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Jan. 15, 2025 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

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The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1079

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	Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters, episode 1079. Blimey, we're getting old around here.
	It is the 8th of January 2025. Happy New Year, folks.
	My first appearance back, I believe, if I remember correctly.
	No, wait, we did one a little while ago.
	Anyway.
	What?
	I'm stupid.
	It's the 15th, isn't it, today?
	It is the 15th, yes.
	15th, wow.
	Don't ask me.
	Callum all of a sudden asking what the date...
	Actually, he never bothered with the date.
	Fair point.
	Anyway, my name's Connor.
	I remembered that bit.
	I'm with Harry, and today we are joined by our guest, William Clouston, head of the Social Democrat Party.
	Thank you very much.
	Well, if people aren't aware of your party, your positions, etc., do you mind giving an elevator pitch to them?
	Yeah, I hate doing elevator pitches, but...
	You're welcome.
	But, yeah, the STP is basically, historically, is an offshoot of the Labour Party.
	Trace it back to 1981. But our brand of politics is a red-blue brand.
	We are sort of leaning left on economics and on culture.
	We're culturally traditional.
	So that's the gap we fill in British politics, red and blue.
	State and nation, faith, flag and family.
	Isn't that the phrase that reform, let's say, liberally appropriated during the election?
	Yeah, I can't...
	Connor, I can't do anything about these things, really, if a party like Reform.
	So yeah, Family Community Nation is our strapline, if you like.
	We've been using that for five years, and then suddenly Reform come along, and I think it was their conference.
	It was literally out in the election.
	I thought, hold on, I've seen that somewhere before.
	And actually, the choice for me at the time, I mean, a lot of members, STP members, were annoyed about that, because it is, I mean, they did pinch it.
	Unless just by, in all the slogans in the entire world, that just dropped after us hammering it for five years.
	And they know us, and we had an electoral pact with them, so they're fully aware of it.
	And I did mention it to a few of them privately, and there was a wry smile.
	They did change nation into country, at least.
	But I can't do anything about that.
	Maybe it's the best form of flattery.
	Yeah, it's good.
	We're all singing from the same hymn sheet, and we'll be discussing that today.
	Because we're going to be talking about Labour's...
	Third world corruption scandal, whether or not woke has been put away, and reforms critical friends, because there's a bit of consternation over there and we can talk about marginal party politics.
	But before we jump into today's news items, I will remind people that today is Wednesday.
	Good, I remember that one.
	At three o'clock, it's going to be Thomson Talks as per usual.
	I'm going to keep the coverage going on the grooming gang scandal because the cover-up is perpetual by Labour politicians, local councillors, members of the police, and so we're going to go through a lot of case studies, some of the recent reporting that's come out, and the vote that happened last Wednesday for a national inquiry.
	Random question.
	STP position on the national inquiry?
	Yes or no?
	Yes, but I don't think...
	I mean, it would be helpful if it was quick.
	I don't think...
	Enriching lawyers for several years is going to help anything.
	I think we already know.
	I think what we need is to have what we already know and the data in particular on the crime are published, quantified and published rapidly.
	And then, you know, the police and the local authorities and the rest of the political establishment need to...
	To do something about this.
	Yes, and the people that helped cover it up should fail jail times.
	We should definitely get some of the names on there.
	William's stuff as well is in the description, so you can find him on X. And I recommend you go and watch for a full rundown of the SDP that you might not also get in our news items here.
	An interview he just did with Peter McCormack, who's a good friend and sort of like Britain's Joe Rogan at this point.
	It's very good stuff.
	But, all of the introductions finally out of the way.
	Let's talk about Labour's brand new third world corruption scandal.
	Now, if you are outside of the UK and aren't permanently plugged into our news cycle, like we three are, you might not be familiar with this name.
	Well, unless you live in Bangladesh.
	And that is Tulip Sadiq.
	Now, Tulip Sadiq was the shadow education treasury minister when Labour were in opposition since 2016. She was elected in 2014. She's now the member for the new constituency of Hampstead and Highgate, but she's been around for...
	Ages.
	And she's been the Treasury Secretary since the election on the 9th of July.
	Until yesterday.
	This is important.
	She was Keir Starmer's close personal friend.
	She was also his anti-corruption minister.
	And she's resigned.
	For a corruption probe.
	Don't you just love politics in this country?
	It's going so well for Labour at the moment, isn't it?
	I bet you're thinking, yeah, the fact that we split from them quite a while ago.
	Oh, a long time ago.
	Yeah, it's long gone.
	So a bit of background on what the Corruption Probe actually is.
	So it's related to the fact that her aunt, so she's the niece, of Sheikh Hasina.
	And Sheikh Hasina, until last year, was the longest-serving female head of state and the longest-serving prime minister in Bangladesh.
	And she was the leader of something called the Awami League, which was the ruling party at the time.
	And they were...
	Basically an unbroken chain of rulers since 1971 when they had their war for independence.
	And Josh actually covered this a little while ago in a segment on the website about the revolution happening in Bangladesh.
	So what ended up happening was Hasina's dad was the first PM of Bangladesh after independence.
	And then they played...
	Ethnic familial clientele politics by allotting about 5% of all government jobs to families of the people that fought for the War of Independence.
	They then also allotted at least 2% for DEI work, like transgender people and racial minorities and all that.
	So they were a kind of secular, UN-aligned government that tried to keep...
	The Islamic and the Hindu minority factions under control.
	And after the Supreme Court ruled that that was going to be the portion, there were a bunch of student riots that then turned into Islamic riots.
	They burned down Hindu temples and chained Hindu women to fence posts and things like that.
	And so Hasina, when they started gathering outside the Prime Minister's quarters, fled on a helicopter to India and has been in hiding ever since.
	So there were allegations that her government were despotic and that they locked up certain political dissidents.
	So she wasn't the most...
	Cuddly and cosy lover of human rights leader, which is a bit inconvenient when you've got a senior member of the Labour Party who's also related to her and seems particularly concerned about Bangladeshi politics back in her family's country.
	So, the corruption probe, specifically on Sadiq's case, there were officials over at the ACC, which is now the ruling party in Bangladesh.
	Apparently, Hasina had allotted plots of land in 2022. In collaboration with senior officials of the, and this is going to be very difficult for me to pronounce, Rajhani Uniyan Khartipaka, so Rajuk, thank you, which is the Capital Development Authority in Bangladesh.
	So Rajuk is apparently responsible for urban planning and development in the Dhaka metropolitan area.
	And so she was giving, let's say, preferential treatment to her political allies for development in the area.
	And this was to do with Tulip Sadiq.
	And there's also another claim about £4 billion of embezzlement for Sheikh Hasina.
	It just comes with all the territory, doesn't it?
	A lot of money.
	Yeah, not exactly pocket change to find down the back of the sofa.
	What you're telling me is the third world government was corrupt.
	I know, knock you down with a feather.
	Yeah, I'm shocked.
	Are you now going to begin advocating that we should bring that sort of corruption here?
	Well, it looks like it might possibly already be.
	Well, I mean, that's what our government has already been doing for a long time.
	Well, quite.
	So Sadiq has...
	Denied all wrongdoing, and she said that her ownership of properties possibly may be linked to her very corrupt and despotic arm.
	Any suggestion is categorically wrong.
	It's like all of those houses that Angela Rayner owns.
	A little bit different.
	On reading it, the odd thing about this is her puzzlement or equivocation about who gave her a particular flat in London, who donated it, because apparently someone just gave her a flat as a gift.
	Yeah, it's a gift.
	And part of the inquiry, the recent inquiry, and the cause of the trouble now, the proximate cause, is that there was a lack of clarity about her account of who gave her that flat.
	Was it her mother?
	Was it a family member?
	Was it a property developer in Bangladesh?
	Which apparently it turns out to be.
	But the odd thing is that you can't...
	Like a salient person isn't really equivocal about this stuff, you know.
	I mean, fair enough, you know, if it's Christmas and you've got a chocolate orange, six months later, say, yeah, who gave you the chocolate?
	I'm not really sure.
	It's really nice.
	But, you know, a flat that you live in, you ought to know who gave it to you.
	So that's the problem.
	And then the inquiry that we just had and is published, the civil servant had a look at it.
	The wording is very interesting because there's no evidence.
	But abstinence of evidence of corruption isn't...
	There's no evidence there was no corruption at all, so you don't know.
	He said that.
	But I think the reason she's gone is that it just looks terrible, absolutely terrible.
	And to be the person in the government that's responsible for corruption, but getting embroiled into that is a problem.
	But you know, Conor, I think the worst thing about this general issue is, and I'm talking general, I'm not talking about this case, that the appalling thing about this is that there are kleptocracies all over the third world, all over the world.
	And in this particular case, you're talking about £4 billion.
	These are very, very poor countries in many cases, right?
	And the leaders basically steal, a lot of them steal from these countries.
	And then they'll end up in the Francophone world.
	They end up in Paris.
	And Paris does very well out of it in the Lucifer world.
	They end up in Lisbon and Porto, eating in expensive restaurants, having skinned these countries.
	And in London...
	London's full of these people.
	We do nothing about it.
	We don't care.
	But remember that poor people in these countries are being ripped off, basically, by this.
	And I think it's appalling.
	Well, it's also the fact that we allow wealthy foreign nationals just to buy up loads of our property.
	So it becomes an incentive to launder money that you might have gotten through ill-gotten means in different countries who have unilaterally liberal I mean, this...
	Her arm was putting in place a regime where the families of the people that fought for independence were guaranteed government jobs despite their competency.
	Yes, and we saw that, and that was the origin of the riots, and then a lot of people lost their lives, quite rightly, objecting to that, because why should that be the case?
	It's crazy.
	But just on a broader point, we tolerate it because we want the money, basically, but it's rotten, absolutely rotten to the core.
	And anyone that thinks, this is one of the things that, you know...
	Progressive liberals don't really get and don't want to believe, but it happens to be true on the evidence, is that most of these countries around the world are pretty corrupt.
	Get a Transparency International, have a look at the Corruption Index, and have a look at the extent of corruption.
	It's normalized.
	There are probably only about 40 countries out of the 180, 190 that have reasonable levels of non-corruption.
	And there's a league table, there's a hierarchy.
	But Bangladesh is one of the most corrupt countries in the world.
