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Dec. 12, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:06:39
James and Laura's Chinwag #5
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Welcome to James and Laura's Chinrack, as it's apparently now called my I think it's a pretty good name.
And I worked out one of the really good things about doing a podcast with a woman as opposed to a man.
The first thing Laura said to me was, have you got on the right internet?
And no man would have thought to ask that.
But Laura remembered that last week I just did a crappy... I used my wrong internet.
What are they called even?
I'm looking for.
I have different ways of getting the internet in my house.
Some satellite and some sort of copper wire.
You know, kind of like pedal power.
Um, well, let's see.
Oh, and also the other thing I forgot to do, I forgot to charge the, the batteries on my, on my lighting.
So if it starts flashing, I'll have to go and change that.
Anyway, Laura, we have much to talk about, and I think we should, I think we should talk about the most important.
I mean, I think there are only two stories in the world right now.
And I think we've, we've, we've mentioned this before.
One is, is president Trump and the Stolten election.
And the other is that everything surrounding the coronavirus vaccine, all this nonsense.
But I think that Trump edges it.
And a conservative woman today, your most excellent website, you're going to be publishing one of my rants on the subject.
But are you as surprised as I am that Nobody in the mainstream media, not even conservative voices, is even discussing the issue about the stolen election.
What's going on?
Yeah, I just don't think they want to touch it.
Also, you know there is bad news.
Am I the one giving you the bad news about the Supreme Court?
Yeah, well no.
So the Supreme Court voted 9-0 against the Philadelphia thing.
Well, I think that's the end of the legal process, though.
That's quite big.
They've decided not even to take the case.
So I don't think... I think that ends the legal process now.
All you've got left is, you know, asking basically Congress not to certify the Electoral College.
Well, yeah, but you've got, as I understand it, you've got the case being brought by Texas.
Yeah.
OK, OK.
Yeah, I mean, if they haven't taken Pennsylvania, I think it's going to be difficult for them to take, you know, another.
But I could be wrong.
And the big issue is that they didn't even take it.
That's the problem.
You know, they could have taken it, heard it, and he could have lost.
But to not even take the case is always a bad sign.
Well, obviously.
Yeah.
Yes, I agree.
If only we had Two US constitutional experts talking about this topic instead of us, we'd probably be on safer ground.
But here's the thing.
pretty good for okay but okay but but here here's the thing i i sort of okay i'm being i'm being i'm being optimistic to the last on the trump score because it seems to me that if trump goes down the world goes down then it amazes me Well, we can talk about this more after this bit, but it amazes me that other people can't see this, particularly on our side of the argument.
But when I saw the news about the Supreme Court rejecting the Philadelphia appeal, 9-0, Yeah.
I then scoured Trump Twitter, you know, the kind of people I trust, the kind of voices.
And I wasn't, you know, it's been reported a lot by, Twitter obviously is very happy about this, Twitter itself, Twitter thinks that this is it.
But I wasn't seeing signs that all is lost.
Rather, I think people are Right.
putting their hopes on this case brought by Texas, which other states are taking part in.
The view seems to be that this carries more weight because it's what the Supreme Court was designed for.
I mean, for example, let me just read what one of my...
The issue is, though, I mean, I haven't looked into enough detail, though, James.
Say he even wins that case and it's a long shot, I think that would just mean he gets to Texas.
And I don't think that would be enough to overturn the whole results.
So that might be why... No!
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
It's not that at all.
No, it's Texas.
Texas is is suing Pennsylvania.
It's suing Wisconsin.
It's suing.
No, this is this is what they.
OK, so let's have a look at what one of my lawyer friends says.
Let me read you this.
I could be wrong, could be wrong.
Also, have you seen the suit filed by Texas?
Very significant.
Interstate disputes are the only ones in which Supreme Court has original, as opposed to appellate, jurisdiction.
That means SCOTUS can hear Trump's evidence of fraud, not just rely on findings of courts below.
You see?
Yeah, this is the play.
Well, OK, there you are.
And the evidence of fraud is looking pretty solid.
Look at Arizona, for example, where Biden's margin of victory was 0.3 percent.
And it appears there were more votes than that by dead people.
So I suspect that the person who sent me that those comments was a lawyer.
It sounds like it, doesn't it?
Yeah, well, it just means that, OK, they've rejected the Pennsylvania suit because they're only deciding issues of law on that appeal.
That's the default position for the Supreme Court.
But OK, because it's state versus state, they can actually look at the evidence and act as a trial court.
Yeah, it's a huge difference.
It's very unusual for higher courts to be able to do that.
I had forgotten that they could do that if it was an interstate dispute.
Yeah, so I don't want to I don't want to get our hopes up unnecessarily.
But on the other hand, I think it's incumbent upon us as as true, true Christians and true conservatives and everything else to hold out to the very last because I don't know about you, but I think that this is This is the most important thing that's happened in our lives, because let me just rewind slightly.
I mean, how do you explain this crazy, crazy year in terms other than the most massive?
Conspiracy, I think, probably is the right word, but let's call it convergent interests, which are not in the interests of you and me or any ordinary person.
Yeah.
And you've got a combination, a toxic combination of China, which we know yesterday, because that was the big story on Twitter.
China has essentially bought and paid for certain Democrat congressmen.
Yeah.
We've got Bill Gates extremely dodgy.
We've got the World Health Organization operating in lockstep with China.
We've got the Great Reset, which is one manifestation of this kind of globalist takeover, which is also being endorsed by the United Nations under the auspices of Agenda 2030.
So we've got these supranational entities, and national entities in China's case, In in cahoots with billionaires, big tech, essentially trying to take over the world's financial system to try and crush small businesses to all this stuff, and
A lot of my conservative colleagues, and your conservative colleagues, are going, yeah, yeah, but here's a free speech issue which is really important at a university, or here's another story that I understand because I don't want to go for the big one.
That's often me, though.
It is often me who sometimes does that, but not always.
You know, I think, look, I agree.
It's a huge issue, but I think, for me, I always am pessimistic.
So I'm thinking this is going to end badly for Trump and maybe you need to, you know, we need to move on and focus on, I mean, Georgia now is huge, this Senate race.
