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Dec. 5, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
02:01:22
Jamie Blackett
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Welcome to the DelicPod with me, James DelicPod.
And I really am excited about this week's special guest, and I know I always say this, but Jamie Blackett has got an interesting story to tell.
He's got lots of hinterland, which I like.
I've met him I met you on a grouse moor among other places, didn't I, Jamie?
You did, yeah.
That's a terrible admission, isn't it?
But yeah, we did meet there, didn't we?
I thought it would be good to mention it to wind up all the people who disapprove of grouse moors.
I just think grouse shooting is just one of the best things in the world and I only discovered it this year.
Well, you're a true conservationist then, James.
Yeah, bloody right.
Absolutely bloody right.
I mean, what I learned in my small amount of time on the moors is just how well managed these ecosystems are in a way that, say, if the RSPB manages the land, they're not, because they're eco-fascists, basically.
They're subject to all the kind of the wrong thing that grips Enviroloons and they don't do things like they won't they won't cull predators which you need to do to be able to have biodiversity.
Yeah and sadly we were supposed to meet there earlier in the year weren't we and the lockdown prevented us but we were gonna watch a black cock lek together I think.
We were.
And I've been on that more in springtime and the extraordinary diversity of birdlife curlews and lapwings and golden plover and and all the really rare ground nesting birds that you
You never normally see anywhere else and Grouse Moors, unfortunately, it's the whole class warfare thing, has really muddied the waters and we need to get away from that and concentrate on all the good things that keep us doing.
If you remember that day we were together, we saw short-eared owls And Snipe and loads of Black Game.
I mean, Black Game, Blackhawks and Greyhounds.
That was the terrifying part, my God.
If you, the rule is, if you accidentally shoot a Blackhawk, which is what?
It's a type of grouse but it's a Blackhawk.
A black grouse, yeah, which are very, very rare in this country.
We're not that rare, I saw bloody loads.
I was bricking myself every drive.
I know, so was I. And if you shoot one, you get fined £500.
You have to give £500 to the conservation charity.
The game conservancy and that really concentrates the mind doesn't it when these grouse are hurtling towards you at 100 miles an hour, whatever they fly at.
Yeah, I've got to think quickly, you know, is this shot worth five?
Yeah, and and and I just it really depresses me how the Well, I think you're part of the coining of the phrase watermelon, aren't you?
I think the people who are green on the outside but red all the way through.
Yeah, red on the inside.
I was going to just describe you.
I actually met you, first of all, at another friend's house in Scotland where you live.
Our friend Mark Miller, who I absolutely love and I know you do as well.
I didn't know much about you other than that you had a farm in... What's this part of Scotland called?
Galloway.
Galloway.
Which is a lovely part of the country.
Soft.
It's softer than the kind of the hill country, isn't it?
It's not like the Cairngorms or anything like that.
It's a lovely agricultural country.
On the Scottish Riviera.
And you and your family has been farming this spot since 1850, was it?
Yeah, yeah.
1852, yeah.
So you're not some kind of ghastly, as I imagine that a lot of Scots would view you now, because Scotland is becoming increasingly xenophobic, I would say, towards the English.
Anglophobia is a big issue, yeah.
You're part of this landscape.
Your family's been bound to this.
When I first met you, I remember sensing a sort of gentle melancholy about you.
I'm sorry to say that, but I hope you won't be offended.
Having dipped into your rather excellent book about your life here and about what it means to you, I understand your position that you are a bit like farmers that I'd met who had farms in Kenya in the 1950s or maybe a better analogy is people who had farms in Rhodesia and Zimbabwe.
who were living in paradise, who had a fantastically prosperous, happy existence amid the most beautiful nature.
And slowly their lives were taken away from them, their properties were taken away from them, eventually confiscated by Mugabe.
And I think what's happening now in Scotland is really not dissimilar.
That Nicola Sturgeon is like our homegrown Mugabe, who is slowly expropriating land and ruining the lives of people like you.
Well it hasn't got that bad yet.
I mean there are certainly people in the SNP and certainly in the Scottish Green Party who have got this radical land reform agenda.
I've got a deep knowledge of Zimbabwe because my wife Sherry comes from there and as you know they lost their farm there.
And I hope it never comes to that in Scotland but at the moment what I'm seeing is I sort of relating very much to farmers I knew in Northern Ireland when I was serving there as a soldier.
And what we're seeing in Scotland is the the ulcerization of Scotland.
Polarized communities Slight sort of intimidation going on, the projection of power.
They bus people down from the central belt down to Dumfries to march around the town with flags waving.
It sounds like Germany in the early 30s.
It really is, deliberately I think.
National socialism is pretty similar wherever it rears its head.
I mean it's really a power thing.
It's about grabbing power and it's about making the population bend to your will.
And of course the pandemic has really allowed the state to interfere in people's lives in lots of ways.
And I know that you have strong feelings about what's going on in England.
The difference is that I think Boris Johnson's government is by nature for liberty and personal liberties and that hence their slight dithering possibly over lockdowns and things.
The the SNP have really leapt at this chance to insert the state into places where it really shouldn't go.
And they have tried to make people, they seem to have had a deliberate policy of people relying on the state rather than on family and friendships.
And what I mean by that is that, you know, we've had really quite scary examples of a narcissist regime where people have been encouraged to stand on their doorsteps and clap for Nicola.
We've had really quite scary social media footage of children as young as six being filmed saying thank you Nicola for keeping us safe.
And we're talking about a regime here whose first instinct on dealing with the pandemic was to try to suspend trial by jury.
And to suspend freedom of information because they felt that, you know, the government, the Scottish government was going to be too busy to deal with information requests because they would be so busy dealing with the pandemic that they just suspended freedom of information requests, made them much harder.
We've got this hate crimes legislation that they seem to be pushing.
Which is terrifying.
Absolutely terrifying.
This character Hamza Yusuf, Hamza Yousaf is, I think, one of the most divisive politicians anywhere, really.
Well, divisive is a bit of a polite word, because I think he's much worse than that, isn't he?
I mean, divisive, people always use the word divisive about Margaret Thatcher.
I think it's a bit of a sort of cop-out word.
Hamza Yusuf is a very unpleasant demagogue.
I mean, this hate speech thing is a tremendous threat to free speech.
I think it is.
I mean, there's a magazine that you and I both write for from time to time.
And speaking to one of the editors there, they discussed it and thought, you know, it would make it that they probably couldn't publish in Scotland anymore.
I mean, this really strikes at the roots of our society, this sort of thing, and they still have this wish for every child in Scotland to have a state guardian, which is, I think, a deliberately Marxist To try to, you know, insert a sort of wedge between parents and their children, such that they had in East Germany and places like that.
I mean, you know, people, I will, when nationalists listen to this podcast, they will throw all sorts of stuff at me.
On social media, I remember a few weeks ago the Times came to interview me and there was that usual box at the end of the profile where it was, you know, what was my favourite piece of music and all that kind of thing.
You didn't say host vessel, did you?
I didn't, no.
What I did say, when it came to, they said, which historical figure do you identify with?
I said, well, it's a bit presumptuous for me to identify with any historical figure, but it was at the time of the Battle of Britain, anniversary and I said that I'd been thinking a lot about Phil Marshall Dowding who is a local man.
He came from Moffat in Dumfriesshire where there's a memorial to him.
And I said I've been thinking a lot about him lately because without him we'd have been ruled by the SNP since 1940 in collaboration with the Nazis.
Yeah.
Which is historically true because the early SNP was the Scottish equivalent of Mosley's Blackshirts and they did have a plan to be the Scottish Quislings.
Ironically they they call unionist quizlings, which is a really bitter irony.
They always project, basically.
Yeah.
Anyway, they then got a no lesser figure than Professor Sir Tom Devine, the most eminent historian in Scotland, to denounce me on the front page of the national newspaper for these outrageous comments to denounce me on the front page of the national newspaper for these But there is something really deeply authoritarian about the SNP.
And, you know, we're seeing this increasingly with the way they behave.
And it does, I think, go back to those early roots.
Yeah.
You mentioned their shocking policy where every child is going to have a named guardian and I think you mentioned Marxism.
Yeah, I mean they're not pushing that at the moment but they keep coming back at it.
Oh yeah, it's not going to go away.
But it's not just Marxism that does this.
Every totalitarian movement separates children.
They try to break the bonds of parent and child.
Look at what happened in the Cultural Revolution under Mao, for example.
The children were encouraged to denounce their parents.
Why do they do this?
Because they want the state to be your parent.
Yes, I mean Nicola Sturgeon, she calls herself the chief mummy.
She doesn't.