	Yeah, and it's excellent that we're sourcing lots of immigration there, and I can't possibly think of any drawbacks of allowing someone who has direct familial interest in the politics of that country up in the highest echelons of our government, as we can see.
	So a couple of details on the flat, and also to answer your question, Harry, about whether or not it's...
	Well...
	Is it confirmed or is it a bit like Angela Rayner's place?
	There's a link to the Labour Party coming up.
	So the flat in question, she got it in King's Cross in 2004. You know, prime bit of London real estate.
	And the filings indicate the donor was a man named Abdul Muttalif, who's a property developer, linked to her aunt.
	And, well, despite them saying there's absolutely no suggestion that she could have got this through ill-gotten means because of her aunt's influence...
	After the Prime Minister's residence was sacked by the protesters when she left.
	It's funny, because apparently the Times is reporting that there were Labour flyers and a thank you letter for helping Sadiq get elected, found in the ransacked house.
	So there was...
	Do you think that's...
	Do you think...
	I mean, I saw that, but do you think that's surprising?
	I mean, they are a family, right?
	So her aunt would want her elected.
	Naturally, she'd want her elected.
	Yes.
	Yeah, I mean, I saw that.
	So the idea that there is absolutely no transmission between the British Labour Party and the regime in Bangladesh, as you said, evidence of...
	Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.
	There's clearly a suggestion of a permeable barrier here, to say the least.
	So the idea that she's going, well, we had absolutely no idea and there's nothing untoward to see here.
	Yeah, and the other thing that was interesting is the rather...
	Let's say embarrassing for the Labour Party photograph of Tulip Sadiq over with Putin and her aunt.
	Do you see that photo?
	No, I don't.
	It's out there, you know, if you look for it, yeah.
	So it's there, you know, so I was invited along.
	Nothing to see here.
	Nothing much to see here.
	Yeah, as much as she wants to then say that she's done nothing wrong.
	Not connected, yeah.
	Yeah, literally the next day she's resigned.
	She referred herself to Solori Magnus, who's the...
	Keir Starmer's ethics advisor.
	I didn't realise he had one.
	He might want to get a new one because he's not exactly doing very well at the moment.
	And then she wrote a letter to Starmer yesterday saying that he should reconsider her ongoing responsibilities even though he didn't believe the ministerial code had been breached.
	So even though he didn't hold her up on an actual ethics complaint he was still saying something looks a bit squirrelly here.
	Not a good look to have an anti-corruption minister being investigated for corruption.
	And so she's now resigned, saying that it's likely to be a distraction from the work of the government.
	Right, so the problem is not that you might have done something wrong.
	The problem is that the headlines about you possibly doing something wrong is going to distract from all of the other errors that the Labour Party is making.
	Which is true as well.
	I mean, they don't want that.
	And it's just very, very unfortunate that the government's person in charge of...
	Corruption is sort of linked in some way to other corruption inquiries in other jurisdictions.
	Yeah.
	And then...
	Okay.
	So as you said, is it a good idea to import this very familial, nepotistic politics over?
	It turns out the government's doing that anyway because her replacement's been announced, right?
	And I saw this in the Telegraph.
	I'm just going to have to read from it.
	So she'll be replaced as Economic Secretary to the Treasury by Emma Reynolds.
	And Emma Reynolds was work and pensions minister, so she's going to be succeeded by Torsten Bell, who ran the Resolution Foundation before coming an MP, and who is the twin brother of a guy called Olaf Herrickson Bell, who's a career civil servant who recently became the head of the number 10 policy unit.
	So they're literally just appointing each other's family members from permanent civil servants.
	Like, it's a big club.
	None of us will ever be in it, it turns out.
	And then there's the question of, okay, just how...
	Third world of politics are we going to get here?
	Because a little while ago, she was questioned about her untoward links with her aunt's regime, because one of the people that her aunt was supposedly imprisoning under spurious means was a British-trained barrister called Ahmad bin Qasem, good British name, and he was imprisoned by Sadiq's aunt for eight years and was only freed after she was chucked out.
	And Sadiq was questioned by Channel 4 in 2017, one of the few times that Channel 4 has ever done anything sensible.
	When she was campaigning for the release of Nazarene Zaghari Radcliffe, the woman that was imprisoned in the Iranian regime, I think she used to work for Reuters, and then Boris Johnson and Liz Truss got her out, and she was asked, well, why don't you just make one phone call to your aunt to release this guy?
	And we've got video footage of what she said here, but she turned around to the journalist in question, who was pregnant at the time, and said, you want to be very careful.
	I'm British Member of Parliament.
	I'm not Bangladeshi.
	And the person you were talking about, I have no idea about their case.
	And then she said, thanks for coming, Daisy.
	Hope you have a great birth, because child labour is hard.
	See you.
	Yeah, it's not very nice.
	It feels threatening, doesn't it?
	It's really, you know...
	Okay, the implication being what?
	Yeah.
	You know, it's a bit...
	It's creepy, actually.
	Yeah, I'll play the footage just so we aren't mischaracterising her, but it's...
	It's properly...
	You're disgraceful.
	Leave the camera alone.
	MPs are there to answer questions about her family connections to her every...
	Oh, sorry.
	Very careful, very careful.
	I am a British MP.
	Very careful.
	Very, very, very...
	I'm so sorry.
	Okay, hi.
	Very weird.
	Be very careful of what?
	Asking about your aunt's imprisonment, possibly strange imprisonment of a British-trained barrister.
	Be very careful about what?
	I can't help but think here that we shouldn't have to deal with any of this.
	I shouldn't have to know the ins and outs of Bangladeshi politics just to know my own politics.
	We should not be importing this very...
	Kleptocratic, nepotistic, possibly corrupt, threat-based politics?
	No, you don't want that.
	But you're likely going to make a broader point about, a sort of academic point about types of immigration and what the true nature of it is.
	So I try and plug this thinker called Garrett Jones who wrote a very important book called The Culture Transplant two years ago.
	He's an academic at George Mason in Washington.
	Brilliant book.
	And if you want to understand what's going on, please read this book.
	The book is Culture Transplant.
	Why immigrants make the countries they go to more like the countries they came from.
	Sounds obvious.
	It's the sort of thing that...
	I mean, he shouldn't, as an economics professor, have to write this book, because people in pubs know this, right?
	You know this is the case.
	But on all the data, actually, assimilation is a bit of a myth.
	People go to a different place.
	Largely the cultural practices, beliefs, savings rates, a whole load of stuff.
	That that group has goes with them.
	I mean, you don't suddenly become, like, you know, if you come from a group, because it's not individuals, but a population is transferred from a war-torn Middle East zone or sub-Saharan Africa or another place and goes to Denmark, it doesn't suddenly become dangerous.
	It really doesn't, and it won't.
	And actually, one of the problems is that progressives imagine that it can.
	Or that it's reasonable even to ask that it should.
	Because no one's getting to a new place.
	I'll just forget all about my culture.
	No.
	Culture migrates.
	That's his big point.
	So, broader point.
	I'm not talking about this case, but broader point.
	If you import a lot of people with belief system X to your country, it won't change very much.
	And it'll stay the same.
	discussed before that they've collected it just shows that first generation migrants and their second and third generation descendants repeat the economic and criminal participation patterns of their parents which means that immigrants from the middle east north and often sub-saharan africa pakistan and turkey are across their lifetimes never net taxpaying contributors whereas east asian american australian and western european migrants are positive contributors around the middle of their lifetime when they're at their peak working age as is the native danish
	But across the cycle they are as well.
	So then, yeah, Jan van der Beek's Borderless Europe.
	Very good.
	I mean, I think it's a seminal bit of work, a couple of years old now, translated into English last year.
	And everyone should read it.
	And if you want evidence-based policy about migration, you have to look at this.
	You really must do.
	Well, there's also the data, I think it's American data, looking into the patterns of nationalism towards the homelands.
	That comes from first, second, and third generation immigrants.
	And they find that, if anything, the first generations who first got there are the ones that try the hardest to assimilate.
	And as you go through the generations, they get more and more nationalistic towards their original home.
	They're in group, yeah.
	It can be the case.
	The same thing happened in that policy exchange.
	It might have been the Henry Jackson Society report about the Islamic data from last year, and it said that 52% want to criminalize during the Prophet Muhammad, 30% are happy with Sharia law, 75% think Hamas did nothing wrong, and it's mainly concentrated among British-born 18 to 30 males.
	With a university degree.
	Yeah.
	So even though they're highly educated, even though they're supposedly economic net contributors, even though they've been born on the magic soil, it doesn't magically transmogrify.
	There's no such thing.
	Magic soil doesn't exist.
	But it's one of these points you've got to get across.
	And it's a very clever book.
	Actually, his book is mainly about Southeast Asia.
	And he looks in particular at Chinese diasporas.
	Fascinating.
	The stability of things like the Chinese savings rate across all, you know, Chinese populations in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, China itself, Taiwan, and the United States, pretty much the same.
	The savings rate is pretty similar.
	High savings rate.
	And we shouldn't be surprised.
	The equation is savings equal investment.
	Investment equals future prosperity.
	And that's why you get a group that outperforms as well as all the other things.
	So if you transport a population...
	From A to B, the population will give you what they had in the first place.
	It should also be really obvious by remittance rates, because a large amount of the economy of these countries, I think India is like 180 billion every single year.
	It's far bigger than foreign aid.
	Yeah, exactly.
	So that means that the people that are in this country have loyalties to their homeland and the people living in that homeland, so they're not going to spend money that they're earning here in the national economy, they're just sending it.
	And that's why as a model, if you've got your eyes open on a migration model, immigration policy should be alive to these things.
	So, I mean, to be fair, Connor, you know, it's of duty to the wider family as well.
	So particularly West African migration, if you go to a small town in Ghana and you've got a few businesses, quite often the businesses there are set up because brother or son has got a couriering job in Croydon and is standing quite...
	Which in Ghana and Sadi is quite big money, and they can set a business up.
	So it works for family massively.
	And actually, very few migrants from that society would come here and not be burdened or fettered with quite big obligations to their family.
	But as an economic model for us, it's crazy, absolutely crazy, because not only do we depress wages here, not only do we fail to train our own people, we have a model which...
	It's bad for the balance of payments, obviously, because you're transferring wealth out.
	You're earning it here.
	You're creating, basically, an import.
