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July 9, 2024 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:40:38

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #952

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	Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters for the 9th of July And I am joined by Esther Krakow, have I pronounced that correctly or have I got it wrong?
	Yeah, good enough.
	That's good enough for me.
	And also Beau.
	And today we are talking about the French election conspiracy, which, you know, it's not actually a conspiracy theory.
	They just conspired to keep the right out.
	Again, yes.
	We're going to be talking about, or they will be talking about at least, what is in store with Labour and what they're already up to.
	And then I'm going to be sort of reviewing the state of the world in which the Labour Party has inherited.
	What is the world that the Tories left behind after their 14 years of governance?
	And how I think it's beyond parody, how you can't even make it up.
	And I suppose I may as well Again, actually no, I have an announcement first, to interrupt myself.
	We will be going back to US politics eventually.
	We've been covering a lot of European politics, I know, it's not everyone's cup of tea.
	However, obviously US elections coming up, we're going to be looking at that a lot more closely, and I don't want you to feel like you're missing out if you're in the US.
	We haven't forgotten you, don't worry.
	Samson is very insistent that I mention Rumble Rants.
	We're going to try this new thing where if you send in...
	a comment through rumble a rumble rant you know the super chat basically we will read it after the relevant segment and we're also trying to leave a lot more time for the written comments on the website as well we're trying to stay on time so we don't miss you out but anyway that's enough of me announcing stuff i suppose i may as well actually talk about some politics and uh france so last month macron took as the bbc
	put it a huge risk with a surprise snap election and And to be honest, when he called this, I was a little bit quizzical.
	I was thinking, well, hang on a minute.
	National Rally, Macron's rivals, had gained a lot of seats in the EU Parliament.
	It seemed like he was set for a defeat.
	And so Him calling an election didn't really make sense.
	You normally call an election when you are ascendant, not when you're at your worst just after a defeat.
	And so this surprised me and I think it surprised everyone.
	I don't know what both of you thought.
	Yeah, for sure.
	You remember when Cameron lost the referendum?
	Yes.
	And just resigned.
	That's a classic thing, isn't it?
	If you're so humiliated politically that you have to either resign or call another election because you feel like you've actually lost your mandate.
	My first thought was that, that that was what was going through his mind.
	Oh I've sort of, it's so sort of undermined me politically that I feel obliged, I have to.
	And then there's other politicians that are just completely shameless and will just live out their political career until the bitter bitter bitter end.
	So my first thought was that he just felt so undermined that he sort of had to.
	I don't think that's what's going on, I think there's some sort of 3D, 4D chess going on, where he made calculations that, well exactly what we've seen played out, which we're going to talk about over the next few minutes, that there was something other than just the surface level analysis going on, that he thought we need to, probably something along the lines of, We need to try and pull the legs out from under our opponents while we still can.
	Something like that, I don't know.
	Something like what Rishi Sunak did.
	I think the idea was to renew his mandate.
	Because obviously you can't have national rally MEPs basically opposing the national agenda of the French government.
	It would be an inconsistent policy platform to try and run on and to implement.
	But this is the worst gamble because you've got the worst of both worlds because now there's a hung parliament.
	So I think while his ambition was to kind of halt the right, he now has to deal with the left, who are actually the ones rallying and setting cities on fire and all of that.
	And you know, two years left of his presidency, it was quite strange.
	Why would you want to take such a huge risk that will make you a lame duck president?
	But I think he was hoping he could clinch on Again, to power, to at least ride out the next two years of his presidency.
	It's a gamble that I suspected would fail, and it has.
	When you listen to a lot of the things Macron says, whenever he's talking about foreign affairs, you know he's in deep trouble.
	That's the history of every French president.
	They never focus on domestic politics if they see an opportunity to take the center stage for Foreign issues basically and that's basically what he's done for the last 18 months particularly of Ukraine and Israel-Gaza, West Africa with all the sort of former colonies basically breaking off in a spectacular fashion.
	So he kind of wanted a way to reinvigorate his own national popularity which was never going to happen.
	I think it's definitely sort of an odd gamble and he's going to lose either way because as weak and as globalist as Macron is, the far left, the actual sort of commies, they hate him.
	They hate him even more almost.
	And they're sort of even more cutthroat, ruthless political enemies than The so-called right in France, Marine Le Pen and that sort of thing, they're even more ruthless than she would be.
	So yeah, it's not going to be a nice couple of years for Macron, but who cares?
	He deserves it, right?
	And his formal reasoning for it was that he was saying to the National Rally voters, I've heard your calls for an election because they were saying we need an election now and I'm going to basically give it to you.
	Which, you know, in politics is unusual that you grant Charitable things to your opponents and I think this has all been part of a grand scheme from Macron.
	But of course it was a gambit isn't it?
	I'm going to give you the thing you want except actually what's really happening is I'm going to make sure you're denied the thing you want.
	Well I mean what he was really hoping for because you have to remember Macron basically in 2017 destroyed The fringes.
	So he destroyed the left and the right because his coalition was very much on the center ground.
	So he was hoping to kind of renew that coalition, renew that like a bit of the leftist and a bit of a rightist into a kind of a broad coalition that he could manage.
	And that's what failed.
	Because when you have the collapse of the center ground, you empower the extreme left and the extreme right.
	And that's, I don't think he really expected it to go this way.
	And I also think he underestimated how much the left, particularly the Mélenchon's tribes, hate him.
	They despise him.
	And if you look at sort of the French markets, Even the inclination that Marine Le Pen would have won the second round sent the market spinning.
	But no one ever guessed that this would happen with the left.
	That's the trick.
	So they were hoping, I mean, loads of these institutions were hoping that Macron's gamble would pay off.
	But I don't think anyone saw the left coming in the way that they have.
	Absolutely.
	But it's worth talking a little bit about the election itself because there are three factions that you need to keep in mind in French politics.
	You've got the left wing, particularly the New Popular Front, you've got the centrists which you have, the Renaissance which is the President Emmanuel Macron's party and then you have of course National Rally on the right as well and the actual process that goes on is there are two rounds of elections so the first round is in all 577 constituencies
	And this was called for the 30th of June and in this round to be secure as a candidate to actually get your seat in the National Assembly you have to have more than 50% of the votes and have a total greater than 25% of the registered electorate in the constituency.
	Um, vote for you.
	So, you know, you also have to rely on a decent turnout.
	So only 76 candidates made it to the National Assembly from this, and this was from both the right and left and not the centreists.
	How many, sorry, again, roughly?
	It's 577.
	577, so it's not very many.
	But it was looking really good for Le Pen because Her party seemed to mop up here.
	They seemed to get more seats than anyone else, although the left did better than Macron's party and his faction as well.
	So this left 506 seats for the 7th of July runoff election and both Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the head of the NFP, the left-wing party, and Macron discussed the importance of keeping the right out of the National Assembly, which I thought was interesting because they're both saying the same thing at the same time.
	You're doing better off doing that deal with Le Pen actually than Mélenchon.
	But I mean it's two sides of the same bum, isn't it?
	It is, yeah.
	Very economically left-wing.
	Well, all of French politics is left-wing, even the so-called far-right are basically socialists to my mind.
	Socialist nationalists, yeah.
	National socialists one might say, yeah.
	So before the 2nd of July deadline for the registration of candidates in this runoff election, 218 candidates dropped out.
	Now this is unusual.
	This doesn't normally happen in French elections.
	So 130 belonged to the new popular fronts and 82 belonged to Macron's faction.
	So, you know, that's the vast majority of them, right?
	And there seems to have been some sort of agreement behind the scenes to consolidate the left and centrist vote against the right.
	It seems like that's what's happened.
	They've agreed, they've looked at the data and the polling, and they've said, OK, well, we're not going to contest you and you won't contest us.
	So we can keep the right out, which is part of the reason why I think both of them were saying we need to keep the right out.
	And that's exactly what has happened.
	Actually, Despite being the favourites.
	The right have now come third in the election because of this method and this is perfectly legal.
	That's probably the most perverse aspect of French politics because you've actually had results like this in previous elections and it's something that I think really manipulates the will of the people in a very unfair way.
	I don't think you should be allowed to drop out for the second round personally because I think that puts too much power in the hands of elitists that are trying to manipulate election results.
	And I think that's something, you know, that's something that you're going to hear more and more now.
	What's her name?
	Le Pen has been very, you know, gracious about this and said this is just a setback.
	It's not a total defeat.
	She still did win the majority of MEPs.
	But I do think tactics like this only heighten national tension as opposed to decrease it.
	And you're going to see more extremist politics embedded in the system because they're thinking, what's the point?
	If our vote doesn't matter, then we're going to find other means to try and influence the actions of politicians.
	And I think that's really unhelpful.
	Well, that's exactly it.
	And it also undermines the sort of spirit of democracy, doesn't it?
	That if someone can fool around behind the scenes and alter the results of an election in quite a radical fashion, well, all of a sudden it doesn't feel like the decision is up to your ordinary working person who is turning out to vote.
	It feels like it's up to party machines It's farcical.
	How can you criticise other people's democracy?
	How can you criticise the Russians' democracy when this is what your democracy looks like?
	Exactly, yeah.
	To put it in the most kind way possible, it's sort of gerrymandering.
	But I think you're much more accurate by calling it sort of a perverse... Yeah, it's perverse.
	It's not in the spirit of the whole point of having a democracy.
	Yeah, it's disgusting.
	And they'll stop at absolutely nothing.
	I'm pretty sure they've done it before.
	Yeah, it's happened many times.
	In Germany, the other parties say, we'll create any kind of coalition we need to keep AFD out.
	In Holland, they're doing anything they possibly can to keep Geert Wilders out of being the head of government.
	Even the coalition that's formed in the Netherlands, one of the terms of there being a coalition of the right is that Wilders won't be prime minister.
	And in Britain they'll do the same thing.
	If we had a hung parliament next time and it was possible that reform could make some sort of coalition government, I bet everything I own the other parties would just rule out working with them.
	Because it boils down to ideology.
	They see them as the right, therefore evil, and they'll stop at nothing to keep them out.
	The whole point of a democracy is the battle of ideas, right?
	You can't blame, and this is where I think this is where a lot of the national discourse really kind of loses any sort of sense.
	If your argument is that people voting for the RN are horrible and racist and all of that, You need to beat them with better ideas.
	You need to treat their concerns like they matter.
	You need to validate the things that they're saying.
	You need to stop treating them like a bunch of cavemen with no sense in their brains.
	And then you can actually beat the toxic ideas that you don't want to be implemented in Parliament.
	But that's not what they're doing.
	They're not even bothering.
	They're just going to manipulate the election results and the will of the people in this way.
	And you're just going to make the problem worse.
	You're kicking the can down the road.
	If you have such a problem with Marine Le Pen's party, why are you not taking the French's concern on immigration seriously?
	Her policy, economically, is very left-wing.
