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May 2, 2025 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:28:35

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1156

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	Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters for the 2nd of May 2025.
	I am Josh, I'm joined by Beau and I'm very pleased to have Tim Davies here today.
	Good, thank you.
	I don't know what else to say.
	Yeah, it's brilliant.
	Yes, you've got your own channel, haven't you?
	I have, yeah.
	Absolutely.
	Fast Hit Performance, yes.
	And I believe I'm presenting something here today at some point.
	Yes, you are.
	Living the dream every day.
	Every day.
	I do also have an announcement to make, and that is that I'm going to be leaving Lotus Eaters full-time.
	I will be back as a guest, so you'll still be seeing me, but less frequently.
	And there should be a video releasing at about half one on social media explaining it and reassuring you that I'm still going to be about...
	So don't worry too much.
	Okay.
	I know I've been here for four and a half years.
	And I suppose what I will say is thank you very much to Carl.
	Thank you very much to everyone I work with at Lotus Eaters.
	It has been a pleasure.
	Made some very good friends here.
	And thank you very much to you, the audience.
	You've been, even though I was very nervous, I know what the internet was like when I started.
	You've been a bunch of sweethearts.
	You're all really nice deep down.
	Some people show it less than others, but you've been really, really nice.
	And supportive, and I very much appreciate it.
	And, you know, I've had the experience of people approaching me in the street and shaking my hand and telling me how much my work means to them, which is wonderful, and I'm always happy for that.
	And thank you very much, I suppose, for the opportunity.
	And with that out of the way, I suppose, let's talk about what we're actually going to be talking about.
	You've just started a new channel.
	Show your new channel.
	Yeah, that's true.
	I have a new channel.
	It's just under my name.
	Joshua Firm, and you can check it out.
	Nice spelling there.
	Oh, there's my Twitter.
	It'll be my main post, I think.
	I've been tweeting about Germans with their family in their basements.
	Oh, TV's messed up.
	There I am.
	There's me with a pint on Dartmoor in a nice pub.
	Yes, please check it out.
	Get into 10,000 ASAP.
	Well, you are.
	Because I checked yesterday, you're like 200.
	So your rate of growth is far, far higher.
	I uploaded my first video 17 hours ago.
	Look at that.
	Already broken 1k.
	That's excellent.
	So thank you very much if you've done that.
	And yeah, I'm going to be doing this alongside.
	I'll be finding another job, probably in politics, I imagine, at some point.
	I'll wait and see what happens.
	But I'll be doing that in the meantime whilst I'm on the Huntford.
	Work, I suppose.
	But yes, we're going to be talking about today Reform's Night of Victory, because there were local elections, and Bo's going to be walking us through it.
	You stayed up all night, so you must be very tired.
	A little bit.
	I am a little bit tired, yeah.
	Nearly all night.
	Just a little bit?
	Nearly all night.
	I had a couple of hours kipped, but yeah.
	Show off.
	No.
	I don't know how you're doing it.
	If I don't have a full seven hours, I feel miserable.
	I'll be talking about...
	Oh no, I won't.
	You'll be talking about DEI in the military, but I think we'll all have a thing or two to say about that.
	I've thrown in a graph that is very confusing there.
	And then I'm going to be talking about how actually Putin is a liberal boomer.
	I imagine this is probably a bit left of field to most people, but it was just something that I saw, a recent statement, which I thought was unusual, and then I did some digging and realised, actually, Russia is not quite what people say it is, and I'm going to give you
	another side to it that you probably wouldn't have heard, and it's just a bit of fun for the last segment on a Friday, and my last segment as a full-time employee at Lotus Eaters.
	So with all of that out of the way, I've gone on for far too long,
	Right, so it was a big night for Reform UK.
	Oh what a night!
	Massive.
	Massive.
	Like a game-changer.
	Paradigm-changing thing.
	Possibly.
	First of all, let's not go over the top because local elections aren't really, or sometimes are, but usually aren't actually a bellwether for what's going to happen at the next general election.
	However, having said that, this is such a change, I think, that we can, it is sort of getting into that territory.
	It's almost like a landslide, really, there, isn't it?
	Like, reform gained 120, the Conservatives are down 94. Lib Dems up 11, which, you know, they're just the beige party of nothingness.
	And Labour down 30, Independence down 9, Greens up 2. So, basically, all the major parties except the Lib Dems are down, and Reform are the main victors.
	They've basically hoovered up, haven't they?
	Well, one thing to say, obviously, Reform haven't had any councillors before, so anything they get is going to be that amount up.
	But nonetheless, even despite that, yeah, they've taken stuff off of everybody, really.
	Even the Lib Dems were expected to do better than that.
	So it looks like Reform, well, it is the case that Reform are taking local council seats off of everyone, more or less.
	Because that was one of the things that Reform's critics would always say, is that you're just a replacement for the Tories.
	And you'll never actually buy into Labour's vote.
	Well, that doesn't look like that's true.
	That was one thing Nigel said straight after, and it's true.
	Yeah, they have done very well, to their credit.
	I have been...
	Critical of reform in the past, but you've got to acknowledge when they've done a very good job here, and they clearly have.
	Sure, sure.
	I mean, Matt Goodwin, you see what he said this morning, I think it was on Twitter, he was saying, he was basically throwing out his line saying, you know, we are the second party in the UK.
	You know, he's quite combative now, isn't he?
	Real opposition.
	I don't think really that people are, and what he was saying is, you know, the real world is not Twitter.
	The real world is, you know, the people out there that are voting.
	And I get that, and I fully, you know, I've sort of not hit reform as such, but I've most definitely been against what Nigel did with Rupert on the exit of the party.
	Things like that.
	And I think that's kind of characterised, I think, him, really, as a bit of a spiteful sort of character.
	But then, you know, you're right.
	They've done absolutely very well.
	I just worry sometimes that they're sort of believing their own hype.
	You know, what can we do, though?
	All right.
	You know, fair play.
	They're taking votes of other parties.
	Is it a uni-party, though?
	I don't know.
	Well, yeah.
	I mean, so just to be clear, if anyone doesn't know...
	We've been fairly critical of reform.
	They treated me and Dan quite badly.
	Carl's been very vocal.
	We've all been pretty vocal about reform and that they're not based enough for us.
	Or we're too based for them, put it another way.
	However, despite all of that, despite all of that, I still...
	Wish them well on some level.
	I said it just earlier in the week.
	I think they're a containment project.
	However...
	I agree.
	However, I still wish them well on another level because the normal councillor people and the normal grassroots people, they're the salt of the earth.
	I just feel a bit sorry if maybe they're being duped, but maybe they're not being.
	But I'm still behind them because at this stage, where there's no other real credible alternative, if they're doing damage to the uni party...
	I get it, yeah.
	Then I'll take that.
	For now, right where we are in April 2025, I'll take that.
	Happy with that.
	It's moving the Overton window.
	It's damaging both Tories and Labour.
	Good stuff, right?
	It is.
	You're absolutely right.
	But isn't the main thing that the country's talking about is about immigration and re-migration?
	And he's already said he's not...
	You know, I think who got them out of him?
	Was it Steven Edgerton?
	It was, yeah.
	He got out of him and he said, I'm not going to do it.
	He said, it's impossible to do.
	I don't want a man that says it's impossible to do.
	I want a man that's actually thinking about doing it.
	I don't want someone that's sitting there and saying, no, we can't do it because it's not possible.
	If that's the case, then there's someone there.
	Farage is someone there that's going to leave the country in the condition it's in.
	I don't want that.
	Even if the issue of immigration was to the side, hearing from a potential leader of the country that something is impossible.
	He specifically said politically impossible.
	I want a leader that is willing to move mountains for the good of the British people.
	That's simply not it, is it?
	Well, we're going to vote in the same thing we've got now.
	It's like when you hear Suella Braveman was talking this morning, and I think I wrote back to her, like she said something, and I remember saying, if only you'd been in power, you could have done something about this.
	And it's like, it's no good now.
	Are we not just voting in the same thing?
	But what you're saying, people on the ground that desperately need representation, they're disaffected by Conservatives and Labour especially, absolutely vote for change.
	But what change are they going to get?
	Is it change?
	To what end?
	Yeah, to what end?
	So their policy is still net zero migration.
	So effectively one in, one out.
	For me, for a lot of us, that's no good at all.
	We need gross zero, i.e.
	not one more person, for starters.
	But still, at the moment, that's the best thing that's on the table.
	I know that's a weak argument.
	I myself have railed against people for making that argument.
	But, I mean, they have gone a little bit harder line in just the last few weeks.
	But do you know why that is, though?
	Because they can see the way people are.
	They want to win the votes.
	So we're all going to do it, aren't we?
	Farage will wait to see what's happening and then he'll fall on.
	Have you seen him do this?
	He's a follower, isn't he?
	Of course.
	He's not a leader.
	So he'll wait to see.
	Where's the country going?
	Right, now I'm going to make a statement on this.
	And he does it every single time.
	And I just don't...
	I think he's more of a globalist than we realise.
	And I think we're going to vote another party in.
	That's going to just be in the pay of the big people up top, really.
	I think, actually, Farage could learn a thing or two from Tony Blair, not in his policies, but in terms of how he approaches the press, in that you can do things in a much more tactful way.
	While still maintaining a sort of neutral position.
	And I'm sort of more frustrated about him not thinking in terms of tactics more than anything in that he's alienating his own base.
	He's not saying, listen, I understand, but this is the best we can do right now.
	That would have been a much more acceptable answer.
	I think you're absolutely right.
	I would have said exactly that.
	We haven't worked it out.
	It's heavily complex and nuanced.
	This is the best we can do.
	But we're working on it.
	The British people would fall behind that.
	You know what I mean?
	They really would.
	They'd say, yeah, we understand it's complex because it is really complicated.
	I mean, look at the rape gangs and everything else.
	And it's not all Muslim.
	It's not all Pakistani, sorry, is it?
	You know what I mean?
	How do you sort of put that out to the rest of the country that we're trying to do something about it?
	It is really, really nuanced.
	I think the message isn't entirely wrong.
	I think with Richard Tice, when he was talking about Rupert Lowe having dementia, that was childish.
	It was embarrassing.
	They don't want people like that anywhere.
	The whole Rupert Lowe debacle was beyond disappointing.
	It really was.
	It was terrible from our point of view, from people to the right of the reform leadership.
	It was terrible.
	I don't know why I'm playing defence for a Nigerian reform, but I'm going to do it one more time real quick.
	I think it's good to balance, though, and try and...
	You know, put forward the counter-arguments.
	I saw Tyus talking.
	It must have been overnight.
	I saw a clip of him and he actually mentioned, very quickly in passing, he did mention the word legal migration.
	Right.
	They don't usually go that far.
	And I have seen Nigel be fairly strong about...
	He's completely taken the policies that people like myself and Douglas Carlswell have talked about of having a whole new re-migration or immigration department, like a whole new thing,
	restaff it from the bottom up.
	We're not going to have a home office now.
	He said you'll keep it within the home office, but as a separate entity, but under the home office, and restaff it from the ground up with sort of true believers, all that sort of thing.
