change things with a sledgehammer.
Whereas Dominic Cummings was all about burn it down, tear it up, light a fire.
Actually, I think they gave one of those speeches, which was exactly the same as Barack Obama's speech, that we were going to fundamentally change Britain.
From a conservative Prime Minister, If you wanted to fundamentally change your wife, you wouldn't really like your wife that much, would you?
That's true.
You'd be like, I would like to fundamentally change my marriage.
Really?
All of it?
Not just maybe go out a bit more?
You can.
As Boris Johnson once joked, you can actually pay for her to have bigger breasts, I suppose.
But he wants more of that, doesn't he?
I think he wants a brain transplant and a body transplant.
So things like fundamentally change, radical change, if you hear any of these buzzwords, you should have alarm bells, should be ringing.
And a lot of people, I know you, I think your last, or the doctor spoke about it, you know, because once you have a revolution, right?
People with agendas that are very different to ours latch on to them and say, this is our opportunity.
And that's what you're seeing now.
You might not have planned it.
You know, there's not somebody there in, you know, they're not all coalesced to make, to trigger this.
But revolutions mean fundamental change.
Well, I quite like the way things there are.
I don't want fundamental change.
Thanks very much.
So take off your mask and go and have lunch somewhere without some bloody waiter serving you in a mask.
Isn't that the most evil phrase of this year?
The idea that there is this new normal which we're never going to get back.
They might as well say New World Order, right?
I mean, as I said, fundamental change.
It's like, you know, they'll be coming out wearing Darth Vader suits soon, given these press conferences.
I mean, they're not even hiding it now.
It's scary.
Let me talk to you about self-isolation, because I, again, along with mothers wearing face masks, this has gotten very little coverage.
So you know how if you get your, you know, if you happen to be in the vicinity of somebody five miles away from you who's got COVID, Right.
You get your call from the Stasi or whoever it might be because you've given them their number or I mean, who does track and trace?
Crazy people.
But anyway, somehow they've got, crazy people, but somehow they've gotten your number and you get the call and you've just self-isolated for 14 days.
Well, they do this to kids in school.
Now, I don't know how you, but do you know what technically self-isolation would mean?
Your kids are at university, aren't they?
Well, yeah, you have it at the university.
We can do them now in a minute.
But this could mean that your teenager has to stay in their room for 14 days with pretty much only their food given to them outside the door.
Now, I don't think anybody's doing this, right?
I mean, no family is doing it.
But again, I'm wondering, as a Catholic, why isn't the Church saying that this is a fundamental attack on family rights?
So if you had an 11-year-old or a 10-year-old who's told to self-isolate, I don't know how low the cut-off age comes in this new normal.
Are we telling eight-year-olds you have to stay in your room for 14 days and not go out and exercise, not play Lego with your brothers and sisters, not eat at the family table?
Yeah.
Right?
That's what's wrapped up in this nice little word, self-isolate.
You know, not read a book, not watch a family movie, not be read to at bedtime.
This is evil.
Don't be under any doubt about this.
And I'm just wondering where all the people who are supposedly supposed to be defending human dignity, private family life, family relations are, because I'm not hearing much pushback from Cardinal Fox's face and the rest of them.
Norm Jeed from The Pillock, who's in charge of the Church of England.
What's his name?
The old Etonian, whatever he is.
Ex-oilman.
What's he called?
Welby?
Yeah.
Justin Welby.
Yeah, I agree.
The performance, it's actually almost made me want to find a proper religion, you know, like, I mean, if the Catholic Church was chosen.
That's my one.
Yeah, I know, but your church has been crap as well.
You know, I was so disappointed, but I found myself in a strange place the other day and, as I often do, I walked up to the church to look at the church and walk around the graveyard and to look inside.
Except, of course, I couldn't go inside.
I couldn't have that moment of solace inside a church that's traditionally been available to I mean, I imagine that during the war, had you gone to any village in the country, you'd have been able to walk into the church and look at the effigies and the stained glass or whatever, and appreciate this part of your culture.
And now that's been taken away from us, with the church's consent.
It's not doing its job.
No, they're really not doing their job and they need to man up.
But these things take courage.
And courage is a virtue that is severely lacking right now.
Severely lacking.
I mean, as I said, a lot of it is the emasculation of men.
They need to man up.
I mean, they're being banned from working.
I mean, it's the same.
It's terrible for women as well.
But the self-isolation thing, You know they bring these these little dick talks out and they get hardly any any news but they should they should get coverage and as I said this is what's going on is wicked.
