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Feb. 16, 2022 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
54:28
Matthew Lavender
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Time Text
I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest but I really am.
Welcome to the Delling Pod with me, James Delling Pod.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I really am.
Matthew Lavender approached me out of the blue, volunteering himself for the podcast.
And I'm really looking forward to what he's got to say, because he's got stuff to tell me about the vaccine.
and stuff to tell me about his trip out to Ottawa.
Ottawa or Toronto, Matthew?
Or both?
Ottawa.
Ottawa.
No, just Ottawa.
To see the actual truckers, the truckers revolution, which is really exciting.
Um I don't know whether you can see my face or not if my face hasn't recorded it's because I haven't mastered sodding zoom it just decided recently to only only video I mean obviously Matthew is more beautiful than me so it's not a problem but I'm not doing it deliberately I'm not doing it to hide my face so Matthew
First of all, I've got to ask you about a kind of tragic and sad tweet that you put out that I think was widely shared about your vaccine status.
So tell us the story about that.
Yes, I was quite surprised how much attention that tweet got him.
It was one of those things where you just randomly, something pops into your head and you put it out there and it just seemed to go quite viral.
But the basics behind it was that, you know, I've obviously thought a lot about vaccines and
Myself and the fact that I I took it and I was really really reticent at the time when I took it and ultimately I did it for somewhat selfish reasons but I had to make a living so the first thing is I travel a lot for work and so it's it really felt at the time that if I didn't that would be very difficult to travel that was the first thing and make a living and I suppose the second reason was that I had been convinced by people.
I wouldn't say convinced, I would say almost convinced by people that somehow by doing it I was doing good by other people, in the sense that by me having it, it would protect other people.
And at the time, I suppose in the early days, that was the message that was being put across and I felt For those two reasons, that's why I ended up taking the vaccine.
So you had your reservations at the time, right from the off?
Long reservations, strong reservations, yeah.
And why did you have those reservations?
Because obviously this can't have come from reading the mainstream media, which were universally pro.
I just don't feel that it would have been necessary to use so much coercion and so many what I would call dark psychological tactics to persuade people to have something that was completely in their best interest.
I'm a strong believer that if there's a medical treatment that people need, you give them the facts and then they can go and make their own decision.
And if it's the right thing to do, then they would do so.
But I just saw So, so much going on in the way the media was pushing it, the way government was pushing it, and the blackmail techniques that were being used, the guilt trips they were putting people on to make me suspicious.
Right, right.
So you just felt that you were being sold a particular line and that sort of Your bullshit detector suspected something was amiss.
It wasn't, you hadn't, you hadn't been listening to Mike Yeadon videos or anything like that.
I mean, were you, were you aware or, or who else?
You know, there were quite a few people working, speaking out from the off.
Dolores Cahill.
I mean, I interviewed her early on.
People were saying that these jabs are to be avoided, but had you heard any of those or not?
Yes, I had.
I don't get my news from the mainstream media.
I stopped doing that a long time ago.
You know, I've listened to both of those interviews with Mike Keaton and Dolores.
But, you know, I take everything with a pinch of salt, whether it's alternative media or mainstream media.
And I, you know, I make up my own decisions.
And I think regardless of those messages that people like that were putting out there, I think the way I am and the way I question everything, something didn't quite add up to me.
And did you have any, well you had two of the jabs, or you had the, you can't have had the booster?
I've had two, yes.
I've had two, yeah.
I've tried a lot to have the booster.
And apart from your second head, did you, there's any side effects at all?
No.
Well, I mean, immediately after, immediately after I had a horrible night's sleep, as I think many people have had after the first one, which was a really bad flu-like symptom, shivers and shakes.
But no, I haven't had any side effects or anything.
And I have to say, you know, I'm still very much open minded about, you know, Whether or not it's, you know, there's anything nefarious about it.
I'm not, I wouldn't put myself in the anti-vax category whatsoever.
I just, I know my risk profile.
I know, I know how likely I would be to be seriously ill should I get COVID.
And when I weigh up the risk versus rewards, that's what didn't quite add up to me.
So it's, It's not necessarily that I'm in that camp where I'm full on believing that there's something particularly wrong.
Yeah, you're not full Delingpole yet.
You're just kind of, you're halfway between Delingpole and normie.
I would say so.
I mean, I listen to your views and I like them and I entertain them and I don't discount them.
But yeah, you're definitely a little bit further down the rabbit hole than me, James.
I think most but then you are probably better than most people.
Right.
So I think that's probably true.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So but but this is why it's really good to have you on to the podcast, because, you know, I can't always be be interviewing complete nutcases like myself.
Occasionally I've got it.
I've got to touch base with the generality of the populace.
And you're a good kind of interim interim person between between the two the two states.
So When you tweeted out that stuff about your VAX regret, did you get a lot of sympathy?
Were a lot of sort of people in the same boat as you?
Yeah, overwhelming.
In fact, it seemed to be an opportunity for a lot of people to have this kind of cathartic experience where people could kind of say, you know what, I feel the same.