	So shifting it like just a couple of degrees.
	It's not enough.
	I know, it's not enough.
	It's not enough.
	I mean, my thinking is, my hope is that, to explain myself, why I'm sort of kind of happy to take this at the moment, is I'm hoping by the time we get to the...
	A general election.
	That's still three years away or whatever.
	All sorts of things are going to change and hopefully we'll have more options at that point.
	So the argument of well it's the best we've got and don't worry about if they're actually globalists at the end of it all.
	Hopefully we won't be in that place in three and a half years time.
	But anyway.
	Anyway, we're always in a moment in time, aren't we?
	I can understand what he's doing, because I don't want to drag us out, by the way, but the AFD being called extremists, I think it was this morning, isn't it?
	I think largely because of the youth wing or whatever, but they're being called extremists when you've got the leader who's a lesbian married to a minority woman.
	But that's not just it, of course.
	I think maybe Nigel...
	He's worried a bit about that and how he's seen and how that could turn on the party if he's not careful.
	Because the power of the state, as we're going to see through the piece I'm going to do in a minute, to discredit someone is huge.
	It's very well done.
	They do it very, very well.
	And if they were going to do that to Nigel or his party, of course, I think that's what he's worried about.
	And that's probably why he's playing a calmer hand than the rest of us would want.
	It's very easy, isn't it, to say he should do this when it's not our party.
	That's true.
	It's not our reputation.
	I do feel like he's falling into...
	I think that one thing that Nigel could learn from people across the other side of the Atlantic is that you can drag discourse in your direction if you choose to.
	And I think that that's what many of the people in reform want, isn't it?
	I think actually reform's base is more radical than their leader.
	Oh, definitely, yeah.
	And so a lot of people in reform would actually be delighted if he did that.
	And I don't think it's happening yet.
	But, you know, never say never.
	It's possible, but I'm very lukewarm on the whole thing.
	Oh, no, yeah, the amount of shade I've thrown at them.
	Yeah.
	I would love it if they were...
	I mean, personally, if Ed Davies suddenly became super-based, and I believe that he meant it, he's got my vote.
	I don't care if it's Nigel.
	The amount of shade I've thrown it in, I don't care.
	I don't care.
	I'll recant on all of that if I get my country back.
	In politics, you have to look at the policy.
	I just don't believe he will.
	It's got to be about the policy and not about the individuals, unless you believe the individual in question isn't being honest about their policies.
	Yeah.
	But also, you've got to look at the fact, and the only reason I say this is the Office of Budget Responsibility have said that we need 350,000 people coming into the country every year in order to increase his GDP and keep it going up.
	I know as ludicrous as that sounds, but if he's playing on that, if he knows that's a factor, if he gets in and he stops this coming in.
	Because, of course, whether it's nets or how many are coming in, how many are going out, it's not...
	I mean, I think we're losing some pretty talented people from the UK, from what I can read, especially in the high earners.
	Lots of doctors at the minute as well.
	Is that right?
	Is that it?
	Yeah, US and Australia.
	Is that right?
	I know Australia.
	I didn't realise the US as well.
	That's interesting.
	I didn't know that.
	So, of course, we are hemorrhaging the talent, as it says, and I don't really think we're bringing it in necessarily.
	Arguably.
	I did see, I think it was looking at, I'm going to, I looked at Hindus and Sikhs and Jews and Muslims.
	I think there's 6.5% Muslims in the country.
	I think it's probably a lot more.
	But I think one of the Muslim councils was celebrating the fact that they were bringing in 2.5% of GDP.
	It's like the maths, mate, doesn't work out.
	Yeah, that's not good.
	That's bad.
	Yeah, if we're a fully Muslim country, we're two-thirds less well off.
	It doesn't make sense.
	You can't celebrate that.
	Whereas when we look at the figures for Jews are 0.7, Hindus, I think Hindus were about 0.5 and they were bringing in over 2% or something.
	I read that.
	That came from the Hindu figures themselves.
	You know what I mean?
	But let's just be honest.
	What do we want?
	Do we want to bring in people that are going to lower our financial sustainability within the world?
	Or we want to bring in the best only?
	And we're not doing that right now.
	So I can understand if he thinks, you know what, we need to increase this at all costs.
	He's never going to go and say that we need to stop immigration into the UK in the way that we think he should.
	And I understand that.
	I might not necessarily like him too much.
	He's a likable chap.
	But you know what I mean?
	When we look longer term.
	And, of course, what he did with people that he doesn't really sort of get on with in the part and how he discredits them and smears them, I think is very unprofessional.
	But, you know, you can't be everything to everyone, can you?
	Yeah, no, you're sure.
	If I can flip back quickly into my more comfortable caning nigh-edge mode.
	Yeah, I don't trust him.
	To actually do these things.
	Anyway, let's talk about what happened overnight, because the big story, actually, the big show, was the by-election, the Runcorn by-election for an MP, which they won.
	Now, I've already said, and I said earlier in the week, the old cliche, the old adage that one by-election does not a general election make, does not a government make, on and on and on.
	But you sort of can't help yourself but read into it.
	But this is...
	It was such a big majority.
	It's a super safe Labour seat.
	Super safe.
	It's like Labour heartland.
	The guy I had, you know the guy Mike Amesbury, is it, who punched a dude in the street?
	Should have been an archer, really.
	Crazy shit.
	Absolutely.
	Is that a reference to the Amesbury archer?
	It is, yeah.
	Very good, very good.
	We're in Wiltshire.
	It's perfect.
	So, it's ridiculous that there was even a by-election in the first place.
	He had a majority of well over 14,000, I believe.
	Super safe seat, like top 50 Labour safe seats in the country.
	He was really connecting with the electorate, wasn't he?
	Sorry, had to.
	So for reform to even get close is sort of a very good achievement, but they won it by the smallest margin ever, in fact.
	I was watching it overnight, and when the first result came in, they were saying that they'd won it by four votes.
	Of course, Labour demanded a recount.
	The recount came back that reformer had actually won it by six votes.
	However, that is the tightest margin ever.
	I think back in the 60s, I sort of read somewhere, I saw somewhere, back in the 60s there was one that was down to like 57 votes or something.
	And there was another one in the 70s where it was like 100 votes.
	So if it's come down to six votes, that's historically tight.
	If you're outside of the UK, our constituencies for each MP are between about 70,000 and 100,000-ish.
	You know, the boundaries are a bit porous on either side.
	But that's roughly the order of magnitude we're talking about.
	And with a 60% election turnout, I imagine it would probably be much lower for local elections.
	But even half of that, that's still, what, 35,000 at least?
	So just say we are talking about the MP sync, not the local election.
	That's true, yes, but it still suffers the same thing, isn't it, that by-elections tend not to have the same turnout as a general election because people aren't as aware that it's going on.
	Quite often, yeah.
	So one of the things...
	So there's various ways of looking at this, break it down.
	One is just the swing from Labour to whoever beat them, obviously reform in this case.
	And the swing is massive.
	Like I say, overturning a 14,600-odd majority, that's big.
	That sort of, you can't just say...
	That was lucky or anything like that?
	It was on the back of a scandal, though.
	He stepped down because he punched a constituent that he was meant to represent.
	And I think the constituent was being annoying, but that's still not good enough, unfortunately.
	So I think that would probably affect the popularity of Labour in the area if their elected representatives are punching them.
	Sure, yeah.
	Just a little bit, I reckon.
	It was a crazy thing to do, really.
	I think the guy was just being rude.
	I think he was being rude and belligerent, but he wasn't being physically aggressive, so it was crazy to punch.
	His body language was that he wasn't even looking at him as he was punched.
	So it was a sucker punch?
	It was sort of, yeah.
	I have seen the footage, but I can't remember that.
	I remember covering it when it happened, yeah.
	So one thing is the swing.
	So the swing is...
	Substantial.
	Remarkable, really.
	Nigel said afterwards, which also is very true, whether they won it or lost it, even if he lost it by six votes, that swing is still there.
	The other thing to mention, though, which is something you mentioned about turnout.
	The turnout for this, I think, was something like 46%.
	Blimey, that's...
	So that's low.
	That's really, like, sort of pathetically low, really.
	Now, that does speak of that even...
	Nigel and reform, despite the swing, they're not galvanising...
	They didn't galvanise a big, big chunk of the electorate.
	People weren't dying.
	They weren't fooling over themselves to vote reform.
	Sure, they were prepared to turn up enough to overturn that big majority.
	Remarkable, as I keep saying.
	But it's not like 60, 70, 80% of people were queuing up round the block to put their cross.
	Next to that Sarah woman.
	It's not so much that there's massive enthusiasm, it's just that there's no enthusiasm for the other parties.
	That's what I'm going to say, the votes were taken from the other parties and were generated by new voters for reform.
	I think that's been established already, isn't it?
	Yeah.
	So it's like maybe reform will do very well in the next general election, but will it be just out of pure apathy and spite for the other ones?
	I mean, that's not a great foundation.
	No, it's not.
	So it's also worth mentioning the candidate herself.
	Because I believe she, was it in her capacity as a mayor or something?
	I can't remember.
	But she attended a refugee's welcome for Syrians and Afghans.
	And that's an interesting turn of events from going from that only a few years ago to running for reform.
	And it's one of those things that makes people like myself worry about how authentic reform are in tackling immigration if people like that.
	I seem to be representative of the party, quite literally.
	So she's Radio 4 friendly.
	Yeah, that's a good one.
	And that's what Nigel's looking for.
	She's been accused of that before.
	She's never really answered it.
	She says, well, actually, the policies I'm interested in.
	And she goes into the whole kind of politician's appeal.
	But you're absolutely right.
	This is why I think we have to have a healthy concern.
	About reform.
	You're absolutely right though.
	You need to support something that's going to make a positive change.
	But I don't believe any of these.
	See, I'm a political guy.
	So my stance on my channel is about the individual and about the community.
	It's not about politics isn't going to save us.
	But who you are and who you are within your community and how you hold yourself is going to save us as a country.
	It's about re-establishing the values of what made England so great.
	You know, to be honest with you, I just don't think anything is going to save it.
	I think you're going to go in.
	You're going to have the civil service behind you.
	It doesn't matter who's at the head.
	They can't make change anyway.
	It's going to be the ministers beneath them.
	And those people, well, the ministers can't change.
	It's going to be the civil heads beneath them.
	And those are the same people that have come in through Common Purpose, which, I don't know about Common Purpose, it educates these new leaders, doesn't it?
	So it educates them with this progressive, diverse narrative that we install within our civil service.
	And it doesn't matter who's ahead of them.
	And in a way, you understand that, because then we continue a consistent...
	Sort of policy as the United Kingdom, don't we?
	A consistent policy.
	We don't get these jarring changes.
	That's what a conservative sort of civil service does.
	But I don't think reform coming in is going to make much of a difference at all.
	Yeah, I mean, they talk about leaving the ECHR and repealing...
	But they talk about it.
	I know, I know, I know.
	I can't believe they will.
	No, I'm with you.
	I'm with you.
	I don't really...