So okay, so we've got the feminization of our culture in a number of ways.
For example, there are so few male role models teaching these days, are there?
It's almost totally women who tend to mark boys down for being boys.
They tend, you know, just natural male behavior is suddenly sort of pathologized as something.
So there's that.
Are there any other reasons why?
Okay, we've already established that The governments, what do you call them, the head people, the weird psyops people have been very... The narcissists, they want to crush other people's fun.
So they've been very effective.
Yeah.
I'm still at a loss to explain how the country that allegedly, maybe it was just a propaganda myth, allegedly showed the Blitz spirit and kept going, you know, was not going to be defeated by Hitler.
How come we've surrendered so easily to this?
It must have been a very different country back then.
I mean, how much contact would you have had with the States in the 1930s?
I mean, you know, it just, it was just, it was, it was a very different country.
People would say the, it's, it's very, but also if you, I mean, running up to it, I mean, people wanted appeasement, right?
It's a mistake to think that, you know, so that darkest hour when Churchill, that, that Churchill goes down into the tube.
When he met a black man in the tube.
That changed it, I gather.
I thought it was a great film.
But, I mean, Churchill did stand alone, right?
He was a minority.
He was the minority voice in government.
The public weren't with him at the beginning until they realised, obviously, it was serious.
So it is always difficult to stand up and say, hmm, we're going to fight this.
You know, it's just our way of life is actually very, very important and we're not going to let it be crushed.
These are always minority voices.
The pushback always usually comes normally from a much smaller amount of people and then eventually the masses go along with it.
This is us, Laura.
We are that small group of people.
Did you read or see the video of Lord Sumption's incredible speech at Cambridge?
I didn't read it but I mean obviously he's, yeah, I'm aware of his protests.
I was going to ask you, one of our checks and balances is the judiciary and the judiciary have failed us.
The judiciary have just been, they've refused the chance, Simon Dolan's attempts to get a judicial review of government policy and the judges have just in every case just gone and rolled over and said yeah well the government's trying to save lives so I don't think you really have a case.
What you need to do is you need to get a terrorist who's annoyed with these laws and think it breaches their fundamental human rights.
Then go to the Supreme Court and it'll all be gone tomorrow.
Because, you know, the terror... I mean, remember the fuss made over House Arrest, basically House Arrest for 28 days, and even like a supervision of suspected terrorists.
Do you remember the domestic court case over that?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So if you're a threat, you know, if you're a terrorist threat, your rights are You've got your rights.
If you're ordinary Joe who wants to go out and work, not so much.
So you need a terrorist to bring the case.
It sounds like the script of a kind of fantastic satirical movie.
They have to find a terrorist willing to... In return for what?
I don't know.
I'd have to go over the case.
They had to change the legislation quite a lot because, you know, if you put a suspected terrorist under essentially house arrest and not surveillance, the court said that was amounting to incarceration.
Again, I'd have to go over and check all the case law, but there were plenty of cases over it.
But for some reason, anything can be justified by, obviously, under safetyism.
Anything.
Safetyism, yeah.
It is extraordinary that, surely, when did any government or any, you know, a king or whatever, any administration remove so many freedoms in six months?
It's unprecedented, surely.
I call them the Ayatollahs of Sage.
That they are the Ayatollahs of Sage.
They probably, you know, they're looking into their mystical ball and making their predictions that the God of the NHS will be angry if we don't... And that's the other problem, of course, is the deification of the NHS.
That's why, essentially, the public are going along with it.
Again, very clever politically.
You can do anything you want to save the NHS over here.
Literally anything you want, because it is so revered.
So it makes sense to close down private enterprise to save the socialist institution of the NHS.
Yes.
Certainly, if one were going to write a book about the different currents that created this situation, you start to see it was actually inevitable, even though we're surprised by how extreme it is.
I noticed this during the Brexit campaign, the way that it was all about, yeah, we're going to get 350 million back and we're going to spend it on our NHS.
And you knew it was lost when politicians started using the phrase, our NHS, unironically.
And continually.
And you thought, hang on a second.
You are setting us up for a massive fall because this greedy creature is just going to get bloated and fat and it's going to be untouchable.
And that's what's happened.
Yeah, I mean, it's like saying, you know, don't go out at night in case you get mugs.
Please protect the police.
We don't have to protect our police.
Or protect.
Don't light a fire in your house because the fire brigade might get called.
Protect the fire brigade.
I mean, it's just...
It's just, it's madness.
Everything has to be sacrificed for this institution.
