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May 22, 2025 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:31:29

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1170

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	Hello, and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters, number 1170, for Thursday, the 22nd of May, 2025.
	I'm your host, Luca, joined today by Beau, Stephen, and collaborating with the band, we have Dr. Nima Parvini.
	How are you, sir?
	Pleased to be here again.
	Very good.
	So, today we're going to be talking about Trump's public slapdown of South Africa and the South African government.
	We're going to talk about kneecaps implosion, which sounds like a very traumatising wound.
	And we're also going to be discussing some new details around the UK's migration scam.
	But before we get into all of those details, I'd just like to bring your attention to the fact that we have today at 7pm the webinar hosted by Carl and Nima.
	You're going to be on too, aren't you?
	Discussing logic as part of your Trivium, the wider branch of the Trivium.
	And that's going to be on from 7pm today, so you can sign up there.
	At the link.
	And you can have access to that.
	And we hope to see you there.
	So.
	South Africa.
	Well, what is there to say about it?
	The fact of the matter is that for a long time now, for many, many years, it's been chronicled that the white farmers in particular have become a very, very persecuted minority in South Africa.
	And you can see ever since this Lauren Southern documentary, Farmlands, going back as seven or eight years, that this has been something that's been going on for over a decade now.
	Over a decade now.
	And there are some truly horrific truths that this particular documentary highlights.
	Contracts that go out from the South African government to a group of people called Blood Sisters.
	And these Blood Sisters are, as I say, government contracted to go round the white farms after there have been murders and lawlessness and anarchy and essentially clean up the bodies.
	And so the South African government has long been, you know, there is no ignorance cannot be used as an excuse in this.
	There are some truly horrific, horrific stories out of it.
	You know, people being boiled alive and other such just grotesque things that I don't truly want to repeat them here.
	but they are absolutely awful.
	And this has, of course, led to enormous, um, uh, Existential threat for those white farmers living in South Africa.
	You've got enclaves now, such as Irania, which are white enclaves that they've had to set up.
	Independent farmers, white farmers, are having electric fences and security cameras and packing arsenals worth of weaponry in order to defend themselves.
	And ultimately...
	Yesterday, with the scenes that we saw from the White House, I think we're seeing here with Trump the first real efforts by someone with genuine political weight and magnitude to force this issue and fundamentally force the South African government to reckon with what it has overseen and been complicit in now for a long, long time.
	Well, we've seen much of their comments coming back saying that this doesn't happen.
	White people aren't getting killed because of a genocide.
	It's just normal crime.
	As if normal crime of killing, as what I think you were saying, Nima, 20,000 have died in what?
	Was that one year?
	Well, I was kind of interested that The Guardian came out and said, well, Trump's claims are baseless, and this sort of language is, it reminds me of COVID, funny enough, but baseless, remember, or the 2020 election.
	I'm always interested when that language comes out, but also the BBC discredited claims.
	So I just had a little bit of a session with Grok going back and forth, which is one of my little hobbies now.
	I like to fight with Grok.
	And Grok was like, absolutely, there's no evidence whatsoever.
	Basically, the argument is, if I understand it correctly, that, yes, it is true, lots of white people have been killed in South Africa, but it's just normal murder.
	It's not a systematic government programme.
	It's not like the mid-century Germans, for example, where they'd set up a kind of system of systematic killing.
	It is much more, oh, there are lots of white people who've been killed.
	But them's the brakes, because South Africa, guess what, is really violent.
	And I did actually look down into the figures, and the figures I got were, it's something like 12.5, 12.8 per 100,000 for the white murder rate in South Africa, which is very high.
	Incredibly high.
	To give you a basis of comparison, in this country, it's less than one.
	Something like 0.9 or something like that.
	In some areas, and that's taking London, if you take London out, in some areas it's almost zero.
	Like in Wales, you know, it's headline news if somebody's killed, right?
	Whereas in South Africa, obviously that's much higher.
	But then the black per capita, per 100,000 murder rate is something like 48.8.
	Which is huge, which is absolutely enormous.
	And so the argument from the left is like, well, this isn't a deliberate government policy.
	South Africa is just a really violent country.
	And actually, if you look, the black murder rate is higher.
	So how can you say there's targeted white genocide?
	That's the argument.
	So it's just massive amounts of homicide in South Africa.
	That's just across the board.
	It's just an extremely dangerous, violent place.
	If you add those two together, 60 per 100,000.
	I mean, it's...
	That's huge.
	It's big.
	Very big numbers.
	I wouldn't take those odds.
	I'm sure there might be...
	I'm not sure.
	There might be some nice places to live there, but as a whole, it sounds like you get the impression, don't you, that it's a nightmarish society.
	Especially if you do live in a white enclave, that you're living under siege.
	Quite literally.
	There is another element to it, which is that, if you remember, I mean, do you remember Mugabe in Zimbabwe?
	They had the land reform laws that they brought in, where they basically seized farms, and it was a disaster, and it led to famine, because they took lands from farmers who'd been there for generations, and they literally just gave them to government cronies, who were like, I'm not a farmer, I don't know what to do with this land, who then immediately sold it, or immediately did something else with it.
	So it didn't work.
	And one of the reasons why Nelson Mandela was the good guy and Mugabe was the bad guy is that when Mandela, in 1994, Mandela said, well, I'm not going to follow the same course as Zimbabwe.
	We're not going to do that.
	But the ANC recently have been, I think last year or the year before, they passed their...
	Now talking about reparations and land reform, you know, to correct historical wrongs for apartheid.
	This is how they're explaining it.
	And what Trump has done is he's put these two numbers, the kind of high numbers of murders, which are real, but not systematic, according to The Guardian.
	And he's put that together with this being the official government policy.
	And the people on the other side are saying...
	This is a narrative that you're telling.
	It's not quite the whole truth.
	But still, he's drawing attention to a situation there that has existed.
	I mean, I remember back in 2016, people like Stefan Molyneux had a video called The Truth About South Africa, which, I mean, you talk about when you take those first couple of little...
	It blew my mind, the stuff that we're not told about or the stuff that we weren't aware of.
	One of the little things I remember Moliny mentioning in that back in the day was the fact that large swathes of South Africa were never even occupied.
	When they first settled it, there was nobody there.
	So, I mean, there's a lot of other stuff about whether this idea of reclaiming the land for the original inhabitants, there's all sorts of things that it kind of opens up.
	As to what that claim is based on, who those people are, where they were 500 years ago, etc.
	So anyway, I don't want to...
	No, no, not at all.
	Aren't there now just lots and lots of laws on their books that are explicitly racist or explicitly anti-white?
	Not just, we're going to start thinking about maybe forcibly taking your farms away from you, but just lots and lots of things.
	They just call them equality legislation.
	There is the South African...
	Yes, the South African government created something called the Black Economic Empowerment Policy, which is, of course, an affirmative action programme and form of social engineering in order to just get fewer whites.
	In the institutions and just honestly throughout the general domestic workforce, it seems.
	And also one of the other things mentioned in this documentary as well, or rather one of the people that Lauren Southern interviews, is a woman who is part of an organisation and movement called the BFL, which is Black First, Land First.
	And it's remarkable how to say that this is a documentary that's been seen by nearly...
	Three million people on YouTube, right?
	How brazen this woman was in her rhetoric.
	She just says, no, you came here and we own all of it and we are taking it back.
	And yes, that will mean violence.
	And so it's just open racial vengeance against the white population of South Africa.
	And I suppose that's why this here, with Trump's intervention...
	was such a watershed moment.
	Are you seeing for you to be connected?
	Are his good friends, like those who are here.
	When we have talks between us on a quiet table, it will take President Trump to...
	I can bet listening to...
	We have thousands of stories talking about it.
	And we have documentaries, we have news stories.
	Is Natalie here?
	Somebody here to turn that...
	I could show you a couple of things.
	It has to be responded to.
	Let me see the articles, please, if you would.
	And, excuse me, turn the lights down.
	Turn the lights down.
	And just put this on.
	It's right behind you.
	There's nothing this parliament can do with or without you.
	People are going to occupy land.
	We require no permission from you, from the president, from no one.
	We don't care.
	We can do whatever you want to do.
	Who are you to tell us whether we can occupy land or not?
	Who are going to occupy land?
	South Africa, occupy land.
	That's who we are.
	I won't let it play too long.
	I'm sure many, many people have seen this by now.
	But yes, the South African president went over there expecting to talk about trade and making a few quips about golf in order to get Trump on side.
	And Trump obviously addressed the one issue that mattered more than anything else.
	Took the time to make this about...
	No, eject.
	It was pretty impressive because two things I took from the take on that is that when that continues, Julian Bear carries on saying kill the white, kill the boar, kill the white, kill the boar.
	And it's very explicit of what he's saying about kill the white, kill the boar and we will take the land back.
	Which blows away the argument of the left that there is no intent within government because obviously he is a partner.
	In government, in terms of sharing power in certain institutions because of the lending of his MPs that are in there, or those who support him at least.
	But the second thing was the telling, I don't know if you're going to go into, is the NBC response.