	It's pretty socialist.
	They're handing out money that doesn't exist.
	France's debt-to-GDP ratio has been above 100% for well over two decades now.
	There are serious problems with the social and economic situation in France, and yet they're not arguing on those fronts.
	They're not saying, we understand you, we're going to make it better.
	We're saying, oh, you're horrible racist.
	So what?
	33% of the country are just racist overnight.
	Does that make sense to anyone?
	And it's like the same thing with people in Britain.
	Oh, suddenly 4 million people in the UK just happened to become racist, just like the millions in Spain and Poland and Belgium and Netherlands and Germany and France that suddenly became racist overnight.
	It doesn't make sense.
	Yeah, they've conflated sort of having a self-interest with being racist, haven't they?
	That's what it is now.
	It's become the boogeyman.
	What you've said there is sort of based on reason and these people aren't reasonable people, are they?
	Yeah.
	Again, they're sort of implacable.
	They'll stop at nothing.
	There's nothing too shameless for your average socialist or communist.
	Well there's that and also it's a boogeyman strategy that's eventually going to lose its potency.
	I mean I just got back from Ghana, I went for a few weeks to celebrate my mum's birthday and I think look at how people live and they're living because of actions of people that look like them.
	At some point, people are going to realise that actually, if I have decent infrastructure and good healthcare and housing and all of these things, and the worst thing I have to contest with is someone who doesn't like me because of the colour of my skin, I'm alright.
	I'm fine.
	Because there are people that are living in much worse states, perpetrated by politicians that look exactly like them.
	So people are going to get a sense of reality and contextualize, actually, the situation they're living in.
	And more and more people are going to end up lurching to the right, which is what has happened in Britain, not because they've suddenly discovered their racist great-grand-uncles inspired them again, but because it doesn't make sense and it's not how to actually conduct productive national discourse.
	Absolutely.
	So the PM also went to resign after these recent results which Macron has stopped and I thought this was quite interesting because it again feeds into this notion that Macron had a plan all along and this is clearly part of it and I don't necessarily know quite why he's stopping them but I think part of the reason is that the New Popular Front, because they
	Pretty much won the election in sort of quotation marks.
	No one actually won technically.
	Yeah, but they at least won enough that they can earn the right to pick the next Prime Minister.
	Perhaps it's Macron saying, hang on a minute, stay on for a little bit, otherwise they'll get their Prime Minister.
	That's my understanding, I don't know.
	Yeah, I suspect this is probably going to go on until after the Olympics actually, keeping the caretaker Prime Minister in place until some sort of agreement can be wrangled.
	I wouldn't even be surprised if they have another election, to be honest.
	That's not outside the realm of possibility.
	But the question is, what are people willing to give?
	And I think they're lying in bed with their worst enemy.
	I actually think Macron would have been a lame duck president regardless, but I think he would have been a lame duck president able to secure more compromises from Le Pen's side than from Mélenchon's side.
	And I think he's learning that the hard way.
	Yeah and I'm not a fan of the guy but I can at least acknowledge that he's got some while about him to have done this.
	It'll be very deliberate.
	Yeah.
	All that won't have been by accident.
	That you offer, you tender your resignation and I'll refuse to accept it.
	Yeah.
	It's obviously deliberate and just remember for anyone who doesn't know that the Prime Minister in France isn't the same as our Prime Minister.
	They're a republic like the United States so the head of government is the President Macron.
	Our head of government is the Prime Minister.
	Head of State is the King.
	So their Prime Minister is something like, people will probably pull me up on this for being not very accurate, but yeah it's something like the Leader of the Congress or something in America, something like that.
	Head of the Legislature.
	So it's not such a big deal as maybe it first seems when you hear Prime Minister.
	It's not as senior a position as it might be in other countries that are headed by a Prime Minister.
	But some of the projections, because we're still not entirely certain at the time of recording exactly what the numbers are, things are still coming out, we just have a sort of rough idea of what's going on.
	So this is the sort of spread of the seats, the potential of what people are going to get.
	So it does seem like the left have won by a small margin but it's certainly not resounding.
	You see this three-way split, don't you, between the different parties where you've got the three different factions and it's probably going to result in some form of political deadlock unless more underhanded things carry on.
	But I've seen lots of people commenting, and I've not been able to verify this yet, I've been looking online quite a lot, but I've seen people talking about it at least, saying that 9.3 million voted RN, the far right in quotation marks today.
	5.1 million voted NFP, the socialists today.
	People of France wanted a right-wing government to put France first, instead they're getting the opposite.
	Yes, if this is true, well, this further undermines the whole democratic mandate that they're meant to have in a democracy to govern.
	Because, of course, When the right-wing party gets almost double the votes of the left-wing party and the left-wing party wins, then what exactly are you voting for?
	It's a sophisticated manipulation.
	It is, yeah, exactly that.
	Have you seen people online, I've seen a lot of Twitter accounts being like, yeah, the left won, this is what happens when good versus beat evil or some rubbish like that.
	And I just think, wow, so you're suddenly an expert on French politics.
	Like a few months ago you were scared to define what a woman was.
	This is interesting.
	Such a broad area of expertise.
	I know both sides gloat when they get a win.
	But it does seem to me, obviously I'm biased.
	It does seem to me that left-wing gloating is particularly obnoxious.
	Sanctimonious.
	Yeah, sanctimonious.
	When it comes from sort of dysgenic freaks as well.
	It's just extra annoying.
	It's just rooted in ignorance, really.
	Oh yeah, Kate Starmer showed, you know, the Tories what's up.
	I mean, this man won a few votes in Jeremy Corbyn.
	On both occasions, I don't really see what's to gloat about.
	Yeah, well, it's frustrating as well that they use the language that seems like it's taken from George Lucas' Star Wars, like, oh, good versus evil.
	You know, the world's not like that, really, is it?
	It's a bit more complicated than that.
	Also, Leo Kearse of GB News, who also, of course, comes on this show quite a lot, is talking about a similar thing.
	saying that the far right actually won three million more votes and were only kept from power so he seemed to have found some sources here that have suggested the same thing but I still don't know yet.
	It's sort of all smoke and mirrors and I probably shouldn't even be sort of talking about it yet because we don't know for certain but I just thought it was interesting and it's something important to put people's attention towards because of course France is supposedly one of the leading Western powers, supposedly a democracy and
	You think it would be quite important to the geopolitics of the world if this sort of thing becomes commonplace and parties get a significant number of votes and don't win the election?
	It's a bit bizarre really.
	I don't know for how many years the French have to put up with their cities being set on fire at the drop of a hat.
	Before people vote someone in who says they'll do something about it.
	Look, I do think there's something to be said about elections not being decided on plurality strictly.
	I do think there's something quite admirable about the US model and the fact that it's based on the electoral college and that it gives states equal weighting.
	Because if that wasn't the case then Democrats would win every single time because they always win the popular vote.
	They've won the popular vote for the last four or five election cycles.
	So I do think there's something to be said about that.
	However, the way you design your electoral system has to, in a significant way, reflect the will of the people.
	I think this is too far.
	This is such a perverse way of being able to interpret and manipulate election results and effectively the will of the people that I think it's counterproductive.
	I also have a problem with the first-past-the-post system because I think there's nothing reflective about 4 million votes and 5 MPs versus 3 million votes and 72 MPs.
	I think that's taking the mickey and I think that also it doesn't really reflect on a national level anything of any significant importance because I don't see why your vote has to be tied to the constituency that you live in.
	I think that if you're living in a council flat in, I don't know, Wiltshire for instance, or in a council flat in Hampshire, I don't see why that makes a difference.
	You're still a British citizen, you're still paying taxes to the British state.
	It should have equal weighting.
	But I think this is just, what's happening in France is just ridiculous and it's incredibly frustrating.
	I couldn't put it better myself.
	And the people who have been empowered from Macron's dodgy dealings, I suppose we can call it, are people like this.
	This is the leader of French Antifa, Antifa of course known for leading the left in political violence, Raphael Arnaud, and he is classified as S, a threat to the French state by security services, and yet he is a member of the National Assembly.
	Which I think is absurd that this can be allowed to happen because he's part of a group that, by the way Antifa in Britain in 2004, there was a dawn raid in the UK and we just arrested them all.
	And now they're a political non-entity, you know, that we don't have Antifa really here.
	And it's funny how that works.
	That's why someone has to say they're not a fascist.
	Like, okay, we're not Japanese.
	Like, why does that need to be said?
	It's not, well, when everyone to the right of Joseph Stalin is a fascist then I suppose it means something.
	He looks like Sean Penn with downs.
	That's a good point!
	And a nose job, a slight nose job, yeah, you're right.
	But again, what a perverse thing that you've got, really a domestic terrorist essentially, that they can win a popular vote and that there's no law preventing them from actually then taking that seat.
	Odd, an odd thing.
	Strange.
	So we've also got the leader of the left-wing faction Planning to freeze food prices and give away 300 billion euros, which, by the way, putting price caps on things, freezing prices, doesn't work.
	It'd be interesting where they'd find it, that 300 billion.
	I'm just curious.
	There are a lot of sofa cushions in France to turn over to get all that money.
	Yeah, you only need to look at New York and rent caps to see that capping prices doesn't work.
	It's economically illiterate in my opinion and yeah it's just going to mean that there's going to be less food in France.
	That's what's going to happen because there's going to be no reason to send it there because it makes it less profitable if it's less profitable.
	I'm always curious by people that because obviously people like this would wouldn't have any sort of appeal if the general public knew the economic illiteracy of any sort of caps, like food caps and rent caps and all of that.
	I always question, is it the people are not, they don't know that it doesn't make sense and won't work Do they know and don't care?
	Do they think it's all a conspiracy?
	Because people talk about, like, people living in echo chambers and they just want to hear what they want to hear.
	But if someone said that, OK, you're poor, I'm just going to print more money and give it to you, I know that's economically illiterate because you haven't actually given me anything of value.
	You just printed more paper.
	I'm better off selling Luroll, right?
	But people like this, I think, actually, yes.
	Well, who hasn't?
	Why don't they just give away 300 billion euros worth of Free stuff.
	Why didn't anyone think of that?
	I just think, what is stopping the political elites from getting to these people?
	Are they just unappealing?
	Are they just kind of bought into the whole conspiracy of like, nonsensical?
	I don't understand it personally.
	Well, I think that there's two different layers here.
	From the left wing, these people who are quite far left, should I say, they're sort of true believers in their ideology.
	However, people that are ruling things, the elite, see these sorts of things as an opportunity.
	If you make the cost of living for your average person More and more, then it's easier to extract resources from them.
	And I think that a lot of economic policy in the modern day, in modern western democracies, is just about resource extraction to elites.
	And that's why there's all this big money in politics, is they're trying to rig the economy in their favour so that they can steal from ordinary working people, as I see it.
	Well, I think that's maybe what fuels the conspiracies.