And I mean, let's face it, if they kept the closed pubs forever, you would, you would save a lot of money.
I mean, how much alcohol, I mean, how much problems does alcohol abuse cause?
A lot, right?
Well, you'll save the fire service and the police and the NHS if you keep the pubs closed forever.
That's true.
No doubt about that.
It definitely is to pesky patients that keep the NHS, you know, having to spend money and stuff.
If there were no patients, it would be absolutely fine.
Tell me, have you got any theories on why... Any thoughts on Michael Gove?
I mean, your co-editor, Kathy Gingell, wrote the most excoriating letter to Gove, laying out just how bad what he's doing is.
Do you have any theories on... I'm a friend and I do not understand why he's doing this.
Have you got any theories?
Well, A, they're either true believers, right, and they really think that this is a big threat, and what they're doing is proportionate, which it certainly isn't.
But again, human nature, start low.
He's been incredibly invested.
He's totally in the heart of government.
He would lose a lot.
It's not about money, but it is about status.
They want to be on the inside.
I mean, ultimately, I think it's Dominic Cummings who's making all the calls.
So maybe Michael got calculated.
It's just not worth it for me to leave.
Even if I leave, it won't make any difference.
And again, if you want it to be sort of kind to them, you'd say, well, he figures he could make, maybe he can do more in there, right?
He can definitely make sure it's lifted on the end of December or whatever.
If you want to think well of him, you know, that's what he's saying to himself.
He can't leave Matt Hancock and Dominic Cummings in there just to wreck the whole country.
Jacob Rees-Mogg might be making the same calculation.
That's on a good day.
The rest of it will just be because they like the status, right?
But Laura, we're not like that.
I mean, there's a few of us, and we know who they are, and everyone knows who they are, who've been fighting this from the beginning.
Why haven't we been taken in?
What is it about us that makes us... are we just bolshie idiots, or what?
I don't, I just don't know, because to me it's just so obviously wrong.
It's so, and again, it's so obviously disproportionate.
So I always said at the beginning, look, if you want to close down the big, the big super spreader events or whatever it might be, you can certainly tweak things, maybe have a 10pm curfew, you know, I'm not big on it, But you can do those things.
But to be so petty, you know, to close down all human contact, essentially.
There is something more to this.
This is, as I said, radical, fundamental, revolutionary change that shouldn't be supported by any right-minded person, even if you personally will be okay.
It's just, it's not right.
You know, the suicide rate on this is terrible.
You know, and what they're doing to the university students is outrageous.
They have been locked up, I'm told, by basically private security firms.
They essentially have no teaching.
They were given fake grades for exams they never sat at A-levels.
Now they're going to be given fake degrees for degrees they'll never have read.
The whole thing is such a, you know, it's such a mirage.
You really have to go back over your old Brothers Grimm stories, your fairy tale stories, because these are timeless themes in a way.
This is a lie.
Again, in terms of why haven't we been taken in, I don't know where you stand on the whole Vietnam War thing.
I am pretty anti it.
But, you know, I read at the beginning, the beginning, the protests in the beginning for that Vietnam War were tiny.
There were like 10 people.
So I'm hoping, and of course, by the end of it, they have to pull it.
And the reason why, again, the Vietnam War, again, you could support in principle, right?
Communism is bad and the Americans were right and safe.
But it could never be successful in practice.
And the cost was too high.
And again, if you watch the long documentary on Ken Burns, General McNamara was running that war on data.
He ran that war on, they had stacks of papers in the Oval Office.
So it's exactly the same thing as if, and they were running through the numbers and it was literally, you know, the body count.
They're like, but we are killing more of them than ours.
Yeah.
How, why can't we win?
Why can't we win?
Well, because you're on their ground.
That's why you can't win.
Yeah.
That's why you can't win.
So I just think there are big similarities.
If you read Niall Ferguson's history book on the pity of war, You know, he goes through the whole First World War and he's like, this wasn't a tragedy.
This was a mistake.
This never needed to happen.
And again, people become really invested, right?
So it's too hard for them to turn the tanker now, right?
It's too hard for them to come up and say, you know what?
I'm really sorry.
We were wrong.
So, you know, it's, you have to go with human instinct.
Oh, well, I'm on it.
So I was watching the old version of The Secret Garden with the kids last night.
It's on Netflix.
And again, it was, it was like I've been sent by God to watch this because the young lad, what's his name?
Colin is really sick, right?
Right.
He's under the illusion.
He's, you know, The Secret Garden.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'd like to see it.
