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May 29, 2025 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:32:58

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1175

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	Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
	Welcome to the podcast of the Low Seaters for Thursday the 29th of May.
	2025.
	I almost said 2022 for some reason.
	Time stopped in my mind, if not everywhere else.
	Today I'm joined by Stephen and Nima Parvini, and we are going to be talking about how the Americans are coming because they're taking free speech very seriously, how Trump is warring with his own judges, because really who decides to set policy in the United States, and whether Nigel Farage is actually the voice of the working class and not the Labour Party, which they've taken this very badly because this actually seems to be a genuine weakness that they have perceived themselves to have.
	So that is wonderful.
	So before we begin, at 7pm today we have another free webinar for The Trivium, where we are going to be talking about the most important part...
	This is by far my favourite part of the Trivium, and just the most interesting, because as Dr. Parvini pointed out, this is where, after you've learned all the rules, this is where you get to break them.
	So that's the good bit.
	Anyway, so let's begin.
	You will remember a few months back when Trump came into office back in the...
	And Vance decided to go over to Europe and make them cry by explaining to them, free speech is important, actually, you communists.
	And they took this very badly.
	I mean, one German MP actually did stand up in public and cry actual tears over it, which I enjoyed.
	And so Starmer realized which way the wind was blowing.
	And so he went over to the United States and decided to do the honourable and decent thing and just lie through his teeth.
	When he was like, oh yes, free speech in Britain, yes, that's definitely something we have, Mr. President.
	We have a long, I mean, this is the exact quote, we have a long, we've had free speech for a very, very long time in the UK.
	And it will last for a very, very long time.
	Certainly we wouldn't reach across the US citizens if we don't, and that's absolutely right.
	But in relation to free speech in the UK, I'm very proud of our history here.
	Does anyone think we have free speech in this country?
	I don't know anyone that really does, apart from the kind of small group of elites who want to continue with the fact that we haven't got free speech, but they'll pretend it's there.
	I don't know if they even pretend.
	I saw a discussion on BBC, you know, panel discussion, and there was a woman from the Telegraph, I think it was, who was...
	And then her interlocutor was like, yeah, but we've never had free speech over here, have we?
	And she was like, well, no.
	No, we haven't.
	I've noticed this sneaky thing that Jacob Rees-Mogg does and some Tories do, which is they do this little sleight of hand where they reframe it as freedom of the press.
	Notice that?
	Freedom of the press.
	Interesting.
	It's like, well, you have free speech, you know, as long as you're writing for the sun or as long as you're writing for the...
	I've seen them narrow it down to freedom of the parliamentarians as well.
	It's like, oh great, well I'm so glad that 650 people in this country have free speech.
	But anyway, the point being is that everyone knew that Starmer was lying through his teeth come the end of February, and the Americans kept going on about this.
	Remember that Donald Trump made free speech one of the key parts of his trade deal with the United Kingdom.
	When asked about the comments, a source familiar with the trade negotiations told the Telegraph, quote, no free trade without free speech.
	I mean, I like the sound of that.
	Oh, I love it.
	Yeah, that sounds amazing.
	I guess Starmer just carried on lying through his teeth.
	And the thing is, the Trump administration is paying attention to Britain, because, of course, being nativists themselves, you can't really be an American nativist without having some kind of goodwill towards the United Kingdom.
	Because, of course, we're the place that the Americans came from originally.
	And so they've been paying close attention to us for quite a while.
	And this is just a fascinating article that the Telegraph have provided to us, in which they list a series of the...
	So I thought we'd go through a few of them just to make the point that, no, we don't have free speech.
	And when Starmer tells you that we do have free speech, he's lying because he's the one who agrees with the way that the suppression should be set up.
	So the first one is the case of Livia Tosiki-Bolt.
	And this is one of the interesting things about this, is the Trump administration being...
	And so this is a pro-life campaigner who, she is a pro-life campaigner, who is being prosecuted after she held a sign outside an abortion clinic that said, here to talk if you want.
	Now, this I don't think is terribly controversial or provocative, but for some reason in the United Kingdom, abortion is some kind of sacred right that women have.
	That you're not even really allowed to question.
	And so it's not really a hot political issue here at the moment.
	It's just something on the way on the 250,000 abortions happen every year.
	And everyone says...
	And we don't really talk about it.
	So those people who have been arrested for praying quietly in their heads outside of abortion clinics, the state oppression looks all the more peculiar.
	I guess it's there by implication.
	It's as simple and plain and as calm as you can get in any form of protest.
	It's the Martin Luther King of quiet protest over that particular view.
	And why is it the left can turn around and say we want peaceful protest for change?
	But not a few peaceful protests opposing our shibboleth of abortion.
	And therefore we're going to implement a quite radical and discriminatory piece of legislation that allows us to have a criminal act by banning you from a certain area around a building.
	That in itself is a breach of freedom of speech and freedom of movement.
	But it's also comical when the police ask them, are you praying in your head?
	And they say, yes, they're right, right, you're under arrest.
	And they actually have been arrested for praying in their own heads.
	Anyway, moving on, the next one is Adam Smith-Connor, who was one of the people also convicted for praying outside of an abortion clinic.
	He was a 51-year-old former army veteran.
	He was given two-year conditional discharge in order to pay £9,000 for breaching a ban on protests within a legal buffer zone.
	J.D. Vance, of course, has taken a particular interest in this one because, again, they are actually Christians.
	Like, we might be an island of atheists, but they take this seriously.
	And if our, what is now, Christian minority seek to exercise what the Americans perceive as their free speech rights in pursuit of their religious convictions, this matters to them.
	Even though for some reason it doesn't matter to us.
	Anyway, the next one is Tyler Kay.
	Kay was jailed for 38 months after writing an offensive anti-immigration post on X during the Southport riots.
	His post was very similar to Lucy Connolly's post.
	He said, quote, Mass deportation now.
	Set fire to the effing hotels full of the bastards for all I care.
	If that makes me a racist, so be it.
	He's very similar.
	He pled guilty and the new Northampton Crown Court And Elon Musk signal boosted this, calling it messed up with a post that attracted 31 million views.
	So, interesting.
	I'd be interested to have seen what would have happened if he took a trial by jury.
	I suspect that he would have actually gone.
	Well, if they just pled not guilty.
	Yeah, pled not guilty.
	Everyone should have pled not guilty.
	Everyone should have gone into the Crown Courts and then we could have been able to have even more interesting cases to come out because then they've got to prove the evidence on a number of cases.
	It would have delayed the courts.
	It would have created issues.
	And that's their legal right.
	Their legal right to do so.
	What is fascinating is how you keep hearing time and time again the due to solicitor or the solicitor at the time said plead guilty and you'll get credit and they got no credit.
	And these are solicitors who are given by the state?
	Yes.
	Because I think many of these people probably had no criminal records, had no legal interaction with the state in any way, didn't have a lawyer of their own, didn't know what they were doing, and they were just advised by the state-appointed lawyer, just plead guilt and you'll be fine, bro.
	None of them were.
	None of them were.
	So anyway, moving on, we'll skip over that chap and come back to him in a minute.
	We have Alison Pearson, who is an award-winning Telegraph columnist.
	So, let's talk about the freedom of the press again, shall we?
	She's an award-winning writer being investigated for allegedly stirring up racial hatred of the social media post made in November last year.
	Two police officers called at home at 9.40am on Remembrance Sunday to tell her that she was under investigation and invited to a voluntary interview.
	And so this is an ongoing case.
	This, of course, got a bit of a backlash because, hang on a second, isn't this one of our own?
	Hang on, what are you doing?
	You can't be investigating one of ours, part of the media class.
	This is meant to be a protected person, which goes to show you that there are no protected people.
	And the last one here that we'll cover is Darren Brady, an army veteran, 51, who was arrested for, quote, causing anxiety because he put up a meme of a swastika which was made up of the four LGBT pride flags.
