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April 14, 2025 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters
01:31:44
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1142
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Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
Welcome to the podcast of The Lotus Eaters for Monday, the 14th of April, 2025.
Worst day of the week, I know, but we are here to brighten it up.
I am with Beau and Stephen, and today we're going to be talking about what's going on in Scunthorpe, and then what's going on in Birmingham and why that's terrible, and then, of course, what's going on down at the coast.
Very Britain-heavy episode this week, today, but we covered a lot of American stuff.
So, I think we can.
No particular announcements today.
So, let's just get on because I don't know anything about Scunthorpe Steelworks.
I don't know anything about the subject.
So, please enlighten me.
I'll try and do my best.
Hello, everybody.
It is British Heavy.
It's very important.
Scunthorpe is a specific factory that's been churning out steel for 100 years and 100 and odd years.
And it was really one of the most important parts.
Of British history in terms of building our empire, and particularly in providing the right levels of steel for our military, the Navy, but of course go beyond that, just central infrastructure.
If you think of, like, Indians' railway systems, a lot of that was coming from steel mills in Britain, and in particular it was coming from Scumthorpe.
The importance about Scumthorpe is the last of our major steel.
We had our Welsh steel factory was closed effectively last year whilst they're trying to build some kind of net zero, best improved, recycling-centred factory with hardly anybody,
probably going to be used by AI to actually deliver the process.
But what we had here, it was owned by the Chinese, and they bought it, they say, for about £55 million in 2020.
2019, 2020.
It was unbelievable.
Sorry, we sold Britain's historic empire-building steelworks to the Chinese for only 50 million.
Yeah, about 50, 55 million.
And they're alleging they've put in about 1.2 billion in terms of funding since then.
But we sold it literally for about 55 million in terms of the debt.
And I think in paper, they actually paid for the equity a pound.
So any one of us could have bought that for a pound, provided you got the debt to pay off the initial 50%.
Conservative government.
Yes, a conservative government who did this.
The irony of that is crazy, isn't it?
I've said it before, I think I've said it before, it might have been between segments, but the historical rivalry between China and Britain, specifically over steel.
Mao was obsessed with steel quotas, and it was always to try and...
Get on par with Britain.
Absolutely. And that's obviously much earlier in the 20th century, but still.
Now, we're in a position where, well, where the last big steelworks is owned by a Chinese company.
I mean, talk about tables turned.
Or we just completely lost that competition.
Right, yeah.
And I'm sure a lot of it...
Bowed out of it.
Yeah, I'm sure a lot of it is due to cheap Chinese steel, which allow it to be easily accessible on the market as our own steel.
Well, unsurprisingly...
I believe it goes back further than that.
It goes to our membership of the European Union in parts of the way that we divvied up the continent and our deals and the way that we said, like the UK, you're going to be safe because you have financial services.
We'll give French the farming and a little bit of insurance and some of our aspects.
You can keep your military Britain, you can keep your nuclear weapons, but Germany, you can keep most, you and Italy in particular, can keep the steel and all the manufacturing things, and that's the point.
We've got this new country called the European Union, and we'll be able to trade across each other.
But of course, that doesn't work when you start seeing the changes of our economies, and our economies were changing dramatically because the European Union started to take on board net zero.
Across the spectrum.
And one of the aspects about net zero was they said that Britain needed to reduce CO2 like everybody else.
And in doing so, we were heavy on CO2 because we had coal mines, coal-fired power stations, and we had places like this that relied upon coke, a specific type of coke, to actually be able to run the factory.
We need electricity for these and coke as well, to keep them both going, keep the furnaces going.
And we, of course, started to close them down.
In December 2023, we had Issy-Fran was the last of our coke kind of mines that could have fed this particular factory.
And I'll come to a different point.
I'm probably edging on on it now.
So we could have had that.
And in Yorkshire in 2015, in a kind of apocryphal period of October to December, we actually destroyed two other...
Coal mines by closing them from being able to...
And that's the same sort of coke that's used now.
Just as a quick thing here, I actually looked this up yesterday.
Britain has something like 185 billion tonnes of coal.
Absolutely. We are an island of coal, and for some reason we've decided we're not going to use it because...
Otherwise, China won't get to destroy the earth before we do.
I don't know.
I can't remember exactly what the Labour government's reasons were.
Sorry, Karen.
We've got a coal, a particular coal farm.
Yes, it's in Cumbria, and I love the Lake District, I love the whole area, that isn't that far away from Scunthorpe.
So in terms of travel, actually, we could be able to transport coal to this with a very minimal amount of CO2 on road and transport.
And I'll come back to what we're going to do with Japan.
Talk about this point later.
By canal boat, like it's actually the 19th century.
Could have done something like that.
Literally bringing the tons of coal to this particular factory at a very low cost and also environmentally a lot better.
Very low impact.
So we closed our coal-fired factories down.
First of all, obviously, Thatcher decided we didn't need as much anyway.
But if we remember, we banked up a lot of our coal to be able to take out the miners by buying it from China and other parts of the world.
So we had a supply of coal from these countries to be able to destroy our miners in order to close our mines.
That's stage one.
Then we have the Conservatives and Labour coming alongside our parts of the membership of the European Union.
Here's our deal.
We've got to close down some of our factories based on net zero.
I feel like we're being smothered to death.
Yeah. You know, I feel like we're just like, oh no, someone's got your arm, okay, I can't move that arm, oh, they've got that arm, and now it's got the chloroform over your face, and now you're just going to go...
I feel like we're just being smothered.
Like a tourniquet around your neck.
Yeah. Slowly tightening it up.
It does feel like that.
The tightening up now is about the 2,000-odd people.
2,800, I think, were working here in 2,000-odd.
That were working in Wales, who are about to potentially lose their jobs, because it's still not clear that we can save this.
And I will say that there is a good chance, but what the Japanese firms, Jisingtou, was saying is that they're losing £700,000 a day.
Right. Huge amount of money, £700,000 a day.
And they'd also had, were deciding to cancel the last contract of the Coke that was going to come in.
If it didn't come in, apparently...
Why not?
If you didn't, we're going to close this down because we can't afford it.
The Tory party went into some sort of deal, and it's alleged that the Chinese wanted more money.
The Labour Party said that they weren't going to agree with the deal, so the Chinese said, right, we're going to close the factory.
We can't afford it.
Well, who can afford £700,000 a day?
Now, we have MPs who are arguing it's the Chinese deliberately did this to close this down.
But actually, they've come in, and one of the reasons why they've decided it's too expensive is because we've closed down our factories and our energy costs have shot through the roof.
Yeah, we've got the highest energy costs in the world.
And I have a map on that.
So we now have Keir Starmer coming in and saying...
Trust me, I have just saved Sconfort, like some sort of Superman with coal around his neck and steel on his arms.
It's just a joke to say that we have saved this.
And by the way, I just love the fact that we've stepped in to save British Steel, just to show how much of a joke they are.
If you look in the third paragraph, they talk about building the biggest theme park in Europe, in Bedford.
Maybe they'll dig some kind of steel or coal theme park.
For the North East, for the jobs that they'll lose eventually.
But, like, if we ever intend to build anything in this country again, surely we're going to need a supply of steel.
Yes. And becoming dependent on foreign steel as probably one of the most core building materials in the world just seems really short-sighted.
Yeah, and I'm going to come across...
I'm just going to quick...
Quickly go to the next one.
Now, he's gone out and said, we have saved Scunthorpe.
And then you had a whole load of preening...
Actually, it's quite funny.
Preening Preet Kawagit Gill here, an MP, who was one of many, many Labour MPs who on the day say, I'm on a train coming to Saturday to save Scunthorpe so we can secure Britain's steel industry.
Steel industry?
You mean steel factory?
You've already let all the rest of the industry go, love.
And it was part of your net zero policy that did this because you've driven up costs.
But there they are, preening.
We've done it.
And then we go to the next one and we have the man who said he was a solicitor but not a solicitor.
Just like the economist.
He said she was an economist.
Exactly. It's kind of like generally the sort of theme of what we are.
The government, I like this, is acting in the national interest.
Finally, that's true.
To secure the future of UK steelmaking, can't argue with that.
Secure thousands of jobs and protect the UK's national security and supply chains.
If it's just one steel factory that doesn't have coke supplies coming to it from in Britain, that's hardly securing the future of anything.
It actually makes it more look like a museum piece.
And I think you've picked up the point.
The point is that when we come across on this, and we go on to this, they're saying we're securing it, and I get it.
We do need to have steel to secure it for our industry.
Three key areas, military and our own infrastructure are the two main points.
And the rest is just, how are you going to build all the houses in Britain?
You're going to have to import steel.
And what's one of the biggest steel places that's manufacturing it in the world?
China. If you want to have your wind farms, where are they coming from?
China. And where has Ed Miliband recently been begging to get his steel from for the wind farms?
China. So you're not really securing it if you're still doing all these deals.
Two quick things.
If we were in some sort of total war situation, the enemy knows where Scunthorpe is.
One strike on Scunthorpe and our steel industry is wiped out.
China has the front foot.
And so now we've got all these various MPs, Ian Duncan Smith saying, it's the Chinese deliberately want to do it.
Actually, the reality is, if you go into the next one, this is where the issue of security comes in.
And the cost.
Millions on coal from Japan to save our steel.
Why do we have to buy Japanese coal from the entire other side of the world?
And it's not just a cheap amount?
£700 million.
Is what they're going to give the Japanese for the coal that we could be digging in lots of places all over.
