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April 26, 2023 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters
01:31:02
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #640
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Good afternoon folks, welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Easters for the 26th of April 2023.
I'm joined by Stelios.
Hello.
And today we're going to be talking about how you can feel the winds of change in England, and they're actually in our favour for once, although things aren't going brilliantly, and then a look at the total catastrophe that is the global geopolitical stew, and how by the end of this they're going to make you own nothing because they don't understand what they're talking about.
It's insufferable.
Anyway, let's just get on with it.
So, the other day on Good Morning Britain, and that's really the only reason I'm covering this, a lady called Narendra Kaur got into a debate about the English flag and Englishness, because of course it was St George's Day, so it's the one day of the year we actually get to talk about England and Englishness.
And naturally she was on the negative side.
You would expect that?
You would expect that.
Well, I mean, she doesn't have to be on the negative side.
There are lots of people who are ethnically not English, who are on the pro-English side of the debate.
But of course there are lots of English people on the anti-English side of the debate.
So what can you do?
Who is given more air time to
Well, the anti are definitely, as you'll see by this debate, dominate the debate, even though underneath it you can see there's a kind of iron core that's forming, where all of the progressive arguments are starting to sort of break, and this still remains where it's just, no, actually, we're not apologising, we're not taking on a kind of ancestral guilt, we're not going to apologise for being English or our past success,
And this is where the conversation is going to end, actually.
And you can see there's a kind of hysteria mounting in the left-wing position there.
Hang on a second.
If you're not just going to be vulnerable to me browbeating you about being bad people forever in perpetuity, then I've got very little to attack you with, right?
And so it's nice that you can see slowly this is changing.
For the promotion of this, of course, you know, we've been demonetized, so we have to promote the website, but on the plus side, thank you to the over 8,000 people who have subscribed.
We'd like to get up to 9,000, so do help us achieve line go up, and go and subscribe, and watch Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals, which is a book club I did with Connor, because I feel that, and I don't want this to sound sinister, but I do feel there is a kind of will to power forming in the pro-English camp, where it's like we're very sick and tired of being beaten down using our own moral values.
And actually, no, we are used to setting the moral agenda.
We are used to being the ones who say, no, actually, this is how things should go.
Because, I mean, just historically, the English have always done this better than everyone else, frankly, in my opinion.
Now, I will, of course, tip my hat to the Greeks.
They've done a fair job in their time.
But in the last few hundred years, it's been the English setting, the moral agenda for the world.
And you can see that there's a strain of Englishmen who's got to the point where it's like, no, actually, I'm right, and I'm not even taking your argument anymore.
I think, and this is where the left went in, because there is a tendency to try and understand the world.
And a tendency to try to sort of give the benefit of the doubt to other people and other cultures.
And there is a kind of negotiation that I think that the UK came into with other nations.
But the left has completely contaminated it and they see the kind of, let's say, well, good intentions, they see it as a sign of weakness.
They do.
And they basically have They are in a position now where they are asking for societies to self-destruct.
Yes.
Throughout all the Western world.
So it seems to me that it's one thing to be kind, it's another to be naive.
Absolutely.
And it's good that people are waking up.
And it's very obviously got to the point where the left are not asking in good faith anymore.
It's very obviously.
When did this?
Well, I don't think they did, obviously.
But to your average person who doesn't realise that they're dealing with someone who on themselves might not be very intelligent and so don't know what they're promoting as communism, which is actually Narendra Kaur described very accurately there.
But those people who don't understand they're dealing with this have finally got to the point where it's like, no, you're asking me to just give up everything.
And we're not going to do that.
So this debate on GB News was framed as this.
Should we be ashamed to be British?
But that's not really what the conversation was.
Because Narendra, of course, has a redefinition of what being British is.
Now, being British used to be about the promotion of a kind of traditional and, dare I say, inevitably English world view and traditional moral set and this has been undermined by progressive American values.
So now that being British has been harmonized with the concept of progressive American values and it's no wonder that the English don't see that.
The English would be described as a very conservative people in most places actually and that's not something unusual.
Most people around the world recognize the English as being Stubborn and set in their ways, shall we say?
And we've got to this point where now the hysterical person is just trying to get us to just give everything up.
Let's watch the first clip.
Are people actually ashamed of being English?
Thomas Skinner joins us now, along with the broadcaster Naminda Kaur, who says it's hard to be proud of being English right now, and she worries the coronation is going to make things worse.
That's right, isn't it?
Yes, that is right, I do.
I think it's very hard.
Unfortunately, the St George's flag, you know, we should have national pride.
I feel that every English man and woman should feel proud, but we can't feel proud when that flag has been hijacked by far-right groups.
And what it actually represents is this ideology that by some virtue of a piece of cloth that we are superior to other nations.
And it conveniently forgets our history of slavery links, of colonisation, and a history of genocide and everything that we've built up.
And most countries that celebrate independence day, because I've seen a lot of people on social media saying, well, Ireland celebrate and America celebrate.
They celebrate because they're celebrating because they've come out of tyranny or invasion.
England were the oppressors.
They were the suppressors.
England have got nothing to celebrate because they suppress half of the world.
And somehow they have this suffer from this Napoleon-like complex.
And I believe Napoleon was not British.
He was a Corsican-French dictator.
But the concept of Napoleon Complex is being a short man and having to overcompensate for being a short man.
But she's saying that we were the tyrannical evil empire that oppressed the entire world.
It's like, okay, well... I mean, what more can you... How much higher can you get than world domination?
England's got nothing to celebrate.
Well, we did earlier.
Planetary domination.
Yeah, sorry!
There seems to be a bit of contradiction in the framing there, right?
It's like, no, England's actually not very impressive, but everyone does celebrate their independence days from England.
So it's like, okay, well, I view that as impressive.
She goes on to talk about genocides, which I can't name one, actually.
I can't think of it.
Name the people that the English genocided.
And that is to have a specific policy of extermination.
I mean, you can name them for the Turks, you can name them for the Germans, you can name a few for the Germans, actually.
You can name them for quite a few nations, actually, the Chinese, the Mongols, obviously, the Assyrians.
There are quite a few genocidal regimes in history, but actually, England hasn't been one of them, as far as I can tell.
Again, not a historian, I actually think that England left the world in a better place than what it found it.
So, and this is not my opinion, this is the opinion of actually most historians.
Of all the great conquerors of history, probably would have been better to have been conquered by England than someone else, right?
You could have done worse.
But this just seems to me to be sour grapes.
I mean, she's a lady of Indian descent.
She doesn't talk about the Mughal Empire, which was a brutal, Muslim, purportedly Mongol empire that ruled over India before the British?
I cannot understand why she appeals to national pride because it seems to me that right now many people in the, let's say, cultural left, they don't like the idea of a nation, they don't like the traditional idea of patriotism, but they do want to appeal to national pride.
But You just wonder, what kind of national loyalty is this?
If you constantly say that your nation should be ashamed of itself, and that your nation has nothing to celebrate, and that there is no, for instance, Magna Carta, there is no tradition of, let's say, British philosophy, British literature, there's nothing there to celebrate.
How can you be nationally proud?
I view it as, and I don't think this is actually Narendra's innovation, I actually think she's a bit of an NPC when it comes to all of this, but I just view it as a cynical attempt to essentially leverage open your ability, your weakness, so they can, oh, yeah, I want to be proud of my nation, but I'll be proud of my nation when it's inclusive and tolerant and progressive and left-wing.
It's like, okay, but you're looking for the dissolution of the nation.
So this is a subversive tactic.
The question is, what is her audience?
Once we understand what her audience is, we'll understand why she adopts that tone.
Well, left-wingers on Twitter, obviously.
But you'll notice how she begins this with we.
We!
The collective Scrutonian We can't be proud of England because far-right groups wave the English flag.
I mean, if they are English, they're entitled to wave the English flag, and that doesn't stop me from waving an English flag.
It doesn't stop you from waving an English flag.
It doesn't stop anyone.
I can't control what they do, but also I don't really care what they do.
But this shows that that's her sentiment if she says that there are some groups that I don't agree with and they wave the English flag.
Instead of saying, no, no, I will wave it as well and I show the difference, she wants to basically say... We'll get to that because she does go through this.
So the question then is, again, note the we and how that doesn't maintain consistency.
Let's watch the next clip.
We did save Europe from fascism by defeating Hitler and pushing him back.
It doesn't really work like that because it's not a fascist dictatorship taking over Europe.
No, but it doesn't work like that because you're saying, well, we stopped that, but that doesn't mean that we didn't have involvement in slavery.
It's not just saying because you've been ignorant actually Ed because it's ignorant because you're saying actually that well we saved it from fascism we did do that however you also should also acknowledge how much genocide and colonialism and theft has gone on in this country.
You said there was nothing to be proud about about being English and I'm saying when France was occupied and the But then you keep forgetting.
