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June 19, 2024 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters
01:30:55
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #940
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Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Loadseaters, episode 940 for today, Wednesday the 19th of June 2021.
I'm your host Connor, joined by Karl.
Hello.
And Professor Eric Kaufman.
Thank you very much for rejoining us over at the website.
It's always a pleasure.
Yes, and after the show today we will be talking about your brand new book on my show, Thomson Talks, which will be behind the paywall, so £5 a month, sign up, you can get all of our stuff.
But you've been up to plenty of stuff.
Do you mind giving a brief introduction for the audience who may not have seen your previous interview?
Oh yeah, well, I mean, boy, where do I start?
I mean, I've left, I was at Birkbeck College, University of London for 20 years, and I believe Carl may be familiar with Birkbeck?
That's where I did my philosophy degree, and I did it because you were there.
You were in the wrong department, though.
Sure, sure, but I thought, well, at least there's a friendly face in the faculty, you know, so, you know, maybe I'll have a defender there if I get caught out or something.
Well, meanwhile, they were coming at me with pitchforks, and so I had, you know, Twitter mobbings and internal investigations driven by, you know, radical faculty members, many of whom were not in my department, actually.
There's only one in my department.
She was particularly poisonous, but I think you did a good number on her, Carl.
But yeah, so essentially, around about 2022, I just decided it's time to move on.
I went over to the University of Buckingham, which is the only, I would say, free speech oriented, or at least the leadership is the only free speech oriented leadership of a university in Britain out of 181 institutions.
I've set up a new course on woke, so I want to study woke like you would study liberalism or nationalism or any other ideology.
Let's just look at it analytically, its origins, what its effects are, what its impact is on politics.
So I've got that course, it's run, it's been a big success.
I've had hundreds of people take that course now and encourage any of your listeners to sign up!
And so yeah, and then of course what I've also been up to is I've published a new book, which is called, in Britain anyway, it's called Taboo, How Making Race Sacred Led to a Cultural Revolution.
That comes out 4th of July, it's certainly available to be ordered now, and I've been doing, it came out a bit sooner in the US under the Third Awokening, which is the name of the title, so I've been doing various Media and writing op-eds.
So I was on Jordan Peterson and trigonometry and various other places.
So just talking through the thesis really of the book and how we should understand Woke, how it's applying to our politics today.
Yes, you guys were litigating that off air right before we came on.
Eric will be arguing with me later, so I'm sure.
Eric will come back and argue with Karl another time, but today on the show, because we're doing some news here, we're talking about the smear campaigns launched against various candidates for Reform UK, how we've hit yet another migration record milestone.
Celebrate the little things, I suppose, and how we're funding our enemies, because I've got some stats on just how much money the Home Office has given Hope Not Hate.
Turns out, you remember when they paid us that £5 to watch the Liz Truss interview?
Yeah.
It was a tax rebate.
Oh, was it?
Yeah, love that.
Brilliant.
But anyway, let's jump into today's story.
So, Reform UK are rocketing up in the polls, which is always nice to see, since Nigel Farage came back and decided to be a lightning rod for discontented young men like me who have been bereaved of a cultural inheritance and the ability to buy a home.
What was it, 1997?
It was three times the average house price?
Four times.
Now it's 11 times, because something happened.
Anyway, so it's not just a flash in the pan, because we had this poll with YouGov a little while ago, last week, and this is where, for the first time, reform had eclipsed the Conservatives in the polls.
I think the Conservatives were at something like 18%, reform became 19%, so Farage's statement that he will become the opposition, even if not in the plurality of seats because of our electoral system, but at least the popular Opposition seems to be true and now we have another one, turns out.
There's a Redfield and Wilton Strategies one that came out two days ago and Conservatives are down to 18% and Reform are now neck and neck with them.
I saw one this morning that showed that they were leading in Wales above the Conservatives and obviously behind Labour.
Labour have gone from something like 51% to 31% in Wales and Reform are up to 17%.
So Reform are actually the opposition in Wales now.
I mean, if you remove London and Scotland, reformers are beating them everywhere else.
It's great.
Yeah, it's worth saying one other thing about this, by the way, which is, you know, it is true that reform and Tory are in some ways substitutes, but there are a lot of voters who are pissed off with the Tories who would have not voted at all and who might have voted for Labour.
So in that sense, those voters going to reform takes votes away from Labour as well.
So that's worth bearing in mind.
That's what happened in UKIP in 2015, I believe, as well.
And also, just getting out the resigned voters the the people are just like well i'm not going to vote at all giving them something they want to vote for uh hurts labor as well yeah yeah labor is sort of like looking at this you know full house or whatever uh because people are just going to stay home so i'm not voting for the tories and there's no one else so i'm just not going to vote well now there's something for them to do it's fantastic
well that's been their ming va's strategy of not disclosing too much about their manifesto plans which are going to be very radical and they're going to put up taxes through a sneaky way because they just think they can carry it across the finish line and win by default Now Farage has come in and I think Matt Goodwin put it about 6 in 10 people who voted in 2019 for the Conservatives just weren't going to vote until recently.
They're going to galvanise that base and a lot of young people and it seems like they're going to translate it into some seats for...
Well, that young people point is interesting.
I don't know if you saw Matt's substack recently where he showed that amongst Zoomers, actually twice, it was over twice as many were going to vote Reform as Tory.
15% versus 7%.
And that really hit me like, wow, okay, so they're making an impact amongst younger people.
Do you know something that was really interesting?
When I was doing the 2019 MEP campaign, we got a poll through That showed that 14% of 18 to 25 are going to vote UKIP.
And Callum was with me at the time, he looked over and goes, look, we've done our job.
And it's like, yeah, that's what we were there for, you know?
And so it's interesting that younger people are just like, look, we do not buy into the sort of post-World War II consensus on politics.
It's not just Labour and Tory.
We're prepared to go elsewhere.
And that's fantastic, because up until this point we've had really, I don't know, feudal voting in this country, where it's just like, oh no, I'm conservative, my grandfather was conservative, you know, my great grandfather was conservative, or Labour, you know, and we've always voted Labour.
And these things are actually starting to break apart now, and we're actually seeing some light emerge through the clouds, which is fantastic.
There's an open letter for people that are saying, a sort of reform youth chapter, if they start one, because the Young Conservatives chapter has been very successful, unfortunately, in picking some wet careerist candidates, but if you start one with the principles of reform, and also saying if you do some policies that Go towards enterprising young people getting home and making good on those recent manifesto promises to have families, single income payer families, then we'll renounce all prior party memberships and specifically join you in campaign for you.
And it's getting a lot of traction.
I tweeted out the other day and there's quite a few thousand people going, oh, sounds good.
So the energy is there.
It's encouraging.
That's there as well.
So if you want to sign the open letter, it's linked down in the description.
So naturally, as soon as they come along and actually, I don't know, do some proper reactive conservatism for for once the smears start rolling in and the label far right has lost a lot of its power now because they've cried wolf so many times but i thought i'd just go for a few that have come out in the last week against nigel farage who's a big boy and can take it and then some of the candidates and i think they're just getting a bit tiresome so here's here's one um david arinovich who's on bbc for.
So Matt tweeted out, oppose mass immigration, embed national preference, take on radical woke progressivism, oppose luxury belief class, and return to fiscal conservatism, as some of the five principles that reform reform are going for.
And David decided to translate that to, deport Somalis, gaze back in closet, cut benefits to the poor.
What?
Based.
What did you do?
Well, did you see I sort of then retweeted David, which actually got reasonably good And I sort of said, you know, translation deporting illegal immigrants is racist, number one.
And so and second thing is that so essentially what I was trying to say is we can play this game of exaggerating what the other person says.
And that is a tactic that's quite popular amongst mainstream liberals.
Just a quick thing.
I mean, in what way does this does Matt Goodwin's statement mention gay?
The gays not oppose mass immigration?
I mean, I think they've actually got lots of good reasons to oppose mass immigration in certain areas of the world.
Well, I mean, that's a point that I talk about in the book is one of the key components is this idea of what I call fascist scare.
So we have this term called red scare, right, which is McCarthyism.
This idea of fascist scare that if you give an inch on anything to do with culture, We're going to have gays back in the closet, women back in the home.
We're going to have, you know, Jim Crow segregation again or Nazism 1933.
And they've been able to essentially get away with that.
And that's accepted.
It's not seen as the same as a red scare, but it is.
But ironically, it's that lack of ability to sort of give any grounds to the conservative side that caused Nazism to flourish and succeed anyway.
Well, it was the fact that they took everything to its most radical left wing position.
Disgusted people and made them think, okay, maybe this Hitler guy is making a point.
You know, not that we want this, of course, but the point is you can't have it just all one way and think that the people on the right have known you've got to accept the most radical left-wing position on everything.
It's like they don't and they won't.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, this is my point about left liberalism, though, is that it's actually got a check on the economic side.
It believes in markets, but also redistribution comes out moderate, whereas on the cultural stuff, there are no boundaries at all.
And so it is just catastrophism all the way down.
And it's only we can only progress.
And if we stop moving Then we're suddenly going to give way to fascism.
And that has been the storyline.
And there's just no ability to have a conversation.
That's why immigration is so impossible.
That's why talking about LGBT is so impossible, because it's just maximalism or nothing for them.
Well this is what the term far-right is meant to do.
It's meant to be a fill-in-the-blank because as soon as you actually unpack what they think far-right is, it's the most absurd caricature.
Or if they say fascism or Nazism, well that's implacable to the particular history and conditions of the UK because we actually, and particularly the post-war paradigm, prides itself upon being, particularly Nigel Farage going to the D-Day celebrations every year, prides itself upon being the nations where that didn't flourish and it was actively repudiated.
So if you called us National Socialists from 1930s Germany, we'd be able to laugh it off because it's so absurd.
But now they're just going to far right, and so they try to hope that people hear that and hear the dog whistle as being Nazi and smear you.
But even that's just lost its rhetorical power now.
Well, it's worth saying, by the way, these taboos, yeah, they have moved, as you say.
So, for example, in Europe, like in Sweden, the immigration, the interior minister tried to talk about immigration levels in 2014.
Was attacked as a racist in the press.
And then what happens?
The Sweden Democrats say, OK, fine, it's a taboo.
We're going to break that taboo.
Once they break the taboo, then all the mainstream parties then say, actually, we're going to start talking about immigration, too.
And so that's what's happened.
So France, you know, Le Pen, when Jean-Marie won in I think it was 2001, you had like a million people out on the streets protesting.
