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Sept. 18, 2020 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
45:46
Adrian Davies: "Optics, Ethics, and the Cause" (2018)
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Our next speaker, Adrian Davies, was educated at Cambridge and at the University of London and also at the Sorbonne.
He is a full-fledged British trial lawyer, that is to say a barrister, which means that when he's on the job he gets to wear a genuine 19th century horsehair wig.
And he has used his great eloquence and insight defending many of his countrymen against Britain's horrible anti-free speech laws.
For many years he's been a very keen observer of our cause and has worked hard in many different ways for our people.
And today he's going to speak on what strikes me as a rather provocative subject, Softly, Softly Catchy Monkey: Optics, Ethics, and Our Cause.
Please welcome Adrian Davis.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Jared, for that warm welcome.
It's a great pleasure to be here.
It is, I think, 12 years since I first attended an American Renaissance conference, and looking around this auditorium this morning, I can see changes from that time,
which are all changes for the better.
In 2006, the equivalent meeting really could be described as pale, male and stale.
The age profile was terrible.
It was the first thing that struck me coming here from Europe, was to see an audience consisting almost entirely of older people, and frankly almost all older men.
Who remembered a time before the great demographic changes in American society and remembered it fondly, but seemed to have little appeal as a meeting to a younger generation.
That has all changed.
There are far more young people here.
There are far more women, though still not enough.
And all in all, the whole composition of an American Renaissance meeting today.
It's so much more encouraging than it was 12 or 13 years ago, that for those of you who were too young to be here 12 or 13 years ago, you don't know how much better things have got.
I'm particularly pleased to see Identity Europa here.
It's not an organisation about which I know a great deal.
I'm pleased to see Identity Europa here, maybe because they're doing some of the things I think we should be doing, a subject to which I will come.
Here we are in the year 2018, and as a foreigner and a guest in your country, I'll give you a little bit of a perspective not on the changes I've seen over the last 12 years, but the changes I've seen in this meeting over the last couple of years.
When I was here in 2016, there was an enormous atmosphere of anticipation.
A lot of people got very excited about the Trump campaign.
I'm not here to speak good or ill about Donald Trump, but it was manifest that there were expectations that were in some respects perhaps a little overexcited about how much one man could do, even if he were completely on side with this project,
which manifestly he isn't, and incidentally obviously manifestly he wasn't.
I think too many people had projected onto him their own hopes for the future.
And invested perhaps too much anticipation.
My only comment, I'm not here as a foreigner to comment to American politics, is that there's been, so far as I could help, at least among some people, too much of a reaction in the opposite direction.
And now they are too critical or too pessimistic.
That's human nature for you.
It tends to overreact in one way or another.
So here we are in 2018, and it could be called, in some respects, a hangover after the party.
People were expecting the world to change overnight and lo and behold it hasn't.
So it will do us some good this year to have neither the mood of anticipation that was present in 2016 or perhaps misplaced triumphalism that some felt in 2017 and to engage in a little reflection.
We can see, as a first cause for reflection, that many trends in society are working in our favour,
if correctly understood.
I'll take up a topic that Nick Fuentes spoke about in what I thought instead was a truly brilliant speech, actually the best debut speech made by a young...
I've never met or heard of Nick before today and I had no idea what he was going to say.
So it's interesting to see that he was developing a theme that I was going to take up and I might take a little less time over it because he's already spoken about it but I will reprise it because it was something which was quite independently struck me.
One of the problems that we've faced historically is the failure of an older generation of our people, be that in England or in America or anywhere else, to grasp how profound are the demographic changes which are taking place in our societies.
And I was going to say this in almost the same words as the previous speaker, so I jolly well will anyway, because I can't change the whole speech having thought of that beforehand.
People who grew up in the 1950s and the 1960s cannot conceive how our societies are changing.
There are large parts of many English cities, and I now use that word in a geographical rather than an ethnic sense, that do not appear to be part of Europe, let alone part of England.