America was out of the war, we stood alone, pushed back fascism, and stopped oppression across Europe.
But you did, but you also had a lot to do with, you had a lot to do with suppression across the whole of the world.
So Naz, it's you had a lot to do with suppression across the whole of the world.
It's not we had a lot to do.
She's taken herself out of the moral constituency of being English or British and put herself in the moral constituency of those people on the receiving end of British colonialism.
Because she wants to pose as morally superior.
Exactly.
And this is, in her view, how she does it.
But again, she talks about genocide.
That's not true.
At least... I don't actually know what this guy's name is.
I should have had it.
But at least he is not taking this, right?
It's quite a weak defense.
You know, well, we fought fascism.
Yeah, we've done loads of great things.
What's the standard of pride for her?
What is it?
That's a great question.
Perfection.
But fighting fascism is by far the only virtue of England and the English.
But she gives a parochial Indian view because she has extracted herself from being British.
And this is weird.
Not only is this inaccurate, but millions of Indians fought voluntarily for Britain and the British Empire, including her own grandparents, which is why they moved here upon decolonization of India.
And she is herself a third-generation immigrant who's living in England, and yet she still doesn't, for some reason, incorporate herself into the body of what she's talking about.
She still thinks of herself as someone external.
Yeah, no, Tom Skinner is the gentleman who's on with her.
We haven't got to him yet.
The presenter is a former MP, and I'm sure I knew his name, but I can't remember offhand.
Sorry, I apologize there.
But note the setup.
She is now the representative of India against the British Empire.
That's not really what we're talking about.
But it's interesting to see this because identity and memory are frequently linked, especially when we talk about nations and national identity and national pride.
Weren't the British involved in the development of history of India?
Yeah, the moral improvement of India in many ways.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that the Indians didn't have history of India in the way that we currently know it, and that the British aided the Indians into forming a history of India.
To have a cohesive conception of what it was to be an Indian.
Yes.
Yeah, because before that it was a patchwork of competing empires, the largest of which was the Mughal Empire, which was a Muslim foreign empire.
They were no more Indian than the British were.
But yeah, so there is that.
And then there's also, you know, the ending of burning of widows and things like that.
Many other things.
Building of infrastructure, hospitals, schools, trade routes.
Anyway, we'll stop because this is not the sort of thing she wants to talk about.
What she wants to talk about is how we're bad.
Because, you see, I'm being ignorant.
Let's watch.
No, but then are you also proud of what you do?
I'm quite proud of defeating fascism.
Are you proud of slavery links and colonialism?
No, but I'm... Right, so let's talk about that.
You said there was nothing to be proud of, and I told you something to be really proud of.
No, that's something to be...
But then you're conveniently forgetting about slavery and colonialism.
So you don't seem to want to talk about it.
Fingers and ears and blown raspberries.
We don't talk about that.
Let's talk about the one good thing we did.
And of course you should be proud of that.
However, but you don't seem to acknowledge that.
It's that kind of ignorance that I don't like, Ed.
So this, I find hilarious, this very English response, just like, the little smug, sort of like, no, this was a good thing and you can't deny it.
And she's like, yeah, but I don't want to talk about that.
It's like, why?
Why?
She reminds me of Sophistry that we talked about in Symposium 4, where Socrates and Thrasymachus are talking about justice, because she's making the same move.
She's asking him, why are you proud?
But don't tell me because of A, B and C. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You can't win against her.
Exactly.
She's accusing him of ignoring the bad things England does, but she herself is ignoring the good things that England does, to create a narrative that England has only been evil for its entire history, because she has some sort of, what appears to be, a racial grievance complex.
Or she just doesn't want to talk about it.
Yeah, she just doesn't want to talk about it.
And then she's like, oh yeah, you're putting your hands and fingers in your ears and going, blah, blah, blah.
But that's what you're doing.
Not in the mood.
Exactly.
You're acting like, I've really annoyed my wife.
My wife doesn't act like this.
7.27 in the morning.
You don't want to be talking about good stuff.
Yeah, exactly, right?
And so, you know, everyone else is displaying ignorance.
But what I like about the presenter is he's just, no, no, no, I'm not moving from this position.
I mean, again, it's very weak, actually.
Look, we've done loads of great stuff.
You know, there's a massive, massive litany of great things that England has done for the world.
But she wants to create the sort of Elinsky-ite sort of narrative where the enemy, the opponent is 100% evil.
All the good things about them have been ignored.
The opponent is just a demon to be defeated in order to justify where she ends up going with this.
Let's carry on.
...about being English, and I thought, shall I say we won the World Cup in 1966?
And I thought, no, why don't I say that we stood alone and defeated fascism in Europe?
You didn't stand alone, you had America's help, actually.
I'm quite proud of that, that's all.
You had America's help in that, anyway.
Well, I mean, finally.
I took a bit of prompting.
You shouldn't permanently, but, however, you can't always dismiss it.
No, I don't think anyone's dismissing it.
They do dismiss it.
I'm not in favour of dismissing it.
As a woman of colour, I feel in this country that St.
George's flag represents to me far-right racism and bigotry.
Right, you can see how she's literally extracted herself from being English now.
She's like, no, I'm a woman of colour.
That's evil, right?
And so, it's just remarkable to me how, like, this isn't going anywhere for her, though.
She keeps making the same point, and they're just like, no.
No.
It's like, finally.
Absolutely, finally.
Ed Balls is the name.
Thank you, John.
I apologise, Ed.
I should have remembered.
But the point is, she's like, okay, well, you've got to the point now where you're coming into contact with a very old English stereotype, which is, yeah, we're ignorant and we don't care.
Like, this has been a long-running continental grievance, in fact, from the Europeans, that the English aren't very smart, and they don't seem to notice, and they still seem to be beating us.
It's like, yeah, don't know how that works.
Don't think about it too hard.
But the thing is, what she's saying is, oh, the far right, I don't care, this is your problem, right?
The far right aren't the ones on TV lecturing me and hectoring me, right?
It's you, it's the far left that are on TV, trying to destroy our country, and I don't want that, and you become hysterical, love.
Let's go to the next clip.
And actually, what we should be proud of in Britain is actually we are diverse, we are multicultural.
And the good people of Britain will always want diversity and multiculturalism.
And that's what we should celebrate.
1948, I think it was, when Windrush came, there were no good people in England.
Because there was no diversity.
Exactly.
The only positive thing about England that she can say is the foreign elements living in England.
And why?
Well, possibly because she views herself as belonging to those elements.
She views herself as being an outsider.
And it's like, well look, there are loads of people who have immigrated here who don't see themselves as outsiders.
Like my grandfather was one.
John, our producer, is one.
But you're not one.
It's your mindset that is the issue here.
Not like anything to do with England itself, in my opinion.
But yeah, in her definition, the native English are therefore bad by definition.
Just no.
And on top of this, this is just a woke talking point.
This is just woke progressive, oh well, it's diverse and inclusive and therefore it's good.
No, that doesn't necessarily make it good.
I think it is a sign of progress, actual progress, I mean, not in the progressivist sense, that Ed Balls is not having any of it.
Because I'm not certain that some time ago this would have happened.
I think some time ago she would have been given a free pass.
Oh, without a doubt.
There would have been no resistance.
There would have been just complete crumbling on the part of Ed Balls and the other chap who hasn't yet had a chance to speak.
I've clipped bits out of this because she literally is just going on about the same point forever and ever.
Um, that, uh, finally, finally, her interlocutor, Thomas Skinner, gets a chance to say something.
Let's watch.
But aren't the good people of Britain also represented by those flags?
No.
Well, actually, sadly, no.
Sadly, that flag needs to be reclaimed by moderate voices.
Moderate voices need to be louder than the far-right voices who say, oh, waving this flag.
I think you're wrong there.
I do think you're wrong there.
Listen, just because a few people have hijacked the flag here doesn't mean that for everyone else throughout the country should not be proud to be English or British.
Like, I'm... I love that I'm from England.
What are you proud about?
Everything.
Fishing, chips, cups of tea, going to work.
I love it.
Everything about England I love.
Stonehenge, we've got beautiful history, as well as bad history.
There's been pitiful reasons compared to the bad.
We have a Home Secretary that dreams about sending... I just think... If St George was alive and came to this country, he'd be actually sent to Rwanda right now.
We have a Home Secretary who... We don't welcome asylum seekers.
We are not being inclusive.
All she has are hysterical left-wing talking points.
But what I love about this is the aesthetic of it, right?
Now, I don't mean to insult Thomas Skinner, but he kind of represents the stereotype.
that I was describing, that the Continentals were often criticising us for, and he ends up with, I think you just don't like England.
Well, obviously she just doesn't like England, right?
She hates the flag, she hates the people, she thinks that all has to change, right?
But you can tell that she's looking quite desperate, right?