I would take 700 million and open up one of our own coal mines and have it delivered.
I mean, I can accept that Britain, not a giant island, doesn't have huge amounts of natural resources, but the one natural resource we have...
Aside from grass, is coal.
We've had Alex the Steam Guy on once.
I like him and I talk to him because he knows about this sort of thing.
And yeah, I said, so wait, there was famously massive seams of coal sort of in the North East and in Wales.
Are they still there?
And he looked at me like...
Yes, of course there's still there.
Of course there's still there.
The Chinese haven't actually dug under the ground like we did in the Iran-Iraq war where, you know, Kuwait was actually digging into Iraq's oil and stealing it.
They haven't taken it away.
It's still there.
You know, Bob the Builder could probably pick it up and get it out.
Did we exhaust all our coal in the Victorian era?
No. No.
There's tons still.
So we're not taking it.
Hundreds of millions of tonnes.
Sorry, yeah.
I looked it up.
It was 180 million tonnes.
So we've got hundreds of millions of tonnes of coal.
Most of it is actually very close to where this steel factory is.
It would save us on net zero costs in terms of transport, but we will pay £700 million to put Japanese coal, which has to be dug, at a great environmental cost, then transported.
At great environmental cost to us, and we're still not secure, because if it doesn't get here in time, the furnace goes down and it doesn't work.
It's only going from literally the other side of the world.
Could it be further away?
Exactly. What possible risk of interception could it have when it's sailing past China?
I know someone in the comments said, the Marshall Islands would be further away.
But still, the other side of the world, how absurd.
It is.
And then I look at this.
So with 700 million to Japan, where would 700 million be invested in the UK?
You know, that's actually pretty good.
I mean, in the north of England, where they need it.
Where we need jobs.
There were 350,000 jobs in steel, you know, right up to the 80s, 70s and 80s.
What sort of jobs were that good paying jobs with a nice salary for people instead of having the decline that we've got up there?
But we go on to the next one.
We see that you've got this.
We could show a clip of it just briefly, but not too long, because it's watching a train go on with coal on the back.
But look at this.
This Chinese longest coal transport route, and it's transporting 1.87,000 miles of railway links of Inner Mongolia bringing Chinese coal to their factories for their steel.
We're talking coming over from Cumbria to Scumbria.
They've got 1,800 kilometres to bring coal to their factories.
We've got, what, 180 miles?
If that.
And it's the longest train bringing 200 million tonnes.
We would be...
Okay, it's more than what we've got in our country, but bloody hell.
Why can they do it and we can't?
And then they ask why they've got cheaper coal, cheaper energy.
And I think we come on to the next one.
Well, I mean, why can't they do it?
Well, their government is acting in the interests of their nation.
Yes. Our government is trying to kill us through next one.
I know, it's rhetorical, but...
I wanted to show you this.
The next couple of clips is this.
This is Ravenscraig in Scotland.
So they're saying, why are you protecting Scunthorpe?
You didn't protect Ravenscraig.
Well, actually, they wouldn't protect Scunthorpe if it wasn't for other reasons I'm going to talk about in a minute.
In a moment.
But you didn't get to protect Ravenscraig and you see them just blowing up our blast furnaces.
You're blowing them up.
Now you say it's national security, we need them.
Why weren't you doing that when you were thinking about Ravenscraig?
And we have Scunthorpe coming up here and at double standards because in Wales exactly the same issue.
Let that go to rack and ruin.
And I come to it, and I think I look at what Nick Timothy says in the next clip, linking along here.
British Steel ought to be a turning point.
It should be.
No more to net-zero unilateralism.
I agree.
No more to self-indulgence and coke and coal.
Let's dig it ourselves.
No more naivety on Chinese trade.
No more critical infrastructure in Chinese hands.
But Labour wants to let Chinese firm control our wind farms.
The thing is, is this kind of conservative?
Yeah. He is.
Yeah, yeah.
Elected this time round.
Absolutely no sympathy.
The Conservatives were just as guilty of this as selling off the national infrastructure as the Labour Party are.
Well, under Cameron...
Under Major, they were doing exactly this.
I admit Nick Timothy has always been one of those who's been anti-net zero.
He's on the right.
This is his first time round.
He can sit in the cuck chair when the rest of his party sells off the country.
And instead of criticising and saying, we made the mistakes in the first place, and I want to criticise my party for doing so, and now can legitimately, having done that, now criticise the Labour Party for doing it.
But I also have this interesting point.
No more critical infrastructure in China.
Why is it only critical infrastructure?
Why is any of our infrastructure owned by a single foreigner?
Most of our banks, 60% of financial services are owned by US banks.
Or effectively, we're owned on the internet and the web by America.
If they decide to turn it off tomorrow because we no longer support their ideology or a particular way that they want to control our country, they can do so.
Now, they might say, that's fine.
What about the European Union?
They own our water and our electricity companies.
Our trains.
Our trains.
Is that not critical?
It's train fares in the world because we are subsidising European trains.
It just drives me mad.
So I'm asking the question, why is it suddenly that the Chinese and the infrastructure issue coming up now, which is important, and I agree, but why is it only the Chinese?
And I think it's because, as we're moving along then, we look at this.
Sorry, I'm moving it.
The answer to China wasn't willing to lose energy prices.
Look where we are in energy prices.
Yeah, I know.
It's ridiculous.
Above Taiwan and Canada, even Russia, you know, all the way down there.
That's another reason why we are costing us more.
But I think it's because we're hitting the Chinese because of this.
China is waging a silent war and it's time to act.
Who is saying that?
That is Suela Braverman.
She is putting out this picture that we're already at war with China and they're doing this deliberately, as Ian Duncan Smith has said.
And I think this is because we're trying to build up towards a war with China.
We've already got a silent war going on with them now and infrastructure.
America clearly has an issue because China's become successful.
Incredibly successful.
Products everywhere in the world.
Owns infrastructure.
But if you've got money, you own the bonds in the US.
If you've got cash, as we once did, you went and bought assets all over the world to protect yourself.
It's because of our own weaknesses in our own economy.
Because we fall and fall to net zero, the European Union, masses of regulations, increased costs on salaries, that we're not competitive anymore.
We now have to go and start a silent war with a country that is.
Now, that might be an important thing to do for the future.
It's not just us that are saying it.
They're saying that it's about being scared of Nigel Farage because he's doing well in the North East.
It might be.
It might be.
Is that why they're protecting Scumthorpe?
Do you think that's really the major reason why they're going to put 700 million up there?
I think it might be an ancillary reason.
No, I think that's probably true.
And the thing is, like you've shown, it won't matter.
Scunthorpe's industrial production is going to be a relic.
It's not going to be an essential part of a booming industry.
Do you know what struck me as, over the weekend, Keir Starmer's intervention and that statement we had up earlier?
It struck me as, obviously, too little too late.
To a crazy degree, too little too late.
What it strikes me as is...
Government, by reaction, is that somewhere in his team, they said, oh, we need to be seen to be doing something about this.
We need to be seen to be drawing a line.
And so they cook up a little statement.
And, I mean, it's not a small thing to nationalise that, but nonetheless, it's far too little, far too late.
It's just by reaction.
They'll just know they'll get really bad headlines and things if they do absolutely nothing.
So they've done this.
Nonsense. I think the Labour Party are in trouble because the Foreign Office have been running the show on this for a long time.
The Foreign Office have said that we've got to stick with the European Union and if they're saying net zero, reduce our kind of energy and therefore it leads to loss of businesses.
So be it.
But we have to replace that by working more globally with China.
And they've reached out to China, and China has taken over things, and now they don't like that.
And the Foreign Office is trying to back off and go, hey.
At the same time, politically, the Labour Party have got in stock because they're part of the net zero.
They've been backing this for a long time.
They've even put Miliband in a big way of saying he should do it.
And they're seeing an opportunity to get...
So I think this is minor.
The main thing is, this is last year, the army chief, this was General Soroli Walker, came out and said, we've got an axis of upheaval, he actually went on to say an axis of evil, of Russia, China and Iran, and we must double our lethality to prepare for war in 2027.
We can't go for war, as you said, with China.
We've got no factories.
We need that steel.
We need that steel.
So we're going to try and shoot Chinese with steel.
No, I'm afraid not.
Yeah, so I think it's...
No, I must have missed it.
But I also came across the Communist Party of Great Britain and they had a link saying that we're preparing for war in China.
So we have Suela Braverman, we have the army, we have the Guardian, we have lots of people saying we're in this silent war with China.
And now we have Ian Duncan Smith and we've got Trump.
I think that this is one of the major reasons behind this.
The Foreign Office collapsing?
On its own strategy that it's been working on since the early 70s with the EU, it's now coming back on them and they're turning around and going, oh, we're in major problems and now we've got to try and prepare ourselves.
And what's one of the best ways for a government to try and put money into the economy?
Military. And what is Keir Starmer doing with the so-called hard right of the Labour Party?
They're starting to put more money into the military and the idea will be...
That they can do that in the eastern and northeastern parts of the country.
We've completely done this to ourselves.
Yes. There's absolutely no reason that we should have exported any industries to China at all.
The thing is, I would say, a hot war with China...
I mean, we're both nuclear powers.
So what, we're going to have a nuclear exchange?
They're going to nuke London and we're going to nuke Beijing, are we?
I mean, calm down.
I mean, don't sell it.
It'd be one in the eye for the Nothing Ever Happens crew.
Yeah, it would, yeah.