And, you know, I think it was very taboo to say that, and probably still is to some extent, to say that you regret it.
But yeah, I had lots of sympathy.
I mean, I would say, Like 99.9% of the messages that I've read and I haven't been able to read all of them because it just became a bit overwhelming.
But I think the vast majority were very positive.
You know, I had a couple of weirdos that sent me rather strange messages and verging on death threats.
But I mean, apart from that, it was, you know, absolutely overwhelmingly positive.
Right.
And are you finding that among your among your friends?
Have any of them expressed regrets or doubts or?
Yes, I have a handful of people, but I think that it's difficult, isn't it?
It's almost kind of buyer's remorse, where people don't want to admit that perhaps they made a bad decision.
I suppose there's some cost fallacy.
For your own sanity, it's probably easier just to believe that you did the right thing.
There's nothing, you know, nothing nefarious about it.
And, yeah, just go along with that train of thinking, just to stay sane almost.
To face that reality, you may have put something into your body that you really shouldn't have.
You know, it's quite a hard pill to swallow, isn't it?
It is.
It really is.
And I have every sympathy for you on it.
And I hope that, you know, you haven't You know, you don't grow a third head because that would be terrible.
But because of your noble self-sacrifice, Matthew, you were able to go out on our behalf to Ottawa, which I'm presuming you wouldn't be able to do.
I mean, I can't imagine they let you into Canada unjabbed.
Definitely not, yes.
That would have been basically impossible.
The one good thing about the fact that I took those two injections is that I was able to get out there and report back on what I saw.
I don't think they allow even a negative test or anything like that.
You have to have had the jobs to get into Canada.
I think a lot of people are going to be watching this quite intrigued to hear eyewitness accounts of what's been happening in Canada because it's a bit like, back in the day, it's a bit like somebody who'd been behind the Iron Curtain.
And reported on what the Russians are really like, you know, they're really into their blue jeans and they love listening to Western pop music on the cassettes that I brought out.
You're probably too young to remember that.
I bet the Berlin Wall came down just after you were born, probably.
Yeah, you'd be surprised.
I was born in I was born in 1979.
So I actually I can remember it quite well.
I mean, I would have been quite young.
Was it 89 that the fall of the Berlin Wall?
Yeah, so I was 10 and I remember it very clearly.
I mean, it was one of those moments in history, wasn't it?
Which just kind of sticks in your mind.
It was one of those everybody knows where they were at the time moments.
So you're old enough, just old enough to remember that period where the East, Eastern Europe was displaced.
You never met Eastern Europeans.
You never, no one ever traveled there apart from sort of communists like, like Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott when they went on their, their love tour on the motorbike.
But, but I think generally Eastern Europe was, was behind the Iron Curtain and it was another place and one never visited.
So all reports that came out were, were, were just like from a, like from an alien alien planet.
And in the same way now you've been out to Canada, how are they getting on?
They're, they're doing something that's fighting for the freedoms of everybody.
And I think that's something that some, some people haven't quite grasped yet, I had a couple of people say to me, what is it with you and truckers?
Do you like Canadian truckers in particular?
Why have you gone to support them?
And I felt from seeing the live streams and the images from Alternative Media of what was going on there that it was quite a momentous occasion and that they were kind of ground zero for this Is revolution too strong a word?
You know, this fight for freedom that's now taking place all over the world.
And I mean, the biggest thing for me was the fact that, you know, we were having conflicting messages when we, you know, you've got Trudeau calling them all sorts of names and kind of making it sound like it's tiny and it's nothing.
And then, you know, anybody who took the time to actually go and have a look But the live streams or alternative media could see that it was it was much bigger than that.
And and these people being or appeared to be being massively misrepresented.
So for me, it was it came about through a strong belief that the only way you can really know the truth is if you see it with your own eyes.
And that's why I wanted to go out there and and just see it and prove to myself, you know, you're not mad like Trudeau.
Trudeau is lying.
And and then hopefully report back to other people and perhaps because Because, you know, I don't have any agenda or anything like that.
I'm just, you know, a British guy who doesn't really have a side, you know, in terms of like, you know, I'm not Canadian.
So I think maybe I just had a little bit more credibility if I was to report on it and say what I saw.
And that seemed to happen.
So, OK, so take us through it.
You booked your flight to Ottawa.
How much is a flight return to Ottawa these days?
It cost me about £900 return.
I went via Toronto's short change in Toronto.
It was a last minute flight and I flew with Air Canada.
There are cheaper options.
Was the flight full?
Yeah, it was.
In fact, I had, yeah, I'm just trying to remember if I had, I don't think there was anybody sitting next to me and I was lucky because I remember looking around and thinking, yeah, it was pretty much, pretty much full, I'd say 90% full.
Right.
And so Ottawa, I imagine it's quite like a lot of capitals, official capitals, you know, I mean, because surely Toronto is bigger, isn't it?
Ottawa, I imagine is I'm imagining a sort of slightly sort of soulless place, but I don't know.
I don't know anything about Ottawa.
So tell me, what's it like?
Well, I love it now because I had such great memories there.