She's sounding like Wile E. Coyote, who's just run off the cliff, and is running out of, you know, purchase, and he realises about to fall, and Thomas Skinner's just smiling, he's like, this is crazy, you know?
It's fun with the talking points, because it's like those games where you have, let's say, a bear or something, especially when you get to, let's say, to your brothers or, you know, siblings, where they have numbers and you press and they say things.
We could have woke.
Oh, yeah, you could absolutely have a trained animal.
One, the West is bad.
Two, all English people are bad.
Three, there is nothing you should be proud of.
But you can see, like, Tom's going to, like, He's got a very concrete and, in my opinion, quite unassailable point.
I like the things about England that I see as virtuous, simple as.
And her hysterical talking points, he's just kind of smiling and laughing at them.
So St George's like, oh come on, come on, come on.
He's not having it, and that's what I like.
But this is where Norinda gets to, she starts building up to the final crescendo of what she's actually demanding.
Let's watch.
Because I was a member of parliament in the constituency which had not only a British National Party councillor, but the largest BNP membership in the country.
We had a St George's Day parade every year with all the primary and the secondary schools because we said we will not allow the English flag and St George to be taken by the far right.
Stop it being a BNP thing.
All of us owned it in our community because we were proud to be English, proud of the flag, proud of St George.
I'm proud of defeating fascism.
All the things you're saying we should be ashamed of.
No, I'm not saying you should be ashamed of that.
And I think that was a great thing you did.
But those voices are too low.
We need louder voices like that.
You were just laying into me.
No, because the straight argument you went to is, well, we defeated fascism.
That's always the get-out-of-jail card.
You can't keep getting out of jail.
And actually, I do worry for the coronation.
In no sense is that a symbol of nationalism or racism.
That's just kind of ignorance to me, because you're waving it around, and I feel it's a problem for people.
Don't start on me.
Listen, look, I'm proud to be... I'll come in here and say that.
Look, there's a million things... I don't think that, just because of a few wrongings that are far right... It's not a few wrongings.
It's a lot.
The majority of people, yeah, should be able to be proud of where they come from.
We should.
We ain't letting them take away from us.
I don't think you should encourage nationalism.
We are!
Love it.
She's going on, she's going on, he just gets to the little England flag and starts waving it and smiling at her.
We're not letting him take it away from us.
Well, again, this whole thing, right?
She's like, the voices against, the pro-English voices against the far right aren't loud enough.
It's like, you're on TV with a former politician who used to have this community St. George's parade, which I would love, by the way.
We don't have those.
And a regular dude who's just got his English back.
And where is the far right being represented here?
Unless she thinks that just any instance of English patriotism is far right, which of course maybe she does.
glaringly obvious point of pride and the double standards.
Some groups should feel pride regardless, other groups should feel shame, whatever.
And if we have people like Ed Balls who stand up and say no because of A, B and C, the other person just goes, I don't want to talk about it.
I don't want to talk about it.
Thank you, Thrasymachus.
And so this is where she finally gets to the apex point that she's trying to make.
The very reasonable demand that we simply get rid of the English flag and get a new flag for England.
Let's watch.
If you give the flag and patriotism and St.
George's Day to the far right and say we're not going to touch it because that's something we're not proud of, that is a catastrophe for our country and we have to own it together.
It's outdated.
We could be proud of the things we achieved together.
Let's get a new flag because that one is outdated and it represents far too much negativity in this country.
I think we need a new day.
What's the...
What?
Did anyone celebrate St. George's Day?
I mean, the turnout in Trafalgar Square was...
In Morley, there was a big parade of school children.
The turnout in Trafalgar Square...
Norendra, will you celebrate the coronation?
Actually, no, because I think the monarchy...
No, I'm sorry.
I think the monarchy represents...
Have they done as well?
...represents colonisation.
They need to give back all they're stolen to.
See, as you can see, she just doesn't like England.
I honestly can't see how this is going to backfire.
So the idea is we don't need one flag because some people are waving it and we don't like these people.
We should get a new one.
Well, that group is going to get the new one.
But also, again, the argument is very much the argument from progress, right?
It's outdated.
There's nothing about England and its history that's outdated.
In fact, in England, when things accrue a significant amount of age, that's when they become their most valuable.
Everything in England that is considered the best is the oldest.
This is why we have so many ruins around, so many old buildings.
So the flag itself is at least 800 years old in use.
It's unbelievable that you could say something about England could be outdated.
That's just not how England works.
And again, all she can do is bring the sort of year zero French Revolution perspective.
to this it's like yeah but i don't i don't want the french revolution i'll get rid of the monarchy as well of course there we go apex french revolution perspective there oh yeah the king's got to go and she can understand that the flag is not clothes or a product or a commodity that you know it's fashionable or no we need a new season we need to sell it now and get the new you know stuff no never goes out of date does the english flag uh just like everything else but anyway she she after this got a lot of kickback and so she put out this video on twitter let's watch this
you know it's kind of sad how the racists and government are all triggered by my remarks on good morning britain this morning uh The fact is, the St George's flag is sadly aligned with four right extreme groups.
It's a fact.
You see that flag, that's what you think.
Because they've claimed it.
And they represent division, hate, xenophobia, racism.
And that's not what Britain is about.
We are better than that.
We are about inclusion, tolerance, welcoming.
So, I don't agree.
Just don't see why and how.
But the thing is, I don't agree that Britain is what she's saying it is.
But okay, then what you're saying is that Britain is not England, and England is currently being occupied by Britain, which has some sort of wildly progressive regime, and the people waving the flag are the English, who are just normal people, and that's bigoted, xenophobic and far-right.
And so I replied to this just going, like, look, the St.
George's Cross represents England and the English.
You're right that it's not inclusive of things that are not English, in the same way that the Indian flag is exclusive of things non-Indian.
This is totally normal and accepted by everyone who isn't a bizarro progressive.
Because that is totally normal, and that's literally... I mean, Ed Balls was like, look, you're asking us to give up the entire country?
And she's like, yeah, let's change the king of the flag as well.
It's like, no!
No, we're not disestablishing England because you don't like the far right, whatever that's supposed to be.
But she kept going on about this on Twitter, and I just thought it was quite funny because, again, if you go through her replies, man, there's a lot of pushback.
And if you go through the comments on the Good Morning Britain segment, man, there's just people just like, no, no, we're not having this.
So if you hit the next one...
She keeps going on.
It does not represent the best of Britain.
Right, so the English flag and England does not represent the best of Britain.
We are better than that.
We are multicultural.
We are tolerant.
And that flag represents something sinister, I'm sorry to say.
England is not sinister, you lunatic!
I don't even know where to begin when it comes to questions of liberty, questions of justice, questions of the rule of law.
All these things that you take for granted in a liberal democracy were invented in England.
This is the genuine greatness of England that has spread around the world because it was just a series of really good ideas.
And it produced really, really good results.
But she conflates Britain with just being a complete leftist.
Like, everything about that is just left-wing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
And then she ended up retweeting this, which I thought was hilarious.
What Narendra tweets said was a perspective from non-white people with a traumatic history in relation to the St.
George's flag.
A lot of Asians and black people face racism, xenophobia in Britain, face it from people who use the English flag as a nationalist symbol.
Is the English flag a nationalist symbol?
I mean, it's only the symbol of the nation, so I don't know what else you want.
And the thing is, the EDL was a mixed-race organisation.
As you can see there with an American and an Israel flag.
And you can see there are Sikhs and blacks in the crowd with the EDL.
So, it's weird, your perspective.
But Narendra has talked about this at length.
If we go to the next one, you can see that she said, look, you know, she's of Indian heritage, but she was born here because her great grandparents came here to fight England's wars, in fact, because the next one, they were part of the Indian war effort in World War Two.
And so I'm not saying that she has to leave or anything like that, although there are people saying, look, if you don't like it, why don't you just leave, you know?
But the point is, why is it that a third generation immigrant who you think would be pretty Anglicised, I mean, she sounds pretty Anglicised, like she sounds like she's born and raised in England.
Why is she sat here unable to have any love of the country in which she's been growing up in?
And so, people are asking her this.
They're just like, look, if you don't like it, why don't you just go and get the next one?
And she's like, why?
Why do any women of colour who have an opinion, if you don't like it, need to get a flight out?
Why?
So, well, because ultimately you've come to the end conclusion of what you were asking for, right?
Abbot, Shola, Sarkar, all of these women of colour, as you put them, have all been driving at.
You're just the lowest IQ one to get them to the actual mask-off moment, which is disestablish England.
That's what you're asking for, and that's just not going to happen.
We're not going to agree to this.
And as you can see, the public is not going to agree to this.
So what they're saying is, look, this is an irreconcilable difference.
If you don't like it, you either stop going on about it or you leave.
They're your options.
As Peter says below there, to give our eyes and ears a rest, maybe.