That's a sort of deliberate attempt to become the sort of mother of the nation.
I mean it's a weirdly narcissistic way of thinking but it's also rather revealing isn't it?
It's very spooky what's going on at the moment and as you know we now have a movement in Scotland to Try and encounter this and it's striking how many women in particular coming forward now quietly, you know, not wanting to perhaps support us too overtly.
Again, it reminds me so much of what went on in Northern Ireland when I was serving there of a population that was really in many ways quite quite scared.
I mean you'd go out on patrol and you would see people perhaps driving towards you down the road and they would just quietly lift one finger off the steering wheel just to say you know don't worry I'm on your side.
Interesting.
Was this in sort of bandit country?
Yeah this was in South Armagh which is a very very similar Part of the country to Galloway.
I mean the landscape is is almost identical the The farming community is is almost identical and And this is what really scares me.
I think the way Scotland is going with these polarized communities people people never used to fly flags anywhere in Scotland when I was growing up and And now when you see the Saltire in a garden in a village, you know, that's somebody there making a deliberate statement that they are a nationalist.
I mean, they have stolen our flag.
The national flag of Scotland is now associated with one particular community in the way that in Northern Ireland you would particularly in Belfast you know you'd go from Shankill Road where even the kerbstones were painted you know red white and blue across down into the Falls Road and and you know there you were everything would be green white and orange.
Yes.
And I mean that there's always been sectarianism in Glasgow.
Rangers and Celtic.
And the SNP have made a great show of bringing in legislation to ban certain football songs being sung and that kind of thing.
But at the same time what they've really done is actually very subtly spread that sectarianism all the way across Scotland.
And it's really becoming quite toxic and families are divided over the issue, communities, workplaces are really becoming more and more divided now.
And I think next year's elections could be really unpleasant.
The independence referendum in 2014 was a deeply traumatic experience for Scotland because it divided communities and families.
And that is why I think people are getting so fed up with this neverendum, you know, this constant going on about, you know, must have a referendum, we've got a mandate for a referendum, why won't the government let us have a referendum?
And I never really sensed any of that growing up in Scotland.
It's just come about in the last 10 years or so.
And I think it's the Scottish equivalent really of Trumpism, of Orbánism in Hungary, of of the xenophobic Little Englander strand of Brexitism.
You know, it's a response to something deeper.
It's a response, I guess, mainly actually to central belt Scotland, post-industrial Scotland, feeling left behind by globalism and reaching out to this nationalism that's there on offer.
I mean, it's...
It's not by any means the answer to their problems, quite the opposite really.
But as a massive Trump fan and someone who believes that he's the only person who's going to save us, I think there are certain key distinctions between Trump's base and Nicola Sturgeon's base.
Because she's coming from a Yeah, it's nationalist, and I suppose in common with Trump who is also nationalist, but at the same time the political strains that the ideologies that she's borrowing from are very much Fascism stroke Marxism.
Yeah, he's not he's not talking into that at all.
No No, no, I think I think it's The where the similarity is is that they're both demagogues and appealing to people's base instincts.
Trump reaching out to the sort of redneck Midwest anger.
Yeah, middle America.
Sort of middle American.
Which is justifiable.
Anger, yes.
And Sturgeon very cleverly tapping into this real feeling in In the central belt, particularly in the old mining areas, the steel towns, you know, and they feel failed by the Tories and failed by Labour.
I mean, there's always talk of this great Tory revival.
But if you go to any of these places, they look at you as if you're completely mad.
If you suggest that, you know, maybe they're going to vote Tory.
They say, look, we understand why Mrs Thatcher had to close down the mines and the mills.
Deep down we knew that it was inefficient, that it couldn't last, whatever.
What we can never forgive her for is the fact that there was no plan B and we've just been left hanging here for two generations with no jobs.
And of course, you know, Labour really failed them as well.
You know, Tony Blair came in and nothing changed.
Their lives didn't improve, they were still jobless and Nothing has happened.
And that's where it's very different.
Scotland is very different to the red wall northern cities in England.
Who have, you know, come out in droves and voted for Boris.
Yeah, not again I imagine.
Well, possibly not.
Possibly not.
But, you know, so the Nationalists very cleverly saw a gap in the market and they've been selling this dream.
And the dream, I think, you know, would very rapidly turn into a nightmare for them if it ever came to reality.
But nevertheless, it is a dream that gives hope to people who had no hope before and sustains them.
And politicians in Scotland have Well, part of the problem is that they're hopefully, hopelessly divided against themselves.
We've got this tripartite system where the nationalists have cornered 50% of the vote for one party, the SNP, and the Tories, the Labour and the Liberals are dividing the other 50% between them.
They are guaranteed under the first-past-the-post part of our system here, this continental system, a hybrid system of constituency votes and then proportional representation list votes.
The the SNP have have got themselves into a really strong position and they're backed by the Scottish Greens who are in effect your your term watermelons Marxists really with a green cover who are also separatists and between the two of them they've got themselves into a really strong position and I think
Every schoolchild knows, or used to know, that Hitler rose to power in Germany because of the proportional representation that they had in the Weimar Republic.
If things go on as they are then every school child in 50 years time will be learning about how the nationalists in Scotland used a similar system to get themselves into a position where they are pretty much a one-party state.
Yes, this is very much the feeling I'm getting about Scotland.
Just rewind a bit.
When I was When I was growing up, when I was sort of starting to know about the world, you know, maybe I was a university or whatever, the Scottish education system was superior to the English one.
Scotland had the most incredible tradition of producing the greatest thinkers of the British Imperial period.
Yes, the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment.
They started the Enlightenment.
Yeah.
Adam Smith.
David Hume.
David Hume.
Yeah.
All these brilliant people.
These soldiers.
Explorers.
Everything.
And we had this fantastic relationship.
I mean it was a kind of like a sort of bickering couple.
But you know Dr. Johnson and James Boswell.
But this went back centuries.
And I mean you think about the Are you a Richard Hannay fan?
Yes.
Are you a big John Buchan?
Yes.
And you read those John Buchan novels and the Scotland it describes there.
Yeah.
Is like paradise.
Yeah.
Really happy place.
Happy place.
Yeah.
People happy in their skin.
Yeah.
People actually frankly better than the English.
Yes.
I don't get that feeling now at all.
It's an unhappy, crabbed, bitter place full of resentment.
How did that happen?
I mean it can't just have been Thatcher's fault can it?
What happened?
No it wasn't just Thatcher's fault but I think unfortunately it happened a lot of it on her watch.
But the whole of Great Britain was in industrial decline.
Yeah.
It needed to reinvent itself.
Why didn't Scotland benefit from that kind of, that 80s recovery?
Well, I mean, I think in some places we did.
I mean, there were places.
The Edinburgh financial sector, for example, was the second biggest financial sector after London in the UK.
In fact, I think the second biggest in Europe after London at one stage because they had all the pension funds and things there.
There were a lot of very good Scottish industries and food and drink in particular and all the rest of it.
There was a partial recovery.
You go to places in East Ayrshire and Lanarkshire and the outskirts of Glasgow and Dundee, there's still terrible deprivation.
And there was not a revival in the way that there was, say, in Manchester, or the towns around Manchester.
And I'm sure there are lots of reasons for that.
But I think somehow Scots have been talked into grudge and grievance and it's all the English fault.
The English are doing the job of the Jews basically in Nazi Germany because you always need a hate figure.
As Orwell said with his character Immanuel Goldstein in 1984, you need a hate figure so that you can...
Yeah, yeah, it fed that anglophobia.
I mean, not helped by the fact that, I mean, actually, you know, it was fairly obvious that all the wealth was accruing to the southeast of England.
Yeah, but despite the Barnett formula where people in Scotland get more money from the British government.
So, you know, I mean, I don't get this.
There's got to be something going on, something that happened to Scotland.
That somehow rendered it incapable of enjoying the boom that it could have had in the 80s.
And is it that kind of welfarism mentality?
Did the Scots suddenly stop respecting themselves?
Did they start sucking on the teachers?
Well I think I think welfarism does have a lot to answer for it actually and I wrote about that quite a bit in my book in Red Rag to a Bull that you talked about earlier about seeing
people living in the around here in the countryside who were blatantly really sort of milking the system and had lost all pride in themselves as a result really and I I think, you know, the Nationalists have tapped this deep well of resentment, grudge and grievance.
And there has been a counter-enlightenment, there is no doubt.
An endarkenment.
Yeah, absolutely.
We've somehow just retreated from the age of reason that Smith and Hume led the way on, really, as you said, back into superstition and religions.
Religions now being, you know, the religion of the NHS and Welfareism and whatever, rather Well that must be another element.