They have been transformed out of all recognition.
In considerably less than two generations, it's not merely the case that the people look different.
Many of them have no basic functionality in the English language because they're able to live in monolingual communities of their own in which they interact only with people from similar ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds.
And they have no desire for broader integration into society.
Today, England isn't a country to which they feel any sense of allegiance or which they feel any affection.
It's a place where they come, as they like to put it, to better themselves.
This is supposed to be a noble cause.
What it actually means is abandoning your own country and your own people in the selfish pursuit of personal economic advancement.
It doesn't strike me as a particularly admirable cause at all.
But that is why they, broadly speaking, have come.
When they come, they form communities which are effectively ethno-religious enclaves, with no broader interaction with society around them.
One example that has been taken up by our own British press, which is positively full of shock and horror, to discover this curious fact.
Is that in Blackburn, taken to be the most racially segregated city in England, it's a rather poor, economically depressed city in our northwest, the degree of racial segregation is much greater now than it was in the 1970s.
There is much less interaction of any kind between the different communities, and they are pursuing completely divergent lives in every way.
The reason for that, which didn't appear to have dawned upon...
English or British liberals.
Because once you acquire critical mass as a community, you can live an entirely segregated life if you so desire.
And there comes a point where, as it's now slowly beginning to dawn on some of our rulers, people don't even need to trouble to learn the language of the majority population.
So it is beginning to dawn upon people the things which would have been thought unimaginable.
40 or 50 years ago, and scarcely imaginable one generation ago, are now coming to pass in their day-to-day lives.
Now, here there is, I think, a fact that we all need to face up to.
It's something everyone involved in this struggle, whether in England or America or Europe or anywhere else, has learned slowly and painfully.
Which is that the political reaction to what is happening is producing itself over a much longer period of time than we could anticipate it, and certainly a much longer period of time than we had hoped.
And what is important, I think, to bear in mind at this stage is that we ought to believe in our own ideology.
Now, this may sound like a rather obvious thing to tell people, but let me explain what I mean.
If you believe that a nation is an organic home, of which all the members, young and old, men and women, rich and poor alike, form a part, as the cells form part of the human body, you will believe that the organism has,
or the organic society has at some level, a form of collective consciousness.
Of course it's different from the consciousness of the individual, it's much vaguer and more generalised.
But it exists, and over time, it operates.
And one of the things which it will operate over time to do is to perceive that things are changing against its interest.
If, in other words, you see your people being transformed into an ethnic minority in parts of their own country, and moreover an ethnic minority that's subject to vilification,
abuse, violence and hostility from those who have come to our country or other European countries, sometimes on a shocking scale, the worst examples you can see in Sweden, for example, this is a country
which is undergoing rapid demographic transformation, at least in its major cities,
In England or France or Belgium or the Netherlands, these world countries had great colonial empires, and an inevitable trend of empire is that colonial peoples gravitate towards the imperial.
The poet Juvenal was complaining about this in Rome in the 2nd century AD in the kind of language that got him prosecuted in the English courts if he was using it in England today.
It wasn't very complimentary about the newcomers he saw arriving in areas of Rome.
Incidentally, it's certainly not confined merely to Europe and North America.
I witnessed a similar phenomenon in the more affluent southern countries of South America.
Whole barriers of Buenos Aires, which was a generation ago, a very European city, have been utterly transformed by the arrival of hundreds of thousands of people from poorer neighbouring states, who have changed the character of that city from an essentially European city,
the European descent population, to essentially an Amerine city in certain barriers.
And it has all the same characteristics.
Do not imagine that the things you see in California...
are caused merely by a bad relationship between Hispanic people and Anglos.
It happens in South American countries between people whose native language is Spanish.
You can see great demonstrations in Buenos Aires of Bolivians who are profoundly antagonistic to the Argentine society in which they now live and demand the right to have dual nationality to vote in both sets of elections and to enjoy the privileges of both countries, the one in which they were born and one in which they choose to live,
without any compromise.