	There you go.
	Yeah, and the final example I'm going to use came out on the same day.
	So I don't know if you saw this tweet yesterday.
	There was a chap in a kaffir in Brighton who was given British citizenship by the Brighton mayor, who himself is of an immigrant and Islamic background.
	And it reads for all your listeners, yesterday I became British.
	I thought the ceremony would be nationalistic and a bit cringe until the Lord Mayor of Brighton started his speech with, al-salamu alaykum.
	Yeah, you're not British, you're a British.
	You're a paper citizen.
	Thank you for demonstrating your cringe for my country.
	I think you should have your citizenship revoked and returned instantly.
	But this all boils down to people will import the baggage of indigestible, Tribal allegiances, whether it's to family members overseas, whether it's to a foreign religion, whether it's to ethnic identity that they think is opposed to ours for colonial, even skin colour surface level reasons.
	And so there are certain people that will never integrate.
	And so if you allow this to incorporate itself into British politics, it will take advantage of the very liberal, very individualistic instincts of British politics with its clannish structure.
	And then start taking the piss.
	So perhaps we shouldn't allow that to happen.
	It's far from ideal, because the chap who's done that, he's smiling, and he's obviously very happy to become British, but that entitles him to the social wage, which is education and health benefits, housing possibly, but then has a pop at nationalistic and cringe.
	Well, I'd hope he would be nationalistic, but he's going to become British, because it's the only hope this country has.
	Is a form of nationalism that can unite people.
	It maybe doesn't unite him, I don't know.
	Yeah, I think...
	Doesn't seem to.
	No, he's the perfect example of what Douglas Murray once said.
	If you import the third world, you get the third world's problems.
	But anyway, Harry.
	Alright, we've not got any rumble rents or anything.
	Nope.
	Okay, let's carry on.
	I'm going to talk about wokeism and present my case for the idea that woke, as some have predicted, AA in particular, is slowly being put away.
	Now, I'm not trying to make a case here that it's going to vanish overnight, nor am I going to make an argument that things like local councils, and especially the educational establishment, aren't still going to be infested with these people.
	My argument is that...
	We have reached peak woke a couple of years ago now, especially following George Floyd.
	And since then, I mean, we saw the result of that in that Bloomberg article, in particular with DEI practices, where corporate America decided to basically only hire non-white people as a result of the George Floyd riots.
	So we've reached the peak, and now it's beginning to die down, especially with Donald Trump coming to administration in America, and particularly, I would say, also following the...
	I think what spurred this along a little bit more as well was October 7th, and a lot of the tech guys like Mark Zuckerberg realizing that by supporting WOKE, whether they intended to or not to begin with, they have aligned themselves with people who don't just see it as a regional conflict.
	Thousands of miles away, but see somebody like Mark Zuckerberg as their ancient enemy and hate him for it.
	Quick question.
	So when you say we there, are you conceiving this as the imperial capital of the great American empire has realized this, but it's going to take time to...
	Cascade across its various vassal states like the UK. In the UK in particular, we're still going to get headlines like this from The Sun.
	Partially because The Sun like to promote this kind of thing because it's news articles for them.
	But also because for some reason, like this one, woke council bans staff from asking people for their Christian name over risk of offending Snowflakes.
	If you actually read the contents of the article, it's not that cut and dry.
	They're just asking people for their first names and it doesn't seem to have been any kind of ban.
	So the Sun doing their usual excellent journalism there.
	But still, I will admit, Britain in particular seems remarkably glued to woke ideology.
	Probably because I would imagine that given that it's kind of a divisive, dividing, intentionally ideology that's meant to divide, shall we say, native populations whilst uniting foreign populations, it acts as kind of a unifying glue for...
	Hostile foreign populations coming into the country because it gives them a target that they can all aim against.
	Basically, whitey is how I would describe it there.
	And also, you'd have lots of insane true believers.
	White or otherwise, who have been staffed in a lot of these institutions, and it will take time to either sideline or replace these people.
	And with Labour in charge as well, I think it was Morgoth said that we might end up being woke North Korea.
	Yeah, well you can play divide and conquer client politics.
	But even that isn't looking so great for the Labour Party right now because they always have to go and have a struggle session down at the mosque to stop various Islamic communities voting for independent Islamic candidates.
	But, obviously in the UK it's a different situation to the US right now.
	And the US is where a lot of this will be focused on.
	Although there are already counter-arguments to this.
	I know you've contributed to The Critic.
	The Critic, for instance, put out an article the other day by David Scullion saying that Woke isn't nearly over.
	And he's pointing out something that I actually agree with here, which is not necessarily that the driving force behind all of these initiatives is going to be put away straight away.
	A lot of this is going to end up either being temporary until they can get another Democrat in.
	Or is a form of rebranding.
	Like, for instance, I've covered the bridge initiatives in corporate America as well, which seems to be instead of having specific policies or specific branches of corporations dedicated to DEI, basically just have it written into the goals of the corporation in the first place, that it's always something that they're going for.
	Greater diversity.
	Like the Charities Act or the Equalities Act in Britain, so that you set the law, you set internal company guidance, which then sets the incentives for them to comply whether or not there are true believers in the institution.
	You make it so that if they're risk-averse, they err on the side of diversity in order to do it.
	You make it so that there are corporate costs to not hiring these people who will end up occupying the recruitment centres, and if they're...
	True believers, they are only going to hire other true believers, so that's how you get infested.
	And he even points out in here, mainly regarding the education sector in the US, he says, totally overrun.
	The University of Michigan alone spends more than $30 million on 241 DEI staffers.
	And then he also points to the UK as well as an example of how it's not going away.
	So I do think there is a counter-argument, and I think most of the points of the counter-argument are valid.
	But for me, again, the point is not that it's going to...
	Overnight vanish.
	It's that we have gotten past the peak of this and slowly I think the aims for diversity as a goal will not go away but particularly the woke scolding within parts of our culture are slowly starting to die down in regards to some parts of cancel culture are nowhere near as effective as they used to be which is something even the Telegraph has noticed.
	So in favour of the argument that I'm presenting here obviously one of the big ones you have Corporations like BlackRock quitting their Net Zero initiative.
	They left the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative, which was a UN-backed group of institutional investors who say that they want to save the world from climate Armageddon.
	They joined that a few years back.
	Now they're leaving it.
	Meta, in particular, unsurprisingly, given that Mark Zuckerberg has gone through quite the PR rebranding and made his Joe Rogan appearance the other week as well.
	You see Morgoth's very viral tweet that said that basically the Joe Rogan experience has become a confessional booth for these, let's say...
	Recovering Wokies.
	Yeah, yeah.
	So they go on and they go through three hours of bro talk and come out.
	Completely reborn.
	I think part of it is sincere.
	I do think there is a bit of trial by fire in that.
	I think he's absolutely right because you basically have to go on a conversation for three hours and prove that you're a normal person and come across somewhat likeable.
	Now, for the kind of image that Zuckerberg in particular had just a few years ago...
	He's like Data from Star Trek.
	Yeah, that must have been a particularly difficult challenge for him.
	I've not actually watched it, but I have seen the one small clip that people have been posting where...
	Joe Rogan's kind of throwing a little dig at him, where he's like, you were one of the most censorious people in the world only a few years ago, and now I'm supposed to believe you've just flipped, and you're one of the good guys now?
	And again, I think that's pointing to something that I believe, which is a lot of this might just be rebranding.
	Some of it, yes, but also...
	Don't underestimate the social pressures of him getting involved in MMA because the person he's appointed in Nick Clegg's stead is Dana White.
	Dana White being a very close friend of Joe Rogan, head of the UFC, very much ingratiated with Team Trump.
	It seems like rather than appointing some Nick Clegg equivalent, like a former right-wing politician from anywhere, he just picked one of his mates because he likes wrestling.
	So it might actually be a personal conversion here.
	But it's also technically useful with the new administration, probably.
	I mean, Hogan recently got booed out of the building at the first Netflix Raw, so perhaps he should start getting Hogan onto some of the board meetings as well, so he can flex on anybody.
	But yeah, they've announced, Meta has, that they are dismantling their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across the company, and he's also, points out here, Zuckerberg, of course, donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund and hired a Republican as a Republican.
	Isn't he attending as well?
	I'd be shocked if he didn't.
	I know Keir Starmer hasn't been invited, which is interesting.
	I also heard that Netanyahu hadn't been invited as well, which was interesting, because Trump's very...
	I have to beef up the security as well.
	It's quite a big deal to look after him.
	So it's always interesting with inaugurations who gets invited and who doesn't because it really shows who's being snubbed and who's being favoured.
	So if Zuckerberg's going to show up, that does show a def...
	I mean, there's obviously a realignment with the Silicon Valley tech bros with Trump.
	But I would also argue that that's...
	It's going to go both ways.
	That's not going to be a one-sided thing where the tech bros just give everything Trump wants.
	They're going to have their own things that they want out of it.
	Well, they're also going to have some internal pressures, and this was the conversation that Musk and Vivek were having on Twitter over Christmas when the rest of us were tucking into Turkey about H1B. They're going to have...
	Do you reckon he got drunk on Christmas and that's why...
	The time of the tweet may be telling you that.
	I don't know if Musk drinks, does he?
	I don't think so.
	Well, some say that he, like, what, microdoses ketamine as a, like, medication or something, so...
	I hesitate to speculate on that one, I'm going to be honest.
	No, I've just, I've been told as much, but anyway.
	Anyway, we'll move on from that one, I think.
	Do you buy the sort of Pete Woke thing?
	I don't...
	Right.
	I think the...
	I don't think it'll ever reach a fever pitch like it did after Floyd.
	Yes, I agree with that.
	I think that was a particular thing to do with lockdown and everything else.
	The mania...
	Of Black Lives Matter was incredible.
	The way it washed over the whole West, particularly the Protestant West, Anglosphere.
	Astonishing.
	And I agree with you that that is an event, an event.
	Unfortunately for them, the lack of correspondence with reality didn't stop that.
	There isn't a racial disparity in police shootings.
	Fryer's report proved that was the case.
	A lot of the nostrums and ideas were completely false, but it didn't stop it washing over.
	I mean, it doesn't have to be false to be effective.
	And I agree that was a particular moment.
	And I also agree that there have been some domain wins, say some trans ideology has been knocked back because it's harmful and dangerous for children and so on.