	It has huge ramifications if we do.
	And also, if you're listening, I think it was Matt Goodwin saying, it might have been David Starkey was saying, in fact, on one of his ones.
	In order to do this, you've got to install people, like Trump did.
	Have a team ready to go that have built up this over five years and know exactly what they're going to do when they walk in the door and how they're going to do it.
	And they've got people in there that are going to help them do it.
	None of that's happening.
	Like, zero of that's happening.
	They're going to go in, they're going to celebrate themselves because it's all about the leadership, all about the top people.
	It's a big problem in this country that we celebrate.
	It's what happened with the Conservatives at the very end.
	The Conservatives were all trying to jostle individually for positions.
	And they were neglecting what they really should be doing.
	And that's why the Conservatives are there now saying, you see Suella Braverman, or you see Robert Jenrick, or you see all these people saying, we need to do this.
	Yeah, you had the opportunity, mate.
	You need to do it.
	It's no good saying it now.
	You were literally there, but they were too wrapped up in their profiles and what people were saying about them and their ratings.
	It really grinds my gears when someone like Suella Brevman or Preeti Patel or whoever, James Cleverley or Rhys Mogg or anyone like that tries to pour scorn on other people for not being based enough.
	It's like, you had your shot, bro, and you did jack.
	So I don't want to hear it now.
	Oh, suddenly you're really bad.
	That's the most American turn of phrase I've ever heard you say.
	In a Cockney accent.
	Yeah, it was good.
	I don't want to hear Jack, bro.
	No, so, OK, so they got the run-con thing, so they're now back to five MPs.
	So that is significant, although let's not get carried away.
	Because anything could happen in three years and one constituency doesn't the government make.
	But so in the local elections then, as you can see there, this is the total at the moment.
	There's still lots more to come in.
	Also, they won one of the big mayors up in Lincolnshire.
	I did see that, yeah.
	Yeah, I think they're set to win another one up in Huddersfield or somewhere as well.
	I know Aaron Banks lost, but he came second.
	And a lot of the places where Reform didn't actually win, they came close.
	It seems to suggest that they're doing quite well.
	They're in the ascendancy.
	You can't deny that they're in the ascendancy, for better or worse.
	I mean, the momentum seems to be with them.
	It does, and also Labour are not.
	In this sentence, I think, is what we need to look at, really, as well.
	Wildly unpopular.
	I was looking at some of their figures, and at the minute, even Tony Blair is much more popular than Keir Starmer.
	That's weird, isn't it?
	It's strange.
	He was the most popular Labour Party member amongst millennials, which is slightly worrying.
	Well, he was, you mean?
	I apologise for my generation.
	No, he is now.
	He is now.
	That's incredible, isn't it?
	Because I think he's carrying the baggage of what he's done over his career in his face.
	You know what I mean?
	I think people do that when they hit 50. All of a sudden, you see people and you look at them and you think...
	You know what you've done.
	You know what I mean?
	And you're carrying that on you.
	I think we can see it.
	But it's interesting.
	I look at Blair and I'm thinking, jeez, dude, you know what I mean?
	That's a lot of weight to carry on your shoulders there.
	You can sort of see the evilness manifesting in his pictures.
	I wasn't going to say that.
	I was going to let you say that.
	But no, it's also a thing quite often, not always, not always, but quite often when someone's an elder statesman, people, you can't help but look back on their career a bit more favourably than you did at the time.
	They do, yeah.
	Not always, but often that is the case.
	I mean, you look at...
	Well, there's so many examples of it.
	But okay, so just to mention that, it was just a big night for reform.
	Whether you like them or loathe them, that's what happened.
	So, well, we'll see where it goes from there.
	I think that's my time up.
	Okay, I imagine I've got a bunch of messages here.
	DragonLadyChris says, Josh, we'll miss you here.
	Not only is your insight delightfully intelligent, you are just so darn cute.
	Oh, well, thank you very much.
	You are to Ellie what Paul McCartney was to the Beatles.
	Be well.
	I'm very flattered by that comparison as well.
	He was probably the most talented Beatle.
	That's a random name, says, Josh, I just wanted to say that I'll miss seeing you on Lotus Eaters.
	I know the economy's been rough lately and I hope your new endeavour on OnlyFans works out for you.
	Much love.
	I was meant to keep that one on the down low.
	You should have told everyone.
	Some people have got non-sexualised OnlyFans accounts.
	Just use it as another platform.
	I'm going to use it to teach you statistics.
	I could do that, couldn't I?
	I mean...
	There are actually people who sell their courses on there, apparently.
	That's what it was originally intended for, yeah.
	Oh, is that right?
	I never knew that.
	There's me being all naked.
	Yeah, I didn't even need to.
	Yeah, exactly.
	JC's Angel says, Joshua, son of Nun, Moses sent ten spies into enemy lands and only Joshua came back with a positive report.
	Then he knocked down strong walls.
	I see great things for you.
	My first son's name too.
	Oh, that's really nice of you.
	Well, thank you.
	Name the first son after you.
	I'm sure it's not that.
	You can't really claim that with a biblical name, can you?
	Okay.
	I suppose we may as well start talking about DEI in the military.
	Yes, we should.
	Because it's still going on.
	And I thought we'd stop this when we spoke about the Air Force.
	They had to apologise for bringing DEI in when they stopped young white men joining by prioritising minorities and women.
	And by the way, what people don't realise when the Air Force did that, they actually put minorities and women onto training courses that hadn't started yet in order to get the figures in so they could say, look how many minorities were getting into the service, look how many women were getting into the service.
	And those people were held for a couple of months before they even started training just to make it look as if they were satisfying the figures.
	And let's be honest with you, it's not the Air Force that did this.
	It's the Ministry of Defence that demanded it.
	And it was the cabin office that directed the ministry.
	And I had a bit of an argument on here with Ben Wallace, actually, on Twitter.
	Only because someone said it was Ben Wallace.
	And I said, well, it was Ben Wallace.
	And I met Ben's...
	PA once at a meeting, sorry, at a party of a friend of mine.
	The ex-secretary of defence, Fenway, doesn't he?
	Sorry, yeah, my apologies, ex-secretary of defence.
	And Ben obfuscated and went off on a tangent about, do you think we just make up policy every day?
	And I'm like, well, you bloody should, mate.
	If you'd stopped this, if you said, no, we're not doing this, it would have stopped.
	End ex.
	It would have stopped.
	So what's happened here then?
	A young Royal Marine has gone out on a limb, really, and he said, hang on a second, he put a petition out.
	And a thousand Marines started...
	Signing that petition overnight within 24 hours.
	Now, I've never seen the petition.
	No one has.
	We've seen clips of the petition.
	And the argument against...
	The petition basically said that we shouldn't be lowering standards in the Corps, the Royal Marines.
	The Royal Marines was formed in 1664.
	The Duke of York and Albany's regiment of foot, it was called.
	28th of October, I believe it was.
	My father was a Royal Marine.
	So I have a bit of an attachment, my family of attachment to the Corps.
	And I keep following what happens at Commander Training Centre, Royal Marines, and a lot of Marines write to me.
	And I've did a lot of airborne stuff over Marines when I was on Tornado.
	And hawk for training.
	So, you know what I mean?
	A good bunch of dudes.
	Notice my language.
	Good bunch of dudes.
	All right?
	Let's be honest with you.
	These are men.
	Now, if you want to know, it's about basically that the standards are being lowered to accept women into the Corps.
	And I think the petition probably lent on an individual who was a woman in training.
	And that's why maybe the Corps got upset with this guy putting a petition.
	But we've never seen a petition.
	But what he says, this young man, says we shouldn't be lowering standards to accommodate.
	He says women in the Corps, but he could have said anyone, couldn't he?
	Let's not lower standards to accommodate just anyone in the Corps.
	Let's keep it.
	What you've got then, you've got Guy Alistair Carnes, who's a Labour MP, I believe it is, was a colonel within the Marines.
	He's come out on Twitter and he said, hang on, we're not lowering standards.
	He used to run, I believe, the Commando Training Centre, but they do all the training down in Devon.
	He said, we're not lowering standards.
	And now what you've got is this classic case of a young Marine saying we are, all the Marines saying we are, and senior officers saying we're not.
	Now, this happened in the Air Force as well, because what happens in the Air Force, a new boss comes in, he looks at statistics, and he goes, right, I need to improve those statistics in order to get promoted.
	That's what I need to do.
	So statistics say flying rate, how many people were qualified, I need to make that better.
	So what they'll do is they'll downplay these statistics, and they will overplay theirs, creating a bigger delta.
	That makes sense?
	So what this Marine Colonel is saying, we're not...
	Changing standards.
	Well, he's not necessarily wrong, because the tests and everything are kind of like the same.
	They've still got to drag someone 200 metres whilst they're wearing 32 pounds of kit wet.
	You know what I mean?
	They've still got to do that.
	The difference being, when the male marines do it, they've been on a four-mile hike, you know what I mean, in the morning, and they're absolutely, you know, bull-bagged, they're threaders.
	Now they've got to do this drag.
	And the girl's been nursing an ankle injury, so she's been given the day off before.
	And it's that kind of thing.
	So she still has to do it to the same standards.
	But everything surrounding it is different.
	And that's what the Marines are saying.
	It's like, hang on.
	Now, one of the things says, and this is quite an interesting point to make as well when it comes to talking about the military.
	Yes, women are finding it difficult to get into the Corps.
	Men find it difficult to get into the corps.
	A lot of men don't make it in there.
	A lot of men are sacked off.
	A lot of men get injured and have to go back to Hunter Troop and never get through commando training.
	It's 32 weeks long.
	You know, the main commando training is 32 weeks long.
	It's no joke, right?
	Well, the old arms is 13 weeks.
	Can I ask you a thing?
	Because they're special forces, right?
	They're considered special forces.
	Well, they're considered up there with Tier 1 Shock Troop special forces.
	So that's what I wanted to ask.
	So you've got full-blown, just out-and-out, undeniable special forces for us, the SAS or the SBS, something like that, in America.
	It might be like Delta or something like that.
	But then you've got...
	It's more than just your standard...
	For us, the Royal Marines, they're commandos.
	So it's more than just your standard infantry.
	They're considered to be like Parachute Regiment.
	If you're in an infantry regiment, you can apply to go into the Parachute Regiment.
	Well, you can look to go into the Parachute Regiment.
	The training is harder.
	Fewer people actually succeed.
	We know how it is.
	In other words, you've got to be, if not...
	If not that, you've got to be very close to being the best of the best.
	This is a very good...
	Like the top 0.0 whatever percent of human beings.
	On entry.
	On entry, yeah.
	This is a great point to introduce this graph.
	You've probably seen graphs like this before.
	This is just a normal distribution.
	And what we...
	I'm going to explain some statistics and data because this is my bread and butter.
	But basically, what you want is, ideally, you want to be recruiting people from that upper, you know, the third standard deviation from the median there.
	So you want the best.
	And I would argue that for the Marines, you don't want the top 2.35% you want.
	Even more...
	Selective than that, yeah.
	So the vast majority of men are going to fail.