Watch it on Netflix.
He's in his bed and it's all dark because the spores might get them.
And not a word of a lie, they all have to wear masks.
They're all wearing them!
Do they?
Where was this made, this stuff?
Judy Dench, whatever, the head girl, the housekeeper, they're all wearing, they have to wear masks otherwise Colin will die.
And then of course, we need Mary.
Mary comes in, takes down all the things, shouts at them, tells them there's nothing wrong with them.
Mary, by the way.
That's not a coincidence in my head.
Gets him out of bed.
He's like, what about the spores?
He's like, they're no spores.
They take him outside and they're all lined up with masks, right?
All the help, all the servants.
And then at the end, he turns around and goes, oh, just take off these ridiculous masks.
I'm like, oh my God.
Oh my God.
Yeah, you got it, yeah.
Fantastic.
And I think to the kids, I'm like, those masks are about as useful to Colin as the masks outside are.
Actually, Laura, one of the very few things that's made me happy about this whole craziness, I think it's radicalised my kids.
They've become much more like me.
Yeah, I don't push my politics on them.
I really don't.
My son is begging me to actually let him read my mask, Facebook, because I actually try and keep them away from the news, right, because they absorb it.
I don't like it.
So I can control what happens in my house.
I can't control what goes on elsewhere.
But yeah, I mean, I don't think they know my position.
I think what this year's year has done, and I sometimes think that one of the processes of getting older is unlearning all the propaganda that you've been fed through the culture and through the education system and realising, well getting closer to seeing the world as it actually is rather than as the narrative you've been fed.
And I was just, just a couple of examples, I was watching Have you seen Barbarians?
Barbarians is about the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, just about the biggest defeat ever suffered by the Romans when the German barbarians in I think the 6th century defeated I think two legions, something like that.
Anyway, when I first heard about this story, Years ago, my sympathies were all with the Romans.
I thought, my God, how awful it must be to be a Roman legionary in this kind of dark barbaric place in the forest.
You know, forests are scary places.
You know, you think about Grimm's fairy tales and stuff and imagine these hairy barbarians chopping you to pieces and probably ripping your balls off and eating them.
Well, watching the series now, I'm thinking... Sorry?
That's what the government are doing.
That's what the government's doing now.
Yes, I'm a barbarian and I always have been a barbarian.
And the other thing I've realised is that it isn't the kind of the Western intellectual tradition to see, I mean it's actually a sort of liberal progressive view, the idea that
history has been a a period of of of progress towards towards the kind of uh what francis fukuyama called the end of history you know where where everything is just we've got all our institutions sorted we've got we've got the un to look after peace we've got nato we've got it's all okay don't worry about it little man you know it's all we've got your back and i realize now I mean, this is pretty happy occasion.
No, it's never acceptable.
It's not!
It's just these... No.
We are, right now, we are experiencing the same group hysteria that saw those girls being hanged or burned as witches in Salem.
Not just that, in terms of the witches.
I read that a lot of the girls actually confessed in terms of why are people going along with it.
They actually said, yeah, yeah, yeah, I got on my broom last night and went whizzing around the neighbourhood.
That's how deep That's how deep the hysteria was.
It wasn't like a forced confession.
They actually kind of believed it.
People believe the NHS will just close down tomorrow even though it's a massive institution that can never close.
Yeah, when you think about, you mentioned the First World War.
I mean, the appetite among the young men of Europe, and of course, the parents as well, you know, sort of giving them white feathers if they didn't get it.
It was... Well, that's the shaming, right?
That's the shaming.
That's the same here.
If you don't have your NHS flag, you haven't done your bit.
You haven't gone off and gotten yourself blown up in the song.
So they shamed soldiers, women, shamed soldiers, obviously, in going to the front.
And yeah, a lot of... I mean, I think it was maybe a quarter of a million people signed up way before conscription.
I'm sure I would have done had I been around in 1914.
There was... Yeah, yeah, yeah!
There is that.
If you go to the Imperial War Museum, there's a great quote from some classical writer inscribed on the wall explaining how the men who'd never experienced war before were hungry for the experience.
I think it's a natural.
Well, that's even more justified.
It's just going out and sort of, that would have almost been seen as an adventure, right?
And proving yourself as a man is somehow justified.
Staying at home on your couch and watching Netflix, there's no justification for that.
That's just, they're just doing that to kill your soul.
Yeah, but Laura, this is our version of the First World War.
You think about the cultural currents that led to the First World War.