If Trump loses the Presidents, everything, I mean, if you're talking about Western civilization, everything hangs on that Senate race in Georgia.
And again, I haven't been following it close enough to really crunch the numbers, but If they lose that, I think the Senate goes 50-50.
And this is disasterville.
If they can hang on to that, then you can limit the damage Biden is going to cause.
Significantly.
And he will try and cause a lot of damage.
Biden, which Biden could cause, I think.
Let's make it conditional.
What I mean really is what Harris will cause, because he obviously is just a bigger head.
So, you know, everything hangs on George.
Look, I agree.
I'm certainly not saying Trump should concede or anything like that.
I just think in my gut we're not going to win this one.
We shouldn't concede either, even mentally.
I'm sorry.
I'm going to be strict with you here, Laura.
No, no, I agree in that, you know, there's good knowing.
I mean, make it make it difficult for them.
But I think they in, you know, the left are very, the Democrats, James, they know what they're doing.
You should never underestimate them.
And their only weakness is sometimes as we said, overreach before.
This thing is a long time coming.
Voter fraud is a big issue on lots of different elections.
... elections and previous occasions.
I mean, this idea that this postal voting should just be allowed to go on and on for days.
I mean, as Anne Coulter said, and I do like Anne, I robbed some of her lines, like, can we at least have the election on one day?
So if you're going to steal it, you have to do it in this one day.
But this idea that, get your postal votes in, we're going to run it over six months and, you know, six weeks after the election, like this is, This is ridiculous.
This is America.
You know, you can't run the show like this.
But I think people will be genuinely shocked at how their electoral system is run in some states in America.
You know, I really do.
And I think Again, if we were to do, if you were, if you were to not go head on in your journalism with Trump, you know, again, it would be good to compare the electoral systems.
You know, so you ex-conservative journalists are saying, how very dare you call into question this election?
Well, can we just have some compare and contrast?
Could what happened there happen in Britain?
How tight are the British laws?
How tight are the French laws?
Are they?
Well, we know that the postal vote here is already deeply corrupt, particularly in boroughs where you've got a high population originally or ethnically, religiously from the Indian subcontinent, particularly parts of Kashmir.
It's a tradition.
One of my very last cases I did at the criminal bar before I went off and had the babies was an electoral fraud case.
Up in Leeds.
And so it was this huge electoral fraud case, all on postal voting.
And yeah, it didn't disabuse me of any of my preconceived beliefs as to how dodgy postal voting is.
And actually, also, do you know who was on the case?
The guy who had his moat... Keith Bass.
No, no, the guy... No, this is again, sorry.
Do you know the guy who had his moat drained?
Hodge.
Remember the MP who had the dockhouse?
No, was that the dockhouse?
That was a different one.
This is the guy who had to have his moat dredged.
Oh, OK.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, he was one of the lawyers on it.
He took a ski trip in the middle of the trial, which, by the way, caused the trial to collapse at not inconsiderable expense to the taxpayer.
Yeah.
No!
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's a conservative MP.
He's gone now, though.
He went out with one of the things.
Yeah, well, that's the shorthand.
I hope he's not going to sue me for that.
The judge didn't keep proper control of the trial.
And it meant that one of the defendants was left unrepresented for one day, even though the evidence didn't concern him and it collapsed.
They had to redo it.
And that would have been thousands, hundreds of thousands.
Yeah.
This is old school.
This is what you get away with.
This is... Laura, I think this is... 2020 has been the year when the scales fell from my eyes completely.
And I have completely...
I don't know, the establishment mainstream view of things, you know, like I really did genuinely believe that old school Tory MPs had a sense of honour and principle and that they were the backbone of the shires and that they were what kept our government honest and true to Tory principles.
Yeah.
And, you know, probably Probably when I... because I remember thinking when that story broke in the Telegraph, when they went really big on it, and they went on about the duck houses, and I kind of thought, well, MPs aren't paid... Yeah, your instinct, I think, as a Conservative is to defend, but often you shouldn't defend.
Yeah, go on.
No.
No.
Well, it's that, really.
When I read the story about the chap having his emote drained, I thought, well, I haven't got a moat myself, but the chap does need his moat draining and it's probably okay.
So it's it's kind of like taking the piss slightly.
But it's but if he's if he's doing a good job as MP, I can forgive him that.
And and now that story you've told me makes these are arrogant cops.
Oh, yeah.
One rule for them.
These people, I mean, they would make you they would make you a card carrying socialist guardian.
I mean, you really you really really what you just think these are they're so corrupt.
There's such vested interest.
I mean, I think actually, because I really like what we did last week, it does come down to that split between the aristocracy Tory and your middle class, often, you know, sometimes working class Tory.
Because what Thatcher did, of course, has got so many working class Tories.
You know, on so many working class voters to vote for her because she was either close to one of them or just one more step in the wrong.
But once you go above, you know what I would call them.
So, you know, the Camerons and the Tots and the Tories, these people, their lives are so different to mine.
I mean, I don't want to be one of those.
It's not that I want to drag them down or that I'm jealous of any kind of personal wealth, but when they start acting, you know, corruptly, when they are not clean or whiter than white, which they should be, because you're in an incredibly privileged position, right?
You've had an incredibly privileged life.
And that doesn't mean you haven't worked hard, and you may well have worked hard to get where you are.
Just don't get the taxpayer to pay for your moat dredging.
Like have some sense of decency.
You know, I mean, I think it's just a question of actually decency.
And just to ask you a question, has what this person done decent?
You know, if it's something you would admit to your wife or your mother, and if you think you'd be a little bit shamefaced to, you know, a respectable, or Thatcher, just use Thatcher.
If you did this, and you had to go up to Thatcher, no, Thatcher would be like, get out!
And I love that scene in The Crown, going back to The Crown, when she's just like, when she's with them all in Scotland, and she's like, what am I doing here, you know?
And they're like, they don't work and they just, they don't do anything.
And I am just like, that is it.
That is the great divide on the Tory side, you know?
It really is.
It really is.
It's interesting that, isn't it?
You think, who was the best, the very best minister in Margaret Thatcher's cabinet?
And it's got to be Tebow, hasn't it?
Norman Tebow.
He comes from a sort of, what you call him, sort of lower middle class.