And he was on 18%.
Marine is on her way to, you know, presidency or essentially their numbers are in the 40s, not a peep.
So the point is that these things do shift the Overton window.
You can even see it with the Labour and Conservative parties at the moment.
They're both campaigning on an anti-immigration platform.
Ed Levy said the other day that immigration's too high.
Even with them, there's no way!
I didn't see that.
It's only the Greens and the SNP and Plaid Cymru that are like, yes, infinite immigrants, please.
And so Farage has done a great job of just shifting that Overton window, saying, no, immigration is bad and we're going to reduce it.
Fantastic.
Yeah.
And this scaremongering, again, clearly isn't washing because Brian Cox, the lesser of the two Hannibal Lecters, went on, what was it, Laura Koonsberg's show on Sunday.
And he said, I find Nigel Farage slightly fascist, frankly.
And it was just, what does that mean?
It's just a little bit of jackbooting.
Just a slightly fascist.
Yeah, he just likes the uniforms and the flash cars, I'm sure.
And then there was Lord Heseltine, who I like the dig that Nigel Farage made in 2017, is that the last time he came out against Brexit, because he's president of something called the European Movement Organization to constantly bring us back into the EU.
In 2017, Nigel Farage responded to a clip of Hesseltine complaining about him then and said, "Oh good, someone's interned him from the National History Museum." I'm just gonna play this game, because some of the accusations he makes are, again, that sort of like very boomer-era, hyper-absurd caricatures that just aren't washing.
The reason why the parties won't talk about the detail It's because of the emergence of what was UKIP is now REFORM.
It is the voice of Nigel Farage.
And frankly, we've had all this before.
We saw it in the 1930s when Mosley marched with his black shirts.
We saw it in the 1960s when Enoch Powell made that infamous speech.
And now we've seen it again in UKIP and REFORM.
You would put Nigel Farage and Richard Tyson on par with the likes of Enoch Powell and Mosley?
Yes, of course, because what they are doing is exploiting that human anxiety that comes from something that is slightly different.
And this is not new for us.
Across the world, you can see tribalism and racism tearing communities apart to this day.
And it is the easiest thing When you have economic pressure in a society, and we have, let's be frank.
Life is pretty difficult economically at the moment for many, many people.
So you've got to find someone to blame.
And that's when the Farage team move in.
All right, Grandad.
Thank you very much.
Sorry, just a quick thing.
It's like, yeah, look, we can see all of these cultural conflicts around the world that are really dangerous and really hurting people.
So we need to bring them all into our country to make sure they're all here so we can manage them.
What's the plan?
Yeah.
Well, yeah, I mean, these tropes, really, it's very interesting.
It's basically all about this, what I would call fascist scare, right?
And the idea that essentially you should fear majorities.
Any compromise on cultural issues is a slippery slope to fascism.
So that's kind of, yeah, I mean, it's a well-worn trope, really.
The hilarious thing as well is that Mosley and the people have been posting ever since the EU election swung massively right.
There's a photo of Mosley in Trafalgar Square at a rally saying we need closer ties with the EU.
Thank you Mr Heseltine as the expert on Oswald Mosley's policies here.
Enoch Powell wasn't a fascist, he was a member of the Conservative Party.
He's the most popular man.
Until he was turfed out.
But it is interesting, this whole question of immigration, right?
I mean, essentially on immigration, there's no such thing as an accommodation.
It's basically, you're either an open quote-unquote person, or you're a closed quote-unquote person, in which case you're a Nazi and fascist and Mosley supporter and everything else.
There's just no flexibility.
It's a very binary, totalizing worldview.
And that's one of the problems with the left.
The only way they will move is when facts on the ground move, as I mentioned with Le Pen.
There's a new reality.
OK, maybe we have to adjust a little bit because there's a new reality.
We have to talk about immigrant.
That's the only way they're going to change.
Otherwise, it's the same old slogans.
It'll come up.
Another thing as well is that Nigel Farage has been in politics for 30 years.
Everyone, he's a very known quantity.
And what he obviously is, is a British patriot and Englishman.
He's obviously not.
For anyone who doesn't know, fascism is essentially the totalisation of society under the auspices of the state.
And the state acts like a kind of god over society.
That's obviously not Farage's opinion.
At all.
in any way shape or form it just doesn't really suit the british character either exactly obviously doesn't suit for us character i mean there's a reason that he's making free speech one of the main pillars of his manifesto this is not a fascist principle uh there's no i don't know why i say that um i've been doing some reading and i was shocked to discover Yeah, bizarrely.
It's not in their doctrine.
No, Nigel Farage just isn't a fascist.
Like, that's the thing.
They can say, well, you know, feels a bit... No, he's not, and you're wrong.
He's literally the only thing that... I mean, you know, I've read all the fascist doctrines.
I know exactly what they thought.
Nigel Farage is just, if anything, the opposite of these things.
He doesn't want a totalitarian state.
But these words are just stretched and manipulated.
We know that.
I mean, it's interesting because there is a guy called David Rosato who really does a lot of interesting work on big data.
The use of the term far or extreme in front of the word right has soared in the press since about 2010.
It's been an explosion.
Now, it's also, there's been some increase in the use of far and extreme left, but much less so.
So, there has been this explosion, and now there's just this hair trigger.
As soon as you see anything that smells of any kind of cultural conservatism, you just go in on far-right.
That's it.
I mean, I see them describing you, Emmett, Meir, the entire organization, everything.
Everything's extreme, mega-hard, far-right.
Can we just get to the, that's a good thing part, please?
Because, I mean, I think that we've got a relative concordance on what would be good for the country, is that we need to reduce immigration, maybe reduce some taxes, maybe get people off benefits slightly, if that's alright, to get them back to work.
Have kids.
If that's mega-extreme, hard-far-right, then they are still good things, even if that's how you label them, okay?
You're not calling us Nazis, because we're not Nazis.
We are just conservative.
And, okay, well that's a good thing, that's fine, I'm not bothered by the label, you know, I'm bothered by the fact that you're not doing any of these good things.
Well, so much of the discussion though is underpinned by this kind of moral, emotional, unseen order, you know, and in the book I talk about essentially, majority's bad, minority's good, so you have a very negative, fearful approach to majority politics, and you have these narratives, Nazi, Jim Crow, What if slavery, you know, gays in the closet.
Foreign narratives.
Yeah, but they have an emotional pickup, right?
So when you wheel that out, you get an emotional surge.
So a lot of this is about playing games with the moral emotions of people and working them up.
I just find it really interesting they can't hark back to British history to do that.
So you've got to worry about that thing in Germany.
What, the thing we defeated?
Yeah, I'm not bothered by that.
You've got to worry about slavery in America.
What, that thing we defeated?
Yeah, I'm not worried about that, actually.
You know, we seem to have been on the right side of all those arguments, actually, and so don't bother importing these weird foreign things that we were against over to here to us.
We're against these things, you know?
Call me a nativist if you like, but, um... Well, that's why none of these smears are working.
That's why Michael Hessetine seems like a total dinosaur.
So...
What seems to be happening is some forces might have tried to subvert reform from within.
This is the allegation that's been made in the last day or so.
So they decided to pay a vetting firm and the vetting firm is vetting.com and it's owned by a gentleman named Colin Bloom and he worked under Boris Johnson as the Conservative Party's faith engagement advisor.
He was made a CBE in Johnson's honours list and then resigned when Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister.
And the allegation is that they spent about £144,000 on vetting software And that it wasn't done properly.
Now.
Could have paid me, I would have done it.
Well, I was going to say, hope not hate, we're doing it for free.
Richard Tice was proud of that.
That was a bad strategy.
A few false positives, but hey.
So they've now decided they're probably going to take legal action against this.
Of course, the firm themselves have turned around and said that, don't worry, we just couldn't complete the checks in time, it's not our fault because the election was called, and we are politically neutral.
There is no such thing, it turns out.
And Richard has given a statement to this and says, a professional vetting company was paid a six-figure sum in April to vet reform candidates.
They prompted a deep dive, particularly on social media and adverse press checks, received our candidate data, but then absolutely delivered nothing.
Suddenly, a round of stories appear in the Times and elsewhere after nominations close, including some stories that are 15 years old.
Something feels very wrong, and I've instructed lawyers to pursue this matter vigorously.
So it isn't that they necessarily let dodgy candidates slip through the net, because frankly, all sorts of people can have all sorts of views, and anything can be taken out of context on the internet.
And this is something that's going to...
In the next few years, with Zoomers that have fun and make memes, this is going to be...
It's going to become another nothing-burger like the term far right.
The allegation is around the leaks and the strategic campaign to smear them in the press and the reason I raise this article is because they mention in this Telegraph article one of the hit pieces in question and it's on Jack Aron and they say, quote, he described Hitler as brilliant at using personality traits to inspire people to action.
Now I highlight this as an appalling hit piece because Jack Aron is a viewer of ours.
Hello, Jack.
Yes, turns out, yes.
Many reform candidates are actually viewers of ours, because they're sort of like, moderate, patriotic, right-thinking people.
Would you like to find out exactly what Jack said?
Because this is mad.
Can we read that quote out again, just very quickly?
Yes.
Jack Aaron, who described Hitler as brilliant at using personality traits to inspire people to action.
Okay.
How's that not true?
How is it not true that Hitler was brilliant at using personality traits to inspire people to action?
That's how he took over the country.
That's literally how he got stadiums of people to listen to him ranting and raving.
To say that Hitler wasn't a charismatic orator is to simply deny the truth of what happened.
That doesn't mean he wasn't the enemy.
That doesn't mean he wasn't evil.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't have gone into World War II.
It's like saying Napoleon was a brilliant general.
Yeah, of course he was a brilliant general, but he was still the enemy.
We have to be aware of the facts on the ground.
Well, this is of course the gotcha technique where you're, you know, a person makes an analytical statement, an empirical statement about the world, you translate that into, no, they're making a normative moral statement, endorsing, yeah, and it's the oldest trick.
I don't know if you saw there was that monk debate recently with Douglas Murray.
And Mehdi Hassan, but Hassan tried that on a couple of occasions and was called out pretty nicely by, uh, it wasn't Murray, but his debating partner sort of went through the entire quote and made Mehdi look like an idiot.
That's all over.
Mehdi's.
Yeah.
Well, I'm going to do that here because, uh, so I've actually spoken to Reform Candidates the last couple of days and I've learned some information about Jack himself.
Turns out that Jack would be funny if he was a Hitler supporter.