Or regard for the wishes of the people of the country to which they have come.
So it's not actually confined, as you would imagine, to a kind of culture clash between groups with deeply different cultures.
It can actually happen in surprisingly similar circumstances.
But to all this, there will be a reaction.
You are beginning to see it here.
However ill thought out, however much based upon emotion rather than I'm
always full of admiration.
For those of an older generation of mine who fought the good fight through very difficult years, and Jared is one of the best in that respect.
I'll come on to some of the things that have been done well here, I think, and some of the things that have been done not well.
But we start from the premise which I think many here would agree upon.
Society is an organic whole.
We all belong to the nations into which we are born.
Those nations are now beginning to perceive themselves as threatened.
There is a sense, which is entirely justified, that in another generation or at most two more generations...
We may all become ethnic minorities in the lands of our birth and lands in which our forefathers were unquestionable demographic supermajorities, although we're essentially culturally and normatively white European Christian countries.
We're seeing the inconceivable that would change.
Now it is actually happening in front of our eyes.
It is very, very far from inconceivable that these societies will be transformed out of all recognition.
And more and more obviously to the great disadvantage of the founding peoples, the original peoples of those countries, to that there will be a reaction.
That reaction may or may not be sufficient to reverse what is happening.
We're involved in a race between the demographic explosion, Of the people who have come to the traditional countries, traditionally white majority,
Christian majority countries of Europe and North America, on the one hand, and the red pilling of the natives on the other, which will come about first, the demographic transformation of these societies to such a level.
That we will become nothing more than a small minority in our own lands, which was, after all, the unfortunate fate of the indigenous peoples of North America.
You can see there rather a frightening example of what happens if you don't have or can't enforce immigration control.
You end up living on a reservation in the extreme case.
It happened to the aborigines of Australia, about whom our first speaker spoke with great affection.
They now form an infinitesimally small proportion of the population of that great continent.
If you don't or can't stand up for your interests, in the case of those people, they couldn't because the people coming to those...
New continents from Europe were technologically more advanced than they were in a position to impose their will.
Or if you simply don't, because you subscribe to a warped ideology, that of liberalism, which prevents you from acting in your collective interest.
Very, very bad things happen to you.
That is the nature of human society and all through human history.
We haven't suddenly changed.
We haven't suddenly changed from the kind of people that we were 100 years ago or 200 years ago or 1,000 years ago or 2,000 years ago to become disinterested actors seeking only some liberal social ideal contrary to what one or two of our more deluded rulers think and the larger majority of them pretend to think.
We do see a time of crisis.
Whether it's really true, as we're sometimes told, that the Chinese ideogram for crisis consists of a combination of ideograms of danger and opportunity, I don't know.
If it isn't true, it's only where we're all to be.
But that is the situation in which we find ourselves.
Now, if you wish to do something about that, you need to consider What things you can influence and what things you cannot influence.
There are things which at present we cannot influence.
It is manifestly disadvantageous to an intelligent young man or woman to become involved in a course such as this.
In a society, whether it's your society here in America or our society in England, where cosmopolitan liberalism is essentially a soft totalitarian ideology.
It's not imposed the way in which Stalin and Beria impose communism upon the Soviet Union.
People don't come for you in a van marked red in the middle of the night and take you away to Petropavlov's prison and shoot you in the back of the net.
It's imposed in much more subtle ways.
Which in the longer term, however, are arguably more effective.
After all, look what happens.
The Soviet Union and its ideology no longer exists and has been replaced by a regenerated Russian national state.
Whereas bourgeois liberalism proves remarkably tenacious, however serious its mistakes and however much damage it is doing to the people of the countries that it dominates.
So there are things we cannot control.
If you become involved in this cause, it involves sacrifice.
There is no benefit from it of a direct or tangible nature.
There is a great deal of social pressure against becoming involved in such a cause, a great deal of social pressure to conform.
That, incidentally, is normative human behaviour across all societies at all times.