But what it would be like in normal times?
Yeah, I suppose probably a bit like Canberra or somewhere like that, which I've been to.
But I'll be honest with you, it's unusual for me.
Normally, if I go to a place, I go there and I'm exploring.
I hardly ventured.
away from the few blocks from my hotel and where the and where the protest site was, because that's just where everything was happening.
And, you know, I had had a thought that maybe I'd take a day trip to Quebec City and do some things.
But in the end, I realized that it was such an important moment and it was all happening in this one place.
Why would you want to be anywhere else but right right in that moment?
No, I can see that.
So, OK, so so describe the scene.
So this is a few blocks from your hotel.
And just lots and lots and lots of trucks blocking the street.
I mean, how many?
Yeah, so, yeah, it was about two blocks from where I was staying and I purposely booked somewhere.
So even in my hotel room, you know, you could hear the honking of the trucks from there.
So that was, you know, the first sign that, you know, there's something going on there.
Now, you've got to bear in mind that I arrived there on the Monday evening, so It just really started that weekend that had just passed.
And I know that there have been a lot of people there out there supporting.
And it probably died down just a little bit by the Monday as people went back to work.
But the way they've done it is they didn't let all the trucks all the way into the centre.
They put blockades up at various places.
So you've got areas where you've got trucks back to back and then you've got areas of just nothing.
It's like Ground Zero or DMZ or something like that.
And yeah, and that's where the police have purposely stopped it.
So it can give you the impression that there aren't as many trucks as there are, but it's because they're all spread about.
But then when you start to actually explore and go down side streets, you see the trucks being backed up.
Yeah.
And am I right in thinking that a lot of these truckers have got their children with them?
Some have.
Yeah, definitely.
Families, children.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And they're living out of the cabs of their trucks.
Mostly, yes.
Now, I know that the organisers have been using some of the funds that they've actually been able to get their hands on, and that's another story as well, but to put them up in accommodation.
I met people who live locally who offered to give them a spare room for the night, or even just to go and have a shower at their places, but I think a lot of them, they're used to spending long times in their trucks and in their cabs, and most of them seem to be sleeping overnight in their cabs.
So what, I mean, if they're not using people's bathrooms and things, I mean they've presumably got toilets in their truck cabs, have they?
I never quite worked out where they were going to the toilet.
I honestly didn't.
It wasn't a question I was asking them, to be honest.
I would have been curious.
But they must have found a way.
They must have found a way.
Maybe they have little portable cabin toilet things.
I'm not sure.
Right.
And so what were you just sort of going and hanging out with them?
Yeah, so in the spaces between the trucks, there's all sorts of things going on.
So there's a stage, for example, where you have speakers most of the day talking on various subjects.
I mean, by the time we got to the end of the week, people had turned up with these huge music rigs.
And by the early evening, everyone's dancing.
There was just, you know, people barbecuing.
I mean, it was like a festival that, you know, that's how it felt like a festival stroke carnival atmosphere.
It was fun.
Oh, that's good.
And so people of Toronto generally very supportive.
Well, Ottawa, sorry, sorry, sorry.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, I mean, obviously all the people you see who are at the protest sites, they're clearly in support, you know, that's why they're there, because otherwise they wouldn't be.
And you hear all these stories about, you know, the local residents are livid and, you know, they can't get any sleep because people are honking all night.
But honestly, I didn't meet any of those people.
So it's very hard to tell what percentage of people are in support, because obviously all the people you meet there are in support.
What I did do is go to a couple of bars and cafes a little bit further away from the protest site and speak to people who were just out there having a drink.
And bear in mind that you have to be vaccinated to even go into a restaurant or bar in Ottawa.
So these people are vaccinated people.
They're not supporting the protest.
And what was interesting is I didn't meet people that were massively against what was going on, but I did hear people who were just regurgitating the stories that the media were putting out there, which is interesting because they're only a couple of blocks away.
So I said to them, go and have a look, like literally just, you know, me and you, let's go and have a have a quick look.
They're not they're not scary.
It's fun there.
They're not these people that the media has been saying they are, but it's interesting because even though they're so close geographically, they're hearing the same media stories that we're hearing, so they actually had no idea what was really going on.
Right, right, right, yeah.
And so how long were you there for?
So I arrived on the Monday and I flew back on the Friday evening.
So four nights.
I desperately wanted to stay longer in the end.
I had the flight booked back.
I had some work that I needed to do.
I needed to travel again.
But to be honest, I weighed up the pros and cons.
I thought of maybe extending my flight and trying to delay my business trip.
But by the time we got to Friday, I kind of felt that My job was done.
You know, I'd seen what I needed to see.
I'd reported back.
It had sort of seemed to encourage a lot of other people to make the trip there and start reporting as well.
So as much as I was sad to leave, I was mostly sad to leave because I was having a good time.
It was so much fun.
I met so many nice people.
I just wanted to hang out.
What about the the authorities?
What about the police?
How did you get heavy, heavy duty vibe, bad vibes from them?
Or were they being softly softly or what?
Very softly, softly whilst I was there.