The kind of person who wears a blazer and tie at the golf club or whatever.
He's had a proper job.
I mean, he was a pilot, wasn't he?
Yeah.
But he's fundamentally decent.
He doesn't believe that, you know, part of his job is being raffish and sailing close to the wind and seeing how much you can take the taxpayer for.
This would be anathema to him.
Or not quite the same.
I was praising him on my Toby podcast the other day, Ian Duncan Smith, I think, palpably decent man, really, really decent.
But then you think the corollary of this.
OK, so we know that the Toffs are crooked.
I mean, look at look at look at Zack Goldsmith.
I mean, that is really scary.
The influence he has over the government.
In the last election, he actually lost his seat to a Lib Dem.
Which I said, it's like losing to San Marino at football.
It's like, how can you lose to a Lib Dem?
How crap must that make, Zach Goldsmith?
With all his money and all his power, he still couldn't win an election, and yet he's now got this extraordinary power within the government.
Anyway, that wasn't my point I was going to make.
I got distracted by my own kind of... I got chased down a rabbit hole.
You've got people like...
Michael Gove.
And I must do a podcast with Cathy on this, because I know she wrote that brilliant piece in Conservative Woman about, you know, what's happened to Michael.
And my theory on Michael is that he is the opposite of the phenomenon we've just described.
He's not David Cameron.
He's not George Osborne, heir to the Osborne or Little Fortune.
And yet he mixes in circles with people who have all this money.
Yeah.
And I think that and I think that this has given him a slight chip on his shoulder, a sense that because he's cleverer than these people.
And I think there comes a point where in the life of a politician, where if you're doing well enough, you get shown the keys to the room where it happens by the people who Not on your local, on your puny United Kingdom level, but on the international level.
You know, the kind of trilateral commission.
All these fancy... Blackrock.
Blackrock, which pays you 600,000 a year for one day a week, is it?
This is what Osborne gets.
This is where the real money is.
And it doesn't matter whether your government's in power or not.
People like Gove.
This is just my theory.
I don't know that he's been corrupted.
I suspect he's been shown, he's been taken to a high place and shown the world.
Yeah, I think you're right.
And he's been unable to say no.
Yeah.
I think that's hard.
You know, I mean, look, I think that it's very, very difficult.
As you say, when you're not even at national level, yeah, you're on international level, IMF level, as you say, you know, private equity stuff.
It doesn't matter whether you're in government or out of government, you have the access, you have the, you know, Facebook comes knocking and that's it.
Yeah, I agree.
You get your suits by Brioni and you get to travel first class and you go to these ritzy conferences and you go to Davos, obviously.
You sell out your country, totally.
You sell out the people who voted for you.
You shit all over the little man.
But hey, you're alright and you've got, you know, you kind of deserve it because you're clever.
So those people compared to the Moe dredger, the Moe dredger is He's just old style Tory.
He's not a problem.
All he will do is get you to pay for the moat being cleaned.
But yeah, those guys, they're an actual problem.
They have power.
They have influence.
They can make your life very difficult.
They can close down your restaurant if they want to.
They can screw up your supply chain.
And yeah, they're a much bigger problem than your old style, slightly, you know, dotty, yeah, tough, down the village.
You think, for example, of the celebrated instance where George Osborne went on Oleg Deripaska's yacht with Nat Rothschild.
Yeah.
If only they'd been cameras to remember the war cameras, maybe maybe maybe that this video footage in a vault somewhere and this is part of the problem but something happened to George Osborne to take him to the next level of evil.
I think I think something's happened to Michael Gove.
I think I think even cuddly Rishi Sunak who?
You know, at the moment is enjoying a kind of massive popularity wave based on the fact that he's been handing out free money, which actually belongs to us and our grandchildren are going to be paying off, you know, great-grandchildren probably.
I think that there are very few people in the cabinet now who haven't been brought off and who aren't, who are acting in Britain's interests.
I think maybe Priti Patel is.
I think she's just... Priti's... She's authoritarian, you know.
She's been there... Oh, no!
That's a different thing.
That's a different thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think Priti's problem is that she's authoritarian and she's not as bright as some of the other people.
But I don't think that she's dishonest in the way that a lot of them are.
Um, I don't, but I don't know what, you know, frankly, burn, burn the entire Conservative Party, or certainly the parliamentary party.
I trust hardly any of them and the Conservative Party needs to be destroyed.
Peter Hitchens is right.
This is a big debate between which is really important, say politics or culture.
Myself and Cathy have discussed this and Mark Stein has always said it.
You know you're winning when you get a politician to do something they don't want to do.
Right, because it's political, because you have created either culturally or such a groundswell of support for whatever your issue might be.
And you know, you know, so sometimes Cathy would say to me like, oh, but I know they don't believe it.
And I'm like, I don't care if they believe it or not.
I don't want their souls.
I just want the policy.
And it's almost better if they don't believe it, because we know they're all schmucks.
We know they all just follow the polls, right?
So who cares whether they don't believe anything, most of them.
So, you know, I wouldn't be arguing over whether or not they really believe it or not.
And I mean, this is I think Mark Stein says this a lot, you know, you know, you know, we're winning when they're doing things they don't even want to do.
And I think, unfortunately, you get that you get conservative MPs doing things they don't want to do because they're put under so much pressure from the media and the left culturally.
So the big question is, you know, it's always which is more important, politics or culture?
But I would say culture creates the pressure.
Yeah.
Answer me a question.
When was the last time you saw a conservative MP doing something ...that were beneficial to us, that we'd have approved of, albeit reluctantly.
They haven't done it at all, have they, ever?
I mean, not in recent years.
If you look at how quick they... You know, George Eustace, though, was non-useless.
What I call... I only ever call them they're either useless or non-useless.
I don't go any higher.
He was non-useless about the whole Black Lives Matter thing on Sky over the weekend.
I only saw a clip of it.
And then he ruined it by bringing in this... he's now banning fur retailers from selling fur.
Why?
How is it a conservative thing?
Look, if you don't like fur, don't wear it.
Don't buy it.
If you really feel angry about it, make a catty remark to somebody who's wearing fur and see how she feels about it.