You've got, okay, people would have read the novels of G.A.
"Bed of red, Vitae Lamparda," "The sound of the desert is sodden red," "red with the wreck of a square that broke." All this play up and play the game.
The idea that you had a duty to go out and fight for your empire, whatever.
So that was then.
Now we've got 50 years of cultural softening where we've been taught that altruism is the most important thing and men must rein in their masculinity and become more feminine.
So in a way this is the kind of the anti-war but it's as bad in its way as the war.
If you've got asthma stay at home and be terrified even though you're a 20 year old bloke.
When I see the young men wearing masks as well, it makes me almost as angry as when I see the women with the young babies wearing masks.
It's just like, what's wrong with you?
What is wrong with you?
I totally agree.
I agree.
Now listen, this is good.
This is a moment of cultural defiance.
My wife, Has brought me a cup of coffee and like like like wives used to do back in the day and it's great well there are there are we could go on and I'll tell you that we'll end with what some good points from what you know what we could we could make This bearable.
But I'm going to put in one film reference because I watched it in the last lockdown and you'd be surprised.
So the new remake of Robocop, right?
It's worth watching the first half an hour of that because it has an evil TV network dude.
I think it's Samuel Jackson, is it?
And then it has like another congressman.
So they want to introduce RoboCops and I think it's the Republicans who are like, no, because we need a human to make the final decision to take someone's life, okay?
That's what we need to do.
And the polls agree, no RoboCops.
And what are the politicians, honest to God, no, are they maybe the guys who make the RoboCops say, let's change the public's minds?
That's all we have to do.
Show a polling that's different, right?
So what they do, and so you have your Pierce Morgan, sorry, I mean Samuel L. Jackson on the TV every night saying how we must have RoboCops because, and this is not a word of a lie, it'll be much safer for Americans and what's more important than the safety of Americans?
And I just thought, safetyism, even then, it wasn't like, no, the value of, as I said, a human making the ultimate decision to take a life is what's important.
No, safety is what's important.
And they can cock this thing and they manipulate the public mood and the polls.
And of course, eventually they get their Robocop or something.
But the first half an hour, it's definitely It's a good watch.
I'm just like, it's just everywhere.
You know, this is what people do.
That is, that is extraordinary precedent, isn't it?
It just shows that we've, there are intelligent people who've been aware of this stuff and who see what's happening now.
Can I give you, if you're a Netflix person, do you ever watch series on Netflix?
Mmm, the whole thing does.
No, listen.
Go on, what do you want?
I totally recommend To The Lake.
To the Lake is the TV event of this year, okay?
Russian-made, Russian-made, get this, made last year, about this deadly flu outbreak and the effects it has on Russia.
But the flu itself is just the MacGuffin.
It's basically about, it's a bit like the Day of the Triffids.
It's called a sort of benign apocalypse, something like that.
A cosy apocalypse, I think Brian Alders called it.
So it's about a group of family and friends fleeing to this remote lake where, presumably, they're going to find safety.
But there's a particular episode, episode 5, where the state responds with a thuggery not dissimilar to what we're experiencing now, only a kind of Russian-style thuggery.
So we've got Troops in kind of full NBC kit rounding up villagers and actually shooting them.
And there's a fantastic scene where this bunch of stock Russian peasants, they're all alcoholics, they all look kind of really rattled, are talking about this and whether the government's measures are proportionate.
And one of them says, well, you know, it seems to make sense to me, you know, if you sort of shoot people who are infected, because after all, they could spread the virus.
Anyway, in the course of the episode, the peasants come to realize that actually, no, what's going on is really wrong.
We've got to resist this stuff.
I tell you what, if I were a teacher, I would make this series compulsory viewing.
It's quite gory, but my God, it does tell you a lot about what's going on now.
Yeah, no, I mean, it is often a minority that starts the resistance.
It's never, you know, but I mean, the mainstream media is obviously a problem.
It's a big, big problem.
My professional lighting has started to, the battery's getting a strain effect, so I'm inducing epileptic fix in anyone prone to that.
I'd like to say thank you very much, Laura Perrins, of Conservative Woman And my God, Laura, it's good to have you on the show and good to have somebody as combative as myself fighting the fight.
So well done for that.
Please, can I remind...
Those of you who like this stuff, please support me on Patreon or Subscribestar.
It really does help.
And my God, we're living in a world where increasingly the bad guys are winning.
If you want to help fight the fight, yeah, support me on Patreon or Subscribestar.
And thank you, Laura, once again for being a brilliant guest.