	Oh, yeah.
	So this is something that people have explained before, but I'll do so as well, that, you know, men have a biological difference when compared with women, like our upper body strength is 30% higher, and lots of other things to do with that.
	It's very obvious that we have evolved to fulfil a role far more...
	Related to protection and violence and therefore we are more likely to excel at it.
	And so that is why you find in the military that the vast majority of the best soldiers are men.
	In fact, almost all of them.
	And if it gets to the point where you're dealing with the top 0.5% or the top 1% or whatever it might be, if you already have this biological predisposition, you must have that to be able to...
	To reach that percentage.
	It's a matter of mathematics.
	It's not a matter of, you know, well, we have the standard and maybe we'll see if someone can meet it.
	We know for certain with the information we already have that it's impossible for women to reach that, right?
	And it's the same with lots of other things.
	To flip it around the other way and to make it clear that I'm not having a go at women because I have no reason to.
	The top 1% of people In Britain who are the most caring and empathetic and best in that respect will all be women as well.
	It's just how this normal distribution actually works, right?
	Is that certain people, certain types of people, excel at certain things and the higher up you go, the more important that everything aligns for you to be the best.
	You're absolutely right.
	I saw a great clip.
	And you actually know some Navy SEALs in your past, haven't you?
	Yeah, yeah.
	I mean, the Navy SEALs and the Royal Marines aren't an exact equivalency.
	Anyway, I saw a very good clip of a Navy SEAL instructor bloke.
	And he was being interviewed by a wokest mainstream media person.
	And he just said, look, if you take a £100 or £90 pack and you ask a woman, Pretty much any woman to march non-stop overnight, like 20, 30, 40 miles, whatever it is, she's going to collapse.
	She's going to crumple up.
	She's not going to get close.
	The vast majority of men aren't going to get close.
	Extremely fit, young men, most of them will utterly fail.
	It's not me having a go as well, because I think I probably would too.
	In my current state of fitness, almost certainly.
	I'm down there with you.
	Yeah, when I was at my fittest, there'd be no way.
	It's not really a debate though, is it?
	Yeah, you're right.
	Let's have a look.
	The Israeli Defence Force have two battalions, I believe it is, or two regiments with women in it, the mixed gender regiments.
	It doesn't have all of them.
	So it's actually, the conversation in Israel continues about women as frontline troops.
	It continues.
	The thing is, they can put these women in because they're not specialist troops.
	So you can have a 50-50 regiments, absolutely fine.
	The Marines only will ever have one or two women.
	I know some fit women.
	I've got a firefighter friend I rode with, and she's walked to the Antarctic.
	This girl is a beast.
	She's ripped up, you know what I mean?
	She possibly, she's getting better on.
	She's like 50, like me now, you know what I mean?
	She probably couldn't do it.
	But that's the kind of woman that possibly could when they're going to have kids.
	We're not talking about the problems that women have.
	Hip issues, ankle issues.
	Women do not sustain that kind of level of punishment as most top-tier men.
	And most men don't sustain that level of punishment.
	As top-tier men.
	So we're concentrating on the wrong side here.
	And I think it's completely disingenuous, and this is why I get a little bit miffed at the senior officers out there, who have got it in there from people like Ben Wallace to push diversity in that.
	And what the young Marine is saying is he's going to get people killed.
	And he's absolutely right.
	On operations, go and see that Warfare film.
	If you look at me in the eyes now, I saw a couple of days ago, Warfare, that film at the cinema.
	15 quid, though.
	Fair play.
	It's all Dolby, isn't it?
	All right.
	Calm down.
	There was three men in there, by the way.
	It went on like a Wednesday afternoon.
	I was like, all right, mate.
	You all right?
	All right?
	All right?
	Just us there watching this film, you know what I mean?
	Spread around the cinema as we do.
	But then go and ask yourself, if there was a woman in that building having a drag...
	I'm not going to ruin the story, but having to drag a man in that...
	One thing I noticed was the amount of kits these guys carry.
	Not only their armour, they've got radio packs.
	There is zero way that the majority of women that I know, and I train heavily with women in the rowing clubs and stuff, most men couldn't drag those men in.
	It's not possible.
	Unless you're a 21-year-old, almost like you're an athlete.
	You could have been an athlete, but instead you went into the Marines.
	You know what I mean?
	That's the kind of level we're looking at.
	And we're trying to force women into it.
	It's an absolute joke.
	And the young man there who's put his whole career on the line, a young man called John, you haven't got to go through his surname.
	That's bravery.
	Yeah, it's courage.
	And that's exactly what they should be celebrating, but they're not.
	They're trying to defame him.
	The country, well, basically the Ministry of Defence have arrested him.
	I won't use that word, actually.
	There's been a lot trying to reveal him.
	But no, he's gone on TV news now, I think, and he's gone on Talk TV.
	They took him.
	He works out in Scotland.
	He's a marine serving in Scotland.
	I believe he's protecting the...
	Faslana might be the nuclear...
	That's right, yeah.
	They flew him.
	Down to the MOD to question him.
	He said, who are you questioning me?
	They said, you don't need to know who we are.
	You know what I mean?
	We're just questioning on your motives.
	And then he went, right, this is all rubbish.
	Him and his wife went on holiday.
	They came back.
	They stopped him at the airport.
	I think he went back in, say, through Aberdeen or whatever.
	Again, there's people there who didn't know who they were.
	They were questioning him under the Terrorism Act.
	And then they said, well, it's to do with your political views.
	Do you know what party he belongs to?
	Have a guess.
	Go on.
	I know already.
	He's a homeland guy.
	Now, as much as I'm not a massive fan of any political party, but, you know, homeland, I mean, fair enough.
	A lot of people are getting behind them and understand why.
	You know, they're trying to drive some kind of change in the country.
	It's a good positive message.
	They're a registered party.
	I was about to say.
	They are absolutely there.
	They're questioning him about his motive.
	In fact, he says this.
	He gets asked about this in an interview, and his answers are basically exactly what we would say here, which is relieving to see.
	And also, credit where credit is due to talk TV here, they actually did a pretty good job, which I don't say too often, to be honest.
	Kev's a good guy.
	Would it be alright to play this ever so briefly, just so we can hear him in his own words?
	Let me ask you then about the stories in the paper today.
	Straight questions.
	Are you a neo-Nazi, John?
	No.
	Are we not hearing it?
	We can't hear it very well.
	That's his brother on the right.
	His brother's got a YouTube channel that builds Lego or something.
	Builds Lego?
	Yeah, yeah.
	I'll start again.
	Sorry in the audience.
	Let me ask you then about the stories in the paper today.
	Straight questions.
	Are you a neo-Nazi, John?
	No, I'm not.
	No, I'm not a neo-Nazi.
	Sorry.
	I'm surprised that he's just laughing about that, actually.
	Are you a member of the Homeland Party?
	Yeah, I'm a member of the Homeland Party.
	It's on the Electoral Commission.
	It's a party that's...
	Yeah, it's a party that is in no way affiliated with anything Nazi at all.
	It wouldn't be allowed to be a party if it was.
	And it wouldn't be part of it.
	Yeah, and I wouldn't be part of it if it wasn't.
	And if it was all the things that it was reported to be, Kevin, I wouldn't be a part of it.
	But I've spoken to a lot of these people in the party individually and in person, and they are not what they're reported to be.
	So he's saying exactly the right thing there and just not backing down.
	He's not saying, oh, I'm sorry, I had no idea, as people used to in the past.
	And also it's interesting as well that...
	People are actually able to clear their name in public now, which is very refreshing.
	It's the only opportunity he had now as well.
	They've come after him so much.
	And his brother says, we know what's going to happen.
	They're going to come after him.
	They're going to call me a Nazi.
	They're going to discredit him.
	They're going to blah, blah, blah.
	Stopping talking to the press.
	He's gone, well, I'll give it a go then.
	My career's pretty much ruined, isn't it?
	I may as well.
	He's on some administrative leave now, apparently.
	Okay.
	And he's gone, right, I'll go and talk TV.
	I'll go on TV news.
	And I hate to say it, but...
	Rightly so.
	Every Marine I've ever spoken to is supporting this guy.
	There are a few that are going, well, hang on a second.
	The petition kind of lent on this one particular woman going through training.
	I haven't seen the petition.
	I can't comment on that.
	But either way, that...
	That woman that he's looked at, or the women he's looked at, he's seeing in real time what's happening down at CTCRM, and it is an absolute lowering of standards.
	There's no two ways about it.
	Do you want that?
	It's the same thing, isn't it?
	If you've got someone that's been put into, let's say he's a brain surgeon, or she's a brain surgeon, put in there because of diversity, you need an operation with that person.
	It's a common argument.
	You're going to select that person?
	No, you want the best brain surgeon.
	You want the best troops here.
	And the thing that people don't realise about troops, and I'll stop talking about this now, is if you get...
	Troops who are weak, like there's a weakness within the core.
	Let's say you've got a core full of, say, 4,500 men, and all of a sudden you've got...
	Some women are being forced into this thing, or some weaker Marines are being forced into that thing, and arguably they are because they cannot get enough Marines in to sustain the Corps' strength, which means that they could be disbanded, so the Corps is kind of struggling for its own survival, if you see what I mean.
	Then all of a sudden, you fragment the efficacy, the combat effectiveness, the unit cohesion.
	It's fragmented completely.
	And when you see your films like Lone Survival, you realise how important that kind of stuff is.
	It's not a joke.
	I've been on squadrons where...
	You know, we know to retain this.
	And the boss has said, oh, pass that student.
	No, boss, because they're going to get us killed.
	Not now, but on the front line.
	And I remember having an argument with an airline pilot once when we failed a student.
	We failed a female student because she was failing the course.
	We put her back nine trips, redid it.
	She's on Typhoon now.
	She's doing really well.
	But we failed her.
	Well, basically, we just said, you're not continuing.
	We're going to start you again.
	He said, but she never actually failed the trip.
	No, she didn't.
	So she didn't fail the trip, but we'd start her again.
	Because if we hadn't have done that, she doesn't fail now.
	She fails whilst trying to get into a tanker over North Syria, whilst trying to support troops on the ground who are fighting ISIS.
	So this is why we stop her now in training.
	We recalibrate her and we retrain her.
	Because if we just let her go, for diversity's sake, for statistics's sake...
	Down the line, that's not my boss's responsibility, by the way, because he's got his training stats up.
	He looked good, didn't he?
	He's got his training, he's got the girls out, he's got the boys out.
	But later on, someone else suffers.
	And it's the Marines or it's the infantry that's going to suffer because she wasn't good enough.
	And that takes courage.
	That's what you should be doing as the commander of CTCRM, is saying, look, it might not be your immediate responsibility now, but you have a massive detrimental knock-on effect.
	And I think what...
	Young John here is showing, this boy here, is a massive amount of courage that is lacking in the senior leaders.
	Not just in the Marine Corps, by the way, which is disgraceful to see, because I never thought I'd see it with the Corps, I never thought I'd see it with the Air Force, to be fair, and I was fundamentally wrong when I said that diversity would bounce off the military, I said, and it didn't.