He teaches a Sunday school class at his local synagogue.
Average illicit sport.
Yeah.
What's quite strange, actually, is in Willian Hatfield, the C, right, all the three main candidates are Jewish.
Yeah.
So it's Grant Shapps, Andrew Lewin, and Jack Arum.
Oh.
Not the biggest place for the National Front to me, I don't think, but there you go.
Okay, so this is Jack's quote, okay, he responded to the Times.
Sorry, just imagine that though, you know, like, it's just... Okay, I have given a historical critique of Hitler, which is accurate, and then suddenly you as a Jewish man are being called a Nazi by the press.
You just...
Come on!
I'm glad they refute their own credibility in such an obvious way.
So he said, to the Times, yes, Hitler was as brilliant as he was utter evil.
How is that controversial to say, given that he was also able to turn Germans to such destructive acts, including killing many members of my own family?
I strongly believe as a psychologist in separating intelligence and talent from morality, so we can adequately diagnose these problems and help people.
And that's why you're a racist!
That's a totally reasonable assessment.
Yes.
Quite.
Yeah.
And he said, by no means am I saying that Hitler or Putin or Bashar al-Assad are good people that we should admire.
They range from the absolutely ingenious evil to wannabe warlord to weak man born into a brutal regime of death and destruction.
Because they were also alleging that he said that...
Putin's use of force made rational sense, which obviously it did if he felt that he was, like, you don't have to support the Russians or the Ukrainians to say that in his own mind he's not insane, he's just making logical steps for what he thinks is the geopolitical reality.
And he said that Bashar al-Assad was weaker because he wasn't trying to be a regional tyrant, he was just knocked in a civil war.
That's about it.
The fascinating thing I found in here, it was another smear that they tried to use, Aaron has also been supportive of the right wing influencer Carl Benjamin.
Now the thing is, they haven't pointed out anything that you've said.
They also mentioned the Liz Truss interview.
Well, they haven't pointed out anything I said.
They instead say that you're an ally of Tommy Robinson, who apparently has accused Jews of pushing identity politics over the Holocaust.
The man who drapes himself in the Israeli flag... Well, I mean, I don't drape myself in the Israeli flag, but I mean... I mean, I think it's fair to say that Jewish people do use identity politics.
I mean, everyone seems to use identity politics.
Yeah, but the idea that, again, Tommy Robinson is anti-semitic when- No, Tommy Robinson is definitely not anti-semitic.
He's had criticisms from people on the right in saying that, like, you're bringing an Israeli flag to, like, an English National Valley, etc, etc.
So he has those arguments all the time.
But again, it's the reverse now.
Now it's a condemnation for saying it, for observing a fact, rather than endorsement for observing a fact.
It's like, can't you just observe the fact?
You know, I'm not making a judgment either way.
Well, this is all about sort of taking the worst interpretation of a person's words, right, and trying to cast, attach people to these taboos.
Whether it be around anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, whether it be around racism and Jim Crow or about gays in the closet, it's always coming back to those identity taboos.
And that's really the core of wokeness as I define it, which is making sacred these historically marginalized groups and their narratives.
And that's, if you can key somebody in and tag them with that, then you've won.
Quite, yeah.
And then there was another one as well, which I won't really bother with, but this is the Ian Gribben one.
I believe that this was something to do with him positing the hypothetical of, I wonder what would have happened if Hitler had made the non-aggression pact with the UK?
Would we have been better off?
Wasn't this the overwhelming majority opinion at the time?
Wasn't this what Peter Hitchens basically thought at one point, saying the Second World War had lost Britain?
Its empire, yeah, true.
I mean, I don't even necessarily agree with this, but it's a sort of... Wasn't it Neville Chamberlain, we're going to have peace in our time?
Yeah.
They literally all thought they were going to be neutral on Hitler.
But have you considered this makes him a National Socialist?
I mean, it's just so boring.
So just to wrap up, all right, so apparently... Surely it makes a British imperialist.
I want to remain neutral with it to preserve the empire.
Yeah, yeah.
So reform, riddled with Jewish Nazis, all right, so you can't vote for them.
So what are the Conservatives offering?
I thought we'd finish with this, a little bit of zero-seat schadenfreude.
Well, the Conservatives are now actively telling their candidates to apologise for being Tories.
What?
Yeah, so this is an internal CCHQ...
This is a CCHQ document that got leaked to Judy Hartley Brewer, friend of the show, and she says, We've compiled template letters, scripts, endorsement letters and endorsement scripts for you to use from now until polling day.
So they're controlling the messaging as tightly as possible.
The messaging in all of these has been tested and validated.
Trust the experts.
These letters and scripts will help you get across to voters the choice at this election.
Say, you understand people's frustrations with the Tories.
You've often shared them.
Hey, I get you hate us.
I do too.
Vote Conservative.
Amazing.
I mean, that's, yeah, not great, is it?
Amazing framing.
Not the best-selling pitch.
Imagine getting that from CCHQ being like, look, yeah, we suck, and you've got to admit that we suck to the electorate, everyone hates us, but you've just got to say it and get them to vote for us anyway.
Well, do you know who might get them to vote for them?
The man who did mass immigration and lockdowns, they've now got, they've wheeled Boris out off of his family holiday to do pre-written letters to hand out to various candidates.
The problem is that Rishi Sunak said that this was coordinated by CCHQ and now loads of MPs have come out and said Well, I haven't been told about this.
I haven't got this.
Boris isn't endorsing me, etc, etc.
So they're either playing favourites or it's a real car crash.
And then the other problem as well is that there are now rumours circulating around Westminster, which I can repeat, that David Cameron wants to be the next Tory party leader.
He's going to ask to be parachuted into a by-election after the election.
I tell you what, Farage had better make him lose that.
If Farage can crush Cameron, that'd be great.
Yeah, quite.
But it is worth saying, though, there is still, you know, this is what amazes me, right?
I mean, a lot of people still think Boris is a populist, and a lot of Tory voters.
And he actually has an appeal.
And this is what's a bit frustrating, right?
Is, you know, policy-wise, he's been a disaster.
You know, mass immigration, done nothing on woke, etc.
All the things that actually annoy Tory voters, he's been the architect of.
And yet they don't blame him.
And in some of them, in some cases, they think he's the opposite of what he is.
So we also have to, I think many Tory voters do need to look at themselves in the mirror a little bit and say, why am I being drawn in by a huckster like this?
But Boris embodies the sort of old English Tory that they want to think is in charge and is being responsible.
He's kind of bumbling, but he's good-hearted.
He's got a fantastic patter.
He's very charismatic.
He's likable.
I like Boris when I'm hearing him talk and stuff like that.
But you are completely correct.
He's been on the wrong side of every issue since he got elected.
And it's like, God, why are you doing any of these things?
You could be super popular, but you just did the right thing.
Well, the reason he won in 2019 is because, frankly, Farage stood candidates down to allow him to win.
So why the Conservative Party think that budget Farage, who also doesn't have any Farage's policies or his credibility, is going to win people back from Farage himself, I think is mad.
And so now what you've got, the Conservatives aren't exactly offering very much in terms of strength here, but the final thing I just bring you on to is this is the id of the actual Tory Party.
We've got losers telling them how to lose more.
So... Surrella's telling the party that they must embrace Farage.
I mean, Farage, at this point... Why would he need the Conservative Party?
Behind the scenes channels was that it looked like at one point it was going to go one way and that Farage thought he'd fold himself into the Tories, but basically he's come back, absolutely stormed it, and now he's telling Suella and Jenrick to fold back in.
And there were rumours, murmurings, about defections before standing as a candidate, but now some of them have chosen not to.
But we've got Tobias Elwood, a former West Midlands mayor who then lost Andy Street, who's saying that, oh, we must win from the centre ground.
It's like, mate, your polling actually can't really get much lower.
If they listen to you, they're stupid.
So, far right doesn't work.
Hello to all the reform candidates watching us.
You're doing a great job, lads.
And don't listen to clowns like the One Nation Tories of Tobias Elwood, who are going to deliver zero seats.
I mean, I'd love to know what the centre ground consists of, at this point.
What are you arguing for?
A continuation of mass immigration?
A continuation of wokeism?
A continuation of everything that we've had for the last 15 years that's been a terrible disaster?
What's the positive case for what you want?
Well I think it's basically an economic market liberalism with essentially the woke agenda and mass immigration.
The worst of all worlds!
Market pragmatism with gay race communist characteristics.
Parties like this, you know, on the continent, right?
And like Germany has the FDP.
I mean, I know they're not super woke, but you have a party that's a market liberal party.
They get a small number of votes.
And that would probably be where this party would settle out.
There is a small market for a kind of market liberal, culturally liberal party.
It's just that most voters are going to go towards the cultural conservative alternative.
Yeah.
I mean, I wouldn't even mind a sort of Sort of blue labor, sort of protectionist view on the economy.
So the SDP?
Yeah, I'm not terribly opposed to it.
I'm not a massive free marketeer.
I'm more committed to property ownership than markets.
That's where most people are.
Yeah, exactly.
Scrutonian.
Yeah, far more scrutonian.
So I'd get along a lot better with the SDP types than I would, like, you know, radical Thatcherite Torrey Roe.
It's like, sorry, you guys are like the Steve Bakers of the world.
I view them as awful in every way, shape or form.
And if they lose on election day, I'm going to cheer.
Anyway, shall we move on?
Yes, please.
Right.
Let's talk about immigration, because we've hit a new high score.
Don't we love high scores?
We love winning.
We're doing so great.
Line go up.
Yeah, the line goes up.
So immigration basically is just way beyond most people's understanding.
When polled, people think net immigration is somewhere like 60 to 70,000 people a year.
They just don't know.
Just how bad things are.
So this is from the Office of National Statistics.
I thought we'd just go through just how high the numbers are.
So in the year ending December 2023, they revised up their provisional estimate of the number, just the raw number of people have come in to 1.2 million.
which is 1,218,000, which is down slightly from December 2022, which is 1,257,000.
So it's 2.5 million people in two years.
That's mad.
It's absolutely mad.
You can see it as well.
Yeah.
This is mostly non-EU nationals.
For example, last year, a quarter of a million Indians, 140,000 Nigerians, 90,000 Chinese, 83,000 Pakistanis, 36,000 Zimbabweans.
And this is just a curve that goes straight up.
So huge numbers have come in and people can genuinely see it in the streets.
You also have a large number of people emigrating.
And interestingly, the non-EU emigration is going up as well.