I imagine church going has declined and it's been replaced by these secular religions.
Yes, exactly.
A retreat into secular religions, into superstition.
You know, the English are stealing our money.
And aided really by post-modernism.
You know, it's identity politics.
is really used the whole time now in Scotland.
You know, yuninists are demonized as yuns.
And if you're tainted with being a yun, then, you know, the cybernats every night crawl out from underneath coffin lids and attack old ladies on Twitter, you know, for being yuns.
This is identity politics and the counter-enlightenment I think is something that various writers in Scotland are increasingly starting to explore because you know there is There are very few rational arguments for independence.
I mean, you could make a sort of small is better argument.
But if small really was better, you would actually split Scotland up into much smaller entities, political entities.
You wouldn't leave the dominant central belt ruling places like Dumfries and Galloway, where we're very rural and don't think the same.
way at all and I think that that may be ultimately what happens is that once the nationalist genie is out of the lamp then Shetland is already saying well hang on a second you know we'll go back to being the kingdom of Shetland thanks very much yeah and there's quite a bit of that sort of thing going on at the moment which is which is interesting Is Shetland, by the way, what are its politics?
Is it like us or is it like Cybernet?
They're deeply pro-monarchy, pro-being British.
But I think what they would really like to be is have dominion status like the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man.
That's how they see themselves, I think.
I see, right.
Well, now you mention Isle of Man, that gives me an idea.
Okay, so maybe low tax?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, they own most of the oil.
Not that the oil is probably worth very much anymore.
And a lot of the fish.
I've got shares in this oil company which is exploiting that territory.
It seems to be doing very well.
Right.
So I think, you know, it's not over yet.
It's not over yet by any means.
I think the the boom years are over.
Yeah.
Yeah, but then my dog came in and doubled down and pushed over my water glass.
Yeah, so thing is Jamie, tell me about your resistance first of all to this, your resistance movement to this, what you're hoping to achieve.
Yeah, well it's right to call it a resistance movement because I first sort of came across it when I, if you remember, a year or so back I changed direction in my life and became a journalist.
It's not something I'd really been before, I'd written a couple of books.
Can I just say, bloody stupid thing to do.
I mean, you know, you think being a farmer's bad.
Try being a journalist in 2020.
It's just a shit job.
I'm sorry.
It really is.
And I'm fortunate in occasionally earning a little bit from farming.
You've got cows and you've got properties that you rent.
And having an army pension.
I'm a pensioner.
Oh well done.
But yeah journalism, young people increasingly ask me for advice about being a journalist and I say well try to think about it as a second income because unfortunately it just seems to be dying doesn't it?
The reason you should do journalism Jamie is the reason that you do it because you're very good at it.
You write like a dream And I really do think that.
You write about country matters, about your life here.
You've got your column in Country Life.
It's a joy to read.
You write for The Telegraph occasionally, you write for The Spectator.
But it's a hobby.
You're a hobby Well it's a bit more, actually it's more than a hobby, it has become quite consuming, but it's added something.
The pay, come on, you can't live on no pay.
No.
The rates are so low now.
Yeah, but it's added an important dimension to my life actually now that you know I normally have a book review or something on the boil and it I do find it really it makes me think and it also really most importantly helps me put my point of view across and It probably helps you to work out what it is you think exactly.
Yes, yes and anyway I was sort of, and you talk about journalists earning no money, I mean I became a journalist partly because various literary agents said your books are fantastic Jamie but writing books makes no money.
And so, you know, maybe think about the books as being a way of advertising yourself and become a columnist, which is, you know, as you know, what I've done.
But anyway, various people then said, okay, if you're going to be a proper journalist, you've got to get yourself on Twitter.
And that again opened up a whole new world for me.
I mean, in some ways, not in a good way.
It's like opening the portals of hell.
I know, yeah, because you come across all these sort of shouty people.
Well, you get shouted at a lot more than I do.
And then I suddenly became aware of this Scottish resistance movement on Twitter.
With some really highly honourable, decent, intelligent people.
Many of them grandmothers, retired academics, churchmen.
James Macmillan.
James McMillan.
He's a hero.
Have you come across him?
No.
Oh my god!
Only the greatest living British composer.
Okay.
And he's Scottish.
Yeah.
And he's one of you.
Okay.
I mean he actually believes in... Does he call himself something else on Twitter?
Because a lot of people hide their identity.
A lot of people, but particularly women for understandable reasons, hide their identities on Twitter because they get some really unpleasant threats and You know, their personal security would be compromised if they identified themselves.
You're right.
Cybernats are the most aggressive, viciously aggressive people on Twitter.
The worst.
Yeah, and they are, let's be quite clear about this, Sinn Féin IRA, who are very close friends of the SNP, are a dualist organisation with a paramilitary wing and a political wing.
And the SNP are organised along very similar lines.
And the cybernats are, you know, they're the shock troops of nationalism in cyberspace.
And they deliberately intimidate people.
So I came onto it and I thought, Oh my god.
Because down here in rural Galloway you don't really see it very much.
You know most people down in this neck of the woods are unionists and the few nationalists that there are are not rabid, they don't tend to be terribly rabid separatists.
But on Twitter, I thought, oh my god, what is going on?
And I find myself being sucked into this very dark world of this brave resistance, standing up to the state, really, or outriders of the state.
And so I started off on Twitter, you know, talking about agriculture and countering veganism.
Which is another kind of wedge, which is being inserted.
It is, yeah.
It's not an accidental thing, veganism.
Well, veganism, let's talk briefly about that.
That is an unholy alliance of Russoists.
Call them what you will, really, but a lot of them are Marxists, the watermelons that we've discussed.
An unholy alliance of them, a lot of them having their strings pulled by corporate capitalism, big food, big food.
I mean, in the context of Covid, and this is fascinating, really, I mean, we would not have had to have national lockdowns and all that kind of thing.
If our metabolic health as a nation had been okay, we would have just shielded the elderly and Covid would not have been deadly for most people.
But anybody with type 2 diabetes is in mortal danger from Covid.
Type 2 diabetes is a condition that was virtually unknown until this generation and it's been caused by corporate capitalists, big food essentially, feeding us these processed foods.
Corn syrup and stuff like that?
Yeah, this sort of gloop that in all these, you know, the fake meat, the processed ready meals and all the rest of it, which contain deeply unpleasant vegetable oils, lots of soya, Lots and lots of sugar and carbs and and you know we are not
We're not designed, we haven't evolved eating too many grains and things.
We're designed to eat meat.
We're designed to eat meat and green vegetables and fruit and whatever, eggs and dairy products, you know, whatever we can sort of... Protein.
Yeah, protein and saturated fats.
And it's been astonishing actually how there's been a sort of news blackout on this this year.
I mean I thought, I don't know why politicians didn't say look we've got this problem.
You've all got to eat really well now.
Think about what you eat and get out in the sunshine and get lots of vitamin D. Instead we were all told to stay inside and out of the sunshine and nobody said anything about eating healthily and I thought that was quite extraordinary.
I think for a fraction of the budget that the government has blown on Mountains of PPE which are never going to be used and then their ridiculous test and trace which all it does is actually increase the number of false positive tests and give a false impression of the status of the disease in the country.
For a fraction of the price, they could have given us a prime T-bone steak each, every day, with free salad, and we'd have been sorted.
Spinach, yeah.
Eggs on top, lots of cheese.
I mean, you know, I think everybody goes on about how the UK, and Scotland in particular actually, although that statistic never comes out, has fared worse than other countries.
Well, it's quite simple.
We have the worst diet of anywhere in the Western world.
You must have so many type 2 diabetics here, I imagine.
Yes, I think there are a lot.
And they are, you know, they're very scared and quite understandably because they would be very ill if they got COVID.
Well, you're absolutely right.
I've read papers on this that there are receptors in your body as a result of type 2 diabetes which actually render you much more vulnerable to Covid and you are, as you say, more likely to Yeah, yeah.
And people are failing to draw the obvious deduction.
I mean people talk about the great reset and build back.
To me the first thing that he's doing is sorting out the nation's diet.
And as a libertarian that sort of rather pains me because that means you've got to be a bit sort of nanny state about it.
But, you know, we need to stop big food making us ill and then having to rely on big pharma to make us better again.
Yes.
So that was my sort of mission early on on Twitter and I came across all sorts of wonderful people on there.
Dr. Tim Noakes down in South Africa and Frank McCloner in the States and All these wonderful people.
Anyway, as I said, I then was drawn into this anti-nationalist resistance.
Yes.
And people started sort of getting a hold of me on Twitter through DMs.
Yeah.