I heard after I'd left, they started to do what I can only understand and I can only describe as underhand tactics, passive aggressive things like stealing their fuel and making it illegal to honk and things like that.
But in terms of physicality, they were very hands off.
They just stood back.
They didn't really get involved.
And they had no need to because it was completely peaceful.
There was nothing really for them to get involved in.
They looked confused.
They look confused because I'm sure, you know, they're normal people, right?
Well, to a certain extent.
So they can see that what's actually happening there is not what's being put out there by the media.
And, you know, so I'm sure that I'm sure some of them are quite torn and not really sure whether they should be getting involved in helping or what.
So it must be difficult for them.
Well, they seem to be ramping it up now, I think.
I mean, I saw some footage on Twitter recently of Canadians linking hands, facing down a line of police.
I don't know whether you've seen that, but, but it wouldn't surprise me.
Would you think if, if, if Trudeau started, he's obviously desperate and he's frightened and he doesn't know what quite what to do.
He doesn't want to lose face, but at the same time, it's not going to be good.
Look, is it to be, I mean, how do you see this thing resolving itself?
To me, Trudeau seems like the kind of person who won't back down very easily.
I mean, we've seen that already.
Even if it's just a pride thing, I can't see him wanting to sort of admit defeat or say that, yeah, okay, I backed down, you've made your point and I can see there's so much support.
But ultimately, I do think he'll back down.
It'll just be interesting to see how he does it and how he spins it.
He'll probably try and spin it, oh, I was always planning on doing this all along or something like that to try and save face.
But it seems that it's getting to a point where I'm not quite sure how he can possibly carry on, you know, the charade anymore because it's clearly he's losing the battle and there's no scientific justification for any of the mandates and every other country seems to be gradually moving in that direction.
So surely he'll have to back down.
It's just when will he do it and how long will he try and hold on until then?
Well, what is the, is there an official reason for this truckers convoy?
Is it specifically about being required to have vaccines in order to travel into the US or what?
I think that was the initial reason they brought in or they're about to bring in a regulation which meant that to travel over certain borders, I think maybe it's into the US or back from the US, that they had to be double vaccinated.
But I really think that that's just the straw that broke the camel's back.
When you speak to people, it's about face coverings for kids.
It's about vaccine passports for getting into shops.
It's about the whole shebang, you know, everything that we, you know, you have been talking about for two years, all of the ridiculous unscientific nonsense that have been imposed on people's lives.
So yeah, I think it's convenient to sort of stick with the original reason, because then you can just sort of focus, well, you know, it's just about crossing borders, but it's about much more than that.
And certainly all the people who are there to support, they're from all walks of life, and they all have their own reasons for why they want to be there.
I saw when you were out there, you did an interview with Sonia Elijah and a couple of a couple of truckers.
And one was saying that that he couldn't even get into his he wasn't jabbed and neither was his family.
And they wouldn't they weren't allowed into their local grocery store.
So he had to store.
So he had to take a ferry to get some of his, you know, basic, basic living survival requirements.
It's extraordinary.
What are most of these truckers unvaxxed?
Yes, exactly.
I think that was a gentleman called Blair, and he lived on an island.
I think it's P-E-I, if I remember.
And yeah, so I think on his island, there's mostly small grocery shops.
And I'm not sure whether it's law that they have to check for vaccine passports or whether that it was a self-imposed from that particular grocery store.
But yeah, he was saying that he wasn't able to buy groceries.
And so the only way he could do so was to go to a larger shop on the main island, get a ferry, which took an hour and a half, and just to sort of rub salt into the wound on the ferry.
They had a segregated area.
They had to sit at the back of the ferry and they weren't even allowed to buy food on the ferry.
I mean, it's just it's just it's mind blowing, actually, you know, the the state of of the situation really there.
Yeah.
Well, so obviously the Canadians in Ottawa were, you know, the people as well as the truckers, the locals, they were finally celebrating a chance to kind of resist something which up until that point presumably they hadn't been able to do, they hadn't felt able to do.
Was there a lot of sort of releasing of pent up tension, would you say?
Yeah.
Sorry, James.
I didn't catch the very... Yeah, I know.
It's annoying, isn't it?
It's like, you know what?
This is like doing a... You're in wherever you are.
Where are you?
London?
Oh my God.
No, I'm actually, I'm actually out in Malta at the moment.
Oh, you're in Malta.
Oh.
Is that, is that why the internet's so bad?
It's not just my internet, maybe yours as well.
Because it does, it feels like one of those foreign reports where you're reporting from Kabul and from the mountains.
You're Sandy Gordon.
Yeah, no, I have, according to this, I have a strong internet connection.
So maybe it's just... Yeah, I'm just, I'm still struggling.
I'm catching every other word of what you're saying.
Yeah, yeah.
It's really annoying, isn't it?
It's really annoying.
It does say I've got strong internet access here.
No, it must be mine.
Do you know what I've got?
I've got satellite internet and land, you know, whatever.
What does it come through?
Wire, internet, just belt and braces, and it's just absolute rubbish.
It's so frustrating.