Because we're sick of the hectoring.
But Narendra, this is a pinned tweet, and I just want to make it very clear that Narendra is not the best and brightest, right?
For those saying my politics are a mixed bag of confusing, it's simple.
I'm not left or right, or middle.
I go by what my heart thinks is right or wrong, whether that be Tory or Labour.
You're very left-wing.
You're very, very, very left-wing.
And you just don't understand that you're left-wing, so we'll leave that there.
But the answer's no, and I can see that a lot of other English people are like, no, just the answer is no.
You're asking for something that's ridiculous, that you wouldn't have asked of anyone else.
We aren't asking of the Indians, so stop asking it.
And she says, it doesn't make me confused, it makes me human.
But the realm of international relations is a very confusing realm, and it's a realm of force.
And very frequently we talk, we listen to talk and discourse about human rights, but at the end of the day, the international sphere is the sphere of brute force.
Sovereignty is a matter of force and the force that you are going to use to defend your own ground.
Now, the thing is that we are going to talk a bit about the latest geopolitical stew.
And I call this because I started researching a bit about Macron's visit to China.
Oh, yeah.
And I'm trying to think of the significance of this trip and of the and of the various statements that were made.
And it seems to me that at the end of the day, it's very confusing.
So I will try to introduce various perspectives upon the matter to try to make some sense out of it.
Because on the one hand, it may seem that what he has done has completely backfired.
But on the other hand, what he may be saying, which is something that he was criticized about, may be something else.
It may be a sort of action.
It may count as an action and as extra pressure to the U.S.
because there is a growing sentiment in the international sphere that the U.S.
hegemony is waning.
Now, speaking of problems in the Western world, you can visit our website And watch the latest symposium we did together with Kyle on ecophobia with just as little as five pounds a month.
You can have access to all the premium content and watch discussions such as these.
Now we were discussing a bit a lot about Roger Scruton and another book by Benedict Beckhold on the topic of ecophobia, which is a sort of Western self-contempt.
And it's the notion of self-contempt, which can happen in all cultures, but especially nowadays it happens in the West.
Now, let's go back to our topic.
Let us have some basic context, because at the end of the day right now what we are witnessing is the rising of a multipolar world.
So, after World War II, the world was essentially geopolitically bipolar.
Most countries were under the sphere of influence of either the U.S.
or the U.S.S.R.
And after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was a sort of period of American peace or U.S.
global… The Pax Americana.
Yes, that was… Because Russia basically collapsed, didn't it?
Exactly, yes, and it was supposed to be a long piece, but it seems to me that sadly the predictions were completely and naively optimistic, and the world that we live in the last few decades is completely unlike the one that, for instance, people like Francis Fukuyama would expect when he was talking about the end of history.
Now, and the thing is that right now we see various forces and various tendencies that lead towards the world becoming multipolar.
And the thing is that there's a saying in Greece that nature does not love gaps.
There's a saying in English, which is nature abhors a vacuum.
Exactly.
So whenever there is a, let's say a vacuum, nature will find a way to feel it.
And international relations are not an exception.
They're usually the best example, actually.
Yes, and exactly where there is a vacuum of power there are people who are looking how to fill that vacuum and how to profit from it.
So the thing is that there are two major events in the last two decades.
And the one is the weakening of US hegemony and the war in Ukraine.
And both of these events, along with, you could say, the rise of contemporary Russia and the rise of China, they have reignited talks about EU's strategic autonomy.
And in the Western camp, and the thing is that there are two sides on this, because on the one hand, There is the Atlanticist side of Europe, let's say, and of the Western camp that has seen and treated with suspicion any claim that was supposed to be about European integration.
And usually the arguments are that Europe is a host to many ethnicities and it's very difficult to have ethnicities put together and it's a sort of recipe for disaster.
The other argument says that on the one hand this is propaganda from the US mainly because the deep state of US prefers to deal with a fragmented Europe of small states because it's much easier to, let's say, negotiate terms with each of these states than it is to negotiate with one, let's say, big coalition of states.
So there is at this point, and there is also the war in Ukraine that has led many Europeans think that basically they cannot outsource their protection to the US.
Europe has been doing since World War Two.
Yes, and there was a kind of consensus that there would be a sort of exchange of military protection on the one hand and economic markets on the other.
That's why we had the Marshall Plan and there was this agreement that there would be money given to various states, Greece was one of them, in return to widespread adoption of trading relations.
But at the moment, it seems that there is a tendency in America to start saying that, to start having a more, you could say, isolationist policy, or the policy that Trump is putting forward, the America First, that is a sort of exertion of pressure to states in the EU to say, well, listen, you're not fulfilling your NATO obligations and you need to basically start looking for Yeah.
Your own self as well.
Britain being pretty much the only state in Europe that actually did fulfill its NATO obligations of like 2% GDP.
I must say also that Greece is one of them.
Sorry.
Well, yeah, but Greece has got... I think we have a ridiculously high percentage of GDP two arms race.
But if I live next to Turkey, I would too.
Yes, so the thing is that at the moment we should focus on Macron because at the moment he wants to profit from this vacuum and he is within the EU and unlike Germany He represents simultaneously a really strong economy and a nuclear force.
So the nuclear capabilities of France are about, I think it's about 290 nuclear bombs and 280 of which are deployed.
So it's not as much as the US or Russia, but I think you can cause problems.
Hundreds of nuclear weapons.
Yeah, you can cause problems with it.
So, he is trying to basically create an EU that is going to be French-led.
And the thing is that he is focusing a lot on the EU energy dependency.
And I think we should look at the next graph and see that, for instance, I'll quote some, you can click on the link, you have it if you want to focus a bit more on it.
But to get the idea, I'll just Quote a bit.
He says, in 2020, the EU imported 55.5% of the energy consumed as its own production and stock changes satisfied only 42.5% of its needs.
22.5% of its needs.
So it's roughly four out of seven and three out of seven that was. - Yeah. - And then since 2013, all 27 member states of the EU have been net importers of energy.
In 2020, Malta, Cyprus and Luxembourg were almost entirely import dependent, with rates between 92.5 and 97.6%.
The lowest energy dependency rates in 2020 were recorded by Estonia 10.5%, Romania 28.2% and Sweden 33.5%.
The lowest energy dependency rates in 2020 were recorded by Estonia, 10.5%, Romania, 28.2% and Sweden, 33.5%.
Now EU energy dependency on Russia goes in the following way.
The EU depends on Russia for 24.4% of all its energy needs.
That was in 2020.
The energy dependency on a specific country depends on the weight of the fuels and the energy mix and the dependency of imports of those fuels from a specific origin.
Now, one thing to look at is that France is relatively less dependent on imports of energy.
Germany 65% or so.
France at 45%.
That's because France is filled with nuclear power plants, isn't it?
Exactly.
And if we can click the next link, that's an article from a year ago by the Guardian.
I'm not going to read from it, but if we look at the title, it's a sort of calling back to go back to nuclear power.
And he wants to basically have extra nuclear reactors.
So just as a quick aside.
Yeah.
Loathe as I am to credit a Frenchman.
He's entirely right on this and we should have done this.
We should be doing exactly this every day.
We should be building a new bloody nuclear power plant like literally 13 years ago.
The conservatives when they're in coalition with the Lib Dems decided not to take 10 years.
It's really I think so.
I think that it's imperative for countries to have to have their own energy reserves because if you know, The economy is incredibly dependent on energy, the degree to which another person controls or another state, let's say, controls your energy.
If Russia controls a quarter of your energy input, consumption, that's not good.
And I don't think it's a coincidence that some days ago we found out that Germany is closing down some nuclear plants.
Yeah, and opening coal ones.
Yeah, I don't know if that's a coincidence.
The progressive mindset with nuclear power is just totally wrong, and I find it really insufferable.
Because nuclear power is the most productive and one of the, within very, very small difference of magnitude, safest forms of energy that it is possible to have.
And for some reason the progressives are like, no, I don't like it because I'm scared of it.
But it's the safest.
Like, the fewest deaths are nuclear power.
In fact, I think it's solar that's the fewest, but it's like 0.02 deaths per 100 kilowatts or something.
I think this is a bias in various of our judgments about risk, because I was listening to someone saying that, sorry, a really small tangent, that frequently when we fly, we're way more afraid than when we get into the car.
Even though car crashes are so much more common than plane crashes.
But on the other hand, the obvious argument to the other side is that what happens if there is a mistake?
That's a problem.
But they always go, yeah, but look at Chernobyl.
It's like, yeah, look at the 1970 Soviet reactor.
We don't use those.
Anyway, I'm not going to go off on a tangent.
If we go on the next link, please, on the nuclear power in France, which is updated in April 2023, we will see that France derives about 70% of its electricity from nuclear energy due to a long-standing policy based on energy security.
Government policies set under a former administration in 2014 aim to reduce nuclear's share of electricity generation to 50% by 2025.