	The military absorbed it in a way that education and health could only have dreamed of, you know what I mean?
	But the military, oh no, because they can do.
	You tell them to do something, we'll do that.
	And we'll not just do it, we'll do it in sparkles and rainbows and colours.
	And they did.
	They painted things, didn't they?
	They painted rainbow crossings at Bryce Norton and stuff.
	It was disgraceful what had happened in our military.
	And this guy here has gone, yeah, enough's enough.
	You know, Marine's courage.
	And that's what we're looking at then.
	That's why we need to celebrate these young people.
	Absolutely.
	It is certainly brave.
	I think I might have mentioned this before somewhere, but in Andy McNabb's Bravo 20, he mentions there were other...
	There was a Bravo 1-0 and a Bravo 3-0.
	And one of them, they landed in Iraq and the gang boss took one look around and said, no, no, we're not doing this.
	Straight back on the Chinook.
	Straight back.
	And they said, that's courage.
	That's leadership.
	That's bravery to say no.
	Say no.
	There's a line in the sand.
	I'm going to get it in the neck.
	This might be the end of my career.
	But it's the right thing.
	That takes balls.
	I think it's lacking.
	I think what we're seeing now within the military, if I'm honest, I'm not saying this about the Commandant General of the Royal Marines, because he was probably pre this era, but he's being led by people who are...
	Completely driven by, you know, the common purpose, the world economic, whatever you want to call it, I don't care.
	They've driven up into the Ministry of Defence, which is, no one ever knows the people's names, by the way.
	You know this guy's name.
	You know Senior Marine Commander's names.
	You never know the Ministry of Defence officials that are directing this policy.
	The same with the Border Force, things like this.
	You never know these people.
	They operate behind, don't they?
	Because they're absolute cowards.
	I don't even look at them in the same, I wouldn't even, I don't even consider them to be Englishmen.
	I wouldn't even say they were from the same stock that we come from, you know what I mean?
	But that's just me anyway, and I'll get on a rant, so I'm just going to have to, you know what I mean?
	But the thing is, we've got these people in government now, in our ministries that are driving this,
	I don't think we can necessarily stop it.
	I think it's going to be there.
	That's what we're seeing.
	I don't think this is going to change it either.
	It's going to be marginalised, sidelined and they're going to get a woman into the marines and they're going to celebrate it with rainbow colours.
	There's also the fact that people are aware of this sort of thing.
	And there's this YouGov poll from February that found that lots of Britons won't serve in the armed forces.
	And of course, we know for a fact that it's mainly native-born people that serve in the military.
	More Muslims joined ISIS than the military.
	Things like that, right?
	And so we know that normally it's patriotic young lads that have a family history in Britain.
	That will join up in the forces.
	Certainly, my experience with some of my friends, they've joined the forces for that reason, and family too.
	A sense of public service.
	Exactly, yeah.
	And I think that that is why people join in this day and age, isn't it?
	And, yeah, people look at the way people in the military are treated, they look at what they're actually fighting to protect, and they say, well, it's not worth it then, which is a tragedy, I think, because we do need a military.
	It's not, you know, nice to have it.
	It's necessary for the existence of our people.
	Do you know how many people, how many Muslims are in our military?
	About two.
	Yeah, about two Muslims, yeah.
	In the British Army, it's about 450 Muslims.
	In the Thai military, it's about 600.
	More than I thought, actually.
	Yeah, there are people that join.
	About 0.5%, I think it is, something like that.
	There are people that would join.
	I think Hindus, Sikhs, you know, there are obviously Jews.
	There's all sorts of people in the military.
	They come from military backgrounds.
	Of course they do.
	And so we should be celebrating that.
	And what we should be doing in the military is we don't do it anymore, do we?
	I tell you what, you see adverts full of white men when you want them to go to war.
	That's what you see.
	All other times, and I think I sent...
	A picture down here as well of an advert the Royal Navy's just put out where it's got people, there's just no white man in the advert.
	There's, and at the front of it, you've got two, I think, you've got some black girls on one side, you've got two women in the front of it, one of who's a commissioned officer.
	So what we're saying, you know, we're putting minorities, putting women first.
	No wonder guys aren't joining when we're in a country overwhelmingly of young white men.
	It just needs to be said, like, who do you want in this?
	And it's family tradition as well.
	A lot of these young guys, I get written to all the time, like, my son's not joining anymore, and I spent, you know, 30 years in the army, and I'm a proud, you know, whatever regiment the guy came from.
	We're losing history.
	We're losing people going into these regiments.
	These regiments with an absolute place in the world that's steeped in honours.
	We're not seeing it.
	And it's almost, if you wanted to destroy a country, you'd start with a police force, you'd attack the military, and it's how it's happening now.
	And that's why I talk about these people in the ministry not being English.
	There's also a cultural aspect to it.
	I traced my family history recently, and I was surprised that on both sides I've got, you know, martial men, both in Scotland and down in Devon, both in the army, the navy, and the air force.
	That's amazing.
	That's really heavy.
	Yeah, and it makes you realise, wow, this country's really been defined by our military.
	And of course...
	So small now, though.
	It's a great career, I'd say.
	I'd join back up now and I'd just go and smash people up because, you know what I mean, it's ridiculous.
	But unfortunately, I can't.
	I'm 50, you know what I mean?
	But I still recommend it as a career for a young person, man or woman.
	Just get yourself in there and have a great adventure.
	It's absolutely solid.
	I do recommend it still.
	You've just got to suck up a lot of idiots, unfortunately, that are going to be above you.
	A couple of points I'd like to make.
	I'll build on, I think, a really salient point you made where you made the connection between a brain surgeon.
	Lives are on the line.
	This is not just like bin collectors and we're worried about maybe the efficiency of bin collecting might go down a little bit because there's women.
	You should worry about bin collecting.
	Well, maybe.
	Sure, but in a very real sense, in a very, very real direct sense, there's lives on the line.
	I think that's important.
	It's really important.
	Luxury beliefs just can't be entered into the system here.
	It's got to be as efficient as humanly possible because that's how you guarantee that people live.
	But the secret, this is what we're not talking about, the secret is there are some countries we're never going to go and be involved in a war with.
	India, Pakistan, if they come together, we're never sending anyone.
	Why?
	Because we're about to have that civil war in the UK.
	Because our populations of Indians and Pakistanis are so massive.
	They're kicking off over cricket matches.
	They're definitely going to kick off over this terrorist attack if there's a conflict.
	So we know we're never going to go and invest our military into that.
	What does it mean?
	Well, just reduce the military then.
	It's a huge burden on personnel and pensions and things like this.
	Let's just make it smaller.
	Let's just cut the military down and we can invest in what?
	What's the next thing we can invest in?
	I mean, pensions or whatever we're trying to, you know what I mean?
	So we can really erode the military as much as we can.
	And then you'll have, you know, I mean...
	How do we, what do we see where we think we need a bigger military?
	We don't, because we just commit fewer troops to the battlefield and they'll be alongside the Americans.
	When I was an Afghan, we couldn't field more than, it was supposed to be 10,000, I think, troops into Afghanistan at one time.
	Out of an army, that at the time was 100,000.
	And I think the Air Force was 40 at the time.
	The Navy was about the same.
	And now all those are reduced.
	I think we've got 30,000 in the Air Force.
	I don't think we've tipped that.
	The Army's 70,000.
	I think the Navy's about the same size as the Air Force now.
	But we couldn't put...
	10,000 people in Afghanistan.
	We couldn't field 10,000 troops in Afghanistan.
	When I was there, it was about 8,700.
	And we were pretending it was 10,000.
	And this is the problem.
	We just can't do it.
	So there's inefficiencies as well.
	Literally, I mean, if you only put one out of ten people in your army overseas, there's something fundamentally wrong with what you're doing.
	There's logistics problems there, first and foremost.
	That's more severe than the recruitment.
	If you can't field your soldiers, then there's no point having them.
	Was you at Bagram or Camp Bastion?
	I was at a place called Camp Eggers in Kabul.
	Near ISAF, yeah.
	That's in Afghanistan.
	That's when I was there, yeah.
	The other point I just wanted to make is just building on the idea that lives are on the line.
	It's like going for the jugular with the Royal Marines.
	It's a bit like lowering the standards for the parachute regiment or the SAS or something.
	If you really insist on having women in the military, there's a number of roles they can do.
	Like women in the police.
	Bobby's on the beat.
	No, there's a number of jobs women can do in the police.
	Just don't put a five-foot-nothing, 90-pound woman on the beat.
	She can do a number of jobs in the police.
	I'm going to contest that a little bit.
	You know, I've got family who are police, but that policewoman is more of a mental health worker, that woman on the street there.
	Well, fair enough.
	There's a lot of big lads out there that would smash into a male police officer that are not going to smash into a young girl.
	That's why they have them there.
	And as much as we disagree with response policing, being, you know, young, small women or whatever, five foot nothing, my sister's a five foot nothing police officer.
	You know what I mean?
	She's been beaten up in her time.
	But, you know, you do need a smattering of these female police officers.
	There used to be a height limit, didn't there?
	You know what I mean?
	And my argument is we can do it and we know it's necessary and we can put women into policing.
	We understand it.
	But recruitment is going to suffer as well because now men come in and they're like, well, where's the men that I'm coming?
	Where am I joining my tribe?
	That's the problem I think we see with the Corps as well.
	I think still, although you're right, it's a valid point.
	There's a valid point that the woman isn't necessarily there to be tackling anyone.
	But still, my point was that that doesn't apply to the Royal Marines.
	The Royal Marines are their killers.
	Say what it is.
	Commandos.
	Like the SAS or the Parachute Regiment.
	They go there because they need to demolish things and kill people.
	You don't send them unless you want them.
	Don't send them.
	Right.
	So it's...
	Don't lower the standards.
	It's not difficult.
	It's madness.
	This is why I'm saying, and we'll leave it now, this is why I'm saying there is an agenda there.
	And it's driven internally by...
	You know, whatever this thing is, this diversity, neo-Marxism, post-Second World War thing, isn't it?
	And it's just there.
	I don't think we can change it.
	All we can do is ridicule.
	That's the biggest thing we can do.
	Like what Reform are doing in the polls there, we can ridicule those people.
	They're going to be faceless.
	We don't know who they are.
	It's going to frustrate us.
	But again, I come back to it, and I'm not going to talk about it too much now, but we can build ourselves up and our communities up.
	And be more protective and more looking after each other as opposed to trying to challenge face of entities and bureaucracies that are hidden away in these ministries that we're never going to know who they are.
	Cowards.
	Absolute cowards.
	Like, literally, they're making the country weaker so that they can benefit from it.
	That's what we're doing.
	That's all they're doing.
	So they can get their little diversity stats up.
	Look what I've done.
	Brilliant.
	Well, it's also going on in the police as well, isn't it?
	It is.
	This is a recent story from West Yorkshire Police.
	I believe you know a thing or two about it.
	Yeah, I do.
	This is West Yorkshire, a bit of a disgraceful force, to be fair.
	They've had run-ins with this before.