Short of that, even if it didn't go to full-blown exchange, their army is famously giant, isn't it?
It's also famously terrible.
Well, yeah.
But we're not going to be invading mainland China any time soon.
This is part of a long-term strategy.
What some would say is that we needed to destroy Syria so we could get through Iran.
We needed Iraq to give ourselves a surrounding Iran.
We needed to get through Ukraine so that we can smash Russia very quickly, which you can if Ukraine's in our hands.
It's easy to get across there.
Napoleon showed that.
And once we've weakened all the friends with China, we then hit them economically.
Both on the financials and on the trade.
Trump's trying to do the trade now with massive trade tariffs.
And what we've seen is China are removing billions of dollars at the moment from the global financial economy because they're aware of this, they're preparing this, and they're building up their military, they're building up their army, but they've also got friends.
They've actually built a lot of friends across Asia as well who don't like this hegemony.
So it won't just be us going up against China.
Are we economically or even structurally, morally or culturally in a position where we've got many kids in this country who say, I won't fight for this country?
We will absolutely not be able to fight a long, hot war.
It reminds me very clearly of the early portion of the Cold War, where pretty much the whole world...
It started to fall into two camps of influence, the Soviets or the Americans.
And it's sort of that now.
It's sort of China versus...
Almost everyone who isn't China, kind of.
But yeah, China's got the upper hand, certainly, in all sorts of ways.
I think we're going to see various leadership contests across the country being developed and devoured of particular politicians who arrive on one side of the camp or the other.
And I think Argentina was one of the first, because of course Argentina was moving to accept a lot of Chinese goods and Chinese deals over...
Their infrastructure and also over their minerals.
And then in comes somebody from out of the blue who wins massively, who's now a massive Trump supporter and has cancelled everything to do with China.
We're seeing these battles and wars starting across Africa.
We have more live conflicts now than any part of our modern history going on.
And I think all of this is about that kind of secret war that we're having along the lines you've just identified.
In the Cold War, it devolved into relatively small places.
I mean, a place like French Indochina or Vietnam.
Like the battle between, in the end, the Soviets or the leftist communist bloc and the Americans and the free world, whatever you want to call it.
In Indochina, of all places.
Or, you know, we're ready to have a nuclear exchange over Cuba.
And things like that.
You see China doing all sorts of stuff in Africa, in sub-Saharan Africa, and the countermeasures against them.
I think there is, at least economically, a cold war, not even all that cold, between China and its adversaries, or between the United States and its adversaries, whichever way you want to put it.
We just decided that we'd find a hostile creature and feed it until it was giant, and then we're surprised, oh, this thing actually hates us.
We knew that to begin with.
It's the party of Mao that controls China.
There's never been a secret.
I don't know why we've done this, but hey, what can we do?
Anyway, Scanline says, have you considered that the British coal miners would end up with a black face from working?
And that's racist.
I'm sure that's the Labour Party's primary concern.
And the hapsification says, COVID-19 and the Ukraine war showed so many of the points of failure in this country.
Well, I mean, we're just, we're not what we used to be.
And I'm very tired of us pretending like we're some sort of world power.
We're not a world power.
I'm surprised in a way China views us as some sort of...
Yeah. Strategic rival.
Well, it must be a historical holdover, right?
It must be that...
Because Mao used to bang on about British steel production.
I mean, we're still, like, in the top ten economies in the world, and we've got nukes, and we've got aircraft carriers, and nuclear submarines, and all that sort of thing.
That's great.
That's brilliant.
In one way, we can sit at the top table, okay?
We've got a permanent seat on the Security Council.
And the second anything...
But the reality is, if...
Yeah. China could wipe us off the map, and we couldn't do that to them.
That's the bottom line.
Nuclear weapons would take us out.
It wouldn't necessarily take out America.
And as you say, you've got the Five Eyes principle, you've got certain nukes in the submarines, and financial services are probably our only really major significance.
We're not going to supply...
The kind of populace to be able to fight a war.
That's why they want the Poles, and that's why they want Turkey, because they've got the massive armies to be part of our armed forces, because they've got the manpower there.
But we have a very small, but they still think, significant influence to be able to deal with.
And we're a poor country now.
We can see this on our streets every day.
We're not as wealthy to be able to compete.
We could have been if we had not done things such as net zero, canceling out, and allowing others to buy our infrastructure.
We used to rule the world, you know.
Anyway, let's move on to the next.
I swear to God, it's real, though.
It's genuinely real.
So let's move on to the next terrible thing about the United Kingdom.
Again, England particularly.
Let's talk about Birmingham.
I'm sure you're familiar with this clip.
I'm not going to play it because he swears a lot.
But basically, he's just a man who wakes up, realizes in Birmingham...
And then he's angry, very angry, and he starts raging on the internet about it.
And there are lots of good reasons for this, and we usually focus on demographic issues in Birmingham because, of course, they're a massive issue.
But there are also other massive issues that come along with being run by the Labour government for decades and decades and decades.
Wasting money is basically a professional accomplishment of the Birmingham City Council, right?
And it's genuinely difficult to find.
Examples of where money has been so effectively pissed away into nothing, right?
So I'm not an expert on Birmingham, right?
So I sat down to talk about this because I was like, look, this is all in the news.
I have to figure out what's going on.
And so you're going to get an overview.
From someone who's on the outside.
So if you're in Birmingham, you are doubtless going, oh, you don't even know how bad it is.
You're only touching the surface.
The waste and corruption goes so much deeper.
But you get examples like this from 2017, right?
Where they decided that they were going to stop using, after something like only three years out of a five-year condo, three years earlier in the contract, with this contracting company called Capita.
And it's because it was...
Just costing them an unbelievable amount of money.
I mean, for example, they say in the first six years, this firm was paid a billion pounds a year to do whatever it is they were doing, provide whatever services.
Then in 2011, they attempted to offshore a bunch of IT services to India, which they had to reverse and cost them a million pounds a year for the privilege.
In 2013, they were providing one single computer to Birmingham offices for 7,000 pounds.
I mean, that's a hell of a gaming machine.
It's a sweet rig.
Yeah, that's a hell of a rig.
Chief executive with big screens in front of them.
It's one of those things like the US military pay hundreds and hundreds of dollars for a spanner or something.
Well, because somebody somewhere down the line is siphoning off.
This money.
It's not sort of by accident.
Yeah, and I'm with the Independence Day thesis on this.
It's actually going to Black Ops to keep aliens underground.
But the council also faced a bill of £1.2 million to develop a website from the Library of Birmingham.
1.2 million for a library.
Yeah, and then an annual running cost of £190,000 a year.
That's nonsense.
Of course it is.
It's all complete nonsense, but that's the point, right?
Like, this is a genuine, impressive example of how to just keep effing things up and just, oh, whose money is it?
Well, it's not their money.
You know, it's not their money.
It's people living in Birmingham for their sins, their money.
For example, in 2023, they were like, right.
Birmingham City Council needs an entirely new IT department.
How much is that going to cost?
19 million?
19 million.
That's quite a lot, right?
But if it's the entire council's IT, now it turns out it's going to be 100 million.
The estimate was 19 million.
It's five times more than that.
And the guy in this interview is like, look, I just want to be transparent over costs.
Transparent? Yeah, I mean, that is transparent.
Yeah, 19 million.
No, 100 million.
Sorry. He looks as though someone's just found out that, you know, Maybe he's sitting on the rest of the 100 million.
In his defence, I don't think it's his fault.
That's the thing.
He was the new leader who came in.
That sort of money, though, the numbers just don't seem to add up.
Really? Hang on.
No, no, no.
Put a pin in that.
We're going to come back to numbers not adding up very shortly, okay?
I'll just say, for that amount of money, you can design and build a lunar lander.
Yeah, I was going to say, for that amount of money, I'd be able to found an entirely new city full of these things.
Anyway, right, so, we carry on.
Because in 2023, Birmingham City Council were sued by women.
And these women said, you know what?
We're not being paid equally.
And it's like, right, so what's the difference?
Well... There are a bunch of bin men who are being paid to clear out rubbish, and there are a bunch of women who are sat in air-conditioned offices, and these pay brackets are not the same.
And somehow, the courts were like, yeah, good point.
You've got to pay up.
Do you want to know how much they had to end up paying?
No. For equal pay claims?
Again, this is very feminist nonsense.
Money they don't have, whatever this number is.
Whatever it is, yeah.
Money they don't have.
But it's also total feminist nonsense that's based on the idea that working in an air-conditioned office and getting in on flexi-time or whatever is the equivalent of doing actual labour, right?
£750 million.
That's how much...
But it's got to have had interest and backdated and all of this.
Yep, exactly, right?
And they're complaining, well, Birmingham, when this was written, Birmingham hasn't paid out any of this money yet.
And I'm like, yeah, they probably don't have any of that money.
What the hell are you talking about?
That's nearly a billion pounds.
That's an obscene amount.
It's disgusting.
It's looting.
When you pay attention to the news, hundreds of millions get thrown around all the time.
When you're talking about films, like a big Disney production, it'll be hundreds of millions or whatever.
And you talk about Elon, the world of Elon and space stuff.
I do a fair bit.
You're talking the billions all the time.
Remember that something like 100 million, let alone 700 million, is an obscene amount of money.
It's just inconceivable.
If your bank account had 100 million in it, you'd be like, okay, what now?
I can buy anything I want.
There's literally nothing I can't buy.
Then you'll never run out of money.