	So those are victories.
	But I don't.
	I think Eric Kaufman's probably right.
	I think we're a long way from it.
	You can't tell.
	This is a belief system which is deeply embedded in the academy and the media.
	Well, you can't shift the culture as violently as we have over the past few decades and expect it to, you know, shift overnight.
	Both Silicon Valley and the Democrat Party are entirely captured by true believers.
	And this is what Musk and Babak are going to face as pressures.
	There are going to be, as we spoke about in the last segment, very nepotistic, clannish hiring practices among a lot of the Indian personnel, as we have seen with the fact that as soon as they've had a large influx of Indian migration, lots of the Silicon Valley...
	Tech owners are now Indian and will only hire Indians.
	So they will still want DEI practices in place because they can use that to argue that's going up.
	So that's in the United States in a particular market, in a particular place.
	I think one of the issues with DEI policy generally, more generally...
	Is that it's not effective and it's literally divisive.
	It doesn't work.
	It alienates people, polarizes people, and it costs money.
	So the corporates that are saying, actually, this really hasn't worked, it's terrible, are stopping it for that reason.
	That's an interesting thing that's brought up in one of the other articles that I've got that Connor actually sent me, which was the Financial Times article, where one of them, a consultant who counsels corporate leaders, says that they don't want to be all of these companies that have rolled back on it. says that they don't want to be all of these And Forbes has an article where they point out, you know, McDonald's are abandoning this, Walmart did, Ford Motor Company, Harley Davidson, as well as Meta and others.
	The guy in this article says they don't want to be caught out promising and not delivering companies that are still committed to diversity and inclusion, but they just don't want to guarantee outcomes because a lot of the time they set these lofty goals for themselves and they're not hitting it.
	Yeah, we may, I mean, something that your viewers should be aware of is the...
	The Labour Party in its manifesto had this idea of race league tables in corporations.
	So, you know, it would oblige corporations.
	In fact, they haven't done this yet, but they promised to.
	Maybe it's in a manifesto that has no chance of being enacted.
	But they did promise to.
	And I think it's utterly insane.
	So if they do enact that policy, larger corporations will have to make a league table of different ethnic backgrounds.
	And I can't think of anything more...
	Divisive.
	Literally.
	Would they have weighted schools?
	Yeah.
	So British Hindus are here and everyone's here.
	And isn't that basically what Harvard was doing, which is what got it struck down by the Supreme Court?
	Well, Harvard, no.
	That was bias in selection.
	That was racial bias in selection for undergraduates.
	That's a slightly different thing.
	And the East Asian population in the United States was discriminated against.
	I have family members that suffered from that.
	That was basic racism.
	And so we'll see where that goes.
	But this is a slightly different thing.
	I don't know.
	I think the other point on Pete Woke is that the institutions that are putting this into practice are doing something which the younger members of the institutions, those organizations, want.
	So the driving force of the people on comms, on slightly younger, they're true believers in this progressive stuff.
	They totally believe it.
	The people my age that are head of the corporation don't really believe, sort of bullied into...
	It was a perfect example of that.
	Exactly, and they do it because they're bullying.
	Oh, we better give way to this.
	So that's one thing.
	We've had that, right?
	But what happens...
	When those people retire and then the true believers actually get the levers of control in the organization.
	So the true believers are aligned with the power of the...
	I think it could...
	Well, it matters whether...
	Because with Meta in particular, they had a chief diversity officer, Maxine Williams, who's transitioning to a new role focused on accessibility and engagement instead of being in that DEI role.
	So what's happened there is she's not been fired, but she has been sidelined.
	So the question will be whether these companies with all of the true believers who staff them, 'cause when you talk about the younger generations, I do think as Connor often points out that there is a split.
	in gen z where there's the there's the true believers and then there's a sizable faction of them who do not believe in any of this at all and oftentimes are more just fed up and tired of all of this so the question will be are these people going to get sidelined and will they be replaced or will they be left in a position that if the democrats get back in and start to implement this again they can be shifted straight back into the position that they occupied before
	Well, politically, and this is interesting for the Democrats when they get back in, the Democrats have nowhere to go but double down on woke.
	I did an analysis of this for Courage Media a little while ago.
	If you look at the quadrants...
	There's very few Democrats that basically occupy the SDP position because Trump and Trump have taken that.
	Top left.
	Vance is all over that.
	Exactly.
	He's taken economic protectionism.
	They're not really going to touch entitlements other than try and make them actually not hemorrhage the deficit.
	And they've taken cultural conservatism.
	So those blue dog cohort of Democrats, the sort of...
	Culturally sensible, economic protectionist lot that people thought Bernie Sanders might have been, but he turned out to be a true believer.
	They are the smallest caucus you've ever seen, and about half of them are social progressives now, even in that caucus.
	The rest of the party are like Jasmine Crockett, AOC, like demented leftists who have been selected on the basis of their race.
	So they've got a very short cohort of people they can pivot to to get away from their unpopular...
	Progressively.
	And also, Connor, to remember that people don't, I mean, if they do believe this, they're marinated in this stuff, and they, it is a religion.
	Obviously, there's been a lot written about that.
	It is a form of religion.
	And they're not going to just volunteer and give it up.
	And as I said before, it doesn't matter that it has low correspondence to reality.
	Reality is somewhere that's completely different.
	It's costly, divisive.
	It's damaging, but it doesn't really matter.
	We still believe it.
	And that's, you know, Thomas Kuhn's an interesting one to look at.
	Kuhnian look at this is to say that people hang on to these ideas, like the old Communist Party members hanging on to their cards in their wallets until, you know, forget...
	Even when they're in the gulag.
	Yeah, the gulag, forget...
	Hungary in 56. Forget Czechoslovakia in 68. It was fine.
	Nothing to see here.
	I'm still a member of the Communist Party.
	When I read Solzhenitsyn when he was talking about how a lot of the true believers in the gulags would be trying to plead with the guards saying, no, no, I'm one of the good ones.
	You can let me out.
	I really am, yeah.
	There was a woman whose daughter wrote to her and said, mother, if you're innocent, tell me.
	Because I cannot bear to see you locked up.
	And if you're innocent, I won't join the Consumal.
	But if you are guilty, I will, and I will hate you forever.
	And she couldn't bear the idea that her daughter would betray the party.
	So even though she was innocent, she said, I'm guilty, join the Consumal.
	But it's vital to understand the sort of true believer thing and people not giving it up.
	And I'll flip it back to a current issue here, the rape gangs.
	Every single progressive that's interviewed on television about it is really discombobulated, having a massive difficulty with this.
	Why?
	It's because...
	They're educated.
	Their whole belief system is victims and oppressors.
	Victims are minorities of various kinds, and oppressors are white males, basically, or whites in general.
	And we found a situation where you've got a large cohort of white victims.
	And the people that are responsible for this racially targeted bit of violence are a protected minority, in their view, and they just can't handle it, because it flips their whole narrative.
	And I watch them, I look at the interviews, Connor, and I think, you just can't deal with this.
	So what they do in the interview is deflect into also, you know, oh, most offenders are white, it's a white majority population.
	But sorry, that's a category.
	We're talking about a particular thing, which is racial violence.
	Racial violence against a particular group.
	And the deflection, it's almost painful.
	And what I'm witnessing is people that are, they have this ideology and they're not going to give it up.
	They're really struggling.
	And the terrible thing for society is that there is literally, and history proves this, there is no limit of pain that those people would have us go through or other people go through in defense of their ideology.
	Communism, all the other isms prove it.
	Once you have an ideology, it doesn't matter how many girls are raped.
	It doesn't matter.
	Because we are right.
	And they'll suffer any amount of that.
	It's just irrelevant to them.
	So you've got to understand, I don't think this is going away.
	I think we have to fight it every day.
	I agree with what you're saying.
	I would say that what you're talking about in sort of the rape gang denialism is a separate phenomenon to woke as it has been over, say, the past nine or ten years, which I would say is a big subject.
	Woke, as I would characterize it, definitely falls into a lot of the gay race communism, as Tucker put it.
	But in the way that I'm talking about it here is kind of the scolding and more cultural aspects of it are going to be toned down a lot, especially under Trump.
	And in particular, this article is quite interesting regarding the scolding thing.
	One of the things that Wokes loved to do was language police, tone police people constantly, basically as a form of petty power politics that they would play.
	And so that's actually in Wall Street in particular, they're pointing out a top banker, because we all care so much about the well-being of top bankers, said, I feel liberated.
	We don't have to self-censor as much as we used to.
	We can now say retard and pussy again without the fear of getting cancelled.
	It's a new dawn.
	Silly, vulgar as that can seem, the fact that they are, some people are feeling a bit more able to express themselves in ways that would have previously got them told off, does say something.
	That's in that domain, though.
	But I don't think we're about to have, particularly in the culture, in the arts.
	I don't think that's going to happen.
	People tell me that it's still as difficult for an actor or someone in the entertainment industry to say what's true on these things.
	Well, I mean, Hollywood in particular.
	Maybe less so now that it's burned down.
	Well, look at the reaction to Zachary Levi.
	He came out with RFK and then Trump, and he's just been made up.
	Hollywood in all of...
	California and a lot across the West Coast in particular.
	It's a very closed club.
	The music industry is the same.
	Of course, that's based in Los Angeles for the most part as well.
	But I would say in America, there has been more so than in Britain.
	A very concentrated attempt to build up alternative media platforms for people to get exposure on, so that if you are, say, cancelled from Hollywood and the mainstream, then you're able to go on the alternative media tour and become part of that establishment instead.
	Who was the guy from the Deadpool films with the curly hair, the comedian?
	Oh, not Tim Miller.
	I know who you're talking about.
	Yeah, you know, he got cancelled and then he was able to start going and working with Daily Wire, for instance.
	And so this article from The Telegraph is interesting because it kind of highlights something that I've been feeling recently, which is with the establishment of alternative media platforms, particularly in America, especially if you can go on something like Joe Rogan, cancel culture has lost a lot of its sting as long as you're already...
	It's relatively high profile.
	Obviously, if you're just a normal worker or somebody has a nobody social media following and somebody picks up on you and decides to start targeting you, you still don't want that happening to you.
	But if you're, say, mid-level and above, if you get cancelled, it can kind of be a signal to the alternative media.
	Let's get that guy.