	And what they've said here, they're allowing Black and Asian candidates to apply early for positions, before the positions open.
	So they've got...
	And I can understand why it is.
	They've actually got a release they put out to this Telegraph article, and it said why they were doing this.
	But again, same with the Royal Air Force.
	The statement's there.
	They're basically saying, look, we're allowing them to apply earlier because of diversity, inclusion, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	And they're saying, look, 23% of people in West Yorkshire identify as being from an ethnic minority background.
	We'd like, policing by consent, we'd like to have 23% of people in West Yorkshire police as minorities to identify.
	That's a valid...
	We can all kind of go, yeah, it kind of makes sense.
	Of course, in London, what are we going to get all of a sudden?
	We're going to get a police force that's 37% white, aren't we?
	You know what I mean?
	And the rest of it.
	So there is that.
	But what we're doing is a lot of people don't want to join the police.
	So again, it's standards.
	Okay, so let's say we've got 23% of minorities in our latest application, the rest of the white.
	But let's say 23% of those, maybe only 5% of them are good enough to pass all the tests.
	Are we going to turn them down?
	No, we're not.
	And what's happened is they're recruiting them.
	So what they're doing actively in West Yorkshire Police, again, is lowering the standards.
	Actively.
	So they can say, we're not, we're not.
	We're just being...
	They are.
	We know they are.
	Positive action.
	We know it's actually discrimination.
	It's an absolute lie.
	We did exactly the same thing with the Air Force.
	It's repeating itself.
	And the reason it's repeating itself is because they genuinely don't care.
	Nothing happens.
	There's no one held to account over it.
	Mike Wigston left.
	Massive pension.
	He was the boss of the Air Force.
	Sorry when this happened.
	Nothing happened to him.
	There was no one reprimanded.
	No senior Royal Marines can be reprimanded for what's happening in the Corps.
	This person here running the police is never going to be reprimanded.
	So what they do is they collect up all the applications before the time.
	When the application window opens, of course, these minority applications are there.
	These female applications are there first.
	They're the ones.
	And then every other white guy gets a look in if you put an application in.
	And you see the window opening.
	You're like, oh, there's a window.
	So again, it's unjustifiable.
	It's so frustrating.
	You can't stop it.
	You can't stop it.
	And I think the only thing we can do, as I said, is look after our communities and our people and our families.
	I'll keep going on about that, but sorry to...
	Good place to end it, actually, I think.
	We've got a few more Rumble chats here.
	Where's the mouse?
	We're on Rumble, are we?
	We are indeed.
	Rumble lads.
	Hello, everyone there.
	Let's get ready, ready, let's get ready.
	Sigil Stone says...
	Sorry.
	I want leadership decided by moistened bints lobbing scimitars at people.
	Ballad.
	Good.
	Monty Python reference there.
	Dragon Lady Chris says, Picture women in combat.
	Enemy holds up babies.
	All the women are.
	They're so cute.
	Men only in combat, please.
	Yeah, it's amazing how many women actually agree with this.
	It's not necessarily, you know, I've sort of got this view that men and women have very complementary roles and we, you know, work best together.
	Playing to our strengths is not that I'm trying to tear anyone down.
	Talk to you out later if you want.
	Based women are the best women.
	I agree.
	See the men's sheds where the women went to the men's sheds.
	So now there's a men's shed which was men only building stuff and now there's a shed up in Yorkshire somewhere that's 50-50.
	Because the women wanted to come in and the men went...
	So the men have given themselves their own little room with a train set.
	They'll get bored eventually.
	Yeah, well, now they've gone into that space, they will, yeah.
	Bald Eagle 1787 says, Bo, that was an interview with Marine Corps commander, commandant of the time.
	His saying was, you can't put £100 back on a woman because she'd crumble like an effing crouton.
	60 kilograms?
	50, 60 kilograms?
	Is it 40 kilograms?
	That's a lot.
	I'm not sure of the conversions.
	And then yomp it for mile after mile after mile.
	I can do it now.
	You guys should get this Marine on load seaters every time someone is maligned by the system.
	We should lift them up and bring them into the fold.
	I mean, I would say I'd be happy to do it, but I can't now, yeah.
	We'll have that conversation, I can say that.
	If he was on talk, why not?
	Yeah, you can.
	We'll see.
	His brother is on my Twitter, so you can contact his brother.
	Sigil Stone says, I encourage England to make all their soldiers and cops five-foot-nothing, £90 women.
	It'll make it less messy when Emperor Vance makes the UK a new state.
	Emperor Vance.
	I'll use that.
	That's great.
	And BeboPin2 says, hopefully when the UK reform, the DEI hires not competent people or whatever group will self-report like the commander who didn't put up Trump's picture, not the New Zealand ship's sinker.
	Very interesting.
	Right.
	Now, you might be wondering what on earth you've just clicked on because I don't think many people have argued what I'm about to argue here, that Vladimir Putin is actually secretly a liberal boomer.
	And why do I mean that?
	Well...
	Actually, he said quite a few things and the state of Russia is not quite the same as some people might have you believe.
	And now I'm not picking on Tucker Carlson here, although it's just an example of some people going to Russia and saying, hey, maybe they're doing things right compared to the rest of the world.
	I feel like perhaps let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater a little bit.
	And I'm not hating on Russia.
	For any particular reason, it's just that I find people saying these sorts of things annoying.
	So it's more out of personal inconvenience to me than I'm saying this, more than anything.
	I want you to be truthful and accurate in your views of the world.
	You're saying that some people in the dissident right, some people on the right, people like us or Tucker or whoever, paint Russia out as being...
	This traditional utopia or something like that.
	And it's not necessarily...
	It's a little bit silly because, as we all see, actually, a lot of the problems that we use to complain about the West and how we're doing things wrong are just as present in Russia, if not worse.
	So, obviously, Tucker went out to there and was saying how cheap the groceries were because, of course, he was paying with US dollars in mind and...
	As the community note says here, to understand the international price differences, the average wage in Russia is 73,383 rubles per month, which equates to $791 with today's exchange rate,
	so whenever this was posted.
	15th of February.
	So food's way cheaper, but you're going to be earning loads less.
	So over 60% of Russians spend half of their salary on food, according to Russia's state-owned news agency, which...
	In Britain, if you're spending over half of your money in food, you would be very poor.
	Some people do, of course.
	They do, yes.
	It's a pretty bad ratio.
	You don't really want to be spending half your money on food, do you?
	You're too busy spending half of it on rent, aren't you?
	There's a lot of seasonal, remember, in Russia as well.
	They do really go via the seasons a lot of the time.
	There are some things that aren't available.
	We have everything available all the time, don't we?
	In Russia, they just don't.
	You know what I mean?
	Your staples can be, you know, your potatoes, your chicken breast.
	Chicken breast is quite expensive, I think, actually.
	I looked at that.
	We had Roreg Nationalist on a few years ago.
	He was talking about how loads of people in Russia got allotments or grow their own stuff in their garden.
	Loads of people.
	It's a massive thing.
	It is a big thing, yeah.
	I think that's a good idea just for its own sake.
	I think it's just good for you psychologically to do that.
	I think that actually a lot of people are deifying something that they don't necessarily understand fully.
	For example, Vladimir Putin, who has sort of been the figurehead of Russia.
	He's not always been the leader in the past 25 years, but he's at least played a significant role.
	I mean, is it Medvedev?
	Medvedev.
	He was always Putin's puppet.
	Exactly.
	He was always still Vladimir Putin at the bottom of it all.
	And so he's been the leader for quite some time.
	And so I think it's fair to look at how the country is doing and how this reflects on his leadership.
	Because I think that he's been in office far, far long enough to say that he is responsible for the way the country is today.
	This is an interesting comment.
	This is the reason I've decided to cover this.
	He says, nationalism is the first stage towards Nazism, the first step, because nationalism is not just based on the love of your own ethnicity, but also hatred of others.
	And I don't think that's the case at all.
	Patriotism or nationalism?
	Nationalism.
	What is the definition here?
	Because I always get them confused between patriotism and nationalism.
	So which one's which?
	There's not really much difference between the two, is there?
	I think nationalism is a bit more ideological.
	Maybe, yeah.
	I sort of see what he's saying there, because I think a lot of leaders, of course, have to try and...
	I'm just saying that there's a lot of people that are listening to these leaders.
	They're not all intellectual.
	They haven't got an IQ of over 120 of them, you know what I mean?
	You've got to cater for the people that are...
	So I kind of see what he's saying there.
	He's trying to accommodate everyone's interpretation by saying, you know what, if we push nationalism, then, of course, it's also...
	You've got to be careful about hating on other people.
	So I get what he's kind of saying.
	I'm known as a Putin apologist, by the way, just so you know.
	Yeah, we've been accused of being a front for the bloody Kremlin.
	Not after this segment, though.
	Yeah, hopefully not after this segment.
	My parting gift.
	Yeah, you say that.
	He'll take it with you, yeah.
	All sorts of people define both patriotism and nationalism in all sorts of different ways.
	It's just messy, isn't it?
	But nonetheless, I think there's a few things, a couple of quick things to say about Putin saying this.
	It will be absolutely calculated if there's anything we know.
	I don't necessarily believe that narrative particularly,
	but he's sort of in the empire building business on some very small limited level.
	Oh, Russia, of course.
	Right.
	of its vast size and so what he's probably thinking of is that i'm ruling over these disparate ethnic groups and it's not it's not just you know they flooded the country with diversity they were you know indigenous to these specific areas
	many of them many of these ethnic groups and so uh it's not like they don't have a legitimate claim to their area or anything like that it's just by merit of having to rule over such a large uh
	Area, which encompasses lots of peoples, lots of disparate peoples, that I think he's had to approach this in a way where he's trying to give everyone a national ethos that doesn't put them against each other.
	Sure.
	Absolutely.
	And that's exactly what's going on here.
	And it's interesting as well that...
	It just so happens that it could have been a line straight out of a Guardian article.
	Exactly.
	Yeah, it could.
	But they're coming from very different...
	Mm-hmm.
	World views.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And that's why I thought it was interesting to talk about this.
	And another thing he said before, here he is, this was a little while ago now, May of 23, our adversary is people with neo-colonial mindsets, half-wits, in fact, are unable to realise that diversity makes us stronger.
	So Vladimir Putin openly coming out and saying diversity is our strength.
	Interesting, isn't it?
	Is he addressing the sort of Inuit of Siberia?
	Well on.
	Right?
	I mean, or whatever.
	The Chechens, whatever.
	There's a difference, isn't there, between the way Putin rules, you may like it or may not like it, and the way that someone like Rishi Sunak rules, where when he was voted in, I think, was it the Prime Minister of India gave him a call and said, congratulations, there's an Indian man now running the, you know what I mean?
	So we've got to be realistic about that.
	What he's saying is, this is Russia first, and he celebrates that.
	He's got the Russian flag everywhere.
	We don't do that, do we?
	We don't go, this is England or this is...
	Because we have this thing about England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
	We have this thing about the UK.
	Are we Great Britain?
	Are we British?