But anyway, so this was the GMB union, which was supporting more than 3,000 pay claims against not only Birmingham, but Coventry, Westmoreland, Cumberland, Glasgow, Dundee, and Fife.
They say, well, look, They've handled equal pay issues in the past poorly.
It's because it's nonsense, right?
Because you may remember in 2023, it was all very feminist.
They were like, well, I mean, women are being paid less for being women.
It's like, no, they're being paid less because they do easier work and they do fewer hours.
And that's literally where it all comes from.
But anyway, so after this, Birmingham, of course, went bankrupt, right?
The Birmingham Council just went bankrupt.
And these are the people demanding pay justice, by the way.
Including someone who obviously was working really hard on it.
Yeah, she's been busy.
She's been there for a long, long time.
But look at the propaganda.
Fair and full compensation for the discrimination faced by Birmingham's working women.
It's just feminist nonsense.
It's just feminist nonsense.
None of these people produce anything, and yet they are now looting the Treasury of Birmingham.
They are now rendering the city bankrupt.
And so this is just crazy.
Absolutely crazy.
It's got to be said, it's the GMB who are behind most of the big issues that we face there.
The GMB are the ones who support a lot of the NGOs funding on immigration cases.
They're the ones who are funding lots of cases to take the government, Conservative government to court over Brexit and lots of other issues.
They're using their money all the time to act like a political party in the background controlling our country.
No, no, that's exactly right.
And this is entirely woke stuff.
This is nonsense that shouldn't be possible, but is because we live in a madhouse.
And so there's a great timeline here, but as you can see, in February and March 2024, the Birmingham Council got...
Bailed out by the central government to the tune of $1.25 billion.
So you are financing these woke unions, suing Birmingham Council over nonsense claims so woke people can get money from the council.
You're financing it, just FYI.
I'm sure that it's going to be something that's cleared up.
But then, obviously, there were some strings attached where you see the council has got to start passing budget cuts.
Well, that's a problem because...
I mean, they're obviously going to be massively over their own budget, but that means that some people are going to lose their jobs.
How do the unions feel about this?
Can't have it.
That's exactly it.
They can't have it.
Can't sack people to pay for the people we've asked you to pay for extra money for people who are no longer working for them.
Yep, and so we'll put a pin in that, and we'll come back to that as well.
One quick thing, I don't know if you're getting onto it or not, but has anyone been held accountable?
Any individuals?
In the council.
What does that mean?
They're doing exactly as they're supposed to.
Piss your money down the drain.
It's not a job.
If it's a private company that goes into receivership or something, usually they'll come in, they'll get rid of the people that made all the decisions and it would be like the banks that start saying, well, you've...
you have to sell all your assets and you have to do X, Y, Z. And we can get some of our badass, relentless accountants to come in and actually balance the books regardless of how destructive that is.
I can guarantee that you'll never get anyone who's the chief executive of Birmingham and all his back office staff and all those members losing their jobs.
And they're the ones who are actually part of the major issue because they're running councils.
It's not really the councillors.
It's these people at the back end.
And they're the ones who all should be fired.
So as far as I can tell, nobody has been...
I would say not even fired, but maybe even investigated and prosecuted for sort of malfeasance.
Yeah, you would think, but no, I've seen absolutely gross incompetence.
I don't know what you'd call it.
Feel free to check me in the comments, but I couldn't find it when I was researching this segment.
So if it has happened, I wasn't aware of it.
And as far as I can tell, it just hasn't happened.
Anyway, so Birmingham were audited in 2022, before the bankruptcy, and auditors Grant Thornton...
Put out what they called a, quote, jaw-droppingly bad report.
Councillors at an audit committee said they were shocked and ashamed by the report's contents.
Oh, well, if they're shocked and ashamed, then that's fine.
Oh, well, that's all right, let's move on.
That's it?
That's literally it.
That's literally it.
You can just see the councillors going to their nice dinner and going, I'm shocked and shamed.
I'm shocked and shamed.
It's not going to affect their pensions.
Five and a half, six?
Yes, I'm that shocked and that shamed.
That's exactly it.
It's not going to affect the pensions, right?
The council has had to start cutting things, but not the £283 million gold-plated pensions for their staff.
So don't worry about that.
It's, you know, actually services that are going to get cut, not the pensions of the councillors.
We've done such a good job on this.
And there are just, there are some just really stupid examples, right?
So how about if Birmingham Council bring in regulation that say, look, you have to have clean vehicles in Birmingham streets, in Birmingham streets.
And then we spend two million on vehicles that just don't even comply with that and then hand them out as council vehicles or whatever they were doing with them.
And it's like, okay, but what are you doing?
You know, what are you doing?
The entire thing...
Is, as the housing ombudsman called it, maladministration.
Severe maladministration.
Again, as far as I can tell...
No one's actually been punished for any of this.
They say, For the way that it is being administered.
And in fact, it's taking on the aspect of a kind of feeding frenzy.
It's like this giant whale corpse that's bloated, and it's fish just coming out and biting.
I need to get as big a mouthful of this as I can.
No, sue, sue, sue, union, sue, sue, sue.
We'll just get as much as we can of it before the entire thing just pancakes and explodes.
And that's genuinely what Birmingham makes me think of.
I'm reading through and it's talking about...
Birmingham being the council that actually carries out its own inspections and it's got its contractors and it's one of the worst councils for being able to look after its own tenants as a landlord on that.
And so we know that when you're dealing with contractors and building...
I'm glad you used the word contractor as well, because one of the things, and we'll get into this in a minute, one of the things they've obviously done, as we saw in the first link, is pissed away billions and billions of pounds on contractors when they could have just hired people to do those jobs at half the price.
But instead they decided, oh, we'll just pay contractors, and I assume these contractors have got familial relationships with the councillors or something.
I haven't looked into it, I'm not making any specific allegations, but I suspect there's going to be a lot of that in.
Going on there.
And so, we come to the bin strikes.
Because after all of this, the thing that has really brought Birmingham into the public consciousness at the moment is bin strikes.
Now, bin strikes are not a new thing for Birmingham, as you can see.
So, seven years ago, in 2017, Birmingham had a massive amount of bin strikes.
This went on for seven weeks.
And you can...
This was the Knight Union.
So, a different union that is plaguing Birmingham.
Over just looting the town for money.
Huge amounts of problems with the rubbish piling up in the streets, as you can see from the photos, because of spending cuts the council was trying to make.
Now, the cuts didn't affect the rubbish bin collection services.
They specifically carved them out of these cuts.
So, no, we need to be able to.
But they do give us an interesting thing here in this article.
That is, 80% of the council's budget is spent on 20% of the population, which is really interesting, because what it is, it's the same thing they do in Swindon.
80% of our council tax bills are redistributive.
So it's about providing healthcare and services and, like, quality of life privileges to people who are disabled or, you know, in some other way, disadvantaged, which means that essentially the...
People who are normal and who are just working hard are kind of getting looted.
And what ought to be fulfilled by charities is being done specifically by the government.
You don't seem happy about this.
No, no, I was just thinking unions.
It's funny for me to say who's...
One of the least left-wing people you might meet.
But I'm not actually against unions in sort of the platonic perfect sense of unionization.
But once they're overtaken by ideologues or people that don't care about the host organism or the country, then they're terrible.
They're terribly destructive.
It just put me in mind when you said that...
Back in the 2017 version, they'd already ring-fenced the bin people, but yet the bin people still kicked up a fuss anyway.
They're like a modern poster actor, where they just want to eat everything else that's around them that's edible, and once they've eaten it, they'll turn around and say, what else can we eat?
And when I look at one of the points you've raised, which is something that I've wanted to do through the centre that I look at with migration, is look at how many charities...
Are receiving funding from local authorities?
Because we now know that charities across the whole spectrum are no longer charities.
Most of the money that they get, you talk about 80%, which is probably about right for them as well, is that they're getting that from local government and central government funding.
So if we removed all that money from the charities as well, they'd have to go back to who they actually are.
Then are the charities that we've got in existence ones that are really looking after that 20%?
Are they really looking after themselves?
And that is a perennial problem that we have.
So, yeah, this strike had been going on since the summer.
The union was complaining that, quote, 120 jobs were at risk under Birmingham City Council's restructuring plans and that low-paid workers could lose up to £5,000 a year.
So, this is a perennial thing that the United Union is saying.
He's like, look, you're thinking about restructuring.
And the council are like, yeah, well, we've got to modernize to save five million a year from our budget.
And they're like, no, no, watch.
No bins.
And, of course, this was disgusting.
Apparently, it was a buffet for rats.
12,000 people signed a petition about it.
And the council leader ended up quitting over it.
This is the closest I've seen to accountability.
I must have been against its council.
And, uh...
John Clancy was just like, you know what?
It's just gross and I can't bother to deal with it.
And there's too much media speculation.
And so I'm out.
And so anyway, that eventually petered out.
And then in 2019, there was another bin strike.
Because why not?
This was because in the previous bin strike, they say that this industrial action was because Unite members had been denied council payments made to GMB members who did not go on strike in 2017.
So this is a strike because of an impropriety because of the last strike.
So we're striking again because we didn't get exactly what we wanted.
But this is your town.
This is your city that you're living in.
That you're turning into a disgusting dump.
I can't believe you want to live like this.
But we'll get on to why exactly it's not a problem for them to live like that soon.
Anyway, so this comes to the latest strike, which...
It's been six years later, and so members of the Unite Union once again went on strike over the fact that they claim that the...
The way that things are being done is being restructured.