	Most people think it's all about just taking more from them.
	So it's like if you're giving back to them, it's like, oh, there must be this magic tree where all this money is.
	That's where you're getting it from me and from the billionaires and tax the rich or eat the rich or I don't know what it is now.
	But actually, the economics of it is far more complicated.
	And it's like, that's not sexy.
	How do you run a campaign on like common sense economics or like actual basic economics?
	Well, Millet did it in Argentina.
	He's also mad.
	I mean, he's like, he's, he's like, he's right on most things, but you know, he looks like, he looks like he belongs in like, is it Ned Zeppelin or something?
	They're one of my favourite bands.
	Yeah, something like he's, he's like, he's a madman.
	Like, he's right, but he had to put on this kind of costume in a way to break through.
	Like, he's kind of a mad scientist.
	That's right.
	If he was a boring economist, no one would have listened to him.
	That's true, yeah.
	I think the psychology, particularly of left-leaning people, is just extremely short-sighted.
	Just, this is good for me, in the immediate, so do that thing.
	And yeah, the idea of fixing prices, always, always, always, without fail, ends in disaster.
	Without fail.
	It does not work.
	It cannot work.
	Because you're setting an upper limit.
	You're setting an upper cap, basically.
	There's no incentive to drive prices down.
	It's the state getting in the way of the markets.
	Um, in the most direct way.
	It just doesn't work.
	Mao tried it during the Great Leap Forward and just after the Great Leap Forward, it ended in famine.
	Going back to Justinian I, in the late Roman period, he tried price fixing and it ends in disaster every single time and yet you still get people like this guy, or Corbyn, Um, saying, let's do it, let's try it, and um... Well, it hasn't tried and it doesn't work, yeah.
	It's just so stupid.
	Real price caps haven't been tried.
	I think we don't talk about it in context of society, and who's losing out on what.
	If you, if the government says, okay, we're gonna price fix this, okay, the difference must be made somewhere.
	Are you happy?
	Like if they contextualise it as, OK, we're going to fix prices on, I don't know, parsley for the next year.
	But as a result, your grandmother's pension, the value of her real pension goes down by 20%.
	Are you happy with that?
	If you put it in the context of actual world winners and losers, that's when people would understand it better.
	But we don't really have that because our political discourse is not sophisticated enough for that.
	And you always have to have some sort of gimmick and like a tagline and all of that.
	You're like a performer.
	And I find that really frustrating.
	Loads of lefties, particularly young lefties, if you said, look, we'll give everyone a rebate.
	Everyone gets £4,000 back, but you'll have no army for the next 20 years.
	You can bet your bottom dollar a lot of young lefties will be like, I'll take the money.
	I don't care.
	It doesn't matter to me.
	Exactly.
	We're far enough from Russia.
	So I'm going to skip over these two links because I'm running a bit short on time, but despite the left winning, there for some reason were rights anyway.
	I mean, it is a national pastime in France at this point, so it is part of their culture.
	Well, and apparently Islamist as well.
	I don't know what just happened there.
	Oh, there we go.
	So yes, they're throwing Molotov cocktails, isthmus and antifa at French police in Nantes.
	Looks pretty fascist to me.
	It is, yeah.
	It's political violence and they're not even doing it for any particular reason.
	It's just like, we've won, so let's, you know, throw some Molotovs, which is not good for anyone, really.
	Not even the people doing it.
	And, uh, here, again, the far left, um, rioting.
	I'll see if I can play this.
	It is funny, though, isn't it, when, like, a... Sorry, play it, though.
	Oh.
	It's funny, though, when, uh, when you win something.
	Like, sometimes a sports team will win, and they riot.
	Yeah.
	I think the thing is that the Finns did that once.
	They won something, and still rioted over turning cars and stuff.
	Um, but yeah, because it's what they do.
	It's in their DNA.
	They've got, they've got...
	No other sort of form of expression really, and maybe flogging a bit of a dead horse to say this, but what an odd sort of bedfellows leftists, socialists, communists are, and Islamists, or Islam.
	It's the politics of convenience, isn't it?
	Because of course a proper communist, a real socialist, would be atheist.
	That's hard baked into that.
	Also the Islamic world has quite a good memory, and they'll remember fighting the Soviet Union, wouldn't they?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, well they remember battles in the 7th century.
	They still cry about them quite literally as well, that's not just being mean, quite literally cry about them.
	So yeah, if you'd asked me, or anyone really, even 15 years ago, maybe 20 years ago or before, in the future we're going to see some sort of melding between leftism, hard leftism, and Islam.
	No one would have believed you.
	They'd say, that's nonsense.
	Why would that happen?
	And yet here we are.
	I suppose they see that their mutual enemy is, I don't know, nationalism, like Western European nationalism or patriotism or something.
	I mean, they've been presented a gift in the form of Gaza.
	So that's something that's kind of united them in one way.
	But yeah, the kind of this uncomfortable, what I find uncomfortable, coalition between far-left extremists and Islamists in France is very strange.
	Because the kind of things that underpin Western democracies like equal rights, the rights of women, the rights of sexual minorities and all of that, they're as diametrically opposed as they come.
	But for stuff like this, there's somehow a community, like Macron, Not the rights of women and girls or sexual minorities or ethnic minorities in general.
	Macron is the enemy.
	That's what really matters.
	Toppling this man with his grandmother wife.
	It's the sort of cynical maxim of the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
	Not always.
	It's funny that the leftists think they will be able to control the Islamists.
	We'll use the Islamists as sort of our shock troops or something.
	And then when it really comes down to it, we'll be able to control them.
	No, you won't.
	They'll pay us homage.
	They'll owe us because we liberalise them or we free them.
	Yeah, it's very misguided.
	Here, I think, I can only presume this is an anti-Dutch hate crime because they're burning bicycles.
	I don't know why, I don't know what bicycles have done to them.
	Why is this necessary?
	I don't know, what are they achieving?
	And are these like you?
	They're just filled with resentment and hate, that's all it is, isn't it?
	Yeah, I think it's exactly that, isn't it?
	Because when I win something, I don't tend to go out and burn bicycles.
	I don't know about anyone else, if you want to do that, as long as it's your own bicycle, fair enough.
	Just don't burn other people's.
	Because of air pollution, like where is just up oil?
	Yeah, that's true.
	We should send them over there and say, go on, sort them out, and they'll get Molotov cocktailed.
	And then the final one, I just wanted to show you this.
	Here is the aftermath of their victory.
	So this is a good inkling as to how the country will look afterwards after all of this far-left political influence because of course this will become more common it's not like it will be punished because it's their faction doing it and if we've learned anything from you know 2020 America you don't punish the you know the rioters that are on your side that's a very counterproductive The argument is that the average citizen is losing out.
	I mean the amount of time and money and resources that has to be spent cleaning that up could actually be spent on like, I don't know, in the education system or in healthcare or in social security.
	It's a manifestation of Mental illness, basically, I think.
	Congregation of the mentally unwell.
	Yeah, well, that's left-wing politics personified there.
	But yes, obviously, things not looking good in France.
	It is probably not going to get better.
	It's probably going to get worse, even though the country resoundingly voted for the right.
	They got the left, which is the opposite of what they wanted.
	Macron obviously did some very elaborate positioning to make this happen.
	And yes, it seems like all of it was legal and they can get away with it and it's happened.
	So yes, not looking good, the other side of the English channel.
	All right.
	We have a comment here that I can't see.
	Oh, there it is.
	Oh no, never mind.
	I just can't read.
	Switch our eye of Sauron over to Labour and just start dunking on Labour for the next five years.
	Of course, the rationale of this, and I spoke to you earlier about this, is that The Tories are sort of, we've beaten them in a fight and they're sort of bleeding out in the corner and to be ignored, which is perhaps not the best analogy for the YouTube terms of service, but it is an analogy.
	It's not actual violence.
	You can only slay one dragon at a time really.
	Well, where reform were in the polls before this election, they were never going to be the government this time.
	So it was all about sending a message to the Tories and trying to sort of wound them as much as possible politically.
	Which has happened, so hopefully, as we say, if they're not actually dead...
	Metaphorically.
	Hopefully they are at least bleeding out and won't recover.
	Do not resuscitate.
	A non-resuscitation order on the Tory party.
	So now, Labour.
	So, let's talk about, you know, not much time has passed, so they haven't really had enough time, really.
	Quite often, we always talk about the first hundred days.
	That's almost a truism, almost a cliche, isn't it?
	What a government can or can't get done in the first hundred days.
	I forgot that from the Americans.
	It's been around for a long time.
	I think we've both just been saying it for years and years now.
	So quite often you'll see after the first hundred days there'll be headlines saying, what has Starmer done in his first hundred days?
	Like Blair famously had an amazing first hundred days.
	Brown had terrible first hundred days.
	Anyway, they haven't had very long but still we are beginning to see some of the things they're doing or rather failing to do right away.
	So let's start with foreign policy.
	We've now got David Lammy One of the dumbest adults I've sort of ever seen is now our Foreign Secretary.
	Famously went on Mastermind and didn't get a single question on his specialist topic.
	He chose the topic for the questions and still got none right.
	Knew nothing about contemporary history.
	And on his General Knowledge one, it was laughable.
	It was laughable.
	They were questions designed for little kids.
	On the Celebrity Mastermind, they're pretty easy questions.
	They're much, much easier than the normal Mastermind.
	Anyway, if anyone wants to see David Lammy attempting to go on, or was going on Celebrity Mastermind and attempting to answer the questions, it is laughable, some of the things he said.
	I would be worried for him if and when Trump becomes president because Trump doesn't forget anything.
	And having this man sitting there squirming under Trump's critical eye would be the... I mean I will work overtime that week just to enjoy that.
	There's also the case of David Lammy when he was saying I've not seen any police officers and there was one stood right behind him live.
	In shock.
	Over his shoulder yeah.
	Now he's really really dumb.
	We say this about all sorts of people.
	They're incompetent, they're stupid, they don't know what they're doing.
	This guy is genuinely stupid.
	Sometimes you meet an adult and you think, how have you not understood things?
	How do you not have sort of the baseline general knowledge that a child would have about certain things?
	But that's who he is.
	And so he's our Foreign Secretary, one of the top three or four Secretaries of State in our country.
	If any Americans don't know, it's the equivalent of the State Department.
	So Anthony Blinken is the guy.
	So he's the top diplomat.
	After the Prime Minister and perhaps the King, he's supposed to be the top, most important ambassador for the whole of Britain.
	And it's a pure embarrassment.
	I know it's not necessarily a very politically correct thing to bring up, but He is a black man who will be going to places like China and Saudi Arabia, who will not treat him equally to that of a white man.
	They'll ignore that, won't they?
	Yeah, it's one of the unfortunate things.
	True bigotry in other places in the world is allowed, isn't it?