	Because if we call us English, and all of a sudden I'm a nationalist, but then if I call us, you know what I mean, if I call us Great Britain, then all of a sudden the Scots hates me.
	And if I say, okay, it's the UK then, the Irish are going, hang on a second, we don't want to be, you can't win.
	And that's the problem with the fragmenting of our identity.
	And he's not doing that.
	He's bringing everyone together.
	And that's why he's saying diversity makes us stronger, because he's saying, look, everyone, we're collecting everyone under one unified banner.
	We don't do this here.
	We celebrate the Pakistani population, and we call them communities, don't we?
	We say the Jewish community.
	We've heard it.
	The Pakistani community.
	We celebrate.
	It's like, well, if you're going to do that, if you're going to celebrate communities, then you're never going to get any national pride.
	It is also worth mentioning as well that Putin is saying this after some pretty intense Russification policies in these ethnic communities in the 19th and 20th centuries.
	This is, you know, both under Tsarism.
	As well as under the Bolsheviks.
	So that has already gone on and somewhat homogenised the culture to some degree already.
	And so he's able to say this because they've been part of this empire, if you will, for quite some time.
	The project of the Muscovites controlling a vast swathe of the globe's surface is always going to be a sort of a coalition-building, multi-ethnic building project, right?
	That could have been said by someone on Radio 4 or in The Guardian.
	I think he's actually talking about something very different, isn't he?
	Oh, absolutely very different.
	That's what we need to look at.
	You cannot say that right now we're a better country for the amount of diversity we have in it.
	It's not possible.
	We're about to have a war internally between Indians and Pakistanis.
	I mean, how is that?
	How is that?
	It doesn't make sense.
	What he's saying makes sense because he's got people from all over his country fighting in Ukraine right now on the same side.
	That's what he means by diversity and making us stronger.
	We can come again.
	You know, national pride.
	We can actually go and try and...
	I mean, we're going to bring up Ukraine now.
	I mean, it's going to destroy, you know, what we're doing.
	I hate to say it.
	But, you know what I mean?
	There's a book, by the way.
	I just recommend a book to people called Putin by Philip Short.
	And there's another book called Putin's Wars.
	I can't remember if he did it.
	But, you know, Putin's Wars is quite analytical.
	But Putin is about the man himself.
	It's a great book.
	It's quite big.
	Have it as an audiobook.
	Play it in the car.
	But if you really want to know about the man, and it's not that...
	Not that nice about him, but it's very factual.
	Have a read of it.
	Putin by Philip Short.
	It's a great book.
	A lot of people are commenting, by the way, without knowledge.
	And that's what I find so dangerous on social media.
	They haven't educated themselves about it.
	They haven't watched a documentary.
	You know what I mean?
	They just comment, Putin, bad man.
	You know what I mean?
	It's basic, isn't it?
	It's elementary.
	It's an IQ level of four.
	But also moral judgements are pretty easy to make.
	Well, of course you can make it.
	Putin, he's been the bad man forever, hasn't he?
	You know what I mean?
	Of course he has.
	And by the way, I am going to say that I don't approve of him.
	I do think he's a bad man.
	I'm just going to throw that one out there.
	Just in case someone is saying, oh, you're doing apologia.
	I always say that.
	Whenever I'm throwing shade at Zelensky, I always have to say, but I do think Putin is a killer.
	This is weakness, bro.
	This is what this is.
	I do think he's a killer.
	He has murdered.
	Absolutely.
	Has he stopped the country from being fragmented, though, by the gangs internally?
	Now, what do you want out of a leader?
	And this is why I'm called a Putin apologist.
	I'm like, it works in Russia.
	For us, abhorrent, in our luxury belief Western world in which we live, you know, let's be a bit courageous here and go...
	Yeah, Russia's working under that guy.
	Most guys couldn't hold Russia together.
	If you think it's bad now, wait till he's not in power and see who comes in and replaces him.
	I do think he's one of the better leaders Russia's had in the past 200 years.
	And that's not really saying very much because they've had a rough time of it.
	And being a sort of student of Russian history, I do feel very sorry for the Russian people.
	They've suffered more hardship than I thought possible.
	And yeah, it's a history that I think they look back on.
	And makes them very cynical about their politics.
	I think Gorbachev, when he broke up, he actually was allowing the investment into Russia, wasn't he?
	And I don't think we took that.
	I think we've shunned Russia to maintain an enemy.
	That's true.
	The incentives were just too strong.
	Can you imagine if all of a sudden we weren't building up?
	The Americans didn't have to build their military up.
	How are they going to employ the vast amount of peoples they do?
	How are they going to go and take the resources that...
	You know, we need to take, I say we as a collective, but by having a unified enemy, you can always lobby that, can't you?
	We need more regiments because of Russia.
	And unfortunately he's given that.
	I think he's said that before, actually.
	So one of the things that Putin said as well is that he's in favour of mixed ethnicity marriages, as long as it's, you know, Russians internally doing so.
	And that's one thing that I've seen people just factually get wrong.
	Oh, right.
	Okay.
	And I wanted to include that.
	But one thing that supposedly traditional Russia has is a problem with divorce rates, because this is something that I think has its origin in the Soviet Union.
	Russia has among the highest divorce rates in the world, although they've slightly declined in recent years.
	And it was the highest, apparently, in the 1960s.
	So it is a sort of relic of the Soviet era.
	But once...
	It sort of takes hold of the public consciousness.
	It becomes a problem afterwards.
	You can still see this in some of the westernised former Soviet satellite states.
	They still have comparable levels of corruption that they had under the Soviet Union because it's created a culture after the fact, even though they're not living under the Soviet system.
	It seems to be just something that if you have communism, you will have corruption, even if you give up that communism.
	I definitely know that under the Stalinist period and during the worst excesses of the Maoist period in China, suicide was through the roof, abortion was through the roof, divorce or just not getting married in the first place was through the roof.
	It's a really, really, really horrible, unhealthy, unnatural way to live.
	Well, it's a sign of fundamental problems.
	Right, yeah.
	I'm surprised that they still, mildly surprised, but what do I know?
	I just would have thought where they've got Russian Orthodox Christianity, I would have thought they might be Exempt a bit from high divorce rates, but I guess not.
	Let me just look at this study, though, from the National Library of Medicine.
	Can we just recognise that's probably one of the greatest titles ever?
	The Longitudinal Prediction of Divorce in Russia.
	The Role of Individual and Couple Drinking Patterns.
	I want to read that.
	Is that why divorce is so high?
	Because they're not drinking at the same time.
	It's going to give you advice, yeah.
	The takeaway is vodka good.
	Yeah, it must be.
	Couples that drink together stay together.
	That's what I want to have the conclusion.
	So another thing that's worth mentioning as well, the fertility rate in Russia is very similar to the European contemporaries here.
	If I pull this up a little bit, you can see that the Russian line sort of gets caught along with...
	What colour is Russia, sorry?
	Dark red is not...
	It's like a sort of maroon-y colour there.
	It's the same, isn't it?
	Yeah.
	It's all in the same ballpark.
	Yeah, it's very comparable.
	This is why I try and argue that Russia's still a European country, at least part of it.
	Well, it is in Europe, yeah.
	The western side of Russia.
	Yeah, but it's culturally European as well, isn't it?
	In many ways.
	Sure, yeah, the western.
	Russia is largely western, isn't it?
	When you think of the cities and everything, it's predominantly western, isn't it?
	As in geographically, most population lives in the West, isn't it?
	Am I right?
	Oh yeah, the vast majority, yeah.
	There are still, you know, what is it, like Vladivostok?
	Yeah.
	There are some cities way out East, but yeah, the vast majority of it is...
	Yeah, of course, when you...
	Yeah, their heritage, when you look at, I don't know, like Dostoevsky or...
	Some of my favourite classical music composers are Russians.
	I think they've got a culture to be proud of, as with many.
	You'll be counseled for that.
	I know.
	The annoying thing is as well, my favourite composers are either German or Russian, so...
	Yeah, you're in trouble.
	There we go.
	You can tell the difference between someone from St. Petersburg or Moscow from someone that's from Central Asia.
	They're not Central Asian, ethnically speaking, right?
	Of course, yeah.
	It's a very big country, isn't it?
	And it's also...
	This is...
	List of countries by abortion rate.
	So this is something that lots of people who are concerned with traditional living.
	So I'm starting from the bottom here, Algeria.
	This is the per capita rate here, I think.
	That's the one you really want to look at, so it's a fair comparison.
	The raw numbers, you know, Albania is a much smaller population, therefore they've got fewer numbers, but per capita it's higher.
	But you see lots of European countries here, Austria, Croatia, Lithuania.
	Turkey, depending on who you ask.
	Maybe not Stelios.
	Slovakia, Serbia, Italy.
	These are some of the lowest in the whole world.
	Japan, Luxembourg, Germany, Portugal, Montenegro, Ukraine.
	Religion must play a big part.
	Latvia, Czech Republic, you know, the Netherlands.
	And then you're going up.
	There's Poland, Hungary, Israel.
	There's New Zealand.
	Where's...
	Russia's here somewhere.
	Where is it?
	Is it in the middle?
	You haven't hit Russia yet.
	I haven't seen it.
	It is...
	Where is it?
	I've got 112.
	Sorry, there we go.
	Ah, there we go.
	There's Russia, almost right next to the United States there.
	You know, it's next to Iceland.
	There's Canada, New Zealand.
	We're actually...
	We're worse than that?
	Yeah, we're worse.
	I did not know that.
	20?
	There's France, yeah.
	There we go.
	Only about mid-table, though.
	Yeah.
	Only about mid-table.
	We're still at 92. Yeah, we've still got all of these...
	Who tops the tables, haven't we?
	Greenland.
	It's just a small population.
	Then it's Vietnam.
	In sheer numbers as well.
	India, China, Pakistan, Nigeria.
	So it's just countries with very large populations.
	I don't know.
	It's per capita, it's per capita.
	It doesn't matter how many people are there.
	I know, yeah.
	It's only eight people there.
	They had two abortions.
	Yeah, exactly.
	I know their population is tiny.
	Isn't their population like 50,000, 60,000 or whatever?
	Does it even say what it is?
	About to take over America, isn't it?
	I would never have guessed those countries.
	No.
	India is still there for per capita as well.
	You never would have guessed either.
	It's not a religious issue then, is it?
	No.
	Italy is a very religious country.
	They're right down the bottom, aren't they?
	Yeah.
	So has Hinduism...
	I know we're getting a bit off the topic.
	Has Hinduism not got any problem with...
	I don't know much about Hinduism, really.
	You can make it up.
	I only know the basics.
	Yeah, Hinduism.
	Oh, yeah, those Hindus.
	Another thing as well, Russia has the largest Muslim population in Europe.
	It is 14 million, officially, or 10% of the total population.
	Of course, you can see it's heavily weighted in certain areas.
	But then Middle Eastern areas.
	Exactly.
	Chechnya and stuff like that.
	Rookie numbers, give us five years.
	It's not funny, but...
	It's not funny, is it?
	It's morbid, yeah.
	I can't help but laugh.
	Jeez.