And I've had conversations with taxi drivers.
They've given me barometers on this.
And I had a conversation with one taxi driver.
He was like, my brother owns a house in India.
He was thinking about selling it.
And I told him, don't bother.
I was like, oh, why is that?
He's like, because this country is going downhill.
He's going to want to go back there at some point.
And I imagine that a lot of people share that opinion.
You know, which is unfortunately true.
True.
So, but the net emigration last year was 532,000, which is a lot, an awful lot, but it's just a drop in the bucket compared to the number more than twice coming in.
So the net is nearly 700,000 coming in.
And, you know, most of it's non-EU nationals.
But there are a number... One of the questions everyone asks is, well, is it British people leaving?
It's like, no, actually, it's not.
It's about 80,000 Brits a year who emigrate, but also about 80,000 who come back as well, interestingly enough.
So that's not terrible.
But part six in this...
Still pressing the wrong one.
You'd think I'd know what I'm doing after sitting there.
There we go.
So part six in this is the numbers, right?
So this is the revised numbers.
So they revised those numbers and said, actually, it was more than we thought.
Another 58,000 on top came in and fewer, 10,000 fewer left.
And so the net migration has gone up by 68,000 to 740,000 last year net, which you would think, oh, well, that's a record.
No, actually, they revised the 2022 figures as well.
So that went up to 764,000 net.
But there's a net outflow of 10,000 Brits as well.
And then if you add... No, no, no, that's non-EU migration.
Oh, right, right.
Fewer non-EU migrants left than expected.
So more of them are staying, less of them are going.
And so the actual record was in 2022, which was 764,000 net migration.
Last year was 740,000 net migration.
Amazing.
And so the Migration Observatory talked about this.
Why is this going, skipping over the one I forget to?
I've got it.
But yeah, so the Migration Observatory at Oxford are doing superb work on this.
And they point out that it is slightly down, but not by much.
And the main contributions to the decline were the lower immigration on humanitarian visas.
So fewer Ukrainians and Hong Kongers came.
And Afghans as well.
And Afghans, yeah.
And there were fewer non-EU students.
So I was like, OK, great.
And so we've got a breakdown.
I don't know why.
Right, so we've got the breakdown from the government themselves, and it's encapsulated in this graph.
And you just look at this graph and you realize this is madness, sheer madness, right?
So visitor visa granted, as in people who are coming on holiday or just temporarily coming to the country for whatever reason, business, two million.
Okay, fine, because they're here for a few weeks, they go home.
Don't worry about those, right?
So it's the rest of it that's crazy.
So you've got 605,000 work visas, 562,000 study visas, and 79,000 family visas.
This is the overwhelming bulk.
But look at the bottom there.
756,000 extensions of stay and 129,000 settlements.
279,000 family visas.
This is the overwhelming bulk.
But look at the bottom there, 756,000 extensions of stay, and 129,000 settlements.
So they're people who are already here, but just being allowed to stay here for longer. - I mean, it's worth saying that in theory, people who come in as students should go out.
And in theory, we had a pandemic which cut off immigration and therefore you might have a surge and then you would expect it to decline.
The problem is in practice almost every time there's been a prediction of decline we've had the opposite and so no one really believes this anymore and until we see substantial declines in in net migration I don't think people I think people are right to be skeptical.
The other thing I will say is this surge has happened in Canada, Australia, Ireland, other places, and so it's happening across the Anglosphere and it's roiling politics.
Canada, for the first time, we are now getting a proper debate.
Everybody is agreeing immigration is too high.
That has never existed in Canadian history.
But isn't something like a third of Canada's population immigrant?
It's not, it's about, no, it's probably in the 20s like Australia.
Only in the 20s!
Only a quarter, not a third, sorry.
That's crazy!
It is crazy.
The previous highest number, which I think you've written about in White Shift, was about 14-15% in the early, sort of like Ellis Island era.
Yeah, in the US, yes.
I mean, the US is a much, because it's much larger, immigration is actually a much, it's a smaller share of its population.
It's now up to 14-15%, but it's not, like Australia and Canada, it's like maybe in the low to mid-20%.
You know, Switzerland is probably, you know, in the 30s.
It's smaller the country, generally the higher the foreign-born share, all other things being equal.
Noticeable, it is as well.
Because I mean, another thing that America has an advantage of, over us in particular, is they've got an incorporative ideology.
They've got a set of rules.
You can come here, do these things, wave a flag and be an American.
We don't really have that.
We're just like, you know, we're a bunch of ancient tribes on an island.
We didn't expect to have millions of people from everywhere in the world come and visit us.
Sorry, what are we supposed to do with this?
Even then, America does have ethno-religious underpinnings.
Oh yeah, it does.
The waspishness.
Yeah, I think that's always been a bit of a myth and a lot of it was recently invented.
I'm not saying that it's been a long-term permanent thing, but at least they have something, right?
And I'm not saying it's a guaranteed check to integration or anything like that.
But at least they've got a national narrative that they can wheel out to the new arrival and say, okay, well, look, just grab a beer, grab an American flag.
At least we'll have a conversation.
We don't have that.
What are we supposed to say to these people?
It's like, I don't know, get a picture of the queen?
I don't have a picture.
Biscuit in nationalism.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, a lot of it's implicit, Ryder.
I mean, it's kind of had to happen under the radar, but there's no explicit, you know, British dream the way there's an American dream, you know, that sort of thing.
Yeah, we should be demanding they come to the pub or something.
Right?
It's like, no, you've got to come to the pub.
Mashallah.
Yeah, exactly.
You don't have a choice.
Get a Coke if you have to, but...
But anyway, so I thought we'd go through just some of the numbers just more granularly because, again, the numbers themselves belie the problem.
They conceal the problem, right?
So, for example, the 562,000 studies, well, the extensions of stay are mostly for students.
So, okay, The students aren't just because you think, hey, they're here for three years and then they leave.
No, they have three years and then they keep staying.
And so now another half million have come in and they're going to get an extension.
So the problem keeps building up.
And so you say, OK, but we need the six hundred thousand people to do work, right?
No, no, we don't actually.
Because out of those, only 305,000 were actually work visas.
290,000 of them are dependents.
So we're allowing them to bring dependents and the students get to bring family.
And then we just add 79,000 for just bringing family anyway.
It's great.
And it's just like, this is crazy.
So if you look at the number of people, let's assume that the students are taking loans and things like that.
So they're shouldering their own burden, right?
Financially.
Well, still half of the work visas are people who are not paying into the system.
You don't pay your student loan back until you start earning 25 grand as well.
That is true.
So if you're on the delivery economy, which a large portion of Indian and Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan ones are, because they'll just sign on to a degree, get the student visa, drop out and get the little learner plate moped.
Same with the health and social care visa.
As Miriam Cates got up and said, in 2022 to 2023, 70,000 of those are issued and only 11,000 vacancies were filled by the end of the year.
So they've signed up and done it and then just gone, no thanks.
Yeah.
And then they're just somewhere in the country and we can't track them.
We can't do anything about them.
And so that's kind of mad, isn't it?
So, you know, because we've got 600,000 people coming into work.
No, we don't.
We've got 300,000 people, assuming that they all work.
I mean, they get access to the benefits system like anyone else.
So what can we do about it?
They say, oh, we need it for the NHS.
Like, maybe we only have 100,000, 118,000 grants that are given to health and care visas.
So, out of the 1.2 million who are coming, less than 10% of them are coming for the NHS.
So, OK, well, I mean, if the argument is the NHS needs them, OK, I'm happy to buy into it.
90% of the immigration can go away then.
That's what we're saying.
Because that was your concern.
Oh, well, it's about safe and legal humanitarian routes.
OK, that's 96,000.
Now we're down to 200,000.
So now we've got a net outflow of minus 300,000, if that's what you're saying, you know.
Yeah, but of course a lot of this is officials' hands being tied by courts and a very expansive judicial interpretations of human rights conventions, whereas in most of the world they just ignore this stuff.
They're signed up but they ignore it, whereas in Britain the judges just run with it, right?
But then they're not even the problem, that's the thing.
So let's assume we took all of the 100,000 boat migrants We took the 100,000 humanitarian migrants.
We took any other of these categories.
We'd still be in a net outflow of hundreds of thousands a year of just people leaving of their own volition.
It's really the government rubber stamping visas.
But all this family reunification stuff is tied into these rights frameworks, right?
So that's where the rights frameworks are pushing against saying no to dependence.
And that's one of the big problems is we have to sort of get independence from these very sort of liberal interpretations of these judicial, these rights frameworks that are international.
One hundred percent.
And I mean, you saw in the debate the other day on ITV where the Scottish national chap was like, well, of course, if a student comes over, he should bring his family.
And Farage was like, no, why would you?
Like, why would you think that?
I don't, you know, when I went to university, I didn't take my family with me.
You know, obviously I left my mum and dad at home.
It's weird that they come to bring their family.
It's weird.
And so this is the reason why the country feels like it's full to bursting.
I mean, Farage would be making this point, look, the traffic on the roads is crazy.
You can't get a doctor's appointment.
You can't get a dentist appointment.
You probably can't afford a house in London.
The trains are appalling.
God, the trains are just packed all the time.
The infrastructure can't handle it.
And yet, every year, the Conservatives allow millions of people to come in.
And so you might go, OK, well, how many are they deporting?
Forced returns for last year had gone up by 70%.
That sounds good.
Sounds promising.
I like large percentages.
Up to 7,000.
Seven thousand.
What they're not telling you as well is that the voluntary return scheme is costing you thousands of pounds at a time.
Yeah.
Because they recently said, we've finally sent the guy to Rwanda!
We paid him three grand to go.
And by the way, other European countries have much higher return rates.
Oh yeah.
So this is, essentially, there is some uniquely incompetent stuff going on with the Tories.
Let's be optimistic and call it incompetence.
Let's be optimistic about that.
And so obviously people are just making jokes about this.
Why is that doing that?
People are just making jokes about this.
Oh, my favourite independent journalist?
Yeah, you know, the right-wing memesphere was like, yep, we've got new high scores, things are great.
But actually, I mean, Sky News apparently today published this.
Interviews with Swindon residents, because Swindon now, one in five people who lives here was born abroad.
Uh, which we learned in the last census, right?
One in five.
Now, this isn't the way that things have always been.
You can go back to the 2011 census and it's something like, you know, one in 16 or something like that.
It's, it's been in the last five or 10 years that it's like a demographic bomb and you walk through the middle of the town and you're just like, and it, it, it's not that they're all from any one place either.