And saying, look, we like what you've been saying.
Be our leader.
Well, not really, but yeah, they were looking for leadership.
Because, I have to say, from outside, if you're living in England, it is very tempting to look up at Scotland and think it's a lost cause.
That is so dangerous, people in England thinking that.
And that is so dangerous for so many reasons.
One is that obviously we don't want to be abandoned to our fate.
But also the little Englanders who think you know we'd be much better off without those whinging jocks have not thought it through.
Former UK Abbreviation F-U-K.
Yeah.
The abbreviation is opposite.
Yeah.
Because you would be.
The loss of prestige in the world, you know, possibly the loss of the UN Security Council seat, the difficulty in remaining a nuclear power, no longer being an oil producing state, Just the loss of prestige.
I mean, we've only been called Great Britain since 1707.
That was a part of the whole Union package is, you know, we're now going to call ourselves Great Britain.
Could you really carry on calling yourself a United Kingdom if you'd lost half your mainland landmass, particularly as Ulster, you know, is But more than that Jamie, I mean I accept these are all bad things, but more than that you've got half the people in Scotland whose lives would be made miserable by that.
It's just like you can't betray... what's the population of Scotland?
Six million or thereabouts.
So three million people at least who have every right to Well it gets worse than that because, you know, it comes back to this demographic imbalance, this demographic deficit where the urban, mainly socialist, central belt
would be dictating to rural Scotland, which is very unlikely to vote for independence, I think.
think.
I mean, last time, 2014, over 60%, or around 60%, anyway, of rural Scotland in the South Scotland and in the North voted for independence.
It What the vote was for in 2014 actually was for the city-states of Glasgow and Dundee to become independent.
That was the result.
Edinburgh did not vote for independence and you would end up with this this ghastly authoritarian state where everybody in rural Scotland would be deeply unhappy because you know the lashes go on about you know whenever there's a Tory government they go on about we we've ended up with a government we didn't vote for
Well, you know, the rest of Scotland, most of the land mass of Scotland, sure as hell would end up with a government that they haven't voted for.
So you've formed this resistance with unlikely character George Galloway.
Well, I was sort of part of this resistance and I'd sort of somehow tapped into this dissident intelligentsia, academics, a lot of them retired academics or current academics who were having to be very quiet about what they were doing.
And quite separately, George Galloway, who is somebody who normally I would have been poles apart from, quite separately to this, came up with this genius idea of forming a formal anti-nationalist movement called the Alliance for Unity.
And George was... Somebody suggested to George that I was somebody he should speak to.
He was casting around to see if there would be enough support for it and whether there would be candidates who would be prepared to stand.
And so he came to see me here.
We had lunch together.
I wasn't quite sure what George was going to be like.
We'd already made contact when he very kindly endorsed one of my books.
He wrote something nice for the cover of Red Rag to a Bull.
And so I knew that we were sort of kindred spirits, in a sense, in that we both, I think, are very anti the big state.
And despite him being a socialist, he obviously likes aspects of the big state, but not the authoritarian ones.
And George came and had lunch and we, you know, we hit it off pretty well.
We found actually that there was a lot, we had a lot more that united us and divided us and, you know, it's a sort of
It's an extraordinary thing that I served in Northern Ireland while George was a leading member of the Troops Out movement and he was sharing a platform with Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness while I was, you know, trying to dodge the bombs and bullets and arrest some of their followers.
And I served in Iraq.
I went and evicted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait at the same time.
What was your regiment?
I was in the Coast Guard.
The oldest, the oldest regiment.
The oldest, the oldest regiment.
Indeed.
Indeed.
And I, anyway, we sort of, we kind of thought about this and we thought, well, actually, you know, if Ian Paisley and Marty McGuinness could actually become really good friends, if Ian Paisley and Marty McGuinness could actually become really good friends, which they did, I think, before they
And kind of get over their differences for a really important common cause of bringing peace to North Island.
Then, you know, George and I should really do the same.
And George joked on our first meeting, We were brought together by this mutual friend and he said well you know you're like Roosevelt you're bringing Churchill and Stalin together to defeat the Nazis to this friend and I think when you look back at the history of the Second World War some of Churchill's
Stoutest allies were people like George, people from the old Labour hard left tradition, Ernest Bevin and people like that.
And interesting that George, deep down, is a real patriot.
I mean, he's had a funny way of showing it sometimes, but the parliamentary motion to put up a memorial in London to Bomber Command If you remember it was deeply controversial because of the Hamburg firestorm and all that kind of stuff.
George was the only Labour MP to sign that motion and if you look back on Google you will find the articles he wrote at the time fiercely in support of a memorial to Bomber Command.
He has this interesting side to him where he can be deeply for a United Ireland but at the same time deeply for a United Britain.
Which seems, until you kind of think it through, to be slightly odd.
Which it is.
Which it is, but actually when you look more deeply into it, it's part of, you know, the Labour, parts of the Labour Party have always felt that.
So, I'm just conscious of the fact that I need a gin and I can hear voices next door of people having gins.
Yeah, we should hit the gin.
Well, I think we should have a gin and maybe continue this podcast after we've shot some wildlife or something.
Because apart from this, I want to find out a bit more about what you did in Iraq.
Because, you know, I mean, like, I'm interested in soldiering.
And also I'm interested in whether you share my view that the army has become completely cucked.
I don't know if you've got any insights on that one.
But anyway, we've got more to talk about.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Good.
Let's do that.
All right.
Let's go have a drink.
Okay.
Great.
Great.
Thank you.
Welcome back to The Delling Pod with me, James Delling Pod, my very special guest, Jamie Blackett.
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and you you join a community i call it cafe dellingpole it's like-minded people and i think we all recognize that the world is going to hell in a handcart and uh those of us who are fighting the fight need support so so thank you um jamie if i were a professional podcaster i mean like like a sort of i don't know really really good what i'd have done is i've gone through the previous hour of recording and listened carefully making sure i didn't repeat myself at any stage
But I'm just not that kind of... I think... Yeah, so people are just going to assume you're getting a bit senile, James, probably.
People who listen to the London Calling, my podcast with Toby, will know that occasionally Toby and I tell the same anecdotes for the third or fourth time.
And I think it's, you know what, I call it part of our charm.
Yeah.
It's the same with this.
Just like being in a sort of family conversation somewhere.
Exactly.
I think people like the authenticity of this pod and they like it's kind of rough edges.
Since we last spoke, I've got a better feel for Dumfries and Galloway and the people who live here and I just think you have a little corner of paradise here and there's just, there is a snake in the garden and we know what that snake's name is.
Yeah.
And I don't think that people in England particularly, there's a sense now that Scotland's over because you know it's... Because a lot of defeaters talk around Yes, and I would urge my compatriots not to abandon you Scots because I think we are better together and I think what Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP are doing to Scotland is unconscionable.
So thank you for fighting the fight.
Tell me about your alliance because I think it's really charming that you've decided to form a resistance.
I think we were talking a little bit about this and that resistance is a good word as it grew out of the resistance and I think I'd got as far as saying that George Galloway had this genius idea really.
I mean he's a very clear thinker as you know and he just said look this business of the three old pre-devolution parties Conservatives, Labour and Liberals doing the same thing at every election and getting the same result is Einstein's definition of madness.
And so he formed this alliance, he came to see me, asked me if I would join and then we've now got to the point actually where we've now We've grown quite a big party and George has decided, well it was a sort of joint decision really, that he would step aside and I would take over as the leader.
You're the leader.
And what really the thinking behind that was we're still very much a partnership.
And we sort of complement each other quite well in terms of being at opposing ends of the spectrum politically, though we actually agree on most things, quite a lot of things really.
But also our skills sort of complement each other really.
I suppose I'm more of a somebody who uses their pen rather than speaks.
George is a terrific orator as we know probably the finest orator arguably in the country today and we thought well you know if we were a football team and we had this brilliant maverick star centre-forward
Would we burden him with the captaincy or would we give it to a midfielder and allow the centre-forward to do his thing and focus on being the spearhead of the attack and not necessarily have to worry about all the other things that go with being a leader of a party?
So we've just done that.
He's still very much going to be the outward face of the Alliance for Unity in lots of ways, but I'm now the leader.
And we've got some really excellent candidates who have just come forward.
They're really broad spectrum.
We've got some quite Right-wing people.
We've got a lot of very, sort of, liberal-minded people who were, I think, politically homeless, really, actually, in Scotland.
But I wouldn't describe them as right-wing or left-wing or anything, really.
But they have very, very strong views about what's happening in Scotland today.
And we've got a lot of people on the left, probably more people on the left than on the right because Scotland has a very strong Labour tradition and we don't want to change that.