In every society, there is pressure to conform to the prevailing ideology, whatever it may be, and large numbers of people do so even in the full and certain knowledge that the ideology is false.
Throughout Eastern Europe, by the end of the 1960s, almost no one believed in communism anymore.
That included...
The leading figures in the communist parties in many of the countries that they ruled.
They knew it didn't work.
They knew that the economics were nonsense.
They knew it could only be maintained by a combination of lying propaganda and the threat of force.
But none of them, or very few of them, had the courage to say this in public.
We are in a rather similar situation.
A great many people...
Who know that what the liberal establishments of Great Britain or the United States or Sweden or France or Germany tell them is not true, do not say it because they know it will be disadvantageous to them economically or socially or they will come under family pressure or whatever not to do it.
Now, we cannot do anything about the fact that the rulers of our societies exert that kind of pressure upon people to conform.
We need to accept that a great many people, human nature being what it is, who have some secret sympathy with what we are saying, with what we believe, will not for the present dare to speak out.
We need to work with the ones who are willing to come forward, who are in other words the outliers in our societies.
Do what we can with the people who come to us.
That raises interesting and difficult questions, which I want to talk to you about in some measure today.
There are particular problems, I think, in Anglo-Saxon countries, in the Anglosphere, as it's sometimes called over here, although it's not a term we use so much in England, because in those societies, liberalism is so much more deep-rooted.
As an ideology than it is, say, in Latin societies.
In France or in Italy or in Spain, if you express right-wing or nationalistic views, people may agree with you or they may disagree with you, but they accept that those views have always circulated in their societies, that there have been times in their history where political parties espousing such views have been in power,
and it forms part of, if you like, the general ideological substrate of thought.
We're in a more difficult position insofar as we don't have so much of a tradition of that kind, which is a problem.
And that can lead to a situation which makes it more difficult for us now in our countries at this point in their histories, and it is for some of our counterparts in other European countries.
There's not a reason for giving up and throwing our hands up in despair.
And it's moreover a factor which is sometimes overstated.
One of the things you'll find about men and women in this room is that we are very unusual.
We are interested in ideas.
We're interested in having an intelligent debate about ideas, including unorthodox ideas, outside the mainstream of our societies.
I don't find myself...
Flying into a rage if I meet someone who espouses, for example, communist ideas.
I find it interesting to debate with them.
I don't think most liberals would find it interesting to debate with us.
They're going to an emotional spasm.
I suspect there's some out there right at the moment going into very, very profound emotional spasms.
But, as I say, we are outliers in that respect.
Find ourselves all of a sudden in a situation where there are opportunities for which I don't really think, but I know that many of the older people in this movement did not dare to hope 10 or 12 years ago.
And I know that's true, but they told me so.
We need to think what we do with those opportunities.
They are not going to play themselves out for our benefit without any input for us.
That is a Marxist fallacy under which history is predetermined by certain considerations.
It is actually mocked very well by George Orwell in Animal Farm, in which one of the animals talks about the inevitability of the revolution.
It causes another, rather cynically, to observe that the revolution is inevitable.
Why should anyone make any sacrifices to bring it about?
It's going to happen anyway.
We shall see all the benefits.
And why should I be the one to put my head on the chopping block to make it happen?
No, it won't happen unless we make it happen.
But we need to consider what is going to make it happen.
Which brings me to looking at, and I say, what have been...
And this is not an easy thing to discuss.
The besetting faults of what you like to call race-realist groups in the Anglosphere.
As I say, their first problem is a structural problem about those societies.
Few people from elite backgrounds in such societies will wish to become involved in such movements.
That is something we can't do anything about until such time as those movements are more powerful and more successful and it is less difficult to become involved with them.
What, however, we can do something about is looking at how we run such organisations, how we run our campaigns, broadly speaking.
To make them attractive to the best of those who can be attracted to our movements and not bluntly to the worst.
And there are two besetting faults that I have seen in the Anglosphere over many years of engagement in the political struggle.