	Well, I was going to go into just the general response from the larger media.
	In this?
	Okay.
	I'll reserve my comments then to the NBC part, which I thought was quite shocking.
	Elon's actually in the room.
	He's watching.
	It must be politically so embarrassing for that South African delegation to have Trump play that.
	It's great.
	It's good.
	It's a moral leadership.
	But do they care when they're so close to China?
	That's the point.
	Or do they care anyway?
	They're saying what they really mean, what they really believe.
	They'd only care if they felt so weak that...
	They had no external power being able to support them either in terms of an economic lifeguard, in terms of the bonds that are supporting their debt that they're so far down the line in.
	They have got a huge unemployment issue.
	They've got an unemployment issue.
	They've got a mass amount of immigration.
	People seem to forget about that.
	And that relates to the large killings that are occurring because they're in countries who are just...
	Even poorer than South Africa, which used to be regarded as the breadbasket of that region, being able to propel economic wealth.
	They're now coming down as refugees into there, and there's lots of internal tensions because of that too.
	So who comes steps up as part of the Belt and Road and expanding out to create friction between the West?
	As we've withdrawn, said, let's do it on your own.
	You're okay.
	You're fine.
	You're a black community now.
	We'll come and help you in a way, notwithstanding the fact 50 billion of your money has gone into Africa in the last 10 years.
	And that's other research that I've yet to publish but been working on for a while.
	Is the very nature of that we pull out.
	We're behind you.
	We're behind you.
	And I think they get some comfort from that.
	Also, I just find it, there's a commonality here that I personally see, which is that the entire crusade in the 20th century against apartheid as, oh, well, it's unfair because it's unequal and, you know, it lacks meritocracy and all of these sorts of things.
	Well, it seems to, you know, just the same arguments we hear today about, you know, DEI and everything in Britain, it just seems that these things always happen to coincide with just...
	Depriving white people of agency and safety.
	That that is in fact largely what they are always, you know, really seeking.
	In order to, as we say, these racial grievances that have been very, very entrenched after many, many centuries.
	And so it was interesting as well to see that after the president of South Africa was forced to sit there and endure this humiliation, as Trump called him out, he did have an answer.
	And of course, that answer was a very African answer, which was Gibbs.
	Gibbs, to stop the violence, please.
	Our main, main real reason for being here is to foster trade and investment so that we are able to grow our economy with your support and so that we are also able to address all these societal problems because criminality thrives when people are unemployed, when they have no other hope.
	To eke out a living.
	So that is what we need to resolve.
	That classic argument that all leftists use, that criminality, even the worst types, murders, rapes and everything, it's born out of poverty.
	I don't believe that.
	It's just not true.
	It's just simply not true.
	It's not entirely true.
	It's a cope, isn't it?
	I don't know whether you find it in terms of a philosophical level when we're just addressing these, but I find it particularly interesting that the left will turn around and say, here's language.
	If you use the language of the racist, if you use the language of the white man here, reform, against these foreigners that are there, all you're doing is inciting some form of criminality.
	And violence against them.
	But if they do it in Africa, it's not the same.
	The violence is just born out of poverty.
	It's nothing to do with Jacob turning around and saying, kill the boar.
	That's just a frustration born out of an ancestry issue of never being able to control your land.
	Rather than saying, isn't this the same sort of language that you're saying is what Nigel Farage and others like him say?
	You know, about a generation of people of a different colour in that country.
	They also do, I mean, when we talk about logic later on, I'll be stressing the need for definitions.
	Because so many arguments are over something called equivocation, two different meanings of the same word.
	What the left will focus on is the word genocide being used.
	And they'll say, there is no evidence for systematic murder.
	But what the bait and switch is in that...
	There is an actual field called genocide studies where there are academics who work on this and they talk about...
	Before you get to that, there are all sorts of preliminary stages to what they call genocide.
	I mean, you can look at Rwanda as one example, or you can look at what happened in Germany in the 1940s.
	The first phase before you get to systematic killing is making...
	Taking rights away on the legal front, so depersonizing, dehumanizing through seeing, you know, seeing the group as less than human in some way, and then taking away successively, you know, voting rights, property rights, etc., etc.
	I mean, all of these stages happen before you get to that.
	And the left, when they're dealing with any other situation, they would call it...
	Genocide, okay.
	As they've done when we talk about Israel and Gaza.
	And that is particularly pertinent in this case because it was South Africa who put in the, what was it, the international, the ICJ, the international...
	Was it South Africa and Ireland?
	Well, it was South Africa originally and then other people joined it.
	And obviously...
	Trump is going there like, okay, if you're going to talk about, if you're going to call that genocide, let's talk about this, what's going on under your watch.
	And many of the same arguments could be made.
	So this is, I think, another reason why the left, who obviously on that issue have been using that word a lot, now they're pushing back on this because it undermines the moral case there.
	Another thing which is more...
	Meta-political or bigger is that, I mean, I don't know if you were around in the 90s, but we were talking about de Klerk.
	The regime put a lot of cultural, political capital behind Mandela, building Mandela up as this kind of...
	Almost like Saint, you know, I mean, there's Gandhi, there's Mandela, there's Martin Luther King Jr.
	This is like the holy trinity of, like, boomer icons, if you want to put it that way.
	And I actually went to South Africa once, and this phrase, well, I was going on honeymoon to Botswana, but we had to go through Johannesburg, and our plane was delayed, which means we had to spend a day in Johannesburg.
	So I paid the guy...
	I paid a guy like $200 to take me on a tour of Joburg.
	Quite an eye-opener, I'll tell you.
	One thing is that everywhere you go, there's this phrase, our democracy.
	And it's got the iconography from that moment in 1994.
	And everybody talks, like you're talking to the taxi driver and you'll say, our democracy in everyday conversation.
	But there's a gap between what was promised...
	And what has actually been delivered?
	So there's this sense that the project failed or it hasn't delivered.
	And the guy who was sending me, who did this tour in Johannesburg, it would take too long, but he said, I'm going to show you the tallest building in Johannesburg.
	And he took me up this, what felt like a kind of multi-storey car park.
	He was really proud of it.
	He was like, yeah, this is the best building.
	I was like, well, it's like a...
	Like a high-rise car park type thing.
	Anyway, we got to the top, and there were all these photos from the 1970s of this fairground of, like, kids enjoying themselves.
	And, you know, the driver was black, right?
	And he looked up at it, and he had this look in his eye, and he said to me, you know, they were better days.
	They were better times.
	And I was just thinking, ah.
	And if you actually go there, there is that undercurrent, which is kind of unspoken.
	And it was better then.
	And I think they've done polls of, you know, there's actually quite common opinion there of, you know, has life improved since the fall of apartheid?
	And, well, let's just say opinion is divided in South Africa.
	But our regime, the Western regime...
	Needs it to be a success in a way, so they don't like to draw attention to the fact that the project has gone wrong because we're meant to think of it as this great thing.
	I almost went in the 90s for a similar sort of thing, but I had a girlfriend who was South African.
	For one thing or another, I couldn't go on a trip with them.
	And they were going to Joburg.
	They had to go to Joburg, unfortunately, because there were still some family members.
	And they got back.
	They were just telling them about how, when they got to Joburg, they had to have security.
	And when they got home, they had, like, double sets of gates.
	All the windows had bars on them.
	And they had someone with a gun who was going out with them before they went off down to the Cape.
	And that was then.
	In the 90s, things have significantly got worse.
	It is quite appropriate that we've got a president in the United States that's calling them out.
	But I'd be interested to see, as I say, really one of the analysis is moving on from your point, is the way that the press tried to ignore it.
	And I don't know if you've got the clips of the way that they tried to deflect, totally away from the issue.
	And that's typical of the example that we don't want to touch the Holy Grail.
	This was something that we said would work under the black community.
	It's failing.
	The people want the old system back, but we can't allow them to have that back.
	I don't want to go on about this too long, but I remember one of the things, I even made a video about it once.
	Where Magna Carta was signed is not that far away.
	From, you know, where I live and drive.
	And sometimes I take my daughter to the park down there where Magna Carta was signed.
	And there's a statue of the Queen there.
	And it's got all of the legislation from Magna Carta moving forwards.
	All of the kind of milestone in British political history, which is interesting.
	And then at one point it's got Karl Marx publishes the Communist Manifesto.
	I was like, what's that doing there then?
	And then anyway, right at the end of the line...
	Right at the end of the line is the Constitution of South Africa, as if that's the culmination of British legal common law tradition from Magna Carta.
	And I remember thinking, like, what does Elizabeth II stand...
	Like, did she know that ultimately she stands for...
	But in their mind, when they built that statue, they were obviously thinking the culmination of our liberal thought...
	Is this?
	This is democracy.
	I remember the mid-90s when Mandela got in and the Rugby World Cup that year.
	I remember all of that.
	I was old enough to actually remember it.
	And yeah, he was, as you say, like some sort of holy figure.
	But the reality is, I mean, let's not beat around the bush here.
	The ANC have ruined that country.
	Absolutely ruined it on every metric, perhaps apart from voting rights.