And this will leave 150 members £8,000 worse off, which gives you an indication of how much inflation we've suffered, right?
It was £5,000 six years ago before COVID.
Now it's £8,000.
But I imagine the job hasn't changed that much and the wages haven't changed that much.
How many people was that?
150. It's not 120 now, it's 150.
That's not 5,000, it's 8,000.
A giant city of millions of people can...
And leaving filth there.
Yes. Okay.
That makes sense.
Sure. So, 350 workers.
Actually earning the £8,000 is...
You know what?
I didn't look it up, actually.
I'd be fascinated to find, because I know that in our Hampshire area, they're all on £40,000 to £45,000.
Yeah, yeah.
And that's not a bad whack for anywhere to live in.
I don't know why I didn't know that.
So, apparently, the estimated salary is only £21,000 in Birmingham.
But I find that...
Difficult to believe.
Again, I've got sympathy for underpaid people doing a horrible job that are being squeezed even harder.
I've got sympathy for them.
But then when it comes down to, you know, your union is sort of forced to, you'll be accused of being a scab or whatever if you don't go along with it.
And meanwhile, your own city turns into a public health issue.
It turns into an embarrassment the world over.
Which it absolutely is.
And it's been caused by another one of your unions taking the council to court for people who are not doing your job, which is hard a graph because they're sitting in an office to get an extra lot of money, which has now bankrupt them, so they can't pay you the additional sums of money.
Yeah. No-one's putting that logic to the bin men themselves, saying trade union in GMB, you're at fault for this.
Where is Unite attacking GMB?
They're not.
Because the one thing that we do know about all unions is the guys and the girls at the top are doing very well for themselves.
Hold on to that thought as well.
We will come back to that very shortly.
Anyway, so one of the complaints that they have, which is fair to be honest, they say that the council were employing nearly 500 temporary workers, which cost the council...
18.9 million pounds a year and if they had just employed them at salaries of 25,000 pounds a year that would have been 12.3 million.
So they're obviously, and this is completely true, they are obviously wasting huge amounts of money on agency workers.
And so the General Secretary, Sharon Graham, says, well, Birmingham Council has been wasting millions upon millions boosting agency profits.
That's true.
Rather than going through the hassle of recruiting, you know, finding a good person, recruiting that person, getting them on board, and then having them as a permanent member of staff, which would have saved the council, and therefore taxpayers, loads of money, they said, so we don't care, it's not our money.
We don't care.
And we're just going to pay 50% more than we ought to pay just to get this thing done.
And so they're furious about all of this.
Maladministration is kind.
Yeah, it's very soft.
And so they're rightfully and understandably annoyed about all of this.
But I think the whole thing has just become a very toxic environment where it's just about getting yours while the getting is good because it seems understandable that this town is going down, man.
This is not going to go on forever.
Anyway, so fair point by them, but they're refusing to negotiate, obviously.
And then just finally, yeah, let's talk about the people behind it.
You'd be surprised to learn that the union bosses, they've got the...
Left-wing firebrand here.
Anne-Marie Kilkline lives 50 miles away from Birmingham, and she lives in a leafy suburb in a £600,000 detached house.
Oh, no surprise there.
Yeah, that gets its rubbish collected.
There's a husband putting his bins out.
How did they get a mortgage on a £600,000 on a salary?
Well, you know...
I bet they're doing pretty well for themselves.
Yeah, but it pays pretty good.
Yeah. It pays pretty good.
So that's how they can afford to live...
With an absolute asshole, because they don't live in Birmingham.
Lives in Nottingham.
Not her problem, bro.
Yeah. Isn't that the classic thing?
The world over, every single time, is that you end up with a party.
There's been an inner party in the party, whether it's actually the Soviet Union or Maoist China or in a George Orwell novel, whatever it is, or in most unions, in the end.
There's an inner party that do well for themselves out of it all at the expense of everyone else.
All of the actual binmen doubtless live in Birmingham.
So they have to live amongst the refuse and the rats.
On 21 grand.
On 21 grand.
Houses they can't afford.
And then she's going to be on six figures a year and she lives in Nottingham.
That's right.
In a nice detached house in a leafy suburb that has none of these problems.
Just incredible.
And they won't face the consequences about this at all.
No, no, of course.
All these people who are in the council who are bringing out the contracts, the ones who have got maladministration, they'll still do very well.
They've got the nice pensions.
They're causing the strikes.
They're union members.
They are doing very well, and they'll have good pensions.
But the actual workers who rely on them to do the job and the people who are paying the bills are the ones that are suffering.
Remember, it's just basic communism for these people.
It's like, yeah, no, if I...
Speak the words, then I can live like a prince.
But I'm supporting the people, folks.
He's got a DACA in Nottingham.
And in the end, I don't want to be too alarmist about this, because I did a segment about this a couple of weeks back.
In the end, if you're not careful, you end up with cholera.
Or typhus.
Or the plague.
But anyway, we'll leave it there.
Bronco says, the Heritage Railways can't even run on coal anymore.
No more flying Scotsmen.
True. Mark Arabic says, there are about three to five councils in the UK which are not looking at bankruptcy in the next few years, all from mismanagement.
Yeah, the only ones are basically a bunch of conservative councils in hyper, sort of, homogenous areas.
Or rural areas.
Yeah, rural homogenous areas, yeah.
Diverse cities tend to go bankrupt, weirdly.
And Mark says, As for outside intervention in Council's bow, it does not happen.
At best, they hire contractors from the same budget.
No one got fired and pilloried in Birmingham.
They stepped down voluntarily.
And as far as I can tell, the one guy stepped down.
The Engaged View says, Totally agree.
Bring back the pillory.
Yeah, I'm totally for corporal punishment these days.
And Habsification says, Farming of food, industrial manufacturing, energy and STEM, these policies and industries are vital for economic and national
Yeah, but at least the country is decaying in front of our very eyes.
At least we're literally going to be able to feed on the largest rats known to man.
So, you know, it's not all bad.
Yeah, and if you've ever seen a rat, they're not particularly nice.
I remember one of my garden the other day, they're great big brown.
At least mine's brown, not a black one, but it's great big things, to be honest.
And if there's one, they're producing lots.
You've got to get rid of them.
You're going to be glad that's there.
Sunday roast.
Anyway, let's move on.
Gavin Bovey called a lot of this.
He said that where there's inner cities that have been completely colonised, they run themselves into the ground to the point of essentially annihilation almost.
Yeah. We're going to make this worse, aren't we?
Because we're now, like in terms of Hampshire, they're saying we're going to bring Hampshire, Portsmouth, Southampton, Isle of Wight into one large conglomerate so that you, the wealthy areas that are doing very well and doing councils that are okay, can pay for profligate Southampton and profligate.
Portsmouth. Why not?
That's what we're doing.
And we can segregate the wealthy at the top who are running these councils, the same sort of that trade union person, and they'll never get into trouble as we start your decline.
Sorry, just a quick thing.
Fleet Lord Atvar.
Bloody hell, Carl.
Seeing your hometown video on YouTube is depressing.
What are you talking about?
Like, Swindon, not great.
But it's not rubbish piling up in the streets.
We're not bankrupt.
Swindon's bad, but there are so many more levels through which we are eventually going to collapse, okay?
Just FYI.
But anyway, let's carry on.
All right.
Today we need to talk about the small boats again.
I'd like to actually, rather than just...
Pointing at it.
Sorry, did Starman not smash the boats?
I heard something about smashing the boats.
You had a good conference.
Rishi promised he was going to smash the boats.
No, nothing has been done.
It's got worse, if anything.
But I did want to actually try and...
Drill down into this a little bit, rather than just sort of pointing at it and tutting.
We've done that enough.
I've even criticised some people in reform for doing that.
It's like, yeah, we know.
Everyone knows.
We're being invaded, yeah.
But I thought because we've got you on today, Steve, we could try, because I know you know loads about this, and being an ex-MEP, one of the best people to talk about it.
So, just to quickly say why it's in the news, is that on Saturday there was a record number, 656...
Boat people came over on 11 boats.
A few were turned back.
Record. Yeah, it's not an overall one-day record.
It was one day in 2022, which was obviously during the Tory government.
Must try harder.
800 and odd, I think.
1300. One day in early September 2022, 1300 in one day.
I can't remember if it was Preeti or Suella or James, who was the Home Secretary at the time, I can't remember, but one of them were.
But yeah, so far this year it was a record.
And so far this year...
That is an actual record year today.
8,064 have come over, projected something in the ballpark of 47,000 are likely to cross the channel.
That's right.
I think we've put this up on the Centre for Migration.
We've done an estimate.
It's 27% higher than last year.
So that would put us on about 47,000.
But if I take us back to the time you talked about, 2022, which I'm being conservative at this stage, that was a similar sort of number, and we're bigger than that in the early stages.
And that would lead us to go actually more towards the 70,000.
But at the moment, I'm sticking on the kind of more conservative 45, 47 to 50,000.
But I think I haven't got the numbers on there.
I think you might be having them later.
You look on average on the first year, it's about £50,000 per individual just in their first year.
That's before their claims are even dealt with.
That's in terms of cost, food, energy, medicine, border force.
And that's why we've come to around £8 billion was my estimate last year, a year that we're dealing with immigration and asylum.
I think it's going to go up.
And of course the financial cost, at least to my mind, is sort of the least of the problems.
But nonetheless, that is completely unsustainable and insane.
I just got a letter from the tax man saying I need to pay my tax.
So it's actually very much in the front of my mind.