	It's a bit of a badge of honour for people, which has taken some of the sting out of it.
	Cancel culture only works if it comes from your own side now.
	Yeah, and they point out that Gen Z seems to have gotten bored of it.
	Nothing makes art more anodyne and enervating than an endless list of don'ts and approved by sociology students tick list.
	And this is something I've noticed as well.
	I'm like old.
	I'm an old Zoomer.
	I'm an old man now.
	I'm Generation X. I'm so sorry to hear that.
	Literally just 1965. Any older one of a boomer.
	It's not me!
	You're not spiritually a boomer either.
	Young Zoomers really seem increasingly not to care.
	Not to care at all, because, like, the older Zoomers of my cohort, they're a bit closer to millennials who are moralistic busybodies for the most part.
	Like, the youngers, they've just seen that...
	Culture hates them.
	Most art these days that's produced by the mainstream is terrible.
	And they just get told off like everybody is their parents for the slightest infraction.
	So a lot of them have retreated into an almost Sam Hyde-esque post-irony where they just don't care anymore.
	So they're trying to push boundaries and trying to be offensive in a way that allows them to be transgressive and edgy.
	Because, you know, they're kids.
	Kids look at what older people are doing and say, I'm going to do the opposite of that.
	So with them, it's maybe a little bit less effective, although obviously you still have, especially within the girls, we've seen the gender divides on left and right swinging.
	It depends on the country, though.
	In Germany and France, because immigration is a women's safety issue and because Jordan Bardella is attractive to French women, you've got parity voting for national rally between men and women.
	And it just comes down to two things.
	One, unlike the millennials, Gen Z's...
	...
	siloed so they can self-create their own satellite communities and that means they do have the parallel social capital base so you get cancelled by one group you can go to another and also if you're a straight white man who's exceedingly competent why would you play into a social order that makes you a public enemy number one and if you're a straight white woman who likes straight white men and wants to marry one why would you actively select out of the eligible dating pool men who can support you having a family like it's It's not in your own interest.
	You don't get social capital, you don't get economic capital, so just break away from the order.
	Yeah, and...
	Another thing, when it comes to the arts, I think the mainstream has sucked for a very, very long time.
	For longer than just when we hit peak woke.
	So the fact that the internet is more open these days for a lot of people, particularly I'm a musician, I love listening to music, I love finding new music, the democratization of access to media platforms, being that you don't have to just stay within the Hollywood and LA music system, means that...
	You've still got a chance of making something.
	The fact is, as well, even if you do make it big in the music industry, in the mainstream music industry, you're not going to make any money from it nowadays anyway with streaming and everything else.
	So if anything, it's probably better for a lot of these people to not give a damn about the studio system and say, I'm going to try and make it on my own.
	I watched an interview with the lead singer of Avenged Sevenfold recently.
	You wouldn't like them.
	Where he was talking about how even for a really big band like them, they basically make no money from it because inflation has caused all of the cost of everything to do with touring, which used to be where they'd make all of their money after selling albums became not a way of stopping things.
	It used to be albums, yeah, in the 70s.
	It used to be the albums.
	And it went to gigs.
	Then it went to the touring, and now the touring doesn't make any money.
	So if anything, you're probably best off going, you know, I'm going to be my own boss, make my own music, release it on Bandcamp, or stream it on Spotify, and I'll make what dribs and drabs that I can, because it gives me that artistic freedom.
	So that means that they're a bit more free to not have to worry about...
	It's democratising.
	The atomisation of all this stuff does give people freedom.
	But I think coming together, actually, you know, people assembling groups that agree with...
	Their basic outlook is a good idea.
	You need to do that.
	People are building their own institutions, forming their own networks, which can operate independently of the larger system, which I think is a good thing.
	But again, when it comes to the overall direction of where things are going, for my thesis, I think the main reason is that following October 7th, there does seem to have been a bit of a shift, given that woke...
	Massively seems to trend in the direction of anti-Israel.
	Pro-Palestine.
	And you see a lot of publications pointing out that it has become a breeding ground for anti-Semitism.
	And this gives a rather sad story of basically a naive Israeli woman who was in Berlin who went to one of these pro-Palestine marches.
	I assume that she was quite woke herself.
	Ended up getting beaten up by some of the people there.
	And I can only imagine that that was...
	I would hope that that was a bit of an eye-opening moment for her.
	Because I'd imagine what it was, as I mentioned with Mark Zuckerberg and others.
	Bill Ackman.
	Yeah, Bill Ackman.
	They've probably thought to themselves, hold up, everybody who believes in this hates me.
	Who are my friends?
	Purely for my ethnic identity.
	They don't see this as something disconnected from me.
	They see me as particularly guilty of the crimes being committed by a foreign government.
	It's fascinating that because I'm interested in political coalitions, leading a little political party and making progress.
	We are a coalition of a type, but at least it's coherent.
	I think the odd thing about the progressive woke coalition is just how utterly incoherent it is.
	It's united only by a dislike of the West.
	Both sides, the white progressives that drive it in the universities and media denigrate the West constantly, a little bit rebellious that way, and a lot of their anti-Western friends.
	Are as well.
	But there's no coherence between those two groups.
	I mean, take away the dislike of the central culture.
	They'd be at each other's throats.
	Well, this is what Marx wrote, op-ed, I think it was for the New York Daily News in the 19th century, and said that Islam is a revolutionary ally because it hates Christianity.
	Yeah.
	So that's all this is.
	And also, Mary Harrington's pointed this out quite well.
	But it's temporary and contingent.
	Yes.
	So it's like, there's a town in Michigan, actually, Rod Little wrote about this.
	A town in Michigan where it has a very high Islamic population.
	And they built up power until they had a majority.
	And then the alliance they had with the LGBT group, I think it was mainly lesbian and gay, not T so much.
	And then the Islamist got in and said, no, we're not having that.
	Bye, see you.
	There was a white woman who had converted to Islam and also said she was a lesbian on the town council, weeping because they took the pride flag down.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And it's like, you know, it was a contingent alliance.
	What were they thinking there, Connor?
	What were they thinking?
	It's the Omnicles, right?
	This is what Mary's written about in the pages of Unheard.
	Lots of it is all of...
	The algorithms have fed these issues together on the grounds that they're both...
	Hating the Western white people.
	And so this is where Greta Thunberg will go from one day marching for climate and the next day to Kefir.
	It's just been presented in her feed all the time and this is where she gets social capital from.
	Sorry to cut you off.
	I was just going to say that example that you mentioned of the white woman who'd converted to Islam weeping because she was a lesbian at the Pride flag being taken.
	What you're describing there is mental illness.
	Yeah.
	More than anything.
	And it's sad to see because I do...
	I mean, we've seen...
	There have been studies done that show that liberals do tend to...
	Mental illness a lot more than people who identify themselves as conservative.
	Higher anxiety, all sorts of things.
	So they're particularly susceptible to things that just don't make sense because it gives them a sense of identity that maybe helps them to try and...
	In a weird way, order the world in a way that makes a bit more sense, even though it's completely chaotic, which is why it may make more sense to them.
	But anyway, on the subject of what I was talking about a moment ago, this is an interesting article from, I believe it was November in Unheard, from Noah Karl, who was talking about left-wing academics now primary targets of cancel culture.
	Now, of course, this is weighted in one direction because right-wing academics seems to be a bit of an oxymoron these days, given how...
	Rare.
	Yeah, the academies themselves have...
	Matt Goodwin said to leave.
	Yeah, Matt Goodwin said to leave a lot of the academies themselves.
	You know, can I stop you?
	In the 60s and 70s, the phrase right-wing historian was really quite normal.
	Right-wing historians.
	Trying to think if there's any right-wing historians right now.
	David Starkey.
	David Starkey.
	Would you count Theodore Daralympel?
	I mean, he's not really a historian.
	He's a sociologist, really.
	Andrew Roberts has got some very soft views on immigration, but he's very...
	Pro-Churchill.
	Anyway, sorry.
	Nigel Bigger, maybe, but again, he's a theologist primarily, isn't he?
	Yeah.
	Yes, you're correct there.
	Either way, so this is weighted, so take that into consideration, but it's looking at academic cancellations as compiled by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and it's taking every incident that should have been counted as protected under constitutional speech, and seeing if the people who...
	Who are doing it would identify more with the left or from the right.
	And you can see, this is what I mean regarding cancel culture, why I think, for the time being, we've hit a bit of a peak.
	Because you can see very clearly in this graph that it peaks around 2019 to 2020, 2021, and has been steadily declining.
	But now it seems that more of them that are sustaining are coming from the right, according to this.
	And if you go down, he decided to break it down into a bit more detail and saw that...
	That massively, a lot of the cancellations that are coming from the right are coming over the subject of Israel and Gaza.
	Well, one of these...
	High-profile ones will obviously be Claudine Gay, for example.
	So what got her in the end was plagiarism, but it was instigated by that dreadful congressional hearing where she couldn't condemn people calling for genocide on Harvard University campus.
	That's right.
	Nothing to see here.
	Returning to the subject of coalition building, the reason I think that we're past peak woke is the woke coalition has been fundamentally split by the issue following October 7th.
	That's a good point.
	And I think that Donald...
	Donald Trump coming into office as well is definitely pushing that split along because he's drawn a lot of the big tech bros onto his side.
	That's, I would argue, you see, you know, friends in the academy who are not crazy in the sound will say, will to them, yeah.
	Actually, the STP's overweight academics, so a lot of them are political scientists, and they tell me, they say, I say, why is it?
	Why is this just flourishing in the way it is?
	And why, you know, even after a moderate thing like Brexit, which was the mainstream majority of the public who wanted to leave the European Union, why couldn't you as an academic, why were you chastised for having that view?
	Why were there so many pro-Brexit academics unable to say this?
	And the answer was that it's the consequences, you know, it's the consequences to the academics.
	And until there are consequences, what you're seeing there in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict there is suddenly...
	A meeting with a consequence.
	It really is.
	We're not messing now.
	We're not just putting this stuff out to look virtuous.
	It actually really matters.
	And so that's a collision with reality.
	It's not just being the academics themselves.
	It's also being the students in many cases in a lot of these universities.
	And so these students might be receiving their first bit of discipline.
	Yeah, but the New York Times.
	Regarding these, no, you can't just go on these massive campus.
	protests every other day.