	You can mention it's way worse now.
	It is a nightmare place, it seems to me.
	Well, the murder rates are showing it, so there we go.
	And you mentioned Marx.
	So, again, Mandela and the ANC, they're communists, full-blown communists.
	I mean, he went to prison.
	They didn't put him in prison for no reason.
	They went to prison because he was a Marxist militant and he was involved in bombing campaigns.
	So, yeah, no, the ANC have absolutely ruined that country, 100%.
	And now this man is also inheriting and adding to that mess himself.
	And so this is him, I believe, walking out of that meeting with Trump.
	How did you feel sitting there?
	I felt that I was sitting across as a president who has a lot of power and a lot of focus.
	Is that it?
	Shook.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	That's your reaction.
	And obviously, it goes without saying, but this man who originally sat there next to Trump and said, oh, these things, you're blowing it all out of proportion.
	I promise you, Mr. President, there's no proof of this.
	Well, here he is himself.
	It's a little hazy in the audio, but...
	The tale of our forefathers and our foremothers...
	You turn that up, Samson?
	Yes.
	...has returned to our people without any fail and without any payment of compensation.
	And it must happen now.
	Well, that sounds like Angela Rayner and the way she wants to deal with our farmers as well.
	But there we go.
	Just a different colour.
	But ultimately, the crucial couple of words in that is our people.
	It's our people.
	The South African, the white South Africans fundamentally, not only is he obviously not representing them in action, but emotionally he feels no obligation to them either.
	And so fundamentally it's natural to see why he would not...
	I'll go to the next one here.
	Why he would want to cover this up.
	Because ultimately, as you can see here, he thought and has been very comfortable for a long time with the Western media helping to shield him from all of this.
	This is what I was trying to say.
	He's been able to both...
	Have a very ethnically conscious nationalist bent to his politics, whilst also having the backing of media organisations that claim to despise that type of politics.
	And this is going to what you asked me about, Beau, earlier, about all of these different media organisations, and obviously they all came out and just happened to all use the same word in a very coordinated way.
	Ambush.
	It's an ambush.
	That's ambush.
	Ambush.
	He's been ambushed.
	Ambush.
	They have the equivalent of the lobby.
	Look at the Guardian one.
	Sinister Trump dims the light for another White House ambush like a Bond villain, startling guests.
	That's how they talked about it.
	I'm already on board.
	You don't have to sell him to me any more than that.
	But one of the things they talk about the ambush is the NBC correspondent in there asks a question of Trump.
	He turns to me and points to him.
	And in the midst of having just shown that video...
	The very first words were, what are you going to do about the plane that you're being given by the Saudi Arabians?
	And Trump's response to him was, you're just a fake news.
	Get out.
	What relevance does the plane have to what I've been just showing?
	And that was a brilliant response to him.
	And he was saying, you know, don't talk to me about that.
	Talk about exactly the issues.
	Because they already wanted to try and deflect.
	They're using the word ambush because they know it's pejorative.
	It's a way of trying to diminish the idea that South Africa could possibly involve in any way, shape or form of destruction of property belonging to white people or even murder of them.
	So they want to deflect from that and he exactly called out that deflection.
	You talk about the South African form of nationalism.
	Well, it's ethno-nationalism.
	It is ethno-nationalism.
	Specifically, explicitly.
	Fine, that's par for the course in certain parts of the world.
	In other parts of the world, it's shorthand for undiluted evil.
	We know which parts of the world we're talking about.
	This is interesting.
	This is.
	I managed to find amongst all the media coverage the ultimate nuance, bro.
	Yeah.
	We're explaining that this is not true.
	What the videos show is Julius Malema, the far-left opposition leader of South Africa.
	His part is called the Economic Freedom Fighters.
	And he also showed former president Jacob Zuma.
	What Julius Malema was singing, Kill the Boar, Kill the Farmer, was an anti-apartheid song.
	From the struggle against white minority rule in South Africa, they've explained that this is not a literal call to attack and kill the farmer because of the historical nature of that.
	But it's been weaponized by groups in South Africa and increasingly by the Mager.
	Kill the whites doesn't actually mean kill the whites.
	No, no.
	Lucy Connolly saying burn down the migrant hotel doesn't actually mean burn down the migrant hotel.
	It means give them a nice cup of coffee with a biscuit.
	She's just quoting someone from the 80s who once said that.
	Yes.
	She doesn't mean it now.
	Yeah.
	Absolutely.
	Of course, nonsense.
	And I wonder...
	Who really buys this?
	If there's anyone that's on the fence who doesn't know the details one way or another, hasn't got a dog in the fight one way or the other, could they possibly believe that sort of argument?
	One of the things that I noticed was that I know Trump has taken some South African refugees.
	And the left had a field day, memeing on the guy getting off the plane because he was quite a big chap.
	And I mean, I couldn't help watch the comments and be like, it was never about refugees.
	It's never about any of the things.
	It really does, at some core level, for some of these people, not all of them, just seem to be about hating white people.
	It really does.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Filled with racial resentment.
	Filled with it.
	The first part, it's a protective clause for them.
	They're trying to protect their narrative.
	And so this message goes out to the Rory Stewarts of this world, the Alistair Campbells and the UK, so that they can spread it on their podcasts and they get it out into their media to protect their little groups.
	And it does filter down.
	I mean, I've got a very sensible...
	A business lady that I know who had a conversation with only yesterday who didn't understand or accept that there is this mass murder going on as South Africans.
	And she is particularly someone who's not a lefty and has actually voted for different political parties, mainly of the right.
	But it still filters into them.
	And so I think it's a protective element because they're feeling pushed across many, many fronts because many of their ideas are collapsing all around them.
	And that's why they're desperate to find any result.
	And they'll push this for as long as they can.
	I remember when Trump first started actually bringing some focus to this and in his original statement on the issue of what the farmers are going through and he didn't use the word white in it.
	He just said...
	Some people in South Africa are being persecuted.
	And it's remarkable in a way that he is now, even though it seems like such a small thing in a way, but to, you know, cross that threshold and say, no, these are explicitly white people who are being persecuted because for the longest time we've grown up in societies where white people can't be racist and they can only ever be the oppressors.
	And as you were saying earlier, this is the culmination in a way of...
	A long, you know, logical end.
	So I'm just conscious of the time, so I don't want to go much longer.
	I'll move on to the next segment.
	But I did also just find it remarkable as well to see that the Zulus are backing white farmers in the fight against land expropriation.
	We might get another cool 60s movie.
	It's interesting.
	You mentioned earlier the different races, the different black sub-Saharan ethnicities, entirely different ethnicities.
	Absolutely.
	Right?
	There's like the coloured people.
	They actually call them coloured.
	They do.
	And Zulus are different to Bantus.
	No, no, no, no, no.
	They don't necessarily all see eye to eye or have exactly the same interests remotely.
	That's the other thing.
	If you actually go to Africa, that you'll see very quickly everybody first identifies first at the tribal level.
	From this bush or that bush or these people.
	Well, I mean, I didn't go to Nigeria, but that is something.
	And having studied the histories of these countries, almost all of them, like I mentioned Mugabe, for example, almost all of them, when they get into power, it's like, well, it's my group against everybody else.
	It's like black as a concept is not a thing.
	It is...
	The tribe first, the individual tribe, and they don't really care who they have to, you know, they see the government as a looting exercise.
	There's a very good book by an African economist, I remember, that talked about vampire economies, and it discussed why this happens so often in Africa since, you know, the end of colonialism.
	And it's really due to this mindset.
	They think, while you get into government, I've won the jackpot and I get to loot everybody else, basically.
	And it's very difficult to...
	I mean, Botswana, where I went, is one of the few countries that did not adopt that model.
	And mainly that meant we're going to maintain property rights and not have racial laws around who owns which properties, etc.
	So Botswana is probably a better model for Africa.
	Yeah, it's very interesting as well because King Zwerithini of the Zulu said his motivation in working with the boas was the concern for food security.
	Because remarkably, whatever grievances you might have, you know, I'm sure he remembers rocks drift.
	But fundamentally, black people need to eat as well.
	And so...
	The truth is that those Zulus probably know the truth of the actual history as to who was there first in many of those areas.
	Because, of course, they were an invading force at one point as well.
	Of course.
	I mean, there was nobody in that.
	As I say, we might see Rourke's Drift 2, you know, the movie Zulus and Boars versus Jacob.
	Well, if that film did ever come out, it would finally get me to the cinema again.
	Anyway, so to round off, I thought that this whole intervention by Trump was quite masterful, and I can only hope that this is going to be a turning point for the better in the history of South Africa.
	So, should we go to a few rumbles?
	Okay, so for $2, Neo Unrealist says, in addition to Trump playing the video, one of the white golfers Ramaphosa brought to whitewash the plight of whites, Retief Goosen, instead said, actually, my dad's farmer buddies were killed too.
	Yes, I remember seeing that.
	So for $2, we've got the engaged few.
	Says the various South African private security firms have more men under arms than the military and police.
	A murder rate so high it eclipses some war zones.