	I mean, it's something that people get uncomfortable when I say it, but I always say like, you know, my family's been to China mainly for business, but on two separate occasions.
	And I just think I know, yes, they're racist in the UK, but let's contextualize it.
	The UK is one of the best.
	I mean, the UK and Canada are one of the best in terms of integration of people from different countries, depending on their values, of course, than any other country.
	In places like China and Russia, they don't even hide it.
	They don't care.
	And it's so in your face.
	And I always think...
	Someone like him, and I hope he doesn't have a negative experience because, of course, I don't wish that on anyone, but someone like that, if he did have a negative experience, would still come back to the UK and act like they're racist at his door, like they're trying to club it down.
	And I'm like, you can say that some things are good, like you can show appreciation, you can say something positive about the country that you're representing.
	It's OK from time to time.
	You can tell the truth once in a while.
	Particularly as a Foreign Secretary, as I say, you're sort of, well, you are the top ambassador, really.
	The top diplomat is what you are as the Foreign Secretary.
	All diplomacy is done through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
	So as the head of that department, that's what he is.
	He did play the race card almost immediately, within a day or 48 hours of becoming in government, started talking about race, needlessly.
	But anyway, so the first thing on foreign policy is The spectre of quote-unquote resetting ties with the EU, of course Labour and lots of people on that side of the aisle, that side of the equation, Didn't ever want to leave.
	They thought it was sort of a betrayal of almost the post-war consensus to even have a referendum.
	That David Cameron was insane for even putting it to the people.
	And the fact that he then lost, or the pro-EU types lost, they've never come to terms with it, have they?
	Absolutely never come to terms with it.
	You see it on, I hate to bring it up, on Twitter all the time, don't you, of people in their names, like, rejoin the EU.
	And it's so common, and it's bizarre that they're still clinging on to it.
	I mean up until a few years ago that was like Keir Starmer's reason for existing.
	Not even like trying to get a new referendum.
	Forget invalidating the last one, trying to get a new referendum so that we can rejoin the EU.
	They're like the Remainers' annoying cousins, the Rejoiners.
	And he had to shut up about that since Rejoiners, Remainers, if you remember Change UK, that sort of literally kind of traitorous party that went behind the government's back and tried to negotiate with Europe while we were still in the process of leaving, all that sort of thing.
	There's massive rejoin movements, mostly among, well I won't go down that route, but there is a call for it.
	So just before the election, Starmer did go on record and say something along the lines of, I don't see Britain rejoining sort of formally completely rejoining the EU in my lifetime or something like that he said sort of ruled it out but now sort of straight away they're sort of starting to make noises about it so you can just see there that it was uh we're going to reset tires Because there are many layers, many shades of grey to being quote-unquote in Europe.
	There's one thing to be a full member of the European Union and the European Parliament, but there's many layers, aren't there?
	Like the free movement zones, whether you're in the single currency, there's at least three or four different layers to it.
	And when you really peel the onion and look at it in detail, there's many more layers.
	So they want to, they're just saying, if you look at the other, the next link there, just the idea that they were saying now, the argument that the deal we finally brokered with Europe was sort of botched.
	It was a botched deal and we need to look at everything again and get it right this time.
	Basically meaning They're just going to draw us much, much closer to the EU.
	Now, whether that is actually completely rejoining it, I don't know.
	The noises, the things they're saying right now doesn't seem to be that that's where they're going.
	But if they were doing that, they're making the right steps to sort of set that up in a year or two or four or whatever.
	Which is ironic because there are loads of things that are hanging in the balance.
	One, if Trump becomes president, The UK-US trade deal will be at the top of the agenda, I assume.
	David Lammy would probably need to go into the White House with a bag over his head so Trump doesn't club him over the head.
	There are also questions about what EU are you trying to get a closer relationship with?
	The EU of now, it's not the EU of 2015-2016.
	The rise of far more right-of-center parties across the EU means that even their integration within the EU and the harmony and cooperation within the EU is far more fractured.
	So I think, again, these are the people that would never want to admit there was a point to Brexit.
	Whether you agree with it or not, if we had a much more frank conversation about it, about the EU and what it meant on a practical level about power distribution and accountability and economics and politics and the nature of the union and all of that.
	I don't think the discourse would have been so toxic that they now have to tiptoe around it and say, oh we just want a fresher, newer, closer relationship with the EU.
	Well, guess what?
	The EU that you're even thinking of rejoining, I don't even think will be here like 40, 50 years from now.
	Personally, I don't think this is a project that was destined to last.
	I've always had my reservations about it.
	I always thought it was too big.
	If you want a political union, fine, you can have some sort of kind of loose UN thing in Europe.
	If you want an economic union, you just need to have about seven or eight economies.
	You have all these smaller, less economically productive Balkan and Eastern European countries that have no business being in the EU and it's far more... Anyway, but that's That's what I always felt, even though I didn't swing on Brexit one way or another, but it's going to be interesting.
	How are you going to navigate that?
	How are you going to go to a Poland with a dominant right wing, not at the moment, but a dominant right wing presence within the EU?
	The EU as it exists now, or in the 21st century at least, is far removed From what it was originally in the post-war period what it was supposed to be.
	Ultimately the idea was to try and stop France and Germany from ever going to war with each other ever again.
	That's sort of the bottom bottom line, that's sort of the cornerstone of it all.
	And both Marine Le Pen and the AFD in Germany have said all sorts of things about leaving it.
	Now if either France or Germany left of the EU, either the entire project would fall apart or it would really become a completely different thing, a completely different beast at that point.
	So we'll see if that happens.
	What I suspect will happen though is the EU will make far more concessions, maybe make different layers of membership.
	It will fracture over the years, they will have to give states more autonomy and eventually it would start just looking like this kind of weak amalgamation of states That's having to navigate in this increasingly regionalist world where it's going to be more region to region as opposed to blocks, giant blocks that are very diverse.
	Yeah, their dream of having a single European army and things.
	Hopefully that's just dead in the water.
	Anyway, to carry on though here, other than the European side of things, David Lammy, the next link, it's actually his words, anyone can go and read that if they want to, it's just basically said, we're 100% behind NATO, NATO's a brilliant thing, we've got an ironclad responsibility to NATO, saying things, parroting exactly what the Pentagon and the US State Department want to hear, i.e.
	we're behind Ukraine 100% as long as it takes, So, in other words, no change when it comes to the grand strategy of foreign policy.
	Didn't he vote against Trident a few years ago?
	Yeah, don't talk about that anymore.
	Just checking, I heard a rumour.
	Now we're in government, we don't talk about it.
	Like, Keir Starmer as a younger man wanted to abolish the monarchy, but we won't say anything like that now.
	We'll shake the king's hand and take the power.
	That'd be a little bit awkward when he meets the king, wouldn't it?
	I'm sure the king was like, Yeah, I see you!
	You've come back!
	I know who you are!
	They always come back!
	Yeah, many have tried to get rid of our monarchy and only one has ever succeeded in that.
	So yeah, David is absolutely toeing the line.
	The chiefs over at the Pentagon and Blinken and Biden, or Biden's handlers, they'll all be very happy to hear the noise Islami is making.
	So yeah, the commitment to Ukraine is ironclad.
	But no word about the small boats, no word about mass migration in general, legal forms of mass migration, just no talk of...
	Of any of that.
	So again, just governing by omission.
	I mean, I thought the Home Secretary... I mean, yes, OK, it probably would be EU cooperation, wouldn't it?
	Because he's talking about, what is it, smashing the gangs?
	Because no one's thought of that.
	Right.
	No one's thought of smashing the gangs.
	You say the Home Office, yeah, I mean, really, I would put it under the remit of the Defence Secretary myself.
	Oh, yeah.
	Yeah, no, the Foreign Secretary would have some things to do if we're going to have to strike deals with... Yeah.
	with France as well as any other countries that we want to.
	But the funny thing is they don't even want to share the migrants amongst each other.
	This is interesting, how are you going to share, like when the EU itself doesn't even want to share the load of migrants, how are you going to share it with the UK?
	And then smashing the gangs, it sounds like you're taking them like to the red light district to have a weekend of fun.
	Yeah, you guys can get smashed.
	So moving on to energy, they have talked about, obviously the Labour Party are very green aren't they?
	More of these hideous onshore wind farms.
	Horrible aren't they?
	I think there are loads, when I went to Skegness, there were loads on the beachfront and I was like, they are actually hideous.
	They are an eyesore, no, absolutely, yeah.
	And I think there's all sorts of arguments to be made why they're not really all that efficient, because we're a relatively windy country, give that to us, you know, having giant solar panel farms, like it's OK if you're in Arizona or something.
	That'd be a waste of time here, wouldn't it?
	Yeah, it's going to be a waste of time here.
	But wind farms, maybe, but the onshore ones, people don't seem to care as much about the offshore ones because, obviously, you don't have to look at them all that often.
	But I think there are all sorts of arguments that they're not really efficient, in terms of money anyway, how much they cost to put up and all that sort of thing.
	Obviously let's just build half a dozen or three or four nuclear power stations.
	Yeah.
	Obviously.
	Samson says that after their life cycle they end up being buried in the Chinese desert and of course the amount of carbon that goes into making them doesn't offset the amount that they actually save.
	We spend a lot of money subsidizing them.
	They're hardly efficient.
	I mean, wind farms are one thing.
	Storing this renewable energy is something that no one wants to talk about.
	We haven't figured out a good and efficient way of storing this energy that we get from solar and wind.
	And for some reason, they just think, yeah, we'll generate the energy and then just like pass it on into the UK.
	We don't actually have an efficient way of storing this energy, which is why we like, well, anyway, I don't want to get into it, but I find it very infuriating.
	Even if they worked, I think the aesthetics are important, particularly in the British countryside, which is, you know, beautiful and shouldn't be spoiled with these disgusting things like this, yeah.
	It's not like we can have these in the city, is it?
	Because in America they have got sort of almost endless stretches of prairie and things that are completely empty, whereas we don't have that, we're quite a small island.
	You're only in the most central part of England, you're still only 70 odd miles from the coast at any given moment, so we're quite a small island to be fair.
	But yeah, so they think that the Tories trying to ban this was absurd, so they've just sort of done away with that.
	It was in their manifesto to sort of not do any more drilling in the North Sea.
	Suicidal, yeah.
	But not build any nuclear power stations.
	I mean, obviously there's the spectre of Chernobyl, and there's been other nuclear power station disasters, like the Three Mile Island disaster, and a handful of smaller ones as well, but it's pretty safe in the scheme of things.
	It's pretty damn safe.
	And we have the resources to do it.
	This is the argument around building nuclear power stations.
	We have the resources and we have the cooperation of the EU on that front and developed countries like Japan to do it.
	It's actually the most, well, upfront cost aside, a very efficient way of securing our energy infrastructure and grid, but they don't want to do it.
	And Britain's quite good at it.
	We were among the first in the 50s to build a working nuclear power station.