This target was delayed in 2029 to 2035.
And they have the update afterwards.
It was delayed in 2029 to 2035.
And they have the update afterwards.
In February 2022, France announced plans to build six new reactors and to consider building a further eight.
But you can see why directly underneath.
France is the world's largest net exporter of electricity due to its very low cost of generation.
Yes.
It gains €3 billion a year from this.
Because I did...
I looked into this a while ago.
With energy generation, nuclear power plants can be running at over 90% capacity.
So for 90% of the time of the existence of the nuclear power plant is running and producing electricity, it's ultra-cheap, it's ultra-productive, it's ultra-green, and it's ultra-safe.
And France is like, yeah, well, we want to get that down.
It's like, no, you don't want to get that down.
You want 100% of your energy being nuclear energy.
But this is also another thing that I would not be surprised if France is behind, let's say, denuclearization rhetoric, because it benefits countries that are the rest on nuclear power, they want to have the competitive advantage.
And Australia has got massive uranium stocks apparently.
So you've got a friendly country that is not going to do a Russia and start cutting off your fuel supply.
You can probably buy like hundreds of millions of tons of it and just have it sat there.
And just one thing to point out, France is the world's largest net exporter of electricity due to its very low cost of generation and gains over 3 billion euros per year from this.
So it's totally in France's interest.
It actually rankles me that France is actually getting this completely right and everywhere else is getting this completely wrong.
I don't want to take a leaf out of their book, but they're totally right on this.
So I think that gives us a good context to understand how there is a vacuum of power and France is trying to To fill it and profit from it.
And I think that Macron's nuclear policy is going to be the main thing that is in his mind, because he wants an EU that is French led and an EU that to the extent when he's talking about EU energy sufficiency, this means EU dependent on France, basically.
That's one thing to be said.
Now, In his effort to boost the image of France as a new geopolitical player, he made a trip to China in early April.
And this trip has been criticized to a large extent because he went with Ursula von der Leyen and they visited Xi Jinping and other senior members of the CCP.
And they were talking about the EU's de-risking, not decoupling strategy towards China.
And the thing is they talked mostly about foreign relationships.
And there were such as Taiwan, Ukraine and the great power competition between China and the US.
And there was a clause in some of the documents there that said, 51 clause state, France reaffirmed its commitment to the one China principle and expressed support to several aspects of China's proposed peace plan.
China, on the other hand, affirmed its commitments to the developing of EU-China relations, which basically doesn't say much.
The whole thing is that Macron tried to boost the image of France as being the new geopolitical player and the sort of ruler of Europe in the making.
And he went there basically by talking about strategic autonomy.
And this is the sort of rhetoric that uses that tries to say that Europe should be, let's say, strategically independent.
I mean, the Americans must be really concerned about this, because this seems to be either China or France, essentially weakening US alliances.
I'm feeling very much Hannibal in the Second Punic War vibes from this, because Hannibal's goal was to break all of Rome's alliances with the other powers in Italy.
It does seem so, and I don't know to what extent we should understand this, how we should understand this, because on the one hand we should say that There should be a sort of Western solidarity if we want the Western world to survive, because if the Western world is fragmented, it will be very easily played against by an organized group.
So in the same way that it has been considered as a diplomatic victory on behalf of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who established trading relations with Communist China in 1972, which was sort of seen as a sort of splitting of the Communist bloc of that world.
In the same way now we could say that it's the exact opposite.
Now it's Communist China that divides the West.
What we've done is enriched an adversary.
Yes.
And now they're leveraging their desirable position against the United States' alliances.
But if we click to the next link, we can see what sort of counter argument Macron would have to this.
I won't read all of it.
I will just say it.
Those of you who are interested, you can read it.
He wants to say that the most dangerous thing for Europe at the moment, which has been hit very much by the sanctions to Russia for the Ukraine war, is to get dragged into basically fights that are not, as he says, ours.
Now it says that the great risk Europe faces is getting caught up in crisis that are not ours.
So basically, this seems to be, and he is directly alluding basically to Taiwan.
And the question is there whether Taiwan, if it gets invaded, whether it's going to become the next Ukraine and whether there will be sanctions from the Western camp or not.
That is why Macron was very much adamant on talking about the EU as not being a vassal state of the US.
Now, this is an interesting discussion because, on the one hand, it seems like weakness.
Because if someone goes out and says, I'm strong, I'm strong, I'm strong, I'm strong, I'm independent, the other side may start thinking, why do you feel the need to say so much?
Isn't it implied?
Well, the person in charge doesn't say that.
Yeah, I think that it's like Tywin Lannister in Game of Thrones.
No true king says, I'm the king.
But on the other hand, it's not necessarily Game of Thrones.
We could say there's another perspective to this because statements in the geopolitical realm should be taken not with one A pinch of salt with many pinches of salt.
And the question is whether he is trying to, not blackmail, but whether he's trying to say to the US that if you want to maintain our alliance, you need to basically change the terms with which you are dealing with us.
But that would suggest a kind of diplomatic subtlety that I don't believe the Biden administration is Wouldn't that be even better for Macron now?
Or not?
Well, I mean, it depends.
If he's actually trying to send a subtle message to the American regime and say, look, take care of your allies better.
I don't think they're listening.
I think they're not very nuanced.
So if they are not listening, wouldn't this be a sort of exertion of pressure that would sort of say, listen, if you don't listen to me, I'm not going to have it.
I'm going to basically say something and I don't care to receive the public outrage that was leveled towards Macron.
So, because the whole question is that he is criticized as sort of making concessions to the CCP and saying that basically that contributes to the weakening of Taiwan's protection.
There's a sort of feeling that it's not going to... Taiwan is less protected if people go make... If NATO is less strong and less robust, then yeah, that is going to be weakening Taiwan.
Yes, and basically the thing is that there was also another point of address that Macron was about to, there is a sort of feeling in the EU that China can mediate between with Russia and sort of use that to end the war in Ukraine.
I'm aware that China's been trying to insert itself into that role.
I'm surprised the Europeans are like, yeah, we can trust China to mediate.
I think that basically, this is completely naive.
And if anyone who thinks that is naive, because in a multipolar world, Each poll is benefiting from the weakening of every other poll.
So it seems that on the other hand, what Macron is doing could be seen as a sort of weakness from the Chinese party, but as something that weakens both China and both the EU and the US and Russia.
And I don't think that they're going to mediate to do so.
Now, if we can watch some results of the aftermath, the thing is that that was a very bad timing.
After Macron visited China, China announced drills in Taiwan, and also the Chinese ambassador made some really weird statements that denied the sovereignty of various countries.
Let's watch.
A remark by China's ambassador to France has sparked controversy right around the world.
During a French TV interview, Ambassador Lucey seemingly questioned the sovereignty of former Soviet republics.
Now those nations and the EU want answers from Beijing.
Lucey said this, these ex-Soviet countries don't have an effective status in international law because there was no international agreement to materialize their status as sovereign countries.
Lucie's comments are now one of the topics at today's meeting of EU foreign ministers and it could jeopardize China's efforts to be a mediator between Ukraine and Russia.
Our Ivan Watson explains it all for you.
Comments by China's ambassador to Paris on French television claims that former Soviet republics don't have any real status according to international law.
They triggered somewhat of a diplomatic firestorm in Europe with the governments of three former Soviet republics, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, all saying that they would be summoning Chinese diplomats to try to clarify these claims.
And meanwhile, a statement has come out on the Chinese embassy in France's website today showing a pretty sharp 180 degree U-turn with the statement, quote, "The Ambassador Lucey's remarks on the question of Ukraine were not a statement of policy, but an expression of his personal "The Ambassador Lucey's remarks on the question of Ukraine were not
They should not be the subject of over-interpretation, going on to say that China respects the sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity of all countries, and that China would like to help mediate a peaceful settlement to Russia's ongoing invasion and occupation of Ukraine.
Our diplomatic representative doesn't represent China in this matter.
Yeah.
Come on.
You can't trust the Communist Party of China.
And we can skip the next link.
This, if you want to read it, it's about from, let's say, the European conservative Chinese ambassador's comments to our Baltic states.
That's something you could watch.
And the thing is that it's Really, it doesn't look good on Macron, because he went there to boost the image of France as the leader of the new EU power.
And essentially, after he left, there was a sort of drilling over Taiwan and the Taiwan Strait.
And basically, the Chinese ambassador went and he Basically questioned the sovereignty of all post-Soviet, including Russia.
So Eastern Europe now is no longer a collection of sovereign states and the Chinese are being more aggressive on Taiwan.
Yes, and basically, if you can see, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia are member countries of NATO.
And the thing is that we have, I'm a bit cautious of time, if we go to the next link, that's another thing you could read a bit about the Taiwan Strait, but the next one is the one I'm thinking about.