	And so the police turned up at his house and said "Someone has been caused anxiety based on your social media post." It's apparently a crime now.
	And this is what Jonathan Sumption was talking about.
	Although I disagreed with his analysis of Lucy Connolly, he did explain very clearly that the extension of the Public Order Act to allow, just causing anxiety and concern, and also the fact that they are so connected to the individual who makes the claim, rather than anything ostensibly factually provable.
	You can just say it, even if you don't feel it.
	And I'm surprised that we don't fill the courts ourselves and fill the police time ourselves with those on the conservative side of it by saying exactly the same day in, day out about people like O 'Brien on LBC.
	Let's constantly do that.
	Make a mockery of it.
	Completely in favour of malicious compliance.
	Yeah.
	I mean, I hate to do the, oh, what if the other side...
	But I mean on this case It is absurd It's not that long ago When the left were arguing with an open face With a kind of You know Do you remember the whole thing?
	It's all right to just punch Richard Spencer in the face because you don't like what he says.
	Absolutely.
	Or I remember for ages over this bridge I used to drive under, there was a banner which simply just said, hang the Tories.
	Now, look, you don't have to like...
	Nobody just likes the Tories more than us.
	You don't have to like Karl.
	You don't have to like Richard Spencer.
	But the point is that when it comes to them, BLM was not that long ago.
	It's almost like they say, well, actually, actual violence is fair game for us.
	But speech is not fair game for you.
	And in all of those debates, they even frame it as if they've got a right.
	To violence in those cases.
	So yeah, this is one of those cases where there is just a ribald double standard.
	A play in the whole debate.
	And I think one of the things that's very clear to people and very clear to those in the United States, and I have to admit I was on what they call a spaces last night in the US between two and four in the morning.
	So, you know, my eyes start falling asleep.
	It's pretty much there.
	But on that spaces, the Americans were just so concerned.
	Yes.
	About what was happening in here.
	When I talked about the need to have organizations funded, the Americans were saying, we can help.
	How can we help?
	Can we deal with this in supporting you in that?
	And then the question popped up.
	You said, you know, you left Britain.
	To come out to the United States for freedom.
	Is it possible that we can also offer you all asylum as well from your country?
	And I said, well, yeah, at the moment many of us are fighting for it.
	But there are those who turn around to our children and say, don't bother staying here.
	Go to the United States.
	It's a freer place to be.
	And that's a shocking stakes of affairs when you hear that.
	But they are concerned about us.
	The stereotype on the American right at the moment is not unfounded in that Britain is not a country that has liberty as they understand it.
	They have a much higher bar to what freedom is than we do.
	And like you say, it's completely common.
	I'm friends with lots of fairly large names on the American right and they ask me, is it really like you're saying?
	Yes, it's really like it's being reported.
	The difference, I think, and the thing that I think the American right needs to understand when they're looking at these, is that the targets are usually chosen with deliberate intention.
	For example, we'll go to the example of Tommy Robinson, actually, who, of course, was another very important voice in this.
	And notice that the Telegraph, Tommy Robinson, known for his extreme views on Muslims and his propensity to stop racial education, okay, well, tell me what they are.
	Like, what's the quote?
	I hear that he has these views, but I'm actually lacking a quote of what Tommy Robinson has said about Muslims.
	But anyway, the point is that he...
	It was to prove a point that he published his documentary Silenced on Twitter that got something like 160 million views.
	He wouldn't have gone to jail for this if he had not done that, but he was very firmly in the crosshairs.
	And essentially he...
	But the point being, in other cases, they're very reticent to target high-profile people.
	They target people who, for example, would have had a few hundred views on their tweets to make examples out of the powerless.
	For example, they haven't come for me or you.
	They haven't come for any of us.
	Not that we know that we might have non-hate crime incidents.
	We doubtless do.
	And if they wanted to, they could.
	But they know that we're connected in a network of activists that have sympathetic ears all over the place.
	And that we will make a big deal out of these things.
	There is, with some...
	What makes this confusing is that not all of these cases are the same.
	And I mean, I don't want to...
	But there's a difference between the silent prayer and an active court.
	I mean, if you've been on Twitter for any amount of time, everybody knows don't Fed post on Maine, right?
	Everybody knows that as a piece of advice.
	So there's probably a debate to be had about an active...
	Now, where it gets tricky is that leftists...
	Do you remember the Trump head?
	Do you remember that?
	Yes, I do.
	Do you remember that?
	With the blood dripping from it.
	With the blood dripping.
	I mean, all of the people openly calling for the yes.
	Yeah.
	So, again, it's one of those cases where it's kind of fair game for them to wish kind of death and violence on their opponents, but this will, you know...
	But there probably is a debate to be had about, you know, do we want the country to be, like, absolute free speech?
	anything goes period or is there is there a line somewhere realistically when it comes to That's fake.
	I mean, I know this is a debate you've had many times.
	But that's actually not correct.
	You can shout fire in a crowd of thieves.
	I don't know why.
	Okay, well.
	Americans can do that.
	Yeah, but even in the United States, they have limitations.
	And we supposedly have two main principal limitations.
	The first is a principle of libel, whether you commit slander or be libelous to them.
	And that's pretty much okay.
	you can't turn around, or you shouldn't be able to turn around and say someone's a paedophile without evidence of it and destroy their career.
	So again, you have this argument by people.
	That part now only supports the left.
	And the second is the criminal side of things, you know, where we turn around and you say you can't turn around.
	If you're standing in a street, there's that man, he's a Muslim, therefore let's go and set fire to him and burn him alive.
	That, too, is incitement.
	And the question that we have to balance ourselves is whether someone really on X and Twitter making a statement like Lucy Connolly or this chap that I unfortunately had not heard about is actually genuine doing a call to arms to actually set fire to these hotels or whether common sense says that these people are in a state of emotional trauma caused by the deaths of so many children at the hands of a mass murderer who was pretty evil in his own right whether they really meant let's go out and set fire to these hotels with people.
	And that is the question that a jury I believe should have been asked.
	And they should have been done.
	Just venting, letting off steam.
	Absolutely.
	Venting and letting off steam.
	Like you say sometimes when you see somebody in a pub, you think, oh God, look, there he is.
	He's had ten pints.
	He's going to the wind and he starts screaming about Ferguson being the worst manager ever.
	You know what's interesting?
	I read a couple of books about the death penalty a couple of years ago because I was interested in forming a proper opinion on the death penalty.
	And one thing that one of these books was pointing out is that the The death penalty required a unanimous decision by the jury for the judge to be able to issue it.
	So on paper, the law was if you stole X amount of shillings or if you did this, that's it, death penalty.
	And the softening of the law was done by the juries themselves.
	And so the juries would essentially agree, okay, we think he is guilty of doing this, but we're not all going to unanimously agree to the death penalty, so he'll get whatever punishment in prison or flogging or whatever it is.
	And so you have the option of the harshest punishment in the correct times where it's needed, but because it's, as you say, falling back on the mercy of the jury, who themselves are just normal people, and so they use their gut instinct very, very fairly, actually.
	And so what this actually meant is that in England, though we had something like 230 statutes that were on the books that you could get the death penalty for, you'd get something like half a dozen executions a year.
	Yes.
	And so instead of, like, because what you think of the hundreds and thousands of executions, but it actually very rarely happened because the juries would take into account the mitigating circumstances of the person, and that's precisely what's missing, as you're saying, in this case.
	I agree, and on that particular issue, I've looked at the death penalty, and like so many people, they want to say, okay, we want to kill pedophiles and mass murderers.
	I'm no longer of the view that we have the death penalty.
	Why?
	Because of this.
	Because I believe that we will be pushed by our government into a situation where memes like this and statements like that could potentially have the death penalty attached to it.
	And we give the state the opportunity of being able to extend it.
	I don't trust them, that's the problem.
	I don't trust the state not to extend it to views of our side.
	Just to be clear, where are all these cases?