	And it's one of the things Britain does do well.
	They say we don't manufacture things anymore, which is kind of true, and we don't do all sorts of industries we used to have.
	But what we do do well is higher technology.
	When we choose to do it.
	When we choose to do it, right.
	So another thing, talk about housing.
	Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, another, arguably the second most important office of state, and another one of these people on the Labour front benches who is dumb.
	You know when you speak to someone, within a few minutes you get a feeling of whether they know what they're doing, whether they know what they're talking about, whether they've got any sort of base of knowledge or anything at all.
	And she's vacuous, she's stupid.
	I honestly think that there's only a couple of positions in government where you really need an expert.
	You really, really want someone that knows their business inside out and the Chancellor of the Exchequer is one of them.
	You want a competent Economist.
	Economist in that role and she's just simply not that.
	The thing is our politics in general doesn't attract the best and brightest because we don't pay them enough because somehow we think the people that are responsible for the well-being of 67 million people should be paid just as much as like I don't know a GP in 10 years and I'm like I'm sorry that's not how the job market works if you want the best people you like the Singaporeans pay the politicians bonuses for jobs well done and for hitting targets you have to have You have to be willing to invest in quality, right?
	If you were getting eye surgery and you found out your eye surgeon was on five pounds an hour, you would run out of there because he would stab your eye with a toothpick, right?
	I'm sorry, unfortunately, pay does matter.
	Someone like Rachel Reeves and all these people, the David Lamys, they're career politicians.
	They've been funneled up by an inefficient system and now they're responsible for, they hold very important seats of power and we're saying, oh, but how do these people get through?
	Yeah, because we don't recruit talent.
	We don't build our political system to recruit the best.
	Well David Lammy, Sky News outed him about a year or two ago that he takes all sorts of donations from people we don't know, to the tune of tens and tens of thousands of dollars.
	Well yeah, he uses us to pay his staff.
	The thing is there's also the idea of just public service for its own sake.
	Back in the pre-war, pre-World War II for example, or the 19th century, politicians were paid very very very little, but you were drawn to it by sort of the draw of power first and foremost, but also the idea that you were probably already Rich.
	It was already the reserve of affluent people and that you did it for the sake of public service.
	That's when we had honour in our politics.
	That's when we respected politicians.
	So both Rainer And Reeves are just talking about how they do plan, it seems like they really do mean, to start building lots and lots and lots of new houses, you know, to the tune of maybe a million, a million and a half houses, as quickly as they can.
	Obviously to be filled largely by So how's the million migrants they've let in over the last couple of years?
	This is an utter catastrophe for this country.
	Not only are they concreting over our countryside, which is enough to make me absolutely furious, but then they're doing it in the name of making our country worse by importing people that Have no right to be here.
	Don't share our values, largely.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I know.
	Yeah, it's a crime.
	An unbelievable crime.
	But they're laughing it up.
	They're having a good time.
	It's all fun and games.
	She's planning on improving house building permits on the Greenbelt, which is a bit strange.
	It's part of Labour's manifesto to protect our countryside and be environmentally friendly and all of that.
	What happens to our natural flood defences if you've approved house building across a lot of green sites in the country?
	Again, it's just that short-term thing, isn't it?
	What about farmland?
	Let's just build them, don't worry about anything else.
	Yeah, but what about farmland?
	We're increasingly dependent on food imports because we don't actually have enough farmland to feed our ever-growing population.
	These people are amateurs.
	This is sort of the Blair-era third string, fourth string people.
	Didn't she say she works at the Bank of England?
	I'm pretty sure she interned there for like a summer.
	I saw someone on Twitter, they did a list of the cabinet and their previous work experience.
	And lots of them, it just said none.
	In other words, their whole career had been as a politician.
	They'd never worked outside of it.
	And a good third of them, I think, maybe more, it just said none.
	And then a lot of the others were really, really entry-level stuff.
	Shadowing a minister and then working in the civil service for a few years.
	But the question is, why would the kinds of people we want in politics actually want to be in politics?
	Why would the business owners and the surgeons and the farmers and all of that, why would they want to enter politics?
	There's no honour, there's no dignity.
	It doesn't pay enough.
	It's a thankless task.
	Even if you do happen to get a seat and claw your way up to power, you have a civil service that's working tooth and nail against you.
	I mean, half of the failure of Brexit can be blamed on the civil service.
	So it's just a rotten system.
	Some people are just allured by the aphrodisiac of power, even if you don't really wield much.
	But you get your name inscribed in the history books, that you got to be the Foreign Secretary, you got to be the Prime Minister, along with the likes of Walpole and Peel and stuff, and Churchill.
	You know, for some people that's the allure.
	So before I wrap up this segment, because we're getting on for time, I would mention a couple of things I think might be good, or potentially be good.
	There's one, the Tata Steel, not that.
	There's one where they're re-looking at doing a deal perhaps with Tata Steel to try and save some of the steel industry, whether they really will or not.
	This is actually very very important because I would put this as a sort of national security concern because you want to be able to produce your own steel domestically because otherwise the main place you're going to get it from is China and say that there are increasing tensions with China you don't want all of a sudden the price of steel to Shoot up, because it's used in so many different things that are important to keep your country running and protect it as well.
	Yeah, so cut to the chase on that, although it might sound alarmist and maybe even absurd, but if we found ourselves in a total war with China, they can manufacture endless tanks and aeroplanes and we simply can't because we haven't got any steel.
	I mean, this is the one place where I agree with a lot of left-wing policy, which is we should have crucial industry in this country, like the Americans that have approved billions in funding for the semiconductor chip industry, because most of the most sophisticated ones come from Taiwan.
	And if China blockades Taiwan, then we're all screwed.
	I mean, I think that's something that we in the UK should be doing.
	I mean, we have something on a much smaller scale and like companies in Cambridge, but it's not enough.
	Steel is another thing.
	You don't need to be left-wing to believe that, though.
	I'm about as free market as it gets, but I have an exception for national defence.
	I just don't hear a lot of right-wingers saying it.
	I mean, they would say something like, yeah, we shouldn't have sold off our water companies or energy or whatever.
	Yes, that's fine, but it's more than just core infrastructure.
	It's also about the kinds of industries that keep everything ticking.
	And food is one of those.
	Don't destroy your precious farmland that's ever decreasing because you want to build more houses to let all these people that you've let into the country live in houses.
	Well we haven't learnt our lesson on that because the Americans were able to leverage our food insecurity in the British Isles in the two world wars to basically destroy the British Empire.
	That was the sticking point.
	That is our weakness as an island.
	And we've still not fixed it.
	And it's infuriating.
	Allowing your steel industry to be subverted or stolen from you, or allowing your own farmland to be annihilated.
	It's like, you know, let's poison all our own rivers.
	It's on that level.
	It's absolutely insane.
	That's already happened.
	Can I just say one last thing?
	The reason for this is because of illegal migrants.
	That's the only reason why.
	If you look into why a lot of migrants are coming from France and Belgium, it's because they have national IDs, like a national ID card system.
	And they tried introducing this back in 2014 when I was in uni because I remember I applied for one, fell through the floor.
	But that's the reason why.
	So anyone who's just listening, we're just looking at a BBC article there that says, Labour rejects Tony Blair's call for ID cards.
	If anyone doesn't remember, Tony Blair loved the idea of ID cards and tried to bring it in multiple times and was always just about thwarted.
	And obviously behind the scenes he's still very important.
	Sir Tony, who's a member of the Gata, still has got a lot of power behind the scenes and it seems like he's obviously tried to bend Starmer's ear, let's get this done now, you know, come on, look, let's get this done, and Starmer said no, which is a bit surprising because most people, a lot of people think, including Dr Nima Parvini, that whatever Blair wants, Blair gets.
	Well, Not always.
	I do largely agree with that view.
	I'm not having a dig at AA there.
	He's pretty much right.
	But just not always.
	He doesn't literally control everything Starmer does and says.
	Well, there's evidence of that.
	Which is a good thing, I think, because the ID card thing, we've already got all sorts of ID.
	For me anyway, my thoughts and feelings on it is that it's going down the route of just ever-increased surveillance from the state.
	That's all it seems to be for me.
	It's just a sort of Big Brother thing.
	The thing is, when you turn 17, you get automatically a provisional license shipped to your door.
	I think they should stop that.
	I think if you want a provisional license, you should pay for it.
	And I think you should, the main source of ID should be like a national ID card.
	And the reason why I say this is because there are over a million illegal immigrants estimated in the UK that are working in, you know, excuse me, like the Turkish barbers and the Thai nail shops.
	Yes, it would because it would also make the jobs of officials a lot easier.
	You go into places, random checkups, like you know how, you know, immigration police burst into like these like flats in London that have like 20 people living in them.
	How do you ascertain someone's identity?
	Just give me your national ID card.
	And I was always kind of sceptical on this because I was like, is this a surveillance tactic?
	You know, I was kind of, I agreed with you up until a point.
	But this summer, when I went to Ghana, I got my national ID card and you can't do anything without it.
	You can't open a bank account.
	You can't go to school.
	It's like your life, basically.
	It's more important than a passport.
	But I realised that actually it's a very good way to embed national preference, because just like you can't hear politicians say benefits, for instance, unemployment benefits or housing benefits should only go to British citizens.
	If you have some sort of easy, identifiable way to see who someone is, it cuts through a lot of the The waste we see in our public services and also makes the jobs of immigration officials a lot easier.
	You need to have a system to quickly and easily identify someone.
	The thing is though, I think a lot of illegal immigrants particularly are deliberately off the grid.
	So for example, you can see videos on Twitter.
	In this country based on dead people's identification.
	People that are technically dead but were never registered as dead.
	The abuse of the system in this country is so flagrant.
	I actually support this idea.
	Just on that point.
	I just feel it would be one more layer of bureaucracy that criminals ignore.
	I mean you have to phase it out and obviously the sophistication of it is important.
	And there are ways, like the IDs that we have already, like passports and... National insurance number, you get that when you're 16 don't you?
	But we already have so many of those, why not just consolidate them into one?
	Like if you already have a national ID number and a passport and a license, it should be easy for you to get your national ID card.
	If you're some random person working at like a nail shop, and I know you guys don't go to nail shops, obviously you're men!
	Not regularly!
	I swear to God, I have never, I have been to many nail shops and only, I've only met one person who speaks English fluently.
	The vast, vast, vast majority of them have not integrated, don't speak English.
	Many of them are illegal immigrants working for like three pounds an hour.
	I mean, it is, it is, it is shocking.
	And the whole thing is a front for money laundering and drug money.
	Turkish barbers, these American sweet shops you see in Oxford Street, I mean, they're all, That's what concerns me, how easy it is to slip into the underbelly of British society and just Make a mockery of the system.
	Yeah, you're right.
	You're right.
	I don't disagree with anything you say.