The first is of those who say, look, we are never going to attract people from middle class backgrounds, successful professional people, etc.
It's summed up in the phrase of we've got what we've got.
For all the years that I have been involved, and it's far more years than I like to imagine, people have paid lip service to the idea of quality over quantity, and in practice they have taken any old rubbish that comes along.
That rubbish takes various foes.
It may take the form that some of you witnessed here about a week ago.
A group of people who think it's clever to go into a field and light up a swastika.
And this, they imagine, is somehow going to achieve some kind of positive political outcome.
Of course it doesn't.
It lives up to every stereotype in the Southern Poverty Law Centre playbook.
And if they are not being paid by the other side to do it, they jolly well should be.
Instead, I don't think they are being paid.
I think it's worse.
I think they do it free without even charging Morris Dees for the privilege of putting out his best propaganda for him.
That is one kind of problem.
That's a very obvious problem.
I don't think that to this audience I need labour it very much.
Another is of a more serious kind.
We say that we only want the best for our peoples, yet we don't seem to want the best of our peoples always to lead our organisations.
There is a very dangerous tendency to make excuses for people who are manifestly not fit and proper people to be running any kind of serious political organisation.
Maybe because they're willing to put themselves forward to go into the front line and have some bric-a-brac thrown at them.
We have had this problem, particularly in England, that I'm not going to dwell upon individuals because I think that would be personally unnecessary.
Some of you will know one individual who might particularly have in mind in this respect.
But if you have people with defective characters, people who are either...
Financially dishonest, or who are vain and egotistical, or who display other faults of character which are innate to that person.
Giving them a second or a third chance, or whatever, is the road to calamity.
The leopard cannot change his odds nor the ethiopathy's hue.
Thank you.
One of the very strange things about people who I meet through politics, one of the ways in which they distinguish themselves from my general social friends, business connections and whatever is this, most of us have a besetting fault,
which is to be much easier on ourselves than we are on others.
I've met men who preach about the sanctity of marriage and the family while themselves carrying on extramarital relationships.
I can think of one or two I've known who actually done that.
They are, of course, hypocrites.
They are giving or setting for others a much higher standard than they will adopt for themselves.
But in our circles...
We find the opposite fault displayed.
This is unusual, but it is no better.
People actually accept much lower standards, often from those who are set up in leadership positions in small, vibrant groups in the Anglosphere, than they set themselves.
Now, this is really quite bizarre.
It's just as bad a fault as the first.
But it's so unusual, you wouldn't think it would happen until you've been involved in this.
That if someone is willing simply to express support for an opinion with which you broadly agree, you are happy to take on board, as a close collaborator and comrade, a man or woman of seriously defective character.
Well, surprise, surprise, if you involve people with seriously defective characters, you get seriously defective outcomes.
The other tendency, of course, I've already touched upon.
We need to inspire and win over the best people in our societies, and we are not going to do that by behaving in a fashion which attracts only the mob.
It is important to get your propaganda right.
I'm pleased, as I say, it's CK Identity Europa because I think they're doing this well.
This involves walking a very, very delicate tightrope.
On one side, you get the kind of person who has, in some respects, the right optics.
They present well.
They present as a well-dressed...
Well-mannered, well-educated man or woman in mainstream conservative organisations.
I don't mind for one moment admitting that that is the kind of society which I personally find congenial.
But there is a problem for such people and with such people.
In order to maintain what they call their respectability...
They have had a tendency to trim and trim and trim and betray their ideas over a period of time to make themselves acceptable to mainstream conservatism, what you call conservatism inc, and by the end of their lives, they've often betrayed every idea that they became involved in politics to maintain.
Again, it would be unkind to mention names, but if, for example, you...
After 30 years of involvement in politics, end up dismissing the likes of Sam Francis or Joe Soberham from their employment, it tells you a lot about the kind of person who does that to people.
An awful lot.
And unfortunately, that is one kind of problem, and it's the sort of psilocyte.