And she may well tell you that she doesn't give a toss about your stupid vegan views and that she's quite happy in her fur coat.
That's fine.
But suddenly when government enters the realm of what should be a private decision, and when a particularly conservative government enters that, the government has no business putting the fur retail trade out of business.
And we know that this is coming from Zach Goldsmith and Carrie, um... Yeah.
What's her face?
I don't think that the Prime Minister's bird and her close friend in the House of Lords should have this influence over our economy, even a tiny bit of it.
And there's nothing you can do about it.
They'll just push it through and that's it.
There won't be enough pushback on that particular issue.
The other thing though I want to say to you in terms of how easily people collapse, It's Matt Hancock who I feel sorry for, James, because he really, you can tell, you can just, you can tell how hard a year it's been for him, says Lawrence Fox.
I mean, it's really, it's been awful.
Pause for a moment and have a moment, three seconds, three seconds, three seconds silence to think about the pain that Matt Hancock has suffered this year.
Yeah, it's been sad.
We need to explain to the viewers though, I couldn't even manage to say where this is coming from, because yesterday Laurence Fox, as I said, broke, essentially.
And everyone breaks, James.
Everybody breaks.
That's a lot of people do anyway.
I do know that nothing breaks like a heart.
Arthur Matt Hancock sort of cried on Good Morning Britain over the first vaccine being given to some 19 year old.
Matt had a little bit of a cry on air, which is terrible.
Men shouldn't cry at work.
Stop it!
Did you watch it?
Did you watch it?
I saw the clip.
I saw the clip.
And I mean, but I mean, aside from the pausing the crying bit, and then Lauren Fox tweets for some inexplicable, well, I know the reason why, tweets going, well, whatever you say about the lockdown, whatever, you know, we should, we should bring it up.
Whatever you say about the lockdown, nobody can underestimate how hard a year it's been for Matt Hancock.
And I'm just like, oh, no, back there's another one gone.
And you just think, you know what, save your tears for the, all the millions of people are going to be unemployed after this.
Save your tears for all the crushed businesses.
Save your tears for the suicides and for the people who've died from cancer because they didn't get cancer treatment and had heart attacks and all the rest of it.
Save your tears for those people.
Do not be crying over Matt Hancock.
He's going to be, he'll be in a yacht somewhere in five years time, my friend, and we're still going to be paying his nightmare off.
But I mean, why?
See, this is the thing, as I said to you the last time.
There is even worse than being shot by the Taliban, is being shot by the mainstream media.
And obviously Lawrence has, he's been, you know, he's taken a fair bit and he's just cracked.
He's just said, I've had enough now.
I better throw something out there that shows I'm a nice person.
That's it.
That's your theory.
I'll tell you my theory on Lawrence.
I think That he's... I don't think that he's very ideologically rigorous.
You and I understand that this is like a game of chess.
I mean, it's the Queen's Gambit.
We are the Queen's Gambit.
Whereas, well, we're grandmasters.
I mean, not in real chess, because I'm shit at real chess, but I'm quite good at thinking about how everything connects, which it does.
I mean, I don't think much of Ian Forster, but he was absolutely right.
Only connect.
And some of us have the gift to see the big picture, and most people just don't.
They're just focused on their narrow preoccupations.
And I think Lawrence is burdened with the delusion That all you need is love.
You know, you look at his Twitter feed, he's been tweeting a lot about how all lives matter to the point where you're thinking, yeah, give it a rest.
We get that all lives matter, and you're right.
But love doesn't solve anything when you've got an enemy so intractable, so evil, so committed to your destruction, that love bombing them ain't going to cut it, mate.
No, no, no.
The idea that Matt Hancock, who is a He's got a messiah complex.
He's a complete megalomaniac.
He's part of the Great Reset.
You know, he's a friend.
He's on board.
There's evidence of this, of him teaming up with Klaus Schwab in 2018, I think, and talking about how... So he's really, really, really one of the high-level bad guys.
He's been driving the policy, which has kept The country shut down for no reason, for what?
Bad flu, if that.
He's pushed the vaccine partly because he's on board with the Great Reset, partly because it's an arse-covering exercise.
Yeah.
The idea that Lawrence, even in one of his kind of more hippy-dippy moments, should tweet out to the effect that this guy deserves sympathy is so away with the fairies.
And I did actually send him a message saying, I'm sorry I had to burn you on Twitter, mate, but really...
Yeah.
Pull yourself together.
Can I have a word?
Yeah.
Pull yourself together.
Has someone hacked your account?
I mean, stop it!
Just stop!
And also, the other thing that annoyed me about this was that quite a few people on Twitter said, oh, he didn't mean it.
He was being ironic.
Now, the thing is, anyone who uses Twitter knows, particularly people like us, because we know that the baddies are going to be out to get us.
We think quite hard about how we're going to phrase our tweets.
When I do a tweet, it's like Shakespeare writing a sonnet sometimes.
I don't just toss it off, because you need to get the words in the right order, you need to use the right words.
If you're being sarcastic, you signal the sarcasm in some way.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, you presumably read law, didn't you?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Did you read law at university?
Okay, so I read English.
I mean, English is not good for a lot of things, but one thing it's really, really, really, really good at is enabling you to critically analyse a text.
I mean, it's just like, it's the thing that you do.
So you take apart the nuances, the context, everything, the word order.
It comes naturally to me.
If I had to study physics at Stanford, I'd probably struggle.
But I'm really, really, really good at analysing texts.
So the idea that if there were any sarcasm there, I wouldn't detect it is absurd.
No, this was true.
He meant it.
I mean, the reason is, I don't know him.
He's an actor, James, and actors are needy, right?
Actors want to be liked.
I think if you've had whatever, you know, how many months of people calling him a racist Or white supremacist or whatever it is.
You know, look, we all, we, as I said, I like, everybody breaks sometimes.
And that was him just saying, I just can't, I can't take it anymore.
I'm a nice person, really.
And Quicken, it's not, it's not necessarily easy, but I think you're right about the overall philosophical He mightn't have read his scrutiny necessarily in detail.
So that would be the second reason.
And it's just, he hasn't been doing this for as long as we have.
I mean, you've been doing it forever.
So he doesn't kind of necessarily get the longer.