	Because I know that in the case of the Southport...
	There were the turbo courts, weren't there?
	Yes.
	all of those cases just had a judge.
	There was no jury, is that right?
	That they just sped them through They sped them through the magistrates'courts, where all the offences were technically either either way, which meant you could be tried in a magistrate court or a Crown court.
	The solicitors who were acting on behalf of the defence all said...
	Were those people ignored that advice and said, no, I'm going to the Crown Court?
	Most of them, I think statistically, have actually been acquitted.
	Whereas in the magistrate's court, it's then decided by either a single judge So anyway, moving on.
	The Trump administration is not...
	So recently, they sent a five-person team from the US State Department to come over to the United Kingdom and interview campaigners to give the feedback to the White House.
	They met with five activists in the UK who'd been arrested for silently protesting outside of abortion clinics.
	The diplomats from the US Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labour travelled to London in March in an effort to affirm the importance of freedom of expression in the UK and across Europe.
	They were led by Samuel Sampson, a senior advisor to the State Department, and met with officials from the Foreign Office and challenged Ofcom on the Online Safety Act, which was also a point of contention in the White House.
	So they're taking this very, very seriously.
	They're paying a lot of attention, and they're not happy with what they see.
	And to be honest with you, it's hard to feel that they're in the wrong with this.
	I think...
	How do you sum up a proper argument for you made someone feel anxious?
	To me, thinking politically, especially given what we're going to discuss and where Starmer's gone with the Islands of Strangers speech, to me this would just be such a quick and easy win for the government to just say, Look, we've got this wrong.
	Things have got too far.
	Trump has got a point.
	We are the original democracy, blah, blah, blah, the oldest parliament from now on, you know, and they could easily pass, like, I don't know, the Free Speech Act or something.
	Well, all they need to do is actually repeal some of the amendments to the original Public Order Acts and several of them.
	and it's a repealing.
	And actually the repealing Because what it would say is that we're making a break with those pieces of legislation that have damaged the concept of freedom of speech in this country.
	We've listened.
	We've understood.
	There be deleted.
	And that would be much more significant because then it would also have an impact in the courts.
	What that would do is take away the power of the little petty bully police officer who's like, right, I've got them under various amendments of some obscure nonsense act that was passed in 2007 or whatever it is.
	It would just remove all of that.
	Yes.
	So that would all go away, stripping the power from them, rather than, like you say, creating new legislation.
	But anyway, so they met them.
	The Telegraph found out about it.
	And, of course, various Trump allies, such as Charlie Kirk, have been raising the issue of Lucy Connolly.
	And a State Department spokesman has said, the UK-US relations share a mutual respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.
	However, as President Vance said, we're very concerned about freedom of expression in the UK.
	And it's important that the UK respects and protects freedom of expression.
	And the thing is, ultimately now, we don't view expression as a human right.
	We view expression as the source of danger.
	And that is fundamentally...
	They view that the freedom of expression of an individual is a source of liberty, not the source of oppression.
	It's a much longer conversation to go into with that, which I won't do now.
	But the next thing, and the final thing, is Marco Rubio coming out strong again.
	And honestly, I just love the rhetoric that he's using at this point, where he's like, look, if a foreign government threatens to censor tech platforms, we're going to start coming after you.
	We are going to make sure you don't do this to us.
	And it's very much couched in the language of the American birthright.
	And I absolutely adore this.
	Listen to this.
	He says, For too long, Americans have been fined, harassed, and even charged by foreign authorities for exercising their free speech rights.
	Today I am announcing a new visa restriction policy that will apply to foreign officials and persons who are complicit in censoring Americans.
	I hope you're listening to this, Keir.
	I know you were thinking, can we just go after Twitter?
	Can we ban Twitter?
	Didn't you summon someone, in fact, recently?
	Didn't they summon Elon Musk or someone like that?
	They did.
	And he ignored them.
	Of course he ignored them.
	But the point is, who do you think you are, is the question he's asking.
	Free speech is essential to the American way of life, a birthright over which foreign governments have no authority.
	And he also criticized...
	He says, it's unacceptable for foreign officials to issue or threaten arrest warrants on US citizens or US residents for social media posts on American platforms while physically present in US soil.
	It's similarly unacceptable for foreign officials to demand that American tech platforms adopt global content moderation policies or engage in censorship activity that reaches beyond their authority and into the United States.
	Whether in Latin America, Europe or elsewhere, the days of passive treatment for those who work to undermine the rights of Americans are over.
	I mean that is bloody strong And must have put I hope so because I got a message yesterday saying that a team of people of the US had actually been in contact also with Ofcom Watch.
	Oh, that's what I read about.
	Who are taking the challenge on behalf of organizations like Gab up against, in a judicial review in a high court trial, against Ofcom for the way that they're looking.
	And the message was that the U.S. admin is about to impose phase one travel sanctions against British government officials involved in censorship of U.S. technology companies.
	And I asked, so who was top of the list?
	And he went, Dame Melanie Dawes, the chief executive of Ofcom.
	That may have been tongue-in-cheek.
	Sure, but you never know.
	But you never know.
	But wouldn't that be a delight if you turned around and said, I'm sorry, Dame, you're no longer welcome in the United States and you'll never be allowed to use dollars or any banking facilities again because we put sanctions on you, which means you won't be able to travel in many countries in the world and won't be able to use a lot of the financial markets.
	There could be a bizarre scenario when they really start looking into Ofcom that it leads back to Peter Mandelson, who is currently the US ambassador.
	Peter Manesson gets hit with the sanction because he said he was instrumental in setting up Ofcom.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	The point being, I didn't get to vote for Trump, but if I had, this would be exactly what I was voting for.
	So I hope you Americans are very happy with what they're doing because I bloody am.
	Anyway, the Engaged View says, the man in the grey suit kind of terrifies me when he smiles.
	I kind of like it in Bowes Britain.
	He used to be the one who intergates traitors.
	What man in the grey suit?
	Considering the number of people pleading guilty, I wonder what sort of persuasion is being used.
	Honestly, it was just the intimidation of the authorities, the charisma of the office.
	People didn't know what they were doing, and so just conceded, assuming that the state had their best interests at heart, which, of course, it doesn't.
	Akral says, If you can't own and carry firearms, are not free.
	The pursuit of safety infringes on liberty.
	It's a long conversation I'm not going to get into.
	I like that Carl refers to the United States as a plural rather than a singular entity.
	People forget that the federal government is a group of sovereign states.
	Well, man, like, all I'm saying is, Rubio has done a superb job recently, and I absolutely love everything that he's doing, and I hope he carries on.
	Anyway, let's move on.
	Well, this is interesting.
	So we are going to continue with the kind of stories about what's happening in the United States, but this time back on their own turf, what's happening in there.
	Because as we can see, Rubio and others in the United States and China, As they're trying to make changes in the United States, the same sort of lawfare.
	That we've seen against those six individuals and many more are being used at a grand scale across many states in the United States.
	And the big one that we came across last night, I mean, he was about seven hours behind us in terms of a very, very surprising decision.
	I've got to admit, an incredibly surprising decision.
	And that is a federal court stated that Trump, as the president, does not have the power to individually impose, sorry, to impose tariffs unilaterally against other countries.
	Not much has come back from, as I can see, from Trump himself or their spokesperson.
	But there is a New York-based court of international trade.
	The judges found that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which is how Trump has announced the tariffs across the globe, does not give him the unlimited power to levy tariffs like the President has in recent months.
	Well, that's the question.
	Who has the power to actually issue tariffs?
	Why?
	Has it got to be for Congress?
	I think it's Congress, yeah.
	Is it the Senate?
	Are they the ones who are allowed to?
	Is it the President?
	I actually asked ChatGPT, right?
	ChatGPT tells us that the Constitutional Authority lies with Congress in Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution.
	Ah.
	So we're going to come to that, because there is a particular act that's being looked at, and the President's assertion here, it carries on.