But I mean, those numbers are giant.
So like, for example, some people, our enemies, quite often like to talk about, oh, you're all a nation of immigrants anyway.
Oh, we're not.
Absolutely not.
And anyway, if you look at something like the Huguenot invasions.
It's hardly an invasion.
Yeah, it's not even an invasion.
What, 50,000 over 80 years or something like that?
Yeah, if you look at the numbers, compared to what's happening here, yeah, Dutch Protestants.
Still, the numbers, if you're just looking at straight-up numbers, it's tiny, tiny.
William the Conqueror came over with, what, 10,000 less?
Yeah, probably 100,000 Normans in total, something like that, at most.
I mean, okay, so that's happening.
So one of the things I wanted to sort of...
I'll ask you about, Stephen, and I'll drill down a bit on, is, OK, let's just imagine we've got a government that was prepared to truly act on it.
So the first thing I wanted to ask you about is the ECHR.
Because some people say, we don't even need to leave the ECHR.
We've already got, if the government just had balls, we've already got things in place where a government, if it was prepared to just act, Others say, no, no, no, you have to leave the ECHR because everything else is sort of downstream from that.
I would have to go back a little bit further than that.
You actually have to go on to the UN Convention on Human Rights and on the Refugee Convention.
Both of those set in formality the principles that a nation has to undertake when they're dealing with someone who claims asylum.
Just take, for example, the goodness of our own hearts, that all of these people are genuine asylum seekers.
None of them are coming over for economic reasons.
We have to put into our legislation, which we have done for our Immigration Acts, the fact that when someone claims asylum, we have to give them a lawyer.
We have to house them, we have to feed them, we have to clothe them, we have to throw medicine for them, and we have to educate them.
It's like adopting a puppy.
Great, you know, I've adopted this puppy.
Brilliant. It's a rather expensive puppy.
Yeah, an extremely pampered puppy.
Yeah, 50,000 years.
So that's the first principle.
Then what happens is the European Court on Human Rights gives a variety of rights to people to come in.
The most important one is a right to family life and a right to not being imprisoned and not to have certain removals.
But this is the one that the judges keep getting us on.
Yes. So what happens is the UN Convention on Refugees says that you can actually remove people.
It actually gives you provisions if they're not part of safety of our country.
If they are a danger to the public, all of those can go.
So someone's got to interpret that.
And we had our common law.
And our common law was perfectly fine, but we did sign the European Convention on Human Rights.
And that gives lawyers the opportunity to go to one of their asylum seekers and say, OK, why have you come here?
Well, I'm running away because I'm gay.
Actually, at the moment, we don't have that in our law.
We can get rid of you.
So they make a claim under the European Courts of Human Rights.
That that person can stay because when they are out in Sudan, they're being abused, and therefore they have to leave because they're gay, and we have the international provisions.
So you get that in place, then the courts start extending it.
And that's why we get the ridiculous scenario where people are now being told, well, my chicken McNuggets actually taste different in Albania than they do here.
It will breach my son's rights.
So the courts have extended it, but what's happened to us...
All of that now is embedded in our common law.
We have legislation, ECHO and common law.
So if you want to get rid of the legal decisions defining what is family life and what are the provisions of life privileges and all the rest of it that we've got in international law, are you a danger or not, then you need to remove the ECHO because that gives no background for them to be able to go back.
Look, the judges in Strasbourg have said...
Chicken McNuggets is enough.
So that goes, but then we have to remove the Human Rights Act, because that's embedded it into our common law, and then you have to go back and get judges to actually overrule the human rights elements that are now embedded in our common law, because all the judges will do is go, OK,
ECHR's gone, HR's gone, it's still there.
Look, judge, friendly of mine, of twice removed, made that decision in 2023.
One of the really frustrating things is that if you read Article 8 of the ECHR, which is what they always get the person on, it's the right to the family life.
And the thing is, it doesn't actually say any of these things.
The entire text is Article 8 states that everyone has the right to respect for their private and family life, home and correspondence.
This right includes protection against interference by public authorities except when such interference is lawful and necessary for democratic society for reasons such as national security or public safety.
Additionally, Article 8 encompasses rights related to personal identity and privacy, including protection against unauthorized surveillance and data collection.
And somehow that arrives at, I can't be deported back to Albania because my no
Yeah. And what's fascinating about it is...
The US is not a member of the ECHO.
They are a member of the Refugee Convention.
So in the Refugee Convention, when they claim asylum, they can do that.
But when they're making the assessments, they can turn around on exactly the rules within the UN Convention that says you are a security threat.
You're a danger to the public.
And that's why they're putting loads of them on planes and getting rid.
So you have a situation where America had 200,000 to 350,000 a month coming across.
During Biden, under Trump, 8,200 and odd came across.
Every one of them was arrested and deported instantly.
The border crisis in the United States is over because they're not in the ECHO and they're using convention provisions, plus their own rules on visas, to say, you're not welcome here.
We can get rid of you.
It just telegraphs to the lot of them, don't bother coming.
Yes. We will literally remove you.
And so the border encounters dropped off cliff.
Which is one of the...
Arguably the most important thing is saying that something will happen to you.
So, my question is this then.
Again, let's just imagine you've got a government and a leader who's prepared to actually...
Let's enter into the realm of fantasy.
Yeah, pure fantasy, of course.
Pretend! If we were, then so you're saying that we'd need to...
Can the government, can the Prime Minister sort of unilaterally just leave the ECHR, or does even that need to go through Parliament?
It has to go through Parliament, but what you need to do is a number of things.
I would say any Prime Minister who's preparing this would have to have someone like Stephen Miller.
President Trump, over five years, prepared every strategic element in government, both at a federal level and also a state level.
Game plan, a roadmap.
They have to have a game plan.
And that game plan would be they have to have the legislation for removing ourselves from the ECH already, because you've got a parliament that will vote for it.
The same for the HR.
And then you would have to turn around and find a way of removing those in the Supreme Court.
Who would actually support those and get your own people in.
We can't do that.
They can in the US.
We might just abolish the Supreme Court.
Well, that's the point.
What I would do then is I would end the Supreme Court and bring it back to the House of Lords, and the House of Lords then can be filled with political decision-makers as well as lawyers who would make those decisions for you.
Secondly, you need to completely revamp the immigration rules, procedures, and courts to be able to take into consideration what goes on.
You may have to use Privy Council rules and the ability to be able to force people in the Privy Council.
Douglas Carswell wrote some seriously good stuff about that, but his big issue on that would be, and my issue of that, if you look at who are the members of the Privy Council, most of them are Blairites.
We're not replacing them?
Is that not prime ministerial privilege?
You can pack that in a way.
So you'd have to have that as all part of your preparation to do so.
And once you've done that, you need to be in a position where you've got to instruct your own lawyers, government lawyers, and many of those government lawyers are the ones who've turned around and said, oh, we can't use the law of the sea to return people back to France because the Royal Navy will get sued under the Human Rights Act.
So even within your own lawyers in the kind of judicial system that you've got employed by the government, actually are people that you might need to remove as well, just as the way that you're doing in the Fed, the FBI, the DOJ in the United States,
because it's embedded across all parts of the system.
Now, that's a political element that we don't have the advantage that the United States do.
We can get rid of legislation, but all those other parts would need to be thought about incredibly carefully, Get it ready, and you'd have to do it quickly.
OK, so let's try and get this clear.
Whether everything I'm about to say could be done with one sort of great repeal act, with one...
David Starkey approach?
Yeah. Scrap it all.
One great sort of act of Parliament which at least starts this roadmap, this strategy, to get it all done.
But so, leave the ECHR.
Leave anything...
The UN has put in place to hamstring us.
Well, if you can do that, that would include it.
If you want to remove yourself from the UN Convention, it's the same sort of thing.
If you want to remove yourself, and I think Trump is actually looking at that at the moment.
I know that what Stephen Miller and various other people are tweeting about at the moment is that they're considering whether they should even leave the UN Refugees Convention.
If you did that, that removes all the rights.
That's where they're talking about abolishing asylum.
And Kikorian, I think it's Mark Kikorian, has written a really persuasive argument recently.
I'll put it up on C-MEP over the end of the day or something and we'll retweet it out to yourselves.
That's a really useful piece of where they're thinking about it.
So a Great Repeal Act, yes, if you wanted to go UN Convention, get rid of that.
ECHR, H-R, get rid of that.
There were various ancillary pieces of legislation related to the Immigration Acts.
The Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court would need to go as well, and we'd bring back into the House of Lords.
So you could have a great...
Packing the House of Lords?
You could get a great repeal bill.
The packing of the House of Lords, the packing of the Privy Council wouldn't be part of the legislative process.
No, no, sure.
That would be part of political processes.
So would that be an executive thing?
Yeah, that would be a type of executive prime ministerial role.
And that's where you get Douglas Carswell's ideas coming into place, utilising Privy Council.
So there's legislation.
Like a department of the Prime Minister?
Yes. To bypass the Cabinet Office or the Home Office?
Exactly. That would be one of the things that he'd need to consider.
So you've got legislation, you'd have changes, structures of the civil service, as well as the Cabinet and Stroke Prime Ministerial offices, and then you've also got to be able to use executive provisions.
Across a variety of areas.
And one of the things that I think could be and could be done very cleverly over a period of time is the preparation for the secondary legislation that would remove, say, home office asylum rules, immigration rules, a procedure.
All of that can be done as well because they're secondary legislation.