And I don't think he still understands that they will hate you no matter what.
Unless you completely, you know, disavow, the left will hate you.
It doesn't matter what you do.
They think you're an irredeemable bad person.
Don't bother trying to, you know, ingratiate yourself to them because you're gone.
And I mean, the conservatives do this a lot, right?
I mean, yes.
Yeah.
Well, I know what I call the left.
And then there's the people who like to be liked by the left.
And it's, you know, It's a problem.
Well, people like Tom Harwood, you know, from the Guido thing.
He wants to be...
He's not a conservative.
I mean, people shouldn't be under... No, he's not.
He's a sort of libertarian and also during this sometimes very, very authoritarian.
I think as well, the youth, the youth can go authoritarian very quickly.
And I think you picked it up as well.
You know, when the vaccine was first started coming up, him and also some young chap, I don't know his name, but I noticed that he was young, from Oxford, were like, yeah, make it compulsory.
You know, they like, they're very self-righteous, the youth, OK?
Yeah, they are.
There's no possibility they could be wrong.
And if they think they are in the right, then everybody, you know, everybody must do what they say.
As I said, I mean, before long, they'll be, you know, they'll be taking, we'll be having to wear masks while on one knee while getting the vaccine.
That's going to be the new way you have to take your mandatory vaccine, on one knee while wearing a mask.
I know I keep saying this, Laura, but I think it's true.
This is why we need wars.
Occasionally, you need wars to remind the youth, to enable them to burn off that misdirected passion.
I mean, you don't get rid of hundreds of thousands of years of conditioning.
We haven't suddenly evolved to the point where We don't have that that warlike instinct that, you know, young men are full of full of testosterone, full of stupid, stupid ideas, which probably are best tested in the crucible of battle.
Because frankly, yes, send them on a crusade or whatever you need to do, you know.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, I mean, this is an issue.
You have to be careful.
But we've done Lawrence Fox.
He's just another example of how quickly people can crack and how powerful the media are, how terrible Matt Hancock is.
But then the other story I wanted to do, because I know we haven't... Kay Burley.
You saw that, right?
I'm glad you... No, listen, you were good on this one.
You're good on this one.
You're absolutely right, because some... I think it was Darren Grimes, and I sympathise with this.
I like Darren.
Darren said, I don't like the idea, even though I disagree with Kay Burley, I don't like the idea of people snooping on her when she has a birthday lunch with Yeah, yeah.
No, I agree.
I totally agree with that.
But your take, your take was the right take.
Tell us your take.
Well, my take is, yeah, I totally, I don't agree with the rules.
We've never agreed with the rules.
I don't, well, I don't care about her having her 10 person birthday party somewhere in a fancy restaurant.
I do care about her hypocrisy.
Because herself and Beth Rigby, who also was supposedly there, I mean, these guys have been front and centre.
And I really do think we need to talk about the media so much.
The media are number one reason why we have gone into lockdown and the hysterical way they have presented it at every press conference.
I mean, I didn't watch all of them, but every press conference, every question, it was never like, do you think the lockdown is too draconian?
Do you think you're being...
Every single question, especially from Sky, was either some, you know how they get an inconsistency.
Oh, well, you're leaving the restaurants open, but you're not doing this.
Okay.
So, which are garbage questions anyway.
I was always like, you're not being strong enough.
You're not being, you're, how, why are you letting people exercise?
I mean, how, you know, how very dare you?
It wasn't a global, the narrative wasn't lockdown versus no lockdown.
The narrative was lockdown versus Taliban lockdown.
That was, that was, that's all the media cared about.
And those two were front and centre on this.
And then, and I mean, it just makes me so angry.
And then you realise, actually, they, but I told you about this before with the Elite, the rules don't apply to them.
So she, I mean, and did you see her tweet as well?
It was like, because she was saying, I'm so sorry about breaching the rules.
Yeah, I went into another restaurant to go to the toilet after the 11 o'clock curfew.
She said she'd spend a penny, I believe.
Yeah, yeah.
And you're right.
No, no, no.
I'm not interested in the curfew.
You can't meet anybody in a restaurant that isn't a family member in Tier 2.
Am I wrong?
This is right, okay?
Yeah?
Unless it's a business meeting.
Yeah, yeah.
Me and you can't go for lunch somewhere.
We couldn't go for a coffee somewhere.
But yet, she can go... Yeah, we weren't there.
Yeah, well, we would.
Yeah, because we wouldn't be hypocrites because we have completely, we have said it's garbage, right?
So, but she can have a 10 per, and she announces it.
I was celebrating last night.
You're like, they have essentially banned birthdays.
What are you talking about, woman?
And you are the person who pushed it.
I mean, she shouldn't be on her TV screens again.
It is outrageous.
And as I said before, a lot of it is, they say, Famous Cummings, yeah, we know the rules don't apply to us little people.
This is part of your humiliation.
We're brazen for a reason.
That's the point.
Somebody was saying on Twitter, maybe somebody like Kelvin Mackenzie, was saying that he didn't see... Because I think both Beth who was there from Sky and Kay Burley have been suspended or they've temporarily gone off air, I think.
And Kelvin Mackenzie said he didn't see them coming back, which is interesting.
I don't know whether that's right.
They'll probably come back.
I mean, you know, I don't like the idea of destroying someone's career ever.
I mean, the left do this and they think nothing about it.
I'm going to destroy this person.
But they're so irritating.
They're just so irritating anyway, James.
Genuinely irritating people, number one.
And number two is, I'm sorry, but you are directly responsible for destroying thousands of businesses.
Hysterical.
You have been terrifying people.
And then you turn around and you just say, you know what?
Doesn't apply to me.
For my 60th birthday.
And this is the other thing.
They've taken the high moral ground.
Oh, well, why don't you just make the sacrifice, Kay?
It's just a birthday.
You know, you don't have to have this birthday party.
People have not been able to get cancer treatment because of this lockdown.
Cancer treatment.
So why don't you suck it up and not have your 60th birthday party?
Right?
Yeah.
I mean, this is... I totally agree.
It's outrageous.
It's outrageous.
I think we ought to stress that point.
It all does come down to hypocrisy.