So it's written by Jeremy Warner, and he's talking about get ready for China's invasion of Taiwan and the end of Macron's delusion.
And he is talking interestingly about how Richard Nixon and Kissinger started the negotiation with China then, and how what they did basically led to a sort of weird status of of Taiwan in international law.
But, we should always remember that at the end of the day, international law is a matter of force.
Yes.
It is a set of rules, but at the end of the day, sovereignty, which is defined as supreme authority within a territory, is a matter of force.
And I'll just quote... And in this case, enforced by the Americans.
Yes.
And so if American power is on the wane, you're not going to get international law if China's the one deciding what is and isn't.
Yes, and I'll just say, as a result of Nixon's maneuverings, Taiwan has no standing as a recognized sovereign state, let alone one that presumptuously still claims jurisdiction over all China.
Taiwan was cynically sacrificed in Nixon's attempt to build bridges with Beijing.
Notwithstanding repeated pledges by President Joe Biden, if Beijing invaded Taiwan tomorrow, it is not clear that the U.S.
could legally come to its aid.
And we could go to the last, let's say, to the last part of the article.
Jeremy Warner is talking about some economic interests that France has in China.
He said that billionaire Bernard Arnault has a luxury goods empire, that economic empire, that is the first European company to achieve a half a trillion dollar valuation and thereby enter the harrowed ranks of the top 10 companies worldwide by market capitalization.
And Europe's economic interest in China ensures an ambivalence to China's ambition and causes to shrink from outright confrontation.
So the question is, how can you trust a communist Party, and a communist country to not exert cultural and economic and possibly military pressure against you in the future.
So we can just see that Europeans right now may be thinking that it's a good idea to approach China.
And I think we could just end with another clip by Ron DeSantis, when he's talking about legislation in Florida that he is about to put forward regarding the CCP.
One thing that people are concerned about out here, of course, is the rise of the CCP.
And they're concerned about the security situation.
One of the things they complimented us on in Florida is, I'm going to be signing legislation very soon, eliminating the possibility of CCP land purchases in Florida.
No farmland, no land near critical infrastructure, none.
We're on the cusp of selling all of ours to the CCP.
So, very confusing scene at the moment.
Diplomacy always happens behind closed doors and we should always take many statements with many pinches of salt.
That is why I try to give some various perspectives on the issue.
But we're clearly swimming in a murky tank that's filled with sharks.
Yeah.
A very big shark.
But anyway.
Let's talk about how things aren't exactly going well across the world and certain progressive talking heads don't seem to understand that this isn't just the consequence of Brexit.
Essentially, they have got such a parochial view of Britain that they think that the Conservative government is responsible for all of the evils in the world And don't get me wrong, the Conservative government is responsible for almost all of the evils in Britain, but they're not quite the world hegemons that the left would have them be made out to be.
But anyway, if you want to own something in the coming era of earning nothing and being happy, you could go check out our merch store.
If you want to be unhappy, yeah.
Yeah, where you can get merch which obviously supports us because it's obviously demonetised to help keep the lights on and help us continue to do what we do here.
So this, another hysterical woman having a go at people for being the things that they are, this is Marina Perkis who is a commentator at Byline Times or something, just some lefty rag, right?
So she spends nine minutes in the full clip going, I'm not going to subject you to any of it either, I've already subjected you to enough.
But she goes on about things to break Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has to very patiently explain to her that she's wrong on everything, because she is actually almost wrong on almost everything.
But essentially what this comes down to is yet another hectoring woman who doesn't understand that her paradigm in the world is not the only paradigm.
with which to see things, and in fact it's quite a narrow view of things when you start expanding what else is happening, because she essentially thinks that the Conservatives and Brexit are the source of all of the woes of this country, and that's not really true.
The Conservatives are actually just kind of useless and stuck in the Blairite paradigm that we can't, well, they're not prepared to escape from.
But anyway, so she makes a few points in this, saying children are getting poorer education, which I personally agree with, but comparatively across the world isn't really true, but it's not the most important thing.
The UK has the highest energy bills on the planet, Jacob Rees-Mogg voted to stop people from protesting, and everything's going great in Europe, basically.
And almost all of those things are false, but we'll get to that in a minute.
But Laurence Fox put it well, because it was really her attitude that came across, and you can see from her body language, right?
She is like a girlfriend.
Who you're about to break up with.
And she just accuses Jacob Rees-Mogg of being a liar.
A liar, a liar, a liar.
But the thing is, every point that Jacob Rees-Mogg said was true.
And again, I'm not going to subject you to the clips.
It's sufferable.
But my question is, how can we break up with her?
Because she's... I mean, look at her face.
She's just not taking anything he says seriously.
Everything he says is a lie, so I'm not going to believe any of it.
And so, after this, you can see that she replies to one of the clips.
Hello, GB News viewers.
I ran out of time to say that deregulation means ditching your workers' rights, like holiday day.
Do you think that Britain invented workers' rights?
We wrote the legislation for the EU about the workers' rights?
OK, never mind.
And so Jacob Rees-Mogg is going to get rid of those, and he opposes minimum wage because he wants the free market to set wages.
Now think about what that will do to UK wage growth.
It won't raise them.
Oh, really?
So you're saying the supply for labour is way higher than the demand for labour, and so you need to artificially rig the market.
Well, why don't we talk about the supply for labour then?
Right?
This is just, again, basic economics.
I'm not an economist, but I understand this.
She carries on saying, now think about what it means for your pocket if you don't get paid when you take holiday or if you get sick.
Here's another clue.
You won't be better off.
Please start seeing these people for what they are.
And it's for you, not me.
It's like, look, you want us to live in a world that is just utterly managerial, completely controlled, where every individual human is just a replica of everyone else and is interchangeable as the next.
This small-minded understanding of the economic problems that are going on shows that she doesn't realise that the paradigm that we're in is coming to an end.
It's all unravelling.
The government knows that things are going badly.
This is an article from City AM where MPs have warned that the UK's shrinking and ageing population is limiting economic growth with outdated and static working practices.
An exodus of over 50s from the labour market has worsened shortages, a cross-party House of Commons Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy report said.
So why isn't she on the side of this?
No, no, no.
Labour shortages means higher wages.
So why isn't that something that the left would be in favour of?
Why is it instead, she's like, no, I'm not going to talk about this.
And she's obviously not against immigration, mass immigration.
The chairman, Darren Jones, said this is what's holding in growth.
And so the conservative answer to this is just bring in unlimited foreigners.
And that's why, I mean, last year they brought in a million new people, 500,000 net.
But of course, a lot of these are not People who actually have jobs or actually will get jobs.
And, you know, a lot of them will, thank God.
But the point is, immigration is costing us billions every year.
1.3 billion a year is the net deficit from mass immigration.
And so, unsurprisingly, this isn't growing the economy.
But we'll come back to the growth of the economy in a minute, right?
She then goes on to talk about energy bills.
Energy bills are through the roof.
I was like, yes.
Why might that be?
Honestly, because I'm thinking also about economics and all this.
I've literally heard many people who blame the rise of energy prices to the free market.
I'm saying it's not how it works.
We have sanctions that are imposed by governments.
Regardless of that discussion, it is something that it's imposed by the government.
So it's the leftist attempt to constantly blame the market about anything.
It's like blame first, think later.
This is the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, which is a non-profit organization that just promotes factual information about Energy and climate issues in the UK.
And they said that in the middle of 2021, gas prices, not petrol for Americans, actual natural gas, started picking up before spiralling upwards as Russia invaded the UK in February.
Supplies have been constrained, first by a demand-slash-storage mismatch after Covid, As in the Covid lockdowns and the crisis has caused an issue in the supply chain.
And then by Putin in retaliation to European sanctions against his country.
So, neither of these are free market effects.
These are expressly state actor effects, right?
And so UK gas cost 45p per therm in late February 2021, and then it went up to £5.38, which is colossal, and at the end of August it spiked at £6.31, and now it's about £5, right?
So that's massive, massive increase, not because of the free market.
When the free market was operating with these unconstrained forces, such as the Covid lockdowns, supply chain issues, and Russian invasion, it was down to 45p.
And she said, well, the UK has the highest energy cost in all of the world.
That's not true.
Actually, it's only beaten in Europe by Germany and Denmark.
Again, both in Europe.
But again, not because of Brexit, because of other geopolitical factors and domestic policy.
As we said, this is talking about the lockdowns.
Dan Tubbs has done an amazing series on Let's See Stockholm called Brokenomics in which he talks about the economics of lockdown and how lockdown affected all the supply chains and how lockdown made everything more expensive.
So do go and check those out because they're incredibly informative and that's why I know what I'm talking about now.
Because I've watched these.
So anyway, moving on, she talks about how, of course, Brexit's going to destroy economic growth.
And this is, even if she doesn't say it, a lot of other people are saying it.
Well, economic growth across Europe is not very good.