	So that's fascinating how we're going to link that in.
	The assertion of tariff-making authority in the instant case, unbounded as it is by any limitation in duration of scope, exceeds any tariff authority delegated to the President under AIPA.
	The worldwide and retaliatory tariffs are thus ultra-visors and contrary.
	So I have not yet had a chance to fully investigate AIPA and what it amounts.
	But it was interesting to me, looking at that, that we've got another judge coming in and stepping in.
	I think what it's worth noting in this case, though, is that only Congress has...
	And the Congress is mostly Republican at the moment, so good luck.
	Well, this is fascinating.
	I'm going to be looking at the way that I'm talking to constitutionalists and constitutional lawyers, which I always find interesting because Ted Cruz used to actually recite the Constitution, allegedly, when he went on dates with women that he knew when he was a student.
	And apparently that was a really big thing for American women.
	So if you go out there, lads, if you want to be able to chat up an American girl at a college, cite the...
	Yeah, Constitution, it really works.
	But here we've got EIPA, which is the link that we come in.
	This is the conclusion of the court.
	I managed to get some part of the actual court itself.
	And at the top part, he tries to talk about he's not authorised to have worldwide retaliatory or traffic in tariffs.
	It exceeds his authority, all the things we've just mentioned.
	There's no question of narrowly tailored relief.
	It's either all or nothing.
	You know, he can either give the powers or he doesn't.
	And if you bring that up, Samson, I want to show the last part, the bottom part of this.
	In here, it's the plaintiff's motion of something granted and their motions for preliminary injunction are denied as moot.
	He effectively, as a judge, is giving economic policy and trade policy in these two parts of the end.
	And I just find to myself, what authority did you have to be able to interpret trade authority on part?
	You're trying to mask, and I do this as a lawyer myself, you're trying to mask the constitutional law of the Congress granting powers to the United States, saying that he exceeds the power, that's fine.
	But then you're effectively saying he can't exercise the power that he's been granted.
	But where?
	How?
	Who?
	When can he do so?
	So immediately I kind of thought to myself, this is going to be a big challenge for them.
	The markets loved it.
	I mean, I was looking at something like, this is something like 1 o 'clock in the morning.
	The US markets were already at 1%, which was bad for me because I'd gone short on the US tech, so I was losing quite a lot on this.
	Now the US tech has gone up despite all of this quite heavily.
	So they loved it.
	Asia, the markets in Asia rallied.
	On the back end of this.
	So who's supporting this?
	Who's been behind it?
	A lot of big banks are behind it.
	Hedge funds and trade organizations are doing this.
	They're kind of rocking up the market.
	And we're seeing big changes in the market because Trump is saying he wants to do one thing.
	He's being challenged on the other.
	Then he's having to kind of backtrack, they say.
	So he's flip-flopping.
	I don't think he's really flip-flopping.
	I think he's just trying to organize deals in terms of the way it works.
	And what is it that people are saying?
	Well, just an ordinary individual.
	I picked up many.
	I just picked this one out of the bag.
	Why are the courts in the US working against the prosperity of the USA?
	Why would a court in New York say that Trump cannot impose tariffs against China, Canada and Mexico when they do it to us?
	What the fuck is wrong with the courts?
	I'm so sick of the bullshit.
	And that is what people in America, apart from, obviously, the elite class, are beginning to feel about the court system.
	The same as we're beginning to feel in this country about two-tier justice.
	There is now becoming a breakdown in trust.
	And I hate that as a lawyer myself, someone who is a barrister who believes in the courts, believes in the rule of law, the necessity to have an ordered state, that we now have vast majorities of the public turning around and saying we no longer trust the courts en masse.
	Not just an individual lawyer here and there, but the whole system.
	Is corrupt.
	And that does not bode well for us in the long term.
	No, for me it's very difficult not to look at this story.
	Because, I mean, it's inherently bound up with issues of the Constitution.
	Things like, you know, Montesquieu and the separation of powers and all of that.
	All I can think about, Carl, is Thomas Hobbes, Joseph de Maestra and Carl Schmitt standing wherever they are in the afterlife saying, we told you so.
	Because, basically, if you follow the arguments of the likes of Hobbes, de Maestra, and Schmitt, who is a German jurist, they said, well, look, ultimately, the question in any system is, who is sovereign?
	Who decides?
	Who interprets?
	Who decides on the exception?
	And ultimately, in any system, it can only really be one Ruler, one body.
	And in America, it's not clear who that is meant to be.
	And so, and what's happened over time is because, as I understand it, Congress and the Senate in particular have become so bodged up with various, it's so hard to pass legislation and it's become so polarized that what's happened is that the powers have started accumulating in the office of the president and the executive.
	I mean, it's not just Trump.
	Biden had to do it.
	Barmer had to do it.
	Bush Jr. had to do it.
	they had to rely on these emergency powers.
	In fact, when I was writing...
	It's a very generous interpretation of this.
	Wait a second, though.
	They've had to rely on emergency powers to the extent that emergency powers that were passed by Woodrow Wilson are still live and on the books.
	And you actually get whole institutions, when you actually look into it, well, what's this all based on?
	Oh, it's something that LBJ once said.
	So then you get...
	But then you get a similar concentration of power in the court.
	And then every once in a while, you get a big...
	FDR was famous for this.
	He was always having a run-in with the Chief Justice.
	And, you know, every once in a while, FDR would say, look, if you go against me again, I'm going to stick 30 judges on this court.
	And I'm going to, you know, basically, I'm the president.
	So you get this face-off.
	What it means in practice, though, is that over decades upon decades, the problem is never really sorted out.
	Now, maybe this is how the founding fathers designed it.
	But ultimately, it's not functional.
	Ultimately, somebody must decide.
	Somebody actually...
	If Keir Starmer wanted to abolish the Supreme Court, he could do it tomorrow.
	I wish he would.
	I hope you're listening, Keir.
	Boris could have done it at any time.
	Boris could have done it at any time.
	He should have done it.
	Herbert Spencer, the divine right of parliament.
	And so this actually goes to the heart of...
	Because I just find it absurd that some random judge in Hawaii can overrule the president.
	I just want to say, what a lovely optimistic way of framing the president as if they are innocent of accruing executive power.
	They just had to do it, guys!
	They just had to pass the Patriot Act!
	They just had to become executive presidencies, where if you look at the use of executive orders, they just skyrocket!
	Rocket throw bomber.
	They just had to do it.
	Yeah, I mean, don't get me wrong.
	I'm not saying that...
	they just had to do it.
	Again, very, very, very lovely Mitch McConnell will just sit there like a turtle and just stop anything happening forever.
	Well, I think he'd probably like to do that anyway, wouldn't he?
	The issue, though, that I think is really coming down to this, I think that you were hitting on, is that the markets obviously do understand that the tariffs are going to be damaging for the economic growth of the United States.
	Yes.
	That's not really the question that's being answered by the tariffs, as Tim here, for him...
	What he's questioning is how is my share of that GDP trickling down to me?
	And the use of tariffs is essentially what the left should be agreeing with because it will help the working class actually acquire more of the wealth that actually flows into the United States and is produced by it than rampant free trade globalism will do.
	And so you can see where the judge has landed on this.
	No, I'm against the working people of the United States.
	I'm actually for BlackRock and the other international corporations and hedge fund managers who are all rallying on the market at the moment.
	And what I find really interesting about the tariffs is it's actually shown you where Trump's heart really lies on this.
	This was not a popular thing for him to do, and yet he did it anyway.
	And yeah, and he's going to be attacked not only by the political parties, he's attacked now by allegedly supporters of his institutions, financial institutions, who will lose money in bond investments, CFDs, across the country because of this.
	That's why they're also concerned about the stock market fall, which for me, as a market watcher, market trader, it's incredibly strange how it's flying to all-time highs, despite the fact of what we're seeing.
	Across the globe and the fact that they say this is going to have a massive impact on the dollar, a massive impact on trade and the economy.