You know, it really is.
I am hearing you now, though.
Well, good.
You seem to be clear now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
As long as I can hear you.
I was just asking you that there must have been a sort of Do you think the Truckers' Rally, in a way, gave ordinary Canadians the permission they needed to say things that had been bottled up for nearly two years under this tyranny?
Yeah, absolutely.
It was very clear to me that people were absolutely joyous for that opportunity to be able to finally express views that were perhaps seen as unacceptable before.
But also just to be around other people, to smile, to laugh, to hug, to share stories and to feel that this was A movement where people could come together and finally fight back against the tyranny, because I think so many people have just felt so worthless and so helpless and not really knowing how to do anything about it.
And this really gave people a reason to get out there and fight.
Yeah, because it's really weird, don't you think, that not so long ago, I mean, okay, let's say the first half of the 20th century.
The Canadians, the Australians, the New Zealanders, and the South Africans.
We're a byword for rugged self-reliance that this was the play you know if you wanted to if you wanted to live a kind of proper man's life and a sort of frontier life like that like the settlers did when they went to America.
You could you could still find that in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa and At least three of those have just gone completely cucked.
I mean, I don't know whether the people have, but certainly the governing class has.
And I was just wondering whether you had any sense of what went wrong, and is the spirit still there?
Because I think we look across at these countries from the UK and think, how can this have happened?
Yeah, you've got mountains and lumberjacks and things.
I'll finish that.
You've got... You've just cut off... I know, it's so annoying.
You've got Mounties and Lumberjacks and Grizzly Bears and all the things that you associate with Canadians, traditionally, just doing their backwoodsman stuff.
And now they're run by this son of Trudeau, son of Castro, rather, this kind of President Bieber, I called him.
How did this happen and how are they going to get out of this mess?
It's hard to fathom and I'm sort of a little bit of a loss as well that, as you say, these are countries that traditionally have been built on hardy people, people who have fought against all the odds to fight for a better life.
So it's hard to know how we got two years down the line and it's taken this long for people to stand up.
Yeah, and I suppose this is why I can't help feeling that so much of this is not coincidental, and that it's somewhat orchestrated, because it's been a slow drip drip of manipulation, of psychological torment, of Of putting people in this situation where they just don't know what to believe, that they're scared, that they're not willing to stand up.
But ultimately, I suppose that spirit, that fight that's there within people, it's still there.
It just needs to be awoken and perhaps that's what's now happened.
I almost feel that the powers that be perhaps underestimated just how ready that feeling was to sort of come to the forefront.
I totally share your optimism, but on my side of the argument, Can you hear me?
Sorry, James.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, I can hear you.
On our side of the argument, there are those paranoid voices which say the leaders of the truckers convoy have been bought off.
They're not what they seem.
And they say that this is going to backfire because this is going to be another
January 6th event where where the Patriots are where they become you know they become vilified and imprisoned and and bad things happen to them and the cause gets yet again it gets crushed and there are those who say that There's going to be a problem down the road.
There are going to be food shortages and these are going to be blamed on the truckers and the people are going to turn.
Have you got any thoughts on any of that?
It's possible.
I could see that line of thinking as well.
I could see it going that way.
If I had to put my optimistic hat on for a moment and look at it slightly differently, I think that some lessons have been learned.
Throughout the last couple of years and just how easy it is for a little bit of bad behaviour or even no bad behaviour but something that looks like bad behaviour to be turned into something much bigger and then be used against people and they're smart people.
They're led by really smart people who they know the tricks that can be played and they know that any type of violence, any type of resistance, Any bad behaviour is going to be used like that.
I think they're really mindful of that.
They're not reacting to any provocation.
They are making sure that if there are things that they can do to help, To help the local residents, you know, they stopped honking at night.
In fact, they never honked at night.
You know, they're trying to keep people happy.
They're trying to listen to both sides.
They're engaging in dialogue with people who have opposing views.
So they're doing the best they can to avoid those types of situations where they get misrepresented.
And whether or not they'll be successful in that, I think only time will tell.
But, you know, I mean, these live streams and these images and these pictures, these videos that people are sharing out there, it's hard to fake that stuff.
I mean, I just just urge anybody that has any concerns that these are people with bad intentions to seek out alternative media and go and have a look for yourself.
Or even better, if you can, you know, get down there if they're Canadians.
It's the only way to see it for yourself.
Tell me the story about those red gasoline cans that I saw, diesel cans that I saw, that the whole crowds were sort of taking to the truckers.
What's the story behind that?
I mean, well, again, it's an example of the ingenuity of the of the organizers or just people on the ground.
Somebody obviously came up with the idea and it's, you know, it's pretty smart.
So the basic idea was that the they imposed they imposed a rule or a law.
I mean, I don't even know if it's a law, but it's They seem to somehow be able to push through this regulation where it was illegal to supply truckers with fuel for their cabs.
And, you know, again, this goes back to the underhand tactics that were being used by the authorities.
I mean, the idea is that if you can't If you can't get fuel to the cabs, then they can't heat their cabs.
They can't survive.