0.8% is expected in 2023.
It's not brilliant.
Why?
Why?
They didn't Brexit.
Why are they getting it?
But it's also, it's terrible in the UK.
In the UK they're expecting 0.3% in 2023.
So barely any economic growth.
So if GDP going up is tied to the number of workers that we have, why is it when we bring in 500,000 net new workers, the GDP isn't reflecting that?
It's a very, very small amount of growth.
So that's not really how that's working, is it?
Anyway, moving on to deficits, debts and deficits.
Again, Dan has been covering all of this because really what they're trying to do, as Dan repeatedly points out, is put a plaster over a massive structural crack and hoping that this band-aid will hold this thing together.
And it's no.
They're trapped in the, frankly, the sort of collapsing end of the economic paradigm that we're in.
And we can't get out of it.
So bringing in unlimited foreigners will not fix our own economic problems, and it will create a huge number of other problems, and it will cost us a load of money.
Anyway, she goes on to talk about wages being depressed, but she doesn't talk about taxes.
Now that, to me, is really weird, right?
Can I say something on the point you said before?
It's very pertinent because that was the same rhetoric we heard in Greece by the Syriza party.
Oh, really?
Yes, because they opened... Syriza were a communist coalition, by the way.
They opened the borders and in a year I think we had an influx of, I think, around a million immigrants.
Really?
And the question is, there's something really sinister here because if you have An influx of 1 million people, which is roughly 10% of the population.
That's massive.
Yeah, in a year.
And you don't make the economy more competitive.
What are they going to do?
How are they going to work?
So even from a leftist perspective, where assimilation is the only thing that they care about, how are 1 million people going to be assimilated?
Where are they going to work?
Where are they going to live?
Yes.
And you'd think that, yeah, okay, fair enough.
It's the equivalent of if 7 million people just show up in a year.
It's mad.
Yeah.
Because Greece got like, yeah, 9 million people or something, right?
It's around 10, 10 and a half.
Yeah.
But that's, that's not big.
Yeah, that's a small country.
But anyway, she talks about wages, but she doesn't want to talk about taxes.
And I think that's also quite an important aspect of one's wages, is it not?
Because, of course, the reason I brought the debts and deficit from down there is because we have a massive amount of debt and deficit.
So the deficit this year, we've had to borrow £139 billion.
That is a staggering amount, isn't it?
That's just a ridiculous amount.
And so, of course, we're not going to be getting any tax cuts.
Jeremy Hunt has just said, no, we're going to have tax rises.
The Conservatives are like, we're going to raise your taxes.
They ran a new platform of lowering taxes, but it's simply not possible.
Because if you bring in a million new people every single year, and you have a massive suite of public services, like the NHS or the social services, or the channel migrants who are putting up on things, all of these other things have to be paid for.
And so, okay, well, we're going to have to just start borrowing.
Because what we're doing, really, is promising services to the entire world.
Anyone who can land here gets to consume lots and lots of taxpayer money.
So our taxes are not going to go down.
So that is now going to be half your wages, or a third of your wages, that are taken by the government.
Well, wouldn't you like that yourself?
I think that's the dying breath of cosmopolitans, cosmopolitan liberals who talk about a global community and that there should be obligations towards the global community.
And they still operate under the conceit that Western institutions can totally assimilate without problem anyone.
Yeah, yeah.
But also, again, it just smacks me as just being vaguely dishonest, being like the conservatives aren't going to raise your wages.
And it's like, yeah, but you want to raise my taxes.
How's that different?
I saw one of those Labour posts where they say the Conservatives are going to increase your taxes, we're going to lower this tax.
And I was saying, yeah, what about all the other taxes?
What are you going to do with them?
Please, please spare me.
They're going to take with one hand what they give with the other.
Yeah.
I mean, at one point in this thing, she goes on about energy prices and Jacob Rees-Mogg is just like, well, the government puts a 25% green tax tariff on all energy.
And it's not exactly 25% on every single type of energy, but it evens out to about 25%.
And she doesn't want to hear it.
It's like, no, no, but the conservative government has done what the left wants, which is impose a green tariff on energy.
I mean, you should just get rid of it.
That would be our energy supplies slashed by 25% overnight.
And yet still, this is what's happening.
So anyway, moving on.
Let's talk about inflation.
Oh my god.
Inflation?
For anyone who doesn't know, again, Dan has done a brilliant episode on this.
It's just a stealth tax.
It's just a way of stealing money from people who worked hard by just printing money to devalue what they already have.
Does she talk about this?
Of course she doesn't talk about this.
She sat there screeching that Jacob Rees-Mogg is a liar and just an evil conservative who wants people to be poor, but not thinking about what has had to happen and what has been done because of the Covid lockdowns and the inflationary money pumping out into the economy.
Inflation in Europe is really bad.
Again, Brexit, Brexit, Brexit.
Well, this has nothing to do with Brexit, and yet their inflation is 6.9%.
And that's down from 8.5% in February, 6.9% in March.
That's staggeringly high!
That's really bad.
In the UK it's 6.1%, which is staggeringly high and really bad, but not quite as bad as Europe, and I don't know why.
I've no idea.
Go watch Dan's Brokenomics, he'll tell you.
But the point is, she's trying to say that everything about Britain is worse because of Brexit, because of the Tories.
That's not true.
They're a worldwide phenomenon.
And these are the consequences of the lockdowns we had in 2020 and 2021.
And the Bank of England have just got to the point now where they're just telling us, look, you're just going to be poorer.
You're just going to have to accept that you are going to be poorer.
This is what the Bank of England's chief economist, I think it's pronounced Hugh Pill, Oh, sorry.
It's even worse, actually.
It went up.
Right, OK, sorry.
Thanks for that, John.
I didn't know that.
See, I need to go and do my homework with Dan Moore.
But the point is, inflation is terrible, and it's terrible everywhere, right?
And it's because we printed loads of money, and then we have a bunch of supply chain issues because of these lockdowns.
Like, this is all man-made.
Like, we did this.
These were executive decisions that were made.
These are not, like, the natural consequences of the market.
Anyway, the Bank of England have just got to the point where it's like, look, you're just going to have to accept being poor, right?
Hugh Pill, the chief economist, says the British people just need to accept that they're going to be poorer instead of trying to claw back the historic drop in living standards after a jump in inflation.
And so when you've got some lefty commentator going, eh, the Conservatives did this.
No.
I mean, they are partially responsible, yes.
But, like, it's much bigger than just merely the Conservatives.
It's due to the policies that they implemented.
Yeah, but it's also worldwide policies that are being implemented by governments all around the world.
And the sort of knock-on cause and effect of all of the terrible decisions that have been made in the last three years.
Inflation, I think, is the favorite weapon of the statist because they constantly want to solve problems of their voting constituency and of their supporters by just printing money.
And that is, you know, an indirect tax.
Yeah.
I mean, in 18th century England, that was a crime that got you the death penalty.
The most types of death penalty, the most frequent ones, were murder, and then interfering with the money supply, interfering with the integrity of the coinage, was clipping coins or diluting coins, things like that.
That would get you the death penalty in England in 1800s, in 1700s.
Now it's just government policy, because it's obviously bad for everyone.
Um, but this, the Bank of England economists just gives us a really just steely-eyed, like, you're just gonna have to live with this, and there's just nothing that we're gonna be able to do about this, really.
Somehow in the UK, someone needs to accept that they're worse off and stop trying to maintain their real spending power by bidding up prices, whether higher wages or passing energy costs on to customers.
Pill said in an interview.
The Bank of England Governor Andrew Bayly had said this last year, but he was rebuked by trade unions.
But he also said, rising prices have made us poorer as a country.
Yeah, we know.
Pill was more direct though.
He said there was a reluctance to accept that yes, we're all worse off and we all have to take our share.
A tight jobs market and strong corporate pricing power means that firms can pass on costs at higher prices and workers can demand wage increases, fueling inflation further.
The UK, which is a big importer of natural gas, is facing a situation that the price of what you're buying from the rest of the world has gone up a lot, relative to the price of what you're selling to the rest of the world, which is mainly services in the case of the UK.
If what you're buying has gone up a lot relative to what you're selling, you're going to be worse off.
Great.
This is not Brexit's fault.
This is not, like, necessarily, not individually the Conservative government's fault.
This is a consequence of a massive confluence of things, of bad decisions that have been made in the last three years.
And she sat there going at Jacob Rees-Mogg, going, no, but you're just evil.
You're just lying.
And it's like, no, he's not.
They're just actually, I mean, you know, if you want to take a rather conspiratorial view, you might say, well, maybe they've been doing this on purpose.
Maybe they have, but this is the reality that we're living in, and simply saying, well, we want fixed wages is not going to solve the problem.
Anyway, I'm not going to carry on.
If you want more information on this, go and check out Dan's Broken Omics series.