They're from everywhere, literally everywhere.
So there's people from all over.
And it's like, what the hell is going on?
Well, yeah, and we do need to have a conversation about these cultural things, and I understand why Farage is just talking about prices of rents and things, but... It's easy.
It's easy, but I think it's... I actually think, in a way, we do need to have that conversation about people have a right to have slower change.
Well, let's listen to these people's opinions.
I think this is very interesting.
It's gone a bit too far, I think.
I think some places in England you go to, there's more... You're not, you're... It's in one of the Turkish barbers.
But again, I did end up taking two of them on as well.
They work, you know what I mean, their work ethic is better than most of my guys.
No, it's this guy.
He can't just leave it unqualified.
Right.
Oh, no, they're great people.
I'm sure they are good people and whatnot.
But it's still like, you know, you can see he's like, oh, I'm probably gonna get in trouble for this.
But, you know, it's gone too far.
It's probably worth paying them cheaper.
It probably is.
It's the power of the taboos, right?
I mean, it 100% is the power of the taboos.
But it's so obvious that it's the problem.
We do need people from around the world to help with certain jobs.
You know, I live near a farm in the community and they're really struggling with trying to get people to come in.
Teenagers.
But they're not going to the farms!
They're not going to the farms, they're in our town centres!
You know, people believe these narratives because they're on the media and they say, oh well, we need it for the NHS.
Okay, but that's literally less than one tenth of the immigration, what now?
No, they're not milling about near Diddley Squat.
Yeah.
Well, there's also a big question of, you know, are they paying taxes if they're working in the black economy, number one.
Number two, a lot of public services they're using, including roads.
And if you actually do the math on this, anyone who's earning below a certain level is a net drain on the public.
Finances and there's a great Dutch academic who's Jan van de Beek who's done work on this.
The issue is immigration to you?
I can't get a job.
They come to this country and they can just get a job just like that.
So when you apply, what do they say to you?
Well I've got a criminal record.
Assault.
Assault?
How long ago?
Well I've been out of prison now three years now.
And so you blame immigrants rather than your criminal record?
Yeah.
The fact that they can casually go, I hate journalists so much.
It's Sky News, they're scum.
It's such obvious scum.
But okay, yeah, three years ago he got a criminal record, okay, but he paid his dues in prison and now he wants to get a job.
Well, if they didn't have such an abundance of labour, then maybe they would be forced to hire the guy and so he can rehabilitate himself and become a productive member of society again.
Yeah, but I also want to pay attention to that framing that they use, the phrase immigrants.
You're blaming immigrants, because I think we have to be able to distinguish between immigrants and immigration.
They're not the same thing.
Actually, immigrants can be fine as individuals.
And we're not blaming them as poor individuals, but immigration and the impact it has can be very negative.
And that's what he was speaking to.
He's talking about the amount of competition for the jobs.
It's a buyer's market for the person who wants the labor.
It's not a seller's market.
And she's like, well, you blame the immigrants rather than your criminal record.
It's like, well, look, having a criminal record doesn't mean you should never be able to work again.
And it's personalizing it, though, to mean, like, you hate this individual, these people, and that way delegitimizes a conversation about immigration levels.
Exactly.
And you're exactly right.
The immigrants are just following natural incentives, you know.
Luckily, they're not bad people.
They're wandering around.
I mean, they're not letting things down.
They seem to be perfectly okay.
It's just that we didn't ask for this and it has severe consequences that we have to live with.
But anyway, we'll leave that bit there and we'll go on to the next one.
So, I mean, speaking about economics, I'm always loathe to go on the immigration isn't benefiting us economically, because it misses the point.
You know, even if it was benefiting us economically, I wouldn't want my high street to look like a Baghdad bazaar.
But it does.
But anyway, the Center for Policy Studies put out this very long and detailed report on how it's not.
And anyone can tell just when the GDP figures come out.
We went over this a few weeks ago.
Exactly.
Yeah, and they've got a huge... I mean, they're just like, look, this just hasn't worked.
But probably because we're bringing in so many goddamn dependents, you know?
Well, people from the MENAPS nations, as you're alluding to that Dutch study, there's ones out of the Netherlands as well and Denmark and all that.
The people from Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan and Turkey are never net tax contributors across their lifetime.
And if... I don't oppose women not working and therefore not contributing in tax but if you're mass importing middle-aged men so like 18 to 50 or whatever and they're not making positive cultural contributions and they're also a net drain on my resources as i'm trying to have a house and have a family no just know you can all go home yeah 100 they've got a lot of recommendations which basically stop immigration You can summarize it as.
But the the Conservatives and Labour are just ridiculous.
In fact the Conservatives are particularly ridiculous and let's just end this very quickly.
James Cleverley being like well Labour don't have a plan to cut legal migration.
It's like are you Are you kidding?
Sweller Braveman as well.
Again, people I like, but like, you know, the Labour aren't going to stop the boats.
It's like today we found out the record number of migrants came across the channel yesterday.
882 in one day.
And the thing is, the channel migrants aren't the problem by any stretch of the imagination.
Tiny, tiny percentage.
But it's just the stupidity of the Conservatives thinking that we don't know what's happened.
We know you increased legal migration.
We know you're not stopping boats coming across the channel.
We know you're just allowing people to stay here indefinitely.
You're not removing people who shouldn't be here.
And so it's just insufferable.
And it's reflected, by the way, in the polling that people don't trust the Conservatives on immigration.
And they're right not to.
And they certainly shouldn't trust Labour either.
Right.
So anyway, we'll leave that one there.
Excellent.
Right, I'm just gonna fight the mouse to scroll up.
Fantastic.
Right.
Ah, I'll let Samson tackle it.
Brilliant, thank you very much.
Right, so, turns out that we're all forced to fund our enemies.
As we are well aware, the civil service in the UK and... Definitely my enemy.
Various state departments across the US, of course, are happy to prop up an activist clientele class based on racial, ethnic and sexual preference grievances and funnel money to their mates.
And I thought I'd go into...
I thought that was the civil service.
Point well made.
I'm not even joking, am I?
That's the problem.
Yeah, that's very true.
But we're going to go on a specific example of this because it turns out that there's some questionable funding around an old enemy of ours and an enemy of any right-thinking, patriotic person in the UK.
Hope not hate.
Some colleagues and friends of mine have dug up a bit on their funding and their untoward election interference.
Really?
Yes, which I've been told is a conspiracy theory, but they're very happy to engage in it.
But I'd like to frame this because obviously everyone's talking about reform and fraud recently.
In the reform manifesto.
So there's been complaints that the reform haven't fully costed all of their election pledges, implying the Conservatives and the Labour are the pinnacles of fiscal responsibility, massively blowing up the budget.
And if we all remember in 2010, Gordon Brown Treasury left a note saying, there's no money left.
It's such a circus, isn't it?
Yeah, it's pathetic.
So basically the IFS has complained that Reform's manifesto figures might not fully add up, but I would like to sort of contend with them.
So they're saying Reform's contract pledges will cost 140 billion a year at minimum.
So that's 90 billion in tax cuts, which they keep saying unfunded tax cuts.
That just means the government's going to spend and steal and spend less of your money, which shouldn't require funding.
They should have to make the case to actually up them, but there we go.
And 50 billion in spending increases, but it says it will raise this through.
Cuts to foreign aid, so that's about 15 billion in 2023.
They're going to halve that, so that's good.
A large amount of foreign aid budget also goes on migration, which costs us 14.4 billion a year, according to Andrew Jenkins, so we get rid of that as well.
So the asylum system, that's another massive cut.
Stopping servicing the Bank of England's debt, which is going to be 35 billion every year if interest rates stay at 5%.
It would even be more than that if they decided to raise them, which they keep doing.
We're the only country in the world that's doing that, which is mad.
Withdrawing benefits from foreign nationals and also British nationals to turn down two or more jobs because, yeah, people should be working.
You shouldn't be scrounging and wearing your Burberry like it's the early 2000s.
And they've also said reform proposed to reduce wasteful spending by 50 billion a year across all government departments, quangos and commissions.
But saving this sum would require much more than a crackdown on waste.
It would almost certainly require substantial cuts to the quality or quantity of public services.
Oh heavens!
Not the important public services, the ones that deliver such incredible returns on investment.
How are they going to do that?
Right, so Richard Tyson just turned around and said, yeah, just sack them.
Sack the lot of them.
So to achieve these spending cuts, the party would make a series of critical reforms in its first 100 days, this is in the manifesto, forcing every government department to do a sort of Rand Paul principle of saving £5 in every 100.
Okay.
Which is a great idea.
You just spend slightly less on frivolous stuff.
And, oh heavens, that's the tea budget gone, I suppose.
It's really that penny-pinching over at the Home Office.
And they said, which department wastes the most money?
And Ty said, my answer is all of them.
And some of the quangos, there's probably 100 to 150 to 200 quangos and commissions, just scrap them.
No one would notice a blind bit of difference.
Actually, I think we would notice a blind bit of difference because we wouldn't be actively propagandised against our own national culture, against capital W, white people, or against straight people who just want to have normal families.
And the reason I say this is because there has been an abundance of evidence coming out from Home Office insiders fed through to friend of the show, works at GB News, Stephen Edgington, There's just an endless number of cases that in our month of the liturgical calendar of Pride, the Home Office are obsessed with putting on Pride events.
So here's just a couple of examples.
I wanted to depress you, Eric.
I saved all the best stories for you to come around.
So here's the Home Office's Legal and Illegal Migration team organizing Pride events.
These are five senior Home Office officials who sent Pride messages to instruct employees to celebrate in June.
So Jackie Armstrong is the Home Office's Director of Operational Capabilities Command for Immigration Enforcement and is also doubles up as the LGBT Plus Champion for Immigration Enforcement.
Fire them all.
Fire them all.
So I'm just presuming that role means if you look remotely gay you get your visa rubber stamped and everyone else is just barred.
I mean, okay.
She told staff to wear rainbow pallets or lanyards, change your email signature to include your pronouns or attend a pride event locally.
Right, so she's totally woke.
And she's running our immigration control.
I wonder if there might be some kind of Connection here!
She said that staff should join a Home Office LGBT session held during the month.
There is a long list of those that I'll go through in the moment.
That is the department, by the way, where there were a couple of staff that were talking violently about getting Nigel Farage, right?
This is the same department?
Would be the same one.
Again, I wonder if there's some kind of connection there.