I mean, we're talking about minus 20, minus 30 temperatures there.
And pretty cruel when you think, as you mentioned earlier, that you've got families and kids in these cabs.
But the idea was that if everybody carried one of those, what do you call them?
The jerry cans, I suppose.
And only some people had fuel in, then what are the police going to do?
Go and stop everybody and Yeah, that's clever.
So it's a kind of I'm Spartacus moment of the resistance.
That's really good.
in an empty jerry can so the idea was to to make it very difficult for the authorities to be able to work out who's carrying fuel and who's not i mean i mean what an awful regulation to put in like no no fuel so like these people have to freeze to death i mean it's just yeah but that's that's what we're dealing with here yeah that's that's clever so it's a kind of i'm spartacus moment of of the uh of the resistance that's that's really good yeah
one can completely understand the the tactic used by the authorities because i mean after all we're we're we're run by behavioral psychologists now and they all that they'll find all sorts of ways you know they've They've probably war-gamed every scenario and tried to work out which is the way of crushing the revolt without bad optics, because obviously when riot police go in on crowds saying the Lord's Prayer and holding hands,
It doesn't look good for the for cuddly, friendly, caring President Bieber, does it?
Whereas strangling him quietly is is.
Yeah.
And oh, I know I wanted to ask you, tell me about your experiences on the plane, on the plane back, because you fell foul yet again.
You saw that, did you?
Yeah, I did.
Yeah.
Tell me.
Well, you've just spent a week sort of out there, well four days anyway, with people fighting for freedoms.
You know, freedoms like being able to shop, you know, and things like that.
You know, the idea that I'm then going to get on a plane and wear a piece of cloth over my face for eight hours.
I mean, ultimately, I fly a lot and there are certain airlines that are very lax on it, but Air Canada are not one of them.
So I did my thing because I don't want to be honest.
The main reason I wear it is because I know I'd get kicked off if I didn't, which would be awkward on a transatlantic flight.
But the second thing is that, you know, you sort of feel if it somehow makes other people around me feel comfortable.
But, you know, my my tactic is, you know, just get a bottle of water and you're allowed to eat and drink.
Right.
So if you've got a big bottle of water, I just sort of sit there sipping, sipping my water slowly.
But that works on most airlines.
Yeah, Air Canada have brought in this thing that, you know, you've got to eat at specified times during specified meal periods.
And you have 15 minutes.
You have 15 minutes.
And then, you know, if you go over that 15 minutes, they kind of come after you.
And, yeah, I mean, I just load it.
I literally just load it below my nose.
And the woman came up to me and, you know, the flight attendant said,
So, okay, so I did it, and then there was a gentleman a few rows ahead of me, and he was, and he'd moved his down, and he was actually asleep, and the flight attendant, and he's probably had a few glasses of wine, you know, so he's a bit, he's a bit, he's off, you know, he's off with the fairies, and she's tapping him on the shoulder and saying, sir, sir, you need to put your mask over your nose, sir, sir, and I, I just, I just almost, I just said, I said, I put my hand up like that, I said, Just leave him alone.
Just leave the poor man alone.
He's just trying to sleep.
And she came over to me.
And at this point, I was trying to talk to her from a distance.
You know, it's very hard to have a conversation, you know, especially when it's noisy.
And you put yours up.
And I said, you don't have to do this.
You don't have to do this.
Just just ignore it.
Seriously, just ignore it.
And then so, you know, we're a bit upset.
She was upset.
And so I still had mine down.
And then they came and gave me a warning card.
I took a picture of it on Twitter.
So it's like a warning card that says, you know, you have been warned for not adhering to the mask policy.
And it's quite a long thing.
And it talks about you could be fined and that you won't be able to travel with Air Canada again and all this sort of stuff.
So I just... Had it got a maple leaf on it?
I can't remember.
It had the Air Canada logo on, so yeah.
And so I said to her, I said, well, what are you going to do if I don't put my mask back on?
And I said, are you going to land the plane at the nearest airport?
You know, I'm four well nowhere, like halfway across the Atlantic.
Well, we can't because we're over the ocean.
I said, yeah, right.
I said, well, what are you going to do then?
Seriously, what are you going to do?
And said, I'll get I'll call the police and you'll be arrested when you when you when you land.
I was like, OK, all right then.
But to be honest, by this point, I was causing a bit of a stir and I was quite calm and people were trying to sleep.
And I said to I said, look, seriously, let's not have any more hassle.
I'll put it on.
And I just and I put it on.
And I thought that was the end of it.
Funny enough, you know, five minutes later, it's mealtime.
So then so then we get to all take them off.
So it's absolute nonsense.
So we all take them off.
And I had a croissant and I thought, I wonder how long I could make this croissant last?
And what's going to happen if I take over 15 minutes?
Are they going to say your time limit's up?
You've only got 15 minutes to eat your croissant.
So I'm really hungry and I'm just a slow eater.
I was literally taking little flakes off.
By now, it's just a fun game for me, really.
But to be honest, Rather than cause a scene, I just put it back up after the meal and thought, fine, whatever, you know, I don't really want to have to be barred from traveling on, you know, airlines and things.