	Revolutionaries make pure bureaucrats.
	I'm just conscious of the time, so it's probably best to move on to your segment, though.
	Okay.
	All right.
	I just thought it would be funny to talk a little bit of light relief.
	Talk about the slow-motion car wreck that is kneecap.
	The Irish rap trio.
	Total cringe.
	Three completely lost boys who don't know what they're talking about.
	Getting some sort of comeuppance.
	Seems like one of their number.
	Liam.
	Has actually been charged with terrorism offences.
	Couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of lads, to be honest.
	The genial warmth that I get from them.
	The kindness that exudes from every utterance that they make.
	I just feel that they ought to be the sort of people you can sit down and have a real nice piece of cake with your daughter before you usher them out to a walk in the park.
	Oh, they're definitely steeped in political philosophy and history.
	They definitely know what they're talking about, that's for sure.
	The genial innocence of those eyes.
	Before I continue on, we must quickly mention that on our website you can get the Trivium, where you can learn about grammar, logic and rhetoric.
	Well, one of the things I wanted to mention, because there's a bit of feedback we got from last week, a lot of people don't seem to understand the Trivium is three separate courses.
	Foundations of writing, foundations of logic, foundations of rhetoric.
	And you can buy them individually, and the Trivium puts them all in one bundle package.
	So that's the deal.
	So you can buy them individually or as a bundle.
	And there will also be a webinar every Thursday.
	There's webinars with you and Carl, which is free.
	Anyone can just sign up for that on our website, and they can interact with you and Carl.
	People who went last week where we did writing seemed to enjoy it, and there were a lot of people there.
	And it is Thursday today, so there's one happening today.
	Was it 6 or 7pm?
	7pm.
	Be there.
	Be there.
	At the considerable risk of being square if you don't attend.
	If you're on the course, you'd have learned that you couldn't say be there and be square.
	You'd have found a different language to use.
	No adverbs, you see.
	Be there.
	Just direct.
	So back to the implosion of kneecaps.
	So what happened?
	So first and foremost, there are a bunch of three lads, young Northern Irish lads, who are...
	I mean, let's be fair, morons.
	Don't mix about your phrases there, to be honest, no.
	They're LARPing.
	It's turbo cringe.
	They're LARPing.
	They're trying to get attention, like sort of desperately, I would say, trying to get attention.
	It speaks to me of sort of a lost generation, an unwell generation, a symptom of sort of an unwell society.
	They hark back to the Troubles.
	I mean, they're in their late 20s, so they were born around the time of the Good Friday Agreement.
	They don't know anything about the Troubles.
	They didn't live through it.
	I actually...
	Well, not you.
	You're too young.
	But we lived through at least the end of the Troubles.
	I actually remember Canary Wolf.
	I heard Canary Wolf blow up.
	I remember going to London and being told, don't go near any bins in case there's bombs there, all that sort of thing.
	So anyway, these young lads, they talk about Thatcher.
	They talk about it as if the Tories are the enemy.
	It's like, it's not 1975.
	No.
	Or 1979, rather.
	Like, come on.
	Well, the Tories are the enemy, but not for that reason.
	Not for 79, I was going to say.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, the Tories of 1981 are a very different enemy to Badenoch's opposition.
	Exactly.
	Maybe you can get a better word out of Thatcher than he can do Badenoch and Cameron, you know.
	Mind you, I've got Cameron on the run.
	Might have worked.
	So basically, just in a nutshell, what they said was things like, kill your local MP.
	All right.
	South Africa again.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, it's very South.
	Yeah, maybe they got the lyrics from...
	There's also that strange connection between lefties, socialists, champagne socialists, wannabe communists, whatever you call it, and Islam.
	So they also came out and were really pro-Hezbollah, pro-Hamas, making explicit comments publicly on stage about...
	One of them, there's a picture of where he's got a picture, a flag, a Hezbollah flag, which is odd.
	What a strange collection of political thought, that you're an Irish nationalist, you hark back to the IRA, but you also are sort of pro...
	Shia.
	Go back on that one.
	Do you know a thing to remind me of?
	It's those three New York white Jewish rappers from the 1990s.
	Talk this way, walk this way.
	Beastie Boys.
	Beastie Boys.
	Yeah, Beastie Boys, but with no talent.
	I was thinking Goldie Looking Chain.
	They are Goldie Looking Chain.
	One of the things I was going to mention later is that they seem to be in earnest.
	They're not just LARPing.
	So there are people that are taking the mickey like Goldie Looking Chain.
	This is a comedy.
	This is a parody.
	Oh, is it?
	Speaking of South Africa thing, they had a bass lyric, do you remember?
	Guns don't kill people, rappers do.
	Are they trying to look like Oasis there?
	They were Welsh, weren't they?
	And it is a piss take.
	Or there was that show People Just Do Nothing, where they're English boys and they're into Garage.
	Again, it's a comedy show.
	It's a comedy show.
	They're parodying.
	This sort of thing.
	But no.
	Kneecap are for real.
	These are serious people.
	This isn't ironic, apparently.
	What's their connection with...
	It's like the gimp in Pulp Fiction.
	Lebanese separatism, then.
	Why are they into Hezbollah?
	I'm sure that goes back to when the IRA were kind of...
	And utilising Hamas and the Middle East as not only providers of weapons that were coming through Gaddafi's Libya, but also training grounds where they'd worked together with the Palestine Liberation Organisation under Yasser Arafat.
	So you had all of these connections where weapons were coming in.
	It was an unholy trinity of money coming in from the Irish Catholics in the United States, many connected to senators and congressmen, although they denied it.
	Because they needed the votes from those countries.
	They never came out against the IRA per se.
	Money being funded from there, getting into these countries and funding the organisations that they opposed because they were actually providing training and weapon for the organisation.
	They supported to go up against Britain.
	I mean, this is the complexity of modern terrorism.
	What is the connection between Irish nationalists and, say, Hezbollah?
	There's a picture of a dude with a Hezbollah.
	Sherlock Holmes, that one.
	The connection is that these young men are terribly confused and don't really know...
	History or politics correctly.
	It's just...
	It's as simple as that.
	There's no other explanation for it.
	And they'll never win Eurovision.
	Yeah.
	So they...
	Actually, maybe never.
	Perhaps I wouldn't say that.
	Perhaps they would.
	They publicly called for the killing of MPs.
	Now, you can't do that.
	You can't go around doing that, right?
	There are limits.
	And, I mean, they just thought they could do what they wanted, I guess.
	How does this make any sense from a political philosophy angle?
	How does that work?
	It doesn't add up.
	It's nonsense, isn't it?
	It's a talking tea cosy.
	It's nonsense.
	It's just complete nonsense.
	Sorry, I can't help it.
	I just can't help think about my grandmother's tea.
	When we're in the heat, you should have a tea cosy.
	But they've got a tea cosy made out of a hat, you know, for him, to be honest.
	So they got in trouble a few weeks ago, two or three weeks ago it was, and at the time I was so uninterested, I still am fairly uninterested, but it's funny that they're starting to get their comeuppance.
	But two or three weeks ago they were in the news because they were starting to get some backlash for saying bizarre and pretty damn radical things.
	So there's just a whole bunch of articles saying...
	You know, they've been dropped by a few of their...
	I mean...
	We've got them actually saying anything.
	Let's get a clue.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Just a clue of what this is.
	Look.
	How terribly confused must you be to be an Irish person, Northern Irish person, and...
	We don't actually need to...
	And be into rap, an Irish language rap, but yet you're pro-Hezballah.
	It's...
	It's crazy stuff.
	I hate rap so much.
	Yeah, it's nonsense.
	It's got nothing to do with North Western Europe, is it?
	No, it's nothing at all.
	African Barbata and the Solsonic Force.
	Stephen, you will never change my mind on this.
	No, no, this is classic stuff from the early 80s, battling on there.
	Don't forget, I used to do breakdancing, so I used to love it when I was growing up.
	Send the video after the show.
	Yeah, yeah, you're not even going to get me on this table doing it.
	It's as simple as that.
	Did you do the windmill?
	Oh, I did the windmill, yeah.
	Really?
	That's how I broke my wrist, to be honest.
	When I was about 18, I was doing a head spin.
	Someone from a rival group, as we call her, we were on a challenge, and he came over and pushed me over.
	Are you joking?
	Yeah.
	You're joking, right?
	No, no, no, I'm not joking.
	We used to have Lino in the middle of Fog Lane Park.
	You know?
	That's it.
	Stephen Wolf used to be able to do the head spin.
	Wow.
	Head spin, wimmels, arms on the fist as well.
	Hands spins with the fist.
	I can't beat that, but I did, to my eternal shame, once dress up as Puff Daddy and performed a rap in front of the entire school, wearing shades.
	And I remember I had this confetti, right?
	And my final flourish is I was going to throw this confetti on my rap.
	And I got it wrong.
	And there were all these first-year girls sitting in the front row.
	It all went in the face.
	Any kudos you had at that moment just died.
	It was a white suit.
	I was wearing shades.
	And then I remember one of my teachers was just like...