	You have to actually Abide by the rules that we set.
	So, obviously, many of them will be true believers, but I do think that a lot of that evangelical spirit that comes with a true believer may be tempered by a bit of old-fashioned discipline.
	So I wonder if the culture around them shifts, if not all, but a fair few of them might shift along with it.
	What I really worry about, particularly from the scenes in the United States, is just mob rule.
	On campus, that's what worries me.
	I think it's the weight of numbers of people protesting, intimidating the faculty.
	And you know, I mean, it was a few years ago, but you've evergreen college.
	You have to have someone that is prepared to stand up, and you've got to be brave to do that.
	They're all trying to repeat what they see in their minds as the glorious civil rights victories of the 1960s.
	Shelby Steele, when he wrote about when he was a student radical in the 1960s, gives the story of when he and a load of the other students marched into the office of the university dean and made all of their demands.
	They disrespected him.
	He dropped cigarette ash on the carpet of his office.
	And the dean just didn't do anything.
	He just sat there and let them do it because he was intimidated.
	So what they're hoping for is a repeat of that.
	They want to have their glorious civil rights moment.
	And at least on this subject, it doesn't seem to be working out.
	Well, it's not...
	Yeah, I mean, it's a category error.
	It's the same thing as looking at gay rights, which is justifiable and arguable.
	And then transposing that on something which is...
	Completely different category of thing, which is gender ideology, and thinking it's the same thing, thinking it's the latest stage in that.
	I'll just tell you, I'll lighten it up.
	There's a philosopher called Sidney Morgan Besser, who was a philosopher, I can't remember which, it might have been Cornell.
	In the late 60s, there were a lot of anti-Vietnam rioting and protests.
	Police broke it up, and you've seen the scene, they broke it up by smashing, using the baton and smashing, and he was it.
	Probably a senior lecturer.
	And he was interviewed afterwards, you know, bloodied.
	He said, well, do you think this is unfair and unjust?
	He said, well, it was certainly unjust, but it was unfair because they didn't just hit me, they hit everyone.
	So there you go.
	That's a philosopher at work.
	Right, we've got some rumble rants that have come in before we move on to the next one.
	Yes.
	I'm not reading out that name, but thank you for the two dollars.
	Passports handed out to every...
	Disreputable gentlemen who demands one are meaningless, and then he calls for the deportation of people who disrespect the country.
	It's a hell of a policy for illegal migrants, certainly.
	Dragon Lady Chris.
	Connor.
	Last week's Tomlinson Talks is horrifying, fascinating, and necessary.
	Thank you for your voice.
	On a side note, your theme music is great.
	Excellent.
	Well, you're going to get another horrifying episode today because we've got to cover important topics.
	That's a random name for one dollar.
	When can we get Xi Jinping on the podcast?
	I suppose we'll just ask Rachel Reeves.
	Yeah, she's just been on a trip out in China.
	Perhaps she can get a...
	New job out there at some point.
	And that's a random name.
	You're exactly right, Harry.
	Wokeness in the video games industry is why I left in 2019 to go full indie.
	Best decision ever.
	Indie is the future.
	Yeah, I used to be horrifically addicted to games, and nothing has helped me more to beat that addiction than the video game industry sucking raw eggs.
	I'm trying to think of the last AAA video game that I actually played and enjoyed.
	I can't.
	I can't think of one.
	Star Wars Battlefront 2 was fun after they made everything free and not broken.
	Maybe the 2018 God of War.
	But that had a terrible sequel.
	Well, we shall see.
	Yeah, believe me, I've been through that.
	Don't think that's in the budget or the scope of operations at the moment, but there are alternative imprints, because Lomas has got one.
	It's going very well with Passage Press.
	You've got Imperium.
	They've published a few fiction works as well, outside of just republishing, say, old 19th century philosophy and economics works as well.
	Dalbon Books, go over and buy their stuff.
	They're currently about to do a reissued of, very controversial book, Camp of the Saints.
	Oh, really?
	Yeah, so that's not going to be £200 on eBay anymore.
	No, they've got the rights to that.
	Also, I've still never read it.
	No, neither have I. There are various imprints that are popping up doing even...
	Dissident literature or publishing new stuff or reprinting old stuff.
	And you should support them because I've heard firsthand from them.
	It's very expensive and very difficult.
	So the more financial support they get, the more opportunities they have not just to publish old books, but to publish new books, both non-fiction and works of fiction.
	Quite.
	Well, speaking of supporting new startups, so Reform UK are now one point behind the Labour Party in the most recent YouGov poll.
	And as you can imagine, they're making all sorts of hay out of this.
	They're campaigning on this fact that they've now possibly could be able to say, hey, the Conservatives are splitting the reform vote, etc, etc.
	As things stand, if we had a general election right now, we'd have a hung parliament.
	It would be between three parties and reform.
	The Conservatives would, despite much consternation in each base, probably go into coalition.
	But...
	It's looking like Reform could actually win outright, unless the SDP make a really strong challenge to them, in 2029. It's good you're here, Will, because I wanted to talk about marginal or outsider parties than the big two who have disserviced us for a long time, but also what it takes to win to get there.
	Because in the last few days, and this is something that's been building over some time, Zia Youssef, who is the chairman of Reform, has put out this tweet, and there seems to be a...
	Some opposition to some of the members of the base who are unhappy about certain things that reform has done.
	So I'll read this out.
	You could have just tagged Connor.
	I'll get to that in a moment.
	Who was he talking about, wasn't he?
	Okay, so yes.
	I popularized the phrase critical friends, and I did so in this article that Richard Tice really didn't like very much.
	People within Reform, who actually work on the team, were very eager to assuage my concerns about Reform and say, here's what we're doing, here's the strategy, we'll listen to your concerns, and we're hoping that you're still supporting us.
	And they're very good lads.
	We both know them behind the scenes, won't say who, but they're good.
	Reform has got some competent team members, and I want to say that I'm still inclined to support them.
	Love what Rupert Lowe's doing.
	You'll never hear a bad word out of my mouth on him.
	But I did put at the bottom of this article, I'm a critical friend of Reform, please sort it out.
	The hour is too late for inviting and cowardice.
	And then, that was taken up by Harrison Pitt, my co-host on Deprogrammed, Dan Wootton, and then Ben Habib.
	So I think he's probably referring to Ben Habib.
	Because Ben took the phrase from me.
	But that does mean now...
	Yeah, but they are aware of you as well, specifically.
	If Tice is going out of his way to respond to you and trash your articles, then I'm sure Yusuf also knows you.
	I'm actually surprised he responded in that way.
	I mean, like, social media 101. No, no, no, it's not so much that.
	It's not even to do whether it's right or wrong on the subject, on the facts.
	It's that, you know...
	I always say to people in the STP, if you really want to amplify something, then retweet it and respond.
	Otherwise, we just ice it out.
	That's what we do.
	I mean, icing it out is a better strategy if you don't want that.
	So what he's done is actually just draw attention to the fact that there are a lot of young people who are not impressed with some of the directions, some of the pronouncements and so on.
	So, you know, it's not very wise to do that.
	I'm surprised he did that.
	But anyway, you know.
	I think, and it wasn't intending to get in under anyone's skin, but it's because I mentioned his comment about that lot, as in the people that attend Tommy Robinson's rally.
	And before that happened, the overlap between the people that went on those Unite the Kingdom rallies and reform voters, that Venn diagram was a circle.
	Now it's been pried apart.
	And so rather than handling the situation as Douglas Murray would, or as I advise them to do, which is say, look, the issues that enabled Tommy Robinson to exist speak to a betrayal of the British public by...
	The political and media establishment that have worked in lopstep to accelerate immigration.
	Reform have inherited this mess and now we're going to clean it up so Tommy Robinson will no longer be possible.
	And I think, frankly, Tommy Robinson would probably like that because he'd rather be at home with his kids and sitting in a cell right about now.
	That's the way to go about it without attacking any of the voters.
	And that's what I think Richard objected to.
	And I think what's happening here is there's a sensitivity around reform because they feel like they're getting a bit of stick from people in their base and attack from the right.
	All the while they feel a pressure to tack leftward because the media are going to constantly call them racists and they think that they have to play to the mainstream and try and get people who would otherwise vote for other parties to not see them as racist.
	So they're thinking, why is my base giving me it in the ear?
	Because we're trying to win anyway.
	And so they've written off these critical friends as outside agitators.
	I mean, Yusuf literally alleges in this, I have it on good authority these people are paid agitators literally covertly working for the failed Tory party to try and derail reform.
	He got you, Connor.
	Yeah, me, Dan Wooten and Harrison Pitt are not on the Tory payroll.
	No.
	I vote for reform twice, including in 2021 before Nigel was even leading, for Richard Tice himself in my local constituency.
	So I can say I'm a sincere, likely supporter.
	Just want you to do some good things.
	But it is important they have critical friends, because in the last 24 hours there's been a few blunders.
	And I want to highlight this, because I'm just saying...
	The criticisms are coming from people who want to vote for you, not people who want you to fail and prop up the Tories.
	The first example of this was retweeted by a former Tory, Andrew R.T. Davis, and this is Reform's Welsh spokesperson.
	His name's Oliver Lewis, and he said that...
	Well, immigration is just positive for Wales.
	So I'm going to play this clip.
	Wales has had really very limited levels of immigration.
	And the immigration we have had arguably has been very positive for our economy.
	So immigration is much less of a factor in politics in Wales than it is, say, in England.
	That's a very different tone that I hear.
	So Zee Youssef himself has actually replied to this.
	I don't know if it's there.
	He says, this is not the reformed position.
	That's fine.
	That's good.
	I'm glad to hear that's not the reformed position.
	And did that guy forget about those Welsh adverts for schools where they were just flashing young white girls up for the elders?
	On behalf of the refugee council?
	Yeah.
	So, that's fine.
	Not the reform position.
	Good.
	Glad to hear condemnation of that.
	But again, you need critical friends to point this stuff out to say, well, hang on a minute, there's a bit of mixed messaging here and this isn't what we want.
	And then there's another person that's been ostracised, and that's Howard Cox.
	And Howard Cox was their London mayoral candidate, and their candidate in Dover and Deal, and it was down to the wire.
	He could have been a sixth MP. He certainly would have been now if the election was called later on by Rishi Sunak.