So I honestly thought it was all over.
And well, yeah, I got off the plane and there were four armed police officers from, they were transport police.
They were only based at London Heathrow.
And sure enough, they, yeah, they took me to a room and we had a little chat and I mean, I'm thinking of putting in a Freedom of Information request for the full video because it was hilarious.
Like, I kind of spoke to them and we all just had a big old laugh about how ridiculous it was.
They couldn't believe it, you know.
I mean, surely they've got better things to be doing than, you know, sending four armed guards to talk to me because I lowered my mask for 30 seconds.
It's just bizarre.
So how long were you in that room for?
How long did they keep you there?
I didn't quite catch it.
I think you said how long?
How long did they keep you there for?
Would have been about 30 seconds, but I wanted to have a chat about it because I thought this is my opportunity to have a real chat with them and say, come on, guys, you should be doing more than this.
And you like I said, you know, there's a lot of knife crime in London.
Can you be out there sorting that out?
But they said, oh, well, we're only based at the airport.
Surely someone must be shoplifting in Duty Free or something.
Come on, guys.
There's got to be more than this, right?
Got to be more than this.
So, yeah, we had a good old chat, and they saw the ridiculous of the situation.
I said, I'm going to record you, if you don't mind.
And they're like, yeah, yeah, you can record us.
We're recording you with a body cam, as I find.
Do you realise how silly this is?
I lowered my mask for 30 seconds.
We had a big old chat about whether they work or not, and I've done a lot of research, personal research on this, and I know you know all about this stuff.
I'm just trying to take any opportunity to speak to people and try and see how ridiculous all this stuff is.
Um, I love that story.
But before we go, because I'm slightly worried about just how crap my internet is.
Given that you travel a lot, tell me who the worst airlines are and who the best airlines are for masked Nazism.
Well, we can put Air Canada at the top of the list.
They've been the bad guys, certainly.
I have no qualms if they go down because, not literally, I don't want that to happen to anybody, but if you know what I mean, as a business.
But Thin Air, pretty bad.
I had a flight from Russia a couple of weeks ago.
They were the same, you know, anything like below your nose and nah, nah, they're on you, they're on you.
But good guys.
I mean, I'm not just saying this because I'm, you know, I've got status with British Airways.
They've actually been really great.
And in fact, I've got one of those exemption badges, which I use, which, you know, I have a, I do have a medical exemption, which, you know, I don't think it's anybody's, anybody's business.
But if you want to know, I have a neurotic version to draconian authoritarianism and, you know, it really upsets me.
That sounds bad.
Yeah.
It gives me awful anxiety, so I just, yeah, that's my medical exemption.
So BA.
So I have those badges and yeah, BA are great, BA are great.
I was speaking, apparently Ryanair are fairly similar as well.
I mean, Ryanair, they love it, don't they?
Because it's a great excuse to sell lots of food and drink.
Because if they can sell you food and drink, you know, people, I've heard of people You know drinking so much on planes now because they just want to have a bottle of wine for the whole journey you know non-stop because that way you don't have to wear your mask if you just say yes.
So I know people that normally only have one of those little bottles of red wine on the journey who are now having four or five just so they can not wear a mask.
That's interesting, because I'd pretty much decided I would never travel Ryanair again because of what, what's his name, O'Leary, because he likes, he talks a really aggressive game about masks, you know, and vaccines.
He wants everyone having the death jab on his crappy aeroplanes.
So I was thinking, don't go there.
But you're saying they're okay about the masks?
Yeah, it's disappointing, because you'd think he might be one of those kind of guys that would stand up, because he does stand up to authority normally, so it's a shame he's gone down that route.
By the way, I've heard somebody say that there are a few airlines that don't enforce maths at all.
It might be maybe SAS, somebody told me.
I think the Turkish Airlines are really good, I've heard.
Somebody flew to Turkey and they flew out there with the Turkish carrier and the Turkish carrier were just really relaxed and they flew back with a British carrier who were a nightmare.
I wish I could remember the name of the British carrier.
My last trip when I went jet two Although they said you had to wear a mask, they were really quite, really relaxed about it.
So I'm glad that BA is good.
Any others that you know of?
One thing I forgot to mention about Finnair as well is that they don't allow a normal, like they don't allow a cloth mask.
So if you turn up with a cloth mask, they give you one of their own like masks here.
Has it got Moomins on it?
Because I've got one that's No, it should do though, shouldn't it?
There's one airline, and I can't remember who it is, somebody will probably know, that say you have to wear two masks.
You have to double mask.
They have to go to the top.
I think that's Fauci Air.
They're a small airline operating out of Out of DC probably.
And yeah, yeah, you have to have, you have to have anal, anal swabs before you get on and yeah, double mask, etc.
Yeah.
Well, it's interesting.
I yeah, I, it'll be interesting, won't it?
Seeing how much air travel gets normalized.
I mean, like by normalized, I mean, how many of the old ways And I would have thought there'll be commercial pressure from both quarters.