It's genuinely excellent, and he's explaining all of this in much better detail than I can.
Let's go to the video comments.
Okay, you can kind of see a few over here and over there, but today we're going to look at the Castelia exersta, which is the owl's clover.
It's one that I find really interesting.
It often actually does grow pretty well, even in disturbed habitats.
It's, again, a hemiparasitic plant, and if I'm understanding it correctly, it grows two years in a row and then it dies away.
It's very interesting.
If only all parasitic plants were so pretty.
Let's go to the next one.
The medieval period is mostly associated with the Dark Ages.
However, it's important to note that this was a European phenomenon only, and did not affect England, but did our less cultured brethren to the North and West.
During these times, and certainly since the Doomsday Book, English people kept detailed records and accounts, and the first universities were established.
This is important to Alan Farland's The Origins of English Individualism, where he dismantles the narrative that England was essentially the same as the rest of Europe, and it was the Marxian flux of societies through hunter-gatherer, feudal, capitalist to communist, that caused the differences to which Europe eventually caught up.
That's good.
I can believe it.
Just to show how ridiculous the federal gun laws are, this one particular device right here is a heavily regulated device where That does seem unnecessary.
I don't know anything about guns though.
And it is a quality of life kind of device.
But according to the ATF, it's both a gun, but not a gun.
As in, it's not a gun to where it's not protected by the Second Amendment, but it is a gun that they have to regulate it.
And to get this thing, it's about $200 plus about a year's worth of waiting for them to process the paperwork.
Pay any ass.
That does seem unnecessary.
I don't know anything about guns, though.
But I can tell that's not a gun.
Anyway, let's go to the written comments. - Yes.
Fuzzy Toast says, I'd love to subscribe for more than Bronze tier.
You guys deserve that, and I owe much more than that.
To you, Carl, specifically.
Your early work stopped me from going down a dark path.
Well, thanks.
If things turn out well next month, I should be able to go goalball.
Thanks very much, man.
I really appreciate it.
Derek says, we need more moderate voices.
Comments pushing back her statements.
You're all far-right demons.
Yeah, I know.
Well, that's the thing.
She can't identify what a moderate voice is.
And you can tell that when Thomas was waving his England flag, she was on the verge of calling him far-right.
She just wanted to.
But I did love his, you know, I'm not even listening anymore.
Theodore says, this woman seems to think that if you even mention a single good thing Britain has done, you're automatically, implicitly ignoring and denying every single bad thing.
We never said any such thing.
No, but I will do that.
Omar says, Lotus East's line go up is the only increase in GDP that positively affects this country.
Unlike the BBC, you provide a service people are voluntarily willing to pay for.
Well, yeah, I mean, lying going up is actually good for us, so please do subscribe.
But, yeah, it's not GDP, is it?
That's the thing.
It's our company going up.
Alfred the Beta says, Part of me wishes that Carl would have been on that show to counter her talking points in real time, but it's probably a waste of time to engage with such screeching avatars of anti-English leftism.
I don't think it's a waste of time, but I do think that the chap had the right attitude It's like, no, I'm standing on my point and I'm just not budging from it.
Yeah.
At some point, I don't think that you should engage.
There is a line after which you shouldn't engage in discussions with people like that.
If she has nothing to say and she just says, well, give me one thing to be proud of England and you say A, B and C and she says, no, no, no, I don't want to talk about it.
She doesn't want to talk about it, you know.
It doesn't advance the dialectic for her, right?
She's trying to get you to commit to England bad, and then she can start producing dismantling solutions for England, right?
But if you don't commit to that, then she just gets more hysterical and screeches.
That's why we should go Thomas mode.
Yeah, I agree.
Just wave your little England flag and smile.
Love me fish and chips.
Lord Nerevar says, I noticed a distinct downturn in people attempting to subvert St George's Day this year.
I saw far more people online and off waving the St George's flag and feeling patriotism for England compared to last year.
Yeah, same here, right?
You can feel that something has changed in this.
Sure, the lovies in London are still screeching about racism and whatnot, but They're increasingly losing the argument.
So yes, a change is coming, slowly but surely, and with time I'm feeling less and less afraid to declare my love for England once again.
To quote a respected TV academic Ash Sarkar, yes lads, we're winning.
That's good.
But no, I totally agree with that.
You can just feel it in the water, right?
People just aren't taking this anymore.
Feel it in the air.
Yeah.
A change is coming.
Yeah, yeah, no.
An American isolationist says, Stelios, there was going to be a period of peace.
However, the CIA and US agencies couldn't allow that to happen.
A period of peace would mean they'd lose their funding and control of US politics.
So these agencies encourage and support individuals and groups to cause trouble.
However, if there's no problem, then they create one out of thin air.
You want world peace, then the US agencies need to be destroyed, and you'll see areas where there are wars and conflicts begin to stabilise.
That's a bit weird because I get the rationale and to a large extent, I think you're right.
But I don't know whether, you know, if they just get dismantled, whether the problem will be solved.
Maybe there will definitely be other... I can see what we're doing in the Cold War, right?
Obviously, the Soviets are around, you've got to do something.
But afterwards... Yeah.
The point is, can't you sell guns in peacetime?
Of course, in wartime you can sell more, but it's a really big trouble.
Arizona Desert Rat says you can thank Hollywood for their nuclear-powered fear-mongering, short-sighted idiocy.
It's not just Hollywood, though.
There's a strain of the left that really hate nuclear power, because nuclear power is just good for human beings.
And they don't want that, because nuclear power doesn't facilitate revolution.
Actually, it makes your country sustainable and profitable and, you know, swimming in wealth and cheap energy, so everyone lives well, basically, is the left's issue with nuclear power.
I'm not even joking on that.
I think it's also the idea that you need carefully selected people and having a nuclear plant is a symbol of meritocracy.
Yes, that's true.
Yeah, you can't have people like that, you know, random strangers, you know, get the hands and administration of a nuclear plant.
That's exactly right.
And they hate it for this.
Yeah.
Small Oil Libertarian says solar deaths have only dropped behind nuclear generators in deaths per megawatt hour in the past couple of years because of the huge solar generators being built in deserts around the world before solar deaths were higher because of dudes falling off roofs.
That's a good point.
I didn't even think about it.
So if he says, Denmark is going full on in green energy, because that's working so well for us.
Yeah, again, like, you see in England as well, like, in places like Denmark, solar panels, it's like, look, come on, come on, we actually know how much sunlight Northwestern Europe gets every year.
I mean, if in Greece or in Italy, in Spain, makes perfect sense, you know.
Lots of sun.
In northwest Italy?
No.
In northwest Europe?
Doesn't make any sense.
It's obviously deeply inefficient.
Why are we bothering?
Yeah, and again, there's bad status policy, because in Greece we have a photovoltaic thing, and you can see it everywhere in Greece, but it doesn't work.
It doesn't work as it should, let's put it this way.
Rob says, French foreign policy does tend to lead to disaster.
They give a safe haven to Ayatollah Khomeini when he'd been exiled by the Shah.
It didn't give France any advantage after the Islamic Revolution.
Indeed, it could be argued that the Bataclan massacre was the ultimate end result of this.
I don't know if I connect those things.
Kevin says, that's another nuclear point, so I'm just going to move across from that.
Sorry.
Didn't I see some of the UK still sends $400 million a year in aid to China every year?
Yep.
We still do it to India.
Why?
They've got a space program.
I don't know.
So?
Like literally we send hundreds of millions of pounds to China and India and they have space programs.
So why are we sending them money?
I mean, I assume it's buying friends and influence, but still it's obviously not working.
The love of God.
That aisle guy says, two very quick questions.
If we own nothing, who will own everything?
That's a good question, isn't it?
You know, The we in this doesn't include them, does it?
If we have nothing to lose, what do they think will happen?
That's another good question.
Very good question that nobody wants to answer.
LaFrenchCasseroleBanger says, I wouldn't trust anything Macron says as he's famous for contradicting himself in the same sentence.
Yeah, well, we don't really.
The Germans are just the worst for this.
nuclear waste to power next-gen reactors are the current energy usage for 2,000 years.
We are getting close to free energy.
Unfortunately, bad politicians and attacks against the energy industry by Germany through the EU have weakened the nuclear branch of the industry.
Investments are lacking.
We need acts, not hollow words.
Yeah.
I mean, this is just...
The Germans are just the worst for this.
They just don't want to win.
They don't want to have a success.
Like, they're literally closing down their nuclear plants and being forced to open coal plants.
And they're going, yeah, we're pro-green energy.
It's like, you're just not though.
You're just not.
But anyway, I'm going to have to leave it there because we're out of time.
It's insufferable and it drives me crazy every time I have to encounter it.
Anyway, thanks everyone for joining us.
We'll be back tomorrow.
If you want more from us, sign up to lowseas.com and we'll see you next time.
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