	And he's been kicked out of the party for two things.
	One, because he said on Dan Watton's show the country's run by immigrants, and a bit of a clumsy phrase.
	And the other one is because he has been supportive of Tommy Robinson.
	Not him as a person, he clarifies, but the fact that he was speaking out on the rape gangs.
	For many years, when other people, which Nigel did as well, so credit to him, weren't speaking out about it.
	So, they're removing these people, okay?
	Distancing themselves from this.
	Who they might be letting in is Charlie Mullins.
	I don't know if either of you, you probably do.
	Yeah, I know, yeah.
	I don't know if you know who this chap is, Harry.
	I'm not familiar with you.
	He's the founder of Pimlico Plumbers.
	Pimlico Plumbers?
	Yes.
	Not Pimlico Journal?
	No.
	No, the plumbing firm.
	Plumbers.
	Right, so the plumbing firm.
	Now, before I say the following, when I put this together, after I put this together, I received confirmation that this is not happening, and that they're very annoyed that he said this.
	But he did donate a large amount of money to the party.
	So he just came out with some bollocks on an interview.
	Well...
	Okay, alright.
	They've since distanced themselves from him, but he implied that a conversation had happened when Nigel Farage had asked him to run as a candidate personally.
	Now, there's a few problems with this.
	Namely, first of all, that he lives in Spain, so he's going to have to move back, because he left the UK. Well, they're trying to kick all the UK expats out now.
	Maybe he'll come back, yeah.
	So he might have to come back.
	Maybe that's why he's starting to make moves.
	I think he's reasonably well off, so I don't think he has to.
	Though he could have probably better afforded a plastic surgeon because he looks like the interned corpse of Rod Stewart.
	I'm glad that that wasn't just me thinking.
	He's taken the bog pill.
	He looks like an Oblivion NPC. Yeah, it's not very complimentary.
	But he did say...
	I'm sorry.
	I'm sure you're a lovely guy, Charlie.
	No, he's not.
	Oh, okay.
	Never mind.
	He did say that Farage had asked him to stand personally.
	Now, there's a few problems with this.
	First of all, Reform UK, and we can't say much because we're on YouTube, but Reform UK have committed to an inquiry into the COVID vaccine.
	Charlie Mullins, during the...
	The pandemic had a no jab, no job policy.
	Wait, is that him?
	That's him.
	What?
	Yeah, I know.
	It's quite a few years ago now.
	He switched from one singer to another.
	Before he decided to take a heavy dose of formaldehyde by the looks of it.
	He had said, and this is direct quote to City AM, No vaccine, no job.
	When we go off to Africa and Caribbean countries, we have to have a jab for malaria.
	We don't think about it, we just do it.
	So why would we accept something within our country that's going to kill us when we have a vaccine to stop it?
	Now...
	Questions about efficacy aside, because we all know that narrative wasn't quite so accurate on that, the fact that he was threatening to throw people out of their jobs, he had people leave and he wouldn't allow new employees to join unless they had the COVID vaccine, means that he was coercing people into a medical treatment, which means that he should automatically be disqualified as running as a candidate for reform when they want to have an inquiry into this.
	I take, so this is very interesting and it's not unusual that a party would be policed by people.
	In this way, and you say, well, you've got that wrong.
	But actually, a more important thing for the country and for reform, I'm humbly offering them some advice, is to try and work out what their foundational political philosophy is, because I don't know it.
	So it's a mixture of sort of old-school Thatcherism, small-state stuff, free-tradism, which is disastrous, combined with hostility to mass immigration.
	I agree with that.
	Although they're...
	Policy on the migrant crisis in the channel just won't work, and I've explained that several times.
	Our policy is right on that.
	You detain offshore in Ascension, you control it.
	If every single person that arrives unsolicited is immediately taken there for a couple of years and put elsewhere, the flow stops.
	It's just basic incentives.
	If you understand that, you can stop it.
	They don't want to stop it.
	So they need to improve on things like that, but I still don't, as a, you know, I'm the only person in the world.
	Possibly ever, who's negotiated an electoral pact with reform.
	I do know a little bit about them.
	I'm not hostile to them.
	I disagree with them on economics.
	Fundamentally, I disagree.
	But they were very grown up about that.
	They were fine about that.
	We did a small, limited electoral pact in the general election.
	But I still don't know, as an outsider to it, I don't know what their foundational political philosophy is.
	I don't know if it's J.D. Vance, or a bit like us in some ways, Faith, Flag, and Family, as I said, you know, re-industrialize.
	Understand that this is our home, not a shop.
	I don't know if it's that or it's something else.
	And I think until they...
	These particular things, individuals like, you know, these bumps in the road.
	But they have an opportunity, actually, to get their political philosophy right, and they have an opportunity to get something that is coherent.
	And my deepest criticism of the...
	Double liberalism that people on the right have promoted, people like Boris Johnson, which is social liberalism and economic liberalism at the same time.
	That is not conservative.
	You can call yourself a conservative.
	You're lying.
	It's not going to conserve anything for anyone.
	So they need to do a little bit of philosophical work and then see where they go from there.
	I doubt, given the...
	Individuals involved, they can do a proper cultural turn and an economic turn to our position.
	I don't think any...
	By the next election, I intend to have double or treble the amount of candidates we had.
	Last time we're growing, we're getting some funding in, got an HQ in Manchester established.
	So our offer is just going to be there.
	And at present, apart from George Galloway, he was an odd combination of Arab nationalism and...
	And summing traditional leftism, which is quite strange.
	I don't think that's a stable coalition.
	But apart from that, you know, we're the only party offering this top left type of politics.
	So I think in some ways reform might come onto our territory a wee bit in Thames Water and things like that, and they've shown evidence.
	But I don't see, and it's a friendly criticism.
	I'm not a friend of reform in that way.
	I want people to vote for the STP. But a criticism is that they need to do the work philosophically.
	And until they've done that...
	It's a little bit unstable.
	But if they did it, and if they got that clear, I think they could do extremely well, because the country's crying out.
	And you may be in a sort of break-the-mold position in the next few years, because by the next election, certainly on immigration, my advice to them, I'll give this advice free, do not weaken.
	By the time you get to the next election, this public will be desperate for someone to protect them, on a border and on mass migration.
	And if you water that down, you're doing something which is politically very foolish.
	I think you're right that there's confusion looking from the outside to what reform actually stands for.
	I think the best that I can get as an overall message is vaguely gesturing towards Labour and Conservatives and saying, we're not them.
	That seems to be the main message outside of, as well, stop the boats and things like that.
	And for last year's election, when we'd just come off the back of 14 years of Tory government, that was enough to push them to the success that they did get.
	But moving forward, you are right.
	I think they're going to need to be more solid in what they're presenting.
	Well, evident of that split is their migration policy.
	We actually don't know what it is.
	Because in the contract with the people, it's net zero immigration.
	And Rupert Lowe, who's their breakout candidate.
	That's a million in, million out.
	Exactly.
	Rupert Lowe, their breakout candidate, has said, I don't agree with that.
	We have a party where we can disagree.
	I think we should deport every single illegal immigrant, which Nigel Farage said was impossible.
	But that's basics, Connor.
	He also said, two-year immigration moratorium.
	And he then said, and we should be looking at what the Swedes do, which is offering to repatriate people who do not want to be.
	But on the illegal immigration, there's quite a thing for a politician to just give up on that.
	Because if you're saying, and I saw that interview, and it was interesting, Stephen did the interview, didn't he?
	And I thought it was very interesting, because...
	If you have that position, it sort of belies a weakness philosophically.
	If you decide that you're not bothering to implement that law, someone could live here illegally, I won't bother with that.
	You have to, on a sort of Kantian basis, decide what other laws you think we're just not going to bother implementing.
	You can't pick and choose.
	If someone is here illegally, They should be deported.
	Well, then it's two-tier.
	Because then when he was on Winston Marshall, he also said, no, you can't give them amnesty.
	And so Winston was like, well, you're not going to deport them, you're not going to give them amnesty.
	So what are they?
	They just exist as a...
	Stuck between stations.
	A paperless people.
	Yeah, it's not viable.
	I would describe it as the world's largest game of hide-and-seek.
	And the illegals would be winning, even though we know where they are.
	No, but just as I say it again, I've said it before, but politically, do not weaken on these important points.
	Because by the next election, I can't see...
	Salman has no chance whatsoever of tackling the Channel migrant crisis.
	I don't think he actually wants to.
	I don't think they want to.
	And as a human rights lawyer, all his background, the Labour Party, the PLP, they are nowhere near being able to solve it.
	Solving it, you'd have to do something like...
	The Australians have a we proposed.
	They don't want to do it, so it will get worse.
	So the poor old public, the British people, by the next election, they'll be gagging for someone that is as strong as possible on this.
	It's not a time for weakness.
	It's a time to say, be clear and say what you're going to do and stick to it.
	Well, I'll breeze through the last few links we've got because someone who hasn't...
	Well, has been very clear on his positions, but they're not in lockstep with the British public, is Mullins.
	He said this on national television, and I think, again, this should just disqualify him.
	Is he about to say that he just wants cheap labour?
	No, no, it's worse than that.
	Oh, it's worse!
	For me, it's a no-brainer.
	From a business point of view, it's a must.
	And, you know, the quicker that everybody acknowledges that, without proof of the vaccine, you can't go into a pub, club, restaurant, gymnasium, anywhere at all, you can't travel.
	Theater.
	We can't even go into work.
	I mean, personally, I have to say, I don't even think that we should allow people on the streets unless they've had the vaccine.
	You are literally going to be under house arrest unless you've taken a vaccine.
	Literally just detain you.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	So that should be an instant disqualifier.
	What else should be a disqualifier as well?
	This is why they should have a coherent philosophy.
	Is Charlie Monson's a Remainer?
	So when he was asked about his vaccine policy, by the way, in 2023 by Bev Turner, he said after the COVID inquiry had happened, he said the only thing the government got right was the vaccine.
	So he still doubled down on it.
	So he still believes that he's right on that.
	But he's also a Remainer who put up a bollocks to Brexit poster on his business and refused to take it down when he was told to.
	He donated to Gina Miller's high court attempt to overturn the Brexit referendum.
	Sure, 2018. Problem is, 2024 went on GB News, argued against Belinda De Lucy, who should actually be a reform candidate.