	And yet the equity markets are flying.
	So there's something completely wrong there.
	Either they're all trying to boost it before they get out and then it collapses.
	But the reality is we've got the politics against him.
	We've got the markets against him because they will lose in the short term.
	The working class are with him because they recognise that And they're saying it's only going to give you a few hundred dollars a month.
	They don't understand a few hundred dollars a month is a lot to someone who's got absolutely nothing.
	But it's not just that, though.
	The arguments against the tariffs are your cheap tap from China will cost more.
	Yeah.
	I know.
	I accept.
	But I might be able to get a better job than I have.
	And so the sacrifices, the junk that's made outside of the United States and imported in, okay, you go without it.
	Your coffee will be slightly more expensive.
	Okay, that's true.
	But you can also, over a period of time, and he recognizes, Trump has made it very clear, that there is a short-term pain.
	There was a short-term pain about Brexit.
	Every time you challenge the state, every time you challenge the way that it's been done for a long period of time that's...
	It makes an uncomfortable change for some people.
	But ultimately, you need to have those changes.
	I often look at it in terms of a company.
	If a company has just become too fat on managers and you're paying them too much, either the company goes bust or a takeover comes in, and when the taker comes in, you get rid of middle management.
	Why can't countries do exactly the same?
	And tariffs is part of that.
	It's part of that structural change that's needed.
	Would you guys agree, though, that in the long run, whichever way it goes round, I always say power despises a rival castle.
	And it seems to me that this situation where any random court can just overrule the president, OK, this time it's on tariff.
	It's a preposterous system.
	At some point...
	Either the courts crush the power of the president, or the president at some point has to tame the courts.
	Well, the way the system is set up is that they're in a constant tension forever.
	It's not sustainable!
	I agree.
	I agree with you.
	It's not going to carry on forever, is it?
	No, and I'm intrigued about this because as I move through it, you kind of get...
	You've got here Kelly Loeffler who's saying that, you know, we've looked at an individual.
	Small businesses are happy with this kind of trade.
	Yes, it will give them short-term elements, but they're going to get tax cuts and deregulation, which helps the small business, not the large corporates, who are the ones who are supporting this trade organisation.
	The large corporates are the ones who are most reliant on international trade anyway.
	Yes.
	The small business might be able to source things locally to do what it is they do, just because it would probably be cheaper for them to get it from down the road rather than from China or whatever.
	Opportunity for a small business to turn around and say, I'm going to start doing t-shirts here.
	It's probably worth explaining as well, because you just said deregulation helps the small business.
	It's probably worth explaining that regulation tends to create an entry barrier, which then favours the massive corporations.
	That's right.
	Couldn't agree more with that.
	They can afford compliance.
	Yeah.
	The little man gets squeezed out, which is why...
	Which is why the EU looks as the EU looks.
	Yeah.
	And I was opposed to that.
	I'll never forget the story when I was chairing the Hedge Fund Lawyers Association.
	I said, right, after Brexit, we've got some arguments in the Treasury.
	What regulations do you want to be removed?
	And very few regulations were pointed to me.
	Oh, we don't want, we don't like the regulation.
	Every meeting that I had is, we've got this regulation, then that regulation, it's costing us more.
	Okay, which ones do you want to go?
	The problem was they couldn't come up with them because to do so would mean lots of them potentially losing their jobs.
	And secondly, it would allow new players to come into the market.
	I mean, I had lots of my particular views on it.
	I'm reminded of Adam Smith's definition of conspiracy, which is basically a number of people from rival big businesses getting together in a room, you know.
	that exact scenario.
	Anyway, in the interest of time, I think the They're saying he doesn't have the power.
	I pulled up Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act in 1962.
	That, to me, having read that, and there are those in the US who might have it, seems to suggest that Trump has initiated Section 232 investigations, World Trade Organization, and has the power.
	Well, it's delegated from the Congress.
	So the Congress gets the decision.
	So he has that power to do that.
	It's been granted to him.
	So there are going to be differences.
	Then you've got Charlie Kirk.
	He comes in sweeping new ruling, fact check.
	And as I looked at, the Trade Expansion Act 62 allows for adjustments without needing congressional action.
	And the Congress could.
	Take action against him if they wanted to.
	Yeah.
	Just the Republicans control it, so they're not going to.
	So the courts have the executive broad authority.
	So my next point was, you've got, what's happening, and I said, well, here, you've got another judge here.
	In previous judges, we've got a federal judge blocked the federal age programs.
	How could that possibly be within the purview of the judge?
	Yep.
	I mean, don't the judges need cases being brought to them before they can make a judgment on them?
	To me, it's so bizarre, though.
	It's very baffling.
	Some of these cases is literally a judge saying, like, you've got to give these jobs back to people.
	It's like they've already been fired.
	That's right.
	How bizarre is that?
	How is that the judge's job?
	I mean, but again, don't they need a case to rule on in order to create the legal precedent?
	Well, what they're doing is I'm going to lead into that.
	So we've had the trade.
	we've had federal aid programs, we've got This is SCOTUS.
	Can we get What's-His-Name's five-line summary of that, please?
	Yeah, so we've got that.
	That was against, right, $2 billion of U.S. aid.
	And only two of the major guys.
	So it's five to four, including a Trump-appointed judge on there.
	Oh, he'd become a Barrett as well.
	What can Trump do?
	Well, on the one side, we can do what we discussed already, that he can go to the Supreme and say, intervene against the activist judges.
	And that I know and I understand from my context is happening.
	They're trying to draw up plans of how to deal with it, particularly the blocking of the flights of the criminals and the terrorists they organized.
	But again, the Supreme blocked his Alien Enemies Act.
	Okay, this is temporary.
	They want a full case.
	Thomas and Alito.
	Yeah, I know.
	Yeah, and I'm surprised that what would happen if one of the Democrat judges died?
	Again, he's got that opportunity.
	I think they're trying to keep them alive for as long as possible.
	We've got a federal judge in a court filing that will not comply with the court's orders to resume funding of USAID and State Department.
	So that's the second alternative they've got.
	Go to the Supreme Court or just ignore it.
	What ruling?
	Again, what charge was brought?
	What challenge was brought?
	Yeah.
	Anyway, it's insufferable.
	So we have a situation where he can ignore it.
	And then I just thought I'd finish with this because I just, looking at the lawfare from deepfake quotes, it's not just about policy.
	It's that pink.
	It's about process.
	It's about tying him up.
	It's taking his energies away.
	Making sure his legal teams, the White House, are fighting battles on constant fronts.
	And whether it's the deportation plan, and I'm just going to play this because I quite like, I love this mask, always have done.
	You know, no, I don't go in a shower of one of my own, honestly.
	But it's just...
	A strategy not to block deportation outright, but to slow it down so much that it effectively never happens.
	Over 20 million illegal crossings.
	The goal is delay, and delay becomes denial.
	My point was to just say exactly what's happening here.
	Exactly when we're talking about lawfare is being used against individuals opposed to state, opposed mass migration.
	Lawfare is being used on a number of fronts in different states against everything that Trump does.
	He's got limited options of what he's got.
	So either get everything up into the Supreme Court or ignore it.
	But that's what's happening.
	The markets love it at the moment.
	And this will be a massive trial and a test for him.
	Didn't they do all this last time?
	It seems like an exact repeat of the first time.
	Except he's got Congress and Senate this time.
	T. Jones says, All of the lawfare cases we'll lose in the end.
	This is a judicial coup.
	It is just delay tactics.
	Inferior judges.
	Do not make economical foreign policy decisions.
	Sorry, Logan, I missed your thing earlier.
	All I'm hearing is that my cousins are in trouble and they need my help in some way.
	Yes, well, we are in trouble.
	We've got to deal with ourselves.
	Anyway, right, so let's move on to how these things are being dealt with in print, actually.
	So Nigel Farage has...