There'll be commercial pressure from the mask Nazis who want to be traveling forevermore in a cocoon of vaccinated whatever.
And then there'll be those airlines that are appealing to people like us who just want no masks and no vaccines and everything else.
It's strange, isn't it?
Because even the people who are really pro-mask, I'm absolutely sure that the vast majority of them, as soon as the airlines say you don't have to wear one, they'll take one off.
People just wear them because that's the rules.
And I think that sometimes, perhaps, You know, there needs to be a little bit more civil disobedience because, you know, if everybody on the plane at the same time just took off their masks, there would be nothing they could do.
You know, I almost wonder whether it'd be a nice idea to sort of book up a flight With lots of people that you all knew, like a little bit, you know, a bit in advance, so you could almost get the whole flight.
You could probably do this.
You probably sort of say to everyone, right, we're all booking on this flight to, I don't know, Paris, something fairly cheap.
Try and book out the whole flight and then make the and say, once we take off, all of us simultaneously, we're just going to take our masks off and what we're going to do.
I think you would have to be an Air Canada flight.
We'd have to do that on.
You've got to go to the belly of the belly of the beast.
Um, just finally, um, how much is your, you're in the hospitality industry, right?
Yeah.
How much has your, your business been completely screwed in the last couple of years?
Well, I mean, I've always worked for companies, you know, all my life up until, you know, the pandemic hit.
So, you know, I've never been out of work.
I've always, you know, gone from one company to another.
And so, personally, it was just really tough to see all of that just go overnight.
And, you know, without going into the details, I, you know, I ended up having to start my own business.
That was pretty much the only opportunity, only thing I could do at the time because the, you know, the work just wasn't there for the company that I was working for.
So, yeah, it was it was it was really tough.
I mean, in some ways, I feel I've kind of I'm fortunate in the sense that I don't have a lot of dependencies or commitments.
So, you know, I was able to sort of get by for, you know, the six months where I was building up the business.
But it's just, you know, if you're an ambitious person, someone that likes to work, you know, you want that sense of purpose, you want to be doing something.
And so for me, psychologically, it was quite tough to to suddenly find myself, you know, pretty much out of work and having to start from scratch again.
But as an industry, the hospitality, we've just been so badly hit.
And, you know, I just think the people who make the decisions, you know, and the people that tell the story, you know, the media, you know, the only real experience they have of hospitality is when they travel or when they go into restaurants and bars.
They don't have people in their families that work in the hospitality industry.
And they just don't think they, for one second, really understand the implications for people who have, you know, been essentially put out of business and unable to work.
And there are a lot of, you know, there are a lot of industries like that.
You know, the arts, obviously, is important.
Is another one, and I just think they just don't really have any frame of reference because they don't have people in their close circle that work in the industry, so they don't understand how much people have suffered.
So it's been really tough for the industry.
Yes, it's weird, isn't it?
Because I think if you'd gone back three years and you'd said to somebody, So you're advising somebody where to go for their career.
You just said, Oh, go to hospitality, my son, because there's always going to be a market for the in this new softer world we live in, where we're not all we're not all working in industrial production or whatever.
And we've, we've outsourced all this stuff to China.
So that's going to be okay.
But no, hospitality, there's always going to be a market for it.
And instead, this happened.
Right.
Well, exactly.
I mean, generally speaking, I think you're absolutely right.
That's good advice.
People always want to travel.
People always want to go out and eat and drink.
So, you know, it's a fairly safe industry, or was.
My other sort of hat that I wear is that I took the opportunity to formally study psychology.
I've been self-studying psychology for quite a while beforehand.
And I thought, well, When the pandemic hit, I'd already applied to do my master's degree and I've almost completed that now.
What I've found as well is because I have the hospitality background and now psychology and my company is essentially learning and development, so working with people in the hospitality industry,
It's really, I find it very valuable to be able to sort of talk to these people and find out the psychological trauma that they've been through and combine, you know, my love of service culture and excellence in service with, yeah, with helping people to kind of get back on their feet and get motivated again and have that sense of purpose.
Because, you know, when you're alive and it's been ripped up from you and you have to kind of get back on your feet, it's tough.
It's been really tough for people.
Well, look, you can feel free to plug your your business or anything you've given me of your time.
So is there anything you want to plug?
Well, I mean, the business is called Nlights and the website is nlights.com.
As I say, I provide training and other consulting services for hospitality.
I suppose the unique selling point is that I have that psychology background and I come from a place of science.
So yes, we look at not only trying to make sure that guests, customers and clients are happy, but also the people who are actually there on the front line doing the work, they're happy.
Because I believe, personally, if your staff and your team are happy, then they'll do a good job and your guests will be happy.
Great.
Well, thank you very much for appearing on the podcast, Matthew.
And it only remains for me to say thank you, dear beloved listeners and viewers, for watching.
If you'd like to support me, and I hope you will, you can find me on Patreon, Subscribestar, you can find me at Locals, and you can find me on Substack.
So any of those would be great to see you.
Thanks very much.
And thank you, Matthew.
Thank you, James.
Great.
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