The shuribdicide of this particular equation is the kind of person who positively relishes I am going to make so bold as to say that you need to reflect about things which have happened.
After the Charlottesville episode, I think everyone in this room and everyone involved in this movement needs to consider not whether praise or blame should be attributed to people for the events of that day.
But whether such events should be repeated, they appear to act as a magnet for the most violent and deranged political opponents.
And when you have people of that kind around, episodes are going to happen that are very, very unfortunate.
And guess what?
The mainstream media are going to blame us for the consequences of violent protests against such.
Now, as I say, I know that this is a sensitive subject.
I know that opinions are divided about it.
I know some of the personalities involved.
But one of the things I would say to you is this.
Our own experience in England was that holding confrontational events designed originally to generate publicity.
Did generate publicity and disproved that foolish old saying that no publicity is bad publicity.
Oh yes it is, it most certainly can be.
We do not need the optics of brawling thugs of left and right clashing on the street and on the contrary, if you do that, you will frighten off any of the people from better and more desirable backgrounds.
We need people with skills of all kinds that are only going to come to us if this movement presents in a way as a kind of organisation with which you can be involved and hold your head up high.
Having to face people who don't like you for what you say, that's fine.
I don't mind that at all.
If people hate me because I say something that they don't want to hear, that is their problem.
If, however, people hate me because I appear to be associated with a bunch of sociopathic street folks, that is my problem.
It's very much my problem.
So those are the things I'd say to you.
You're fortunate in the American Renaissance to have Jared Taylor.
Jared is a gentleman.
won't like being praised in public.
But he deserves to be for the following reason.
He has correctly grasped something that we all need to understand.
There are two kinds.
of political respectability.
The good kind and the bad kind.
The bad kind is the mainstream conservative trimmer who will go to the edge of what is permitted in the discourse of the kind of society in which we live, but no further.
The kind of person in England, for example, who gets terribly, terribly excited about Brexit, which bores me rigid, but will never dare to say the fact that soon Well, there's people already a minority in their capital.
And soon there will be a minority in most cities of any size, except, I think, Norwich, across the country.
They won't say that.
This is of infinitely more importance than the political arrangements we have with neighbouring continental states.
So that's the bad kind of respectability.
The good kind of respectability means that you comport yourself in a fashion.
That is worthy of serious men and women who want to achieve something worthwhile for their people and their country, who are not willing to take on board anyone who comes.
I'm delighted for examples here that Identity Europa rejects two out of three of every potential recruits.
It's a marvellous thing.
Believe you me.
You'll get much further.
By recruiting only the best than you will by recruiting anyone who comes along.
Now, as I say, it's not been easiest of speeches to make because it has involved some implied and, frankly, some actual criticism of some people who I've known over the years and people who you've known over the years and decisions that have been made and tactics that have been followed.
But I didn't come here to have a good time.
I came here to put before you some thoughts that I have.
about how best to take advantage of the enormous opportunities which present themselves and which we will be able to actualise if we get things right.
They are not written in the pages of destiny so as to play themselves out inevitably in our favour and again I could not agree more with Nick Fuentes about that.
We can convert those opportunities into reality but only if we act in the best way and attract best people.
Ladies and gentlemen, I've spoken for too long.
I'm anxious to stop on time to take at least a few questions, if anybody has any.
I shall also add that I'll take questions on any subject, not necessarily narrowly arising out of the speech.
We've got a few minutes, I think, left.
Thank you.
Thank you.
My question goes to you as a barrister.
And I hope the answer will be free of charge.
Yeah, yeah, I'm not one entitled to charge for legal work done in the United States.
I'm not admitted in any of these jurisdictions.
Tennessee or federal courts, you can ask for anything that free, yes.
I really would like to know what your take is on the recent situation when one of the speakers of the Italian movement, I'm sorry, from Austria, went to England to speak on a conference like this and was...
incarcerated and deported.