As long as they're prepared, they could be attached to the back of the Great Repeal Act, and then they could go through on a secondary legislation overnight and be done as well.
So really all it takes is 350 barbarians and a very well-prepared process
Yes, and I think that's what you're looking at in Trump, is that he's took one individual, and I mentioned Stephen Miller, but there are others around this, but if you look at Miller as the figurehead, he didn't do that on his own.
He prepared that with lawyers across the various states.
He would have talked to various governors who were supporting him to build that package, and then they would have took it to Trump and worked out how it was done.
And then their team sort of said, this is what we're going to do on day one.
The speed that they did that in the U.S. shows how planning can work if you want to change things rapidly.
What do you think about the idea of the Department of the Prime Minister in order to sort of wield Prime Ministerial fiat with real power?
David Starkey's voice saying this would be a centralisation of executive power in the Prime Minister and this will have knock-on effects.
Well, I was going to say, what about, what do you think of the idea, the concept of that you create a new department and you call it whatever you want, a department for remigration or a department for whatever you want to call it, a new border department or something, and you take all the powers away from the Home Office and the RNLI and everyone that's involved in getting us flooded by foreign criminals and you put it all in this new department and you make sure that that's staffed by People
that are acting in our interests.
Is that just pie-in-the-sky nonsense to you?
No, I think it's not pie-in-the-sky nonsense.
If you deal with that, and I think it was very well put by Carswell, you recognise that you also have to change the civil service rules as well in order to do that, because you're going to have to employ people from the civil service.
We don't have a situation in the United States where...
Once Biden went, literally apartment blocks were being emptied by people who were leaving.
Over 10,000 people just leave Washington overnight because they're all Bidenites and Democrats, and they're replaced by 10,000 people who are now employed by the Republicans to do their jobs.
We don't have that.
So you need to get that particular department.
To be able to have the rules changed too.
I think it's feasible, but I do worry about exactly the point you've raised and what Starkey has raised, is once you do that, we start to move towards the United States.
And Labour will just inherit.
And if Labour comes in, they have the same thing.
So then we'd have to completely change, in my view, the way that we look at our Supreme Court.
It would have to become nominated just like the US.
And in many ways, what I would prefer is a kind of our own homegrown Bill of Rights.
But as I've thought about this so many times, and I've talked about it, I'm deeply concerned that we had a common law that created our own Bill of Rights, and that's been overruled and destroyed by the executive employing EU sort of regulations in that's enabled people like Blair.
To bring in think tanks.
Sorry, not think tanks.
Quangos. Quangos to take those aspects of our lives over, and they run it without any political interference or democracy really controlling them.
My worry is if we do that with the Prime Minister, whether they will be able to have that as well.
So, in principle, I like it.
I like to have the idea that someone can come in ready and willing to do it.
We've prepared.
We've got a department ready to go, but will that then have the enduring power to ensure that the democratic values that we have as a nation sustain itself when it comes under attack, as it will do, by the next...
And we saw what happens with the trade units.
They'll come in.
But we can remove their money.
One of the most powerful things that we have when you're in government is removing their cash.
Remove the funding.
Once the money goes, as you've seen with Doge, once the cash goes, they implode.
I have this concept, and it's very, very straightforward, but I don't see a problem with it, that it wasn't that long ago we had a country without all these quangos and without the Supreme Court.
If we just literally just swept away that entire edifice, yeah, one criticism of that would be, well, that makes the Prime Minister extremely powerful, or presidential-level powerful, and what happens when it falls into the hands of the next party?
But I feel like that's the lesser of two evils, though.
I would much prefer us to have a cabinet that is strong enough with proper departments being run under a democratic mandate in which they can be chastised by the Prime Minister.
And yes, I'd much prefer to have a period where you'd have Thatcher going up against her enemies within the cabinet.
Yes, they were briefing each other against each other, but still it wasn't a fault.
They were still under our control to an extent.
Laird changed it all.
And that's part of the downfall of this nation.
So one of the last things I wanted to ask you about, pick your brain about is, again, I think it was something Starkey had said not too long ago.
He said, again, imagine this fictional government acting in our interest with a spine.
Imagine they came in and the Prime Minister says, I'm just declaring a state of emergency.
They're sitting around the cabinet table in number 10. OK, it's an emergency because we're being invaded.
By 40,000 to 70,000 people a year.
I'm taking this entire question away from Border Force, the RNLI, the Home Office, and I'm giving it to my Defence Minister.
Do what you've got to do.
Go and put a frigate or something in the channel.
Go and put SBS, SAS dudes in speedboats.
Stop it.
Today. If they did that, Starkey said, I think he said, I don't want to get him wrong, but paraphrasing, he said that, well, you get a knock on the door from the police then.
The police will come round and want to interview the Prime Minister and the Cabinet because you're breaking laws.
Is that right?
Is that true?
I mean, I think Starkey would have looked at that more particular than me.
I hope I haven't got him wrong on that.
If that's the case, it's entirely a possibility.
I'd have to look through that.
But my understanding of it is, of course, that...
The Prime Minister can change any part of the government to go with any particular department.
So he could move the aspects of border force and control out of the Home Office into the Defence Department.
And of course, if you're in such a big scenario where you've got a large majority, that too could be part of your Great Repeal Act.
The question, I think, where he's got the issue that I see is that one of the reasons...
One of the departments that have stopped us from being able to use legislation and international law, which is the law of the sea, SOLAS.
SOLAS enables us to return the boats to France today.
The Home Affairs Select Committee heard from experts, both barristerial and professors, that said that we could do that.
So the Royal Marines literally just tow these dinghies straight back to the beach on Calais, drop them off there, and France can't say, oh, you're invading our beaches.
And this is where we came into two particular issues.
One is political.
Which is the Foreign Office say we can't do that because we're upsetting our French friends and this would cause an international, you know, dispute and maybe if I go on holiday back to Dordogne they might not allow me to be there and they'd actually tell me off over dinner.
So Prime Minister, you can't really do that and I'm sure that's sort of the real aspects of the Foreign Office.
That's one of the reasons that, you know, I've actually spoken to Foreign Office people who really didn't like that suggestion at senior level to me.
They said it was an international, we can't do that.
It came against the grain of who we are as a nation.
Actually, no.
You can do it.
The law says we can do it.
And then the second part was legal.
This is where the lawyers for the defence ministry said that we would be putting any soldier at risk or naval officer at risk of charges for potential manslaughter at sea if anyone died or was injured.
So therefore they can't do it.
And that's why they backed off from doing that.
Is that true, though, or is that just...
Oh, again, it's an argument that could be put forward in the courts, just as we've done with soldiers.
Look how many soldiers that we've tried to challenge across the country for what they've done in Ireland, in Iraq, in Afghanistan.
They've done all of those.
So, again, the Great Repeal Act would remove those particular points and make it clear that they're safe to do so.
So we might not be able to do it on day one, as Trump did.
We've got day two.
But we've got a few days in which we can do it.
So is in the power, is within the purview of Parliament to pass new legislation?
Preventing members of the Royal Navy or the SS or whatever it is from being prosecuted if anyone was injured when they were towed back to the Calais Beach.
They can change the legislation to change any criminal rights.
It's within our power to...
Yeah, all that would leave the lawyers then is arguing international law and we would say, OK, we remove ourselves from that too.
We remove ourselves from that aspect of the law of the sea that doesn't apply to us.
If I recall correctly, the entire point of the English Civil War is to establish the absolute supremacy of Parliament.
And that's exactly it.
So, OK, let's use it, right?
But if you want a clear, clear example of why they can do it and how quickly they can do it, just look what we were talking about early on over everybody getting on trains down on a Saturday to vote for a piece of legislation to try and protect Scunthorpe.
If they can do it to protect scumfot, they can do it to protect our borders.
So I hate to interrupt us there, but we're going to have to move on for time.
I'd just like to finish just saying, so there is a strategy or a roadmap possible to stop the boats.
It's not impossible.
We need individuals who can be funded over a period of time to create that scenario, legislation.
And practicalities in preparation in the hope that we get a government of those who support that particular view.
Hewitt says, abolish democracy for a decade with a fixed date on which series of reparandums take place to decide the future of the country.
In the meantime, the entire Blairite infrastructure has moved.
Okay, Mr. Cromwell, calm down.
I was thinking more Cincinnatus or Sulla.
There is, yeah, Sulla.
Sulla. I think Cincinnatus may be more than Sulla.
Yeah, okay.
Yeah, we never go full Sulla.
No, no.
Never say anything.
Yeah, yeah, never say anything.
You should have T-shirts, never go full Sulla.
Yeah. Have we got any video comments today, Samson?
No video comments.
Russian says, Stephen is a quality returning guest.
Keep him coming back.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.
And what's the time Mr. Wolf says?
All right now.
Wolf is such a cool surname.
I wish I had a cool surname.
I've got a really boring surname.
Labour celebrating saving British Steel is just a classic case of government fixing a problem that they themselves caused.
It was the government that let Chinese company purchase the plant and it was the government that was going to let it die.
I'm just baffled how we allow foreign countries and companies to just buy things we own.
It should be forbidden.
It's Machiavelli the Prince 101, isn't it?
We've said it a number of times.
I know you have.
I'm pretty sure I have.
It's literally 101.
Don't let foreign enemies control your army, your infrastructure.
Be the leaders.
It just...
Obviously that's a disaster.
Do not rely on foreign mercenaries is basically Machiavelli's entire strategy.
Just do anything other than that.
You only have to look what the Britons did when they brought in the Angles and the Danes.