Home office spokesman himself said that these activities are being undertaken outside of core working hours and in no way distract staff from their day-to-day roles where they deliver crucial work to the department.
Now I'm really encouraged.
I believe him.
That's so obviously true.
They just do all of this in their free time and it has nothing to do with their work.
I'm glad that gay race communism is done purely outside of... It's just a hobby.
...the hours spent rubber stamping visas like it's going out of fashion.
As you once said, I'm sure they're limited on the number of visas they can rubber stamp by the sheer size of the Home Office cubicles.
If only we expanded the building, we would import the entire third world and his three wives into the UK.
The other one I found really interesting is the Home Office's LGBT plus champion for illegal migration operational command.
There is an LGBT plus champion for illegal migration specifically?
So from the Nation of Homosexuality, they're encouraging mass channel crossings apparently, but that's very weird.
And they said, not everyone has the opportunity to feel comfortable in who they are, and that is for me the purpose of pride.
It's our job to make these people feel comfortable.
Just waving the triangle flag on the beaches of Dover.
There's a bunch of Albanians smuggling across, like people from Africa and Asia.
It's like, yeah, we've got to make sure that they feel comfortable as gay men.
What are you talking about?
And will the immigration make LGBT people feel more comfortable?
Well, I mean, that's the other sort of...
Elephant in the room.
Have you not considered that as soon as they touch the magic soil of the UK, they become... Every Ardent Jihadian just becomes as British as you and me.
They'll be attending Soho's Pride Parade, I'm pretty sure.
So when they say all of these events are outside of work hours, I don't think that's quite true.
But we can't forget the list of the events.
They've got 10 Pride events on, including book clubs.
Just a quick thing, right?
I don't care if it was true.
Yeah, fire them anyway.
Like, if some guy was like, well, I just attend Nazi rallies at the weekend, Doesn't affect my work at the Home Office.
I'm like, yeah, you still fired me.
Quite.
So the books in question are like these rich literary tomes called This Arab is Queer and Hijab Dutch Blues.
Because Islamic queerness is...
At the top of the Home Office priorities.
So the Home Office LGBT network spectrum, so it's outside of work hours but they have their own LGBT network within the Home Office.
Curious that they said core work hours, that suggests to me they're trying to weasel out of something.
They would have just said work hours if it was really just, they weren't holding anything during work hours.
We just do all the bombing and overtime, that's fine.
So, they're hosting ten events this month to celebrate Pride, including two coffee mornings.
Hang on, coffee mornings?
Isn't that going to be exactly on work hours?
Well, you would think so.
Yeah.
But core workouts.
Core workouts, yeah.
Yeah, quite, yeah.
Core workouts, probably about eleven to, like, three.
With a two hour lunch.
They're going to do a scavenger hunt and picnic.
These people are definitely being paid way too much money.
When are you organising this?
I haven't organised this scavenger hunt.
And events discussing the history of pride, allyship and whether or not you can be LGBT plus and Jewish.
Which is strange.
Can you be LGBT plus and Jewish?
Yeah.
It's a question to ask, isn't it?
Really niche intersectional events going on here.
Arabs are asking.
Yeah, quite.
So this is obviously absurd, and even if you just write this off as a few fringe cases in the Home Office, this is clearly an institutional culture.
But, okay.
Maybe they aren't wasting tons of money on the party rings and jammy dodgers that are part of the picnic and scavenger hunt, right?
Maybe they're not just throwing hundreds of thousands at these organisations that are putting on these events.
Well, I'd like to do a test case for how deep the rot goes, and let's look at hope not hate.
So, Charlotte Gill...
has done some work here.
She works with Woke Waste.
She catalogs all of the various grants that the government throws out for things like gay porn research.
Oh, it's insane.
I recently started following the Woke Waste Twitter account, which you should all follow.
I'll bring Charlotte in at some point.
Yeah, you absolutely should because it is crazy.
They're literally like, you know, the government gives a £900,000 grant to literally study gay porn or something.
So what are you wasting all this money for?
Yeah, because these government grants, of course, are issued by people who are awoke.
They capture the grant-issuing agencies, and then they start sort of wheeling out the grants.
If you look at, for example, the academic research infrastructure in Britain, the UKRI, the share that have basically been going on DEI-related stuff has been rising steadily.
So they get onto positions where they can then make decisions on who gets the grants, and then it just perpetuates itself.
They've got to spend the money as well, don't they?
Because if they finish a fiscal year with like, you know, £100,000 shortfall, you haven't spent that money.
Well, you don't need that next year.
So they won't get that for next year.
And so they have to continue spending upwards.
Yeah, well here's one investigation that she's done into the Paul Hamlin Foundation.
Now Paul Hamlin, as I understand it, was an infamous, famous rather, refugee.
It's become an infamous foundation now.
And since he's died, his sizable estate of multiple millions has been spent on open borders activism.
It was pretty nakedly on their own website.
Their raison d'etre is actually open borders.
So Charlotte includes a link to their migration page, which as soon as she posted this thread, it's been taken down.
But on it, it was written That we envision a world in which everyone is free to move and no one is forced to move.
So that's their entire modus operandi, right?
They're a registered charity, so that means they get all the benefits from tax breaks and tax write-offs and the like.
This was actually the group that Liz Truss mentioned in our interview when she said it was run by a former Ed Miliband advisor.
Sorry, this has just given me visions of reforming the British Empire.
No, no, no, we were just free to move to Africa and Asia.
So she found that the Hamlin Foundation gave Hope Not Hate £60,000 in 2015 and 2016 and £240,000 to be spent between 2022 and 2025.
This is part of its migration fund and it aims to do two things.
It says to quote, create a UK network of young migrant leaders, so young migrants agitating for bringing in more migrants, Excellent self-perpetuating cycle and quote a network of leaders and organizations within towns who will respond to local needs and pressure points and share learning to enable rapid response to provocative elements essentially right so this is the stand up to racism crew that are going to get funded and organized through this Roving bands of communist agitating leafleters.
And by the way, it's not ridiculous to call them communists.
Literally, the head of research is a member of the Communist Party who in 2013 attended a rally and said, hope not hate, we are all comrades celebrating the anniversary of the Red Army victory.
I don't even care if they think it's ridiculous.
I think they're communists.
But even if they were just left liberals, which I actually think many of them are as well, I think equally problematic in many ways.
Yeah, but that's like saying, you know, we have a nice glass of water and we drop one little bit of excrement in it.
I'm still not drinking the water.
I'm going to call the whole glass excrement, if you don't mind.
So they are a registered charity, as I said.
Here's their Charity Foundation website page.
Do you know who else is?
Hope not hate, actually.
Which is strange, because they're engaged in political activism, and as far as I know, because I, sorry, backstory, I used to work for an environmental non-profit, and we tried to become a registered charity because of all the benefits that our trustees would be able to then donate to us and not spend so much money on tax and the like.
We were denied because one of our members had written a piece critical of Extinction Rebellion and so we violated their political partisanship.
Oh really?
But Hope Not Hate do an interesting thing of where they have a charitable foundation and then Hope Not Hate is completely distinct even though they share the same website.
Really?
Yeah.
So it would be something that the body that oversees this might be interested in looking at?
If they were applying the standards of political partisanship fairly.
Well, all I'm saying is if people, say politicians, got enough complaints about this, maybe they might actually nudge the thing and start making it happen.
But so much of this is complaint driven, and if the left is more active, which they are, we know they punch five times above their weight on Twitter and in many of these fora, and so they are able to put in all the complaints.
It's like with Ofcom, similarly against GB News.
So they put in the complaints, so they get the action on their side.
So we've got to start complaining too?
Right, and we need to weaponize the sort of boomer Karens.
Spiritual Karens.
Yeah, I agree.
No, God save our Karens, you know.
I get complaining.
It is an anti-white slur.
Actually, it's quite interesting.
It's an anti-traditional slur as well.
I'm more thinking if Richard Tyson and the like are looking at exact areas to trim the fat.
Various places signed up to the Charity Commission, many of the employees at the Charity Commission themselves might be eligible for a job loss because they're not abiding by the principle of political impartiality, which again I understand it's Basically impossible to uphold, but they're not very patriotic.
They decide to walk around and smear people.
And they're also maybe not doing everything quite so legal.
Oh, really?
So, there's been an expose by my friend Jack Hadfield, who works over at the Publica, which is a Sidney Watson and the Quarterings outlet.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And he's done some on-the-ground journalism, some actual, like, beat reporting.
Excellent.
Jack's a good lad.
He is, a good man.
So what's happened is Hope Not Hate are working with Labour campaigners in Rochdale to smear George Galloway.
Really?
So the apolitical charities are allowed to do that?
Well also, does that not count as like undisclosed essentially campaign finance leafleting?
Because they get certain restrictions on that from the Electoral Commission but if your campaigners are working for a supposed A number of investigative journalists went undercover in the Hope Not Hate campaign in Rochdale and discovered strong links and close relationships between Hope Not Hate and the campaign of Rochdale's Labour candidate Paul Waugh.
In hidden recordings, and I've seen the transcripts for these, an activist for Hope Not Hate repeatedly told undercover investigative journalists that he was a campaigner and activist for Labour.
Quote, we just want to get Galloway out.
When the journalists asked if they were planning to go out with Paul and campaign, they said they weren't, as the areas have already been covered by his regional support in the Labour Party, with the activists adding, we kind of want them to win by a big margin.
So Labour are actually, with their activists, organising around the places where Hope Not Hate are campaigning, and they're not spending money and effort in those areas.
Who could have imagined that Hope Not Hate was an extension of the Labour Party?
Yeah, it should actually surprise no one because Hope Not Hate's Director of Campaigns and Communications was also a former Labour councillor.
Shocking!
I wonder how Jess Phillips did a targeted letter-writing campaign against Liz Truss off the back of Hope Not Hate.
It just boggles the mind, right?
And yet, under the Conservative government, under the institutions nominally controlled by the Conservative Party, the Taxpayers Alliance have found that Hope Not Hate got £50,000 in government grants in 2019 and 2020.
So atop the Paul Hamlin Foundation grants, they're getting grants directly from government bodies.
These are I bet these guys can't believe their luck.
So this is six government departments, and they provided migrant help, stonewall, refugee action, hope not hate, and insta-law, with £7,694,408 in grants from between 2018 and 2021.
I bet these guys can't believe their luck.
But, like, the Conservative Party is actually giving us money to go out and say we hate the Conservative Party.
This is incredible.