So how are you going to...
I mean, I think there's a lot of people who feel politically homeless right now, not just in Scotland, but in England and elsewhere.
And I'm not sure that Conservatives and Labour are particularly doing the job for a lot of people right now.
So I think the time is ripe for disruptive movements like yours.
Are you just, I mean how are you going to have policies or are you just going to be the alliance for people who want to keep Scotland united?
Well what we have, when people, when I explain it to them in terms of a council people understand completely because on a lot of regional councils in Scotland
A lot of them are coalitions and believe it or not in Aberdeen which has just I think been judged voted I don't know how they these polls work but they asked people about their local councils and the one in Aberdeen people really like what's going on and that is a coalition of Tories and Labour believe it or not.
The Labour members have been excommunicated by the Labour Party for going into coalition with the wicked Tories but they're doing a thunderingly good job for the people of Aberdeen and on a lot of these councils you've got a lot of independence.
A lot of people sit as independents, as councillors.
And so people sort of understand that and that you know often that could work really well on a council and actually there's no reason why the Scottish Government as it is now called, nobody voted for there to be a something called the Scottish Government.
After devolution it was the Scottish Executive and then the Nationalists, very clever people that they are, got Westminster to agree in a moment of weakness that they would be called the Scottish Government.
Nobody in Scotland has ever actually voted on that.
So this assembly, this executive, this government, whatever you want to call it in Holyrood, is a sort of halfway house really between the councils and central government in London.
And it is, we think, would be better served, actually for a period of time anyway, being a coalition that included lots of very independently minded people.
Right.
And I think that would be good for several reasons.
One, I think it would stop the sort of groupthink that we've been seeing, you know, with Covid, for example.
Yeah.
You know there have been a lot of people questioning what's, you know, the policies of lockdown and whatever and I, you know, I'm not going to go into now whether what's right or what's wrong but it just seems to me that the politicians in Edinburgh have been like sheep.
They've all gone through the same gate.
Nicola Sturgeon has completely embraced Covid as her thing.
She's used it as an excuse to increase her power yeah and and and to stamp her brand yeah even more yeah forcefully yeah and the political class has by and large really gone along with a lot of these
things and that there has been quite a lot of groupthink and I think having a more independent you know more independence in the Parliament would help with that and it would also I think make make it far less corrupt because you would you know the party systems are by their very nature a little bit corrupting I think and having people in coalition It sort of keeps everybody right I think.
Sure, okay.
So am I right in thinking you've got proportional representation here and that's part of the problem?
Well we've got this this funny system where it's First-past-the-post in the constituency seats, but then you've got all these list seats.
So roughly half the seats are one on a first-past-the-post system and the other half roughly are on this DeHondt Continental Proportional Representation AV system.
And that's how they get into power?
The SNP.
They don't necessarily have a lot of votes but because of the system they... Well actually they win most of their seats on the first past the post system.
But on a minority of the vote more often than not.
It's comparatively rare for them to win a seat with more than 50% of the votes cast.
But the other half of the vote is split three ways.
Tory, Labour and Liberals.
So let me just spell this out for those Sitting at the back.
The SNP is absolutely the dominant party in Scotland right now.
And yet it has not even got 50% of the vote.
They've never received 50% of the vote and very often there's actually been quite a low turnout.
I think a lot of voters in Scotland have been rather turned off by the whole thing and what we're hoping is by bringing in some fresh voices, some new people, some new ideas that it's going to energise politics again.
George Galloway, people are really excited about George Galloway being back in politics in Scotland.
Whether they're right-wing or left-wing, it doesn't matter.
They think, you know, George actually in 2014 was by far and away, well either, you know, some people say Gordon Brown was the best debater in the independence referendum, but an awful lot of people say that George was.
I think he's going to energize it and I think having some really good candidates, which we have, who are experts in their field.
We've got two GPs covering health.
Well, one is covering health and the other is actually working on other stuff at the moment for us.
The SNP's record on health is deplorable.
We're short of 850 GPs in Scotland, which has exacerbated the whole Covid experience.
And it was only when this GP, Dr Bruce Halliday, who actually practices here in Dumfries, I said, well, why don't you write an article about what's wrong with health in Scotland?
And he just spelt it all out.
People said, gee whiz, I never knew that.
Why has nobody been telling us anything about that?
And it's because he, you know, he's an expert in his field.
He's not a professional politician.
He's somebody who's been at the coalface.
Arthur Keith, our veterans spokesman, You know really understands the problems that veterans, young men committing suicide and suffering from PTSD and often ex-servicemen are homeless or form a large proportion of the homeless.
There is a man who was regimental sergeant major of the Black Watch, comes from Dundee and served goodness knows how many times in Northern Ireland, in Afghanistan, he's been all over the world.
He really understands.
The spokesmen of the other parties don't have that experience.
I'm sold that you're going to produce some solid candidates with way more hinterland and knowledge and stuff.
I've seen SNP MPs, they're scary.
Well, they're sort of zealots.
They're stormtroopers is what they are.
And that I don't think is going to be your problem.
I think your problem is going to be, surely, that you have in power now a really ruthless party which uses the same techniques that Hitler used in the 1930s to gain power.
I mean, there are many parallels, are there not?
There are and you know as we discussed you know all these sort of cultural Marxism driving wedges into families between parents and children all this.
But they've really got a stranglehold on all the institutions in Scotland.
They centralise the police force.
That is really scary.
You know there used to be a chief constable of the local constabulary and he was you know sort of networked into the local hierarchy with the council and all that sort of thing.
Now that's all been centralised and pretty much under direct control of the government, you know, of Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf and these guys.
And I think people now are quite fearful of the police in Scotland in a way that they were not before because they sort of, I'm not I'm not saying that they are not doing a good job or anything like that, but there is just that element of thinking, well, you know, this police force is not accountable to us, the people.
It's accountable to the state, you know, and a state that we are not part of.
We're treated as the opposition.
I think the police thing is definitely a worry because there's a danger that... I mean, I imagine when you've got police constabularies divided up, when you've got several in the country.
I mean, I don't know how many there were.
Well pretty much every county had one originally and then under the reorganizations as the council areas got bigger the constabularies did as well.
I think you know we had the Dumfries and Galloway constabulary here and it had its own cat badge and its own identity really I suppose and you know we've lost that now.
But also I can just see from the point of view of If a local constabulary goes bad, I mean, I think there are examples in England There are there are some which are definitely worse than others.
They get a kind of dodgy reputation and they can be reformed from People parachuted in from uncorrupt constabularies or whatever.
Yeah, but if you've got one police department in the whole country, yeah and And it goes bad.
Yeah.
How do you get rid of the rotten apples?
Well, I mean, I think this is one of the difficulties, not just the police but throughout Scotland, is that they're all marking their own homework the whole time.
Yeah.
And this is particularly true in the Parliament.
The Holyrood Parliament was set up by Tony Blair and Donald Dewar pretty much as a sort of labour pocket burrow really.
Everything goes back to Tony Blair, all the evils of the world.
That man is just, he's Satan.
Yeah well he and Donald Dewar stitched up Scotland.
We ended up with a unicameral parliament and they said oh we don't need the House of Lords and we don't need a second revising chamber because our committees will do it all.
Well, you know, these committees obviously are packed out with with SMP people.
You know, we had the ludicrous situation where the Holyrood committee investigating possible Corruption within the SNP, the suggestion that Nicola Sturgeon and her administration had in some way interfered with the course of justice in the Salmon Trial and in the course of so doing it actually wasted £500,000 of taxpayers' money.
And the chairman of the inquiry was SMP.
So, you know, you're just always, and Scotland's a small place, and, you know, they're constantly, as I say, marking their own homework, and surprise, surprise, they're either awarding themselves gold stars or failing to award themselves black marks.
And there's just been this lack of scrutiny, you know, there's a hospital in Edinburgh that's been lying empty for years because they've messed up the contract, they've messed up ordering ferries to
You know the transport system was a mess and I think in England this sort of thing would have been called out a long time ago and scrutinized because the Parliament's committees in Westminster have real teeth and really get at the truth.
The Public Accounts Committee I think does, yeah.
And the Public Accounts Committee and well some are probably, some committees perhaps better than others but and then obviously there is the House of Lords as well.
And Holyrood is a weak system and I think, I mean, we as a party, because we're such a broad spectrum, we don't have a policy of, you know, we're not tying ourselves down to a policy, but we certainly are sympathetic to the idea that certainly Holyrood needs reforming.
And that the people maybe at some point should be given a vote again on whether they really want to carry on with this tier of government.