There would be absolutely nothing wrong with you and I living in a tier 2, or frankly even a tier 3 if it were possible.
Having a party, going to a pub, anything.
Yeah, because we've been open.
We've been open about it, yeah.
And we haven't made the laws.
We haven't pushed the hysteria.
You know, we haven't done... So it's completely... Yeah, I know, I agree.
It's the hypocrisy.
It's just... It's so wrong.
And it's that they really are directly responsible for a lot of it.
And this is why if any Tory politician does it, you know, sometimes, again, your reaction can be, oh, let's defend them.
No!
No, they should have their asses fired.
If you have pushed this, if you even...
Tiny bit.
You are gone.
I want you out of there.
You know, it's just... I suppose looking back, that's why people got so cross about Dominic Cummings driving to Barnard Castle.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely right.
And it also makes me realise, having this conversation with you, that I look at some of the comments, particularly below my Breitbart articles, where you'd think people would be on side with me.
Yeah, I get a lot of I get a lot of a lot of stick.
I don't know who these people are and what I realize is that that there is this that that that Tory MP you mentioned with the with the moat draining and stuff.
There is this sense among the what would you call them?
Proletariat, I mean, just ordinary people, let's say, that anyone who has had an education like mine, anyone who's been to Oxford, is damaged goods, is suspect.
I believe in noblesse oblige.
I mean, I genuinely believe that if you've had a life of privilege, and I mentioned this when I went to speak at Eton once, I said, look, you boys, you've You've won the lotto.
You have literally won the lotto.
It was a bit patronizing, but yeah, you, you, this is such a good school.
Yeah.
And so please go out into the world and do good shit.
Is, is, is basically what I said.
I, I, well, yeah, but you can, you can go into banking and still do good shit up to a point.
I mean, I think if you're doing, I think there are some areas of anyone who invented collateralized debt obligations was basically evil.
That was just designed to screw over ordinary people.
But there are areas of banking.
If you say you're a fund manager or an analyst, I would have thought that is relatively untainted because you're a researcher basically, aren't you?
I do sense that there really is.
We live in a them and us world.
And I always balked at that.
I always thought that free markets and certain things would solve that problem.
But actually, I think the system is increasingly rigged.
And in 2020, yeah, it's rigged to the point where we may never recover.
Well, there's a number of forces at work.
And again, because I think I have to bring him up at every podcast, you've got to read, you've got to read your C.S.
Lewis man.
So he does this.
in, oh, Screwtape Proposes a Toast.
So do you know that series?
You can say no.
I know about the Screwtape letters.
Yeah, so Screwtape letters, for our readers, they're written by C.F.
Lewis and they're very good.
They're basically a sort of a demon writing to a junior demon about to ensnare the human soul.
And they are they are excellent.
But then there's a slight follow up he wrote a few years later called Screw Tape Proposes a Toast.
It's so good.
You've got you've got to read it.
You might even get it online.
And he does about two or three pages on this idea.
Oh, James, it's so good.
And he says, no, you know, I mean, it sends chills down my spine as a Christian, obviously, to read it because he's like, well, we've had a great century.
You know, we've had the Nazis, and we've had communism, and we have enslaved so many souls, right?
And we've gotten the really big ones.
We really got some of the big ones.
But how can we do it sort of en masse?
And one of it is, I think he uses the term, this sort of, it must have been only coming up then, this egalitarianism.
And he's saying, you know, so he's saying, obviously, you know, we are all equal in the eyes of God.
And we are all we are all sacred in that sense.
But the idea that you're all sort of equal in terms like, well, of course, some people are more beautiful than other people.
And some people are smarter than other people and some people, you know, but if we can get people to believe, no, no, we're all exactly the same.
So if we're all completely equal in the leftist sense, okay, as opposed to the sacred sense, why does that person live in a bigger house than me?
And why is that person at a better school than me?
And why, why did that person get better A levels than me?
And you get that begrudging, which, you know, I think we should all guard against.
You know, this is what you get, I think, now in terms of the war on the meritocracy is so strong now because you're getting it from feminism, right?
Oh, don't judge outcomes.
No, no.
If somebody gets a better outcome than somebody else, that's not because they've worked harder or they're just smarter.
No, no.
That's because of the system.
You know, that's because that person is white or that person is male or whatever it happens to be.
And then, I mean, you can say it.
So feminists, I mean, the left as a whole, obviously are greatly against it.
And you're like, look, we know things can be unfair.
Right?
Yes, one child can be born to wealthier parents who can send them to a better school than another smarter kid.
Or even reading a book to a child at bedtime is an inequality, right?
But their solution, of course, is to suppress everything down.
And that will cut all the poppies down, right?
Whereas our solution is obviously trying individually to try and lift as many people up as possible.
You know, and it's just, you know, you won't get them giving out about these guys who made the vaccine.
How very dare they, you know, discover a vaccine with their, with all their smarts, parking the issue of the safety.
Well, these people are smarter than a lot of other people and we will all benefit from the vaccine.
The only thing you should be saying is thank you very much.
Goodbye.
Right?
If we're to go along with the vaccine thing.
So they don't mind elitism when it comes to amazing medical breakthroughs, right?
- That's a kind of Spartan's if, that is. - You know, so they don't mind elitism when it comes to amazing medical breakthroughs, right?
Then they're all for the elitism.
But, you know, so I forget where we got back to this Yeah.
So it's again, this war on the meritocracy, dragging everybody down, begrudging anybody, any kind of advantage.
It's so dangerous in terms of just creating a better society.
And I think it's dangerous individually because you just turn into a bitter, twisted, you know, rather fat, you know, just a grinch, basically.
Yes, I mean, I don't know who invented egalitarianism as a concept.
I mean, is it, is there an element of it built into Christianity that was sort of, you know, I mean, could you make that case?
That in a way?
I mean, Christianity is only really, isn't that interested in terms of what What material success you have.
They're interested in what your actions are, day to day.
And actually, rather worryingly, it's also very interested in what's in your heart and soul, whereas Judaism is pretty much only interested in your actions.
So, you know, people think Christianity is less strict in Judaism.
Actually, I think it's the other way around.
So, for instance, the Old Testament is just like, do not commit adultery.