Well, of course, and the entire DEI infrastructure, I mean, this has been written, I think there was a piece in CapEx that I think was $200 million, was the estimate for the amount of money that's going on this stuff.
Enormous resources, and the Tories have hardly touched this.
Now, the question, of course, this raises is, when Labour gets in, I mean, the Tories didn't touch it.
They, at least some politicians, Esther McVeigh, et cetera, did make a certain amount of noise.
Might that have restrained it a little bit?
And might we see a surge in pretty open, you know, pro-left DEI stuff once Labour gets in?
It's hard to believe that we won't.
Yeah, what would be the reason that that would happen?
With the online safety bill, they're going to appoint Ofcom again, another partisan attack dog against the likes of GB News, the arbiters of what can and can't be said on internet broadcasting channels, and the burden will then be to set the standards by which they can censor.
So they'll obviously outsource it to expert institutions and registered charities like Hope Not Hate, who have already done annual smear pieces in their State of Hate report that again conflate people like the National Front with you, Yeah.
and Priti Patel.
- Yeah.
- Tenuous links, but there you go.
So-- - There's no link at all. - Yeah, that will be the manufacturer consent to go after us.
And they've also got an even more sizable war chest because of that money from that year, they didn't just get 50,000 pounds in 2019 from various government bodies.
The Home Office also gave them a dedicated 141,380 pounds. - Why aren't they giving us this money?
Why aren't they giving it to Hope, not hate? - 'Cause we don't hate the country.
Good point.
Yeah.
So the Home Office, who are for some reason obsessed with LGBT issues as they're trying to deter people from breaking the law and breaking into the country, are also obsessed with giving hundreds of thousands of pounds to communist activists who criticize you as far-right if you notice the problem.
So That money they spent watching the Liz Truss interview was a tax rebate, it turns out.
So I would just like to suggest to Reform UK, if you're adding things to your policy agenda as you go along, defunding these sorts of organisations, reforming the Charity Commission application system and gutting the Home Office as well as the Charity Commission would be a good start.
Stop funding hate!
And with that, we'll go on to the written comment, shall we?
Yeah.
So, Sad Wings Raging sends a soup chat and says, the history of the London School of Fabian Socialism economics when?
I haven't got it planned, but that would be an interesting...
That would be an interesting dive to do, actually.
You put some of the stuff about the Fabian Society in One Shift, didn't you?
The Fabian Society, well, I mean, this is sort of part of the history of the British left.
I mean, they have a history going back, you know, so they at one point supported eugenics, right?
So, I mean, these things go through a lot of shifts over time, but I think it is that kind of Not communist Soviet aligned, but this kind of left liberal soft left socialist that that sort of strand is really behind where we are in terms of DEI and woke.
You know, it is that blend of that kind of humanitarian because really the Marxists were not humanitarian at all.
But it's this element of this humanitarian socialism that gives us, that lands us where we are in the sort of John Lennon world we were talking about earlier.
The wokists are consciously an extension of the Fabian paradigm of incremental socialism.
They recognize themselves as part of that tradition.
Sorry, apparently there's some breaking news.
Just Stop Oil have sprayed Stonehenge Orange on the eve of the summer solstice.
Thank you, climate jihadians.
Leave us alone, for Christ's sake!
This is another thing that reform needs to do in the future.
Raise global temperatures.
Well, actively burn tyres in your front garden.
I was going to say, just prescribe them as terrorist organisations.
Literally, you should just be like British Communist Party.
Prescribed.
Just up oil.
Insulate Britain.
Extinction Rebellion.
All.
Hope not hate.
Prescribe them.
Ruining ancient monuments that we have a responsibility to pass on to future generations.
Absolutely unacceptable.
Jamin also says, congratulations on your engagement.
Oh, thank you very much.
Appreciate it.
Josh, the Jew Hendon reform candidate.
I am a reform candidate for Hendon, and I'm furious that no one has put out a hit piece against me.
Am I not based enough?
Is it because I'm Jewish?
Clearly not.
Well, yeah.
Well, we know it's not because you're Jewish.
Maybe you're not Jewish enough.
They're happy to call as many reform Jewish candidates Nazis as they want.
But yeah, you need to get out and be more based, I'm afraid, Josh.
Omar says.
I do wish all the reform candidates luck by the way.
Oh yeah.
I just want you boys to absolutely storm it.
Yeah, me too.
I really, really want reform to do well, because the Tories have to be killed.
Omar says... Electorally, electorally.
The problem with the left, that the left has with implying their opponents are Nazis, is the main bite behind the accusation is anti-Semitism, and they just spent the last few months advocating the genocide of Israel, so nobody has done a better job of destroying the left's best weapon than the leftists themselves.
That's a good point, actually.
You know, no one condemns Napoleon for invading other countries.
Nobody cares about any of that.
It's the genocide that makes the Nazis so uniquely evil.
It's like the Norm Macdonald joke.
You know, people say Hitler was such a hypocrite and they said hypocrisy was the worst of it.
I think it was all the genocide.
OPHUK says, enrichment is like having your country being turned into a shithole.
Diversity is having to be told your culture isn't any better than everyone else's.
And he says some other things I'm not going to reply.
Grant says, Nigel Farage is nowhere near as based as Enoch Powell.
Obviously true.
Tech Heresy says, what's wrong with Enoch?
Take that cudgel from them.
Just ask, what's he wrong?
Well, that's the thing.
I did a thing with Calvin Robinson a while ago saying, look, Enoch Powell's actually quite moderate.
He was a civic nationalist.
Yeah, he was a civic nationalist.
He was quite temperate in his predictions.
He said, look, it could be that in the future, Birmingham will be one third immigrant.
It's like, no, Birmingham is now one-third English, so it's twice as bad.
He massively understated what the demographic change could look like.
Well, lots of the quotes in his speech as well were quoting constituents.
Exactly, yeah.
I mean, Ian O'Powell himself was a classicist, so he looked at things in a sort of old-world paradigm, which doesn't sound good to the liberal, but he's not as they think that he was.
He seems to be quite a reasonable chap.
Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of what he was saying, I think, would resonate in terms of trying to protect ways of life and slow down change.
Now, he did obviously say some inflammatory things as well, but I think it's worth saying that a lot of what he said actually, you know, about slowing change resonates very well now.
And a lot of the predictions came to pass.
Not all of them.
I mean, it's not as though the black man's having the whip hand, but still a lot of the conclusions around the scale of change Actually have been borne out.
I think that was a metaphorical statement.
I don't think he meant that.
Right.
And if you were to frame it in the the context of hate speech laws, well, they only seem to affect the majority white population, actually.
So, again, metaphorically, again, he seemed to be fairly pressing on a few things.
Anyway, George says, good thing Nigel purged all the bad people from his party so that this sort of smearing wouldn't happen.
What a brilliant political strategist he is.
So I have a contentious take on this.
So you should not have capitulated to hope not hate.
You do not let your enemies set the terms of engagement.
But if you are going to select political candidates, select people that understand optics, because some of them have been... Okay, some of them have been the brash kind of impassioned boomers that I would happily live alongside and have as an eccentric neighbour, but would I trust them to be an MP and fix the problems?
No.
Sure, but...
Their counter-argument would be, well, the election was foisted on us at very short notice.
We had to get 600 candidates.
Pre-election.
They were doing this pre-election.
Sure, but I think they've been caught on the hop and have had to run to catch up.
So, to be honest with you, I think they should just come out and say, look, we're the ones going up in the polls, you're not.
Shut up.
That's their new line.
That's what Richard and Nigel have been saying, and that's a much stronger way of doing it, rather than capitulating to favourite Home Office patron Hope Not Hate.
Yeah, I can't stand seeing it.
Anyway, SuitsTheRedCoat says, you know, I feel sorry for the actual far-right.
Imagine being a neo-Nazi and being compared to people like notable gay Jew Dave Rubin.
I don't feel bad for them.
Yeah, that's the problem with the bar, right?
They've got a real image problem.
Ewan says, when Nigel lost in Thanet, David Cameron got a load of people down on a coach to have a party.
The man is utterly abhorrent.
I wish him the worst.
Did you see him joke with, was it Kay Burley, the other day, about why didn't you set the barometer for the leave referendum to be two-thirds of the majority instead?
I did see that.
Yeah, it was on Sky News, and they were laughing and joking about it, and David Cameron just goes, no, no, you know, we had to respect the results of the democratic mandate, ha ha ha.
Essentially like, if you would have rigged it against us, you absolutely would have.
Yeah.
OPH UK again says, uh, there are lots of good immigrants, but way too many bad ones to keep importing more.
And the thing is, it doesn't matter if they were all angels.
You know, that's the thing.
That's not the... Yeah, I mean, I used the metaphor of, you know, can you criticize the NHS without someone saying, oh, you're criticizing our doctors and nurses.
It's the same logic, right?
You can criticize immigration Right, without necessarily saying, I don't like Ahmed the guy in the kebab shop.
It's not the same question, and yet that's always the way it's collapsed.
And the thing is, the immigrants themselves recognize this when you speak to them.
They're like, oh yeah, there are too many people here.
It's like, yeah, I agree.
Grant says, uh, that journalist, you wonder how many English working class she went to before she found someone who isn't that articulate to say something true in a clumsy way so she could grab her soundbites to support the upper-class lefties in their undeserved sense of superiority.
Yeah, I really despise this kind of attitude that the London journalists take towards people.
Like, you see them doing it all the time and they'll, like, look at the camera and it's like, oh, you...
Same with the Politics Joe one where they went around Clacton recently and the guy just said, look, being called racist is boring now.
It's boring.
They put out the clip going, essentially, look at this ignorant troglodyte that lives in Clacton.
Everyone was going, yeah, I agree with him.
I think he's got a good point.
What's his manifesto?
Charles says, uh, being sentenced to jail isn't a sentence to never work again.
Yeah, exactly the point I was making.
Yeah, okay, three years ago, he got out of jail.
He should be allowed to get a job again, you know?
These are also the same people that say the entire criminal justice system is racist.
Yeah, exactly.
Until it comes to a white guy.
Zoranek says, regarding needling people for jobs people aren't doing, it's basically Thomas Sowell quotes, you get more of what you subsidize.
You want people, you want to pick other people's garbage.
It was what I heard when I was a kid.
That's a great point.
You do get exactly what you subsidize.
So are we subsidizing fruit pickers?
No.
The hilarious thing was at school when I got told, you know, oh, if you don't work hard, you'll become a bin man.
And it's like, but they're making more than you.
Yeah, they get like 40.