	I just wonder whether Mr Blair's cards will make any difference.
	But we've got to finish there because we're already getting on for time.
	Josh, you've got a whole other segment.
	I do indeed.
	But it's okay, audience.
	We are going to leave time for comments because I had prior approval from Samson to run on a little bit longer to make sure we don't miss anything.
	So I know we're bad at sticking to our time, but that's fine.
	But anyway, I wanted to talk about, now that the Conservative Party are out of office, what legacy they've left behind for the Labour Party to inherit.
	Obviously 14 years in power is a long time, and at certain points they had a large majority where they could effectively do whatever they wanted.
	And so what we've got to presume then is that the legacy they've left behind, the Britain that they have created, is what they wanted to create.
	And we're going to see some stories from the end times of the Conservative regime that epitomise, I think, The state that has been left behind, not the formal state, but the state of the country, is beyond parody, I think.
	And it's to the point where if you ran this as a satire, 30 years ago.
	No one would believe that these sorts of things would be going on.
	For example, this first story, Boy 12, is referred to Counter Extremist Prevent.
	They deal with Islamists, you know, actual potential terrorists, and they're talking to a 12-year-old boy.
	Well, they attempt to and fail to deal with this.
	Well, yes, that's because the political forces have basically said, oh, what about the far right?
	What about the far right?
	It's Islamophobic to target Islam even though a lot of the people referred to prevent are pensioners that are too old to even be terrorists.
	Funny, I can't remember the last time the far right blew up an Ariana Grande concert or a bus in London.
	No, I can't remember.
	Refresh my memory if you can recall.
	And also Nigel Farage should actually be thanked for basically obliterating the far far right in this country because the whole EDLs and the BNPs they basically vanished after I'm not saying like they've been banned from reforming UKIP and all of that but they basically when people had a legitimate way to voice their non-racist legitimate concerns about immigration and all of that these extremist parties just fell off the wagon.
	What's wrong with saying I'm gay, not queer?
	I don't even understand.
	I was a 12 year old boy gay.
	That was exactly what I thought.
	There's multi layers of absurdity to this story.
	First of all, a 12 year old kid is declaring that he's gay, which to my mind is a little bit young, isn't it?
	To know that sort of thing.
	It's a bit weird that it's even on the cards or discussed.
	You know, I didn't go around... I mean at 12 you're like just becoming sexually curious.
	Exactly, yeah.
	So I don't even understand how you can now say, yes, I'm definitely only attracted to men.
	I'm reading a little bit from the article just to clear it up and also sort of read the story in its own words.
	The child made a video posted online in which he also stated there's no such thing as non-binary, which probably is enough to refer him to prevent.
	And in response to school bullies who mistakenly believed he supported transgender ideology, which is again another interesting point that the school bullies are bullying on those lines.
	Well, you know, sometimes bullies don't get it wrong.
	He said, I'm gay not queer, and he clearly understands the distinction between that that the left has been making.
	What is it?
	What is the distinction?
	It actually explains it in the next line of this article.
	So, originally a homophobic slur, trans activists claim the word queer now describes people who don't adhere to ideas of sex or gender, which is what I've seen it be used as.
	So I think the Daily Mail has got that right.
	It's just weird and I don't think that you should be redefining words because it's weird and communistic in nature.
	But it says, but the school told the boy's mother they would refer him to prevent the home office program that attempts to stop people from becoming terrorists.
	Amid fears he could be at risk of being radicalised by the far right.
	I know politics changes quite rapidly, but I don't remember the part in the far right politics where they're just like, you know what we need more of?
	Gay 12 year olds.
	Well, there's that.
	Also, he's right.
	There's no such thing as non-binary.
	Yeah, it's not true.
	I mean, queer is a word that I didn't even know about five years ago.
	I thought queer was like... They're a bit strange.
	Yeah, I mean, odd, basically.
	Weird word to reclaim, isn't it?
	I find it strange that a 12-year-old is saying with such certainty that they're gay.
	I also find it even more bizarre that a grown adult feels the need to report a 12-year-old to prevent Everything in this story is weird to me.
	It's just bizarre.
	Yeah.
	It's just strange.
	Which is exactly why I've included it.
	I mean, it's disgusting really, because let's be painfully honest about it.
	If he's a boy and he's talking about being homosexual in some way, it all boils down to sodomy.
	Should a 12 year old boy come on?
	It's disgusting.
	But I think that going back to Rudyard Kipling's use of language, gay just meant happy and queer meant odd.
	And now we're quibbling over what a 12 year old boy I think the overarching point is why we... Exactly.
	We live in a degenerated age.
	I do think there's a valid point in asking what the young boy knows about sexuality in general, what he knows, what it means to be gay.
	I doubt he knows what he's talking about.
	If in like five, six years he's like, yeah, I'm definitely only sexually attracted to men and I want to do my business with them.
	Fine.
	I have no problem there.
	But I'm curious to even know what his understanding of it is.
	Probably almost nothing, I would have thought.
	And it's just... With an inmate.
	which there are many layers to this that infuriate me.
	So first of all, I feel like as with being in frontline roles in the military and frontline roles in the police, I feel like it should be men only.
	And then not just men, men who are, you know, over a certain height, can run a certain pace for a certain distance.
	You know, you want the most physically fit, most physically capable people in these roles in prisons, on frontline, in the police and in the military.
	You know, I got in trouble for saying that.
	Really?
	Seriously, I got called sexist and they were like, you think women should only be pen pushers and all of that.
	And I was like, have you seen the video of these two female police officers trying to hold down a man, just elbowed him and ran off.
	There's loads of videos of that.
	It was pathetic.
	And I was like, I mean, it's laughable to pretend like there's no difference between men and women and the kinds of jobs that we can do that involves some sort of physical force.
	I've interviewed a lot of police officers and there are some mixed responses from them.
	Some say, you know, I've known female police officers that are actually very good, but the majority of them have said I think they're worse than a waste of space.
	I think they're good for community relationships.
	So the thing is, if you have police officers outside of Wetherspoons on a Friday night, I've heard police officers say that there's something about having a female police officer that brings down the testosterone in the room and actually helps to have productive dialogue, insofar as you can have productive dialogue with a drunk person falling out of Wetherspoons.
	However, I think in situations where you're likely to make arrests or to have to hold people back, I don't really see why women need to be there.
	Absolutely.
	I've tweeted about that a number of times because there's lots and lots of clips from all over the world, from Australia and Germany, whatever, of a female cop.
	And I'm like about 5'10", I weigh maybe 160, something like that.
	I don't think I'm big enough and strong enough to be a cop on the beat like that.
	You want a big lump.
	You want a big six foot plus 200 pound dude who's under 35 or something.
	That's what you want.
	That's what you need.
	Me if I go to the gym more.
	Right, you want someone that is almost certainly going to win in a one-on-one with another desperate man who's trying to get away.
	That's what you need.
	That's what that role is.
	So to have a little 5 foot 5, 100 pound woman in her 50s or whatever, if you see it, it's crazy.
	Because there's lots and lots of roles for women in the police, just not that one.
	Yeah, I was talking to a few people in the Met Police and they were saying that A majority of the cases they go to are mental health related and actually women are more adept at that, being more predisposed to emotional intelligence and communication as you say.
	Loads of roles where they're better than a man at it, but not fighting in the street.
	Not front line stuff.
	The bit where we hear Bobby's on the beat, you don't need to be on the beat.
	But same with prison guards, right?
	And the fact that we have allowed this to happen, has allowed this situation.
	And the frustrating thing is, I've seen screenshots of the video, obviously I didn't seek it out, but... Don't look at me like that.
	I believe you.
	Sure.
	Actually, it was Rory who told me.
	It's not very good quality.
	Rory watched it and told me about it.
	It's like a flashback to Kim Kardashian's sex tape.
	I remember being super excited and I was like, was this filmed with a potato?
	What the hell is this?
	But the Ray J one, I mean, I don't know what you're talking about.
	But in the video, the prisoner has got like a TV, like a games console, guys smoking a joint, filming it.
	Yeah, there's some weird like Pakistani guys filming it as well and saying, yeah, this is what we get in our prisons.
	Yeah, I'd never want to see that voice again, by the way.
	I'm far too middle class.
	Drugs in prisons are obscene.
	So they have drugs, they have women, they have TVs, they have food that's paid for, shelter that's paid for.
	They've got a better life than me, basically.
	You know, the taxpayer is putting these people up to have a good time.
	Seriously, they have like a bell if you want like a prison.
	My dad knew someone who went to prison in this country and he used to call them all the time.
	He's like, are you growing corn there?
	Why are you so nonchalant?
	I was like, I get three square meals a day and like a roof over my head.
	This is great.
	Yeah, I want it to return to the sort of 19th century where we need to work them to the bone.
	Why not?
	You know?
	I think we need to take inspiration from other countries in terms of how we run our prisons.
	But as Samson has pre-empted, to quote one of my favourite comedians, although I am going to preface this by saying the man she had sex with was a convicted burglar serving four years, also admitted assaulting a police officer with intent to resist arrest, driving without a licence and driving without insurance,
	And he also at the time had a partner who was seven months pregnant and she actually had to be sent to hospital because of the shock of this being a national news story and he faces no further punishment for what he did and he's already living this lavish lifestyle in prison.
	Are you telling me at the time that he was sleeping with this OnlyFans prison officer he had a partner that was seven months pregnant?
	Yes.
	How long have you been in prison or was this a result of a conjugal visit?
	I presume he was only a recent admittant.
	But to quote one of my favourite comedians, Norm Macdonald, now this might strike some viewers as harsh, but I believe everyone involved in this story should have a bad day.
	Because I can't say that last word, but I do think it.
	Those details you just read out just paints a picture of an absolute scumbag of a human being, doesn't it?
	Oh yeah.
	I make judgments, I don't care.
	People say, who are you to judge on all sorts of things?
	No, I'll judge.
	Judge, yeah.
	No, no, I'll judge.
	Thank you very much.
	Oh no, not only will I judge, I'll be jury and executioner as well.
	But anyway, another thing that I thought was absurd was Glastonbury.
	I didn't go to Glastonbury because there were some bands I liked, but it wasn't worth the money.
	It's quite an expensive festival.
	I've never found... For me, Glastonbury is one of the most unappealing things.
	So unappealing.
	To be there around sweaty, smelly communists, dancing in the mud to mediocre, most of the time, music.
	Like, why?
	Don't I have... With no shower?
	Absolutely not.
	I like to go to music festivals with showers and normally it's quite obscure bands and it attracts a nice wholesome crowd.
	Exactly.
	Very bougie festivals, basically.
	I've been to Glastonbury three or even four times.
	When I was younger, in my teenage years, I thought it was great.
	The last time I went in my late twenties, I was like, why am I here?
	This is horrible.
	This is a horrible experience.
	It's been hijacked by champagne socialists from like Southern England.