Well that'd be bloody marvellous if you got that far but you know baby steps eh?
I mean first of all you've got to deal with this Well we've got to get the nationalists out and we've got to get pro-union MSPs in and somehow we've got to get the three major parties talking to each other, working together and if they won't do that we've got to really make tactical voting work.
Yeah, I can't see... I don't know.
Maybe I'm wrong.
I can't see the Conservatives standing down their candidates.
They're so arrogant.
And I'm sure Labour are the same, aren't they?
Are they going to play ball?
Well I mean it's very difficult for them.
You can understand they've got their national sort of infrastructure of constituency chairman and ladies lunches and you know all that sort of stuff.
Sure but Scotland's being destroyed before your eyes and you thought people would realise this.
Yeah exactly and it's a hard sell.
I mean this is what they're coming back to me with very often is, well look we absolutely agree this is the right thing to do and we can see that your plan will work but how on earth are we supposed to sell this to our parties and our candidates?
How are they?
Well and I say well you know this this is about Scotland not about your party.
You've got to put the country first.
Isn't that so typical of what everyone says about Conservatives?
It's not just the Conservatives.
They're all the same really.
And actually are they really so different?
I mean they're all, in Scotland anyway, they're all social Democrats.
Really.
They're all on the Remain side of the argument on Brexit.
They're all pretty much on the same page about taxation and health and policing.
And George Galloway, in his inimitable way, came out with a great phrase the other day.
He talked about the narcissism of small differences.
That is really where we're at with these parties.
They're all so desperately trying to scrabble around on the centre ground and keep pretty close to the SNP actually.
I mean the SNP have dragged them because they've been so powerful in this leftward Pro-EU, anti-Brexit direction.
And so you say to them, well look, really, are you so different that you can't just work together?
And the system pretty much guarantees a coalition every time.
I mean, the SNP is in coalition with the Greens at the moment.
Why can't you just form a coalition before the election rather than after it?
Because we're a vanilla brand, people accuse us of being right-wing and you say Well do you really think George Galloway's right-wing?
Are you sure about that?
Yeah.
Well they accuse us of being a bunch of left-wing people and you go well hang on a second Jamie Blackett's you know George has teamed up with Jamie Blackett and two or three other people who are You know basically pretty pretty Toryish sort of people so how can they be a bunch of left-wing and so we're quite hard to attack from that point of view because you know we're all-encompassing and we don't want to
Be rude about the other three parties, we want to work with them.
Yeah, fair enough.
But we are frustrated that they won't just acknowledge the real Scottish politics at the moment in a way that in Hungary, for example, you probably know more about this than I do, but there has been this anti-Orban coalition formed by all the opposition.
I quite like Orbán, so I'm not so bothered by it.
Yeah, I think you probably do, but the precedent is there for an anti-nationalist coalition to be formed.
The thing that Nicola Sturgeon has got, apart from the tactics of the Nazi party, she's got this kind of...
She appeals to people's fantasies of, you know, yeah, we'll sort out the details later...
Never, you know, don't worry about the currency.
It's just gonna be better.
And the main thing is we're not the Westminster government.
We're not, you know.
The wicked tourists.
They've used xenophobia towards the English and they'll say the Germans, Nazis used it towards the Jews.
Land reform as well.
Is very Mugabe-esque isn't it?
I mean it's about it's a form of expropriation.
Well the extraordinary thing about it is what they've done so far is it's been transferring taxpayers money from the many to the few.
I mean if you if you were a crofter on South Uist or Ghea suddenly you hit the jackpot because the Scottish government egged on by the by their greed partners the gardening section as we call them have We've given them huge sums of money to buy these islands.
Many of these crofters are not the indigenous population.
Quite a lot of them are sort of dentists from Manchester and Birmingham.
We've got second homes of these crofts on these islands and things.
And so they do these community buyouts.
All this taxpayer's money could be spent on schools or hospitals or whatever.
And suddenly you've, instead of having, okay, so instead of having one family who owns this estate you've got 20 or 30 families but you know how is that so much better really because it's taxpayers money and then and then they have to carry on you know bailing them out because what they didn't really think through is that some of these big sporting estates they've been buying up in the Highlands and Islands
never ever made any money you know they were propped up by you know some rich man working his arse off in London or Hong Kong or somewhere to make all the money to to pay the bills so that he could go there a few times a year and enjoy himself with his family and and you know that supported the local economy and all the rest of it
And I'm not saying... I mean, some community buyouts have been successful.
The Mull of Galloway, I think, is one that's held up as an example.
I'm not completely against them, but I am against taxpayers' money being wasted for ideological reasons.
Yeah, well, I think somebody told me a story last night about how some wealthy landowner sold his island to this community and they made such a mess of it that they begged him to buy it back.
Well yes, it wasn't the guy who'd sold it but it was the family before that and without going into any names or where it was but certainly there have been, I know of at least one instance where it's actually led to unhappiness within the community because they then fall out over, you know, You know, if they need to spend money on repairs or something, they have to, you know, they have to go and argue their case for the money.
It's all this sort of... With the committee.
Well, it's sort of micro-communism, isn't it, really?
Yeah.
And, yeah, I think a lot of them have said, you know, actually, if we had our time again, we wouldn't do this.
You know, I mean, I think that, you know, there have been lots of quite exciting projects on the land in Scotland.
Some people, you know, wilding and all sorts of getting going.
Some of it's been good, some of it's been bad.
Wilding is bollocks.
It is, yeah.
I mean, are you going to be telling me that wolves are good next?
Or sea eagles?
Well, the sea eagles... They've been carrying away sheep!
The sea eagles have been...
The unintended consequences of the sea eagles have been terrible, really.
I mean, there are these poor crofters trying to make a living with their sheep.
And the sea eagles, you know, there were sea eagles in Victorian times, but in those days they lived off fish.
Now, of course, there aren't any fish because the common fisheries policy.
has destroyed the fish stocks and so they prey on the lambs instead.
And if you introduce, whether it's seagulls or wolves or whatever it is, if you introduce a predator, an apex predator, well the trouble is it isn't an apex predator.
So the wind farm is the apex predator?
It's a meso predator and man actually is the apex predator.
So if you introduce a big predator and then don't cull it or control it in some way, Then you do terrible damage to the whole hierarchy of wildlife beneath it.
We see it the whole time with ground nesting birds, lapwings and golden plumbers and things in this part of the world.
You used to see them the whole time, now you hardly ever see them.
What, because they've all been eaten by the eagles?
Well, I think it's more badgers and... Oh, I see, because the estates aren't being controlled.
We've mentioned this before about the RSPB who don't cull predators for ideological reasons.
Well, you're not allowed to cull badgers and so the numbers have exploded.
Is that an SNP ruling, is it?
No, it happened long before that.
I see, yeah.
That's why we've got far fewer bubble bees and grass snakes and hedgehogs and all of these animals that are endangered now.
It's largely as a result of us failing to either do our duty as a sort of apex predator or allow other predators to do the job.
I wanted to just change subject totally, because apart from being a political campaigner, you're also a farmer, the latest in a long line of farmers who've farmed this estate.
And you were telling me that you've shifted from beef cattle to dairy.
Yeah.
And because you were being shafted by all the... the Irish farmers were being subsidized?
Well, I just sort of felt, you know, Brexit has been a big Wake up call.
You know, it's been a huge disruption.
Massive anticlimax.
And it's, it probably actually, for most professions and trades, it actually hasn't had that much impact.
But farming and, you know, the land is obviously one part of the economy, definitely is going to be turned upside down because That is really the the the EU had privacy over agricultural policy and fisheries policy but not a lot else actually.
So you did okay under the EU?
Well I think okay is probably the right word because you know whatever happened you were guaranteed your subsidies.
Increasingly I was feeling and a lot of farmers are feeling that The whole bureaucratic superstructure was increasingly mad, really.
You know, there are probably just as many bureaucrats in agriculture as there are actual farmers.
I can imagine, yeah, like Soviet Union.
And the form-filling and Yeah, it was becoming not dissimilar really to being a manager of one of Stalin's collective farms.
You lived in fear of an inspection and a commissar coming and finding that one of your cattle had lost its ear tag.
And then, you know, it was the sort of underlying assumption was always that you would you were guilty of doing something fraudulent.
You know, that was always the assumption you were sort of made to feel like a criminal.
And I hope that's something that will it hasn't changed yet.
But I hope that's something that might change with Brexit.
And the other thing, of course, is that the EU is one giant protectionist market for our beef and lamb and all the rest of it.
And there's been good and bad things about that.
Well, so when we went into the common market as it was, I think we had something like 3,000, 3 or 4,000 abattoirs in this country.