	Polling has put them reliably in fourth place behind the Liberal Democrats, the Labour Party and Reform in first.
	Very consistently now, Reform are polling over 30%.
	So this is pretty impressive.
	And the next nearest challenger to Farage is the Labour Party on 22%, roughly around that sort of area.
	And so they're quite worried because Nigel Farage is parking his tanks on their lawn and saying, right, here's a few new economic policies that we're going to roll out.
	And the first one being a transferable tax allowance between married people in order to encourage them to have more children.
	And he's going to lift the two-child limit on benefits, not because we support benefits culture, but in order to make having children easier for lower-paid workers.
	He admits this is not a silver bullet.
	He's vowed to fully reinstate the universal winter fuel payment scheme, which I actually don't think is brilliant.
	It should be means tested, but obviously.
	Carrying on.
	And he's reiterated that Reform's Manifesto promises to lift the income tax threshold to £20,000.
	Isn't it £12,000 at the moment?
	Yeah, 12, 12 and a half.
	Yeah, something like that, yeah.
	So if you earn £12,000, you don't pay tax.
	If you earn £13,000, now they start taxing you.
	So £13,000 is enough to bloody live on.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And you're taking 22% of that.
	The £500 you're going to get, you're going to lose just over £100.
	So you're only better off by 400 quid.
	Farage gave a reform...
	Question and answer.
	No, there's a press conference.
	I don't know why that was not on the top of my head.
	Press conference.
	Where he explained this, and he made a fair point about it.
	creates a benefits trap.
	So basically if you're getting 16 grand a year, 20 grand a year on benefits, And there are people on benefits who may want to work, but don't have the choice.
	Because, of course, if you're getting 20 grand a year on benefits, and you get a job, and suddenly you're on 13, 14 grand, that doesn't make any sense.
	And it's such small amounts of money as well.
	It's insufferable.
	Anyway, so the point being, he's going to do that, and he's going to get his Doge unit set up, so he's going to cut government waste, scrap net zero, cancel the DEI agenda, and various...
	mean, you know, whether he does any of this, whether it has any significant effect, whatever, who cares, right?
	The question, because that's a question four years away, presumably, but the the thing that everyone noticed is, oh wait, so this is a direct attack on Labour as the And so basically, yes, it seems very clearly quite a wise strategy on Farage's part.
	He has absolutely bullied the Conservatives.
	He, in fact, called them a minor party now, which is true.
	The percentage terms they are.
	Yeah, if you're only on 16%, 17%, 18% of the polls...
	And so now he's pivoting to annihilate Labour.
	And so this caused a lot of consternation in the Labour-supporting shit-lib media.
	They couldn't understand how it is that Nigel Farage could position himself.
	As a champion of the working class.
	Because, don't you know, he has a privileged background.
	Let's watch.
	Ask voters, for example, whether Starmer or Farage makes the better Prime Minister, and Starmer wins comfortably.
	44% to 20%.
	Narrow that down to working class voters alone.
	And the results are flipped.
	How is Nigel Farage, a privately educated son of a stockbroker who left school to become a trader in the City of London, reaching working-class voters in a way that other politicians like Keir Starmer isn't?
	Keir Starmer, by the way, who did grow up working-class.
	Dad famously was a toolmaker.
	Went to a state comprehensive.
	Made his living and his reputation not in the City of London but as a human rights lawyer.
	What is for us?
	The very fact he was a human rights lawyer is enough to turn any working class person off.
	Oh, absolutely.
	Wasn't this dad the fact, I'm sure I remember He was a factory owner.
	owner.
	He was a factory owner.
	Friedrich Engels was working.
	Just a rags to riches story.
	I don't know what you're talking about.
	into a conference.
	That's offensive.
	Yeah, so as you can see, How is it that they aren't choosing the robotic human rights lawyer over the charismatic, pint-swilling, cigarette-smoking nativist?
	And this, I just find this to be honestly hilarious.
	And this is the only, only stab at Nigel Friars they have is, well, you come from a relatively privileged background.
	It's like, okay.
	They don't hate relatively privileged people.
	You must surely have that through your thick skulls at this point.
	Olly Dougmore.
	I love Olly Dougmore because he's one of those people.
	He's a radical lib.
	He doesn't realise he's a radical lib.
	And he doesn't really understand the world around him because he's a radical lib.
	So let's watch Olly here.
	Nigel Farage of 10k a year, Dulwich College, a voice of the working class.
	Is Nigel Farage, former metals trader, a voice of the working class?
	Is Nigel Farage the leader of a political party that until very recently was just an incorporated business and had none of those mechanisms of internal democracy, a voice of the working class?
	Bankrolled, in fact, by several billionaires, one of whom is the deputy leader.
	I think he's a millionaire, not quite a billionaire, Richard Tyson, says that property portfolios of property businesses steeped in his family's blood.
	Is that a voice of the working class?
	I would hesitate to say no, but also I would say Have you considered that that is the voice of the working class, actually?
	This is the thing about the working class.
	Why would Ollie know anything about it?
	Because he's not working class.
	He is a southern middle class lib.
	They don't know what they're dealing with.
	And what I love about all of this is they're like, well, the voice of the working class must surely come back.
	This is the fundamental contention.
	As in, the only representation is formal, direct representation.
	As in, if you want someone working class to represent people, well, they have to be working class.
	It's like, yes, but you call that person a racist because his name is Tommy Robinson, and you put him in jail and you make sure that he's sidelined from any kind of public discourse.
	Because actually the authentic voice of the working class It's his beliefs.
	It's what he's saying.
	It's his loyalties.
	It's his loyalties, his questions, how he's doing it.
	No one seemed to question the fact that Tony Blair, a son of a wealthy family who went to FETS, which actually was more expensive than Dulwich College, then went to Oxford, which was very expensive, and his group of individuals were very wealthy, who also then became a barrister and sat in the chambers with people.
	Who became MPs and even the Chancellor.
	All of that.
	And he was the voice of the working class.
	Gordon Brown, who followed the same route, was the voice of the working class.
	This was the lie they were trading on.
	And this is the assumption that the people in the Labour Party would just be looking out for the working class.
	And this is why the institution of Labour and the relationship that Labour has had with the North is completely hollowed out.
	And so it's now essentially a legacy institution there that is being rapidly replaced by Nigel Farage.
	Because Reforma, basically the second party everywhere, where they're not the first party in the North.
	But again, look at the Southern lib who just can't understand it.
	Like, Ollie Dougmore is 100% a product of Blair's Britain.
	Yes.
	He is like the single degree owning...
	There's an interesting respect in which this dynamic has kind of always been there, all the way back to the days of Disraeli and the high-low, the upper classes and the working man in an alliance against the middle class.
	Even, I mean, I don't think the left ever truly understood the appeal of Thatcher in the 80s, who was very popular with working-class voters.
	Essex Mann knew that he was going to get some money.
	actually I mean one of the one of the things that I don't think they like they keep on going on about the wet the metals trader this is a wide boy to they don't mind the idea of somebody who's done done well for themselves someone who's you know been up with the boy you're doing good you're You remember the Led by Donkeys where they're like, Nigel Farage made a million a year or something.
	They put it in Clacton.
	It's like, I didn't hurt Nigel Farage at all.
	Essex man isn't like, oh no, a rich person.
	Nigel Farage works for his money.
	And partly this may boil down to having known poverty versus not having known it.
	Anybody who's known it will also know that actually if you can get yourself out of it, It's not a bad thing.
	And that was something that, in the 80s, the Tories under Thatcher were able to tap into.
	But Labour never quite understood.
	Labour have just got the politics of envy.
	Yes.
	They expect you to be jealous of that person.
	And I would go further in that, you know, not only is it the politics of envy, but we also recognise in the working class that there were people who were in the establishment and members of the House of Lords, people who owned estates, who had more respect for this country and our history, and they sat in the House of Lords holding back the tide.
	of the lefties who wanted to say that we support the working class when actually they didn't.