Whereas Jesus is like, if you look at another person in a lustful way, you've committed adultery in your soul.
Right?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Exactly.
I know.
I know.
That's a bit hard.
I mean, like, if you're a man.
I think, I think it's more, I think it's okay to, to, to not cause panic because it's obviously very, I think what they mean is to really, really lust after somebody.
So that would be different to say, saying somebody is very attractive, right?
Or that person's very beautiful or I admire someone.
I think what they're, he's talking about is really, you know, really lusting after your neighbor's wife.
So, I mean, I don't know how much of that you do.
It's in there, as opposed to the Old Testament, which is just like, just do it, think whatever you want, my friend, but just don't do it.
Right.
I mean, do you think Jesus was a communist to any degree?
No, no, no, definitely not.
I mean, I know there's a lot of that now.
No, of course not.
I mean, there's the other.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, I mean, even if he might have been communist within his own 12 apostles who believed exactly the same thing.
No, I mean, I mean, the worst thing was Roman power.
Right.
With state power when Jesus was around.
So I don't think he will have been saying, yeah, you know, give all the states.
No, I mean, it's so wrong to think that.
Give all the state power.
And again, it's basically outsourcing your charitable work.
You don't need to bother being personally charitable because you pay your taxes.
No, that is not how he will erode.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He was about the personal sacrifice.
Give your neighbour your own cloak off your own back.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
I mean, we can... Diff brings us on to the footballer, if you want to.
Oh, tell me about the footballer.
Oh, the guy... Oh my God, how have we forgotten his name?
See, we're already out of... Free school meals!
Oh, Marcus Rashford.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's tiresome.
Like, so somebody who's good at kicky ball and is paid a gazillion pounds a week suddenly...
Suddenly starts lecturing us on government policy.
Do you want to do Rushford?
I meant to write it, but again you feel slightly guilty.
Look, I do think he probably gives... So the first thing of course is I don't begrudge him his millions.
I genuinely don't.
That's fine.
And I don't begrudge him his houses or whatever he wants to do.
He should invest.
He's 21.
He'll only have 10 years.
You absolutely shouldn't bet.
Don't blow it on women and cigars and the rest of it.
Fine.
And I do think in terms of charitable work, he does actually do some work.
He personally gives his time and his money.
But what annoys me It's when the commentariat believe that essentially campaigning for another transfer, which is what free school meals are, right, a transfer payment from people who work and pay their taxes to another set of people who may or may not work, I think there are a lot of working poor families, and using government coercive power to transfer that amount of money to a different family.
Now, you can campaign on that, but that itself is not charitable work.
Charitable work would be setting up the Marcus Rushford Charitable Campaign, Charitable Institute, right, like they would have done in the Victorian times, and given 10% of his own income, and also gone around to the other rich people and said, I want some of your own money, and I'm now going to administer this charity to Whoever I wanted to administer it to.
But using stake versus power to basically say, James, James, I want you to give some money to my friend Mary, who works full time and has three kids but can't feed the kids.
And you may say, that's worth it.
But I'll tell you what, that's not.
That's not me being charitable.
Making you transfer some of your money to Mary.
Me transferring some of my money to Mary is charitable, or setting up my own charitable institute is charitable, but that itself is not, it's not a work of charity.
He may himself do other works of charity on the side, but that kind of campaigning is not a work of charity.
And I think people rely on the state of life.
I do it a lot.
You know, you get that tax bill and you just, you know, you're thinking, it does make you less desperate.
Given that you're better up on religion than I am, although, you know, I'm getting there, but do you think it's possible that when Marcus Rashford gets to the pearly gates, and he's got a bit of a swagger, you know, he thinks like, I'm there, I'm there, because I did this charity thing where I forced the government to forcing taxpayers into funding
Kids to have free meals.
Do you think it's possible that St Peter will say to him, no mate, I'm sorry, this is the wrong kind of charity, you're going that way, and that Marcus Rashford is going to burn in hell?
No, I don't, you can't.
Please offer me that sock of comfort.
No, no, no, I couldn't, no, no, no.
Sorry, Galora?
No, he's not.
Is the Lord not a righteous Lord of Vengeance?
Does he not make people like Marcus West?
He hasn't done anything bad.
I'm just saying that that campaigning is not a charitable work, whereas a lot of people seem to think it is.
That's all I'm saying.
It just really, it just really annoys me.
And also, it's the thing is that, I mean, of course, and then we can bring it back to the government and you can say, look, fair do to Marcus Rochford, this is what he wants to do, he wants to do.
But again, it's the bloody government.
Footballers should not set your welfare policy.
We assume, right, that Rushi has his budget, right?
You have your house budget and your wife has her house budget.
And you've got, you're going to spend X on Y, X, X, X, X. And then you may have your, right, he has a budget.
And then this dude comes along.
And says, no, no, I want you to change your budget, right?
I want this amount of money for this worthy cause.
And he absolutely might be doing it for good reasons.
And he really believes in that.
And he obviously had a tough upbringing himself.
And then they just go, yeah, OK.
Because Twitter says Marcus is really nice.
And we don't want to be seen as mean, nasty Tories.
Make the argument.
No, we have a system.
This is our welfare system.
You can't just pull a certain string out of it.
Then the whole thing, if you give it to free school meals, that means that the disabled person down the street loses it.
You know what I mean?
And they're so pathetic.
They can never stand up against Twitter and an attractive footballer with a good cause.
It's just, it's like, you're an adult, Chancellor person.
You make the case.
You have set out the budget.
You can't just tear the whole thing up.
Because, you know, Gary Lineker said so.
Look, I'm going to have to differ with you on this one, Laura.
I've seen the Garden of Earthly Delights, and isn't there a separate panel where you have the bad side?
Look, I've seen Bosch paintings, I know what hell is like, and I am convinced, and you can argue with me if you want, I'm convinced that come the day of judgement, I can see not just Marcus Ratchford but Gary Lineker and most definitely Piers Morgan having their entrails unwound by little devils with little pitchforks.
They're going to be toasted on griddles like, was it St Catherine?
Was it?
Is she tested on the griddle?
Catherine Wheel.
Oh Catherine Wheel, sorry.
Catherine on the Catherine Wheel.