We've now only got a couple of hundred and they're all, most of them, 70% I think of them are in the hands of three Big processors, all actually Irish owned.
Oh really?
And so we had a sort of, really, a cartel situation.
And, you know, we were, it's funny how we were only ever just getting the price, which was just enough to allow us to keep going and no more.
That must have been so depressing.
Yeah.
I mean, really?
And I thought, you know, actually, I've got to change direction here.
And if I actually voted Remain, I know that you didn't.
People are stopping listening at this point.
James, I did it really out of self-interest.
And I thought if everybody votes out of self-interest, the result will be the national interest.
Right.
If that makes sense.
Yeah.
And I thought, okay, but I was a reluctant Remainer and I'm now a sort of cautious Brexiteer, I suppose.
And I thought, well, if we're going to go through the full cold turkey New Zealand experience of getting rid of subsidies, which is what they're talking about doing, whether politically they can do it is another thing, actually, because of the socio-economic sort of impact
Then we've got to think like a Kiwis here and so we've embraced here a New Zealand system of producing milk cheaply from grass.
Most dairy cattle in this country and actually across the world never go outside.
I sort of don't like calling it factory farming because it isn't really.
I mean the cattle are well looked after, well fed.
But you know I don't like seeing cattle I mean our cattle have to come inside when the weather gets really bad in the middle of the winter they'll be inside but otherwise they're gonna be out grazing and converting that grass straight into protein and fats.
So you're saying that most of the dairy cows in Europe or the world are indoor?
I think probably in the world actually, yeah.
That's quite shocking.
Certainly it's going that way in this country and the impact of that is really felt, well it's felt on the cattle themselves in sheds, but as I say, I think actually they're perfectly happy.
inside but the impact is on the the land that that is has to be then farmed intensively for maize or some other crop that can be silenced to feed the dairy cows.
Right.
And that has a knock-on effect on wildlife on soil.
Yeah it sounds wrong to me.
It sounds wrong having cows kept indoors and fed on But anyway, tell me about your New Zealand way.
Yeah, so we've now set up this share milking arrangement.
I've got three partners and we're farming the land
together now we're on this share milking system where we split the split the costs of the proceeds and the the young dairy manager has a massive incentive because he you know he's got he's he's got a big stake in the in the business he owns part of the part of the herd but so so how does it how does it work because I mean what are the what are the key was learned about about producing milk cheaply and in an efficient way
Well, they absolutely have stripped out all of the costs.
The main thing is that they mimic nature by treating their dairy herds as if they were herds of buffalo or bison or something on the On the Great Plains.
Right.
Moving from one area to another and eating the grass right down and manuring the soil, trampling it in and it's a combination of the muck and the urine and the saliva actually that has special enzymes in it.
That then helps the grass bounce back and grow back again really quickly and that benefits the wildlife.
Every time we move the cattle we see on that paddock It's absolutely covered in birds, all manner of birds, because of all the worms and the invertebrates and insects that are really benefiting from having healthy soils that are being managed in the way that nature intended by grazing them.
Have you seen that photograph, the extraordinary photograph of... because it used to be the theory, didn't it?
It used to be the theory that actually livestock damaged the soil, and that this was a bad thing.
And then this farmer, I can't remember where it was, I'm sure there's been a TED talk about it or something, I've seen photographs of it.
Yeah.
The land and the...
What's his name?
Alan Savory.
Yes.
I've seen a fence and on the one side is this lush fertile pasture land, on the other it's a dust bowl and bizarrely it's where you've got the ruminants.
That's the green side.
When you mentioned this thing to me, I got really excited.
I don't know whether anyone else listening to this is excited by it.
I think it's really interesting that this technique, which is old-school and yet modern, and it's got happy cows, being outside, good for the environment, and the cattle go into kind of special areas for, did you tell me, 12 hours?
Yeah, they're in these paddocks.
What they do, actually, is we measure the grass, measure how much grass is in there, and then we fence it off really tightly to make sure that they've got just the amount of grass that we want them to get.
And then we move them on, probably 12, 24 hours, I think.
And it's a very efficient system because nothing is wasted.
In the old way of doing things with my beef herd, It was lovely to see cows out in the field all summer but they would waste a lot of the grass because it would just get covered in cow parts and then they wouldn't eat it.
And then the grass would get eaten down to a certain Right.
and then pretty much kept at that height, which then stopped it growing.
Because the old saying is grass gets grass.
It's photosynthesis.
You've got to have a lot of leaf.
The more leaf you've got, the more it grows.
Right.
So if you keep it short the whole time, then it doesn't grow as much.
Oh, I see.
This is all really good.
Although I don't want to tempt fate by talking too much about it in case people... I'm the only person who's interested in this.
It could be.
It's a fairly esoteric subject.
But yeah, but is it?
Oh, one more thing.
What I learned.
That you use plantains.
Yeah.
Which I consider a wheat.
I mean, I love digging out plantains out of my lawn.
They're funny, straggly roots.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, the Kiwis, clever people that they are, and this, again, is a sort of necessity is the mother of invention.
You know, them suddenly going from having subsidies to no subsidies.
They had to learn fast how to make money in a new era.
One of the things they learn is... Farmers have always experimented putting different... You look at a grass field, a grass field is not grass.
You know, George Monbiot bangs on about monoculture.
Actually, in our grass lays, you've got lots of different species of grass and clover and chicory quite often.
And now plantains.
And plantains are, I mean the jury's still out slightly because this is the first year we've grown them, but they they keep growing at 3 degrees centigrade.
So that automatically extends the growing season.
Do you know what I wish?
I really bloody wish I'd had this conversation with you before my... the terrible... you probably didn't see it, I had a really really shit interview with Andrew Neil where he basically...
The story is, the previous week Owen Jones had really given him a hard time on the Daily Politics program and so he needed a kind of right-wing scalp to show that he could be harsh on both sides and he picked on me over this... I'd had this script written for me by the BBC.
I don't think I've ever told this story before.
I had this script written for me by the BBC and I had to appear in this kind of dressed as a zombie or something.
to argue that actually leaving the European Union under WTO rules would be better than whatever sort of monstrosity they'd cooked up and it was a kind of a bit of an esoteric point really for sort of trade specialists rather than anyone else but but Andrew Neil decided that it would be good for the viewers and stuff to pick on me and show up my ignorance which at which I was woefully ignorant but actually Part of his argument was, look, you're arguing for WTO, but what about the sheep farmers?
What about the dairy farmers?
And it would have been so much better if I'd been able to say, Andrew, I don't believe in subsidies.
I don't actually believe in a protective environment like the EU creates for certain preferred areas of the economy.
Look at what New Zealand did, and this is how you do it, and this is how agriculture should be.
It would have been so much better.
Yeah, well, I mean, but the New Zealanders, it hasn't all been rosy, actually.
They've been through some tough times as well, lately.
Well, they've got Jacinda Ardern, I mean, how can it not be tough?
And the important thing is, I mean, a lot of people, and I write about this in my book, a lot of Brexiteers were saying, oh, we can just be like New Zealand, and farmers will be fine.
Yeah.
Well, the important thing to know about New Zealand is that they didn't just get rid of subsidies and everything was fine.
They did loads of other stuff as well.
And New Zealand agriculture accounts for something like 35% of their economy or something.
I mean, you know, really important.
Yeah.
And a lot of the stuff they did was, for instance, like devaluing their currency to make sure that it was competitive, their produce was competitive, they could export You know, there's a danger that if we tried that here that our economy might explode, you know, in a sort of inflation or whatever.
I mean, you know, and they were also deregulated quite heavily.
Well, that's good, isn't it?
Yeah.
I mean, actually, Jacinda Ardern is busy regulating again, I think, actually.
Of course she would.
She's a communist, isn't she?
You can't just take the subsidies away.
You've got to help in other ways to make sure it works.
Yeah, well, that's fine.
We're not going to sit here arguing for subsidies, are we?
Surely?
No.
Well, I think the other thing I would just caution is that Something has to give and in New Zealand the environment is the thing that's given.
Their farms are, they really are factory farms.
Oh, right.
Interesting.
You know, there's no hedges, no room for wildlife.
And, you know, if we want to hang on to our wildlife, you've got to find some way of Making it worthwhile for farmers to keep the hedges, the ponds and the bogs.
You know we try, you've seen a bit of it here, we try and have as many different types of habitat here as we possibly can.
So we've got a bit of sort of riparian habitat, we've got ponds, we've got marshy bits, bogs, we've got Different types of woodland.
We've got stubbles over the winter which are great for birds.