	They support the Fabian Society's middle class intellectual communist thinkers who wanted to just use the working class As a bludgeon against the country.
	And these people, they removed from the House of Lords.
	always i'm not saying that everyone in the house of laws wasn't a decent uh a bad great individual where many of them as we all know in all classes of individuals are bad people but on the whole they wanted to maintain the country maintain the flag maintain our history support what we were and hold it back in a proper conservative way and a lot of working class like my grandfather are conservative yes a conservative with small sees.
	So there's an issue here that I think is worth pointing out.
	The working class, one of the things that makes the Because, I mean, one of the things that people say was, well, they're very poor and what we're promising them is money, actually.
	We're going to have wealth distribution.
	But this wealth very obviously comes at the expense of something not physical to the working class, which is the integrity and honor and dignity of their own country writ large.
	And it's actually a sort of, there's a kind of emotional reliance that people have on this that the middle class have abandoned, which is why they're globalist anywhere people.
	And the working class somewhere people might say, yeah, it would be nice to have more money, but actually there's something special that we have that we don't want to just give up.
	And Ollie, being the globalist lib that he is, would happily throw this away for a slightly cheaper flight to Benidorm or something.
	Whereas the average working class person, here's Nigel Farage and thinks this is about the country itself.
	But I was born.
	Well, my family is working class.
	My family still is.
	We understand it more than that type of person would ever get here.
	Just because I've done well in life doesn't mean that I've forgotten where I've come from and how it still impacts them today.
	And that frightens them more than anything else.
	They absolutely despise people from the working class who do well, who don't comply.
	With their agenda.
	I just want to come back to the high-low alliance as well, because I think people in the middle class forget that the working class do not hate the upper classes.
	They like them, actually.
	And this is why someone like Boris or Jacob Rees-Mogg has a lot of natural popularity.
	Yeah, it's also worth kind of emphasizing for viewers.
	It's not just that they're kind of toffs or something.
	If your family...
	It means you have a stake in the land and therefore you care about it.
	This goes back to our old property rights argument.
	You're a monitor for it.
	So you're a self-interested monitor because you have a stake in that place doing well.
	In a way that the anywhere person or the corporation or the international lawyer or whatever.
	They don't have a stake in the same way.
	Barrett Holmes, Taylor Wimpey, BlackRock, all those funding the bonds and the debt to be able to buy up the nice piece of countryside and build a whole load of houses on it because it's having to fulfil population growth.
	Have no stake other than a financial remunerative stake.
	That's all that matters to them.
	Oli finds himself 100% on their side.
	I don't know if we could be getting to this now, but I think it's important to stress, though, that Labour internally...
	He is like the Dominic Cummings of Labour.
	He gets this.
	There's a strategy he's using called Blue Labour.
	He gets everything that we just talked about, where they're going to go for small C social conservatism.
	This is why they went so big on the Island of Strangers speech and the immigration talk.
	What's fascinating...
	As the Labour are strafing right on immigration and signalling, right, we're listening to you.
	You can trust us again.
	Reform are actually doing something very clever.
	I don't know about clever.
	I think it is clever.
	They're doing something interesting.
	They're going, right, well, we're going to strafe left in a way that you would never expect us because everybody thinks of Farage as a Thatcherite and he's actually going to go, no.
	Because the weakness for Labour, when it comes to the working man, is actually the neoliberal part of the Blairite agenda, which is still there, of course.
	But I would say to you, you're talking about reform as though they're doing this now.
	I was there in the National Executive Committee and working with Susan Evans and Patrick O 'Flynn in the 2015 manifesto, doing exactly this.
	We'd started to move.
	We started the strategy.
	He's only continuing the strategy.
	And also, to be fair on Paul Nuttall, Paul Nuttall was persuasive in Nigel.
	Nigel wasn't going to go down this line at all then.
	No, because he is, in his heart, a Thatcherite.
	Everyone knows this.
	But the point you're bringing up here is, I think, genuinely the important inflection point that will decide who wins in this strategy, which is the credibility of the person.
	Who is taking up the alien position.
	As in, will Starmer be able to persuade people that actually inside of him does beat the far right heart of an Enoch Powell?
	And compared to Nigel Farage's...
	Which one will end up being more persuasive?
	Now, I don't think either of them actually believes the position that they've adopted here.
	Is he more likely to be persuasive over Starmer, though?
	And I think the answer is probably yes.
	Probably yes.
	Because, just a quick thing, Starmer's strafe to the right has been very hard, very public, very well telegraphed.
	Everyone in the country knows what he's doing, and nobody is persuaded by it.
	This has not helped his problem at all.
	I mean, for my sins, I've been watching Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell.
	The most accurate predictions.
	I'm always interested to see what they're saying.
	And to be fair, Alistair Campbell made quite an astute point, which he said, like, yes, Stalin was right to go after immigration, but he shouldn't have done it in this way.
	Because going on the rhetoric, according to Campbell, plays into Farage's wheelhouse.
	Yes.
	What he should have done, according to Campbell, is show...
	just post the results.
	We've done this many deportations.
	Immigration's come down this much.
	But don't make a song or dance about it or make it a game of rhetoric because you're always going to lose that against reform who no matter what you do, it's not going to be good enough.
	And the way Campbell said it is that Starmer set up a situation where he's saying to the country, judge me against this.
	And the country is going to, I mean, we are all.
	Judge him against that.
	And I get that.
	I think there is something very solid to say about actions speak louder than words and produce this evidence.
	But again, if you're thinking about the way that the Labour Party were moving on this, in particular on immigration, he knew that net migration was going to come down.
	The OBR had told him, I indicated it in my own research, that it was going to come down.
	So he knows in the lifetime of Parliament, net migration will come down.
	He also knows that the Conservative Party had made changes that would impact legal migration.
	The question is whether he really...
	It's still about those who are criminals and those who are being offered money to leave voluntarily.
	He's not deporting people deliberately.
	Three quarters of the deportations have been people who have voluntarily left.
	Yes.
	To go back to the tactics...
	So the issue, though, is this is very much the rhetorically parking your tanks on the other person's lawn.
	Because again, I don't think anyone actually thinks that Nigel Farage will do the things that he's actually saying here, or at least really holds it in his heart.
	If he does it, it'll be to the bare minimum extent because of...
	Which is what everyone can see that Starmer is doing.
	And so the question is one genuinely of intent.
	Starmer is trying to rhetorically take control of this area because he sees it's a very strong place that Farage is on, and he's obviously been given permission to do it by Tony Blair or something like that.
	But everyone can see that in his heart...
	He's a human rights lawyer, as we're told.
	Whereas Farage might actually do something positive on the social issue as well as the economic issue.
	And if the economic issue comes about, that's a bonus.
	But that's not really what Farage's appeal to the working class is.
	What I'm interested in here, because this is like a really unprecedented tactical, really interesting tactical situation.
	What I would say is that the person who's going to lose this is the one who, because at the moment within Labour, Starmer's being...
	Basically the old brown knights and a few people who aren't comfortable with this direction.
	The worst thing Starmer can do, now he's set on down this road, is to U-turn or back off.
	He has to walk the walk, talk the talk.
	Oh, yeah.
	If he walks back on any of this, he'll be crushed from within.
	Like, now he's gone down this road.
	I'm not sure if he can then go back.
	It's like, oh, actually, I was just joking.
	I'm still into the neoliberalism, guys.
	And I do think, because it's a long road.
	It's less dangerous for Farage.
	2029, it's quite a long road.
	Just a quick thing on that.
	So the main issue, I think, is not economic that is driving people to Farage.
	Farage wasn't, in fact, promising anything economic until literally yesterday, right?
	What Farage is promising is a moral realignment of the state towards the interests of...
	That's what Farage is promising, ultimately.
	And that's what Starmer is trying to promise with his pivot to, oh yeah, I'm going to deport all the Browns.
	This is not fundamentally a...