	Look at yourself.
	Who do you think you are?
	I'll tell you what.
	Wise words.
	Save it for a male voice choir.
	Like, not rap.
	Yeah, I mean, yeah.
	So, Carl did a couple of videos about this a week or two ago and his take essentially was it's an embarrassment.
	And it is on a number of levels.
	An embarrassment.
	Not just the rap thing, but also the politics.
	And that they seem to have thought that they could sort of say anything.
	Seems like.
	I find the focus on Hezbollah particularly odd because, I mean, there are, you know, what I'm really into is an Iranian proxy militia group that is ostensibly there to fight for Lebanese freedom or something.
	It's like, how is that anybody's cause?
	Let alone an Irish rapper's call.
	But acting is a kind of devil advocate, trying to get into their brains if they can, if they have it.
	Well, I was just actually wondering whether you could actually blow air from one to the other and it'd go all the way through the three of them, to be honest.
	That's where the last one's leaning more to his left.
	But just trying to look at them.
	Are they trying to do this because they think it's actually what they believe, the kind of currying of favour with these organisations because there is this swelling of a belief in Ireland that Israel is bad and we've got to support everything that's happening in Gaza?
	Is it that and their being able to profit from that in some way, a commercialisation?
	Of the poverty and ineptitude of the Hamas groups.
	Is that what they're doing?
	Do we feel that listening to them, there is a genuine belief in this equality and equanimity that they're looking for?
	No, because they started walking it back immediately.
	Ah, there we go.
	It's the cash that matters.
	I just think they're very unread, callow young men that don't really know what they're doing, really.
	And desperately trying to get some sort of attention.
	I mean, I think that's all it really is.
	When people said, can you apologise to the family of David Amis and Joe Cox?
	And they were like, yeah, sorry.
	It was a really hollow thing.
	To Steel Man, again, foundations of logic, I think probably they're...
	The strongest argument that they have is that they'd say something like, well, Ireland stands in a long tradition of anti-colonialism.
	It was the first country to declare independence from the British Empire.
	Now, bad things that the British Empire used to do are being done by other groups, and we are with the freedom fighters, whether it's Hezbollah or Hamas.
	That's probably how they frame it in their own mind, where you think, well, you know...
	In the same way that they call the original Easter Rising or something, they would have called them terrorists back in 1916, where it's the same story, basically.
	That's probably the most romantic version that the left would have, I'd imagine.
	Like a lot of these people, they know just enough skewed history to be resentful.
	Just enough nonsense to keep them angry.
	So yeah, when it first started, people first started pushing back on it, you know, apparently they did lose their sponsor and their booking agent.
	Sharon Osbourne was pissed off with them.
	Well, that's it then.
	Once she's gone, you've lost your career.
	When's Sharon?
	Sharon Osbourne, I like them now.
	She called for their US work visas to be revoked.
	But finally, the actual authorities sort of had a look at them as a few...
	Yeah, kill your MP.
	Yeah, a few...
	Is it just kill your MP that they said, or was there anything else that was particularly, like, you know, egregious?
	Oh, yeah, loads of it.
	I mean, that is probably the worst, the actual direct...
	Incitement of violence.
	Was it only Conservative MPs?
	You only killed Conservative MPs?
	Or was it just British MPs?
	Your MP, yeah.
	Your MP?
	Everyone.
	I think so.
	I think so.
	But they've certainly got a problem with specifically the Tories.
	Liberal Democrat in Winchester.
	You've got to watch out then, to be honest.
	Sorry, so do you remember there was that famous actress who was in Juno and stuff who then had the sex change and became a man?
	In what, sorry?
	There was an actress who had a sex change.
	The Elliot Page.
	Yeah, and then became like Billy Page or something.
	Elliot Page.
	Is it just me or just the one on the right?
	Really similar kind of physiognomy.
	Elliot Page's test is finally kicking in.
	Yeah.
	So, yeah, now the crowd prosecution service is actually...
	They've sort of charged one of them, Liam O 'Hanna, that one.
	They've actually charged him.
	But he doesn't live here, does he?
	He doesn't live here.
	No, so what happened was they came over to the UK and did gigs in the UK.
	Right.
	And I think that was where they held up the Hezbollah flag, which is a...
	Prescribed organisation as a terrorist flag, so they've gone for a terrorism piece of legislation and therefore being able to charge them for that, under that.
	Not because they've said kill the MP.
	Well, both of those things.
	So, you know, both are sort of crimes.
	And they're claiming they're being sort of unfairly persecuted and stuff.
	They were quoting somebody from the 80s.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, they were just quoting...
	So the process now is if they're out of the UK, then one would expect the Crown Prosecution Service to now apply through the Home Office for an extradition from Ireland.
	Well, I think they're here.
	They've got them.
	Ladies and gentlemen, we've got Liam O 'Hanna.
	Yeah, no, they were just quoting Martin McGuinness from, like, 1982 or something.
	Is that what they said?
	No, no, no, no.
	They haven't bothered with that.
	So, yeah, I mean, let's get an idea of sort of personally...
	Why do you think English people know so little about Ireland?
	Ignorance built into our culture.
	Always, from the start of time, when they fucking started taking over every country in the world, they refused to learn their history and refused to come to terms with.
	That's the difference between Germany.
	After the World War, they learned a thing about the fucking World War, and now they've come to terms with the fact that, all right, the Nazis were a thing.
	The best thing we can do is acknowledge it and get over it.
	Whereas the Brits just want to hate their past because they'd feel too guilty.
	Why do you think English is English?
	I'm sorry, I don't know what you said.
	So the Anglo-Saxons that came over and got a few boats and drove up to Strathclyde and then came down through the north, those Brits that they're talking about, those Anglo-Saxons that didn't know about their history as they're going across there, the deals that were done between the Irish Brits and the Celts in order to safeguard their lands, well, you know.
	And sell out their own people.
	Gosh, that sort of history that they clearly read about.
	He was suggesting that British people should think about their past like Germans think about the Nazis.
	That's literally what he said.
	Yeah.
	So, I don't know why he bases that on, but...
	Yeah, well, I mean, this is...
	Potato famine?
	This is the...
	Blame it on that.
	The politics of grievance from a moron.
	The idea that British people don't know their history, hardly...
	Very rarely the case.
	It's actually very rarely the case.
	And he does look like his head's coming out of banana skin.
	I'm not sure if...
	I'm not sure if he's particularly well-read in history.
	He doesn't seem to be.
	I've never actually heard any legitimate historical analysis from the man.
	You don't think he's an e-box watcher?
	Yeah, probably not.
	But, yeah, so, I mean, they're just getting their comeuppance, really, is that you can't...
	You're not above the law.
	You can't do any...
	You can't say anything and expect any kind of backlash.
	So I've sort of got zero sympathy.
	But I would have thought that if he had not been charged with one of these offences, and that if he had then gone on and been successful at the Brits, then one of our universities would probably have offered him an honorary PhD in history.
	Or Irish history.
	And then he could have paraded that in one of his songs.
	And of course they don't talk about the actual demographic problem that Ireland's facing at the moment.
	The actual issues facing them at the moment.
	Not a dicky bird about any of that.
	Of course.
	So yeah, and they tried to walk it back pretty much straight away, saying, you know, we have not and we never have condoned any sort of violence.
	We're all about love.
	No, no, sorry.
	You're on stage saying these things, so it's a matter of record.
	It was interesting as well what you had to say about the fact that, because one of the questions I was going to ask before you said it was, do they have a label?
	You know, are these independent guys who have just...
	Stuck themselves on Spotify as you can do these days?
	Or do they actually have money behind them?
	Do they actually have backing?
	Which comes to some points that you've been stressing recently about the nature of the music industry and what it wants you to support and what it wants you to consider to be trendy and cool.
	Well, it will do, because if you've been involved in the music and I had a small business, a film finance business, that involved doing work on concerts for what we heard, we had to see the financial breakdown.
	A production company that is supporting the media, if they're like them, suddenly have to go across various places to actually put on their songs.
	They've got to book them in advance.
	So they might be putting up £6,000 or £10,000 in advance.
	So overall, that budget, just for being able to book them, might be £100,000, £200,000.
	Follow that on with the advertising that then has to link in to fill the seats.
	It's not just about putting it on social media and say, here we are, there we go.
	There's a lot more to that.
	Then the production of the labels.
	suddenly you've put out quite a lot of money up front, which is why in their agreements that you see them, they don't get rich very straight away.
	It takes two or three albums, or the equivalent of, or various numbers of clicks on Spotify, etc., in order to recoup all of that back, plus the interest, which is normally compound basis.
	So I don't know if he's actually being held on remand at the moment.
	I don't know if Liam is actually in a cell.
	In Paddington Green at the moment or not.
	Or whether they are back in Northern Ireland and they have to be extradited or what.
	But he has been charged.
	They have charged him with actual terrorism.
	Are they Northern Irish?
	Yeah, I think Northern Irish.
	Ah, OK, well then that's fine.
	They don't need an extradition treaty.
	You can just get them straight back.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And I think it's going before Westminster...