	So, obviously, they've not always got along.
	I know in the 90s, the Chechens, I know it was a little bit before I was born, but I know about it.
	I know it happened.
	Feel old yet, Tim?
	Well, Chechens are fighting in Ukraine now.
	That's true, yeah.
	Fighting with Russia and Ukraine, yeah.
	So, I mean, it's, again, it's factional breakaway, you know, people within these groups, isn't it?
	Warlords and stuff, but yeah.
	I mean, oh yeah.
	I'll tell you, that's a good thing about Putin's wars.
	I don't need to say about Putin's wars.
	One of the things Putin's wars goes into quite heavily is the reactionary nature of Putin's conflicts.
	Unlike America's, where they go in and they change a country and then they resource, come out.
	Putin, things will flare up.
	He'll go like Georgia.
	He'll go in, suppress, maybe leave a little force in there and then come back out again.
	I can't really describe it that well because I'm not clever enough.
	But if people want to read about the way...
	I mean, I could tell you right now, I mean, America's got 3,000 overseas bases.
	So 3,000 bases outside the United States.
	Russia is 21. This is why I get called a Putin apologist for something called facts.
	But it is a fact, though, isn't it?
	So when we're looking at Russia expanding, being the aggressor, trying to improve its empire, is it with 21 bases?
	It's not, is it?
	We're smoking a crack pipe, right?
	It's not true.
	But who is?
	Well, America's got 3,000.
	You know, let's be...
	Realistic now.
	It's just, you know, figures, isn't it?
	But again, that's quite a good book to read if you want.
	Perhaps aircraft carries the ability to project your power abroad.
	America's got 20 or something, or 10. Russia's got one old dilapidated steamer.
	We're not even letting them have that, are we?
	We're not letting them have Sevastopol, even in Crimea.
	We could talk about this all day if you want.
	They were leasing Crimea from Ukraine on $99 million a year until 2042.
	That's why they put the little green men in, because once Yanukovych was ousted in the coup and Perushenko, was it Perushenko came in, I believe it was, and looked to EU and looked, basically, I want to join Europe.
	They realised they were going to lose Crimea, so they went in and took it.
	Crimea's got a huge water problem.
	People don't know this stuff.
	Sevastopol is the only base they've really got.
	It's been a problem since Tsarist times.
	Absolutely right, yeah.
	Crimean, I mean, all that kind of stuff.
	So yeah, that's why they took Crimea, to give themselves some access to the Mediterranean Sea.
	Knowledge.
	Education.
	We don't need that, do we?
	No, not to.
	Bitter now.
	So another thing they have is hate crime legislation because, of course, if you are ruling over a large swathe of multiple ethnicities, what you need is the law to persecute people who target them.
	So anyone commits an offence by anything motivated by political, ideological, racial, ethnic or religious hatred.
	So this can lead to a harsher sentence for something that's already an offence.
	I don't need to tell people that, you know, you don't have freedom of speech in Russia.
	I think we all know that one, don't we?
	Let's be honest.
	Well, that is one, for me, one of the worst sort of black marks on Putin's record is the number of journalists who have disappeared or just been murdered because they're too dissident or a number of opposition politicians that have an accident.
	I mean, you don't want to live in that.
	Country.
	The most dangerous place in Russia is near a balcony because they're just really, really dangerous for whatever reason.
	No railings.
	That's it.
	But also, remember, he does clamp down on speech against him.
	Yeah, right.
	If you want to talk about other stuff, they don't really care.
	You're not going to get in for a tweet.
	For against whatever the lady, I can't remember her name now, Lucy Connolly.
	He wouldn't care about that.
	It doesn't matter, does he?
	You know what I mean?
	Let's go and burn down a hotel.
	He doesn't care about that.
	Let's go and burn down a hotel.
	He doesn't care.
	It's not about him.
	Anything to do with him and his position, anything that might unstable him, come down like a ton of bricks.
	If you accuse him of being a pedo, you get polonium poisoned.
	Twice.
	But anything other than that, they just don't care.
	I mean, I've got, I think they put like 4,000 people.
	I mean, I don't know what the figures are, but significantly fewer people have gone to prison for speech on their internet, whatever, than have gone over in the UK.
	It's much bigger here.
	Orders of magnitude, isn't it?
	What a remarkable thing.
	I know.
	Yeah, it's weird.
	But again, it's about him.
	So he cares about him and his position of stability.
	That's what he cares about.
	The rest of it, he couldn't care less.
	So, one final thing.
	Before I go, is just the number of state-owned industries.
	I've just got this up on screen to show there's a Wikipedia page, but I'm just going to power through and read them really quickly.
	So in the energy sector, they've got Gazprom, which is a gas company.
	Rosneft, which is oil.
	Transneft, which is the oil pipeline transportation company.
	In defence, almost all arms manufacturers are state-owned.
	In the banking sector, they've got multiple different banks.
	Transport infrastructure, they've got railways, airlines.
	Ports and airports, all of the strategic ones are state-owned.
	There are large agri-holdings that often receive state support.
	And then media and telecommunications, obviously they've got their own state-controlled broadcasters and telecommunications.
	And so it's almost like the Soviet Union hasn't ended to a certain degree.
	People forget this.
	People forget that actually Russia is very, very different.
	In this respect, still, than, say, Europe or North America.
	A significant portion of their industry is still fairly communistically run.
	And one final thing, just for the sake of transparency, is they're not always this way.
	They're not always quite liberal and boomerish.
	As we can see here, they passed a bill outlawing gender reassignment, just in general.
	Which no Western country has done yet.
	And also there's lots of legislation in place to prevent people basically promoting this as a lifestyle as well.
	So no gender reassignment surgery whatsoever?
	As far as I understand it, yeah, just outlawing the procedures more generally.
	It doesn't necessarily specify.
	And they explicitly say it's promoting the country's traditional values.
	And yeah, it's passed unanimously.
	I wouldn't have thought that was going to damage traditional values by having gender reassignment.
	There are people that really see themselves in different gender dysphoria or whatever.
	I don't know why you wouldn't allow that to be done.
	Not gender dysphoria, is it?
	But if you honestly felt you wanted to be in a different body.
	They've got to go outside the country to get it done now, though.
	I guess so.
	So, yeah, that's one thing that perhaps it differs.
	But it was just introducing a bit of perspective there.
	because I think that people tend to find it easier to promote things that they don't necessarily understand but when you look into Russia actually they're not that different from Western liberals who you would otherwise
	criticize so we've got this weird dynamic where people on the right are saying actually you know some things in Russia they're doing correctly well actually a lot less than
	We've got some rumble chats here.
	Some more.
	Lots today.
	Putin, some time ago, the West is so preposterous.
	I wish Russia was more like the West.
	I see what you're doing.
	That's a reference to the Simpsons episode, isn't it?
	Where the monkey poor has a backhanded wish.
	To Josh, regarding Putin, I wonder how he protected Russia from the Indian scourge while holding a welcome attitude to diversity.
	I don't know what you're referring to there.
	Have they had...
	Have they had...
	An influx of Indians?
	I didn't even know that.
	Well, that's something for me to look at.
	And Bold Eagle says, you may not like what Putin does to reporters and political opposition, but it's tame compared to what several premiers of the USSR did.
	That kind of thing is just a normal day for Russians.
	That is true, but also just because it's common doesn't mean it's right.
	Well, it's not right by our standards, is it?
	Yes.
	By Western standards.
	Yeah, I mean, the Russian psyche is very different to...
	I mean, I don't understand.
	I've read loads of books on it.
	You don't understand.
	Even when you speak to a Russian, it's very hard to understand the way they think about things, especially about being invaded, especially across somewhere like Ukraine, shall we say.
	They have a massive fear.
	It's almost like embedded historically within them.
	It's very difficult to understand.
	It's a classical thing even for a couple of hundred years.
	You can't understand the Russian worldview unless you're Russian.
	Well, Keevan Rus, the birthplace was Kiev.
	You want to get someone on here who does understand that.
	You want to put a Russian in, just really speak to them and really get...
	That'd be fascinating to listen to that.
	And Bull Deagle does make an interesting point.
	But yeah, just because Putin doesn't have as many political prisoners as Stalin...
	Doesn't mean this...
	I know that's not really what they're saying, but...
	It doesn't make it right, but yeah, he's not saying that.
	Right, I'll do a few comments.
	I can see loads of comments talking about me leaving.
	We've only got two minutes until the end, so I'm going to read...
	You're amazing.
	You're our favourite.
	You're the Paul McCartney of the latest years.
	Don't tease the audience for being nice to me.
	Sorry, you're deserving.
	Thank you.
	WhiteRider says, Bo, we planned for this.
	Get the net.
	He's not allowed to leave.
	Yeah, we've got the net outside.
	Back into the minds, the content minds.
	Gabriel says, I'll miss you, Josh.
	Make sure to visit sometimes and wherever you go, keep fighting to protect our little ones.
	I certainly will do that.
	Don't you worry.
	Michael says, Josh is leaving.
	Well, a word I have never said on air in my four and a half years.
	Since being here.
	Best of luck to you, Josh.
	You'll be missed.
	Thank you very much.
	Dirty Belter says, It will be sad to see you go, Josh.
	I wish you well in your future endeavours.
	Like with Callum, Connor and John, the show will not be the same without you.
	Well, I will be back eventually, you know, as a guest.
	Less frequently.
	It's a treat for you, really.
	The market's been oversaturated.
	Four and a half years of me.
	Russian Garbage Human says, actually annoyed.
	Callum John and now Josh 2. Absolute heartbreak.
	Well, I'm not going anywhere.
	You're fine.
	I'm still alive.
	Still going to be making stuff.
	Maybe even more stuff than usual.
	I'm going to read a couple of comments relating to our actual news coverage.
	One for the reform.
	Omar Awad says, the silver lining to a chameleon politician is that you only need to change the environment and their colours will blend to match.
	The problem is, as you've said, without removing our own deep state.
	That is true.
	For the DEI in the military, Richard says military officers go to uni.
	The types of lads that join the Marines are not highly educated.
	For that reason, they are more discerning.
	Well, yeah, he's got a point there, actually.
	I don't think what he means is that you're sort of brainwashed if you go to university, but that young guy tells it like it is, and for him it really matters.
	Because if his guys next to him aren't switched on and if they're not as strong as he is, he's just going to die.
	Whereas an officer tends to be more remote, I suppose.
	So that's a valid point he's making.
	And then finally, Russian Garbage Human says, Tim Davies is back.
	Nice.
	Yeah, mad lads, innit?
	We're getting mad lads later, aren't we?
	Mad lad crew.
	That's right.
	Well, thank you very much for watching.
	Have a good weekend.
	Make sure to tune in for Lads Hour.
	It's going to be my last one.
	I think we're going to do a bit of GeoGuessr, nice and chilled out.
	I've got some whiskey to sit back and just have a nice time.
	And hopefully I'll see you then.
	If not, hopefully I'll be back soon.
	I've just seen someone send in a rumble chat saying, Josh, you're gay, good riddance.
	And on that note, thank you for everything, audience.

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