Who's tested on the griddle?
Somebody was.
Oh, I don't know.
Jerome?
I don't know.
Jerome could be wrong though.
Do you know what he said, by the way?
Do you know what he said?
He said, I'm done on this side, you can turn me over.
That's, he did, didn't he?
I like, I like Saint Sebastian.
He's my favourite because I just like, I like that song by by Momus, Lucky Like Saint Sebastian.
And I like, you know, the kind of the sort of slightly sort of camp iconography.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
And did you see did you see the episode of did you watch Last Kingdom?
No.
Where the Vikings have been reading up about Saint Sebastian.
And so they this priest gets to die as a master.
Yeah.
Anyway.
Yeah.
Well, I think we can explore this.
Do you think it's weird?
Yeah.
This conversation.
Lots of people are loving our chinwag.
And it's like, why is there no radio station?
Times Radio, basically liberal left elite establishment bollocks radio.
You know, I did something for them.
To fill in the form to get your 50 quid was so long, I still haven't done it.
I swear to God, I'm like, who listens to Times Radio?
I bet if you read the small print, it would include selling your soul to be evil.
It's like, what is it called?
Controlled opposition, isn't it?
The idea that the Times is anything other than this establishment model.
As bad as BBC.
And then you've got Talk Radio.
I like Talk Radio.
I like talk radio.
I've had some good conversations, but you know that these people, one day we'll talk about the cathedral, but these people are all part of the cathedral.
They're not out there like we are.
And if they were out there like we are, they would not have their jobs on Talk Radio.
I was once semi-recruited for Talk Radio.
I was all but promised I was going to get a show.
Then I think the people upstairs, and I'm thinking probably we're talking Rebecca Whatserface, You know, I'm just not sufficiently controllable.
For example, look at yesterday.
Julia, Julia.
Just almost in Hancock-esque levels of tears of joy over the vaccine and how it's going to change everything.
Go on, because as I said to you, I still want to believe.
You're ruining Vaccine Day, James.
You're not that bad.
Yeah, you believe in Tinkerbell.
Tinkerbell is dead.
I'm going to kill her again just in front of you now.
You just think it's rushed through.
You're not happy.
Give me the vaccine.
I think anyone who takes the vaccine is absolutely insane, is a victim of evil government propaganda.
The reason I think it's evil is there could easily be side effects of this.
This has been rushed through.
This is a political gesture, not a medical gesture.
There was no need for the vaccine at all.
Absolutely no need.
Do you think now that they're panicking and they're thinking, oh my God, we can't keep locking down.
We better make this problem go away.
Just give me a vaccine.
Is that what you're thinking?
It's that since about March this year, the entire trajectory of not just UK policy, but global policy with exceptions like Sweden has been, we must have a vaccine.
Nothing else can change until we get this vaccine.
But it's got nothing to do with epidemiology, with immunology, with medicine, with anything other than politics.
It's like, we've generated this scare story.
Now we've got to get out of this mess.
There are two ways out of it.
A, we admit that we got it wrong.
Or B, we just double down and pretend.
And they've gone the double down route.
And it's shaming.
And I'm not going to be one to say, oh look, this vaccine's great.
No, it's not.
It's a bad, bad thing.
My view is, and this might be cowardly, that I'm not going to trash it on Twitter, but I'm not going to say everybody get it either.
I'm just going to be neutral on it because I haven't done enough research.
Look, to be honest, if I was over 90, James, I'd take it, right?
Because you're doing your risk analysis and you think, whatever.
I don't want to think that they're that evil, that there are really, really serious side effects and they're pushing it anyway.
That level of evil is... I mean, I don't know if they're up to that level of evil.
I think they're incompetent.
No, but I think we've sort of dealt with evil.
Evil is... there are very, very few...
Even genuinely purely evil people.
I mean, there are psychopaths, but most people are just people who CS Lewis illustrates in those in those screw tape series that you mentioned.
Yeah.
People who just take the easy path because it's more tempting, naturally, than the hard path.
People don't have principles.
People just get compromised by their jobs.
People who go into the city end up... I mean, you know, there's great money.
And of course, once they get their mortgages, they need more money to feed their lifestyle.
If their business tells them you need to develop a new product, which is going to rate the customer and, and, uh, but, but it's going to make us rich.
It takes a really, really principled person to go, well, hang on.
Uh, you know, maybe, maybe I should become a, a sheep farmer instead.
They're not going to do that.
And in the same way with, with, with people like Michael Gove, you know, he's not going to go having been shown the keys to the haven't been shown the kingdom of the world.
He's not going to say to Satan, no, thanks mate, I'm Jesus, because most of us don't have that level of discipline.
Yeah, no, I agree.
Well, I mean, I think that's my, as I said, I want it to be over, but I certainly, like no one under 40 should take it, or even under 50.
I mean, that would be, and as I said... Or under 60, that would include me then.
Yeah, I mean also this for what it's worth for any I think also any women of fertile age should not be taking it because the official line is is also they they obviously have no idea what it will be like on it impact will be on pregnancy so if there is any chance you know you could get pregnant do not do not take it that will be my line because we haven't ruled out a fourth.
So don't don't go near it.
You know, just it's just not worth it.
But that will be, you know, it'll look.
Let's see.
Let's see how it played out.
I mean, there's room for a good news story here and there, I think.
I have been.
I agree.
You know, it's been quick.
There's no doubt about that.
I don't want to set myself up as Jesus, because I'm not Jesus, but I think I probably am Cato.
I am very, very, very ideologically pure.
And look, I can forgive you totally for not quite matching my standards of absolute rigorous purity, because frankly, no one does, apart from maybe, well, not even the Donald does, actually.
Anyway, Laura, I think, should we bring our weekly chinwag to an end?
I dare any radio station to give us a show.
You wouldn't.
You absolute wimps.
But that's why people are flocking to our chinwag, because they say, you don't get this stuff anywhere else.
This is how markets work.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, this is it.
This is it.
You don't get C.S.
Lewis anywhere else.
Anywhere else.
I'm good.
Okay, well, bye-bye.
I'm going to have my coffee now.
Yeah, okay, take it easy and we will speak soon.
Yeah, bye.
Bye.
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