	Yeah, it's just dirty and smelly and the bands, I don't, I've already, listening to the actual album version is much better than this.
	This is a horrible experience.
	You've got to go to a festival where the live bands are actually good live.
	That's a good start.
	The reason I'm talking about this is not to talk about music, it's to talk about the fact that Banksy did a bit of artwork showing migrants on a boat, and this was in the crowd in Glastonbury.
	And this alone is already absurd, and yeah, Banksy is a scumbag and I hate his guts.
	Anyone who tries to normalise graffiti in my books is like an aesthetic terrorist.
	And should be... They should have paint sprayed in their eyes or something.
	I don't know what the punishment should be.
	Wanksy more like.
	Wanksy?
	I'm sure someone's tried that.
	This is deeply insensitive.
	Yeah, it's really, really weird.
	It's sort of, again, for leftists, there's nothing that's too shameful.
	It's sadistic.
	I just think regardless of where you stand, There are hundreds, potentially thousands of people, nameless lives that have been lost in the channel, just in this industry.
	I don't really see the purpose of doing this.
	This is horrible.
	It's needless political messaging, but there's a bitter irony to this, and obviously the people who go to Glastonbury think a ticket's about £350-ish, I don't know, I haven't looked.
	Over my dead body.
	And you're also paying for transport, booze if you're a normal person and you know all of the food and tents, all of this stuff is going to be at least about £500 which you know you've got to be around the national average income or up to really go to this sort of thing and so one could imagine these are quite sheltered people that are isolated from the impact of importing lots of illegal people because they're not living in the areas where these people can afford to live that you know.
	The places where the government puts them up for free in these hotels and things, they live in nicer places than that.
	If nothing else, they're eco-warriors, right?
	You can go on holiday in Europe for like 350 quid.
	That's true.
	A nice weekend off.
	I'd rather go to Romania, which is lovely.
	This is the irony.
	Glastonbury is thrown into chaos as hundreds sneak in with fake wristbands for just £50 by vaulting the fence, forcing stages to shut due to overcrowding as fans panic in the crush.
	So you mean to say people broke into this bougie Glastonbury thing, this gated community, and they made the place worse despite not paying an equal amount and therefore there is overcrowding, competition for say resources.
	What are you saying?
	I don't know why they felt the need to build a wall around it, because I thought walls never work.
	Yeah, there's no such thing as, like, illegal entry.
	Teaching them that, yes, if more people break in and it's unfair, it's going to make it more difficult for you.
	Obviously.
	And yes, another thing that has annoyed me is the fact that they left all of this litter.
	So they're preaching all of these high-minded causes.
	Look at the absolute mess.
	It's disgusting.
	You know, we could learn a lot from the Japanese.
	Yeah, I agree.
	Whenever I leave a festival, I take everything with me, put it all in the bin.
	I even, you know, mix it into like glass and cans and things like that.
	And, you know, some years I've even taken down other people's tents and took them home to resell just to pay for my ticket.
	The amount of tents left behind, you're probably middle class if you buy a £150, £200 tent and just leave it there.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	You can't even be bothered to take it down even though it takes five minutes.
	A lot of these tents are relatively cheap because I am a great big nerd and know all about tents because I like camping.
	But yeah, it's still a waste of money and it's wasteful and it kind of annoys me.
	I was raised with the sort of, you know, my grandparents instilled the World War Two spirit of don't waste stuff and I still carry that.
	Exactly.
	So another thing that really infuriates me is the push for rewilding and lots of local councils and the Tory government encouraged people to rewild farmland despite the fact that, you know, anyone who's watched Clarkson's Farm knows that farming is very, very difficult and rewilding, you know, it ticks boxes if you're an eco-weirdo.
	But there is the fact that, as this says, we import roughly 40% of our food in the UK.
	We wouldn't have to do this if we produced enough food.
	Yeah.
	I know, sure, there are some things we can't produce here, you know, there are some climates that are favourable to things, so some luxury items could be imported, so there will always be some amount of import, but it's certainly not enough to self-sustain.
	We're not, you know, living to sustainable levels, and people that supposedly say we need to be sustainable don't seem to care about food security, and everyone needs to eat food.
	This is one of the most important ways to be sustainable, it's not happening, and The final thing I wanted to talk about is that Ed Sheeran in, uh, talking to Theo Von, which by the way, completely irrelevant, but Theo Von's real name is Fyodor Kaputini Von Konotowski the Third.
	The Third?!
	Which I think is one of the most decadent names ever.
	I like Theo Von, I think he's really funny, but I never knew his real name.
	Okay, that's interesting.
	I like also that he calls himself Theo Von, he's got respect for syllables, he doesn't want to waste anyone's time.
	But anyway, talking about wasting time, I need to get on with it.
	He was talking to Ed Sheeran, who, when he asked him what's the most dangerous place to be in London, and he says every area of London, literally every area, is sketchy.
	If we said that.
	Dun-dun-dun.
	It's not as well and it's not.
	No?
	You don't think so?
	No.
	No.
	I worked in and around Victoria and Pimlico and Whitehall.
	It's fine there.
	Mm-hmm.
	Yeah.
	I wonder why.
	I think...
	Increasingly, he's right.
	It's not like Mogadishu though, is it?
	It's not like it, but that being said, I think the reason what's making it dangerous, obviously the knife crime, but I think the bigger point is, and you do have this problem with increasingly urbanised areas, people don't know each other.
	People don't know who lives next door or three doors down.
	You have a socially fragmented area where you've crammed nine million people in.
	Who cares if they steal from you down the road?
	They don't even know if you're the grandmother or someone's brother.
	That social connection that actually He acts as a barrier against antisocial behaviour and eventually crime doesn't exist.
	So I see his point.
	Sometimes you go into areas like Knightsbridge and Chelsea and you literally see people communicating with each other, looking for someone with nice bags or a nice watch or whatever.
	I've seen people get mugged, their phones taken around Liverpool Street.
	I've literally seen the person run away.
	I moved here 14 years ago and I've noticed a huge difference.
	So I think increasingly he's right.
	Oh yeah, no, I mean, I was born and raised in and around London, been going to London since I was a small child, worked, went to uni there, worked there up until three years ago for my whole life.
	And it's way worse now than it was ten, fifteen years ago.
	Way, way, way, way worse, yeah.
	There are small pockets that are fine, and other pockets which are real, genuinely no-go area.
	Some estates in the East End, yeah, you would feel immediately unsafe.
	Anyway, our time is running out, isn't it?
	My point in bringing this up is, there are multiple different weird things about this.
	The first thing is, why is a multi-millionaire being asked about, well, what's the word on the street?
	Like, as if Ed Sheeran's out on the streets of London!
	Secondly, I agree, Beau, that not all parts of London are created equal.
	There are parts where I feel like, wow, this is really nice.
	But I'm a sort of, you know, I grew up
	on the edge of the city of Plymouth basically within stones throw of the countryside so all of London is a bit scary to me and weird because it's unfamiliar so I'm inclined to just say it's all sketchy even the nice bits because it's unfamiliar but um it's just interesting that Ed Sheeran is able to say this sort of thing if if you know a political commentator says you know actually I don't feel safe in London thinking of sort of John Cleese him saying England is no longer an English city he'll get raked over the coals for it yeah but
	I wonder if the anti-John Cleese crew will come out in force against Sheeran.
	I don't know.
	Or whether Sheeran will get a pass.
	Of course he will, obviously.
	My point being is that at the end of the Tory regime, it could be the last time they're ever in government, fingers crossed, everything has sort of become absurd.
	There's nothing that really makes sense anymore.
	Everything's been turned on its head and, you know, things are beyond parody.
	They ruined our civil society in all sorts of ways.
	The very fabric of our country was ruined by them.
	Absolutely.
	So, I believe we have some video comments.
	Don't worry, we are going to get through all the comments.
	With current discussions about whether to replace first-past-opposed voting, Mayer suggests a preferential system used in Australia.
	If one candidate receives more than 51% of the votes as the number one candidate, they win.
	If not, the last-placed candidate's number two preferences get distributed.
	This process continues until one gets the absolute majority.
	A closer look at the seats that Reform came second in, if Tory voters placed Reform as their second preference, Reform could have potentially picked up another dozen or so seats from Labor.
	Yeah, it's not a bad system.
	And they have compulsory voting, which is good.
	So you don't have Keir Starmer becoming Prime Minister.
	It's not a bad system.
	It's certainly better than I think what we've got now, but sometimes you do end up with the second place person winning.
	The example of that is when Ed Miliband beat David Miliband for the leadership of the Tory party, remember?
	Yeah, let's decide what these 67, 68 million people want.
	Yeah, let's decide what these 67, 68 million people want.
	I don't think that's right. - This is very relaxing.
	Yeah, that's what I was thinking.
	Who is this guy?
	He's an imposter?
	He is not Gandhi.
	Why is he here?
	What?
	He looked like Gandhi to me.
	Yeah, he did.
	Lithuania, okay.
	Yeah, why is there a statue to Gandhi in Lithuania?
	I know.
	Everyone knows, you know, famous colonizers of India, Lithuania.
	Mind you, the average Lithuanian is probably more historically literate than our politicians.
	That's true, yeah.
	Okay.
	I would like to recommend a YouTube video called The Dementia Team, Joe Biden A-Team parody.
	If you have a president who looks dazed and confused, and if you can afford them, maybe you can hire the dementia team.
	I enjoyed that.
	Is that it?
	I think it might have been cut off at the end there but I expected two more people.
	I'm an 80s kid so I loved the 18.
	I loved the 18 and the 18 theme.
	It's sort of deep down in my childhood memories is that so that was funny to me.
	I am a big believer in memeing your enemies.
	I think that it's good fun and also it is a good way of demonstrating That, you know, your point, in a fun way, and it doesn't really annoy people that much.
	Memes will save democracy.
	Or destroy it, who knows?
	So, some of the comments, the written comments.
	Awesome to see Esther back.
	Cannot wait for more Based Takes.
	That was from Russian Garbage Human.
	Oh, thank you.
	I like Russian Garbage Humans.
	Yeah, and didn't Russian garbage humans send us a massive box of goodies?
	Biscuits, yeah.
	So thanks for that.
	Yeah, you're a bit of a legend, aren't you?
	Biggy Bigfoot says, hope you're feeling better today, Josh.
	I'm on the mend slowly.
	Yes, it still hurts.
	I've been in pain.
	I can taste blood, but I'm doing okay.
	Keeping on a brave face.
	Wisdom teeth if you know.
	Yeah, he told me, yeah.
	He got an emergency appointment on the NHS.
	I know.
	I'm shocked.
	All of a sudden I support socialism for some reason.
	It's amazing what tooth pain can make you do.
	Bleach Demon says, always great to have Esther on, wish she was on weekly.
	Very hospitable audience today.
	And Bleach Demon says again, for my French election segment, the current atmosphere in France has echoes of the lead up to the revolution, terrifyingly so.