Protect ourselves from those Danes coming over.
But they're our mates from the village next door.
Your weak will take them over.
In the defence of the Anglos, they did refuse to pay them.
So, you know, go over, defeat the Picts, and they're like, can we get paid?
And apparently not, according to the legends.
Or the Romans packing their own legions with the Suebi and Franks and Lombards, and then wondering why they don't fight very hard anymore.
At least not for the Romans, anyway.
Or just flip.
Or just flip.
Maybe that's why they don't want to do national service.
Just being a bit controversial at the last minute.
Yeah, the Bonsol Bomber says, well, as long as we're not creating emissions in our own country, then it's alright, and that's literally Ed Miliband's position on this.
No, I want China to incur the moral debt of producing things.
God, I hate this country.
Thomas says, another view of the Scunthorpe election, Labour 15k, Conservative 12k, Reform 8k, saying that basically a reform has split the vote there.
Possibly, but the Conservatives are the ones who sold it.
So what good would it be electing more Conservatives?
Honestly, right, I've genuinely come to the point where Labour are essentially the sort of dreamy wing of the left.
They're like, yeah, maybe we should do ridiculous communist stuff.
And the Conservatives are the executive wing of the left.
They're like, no, yeah, good point, we are going to do that ridiculous communist stuff.
For example, the Labour Party have never had a non-white non-man in charge of their party, right?
Tories are on two female premises, Indian premises, and now they have an African immigrant in charge of their party.
That's what the Labour Party have been demanding this whole time.
So the Labour Party dreams up nonsense, the Conservative Party puts it into practice.
That's how this works.
Do you know what I feel like?
Something profoundly broke.
In the conservative movement with Blair.
Where Blair...
Well, yeah, it goes back.
The Rock goes back further than that.
But certainly that 10 years of Blair, actual Blair himself in number 10, I think they saw that, not just Cameron, but all sorts of people to this day.
Everyone apart from Peter Hitchens.
They saw that and they said, he's a winner.
He wins.
That's a winning strategy, what he's doing there.
So we'll do that, and if anything, we'll dial it up a bit.
And it's just as simple as that.
It's just as simple as that.
I mean, I think the Conservative Party probably died when they decided to flip away from Enoch Powell.
He seems to be the last authentic Conservative voice in the Conservative Party.
And I know I shouldn't go on about it, but never underestimate the power of the philosophy of the EU.
To all those leaders at that time.
And the control of the Foreign Office and the Treasury in respect of that particular aspect and all our political leaders.
Well, I mean, at the time, it just seemed like the future, right?
Like, the Brexteers were barbarians, who were just Luddites.
Like, what are you doing?
I would still argue that the case today, but I think we're now proving them with situations like Scunthorpe that we were ahead of the game.
You know what's really annoying, though?
Is that Britain now...
Okay, so we've thrown off the shackles.
We can do anything we want.
So what do we do?
Nothing. Nothing at all.
I remember the euphoria in 1997.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It was like the Obama, like Obama thing.
I hate it.
Or when Nelson Mandela, you're just not going to vote against...
Obama first time round.
Or Mandela.
Or Tony Blair in 1997.
There's something wrong with you.
You're against civilisation almost if you do that.
Wasn't he a handsome young man?
Yeah. Handsome Mr Blair.
Yes. Cool Britannia.
Don't you trust a lawyer?
Fleet Lord Adfar, by the way, said get mobilized, get everyone on board, take over.
Well, we'll see what we can do.
J.M. Denton said since Machiavelli was brought up, the Italian people's desire for justice and revenge against foreign invaders creates powerful motivation for their military to succeed.
Yeah, but that didn't happen, did it?
Anyway, let's go on.
So Lancelot says, imagine treating your elite fighting force as garbage men.
Someone should tell Starmer he sent them after the wrong kind of enemy.
I forgot that entire segment.
I forgot to say, by the way, they're going to call in the army to clean it up.
I forgot to mention.
That's what inspired the whole thing.
I forgot to say that they're sending the navy to collect a whole load of coal.
Yeah. What did you sign up to do?
I collect coal for the Royal Navy.
From Japan.
It'd be good if we ran coal down from Newcastle.
Like they used to.
Yeah, yeah.
From Newcastle all the way down the...
But you're right about canals.
Like, they're really cheap, energy-efficient ways.
The best way to transport anything is just by the water.
So it's just like, okay, well, let's do that.
We've got canals.
Why can't we do that?
But using the army to clear up rubbish in Birmingham, I mean, that's such a fail, isn't it?
On a fundamental level that you've got to call in the army to do it.
Maybe they'll have a whole set of, like...
Really well-trained snipers to take out the rats.
What part of your division are you?
I'm rat division.
On rat detail.
It's not that absurd, is it?
It's literally what they're using their ammunition for these days.
Lord Naravan says, I work in central Birmingham.
In a rare setting where there are a lot of white Brummies.
So just as a quick thing here, the first time I ever went to Birmingham, I'd never been there before, and there was some Asian guy at the ticket booth.
I was probably about 20 years old, right?
Some Asian guy at the ticket booth in the train station.
And I was like, hi, can I have a ticket here?
He was like, all right, mate.
And I was just taken aback by how jarring the accent was.
But obviously, you know, at the time I was just young, I had no idea what Birmingham was like, and I just didn't really expect it.
This was, like, it must have literally been the first couple of years of Tony Blair's labour, so, like, it wasn't normal.
But anyway, he says...
It did used to be weird when someone with a turban's got a very strong Brummie accent.
Yeah, it was really...
I always find it odd when you see people with a very, very strong Scottish accent, like an almost indecipherable Glasgow accent, but they're sub-Saharan African or something.
Yeah, yeah.
It is still odd.
It's unusual, but anyway.
He says, they are absolutely incensed with what's become of their city.
They remember times when Birmingham wasn't like this, and they all fervently desire to return to them.
They also know who's responsible for it.
Yeah, well, this is the thing I say about Swindon.
Swindon used to be quite nice, actually.
Not that long ago.
Not even that long ago.
It was really quite nice.
You just don't realise how bad things can become.
That's the problem.
Hengis says, we had a bin strike six weeks last year, nobody noticed, all the people just took the rubbish to the tip.
Yeah, and that's another thing as well, isn't it?
If it was my town that had a rubbish strike, I wouldn't just throw it into the street.
Nope, not at all.
I'd take it myself.
Exactly, you'd take it yourself.
You'd pay a couple of quid or whatever you need to pay to dump it.
Like, it's crazy.
But again, you can feel the sense of possession and ownership that people have over the town, right?
They don't.
No, I don't care.
That's my rubbish outside that window.
I'm really proud of that large pile of dirt that I've thrown out there for my neighbours.
Pride in the place.
It's not their city.
I'd go one step further.
It's not even their country often.
If you're first generation.
Yeah, I think a lot of them just have no attachment to this area of the world.
John says, I meant to be visiting the UK for a few days next month, London and Manchester.
I'm having second thoughts.
Well, yeah, the problem is London and Manchester, right?
Go to somewhere like Durham.
Durham's lovely.
Go to somewhere like Bath.
Bath is lovely.
I went to Bath the other day, actually.
Absolutely lovely.
Still lovely.
Although you do see the odd vape shop.
The odd barber spring up, Salisbury, the odd vape shop, the odd barber, they're still lovely places.
Come to Winchester and we're starting to see that.
Six barber shops, three vape shops in one of the most expensive towns in the country.
It's like the creeping corruption in a video game, like in Starcraft or something, the Zerg spread.
It exists and it will continue.
The Zerg menace.
If I could say one quick word in defence of London, of being in London, is that in central central London...
It's not as bad, you know, like round Westminster Abbey or in Bloomsbury and you go to the British Museum or something.
It's not a dystopian hellhole.
It's in the suburb.
It's very affluent places.
It's when you go like I did on Sunday and you sit in Hammersmith.
Right. Because you park there to get into London and you've come back out on the Tube and you sat there for a cup of coffee and then you've gone, how quickly can we drink this?
Yeah. Let's get the hell out of Dodge.
Yeah. Kevin says, the Argentinians took the Falklands with 3,000 in one day and we call it an invasion.
The UK is looking at 3,000 a month and that's not an invasion.
No, no, we're looking at 3,000 a week, Kevin.
And it definitely is an invasion, by the way.
I mean, it's literally invading.
I don't know how to...
There's no other way of accurately characterising it, frankly.
How would you?
I mean, they're literally getting on boats and breaking into the country.
We go back to Denmark and Anglo-Saxons.
We have more in a year than they did come over in 100 years.
Exactly. The great heathen army, nothing compared to what we've got.
Shame I didn't get round to asking you the question about building a detention centre in Dover, or a bigger one.
I think there's one already there, but they're not indefinitely detained.
Building a massive detention facility, and boat people never leave Dover.
I've got even one better.
When he was Prince Charles rather than King Charles, he complained that we really weren't very kind towards those people coming across and refugees should be welcome.
He's got an estate in Scotland that's the size of Liverpool.
I said, OK, let's use that.
Yeah, put them there.
It does two things.
The Scots want it, and he wants it.
We've got a bunch of empty islands off the north of Scotland.
There's literally no one there.
Just dump them there and give them spots.
Triple perimeter barbed wire fences.
Throw them in.
Well, another thing, as someone suggested, is that as the coal's coming in from Japan, we empty that and we take them back to Diego Garcia and just jump them off.
I hate to do this, but we're out of time.
So thank you all so much for joining us.
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