	Westminster Magistrates.
	Which is funny because if you're an Irish person that's got a massive chip on your shoulder about Britain and the English...
	You've been summoned to Westminster.
	The Crown Prosecution Service demands that you show up in Westminster to answer for your crimes against the establishment and the state.
	That's so funny.
	Wouldn't it be funny just to turn up?
	I just want to know when the date of the magistrate's hearing is.
	I might just go, just to see what sort of level of campaign is out there, whether there's all these mini kneecaps out there.
	Lots of mini kneecaps going, free Liam, free Liam, or free Leo, or whatever he is.
	Poor Liam, he advocated for the murder of MPs.
	He's got an answer for it in Westminster.
	Talking about South Africa, you can hear the songs Free Nelson Mandela repeated by Free Leo.
	So, OK, that was just a sort of silly throwaway segment.
	Stop there.
	Sorry, Nemo.
	It's funny you mentioned the honorary degrees.
	We talked about Robert Mugabe earlier on.
	One of the funniest things is that he was given dozens upon dozens of honorary degrees by our universities.
	And then when it came out, there was a massive famine.
	You know, I remember under Blair, Blair wanted to bomb Zimbabwe at one point.
	That's just Blair.
	Of course he did.
	The country doesn't want to bomb.
	But there was a whole spate where loads of universities rescinded the honorary degrees that Robert Mugabe was given.
	And very brave for the style of Tash you went for as well, Mugabe.
	Yes, yes.
	The Charlie Chaplin moustache.
	I could never grow a Mugabe because I don't get growth in that bit.
	Right, okay.
	I notice you've got good...
	I can't remember what it's called, like the Fultrum or something like that.
	Some name for it, but anyway.
	As one who always remains clean shaven, I do not know what you're talking about.
	I've never had to go through those issues.
	It's the Charlie Chaplin look, we'll say.
	Okay, do you mind reading subjects?
	I can't really see them from this angle.
	Oh yeah, sure.
	So I've got for $5, thank you very much.
	We've got Pax Reid who says, I've got to give you five just for dropping Africa.
	You're on it.
	You're on Africa, Babata and the Soul Sonic Force, one of my first ever rap albums that I have.
	Stored it upstairs in my mum's loft, came back thinking, now it's going to be worth a bit of money.
	She'd thrown them all out.
	I was absolutely gutted, you know.
	So there was a lot.
	And we used to have the seven inches, 12 inches, all were like...
	Greens and lime blues, lime greens and blues, all the brilliant different colours rather than just black vinyl.
	And they would have been fantastic, even just put them up in a frame nowadays just for the colour.
	I'm more of a Ladysmith Black Mambazo fan myself.
	Remember that baked bean advert?
	There was a moment, and funny enough, it was the moment of the free Nelson Mandela thing where Ladysmith Black Mambazo...
	And I think all of the old, like, boomer artists, like, you know, Paul Simon and Paul McCartney, they all had to bring out an album featuring Lady Smith, Black Man, Bazzo in this horrible moment of one-world vision in 1991 or wherever it was.
	Oh, dear.
	Stephen, over to your segment.
	Right, OK.
	Well, someone's going to have to use the clipper, aren't you?
	Oh, OK.
	Great.
	Well, let's, unfortunately, let's rip this off now.
	Where is it on there?
	There we are.
	I'm not...
	Is that mine?
	Right.
	We're going to start here.
	Obviously...
	Immigration, my big thing, with the Centre for Migration as well.
	Today's big news in the UK, being called off the phone since about midnight last night, was that the Office of National Statistics, who undertake the numbers of net migration, the amounts of people that are coming into the country, immigration, with the amounts of emigration, were going to release their figures at 9.30 this morning.
	And when they did, it's caused a palpable shock.
	Across the political and think tank world, because the numbers are, as I expected, to drop, but certainly not to drop in the numbers that we've seen.
	I mean, so here you can see the Office of National Statistics put out on their website and on X. Number for long-term net migration down almost 50% in a year.
	So they say the number of people immigrating long-term minus the number of people emigrating long-term is a provisionally estimated 431,000 in the year ending 2024, compared to 860,000 a year.
	Looking at that number 860,000, I compared it to what the ONS has been doing in their new model.
	They have a new model before.
	This is the brilliance of our calculation of immigration and emigration.
	If you ever went to an airport and you saw a couple of people standing with a clipboard and they might collar you and say, where are you going on holiday?
	Are you working here?
	That was how we collected the stats.
	Until only about two, two and a half years ago, in how we analysed how many people came into this country.
	So a joke?
	Clown shoes?
	Yes.
	Absolutely nonsense, really.
	It was just tickle and all the rest of it, and that's how we got it.
	So then they have a much more, what they call, radical dynamic approach of calculating numbers.
	So for people who want to understand how it's done.
	Now, for people who come here, they collect visa information.
	And that visa information...
	Oddly enough, it's only for non-EU citizens and their families.
	So we've heard about working visas, skilled working visas, student visas, if you get that.
	So they'll calculate that and allegedly calculate your family as well on that.
	But they don't calculate EU citizens because EU citizens don't have to have a visa at all.
	So therefore, it doesn't calculate their families and it doesn't calculate their children.
	So they accept...
	That doesn't work properly, but they hope that as EU systems work, we can get them also on national insurance and tax numbers.
	But they do expect that the numbers will change, are more flexible, and more likely in the short term to be estimated upwards.
	They talk about 30,000.
	It wasn't this case.
	It went up about 830,000 to 860,000.
	So every year you've revised upwards, which is why a couple of years ago we had the numbers below a million.
	But it was revised up to over a million.
	So we've now had two years to nearly three years of close to a million people coming in as net migration.
	That's our population increasing by a million a year.
	So the big numbers for them is, wow, we're now down...
	431,000.
	Which is fascinating.
	So I thought to people, okay, you're going to hear a lot about this on the press.
	Let's try and analyse how it works through.
	Just to say before you carry on, there's still a massive number.
	Absolutely.
	431,000.
	They're still giant.
	Yeah.
	It's like saying when inflation is down from 8% to merely 3% or 4%.
	Yeah, they're still...
	Yeah.
	Terrible.
	Yeah, it's still really bad.
	It's still going up.
	Yeah, that's because the TVs, which are calculation, have dropped from 1,000 to 800.
	But by the way, because of bread, electricity and gas are still up.
	They're the ones.
	But don't worry about that.
	Because that's why it's important to look through the numbers.
	We're only replacing you...
	Slightly slower than we were before.
	That's right.
	Only 460,000.
	Bearing in mind that the estimates of the OBR, who oddly enough, I don't know why it's the ONS and the Office of Budget Responsibility do the calculations on future population, but they do, they estimate that on 300,000 the country will have about 75 million people by the time that we get to 2035, which is about 6-7 million more than we are.
	On these numbers...
	That would move us up to about 78. And my estimation, when the centre, we put in about 500,000, so pushing up to 80 million, another 10 in 10 years.
	Unsustainable for the country of our size, increasing density levels.
	Disastrous, catastrophic.
	Catastrophic in so many ways.
	I'm now looking at research on the levels of depression and mental health illnesses that rise as populations rise due to density and the enormous numbers of studies that have come through that.
	Once I've finished that, I'll put that out here first.
	I think because that's really quite, quite, quite big.
	So you're right.
	That's the first thing to pick up.
	It's still 400, you know, still 400 odd thousand people, 430,000 coming here.
	And they love this graph so far.
	I've seen a few Labour MPs looking at that.
	Look, we're here.
	This is in charge now.
	We're bringing immigration down.
	That's what you wanted, isn't it?
	So they come out.
	The issue, they're saying, is driven by a fall in immigration from non-EU nationals with reductions in people arriving on work and study-related visas.
	It's interesting enough, there has been a reduction in the work and study visas, but the point they put here is an increase in immigration driven by people who came on student visas after the coronavirus pandemic now leaving the UK.
	I found that a little bit interesting.
	I've got to look into these numbers a bit more because the student numbers don't seem as big a fall as they're projecting.
	But that is where they're looking at the categories.
	The four categories are students, work, and then you've got a kind of blank category of anyone that includes people coming over and pilgrimages, and then family reunion, which is normally the very big one.
	That's normally much bigger than people think, and that's the one that they can work on.
	So they're saying, look, we've got a massive fall in immigration numbers coming through, and I'm going to deal with that.
	Now, where's the massive fall in immigration?
	Take a look on the left.
	948,000 people still came to the country last year.
	Nearly a million people came to the country.
	The only big difference over the last few years is that that number has been over a million.
	It's been like 1.1, 1.2.
	And the number of people have emigrated have been around 200.
	So we've had a bump of about 300,000, which I think is just a one-off bump due to potentially the COVID argument that the ONS is putting through.
	We're still getting a million a year.
	And that is the number that we need to be looking at because that is the number that's going to drive the population growth.
	So I'm saying, OK, I'm maybe being a little bit aggressive by the use of the word scam.
	But what I want to say to people is be careful about looking at these numbers and assume that the government is in your side because numbers are falling.
	It's not necessarily numbers.