What happened to the country of the Marmar Carter and to the British justice system, which laid the foundation of our justice post lawyer
Thank you.
Well, I'm very glad you asked that question.
If there's anybody here from Identity Europa listening, I hope they'll hear what I say.
Which is that one of the faults of some people on our side is to treat executive action of that kind.
As if it were unquestionable and that you must just accept it.
You speak about the British justice system.
I wasn't involved in that process.
That was an executive decision of the government, carried into effect by immigration officers at Heathrow Airport.
It is a remarkable thing that our government, which has lost control of its borders...
Doesn't know how many people there are in the country and can't even take public order on the streets of his capital city.
Is extremely adept at excluding a gentleman from Austria and a lady from Canada who might want to say something that doesn't conform to the world outlook of bourgeois liberalism as actualised in the present British government.
Our utterly inept and useless Minister of the Interior, or Home Secretary as she's called in the meany-mouthed euphemism.
of which the British state is so fond because Minister of the Interior sounds like the German Democratic Republic circa 1972.
Well, it's actually not like the German Democratic Republic like 1972.
The GDR was efficient, it had clean streets, there was no crime, everyone had a job, its health service worked, schools educated people.
So Great Britain is very different than the German Democratic Republic, but it is just as good at spying upon people and oppressing them through the actions of the organs of state security.
But But so far as I'm aware to answer your question, those who were treated in this way, whether they were Austrian or Canadian nationals, have taken or made no effort to seek any form of legal redress.
If they don't seek it, they certainly won't get it.
Great speech.
Let me just say, I'm curious what your thoughts are on, I don't know the guy's real name, but he goes by Count Dankula.
He recently raised a bunch of money for appeal, I think.
Yes, this is an extraordinary case.
I'm actually defending a rather similar case in England.
I'm careful about how much I say, since we're now on about day seven of the one-day trial in question.
These cases are quite remarkable.
They involve prosecuting people under obscure sections of the Communications Act, even on the following basis, even if you can't be prosecuted for what you say or whatever at a public meeting.
There's a rather obscure statue that forbids the sending of grossly offensive material via publicly maintained telecommunications systems.
This was obviously designed to stop people making bomb threats, sending coax letters, making blackmailing threats, and so on.
It's now used to prosecute people for saying things, which can't be prosecuted as hate speech because no one thinks the jury would convict.
So they prosecute them, as they did with Count Bancula, for using a copper wire That belongs to British Telecom to transmit this.
It is extraordinary.
Again, what is necessary is to show an effective legal defence to this.
And there are cases going on about in both Scotland and England.
As some of you will know and others won't, the legal system in Scotland is quite substantially different from the English system and has a different hierarchy of courts anyway.
He says Scottish precedents have limited value in England and vice versa.
I'll follow that case with interest.
He was convicted at first instance and is appealing as I understand it.
You mentioned Sweden and the Swedish regime has been illegal since 1975.
How do you approach that?
Well, I've got no idea whether the Swedish regime is illegal.
I'm struggling a little bit to think why.
A regime isn't illegal because you dislike its policies.
Again, I'm a little bit pragmatic about this.
A government is generally recognised as a legitimate government of a state if it has more or less effective control of its national territory, is internationally recognised as the government of that state, and is obeyed by the people of that state.
The fact that you don't like the policies of the current Swedish government, which I can very well understand, doesn't make in any sense an illegal government.
It's not like the Petrograd Soviet in 1917 where people are fighting one another in the streets and whether the government's legal or not is difficult.
There are all kinds of difficult questions in the world as you know.
They're de facto states which are not generally internationally recognized.
De jure states which for various reasons of kind don't control parts of their territory.
I have to say, I'm not inclined to listen with great credulity to allegations that broadly speaking democratic governments In Europe or North America are not legitimate just because we strongly disagree with their policies.
I strongly disagree with the policies of the British government but I recognize its legitimacy, its the lawful government of the land and its only to be changed or replaced by constitutional means.
In any country where those means are available they're the only means that should be used.
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