But you know what, this is partly because you're a conservative and you understand that the bond you have with the landscape and you want to be in an environment which is attractive and We're in sort of Roger Scruton territory here.
Yeah, we are a bit, but if push came to shove and I simply couldn't afford to carry on farming in that way, in an environmentally sensitive way, I would have to crop every square inch intensively.
Or you'd bloody take the devil's money and you'd erect a sodding wind turbine.
Or that, or something.
You can't be green if you're in the red, is the NFU slogan.
And it's actually quite right.
And the other thing is that, you know, a lot of... and actually Owen Paterson was very good on this.
He wrote the Brexit agriculture papers, I think, probably various others.
And he did fisheries as well, didn't he?
And fisheries, yeah.
And he is somebody who did really understand it.
And he said, look, upland beef and sheep farms cannot compete in world markets with ranches in Argentina and Texas.
And if you just go completely to free market dogma, they will just die and that will have terrible consequences for communities like here in Dumfries and Galloway.
And also the hefted sheep in the Lake District.
You've got to have that.
And James Rebanks, you read his books.
They're really good on this sort of thing.
I'm going to get him on the podcast one day.
Yeah, you should do.
He's great.
Thank you, Jamie, for making me realise it.
So there is this distinction to be made between farms that are on good land.
If they're on the west side of the country, you say to them, well, look, there's no reason why you can't be a really efficient dairy farm.
Go for it.
We will make it possible for you by government getting out of the way.
If you're on the east side of the country, you could grow a lot of cereals, just as well as anywhere else.
But if you're halfway up a mountain, Then we will celebrate what you do for what it is and because it underpins our tourism, it sustains rural communities and you will continue to get subsidies.
Now that message is in danger now of sort of getting lost in the post-Brexit Wash, I think.
Yeah.
But it needs to be reiterated loudly and clearly that, you know, that needs to happen.
And of course everybody's going to fight about it and say, well I'm, you know, my land isn't that good, so why shouldn't I be subsidised?
I mean, it's going to be a nightmare.
Yeah.
And I suspect that it'll end up with a British fudge.
Oh, sure.
I mean nearly every country in the world subsidizes their farmers in some way.
Tim Lang's book I reviewed for a newspaper not so long ago and he was very good on it.
He said you've actually got to start with the nation's diet and talk about a whole food system right the way back from the plate to the field.
And he said we need to eat more meat, dairy, green veg.
I'm up for that.
I'll do my bit.
We don't need to grow so many cereals because we should be feeding our animals grass rather than grain.
And what are we lacking in this country?
It's vegetables.
We're bringing in vegetables from Italy and places like Spain.
We should be turning a lot more of our land over to growing veg and having fruit orchards again.
You know this is what the EU did to the land, is it sort of forced people to specialise and instead of the wonderful mixed farms that you had everywhere with the manure from the animals feeding the soil to allow the wheat and the barley to grow,
You've got land on the east side of the country that is sterile.
It's just simply lacking in any organic matter because there are no animals.
And on the west side, you know, there are still mixed farms but a lot of the other things like the orchards, cider orchards and things, all were ripped out in the 70s, weren't they?
After we went into the EU.
We need to get back into growing all that stuff.
I think we need to revive Merry England and Merry Scotland as well.
We need to make Scotland merry again.
Yeah, bloody hell yeah.
Now, I'm going to need a bath and a whiskey quite soon, but I think we should talk briefly about your other book, which is a charming, charming book of, what was he called, Kitson?
Michael Kitson.
Michael Kitson, who was a beak at your old school.
Yeah.
Eaton.
Yeah.
But an inspirational character.
He was!
He was a complete maverick.
And the delicious thing about the book, and it's now being adapted for the stage by Henry Filo Bennett, who's an up-and-coming playwright, and that Kitson is the perfect antidote to woke.
I mean, here was a man who went out of his way to offend people.
In a nice way.
I mean I wouldn't have been able to write an 80,000 word book or whatever it was full of anecdotes from his former pupils if they hadn't actually quite liked, secretly quite liked, being insulted by him on a regular basis.
Here was a man who accused an African boy in his class of wanting to eat his dog.
I mean that sort of banter.
Sounds reasonable.
Maybe not now.
But that sort of banter is completely absent from classrooms now.
Totally.
And also he wouldn't get a job at Eton now.
He would not get a job there now and if he did he would have been fired and yet he is You know, still his memory is still sort of revered by people across government, across the city, across, you know,
Actors and all sorts of people who, if they were asked to have a shortlist of the really important mentors in their lives, he would be at the top of them.
I don't know how it's going to go down on the stage in the 21st century.
this sort of i don't know how it's going to go down on the stage on the 21st century um this character from the 60s 70s and 80s um who in the modern age just um seems quite extraordinary and yet um there was this sort of uh fan club of middle-aged men who just thought this man was completely wonderful But it's interesting that that book
I mean, you know, some people are going to be saying, oh, why are we sitting here listening about a master from Eton, the posh boy's exclusive school, why should I bloody care?
I mean, I wasn't Eton, but I find it interesting because he's not just an Eton thing, he's that inspirational teacher.
Well, he's sort of everybody's idea of Mr. Chips, really.
He's sort of everything really.
He's Mr. Chips, Miss Jean Brody, the guy in Dead Poets Society.
That awful Alan Bennett play character.
Hector and the History Boys, very much so.
Except that Hector was a paedophile.
Yeah, there was nothing remotely homosexual about Michael Kidson.
But the thing is, this was a real man.
He lived and yet he was a larger-than-life character, a much bigger character really than any of these fictional characters.
And I think the thing about him was that he was in the bastion of the establishment at Eton but he himself was actually very anti-establishment.
I mean he ingrained in us a deep distrust of authority and would go out of his way to flout the school rules.
I mean you went round to get your essay marked by Michael.
And he would pour you a whiskey so stiff that you were quite liable to fall off your bike on the way back to your house.
I mean he was pretty eccentric really but we all learned to cherish eccentricity I think through being exposed to his particular brand of it.
And actually the other thing really is history.
All of his pupils left with a great love of history and interest in it because he really brought it to life in a way that would be inconceivable in classrooms today because history has... I think it was David Cameron who said to me that he
Michael Kinston gave him his great love of history and he was determined when he got into government to stop the long march of the left through the history syllabus.
Those were his exact words.
I have to say I don't think... He didn't do that good a job.
I'm sure he hopefully did move the dial back in the right direction but I think it's still work in progress I would say.
And of course, coming back to Scotland, there's been a deliberate attempt, well it's been successful, to dislocate the Scottish people from their history.
If you ask a young person about history, Scotland is a colony of England.
It's not a union.
It wasn't the fact that a Scottish Queen wanted to bring her two kingdoms together in an act of union.
Well, Scotland was colonised.
You've seen Braveheart.
The Enlightenment is not on the syllabus in any shape or form because it's a Unionist concept.
And we, well we talked about it last night didn't we?
We did.
This counter-enlightenment but it's been assisted by fake history, post-modernism.
They've grabbed the history syllabus by its throat and really changed it and you cannot I don't think, no.
Unanists are very bad at preaching unanism from a historical perspective.
But I think that's wrong and that's why we're now preaching unity, not unanism.
Unity is forward-looking and inclusive.
Unionism is backward-looking and quite alienating and exclusive for quite a lot of people in Scotland who just don't feel part of that tradition at all.
Right.
Catholics for example.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I think we should go and have a whiskey now, Jamie.
I think we should.
I just hope people listening... If you live in Scotland, I think you should get behind Jamie.
Scotland's... Scotland... I just think back to the novels of John Buchan.
And think what a fantastic place Scotland was then.
It was confident in its identity, had fantastic people.
It wasn't ashamed of its countryside and its sports like stalking.
I mean John McNab all about that.
Exactly.
And the history where we were never better than when we were together.
And now it's gone to shit.
I'm sorry it has.
I really fear for you Scots.
And you are a Scot.
Just the fact you sound like an English posh boy doesn't mean you're not Scottish.
It's beaten out of me.
No.
And I think decent Scottish people, which is most of them, deserve better than the The SNP.
So good luck, really.
Thanks, James.
And I might get George on the podcast, even though we had a brief falling out on Twitter.
But actually, I do think he's on balance a good thing rather than a bad thing.
So I think you've done well to get him on board.
Anyway, so good luck.
Thanks, James.
OK.
This was The Delling Pod with me, James Dellingpole.
You were listening to Jamie Blackett.
Don't forget, I really appreciate your support on Patreon and Subscribestar, and you get early access to my podcast, you get to hang out with... I actually respond to your comments on Patreon and Subscribestar, because I know you're special and I value you.
So thank you very much, bye bye!
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