	I think this could be just a one-off related or maybe even a two-quarter or three-quarter because the way they analyse it is every quarter.
	So you need to be quite smart to break it back and say these are the figures for December 24 compared to December 23. But actually, where we've come out today is they're looking at September numbers and June numbers every year, the quarter.
	So you have to try and work it backwards to a year, otherwise it'll look a lot bigger.
	And that's what they like to trick you on.
	It's a classic thing that governments do, or rather, probably more likely as Whitehall do, or Whitehall do at the behest of governments.
	I remember it was one of my first introductions to the reality of politics when I was a kid still, in the John Major era, when the hot topics of the time was unemployment.
	And it would just be clear that you play statistical games to not include certain people and to just massage the figures to make it seem better politically for them.
	And as soon as anyone with any sort of brain, any sort of adult, digs into it for themselves, you realise, oh no, they're just trying to fool us.
	They're hoping we won't look past the headline, their headline.
	Yeah, the reality is it's still the best part of a million people coming in.
	That's the issue.
	It's funny, you talked about the people doing the interviews and collecting the data that way.
	One of my original hit videos on YouTube, all the way back in the day, was called How Tony Blair Massage Crime Statistics, because when the new Labour came in, they were always hot on, on paper, showing a trend that they had acted, and the line goes down or the line goes up.
	One of the things they did is they...
	Change the way that crime, statistically, was recorded from actual crimes to victim interviews, which are then aggregated, almost like you do the TV data.
	And so...
	When you're looking at historical crime stats, you have to understand that when the Blair government came in, they changed how they did it.
	So then it looks on paper that the crime goes down.
	When I drilled into those numbers, I was like, hold on a second, more crime was committed than ever before in the 2000s.
	And also, does the country feel safer in 2010 than it did in 2000?
	No.
	So it was purely this...
	Trick of the data.
	When it comes to this, I'm very interested.
	I kind of foresaw this happening.
	I was expecting a big number.
	50% is bigger than I thought.
	Yeah, it is bigger than I thought.
	Mainly because of the students, because the Tories did make it laxer.
	You know, they relaxed the rules to basically prop up the unis.
	But my understanding is that only about a third of the so-called Boris wave were students.
	So have we figured out how they're getting the 50% drop?
	Well, this is where I'm going to come into, and I've done a brief analysis.
	I was up, you know, quite early, 6-ish this morning, trying to prepare the ground for this so that not only do I do this, but, you know, get something out on CMEP as well.
	And as I started looking in when it hit at 9.30, and I opened up the database, which has about, like...
	12 different kind of data sets that you have to through.
	Then you've got to pull them out and put them into your own data sets that I've created over time.
	It becomes, and I'll come to it, and I'll deal with it in turn, there is some really weird things about where the numbers are declining.
	But dealing with your point, first of all, it's very important.
	You've raised that issue, as you've done about with Tony Blair, is the way that they use the data and then how they present it.
	So when you look at the immigration data on the Office of National Statistics and then how it's presented in the Home Office, I get an email sent every morning, so I had about six emails from the Home Office this morning.
	They all come out with these big figures, numbers have dropped, and then they pick up things like this.
	This is the image that you're going to get.
	And so most people will say, oh, immigration, immigration, net migration, jolly good job, and this is our provisional estimates, and they might give a little bit of data about it.
	People like the media then on their side to come out and go, hey, aren't you doing a jolly good job?
	ONS has just produced its data.
	It's a big deal.
	Okay, fair point.
	It is a big deal if you've got these numbers dropping.
	First time in years it's dropped.
	Migration is falling meaningfully, albeit from a very high peak.
	It's giving the left now and their supporters the kind of terminology that they want to be able to say, The big issue, this government's dealing with it.
	We've got the data.
	It's there, all presented for you.
	The language of government and the Home Office are presented through their media teams to get it out so we can start utilising it in this way.
	Here's one of their graphs from the source of the ONS.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	Do you see after 2016, there's that little drop there from 2016 to 2017?
	Yeah.
	I remember distinctly the left taking that data.
	Where it would have been zoomed in at the time.
	The Brexit result, taking those two things together, immigration is falling and the country voted for Brexit.
	And then they did a pile of, like, YouGov polls and so on.
	And because people believed that something was being done...
	Immigration dropped as a concern in the country.
	That's right.
	Absolutely.
	And I wouldn't be surprised if all the old nudge units and so on are thinking exactly this when it comes to this narrative.
	And this is where I'm thinking of the narrative.
	What happened also there, you suddenly had two or three organisations that I know run by reasonably decent people.
	I have a decent argument with you, like British Future.
	British Future concentrates predominantly...
	On interviews with people, raising polling data to say immigration is not a massive issue.
	People like people coming in as long as they work and they pay taxes.
	So they use that data and it's funded by leftists within the conservative community and leftists of the business community as well.
	They can fund that organisation to say, right, let's go ahead with this, get this data out, because it's not cheap to do a poll.
	And similar sorts of organisations to do that.
	And then they came out with those polls, and those polls are picked up by Ed Conway.
	On the back of net migration finally falling, I then got British Future to turn around and say, look, people are no longer as worried about immigration.
	How are you dealing with that, Farage?
	How are you dealing with that reform?
	People don't care about immigration anymore.
	The thing is that I feel like that might have, you know, delayed things in 2016 after the Brexit vote and everything.
	But we've had the Boris wave now, right?
	We've had the Boris wave now, and fundamentally they can put out as many numbers and fancy figures as they want and try and bend the narrative through numbers, but it doesn't match the raw reality of what people are seeing and feeling on the streets.
	It's fascinating.
	When you look at this graph, obviously there you've got the COVID periods, but here we are.
	This is it.
	So you had a growth.
	I mean, that's a ridiculous growth from 300,000 there, 250,000 to 80,000, where we were to the first step of 550,000.
	And I remember calling it out at the time and saying, look, this is the start of something that's going to be horrific at the time.
	And there we are, up to a peak.
	He's saying it's not revised up.
	It was revised up a little bit, but not hugely, as I admit.
	But this jump, look at it, from like...
	Zero to a million within two years and stayed there.
	I wrote an essay once and I still am reasonably convinced by this argument as to why did Boris Wave happen?
	And I think it's because, and again, you can tell me what you make of this idea, they printed off so much money during COVID and unlike quantitative easing, which was...
	Put on the asset balance sheets of Goldman Sachs and the financial firms and so on.
	So it never reached the real economy.
	COVID printing through furlough reached the real economy, the M0 money supply.
	So that meant that there was excess money in the economy.
	So one theory, which is still the only rational explanation for this, well, there is another one which we can talk about, is that basically this was...
	Human quantitative easing.
	They imported this number of people to be here to soak up the excess money so we didn't get runaway inflation.
	Because even if you're a student, you still have to buy lunch, you still have to spend money on stuff.
	And as long as they're spending that money, you don't get a massive adjustment between the money supply.
	And the supply of all the goods?
	I think that's really interesting.
	I hadn't really put it in terms of how it connected into the growth and GDP argument that the Treasury consistently put out, is that after COVID we were declining in GDP, our numbers in percentage terms too.
	Our fellow competitors, G7, G10, very dangerous for us to drop out of the top tier because that has a knock-on impact with the markets.
	The markets say if you're out of that level, then suddenly your bonds are going to cost more.
	Interest rates will go up.
	Inflation will rise because of that.
	So it's really a push by the Treasury to make sure we're always high on GDP.
	And one way is obviously bringing human capital on that.
	The second is why I think there was a huge fear.
	After COVID, lots of people in their 50s and onwards were saying, I'm not going to go to work anymore.
	I don't want to deal with woke anymore.
	I've seen my life potentially could die.
	So therefore, they were staying at home, if you remember that concern.
	So big corporate employers.
	We're pleading with Boris, pleading with Priti Patel to open the floodgates because we'd have no baristas, we'd have no drivers for DHL, we'd have no one coming into the hospitals and nurses.
	But actually, having looked at that, maybe that was an aside issue that fitted alongside the economic arguments.
	And I might have to look into that a little bit more.
	I'm conscious of time.
	The other thing, though, is that possibly without Boris Way, the university sector may have collapsed as well.
	The other thing, just very quickly, Stephen.
	I mean, that may be the case, what you've described there.
	I feel like it was more the case that Boris answered to other people, people like Biden or Biden's controllers, people like the people, the cabal that runs the EU, Schwab, all sorts of big companies that just want cheap labour.
	He actually answers to them and they wanted a million new people a year.
	And that's it.
	It was less to do with sort of quite an elegant but complicated...
	Description there.
	They just said, we just need loads and loads of cheap labour and screw the fabric of society and screw the native bridge.
	You've got to understand the power of the investment banks.
	I worked in hedge funds.
	I ran the Hedge Fund Lawyers Association for a couple of years.
	Hedge funds have power.
	That's true.
	But not as much power in terms of the way that you look at debt and interest rates and the control as a foreign policy instrument for the United States as well.
	But also, most of those, including the big hedge funds, are investing in these large corporate companies.