	She's lovely.
	She was a Brexit Party MEP. Yeah, she's very good.
	Saying that this is not a good enough excuse to say that Brexit hasn't been done properly.
	And he named Nigel specifically.
	And then, people were going, oh, hang on a minute.
	Yeah, that's not good, the vaccine stuff, and specifically the Brexit stuff.
	Maybe we should ask him about that when he says he's going to be a candidate.
	So he goes on Martin Daubney yesterday, and Martin asks him, and he goes, Well, no, I haven't come round to their way, I think, and they should come round to mine.
	They'll be begging to rejoin the EU soon.
	So he'll be a Reform MP. Doesn't look a brilliant fit.
	Yeah, so then what ended up happening was, obviously Ben Habib came out and said...
	As far as I'm concerned, I'm just thinking, where the hell is this guy come from?
	And why is he trying to make them look as bad as possible?
	He's given money to the party.
	He's friendly with Nigel.
	He wants some political influence because he's a bit of a grifter.
	And so he's come out and said that I had one conversation, now I'm going to be a reform candidate.
	Makes sense to me.
	Not good.
	So Ben posted this and then he had an argument with Gwaine Towler.
	Gwaine Towler being...
	Nigel Farage is a former spokesperson, only left recently, but still a diehard reform advocate.
	And Gwaine says something very interesting here as to the mindset of how reform might be building their coalition.
	To win, we have to change minds and engage with a bigger base.
	Otherwise, we are pure, fine, but politically impotent.
	Point being, Mullins hasn't changed his mind at all.
	So you need to understand the difference between your critical friends who agree with you on these things and want you to live up to your potential and people like Mullins who are infiltrators who disagree with you on everything but see...
	A wagon with momentum and want to jump aboard.
	It's very interesting.
	I like Gwaine a lot.
	Yeah, so do I. He's a nice chap.
	Good lad, good lad.
	He said, to win we have to change minds.
	It's interesting because actually the STP isn't interested in changing anyone's mind.
	About 50, you know, most British people agree with the STP on most things.
	Our problem is they don't know about us.
	It's fascinating.
	That's very, very interesting.
	He wants to change the mind of the public.
	You know, it's very different from landing on a coalition that already exists.
	Very different.
	And that argument that you'll be politically impotent if you stay purist in your goals, that's just an argument to consistently shift wherever the winds are blowing in that.
	And that's not a principled position.
	I don't know this Gwaine guy.
	I'll take your guy's word for it that he's a decent chap.
	But that's always the excuse I see for people saying, well, we need to soften our touch.
	We need to water ourselves down constantly, which just...
	It just leads to you ending up, in Reform's case, it would just lead to Tories 2.0, which is what everybody wants to avoid.
	Exactly, but Gawain there, I mean, Ben has put it right under the reply tweet there, you know, and you prefer political potency to a little bit of a jibe, without political philosophy.
	And Ben is totally right.
	You've got to get your philosophy right.
	But what they're doing, I mean, the public are already where we are.
	You know, what Gawain's trying to do is to move the piano to the piano stool, which is a little bit more difficult.
	Yeah, quite.
	Very good.
	So Zia Yusuf, quite a few hours after Charlie Mullen said that I'm going to be, I don't know, Reform's next leader or whatever delusion he's hopped up on, has come out and said, genuinely hilarious that some random can go on TV and claim they're going to be a candidate for a party and it's just accepted as fact.
	Even more hilarious that critics of said party use drivel to launch attacks and we'll just keep building.
	There's a few problems with this.
	First of all, you waited basically a full day's news cycle until 10pm to address it, which is not good comments.
	John's got a pretty...
	Sharp barb underneath.
	But anyway, carry on.
	I won't speak about John Wong.
	Also, Zia Yusuf, like Charlie Mullins, decided to donate to the party.
	So, Charlie Mullins isn't a nobody.
	He's not some random.
	He knows Farad personally.
	And so the suggestion there was he's leveraging financial and personal gain to insert himself into a movement that he's never been a part of and fundamentally disagrees with.
	And then, hilarious that critics of said party would use drivel to launch into attacks.
	Now, again, it's saying that the critical friends of Reform are outside agitators trying to derail us, whereas all the people within Reform who are trying to broaden the coalition and bring in people who don't necessarily agree with us are on our side.
	And the point being, it doesn't recognize that Reform's own voters, like me, were saying, well, you don't want Mullins because he's a Remainer and he wanted me locked in my home for not taking the jab.
	But it all comes back to the political philosophy.
	On an important matter, say trade, I don't know what their view is.
	Something like Chinese electric vehicles, which will take...
	The entire market, if you sit there like a lemon and let it happen, you won't produce any cars.
	And I don't know what their position, I know what my position is, which is a protectionist position, more like Trump and Vance.
	I mean, that's the only sensible, viable position if you want to keep industry here.
	But I don't know what they think about these things, and I worry that they don't.
	So, I would probably assume, like you do, that it's probably some kind of Thatcherite free trade sort of thing.
	Tried and failed.
	It worked so well the first time.
	Look at Britain now.
	Quite, yes.
	So, to conclude then, it seems that reform actually might need critical friends, actual critical friends, more than it knows.
	So I suggest perhaps, rather than thinking they're outside agitators trying to derail the movement, give them a listen and it might help you win more.
	Anyway, we've got some written comments on the website.
	Sat on that pile of Gov money like you are right now.
	Oh yeah, the Gov household just love me, I bet.
	Anyway, so we've got some written comments with about five or ten minutes left.
	From James McMeeking.
	Great to see William on.
	This country would be a much better place if the two main parties were SDP and Reform instead of Labour and Tories.
	So what's SDP's consistent polling?
	I mean, honestly, at the moment we're in building phase still and people think you can do it overnight, but there have been four insurgent parties in British politics and in political history.
	Labour in 1902 took 20 years to get into power.
	Post-war liberals, they were knackered, 60 candidates, took literally 15 years to get back as a national party.
	Greens, which was the ecology party in the 70s, 20 years.
	UKIP, because people say, you know, like Nigel came from nowhere, Brexit party came from nowhere.
	Nigel, it's a quarter of a century of work.
	You've been going since the 90s.
	No, we have.
	We literally made a huge impact in the 80s and then collapsed to virtually nothing.
	Tiny little pockets.
	So literally six years ago, we started building again and our path is pretty much what the Insurgent Party should be.
	2019 election, we had 20 candidates.
	Last year, we had 122. Next time, we'll have 300, 400. And we'll do much better at everything.
	So then the path for us is growth.
	And we are small, but I think our foundations are correct.
	We've done the work, and most people agree with us on most things.
	And I'm very optimistic.
	We'll keep on going.
	So I will say, I'll do comments in a moment.
	I don't want this to sound insulting at all, but I think you've got a large market of particularly the young men that we've just said about that are interested in national conservatism and also don't like the outsourcing of their economic opportunities to distant lands who fundamentally hate them.
	You've got a large constituency could snap up there.
	Do you think the legacy branding of the SDP and the fact that the graphics are not necessarily exciting?
	No, I know, because we've actually, you know, we have limited resources.
	So we've had to target our election capacity in specific areas where we're strong.
	Now, in South Leeds, South Leeds Council of States, Industrial City, We've tried it.
	This has been road tested.
	If you've ever seen marketing, I say, does it work?
	Yes, it worked.
	We started with 500 votes.
	In the end, after three years of trying this, the public loved it.
	They wanted more.
	As soon as they found out what this offer was, things like the name, it didn't bother anyone at all.
	Absolutely fine.
	And social democracy is a good thing on something like migration.
	I really wish we had a little bit of social democracy because 70% of people are on my position.
	I'm not asking for very much.
	So no, all of that's very good.
	The other main advantage is that it's quite hard to hit us.
	Actually, and we do take some culturally, some quite spicy positions.
	And we, you know, friend Eric Kaufman has advised us that actually, if you want to go all the way, not get and stay in the angry corner, but if you want to win a general election, you've got to have a shield of some sort.
	And actually, the decency, the decent populism that we offer is the shield.
	I don't want anyone in our party, I wouldn't do it myself, to say anything that you would be ashamed of saying in a pub or a cafe in any part of our country.
	And that's what the offer is.
	Decent popularism.
	It can go all the way.
	I'm very optimistic about it.
	All we've got to do is keep on going.
	And not worry too much.
	Row our own boat.
	Not worry too much about what reform are doing.
	I would give credit to Nigel and reform.
	He's been at it for a quarter of a century.
	They are ahead of us in terms of how long they've really been doing it.
	But we're growing very rapidly.
	So I think we can go all the way.
	Excellent.
	Andrew Cooper also compliments your counterpoints that you've provided.
	Bleach Demon.
	William, being the SDB as a small party, what are your incremental goals to being elected?
	Will you focus on winning local council first, then gain momentum by proving your policies to gain seats in parliament, or will there just be more of a focus at the next general election in 29?
	It's a bit of both, but it's basically the green, not on their policies, but on their type of...
	Yeah, so no, so our Brighton is Leeds.
	So I concentrate a lot of effort and resources in Leeds.
	South Leeds, we started rolling it over.
	We've won an election every single year for the last three years.
	There's no elections this year, but the following year, I intend to do the same thing.
	You've got to concentrate.
	You really have to.
	I can't spread the jam thinly over the whole country.
	We have other strong pockets, but South Leeds is our Brighton, so that's the strategy.
	And the strategy nationally is just to double down on the number of candidates.
	You've got to grow.
	And we'll do this.
	We will do this.
	One last one.
	Yes, Islander 3 in the works.
	And hopefully we've resolved all of the problems with shipping and printing before because...
	We don't want the same problems to crop up again because we want to give you guys the best service possible.
	Yes, and thanks to all your support.
	We can keep the lights on on that, but we are still basically held together by duct tape and goodwill over here, and so any time that someone else does something wrong, it's a real headache to try and help us clean it up.
	But, anyway, we are basically out of time.
	I will be back at 3 o'clock with Thompson Talks.
	William, thank you very much.
	Thank you.
	Where can people go to find out more about the STP? stp.org.uk Or national Twitter, which you'll find if you put STP in.
	If you want to have a look at some of the videos, which are great, STP, just put that into YouTube.
	And I'm William Cluson on X. Excellent.
	Thank you very much.
	We will be back tomorrow at 1 o'clock.

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