	The will of the people is being crushed under the weight of the new elite, the bureaucrat.
	That's very, very true, it seems.
	Warlord Wututai says you cannot ignore the will of the people forever.
	The harder they double down now, the worse the inevitable, inevitable backlash will be.
	Ice Wallow says, I would bet everything I own that David Lammy will make a racism accusation against Donald Trump.
	That, I believe, is for your segment, Bo, but I've read it anyway.
	Tank UK-US relations before they even begin.
	I did see Lammy, I think just before the election or maybe on the day of the election, say something about, no, of course Donald Trump is sort of okay.
	But that's something that he's sort of got to say.
	He's going to say it through gritted teeth.
	Absolutely, absolutely.
	But yeah, they're on opposite ends of the political spectrum, aren't they?
	So yeah, but that's where you go.
	Remember when Gordon Brown went to visit George Bush Jr?
	That was, that was weird.
	George Bush gave him like a leather jacket, like a flying leather jacket, like George Bush used to wear.
	Gordon Brown left it on the aeroplane.
	Really?
	Very deliberately left it on the aeroplane.
	That's funny.
	He deliberately left it.
	It's quite a nice gift really isn't it?
	I would have sold it!
	I'm not a fan of George Bush but you know I'd have had a jacket from him.
	Captain Charlie the Beagle says regarding the French election it baffles me that the conversation in the media over the elections is something to the effect of how come the far right are doing so well they never stop to think maybe our left-wing politics have gone too far It's usually the effect of Russian interference or am I out of touch?
	No, it's the electorate that are wrong.
	A good Simpson's reference there.
	It's only a matter of time before they step too far.
	I only hope they pull back beforehand.
	Hear, hear.
	Omar Awad says you'll never hear the words love has won said with more hate and vitriol than after a leftist victory.
	Which is very, very true.
	Derek Power says, once again, an election was commandeered and yet the far-right, this supposedly the chronic threat to our democracy.
	Je pleure pour la France.
	I weep for France.
	Furious Dan says it's fascinating how the boilerplate conservatives, the globalist liberals and the commies who hate both, all fall into lockstep against anyone who will enforce the borders.
	It's very true.
	It's almost like there's no meaningful difference between them.
	It's almost as if the ideological window is so narrow that they're more than happy to cooperate when they're performatively arguing when there are no external threats.
	Henry Ashman says, I just don't understand why the French elections have multiple rounds a week apart.
	The whole system seems designed to allow dodgy deals at halftime.
	Yes.
	Say that to the FA.
	Okay.
	Would you like to read some of your comments, Beau?
	If you wouldn't mind, go ahead.
	North FC Zoomer says, Esther is right on this one.
	Politicians should be paid extremely well, including a good pension for life, but they should never be allowed income from another source, can never hold another passport, and must have never known an ancestor born outside of the UK, all punishable by death and extradition agreements.
	He had me there until he didn't!
	The other thing is going to work for a company that you lobbied for during your time in office.
	That's a classic thing, is that they don't give you a bribe, but the deal is that when you're finished in politics, you get to spend it.
	But the average person only earns 25 grand.
	Yeah, that's an argument to raise, to make the country more productive so that people's salaries go up, not to depress the wages of some of the most important roles in the country.
	That's what I would say.
	But yeah, they should be paid a lot more.
	We should never see the Don Butlers of the world, former cleaners, advising us on economic policy.
	I'm sorry.
	That is a nonsense!
	So, Thane Scotty of Swindon, my favourite response to We Need a Second Referendum is to ask if Remainers would be bound by the result of that referendum.
	And when they say yes, they would.
	I point out that the 2016 referendum was the second referendum, the first was on the 5th of June 1975.
	It's true.
	That is very good.
	It's like the Scottish Independent one though, they lose it and then immediately, pretty much immediately saying, well we want another one.
	Yeah, doesn't work that way.
	I want a referendum on Scotland.
	Ruins the whole point of it.
	Give the English a referendum on Scotland.
	Do we want them in the Union?
	Get a shot of them.
	Should we do a collode and scorched earth policy on them?
	Solve the question once and for all.
	I say this but I would vote for them to remain in the union.
	Only just.
	If we sorted out the tax system I'd allow it, but until then they're stealing my tax money via the government.
	We definitely need to reform devolution.
	It's 25 years since September, devolution terms, and we have a habit of not reviewing major policy in this country.
	Our drug policies haven't been reviewed for like 50 years.
	This is something that needs to be reviewed.
	You need to strip a lot of these devolved powers of significant powers, like setting your taxes and all that nonsense.
	I think Covid was a big eye-opener.
	There was no reason why the Welsh and Scottish assemblies basically bankrupted their local economies and expected Westminster to pick up the tab.
	That's not in the spirit of a good union, I think.
	I would undo every single thing that Blair did in terms of devolution.
	I would roll us back to before he did anything.
	1996.
	It's fine.
	The year of my birth.
	It was a good year.
	It was great.
	So, based biology teacher says, great to see more Bo, who has been a mighty candidate for reform.
	Will he run in 2029?
	Um, I suspect Tyaj, uh, Tyaj, that Tyas and Nyaj, uh, that Tyaj, I suspect the single entity that is Tyaj, hates my guts.
	Do they?
	I suspect so, yeah.
	Why?
	My views are far too extreme.
	It's a far-right fantasy.
	I'm a far-right fantasist, according to... By repeating, repeating reform policy in an article.
	Yeah, so I don't think they want me.
	If they did, if I was allowed to say what I really thought, and they want me, then I would.
	But I suspect, I don't think Nyad really wants anything to do with Lotus Eaters at all, I suspect.
	We'll see how that goes, but...
	Even Rishi Sunak acknowledged we exist.
	That's something.
	Because their policy is a net zero migration.
	And mine was to call for a programme of mass re-migration.
	And that's just far too extreme for them.
	What would you mean by re-migration?
	Like the Brits that are living abroad to come back?
	Yeah, there are loads of people in this country that hear illegals like that.
	You can't make jokes like that.
	Julia Hartley-Burrow literally made the same joke on her show.
	She was like, if the English should get a vote on Scotland, tell them to F off!
	So she literally said the same thing on her show, listened to by hundreds of thousands of people.
	So I find that weird.
	Yeah, no, they just, if they wanted me to, I would do it, but they won't want me to.
	Yeah.
	There you go.
	I also think that they're going to be gatekeeping heavily after the media attention because they sort of buckled to the mainstream and the left.
	They went a bit more multi-culti and I'm not multi-culti.
	Yeah, I'm not really their boy.
	Bleach Demon says, don't feel too bad about having Lammy as Foreign Secretary.
	In the US they had Hillary Clinton, almost as if the diplomatic corps constantly proves McCarthy right.
	That's true.
	Hillary Clinton was a bit more tolerable.
	I don't know, maybe because I've listened to David Lammy on LBC, so I already have a more in-depth understanding of him, and I'm like, McCarthy did nothing wrong.
	That's true.
	I was going to say that exact thing.
	JGHW says Blair looks more and more like Gollum every day.
	Don't insult Gollum like that.
	I mean, the analogy that ultimate power corrupts, was it absolute power corrupts?
	Absolutely.
	I mean, just look at Tony.
	But it's been wearing the ring of power for too long, it's now visible.
	Colin Pease says, we didn't get a good deal with the EU because both the EU negotiators and too many traitorous politicians in this country had no intention of negotiating in good faith.
	They were actively working to undermine the UK and Brexit and in fact the person that Theresa May appointed to do the Brexit negotiations was a Remainer and deliberately stated that they were working to undermine it.
	So we have definitive proof of that.
	So, for the UK is Beyond Parody.
	JGHW says, if you want a steel industry then you need cheap energy, which is true.
	Yes, the North Sea, we've got it right on Scotland's doorstep.
	So actually, you know, I've changed my mind about getting rid of Scotland.
	You can stay!
	I just want your oil.
	I'm just like a more honest George Bush.
	That Texas gal says, I'm a big gal, thrown hay bales around my whole life and spent a good decade bodybuilding.
	I can't even beat my 12-year-old son play fighting.
	Men are definitely built different.
	Yeah.
	Well, clearly you're feeding your 12-year-old son well as well.
	So well done all round.
	Warlord Wooterguy says, Bow spitting facts.
	There we go.
	That's how I roll.
	No sewage expansion, no new water reservoirs.
	Ewan Baker says no sewage expansion, no new water reservoirs.
	I don't get that reference.
	Oh, no new sewage expansion, no new water reservoirs because water companies have been asking for new reservoirs because we haven't got a new water reservoir, I think, since the late 1980s.
	So that's not very practical because we need somewhere to store water.
	New sewage expansion.
	I mean, they just need to stop dumping sewage into our water bodies.
	That'd be quite nice.
	It would be nice, yeah.
	And the need for additional reservoirs also comes from the fact that we're artificially growing our population, which seems a bit bizarre.
	And we're wasting water.
	The infrastructure that we have right now is actually wasting water.
	I think it was like 30 size Olympic pools a day.
	Many of the pipes are still Victorian, which is absurd to me.
	A testament to the Victorians, but unfortunately they have to modernise at some point.
	When I look to my water bill, I do wonder where the money is going.
	Straight to the shareholders, I imagine.
	Thane Scotty of Swindon says, To be fair, having worked in the police, female officers are perfectly competent, provided they can meet the requirements.
	Unfortunately, our general standards are going down, including with male officers.
	Female officers aren't the problem.
	Reduced standards across the board, combined with an ideological drive to hire more women, Are bringing incompetent people to the front and centre.
	And to be fair, I've heard a similar argument a few times before from other current and former police officers.
	So I think that seems to be quite common amongst people who've worked in the police.
	Omar Awad says the problem with political pay incentives is that greed is limitless.
	The only real way to keep politicians in line is accountability by force if necessary.
	I don't know what form that would take.
	Yeah, it's still a job, it's still a job, and you can't force employees to do a good job, you just have decent employees leaving, so it's about incentives as well.
	Yeah, and finally, Norfans Night, I remember Blair pushing for ID cards in the early 2000s, I think it was 2005 wasn't it, after the 2005 election, and was sceptical back then, even though I'd been foolish enough to vote for him in the first place.
	Yes, well, at least you won't make that mistake again.
	I don't think it was foolish.
	I think it was, well, it certainly wasn't great.
	But if you voted for Cameron, you basically voted for Blair.
	So don't feel too bad about it.
	That's true.
	Yeah, they're basically Blair in different forms.
	But anyway, I think we've run out of time.
	In fact, we've gone over by 14 minutes.
	So hopefully You feel satiated with all the comments we've read.
	I know we get told off.
	We're trying to do better.
	But thank you very much for watching.
	Thank you very much, Esther, for coming down.
	Thank you for having me.
	And it's been a lot of fun.
	And thank you very much for watching.

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