	People are talking about BlackRock at the moment having secret meetings or meetings that are not so secret but you can't get to know what they talked about with Keir Starmer.
	Investing in energy companies, investing in solar panels, investing in land companies that want to build on farmlands.
	All of them are saying, look, you've got an economy that's falling, that's going to impact our bonds.
	So you do as we're told.
	And that fear with the power of the Treasury is enough of what drove Liz Truss out.
	She was about to try and change things.
	In a way that I preferred.
	And anyone who wants to do that will get up against those two big elements.
	I'm just going to run through quickly because I'm very conscious of the time that we got here.
	Even the Migration Observatory, I like Marianne Sumption.
	She's fairly sensible.
	She sits on the Migration Advisory Committee, admits that this is fairly big in terms of a fall.
	And it comes out here.
	New migration, big news from Georgia the Stern.
	They're going to summarise the key takeaways.
	That's worth a read if you want to go and have a look at that.
	I'm ploughing through.
	I've got it in there, but it's caused by large emigration.
	That's our centre.
	I'm just going to show, putting the numbers there for you, in each of the years to show how immigration, they're huge numbers still.
	Look, it's the 300,000 drop in immigration.
	And 200,000 before.
	Some of that is to do with the family reunions that were started to be changed, and the students.
	But look at the numbers.
	It's only 300,000 fall in immigration, so therefore the immigration number may have an excessive impact on net immigration.
	Now, I think I've done another one there for people to have a quick look at.
	I think that immigration is the biggest fall by country.
	This is where we go to your point.
	I've now tried to drill into the immigration numbers.
	How do you get the students?
	How do you get those who are leaving?
	And when you get the emigration category, the big countries...
	Who are emigrating are really India and China.
	This comes to your student point.
	Most of them is a combination of student work.
	54,000 Indians and 45,000 Chinese.
	Nigerians, oddly enough, 15,000.
	I think they're solely related to the scam that was created by Priti Patel on student visas, that you could come here and maybe they're the ones going.
	But I calculated this as it was like the top 10. It's only 147,000 emigration from the top 10 countries.
	So I'm trying to work out where the other 200,000 is coming from.
	Where is it?
	Do we know?
	No, I have not enough time, and I will drill into this, and when I get it, I'll put it out there.
	Luca made a great point, though.
	It's like what you see on the high street in your day-to-day life.
	There's that classic thing about perhaps bodybuilding or losing weight.
	You can talk about calories and macros, but in the end, it's what you look like in the mirror.
	Yeah.
	It's the same with this.
	You can talk about statistics all you like.
	Is my high street flooded with foreign people or not?
	Yes, and I still believe that.
	And it still is.
	And one interesting thing to come about is a different story, again, about time, is all these immigration numbers and immigration numbers are always reversed upwards once you get the annual 10-year survey of our population.
	And all of these are estimates.
	That gives a better figure, and that comes through.
	So this is where the Tories are now.
	Let's look at this.
	The Tories are the first hot-off-the-box.
	They're saying, it's us.
	This is down to us.
	Forget the fact it was down to you that it rose in the first place enormously, but the changes I secured as immigration have led to net migration, but still far too high.
	Robert, you failed as immigration minister profoundly.
	As someone who has done more than anyone else to try to destroy the Tory party, I will give...
	Sunak and that government, they did change the rules back just on the way...
	No, and I've got to agree with that as well, and I do agree.
	I know Robert failed in many ways, but he wanted to go much further than this.
	I mean, I knew the advisers into Priti Patel.
	I knew the advisers, Sola Braverman, she never had a chance.
	She wanted to go much further than him, and they got rid of her as quickly as possible.
	Robert tried to go around this map.
	No, sorry.
	Sunak was Prime Minister.
	It was in his power to go to war with Whitehall, if that's what it took.
	And he didn't.
	Yeah, he tried.
	I don't buy that Suella and Preeti were like, oh, it was our permanent secretary who stopped us from doing it.
	Well, you're the government then.
	That's your job to go to war with them then.
	And you didn't.
	Preeti was different.
	She talked really strongly and didn't do it.
	And it is a real shame, and I think people who knew her at the time were very, very let down, including people working with her.
	Swayla was just not given the opportunity, and she had some good people I knew who were really there as advisors.
	Remember, you get your civil servants plus your own advisors that you can bring in, and they were ready to do some really hard stuff.
	Robert took a while to get round to it, and by the time he did, it was too late, because of this man, essentially, here.
	He's now crowing.
	I mean, just listen to it.
	It's the work I did as Home Secretary.
	And can we play this?
	Is it work?
	Net migration to the UK has halved because of the changes that I put in place when I was in the sector.
	I put it in.
	I have nothing to do with Robert.
	I've just released figures showing that net migration...
	Right, there you go.
	Anyway, so the Tories are out there claiming, and I think the Tories there...
	We pumped them up to 1.3, and now they've come down.
	Oh, they've only come down.
	460.
	How disingenuous could you get?
	Yeah, well, this is why...
	Well, the numbers that may stabilise here, may fall again next year, probably will come up again.
	But I still can't see them coming down much bigger than this.
	Matt Goodwin talks about the opportunity in recent years, but 100,000 higher than when people voted for Brexit.
	Very true.
	That's today.
	It's actually about 130,000.
	Meanwhile, back on planet Earth.
	This is what people are seeing every day.
	They might see a fall in numbers.
	Pedophiles, we can't deport to Pakistan.
	Migrant dinghy being forced to avoid more channel migrant boats, which are up 32% compared to last year.
	So I expect about 50,000 to 55,000 coming across on the channel route.
	But also...
	The numbers coming on the backs of lorries are rising again.
	They've always been one to two, but they're now saying, well, we'll come across as well, because actually some people smugglers are charging too much.
	So they're going for a cheaper route on the backs of lorries or underneath them.
	So they're going to rise.
	Interesting here, back again, a quarter of Birmingham now out of work, who are a Manchester booing employers desperate for staff.
	One in five on the dole, mainly about people who are non-UK citizens.
	Although he doesn't want to use those numbers, if Fraser Nelson.
	He's just talking about unemployment.
	But we've already realised that most of these unemployed now are coming from foreign countries.
	Fraser Nelson is a fifth columnist, as simple as that.
	I'm sorry, if May, Johnson and Sunak wanted to profoundly lower immigration, there's a whole number of things they could have done.
	Not increase it, number one.
	But this idea that they were just hamstrung by Whitehall.
	Well, no, it's the job then of government to take Whitehall by the scruff of the neck.
	I agree.
	And they didn't do that.
	James Cleverley.
	Are you kidding me?
	He would be first prosecuted for treason in Bowes, Britain.
	He's not...
	The sort of individual that would want to attack the blob at all.
	I mean, he's looking for his knighthood, or he's looking for a membership of the House of Lords, which means he's got to tick along doing as he's told.
	Two little things I want to mention here.
	First, on the point of statistics, there's an essay by Thomas Carlyle called Statistics, where he literally says, look, you can give me all the statistics in the world.
	I live in London.
	I live in Victorian London.
	Go and take a walk.
	Don't believe your lying eyes.
	What's really interesting is that Carlisle was very influential on Charles Dickens, who was famous for taking a walk around London.
	And now our imagination of Victorian London isn't the statistics.
	We think of Dickens as London, not what the stats were saying.
	And this is a very similar situation where it's like, look, you can't go...
	I mean, I know Swindon gets a bashing all the time.
	I saw Charlie Downs talking about it the other day, but...
	You take a walk down that, there was a lot of strangers, I'll just say, if you're picking up this drink just now.
	The other thing I just want to say really quickly on this is in the Island of Strangers speech, Keir Starmer, he delinked GDP in immigration.
	And I noticed that Larry Fink of Black Rock also gave a speech.
	Not that long ago, saying the countries that are going to survive are going to be high automation, low immigration, monocultures.
	And I'm wondering if...
	Thinking within the so-called blob has changed.
	Otherwise, Starmer's taking on the Treasury.
	I was actually going to end with that because I've got to talk about Rupert Lowe basically thought net migration is weak.
	We need deportation of visa expropriations to reduce the numbers because it was the most literal thing that I actually referred to in a previous podcast we had on here.
	The first Prime Minister ever to talk around the way that growth has been tested, in his words, to a response to a Sky question.
	It's been tested on growth and it's failed.
	That has not been mentioned before.
	There has been one paper by the Treasury talking about growth not working with GDP, with growth with immigration.
	I've raised it.
	Not many in the press have.
	I'm glad you picked up on it as well because I think it's fundamental.
	We need not one more visa and a system of mass remigration so that the numbers gross or net come down are in minuses.
	That would be useful.
	To the tune of hundreds of thousands year on year.
	That's what we need.
	And that's what Rupert and others are now advocating.
	And how long before that becomes a part of normal political agendas?
	There we go.
	Sorry.
	Well, I'm very sorry for not getting to your video comments.
	We'll get some tomorrow.
	It's my fault.
	First time hosting and not very good timekeeping, apparently.
	But thank you very much for tuning in, and we'll see you again at 1pm tomorrow.

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