Right.
I'm just a resentful, spiteful teacher who I don't find particularly credible.
Why would I care?
And they get to stay in good physical condition.
And they have friends that they actually like.
But it's also a noble profession.
Like, yeah, I like the fact that you help keep our civilization clean and tidy.
Yes.
One of the few parts of my council tax I'm not resentful about is the bin collection.
Like, we got a thing through from Swindon Council the other day.
80% of council tax is redistributive.
It's money they're spending on quality of life things for disadvantaged people and stuff like that.
It's like, oh my god, I'm disadvantaged.
I've got four kids.
You know, I need that money.
Charles says, Hey Loadseaters, lately I've been seeing a lot of Facebook shorts from the Labour Party.
When you check out the comments, they all support reform and are ripping into Keir Starmer.
Yet Nigel Farage's clips show great support for reform.
It sounds to me that Labour will likely still win this time, but I don't understand how.
I don't think they're going to win as bigly as they expect.
I think Farage might actually be able to pull out quite a surprise.
I mean, we've still got, what, two and a half weeks?
Until the election.
And Farage has come this far in less than two weeks.
I think the big tell that will move it over the line is if he gets his ask of being in the leadership debate because he keeps staying above the Conservatives.
Because they've now done an extra question time where it's just Farage and the Greens.
They've stuck the SNP and the Lib Dems alongside the Conservatives and Labour.
Farage is like, I'm the third or second party in the polls now.
Gimme.
And so if on the last week We get a three-way leadership debate and he just tears into them.
That'd be so great.
I watched the two ITV debates and he was smashing it.
He's right.
The problem that they all have is that he's correct on the issues and they're all wrong on the issues.
And he's speaking the truths that a lot of people know.
He's the only one telling it straight in many cases, right?
And he's just a superb orator.
He's a great talker.
He's had many years of practice.
Omar says, I despise the implied entitlement for foreigners to be given access to native lands.
The only valid reason needed to deny them entry is because we don't want them.
but the lord of the land doesn't care for the opinions of us serfs.
And that's a great point from the woman's thing.
So, you know, you've got a criminal record.
They don't come from here.
They haven't got a right to jobs in Britain.
We also are now the number one country in Western Europe, the third country in all of Europe for crimes committed by people of foreign extraction.
So we are actually just also important criminals.
Ah, well, weirdly the vetting process hasn't been superb.
OPHUK says the UK has three and a half non- has had three and a half non-British PM and they've all been conservatives.
Disraeli, Churchill, Boris and Sunak.
How diverse is that?
So yeah, I mean, there's no point arguing about racism with the left because they literally don't care.
The slightly hilarious thing, though, is that all of the South Asian and Middle Eastern leaders that have been installed in the last few years have all failed miserably.
So it has been an act of repudiation that diversity is actually not a strength on its own.
So Grant says, Canada is really different from England, though.
The average Canadian was predisposed to be welcoming and tolerant.
We're welcoming and tolerant.
We're nice.
We just don't have the ideology.
We don't apologize for everything.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I think these are sort of shades of grey.
It's not black and white.
But he's right there that there's been a big change and it's an unprecedented, at least since the 1950s, I'd say, shift in the tone of Canadian media and commentary on immigration.
So that's one to watch.
Very surprising.
Yeah.
What do you think of Pierre Polivar?
Pierre Polyev, I'm a little wary.
I think he's at least better than the previous unbelievably wet Canadian Conservative leaders, but I'm also worried by how little he does.
He hasn't talked about immigration, hasn't gone after the Liberals on immigration, he's been weak on culture wars, reluctantly when dragged there eventually comes late to the party.
Now, I am told That he's keeping his powder dry.
And so I guess a lot will depend on what he does.
He's promised to defund the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the equivalent of the BBC.
So that will be one thing that we're watching.
And then we'll see what he does on a whole bunch of these other things, including immigration.
So let's just hold fire on that.
Okay.
If he's keeping his powder dry, fair enough.
I do love watching him dealing with journalists though.
Yeah.
There's very few people who are better than just where, who said this, why, how, and they just stumble into nothing.
The bit with the apple was hilarious.
He's a very, very, very good debater and he's always skewering Trudeau, which is great.
So, fingers crossed.
I've got a Canadian friend.
And he's well ahead in the polls.
He's ahead in the polls as Labour is ahead in the polls here.
Oh, right.
At least there's some light in the end of the tunnel for Canada.
The Unbreakable Litany says, We need immigrants from the NHS.
I just got back from visiting someone in the hospital.
The nurses were fresh off the boat and rude.
I would seriously recommend getting private insurance if you are ethnically English.
Good luck affording it.
Yeah, well, you're on the waiting list otherwise.
Arizona Desert Rat says, I think that a lot of Western societies have lost sight of is the fact, I think that this is a lot of what the West says.
Individual immigrants can be good, but they can also be bad.
Each individual needs to be seen as their own person and not part of a conglomerate.
Media needs to quit lumping them all in together.
It must be on a case-by-case basis.
Yeah, but the reason they do that is entirely tactical in order to make you a bad guy for daring to criticize immigration.
So yeah, but look at poor Ahmed here.
It's like, yeah, no, everyone loves Ahmed.
I'm sure he's a lovely guy though.
Rue the Day says, Immigration consensus.
We like when brown people work on the cheap, actually.
Who will serve off coffees in Pret?
Yeah, there is.
I always wonder if there's a kind of colonial angst from the sort of upper and middle classes on this.
It's like, but we used to have loads of foreign servants.
Like, you know, do we have, why, why can't they serving my coffee and pray anymore?
It's like, well, look, you could have a teenager serving your coffee.
It'd be the same thing.
And it's like, no, I need, I need a Brown person.
Why?
You know?
I mean, I'm, you know, just joking.
Obviously I'm sure they don't think that, but like, it does have that kind of shade to it where it's like, It's weird, you know, that you think that you should have underlings.
It's like, what was it, Kelly Osbourne, where she was like, Who will clean your toilets, Donald Trump?
And everyone on the panel went, whoa, whoa, whoa, shut up, shut up, shut up.
Who will serve our coffee in prayer?
Who will clean our toilets?
It's like, okay, this is getting weird, actually.
Who will rub our feet?
I'm sure that's not what they're thinking, but it seems to be blurted out every now and again.
Yeah, the mask slips that there's this idea that we want a developing world proletariat to do our dirty work.
Who's going to deliver my Chinese?
Cook your own food!
But there's also teenagers who need jobs.
Threadnaughts says, spraying Stonehenge Orange treason and the penalty of treason used to be permanent.
I mean, it's not treason, it's just massively disrespectful and I hate it.
He also says, congratulations, Connor.
Thank you.
Future Mrs. Tomlinson are very happy.
And Sad Wings Raging says, thanks to the moderator here, I know that Pitta, I know that Pitta, that job is modeling Viva.
What on earth does that mean?
I have no idea.
I have no idea what that means.
Ruthiday says, today's podcast is really radicalizing me against paying taxes.
I hate, you end up knowing where your taxes are going and it's just like, Did you see Ed Balls interrogating Farage about the tax cuts?
Yeah, I don't... Again, if Ofcom were applied properly, given that he is the husband of the presumed-to-be Home Secretary, how he's allowed to do that is questionable, but... There's no neutrality in the institutions.
If you didn't see it, if anyone didn't see it, basically Farage is like, yes, we're going to give everyone, you know, X percent tax cut.
And Ed Balls is like, oh, that means that the rich are going to have more money.
Get more of their own money, Ed.
That's only because they earn more money than the poor.
But it's not just that.
The tax cut's coming from the bottom.
He's raising the threshold for your tax-exempt income to £20,000.
And then you also have a 25% marriage tax allowance that can be transferred if your partner doesn't work.
So, for example, if my future wife wouldn't work, I could get £30,000 tax exempt, which means I could take care of my kids.
But the thing is, Ed Balls is struggling with the per capita problem.
Because, yeah, that is true.
The rich people will have less of their money taken away than the poor people, because percentage-wise, that's how that works.
But it was just insufferable to watch.
I was just like, he's being deliberately disingenuous.
I was like, no, it's a percentage.
It's a percentage.
That's literally all you need to say.
It's per capita, Ed.
JJHW says, replace civil servants with AI.
No.
A.I.
egregore.
Don't do it.
Don't do it.
I don't know.
I mean, like... That's what people are pushing for.
There's two camps at the moment among Gen Z. Some of them want a strongman and some of them want governance by A.I.
And who's going to be calibrating the A.I.?
The experts.
I mean, well, we've seen Google AI, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, all the black Nazis.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yeah.
Warlord Wu2Tai says, my taxes are funding this.
Yeah, all of our taxes are bloody funding this.
Omar again says, reform need to implement a policy of executing anyone that destroys British heritage.
I don't think they're going to go quite that far.
Arizona Desert Rat says, if you do not agree with, I will ensure your indoctrination.
You have no choice.
I'm not sure though.
So Mahal says, so I'm currently working on my student visa to the UK.
First of all, a $1,500 surcharge for the NHS is crazy for a one-year visa.
Secondly, the visa website keeps telling me to register to vote.
That's true.
What?
Yeah, students can vote.
Students can vote.
Why the hell would foreign students?
Foreign students?
Because, yeah, they can vote in the UK now, in this election.
Really?
Yeah, yeah.
Non-citizens?
Yes.
Okay, so I think the reason is in 2014 Rishi Sunak released a paper that said that, it was something like The Changing Face of Britain or something like that, and he said that disproportionately Indian immigrants vote for conservative parties.
Right.
And so there's a massive amount of Indian students.
So the conservatives are literally replacing the electorate with one that more favours them?
It's the Bertolt Brecht quote of, the people are insufficient, we must elect new people.
Yes.
Yes.
So in their manifesto, as Dan went over in his Brokeconomics yesterday, which is excellent, go watch it, because he's so exasperated, it's hilarious, they say that we're going to make immigration from Commonwealth nations easier.
So that means India.
Sophie says they're going to attend Soho's Pride Parade, I'm sure.
Yeah, they could.
I'm not going to read that, Sophie.
Not reading that?
Sophie, and you know I'm not reading that.
And thank God we're out of time on that.
Yes.
Right, yes.
Thank you, thank you for Pete for selecting the most fed post of your comments.
Thank you for joining us, Eric.
We'll be back in half an hour for my show to discuss the contents of Eric's book, where I'm sure we'll be locking horns over liberalism.
Until then, we're back tomorrow at one o'clock.
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