	Farage has got already the majority share, the largest share of the polls anyway.
	So what Farage is trying to do is essentially push the Labour Party fully off the cliff.
	So even if he backs down on his economic questions, well, not good, right, if you're a northern sort of economically socialist Labour voter.
	But your other option is...
	Yeah, they're not winning this back.
	That's a much more fundamental moral issue that they have failed on.
	There is an element also of what's happening in the United States.
	So clearly when you're, we talked about it very briefly, is that Trump used this kind of tacking towards MAGA voters and the working class of America.
	And for him, economically, the argument, just very simple, the concept of a tip not being taxed.
	Everybody knows that's the lowest end of where you get in the United States.
	So Farage is in a way...
	Because this isn't just about him getting out of the Ds and the Es.
	He wants to get in C1s and C2s.
	And this is an opportunity to say, I can branch out into those areas as well.
	Just to push back a little bit, I'm imagining a scenario where Labour, one, don't allow an election all the way till 2029, and two...
	Now imagine if Starmer has been posting the way he's been posting for the next two years.
	It'll be much more difficult because the longer they stay in this kind of mode where they're trying to appeal to us and our friends, the further away the memory of the trans and the kids and all the things that you just talked about will get.
	So I'm not saying it will deliver a win for them.
	I'm just saying that's their route to victory.
	Convince the public that Labour have changed.
	I don't have the link up, but recently, YouGov, on their approval tracking for individual politicians, Keir Starmer is at 15% approval rating, with a negative of minus 50, and the negative has just been getting higher every single day.
	It's been, what, how many weeks now since he came out with his rivers of blood speech?
	Two weeks.
	And it's done nothing, absolutely nothing.
	Things are just getting worse.
	And so Keir Starmer, I think the unfortunate position he's in is he's just completely polluted the well with good faith with the British public generally.
	And now he just looks like a liar.
	So now he looks like a cynical, pandering politician rather than anyone who's doing anything that he genuinely believes to be the right thing.
	He's trying to solidify a certain area, I think, of the middle class university student voting group of people and also work towards those that say he is a world leader.
	And normally, we were talking about this briefly before we came on, when you are in trouble politically at home, a leader tends to look abroad.
	Thatcher had the Falklands, Tony Blair had the Iraq War.
	What you had with Starmu is, because he set off so badly so quickly, he's ended up trying to do Ukraine, the trade deal with the US, the trade deal with India, the trade deal with the EU, and none of them are shifting the dial at all.
	We're not seeing him as a great European.
	We're seeing someone actually is selling us out.
	He sold us out on Chagos, sold us out on the European Union.
	The deal with India is not as good as everybody you're paying with.
	And clearly, what happened in the United States was only a reduction in the tariffs that were already being hit by.
	So he's also thrown out a big card very early.
	He's thrown out his diamonds.
	Just for the time's sake, I'm afraid we have to carry on.
	But I think you're completely correct.
	And we'll come back to that at some point if you want.
	Well, I mean, if Star was a busted flush, the plan B for Labour would be to get in Angela.
	Oh, yeah.
	And then it would be a different proposition.
	I think so.
	She's properly a council estate mum.
	you know, then you can say...
	Anyway, that's a different conversation.
	It is.
	Anyway, so Nigel Farage, of course.
	Not only are you not members of the working class, but you're also selling out the country, so piss off.
	Which, you know, fair, fair.
	So we've got some polling from the Red Wall, the northern former Labour voting seats.
	And, yeah, this isn't good for Starmer.
	He's down to 24 when asked who would be the best Prime Minister.
	24% said that.
	Nigel Farage at 27%, Boris Johnson at 12%.
	And this is a very quick thing.
	People, and Farage really needs to pay attention to this, if Boris Johnson comes back, Boris Johnson will crush him.
	Because whether you like Johnson or not, the majority of the people are not politicos who understand that Boris Johnson betrayed the country more thoroughly than any Labour politician ever did.
	and just with such speed and just inco- Just enjoyment on it, honestly.
	The way that they did it.
	They should be hammering that every day.
	Yeah, they should.
	Farage really should.
	I think it's interesting that you see Rupert Lowe at 6%.
	Yeah, I was going to get to that.
	You've got Corbin at 9%.
	You've got Baden-Koch at 8%.
	But then you've got Rupert Lowe at 6%.
	The man who's not known.
	Twice generic.
	Twice generic.
	Yeah, well, we're told Rupert Lowe's not known.
	Yeah, exactly.
	I don't know, man.
	I'm saying the online right, you know, can spontaneously manifest 6% in a poll.
	Yeah.
	What happens when he actually gets a team behind him and starts fully promoting himself?
	I mean, he's creeping up on Badenock, the current leader of the Conservative Party.
	With Northern voters.
	So, that's pretty bloody significant.
	But then, I was only going to mention the other side.
	But then, we also have with young people, where Starmer's on 22%, Corbyn's on 15%, Friar's on 14%, and then Lowe's on 11%.
	11%, okay.
	More popular than Rayner in tying with Boris Johnson.
	Now, that's interesting.
	I would have thought that has to be unprompted.
	Because Lowe is not like a media star name across lots of ink.
	Exactly.
	So it's quite interesting to see those figures up there.
	Yeah, isn't it just?
	Who are these 20-year-olds who like Keir Starmer?
	I don't believe that.
	Oh, no, no, no.
	I find it really hard to believe.
	University students.
	University students.
	Oh, right, okay.
	They're the ones who like him.
	Manchester, Birmingham, London, you name it.
	But that is fascinating.
	And like for an independent backbench MP who's been there for six months...
	That's a very interesting thing.
	That is.
	My advice to Rupert, don't join the bloody Tories, mate.
	You don't need them.
	Like, look where Bedlock is.
	Look where Jenrick is.
	Gemrick is really working hard as well.
	I know.
	I actually feel bad for Gemrick because he seems like a fairly decent fellow and he is, like I say, working very hard.
	And it is not paying off.
	And honestly, I think it's just, honestly, and this is not a nice thing to say, but you're not charismatic.
	You know, politics is about vibes.
	Sorry.
	I hate to say it.
	But anyway, so this is interesting.
	Basically, it looks like Nigel Farage is living rent-free in Keir Starmer's brain, and you may remember a couple of weeks ago where Keir Starmer asked Nigel Farage for a debate, which is a fascinating turn of affairs, because the Prime Minister asking just an MP, debate me, bro.
	It reveals a profound weakness in Starmer's own position.
	As in, oh yeah, no, I really accept that Nigel Farage is the locus of moral authority and political power in the United Kingdom, and I think I can take something away from him by crushing him in a debate.
	Says the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
	Says someone who's got less actual charisma than actually the former leader of the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, who said exactly the same and then was completely embarrassed in the debate versus Farage.
	You know what he wants to do, don't you?
	He wants to go on there and surprise everybody with how based he is.
	Yes, he does.
	Which is a very interesting scenario for us.
	But the problem is that Farage can always tactically go further to the right.
	Everyone knows.
	And this, I mean, McSweeney must know.
	This is what we talked about.
	This, for me, is the ideal scenario.
	We can have this until 2029.
	Kia Starmer trying to prove to the country that he's based.
	That's perfect, because it means that we may get more stuff.
	I'm with you, man.
	I'm down with the kids.
	The dialectic has been generally very much favourable to the right at the moment.
	Anyway, it's who can out-compete each other on Deepwater.
	Anyway, we are running low on time.
	But Nigel Farage hit back and said, okay, yeah.
	I challenge you to a debate in a working men's club.
	I love it.
	I love it.
	That is superb.
	Very smart.
	Knock you off on that.
	Very, very smart.
	Knock you off.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Friars will absolutely...
	Yeah, he is now.
	Farage would absolutely crush him there.
	Keir Starmer would have to basically go out with a swastika on his arm to persuade anyone of his right-wing credentials.
	This is not something I think Keir Starmer could It's good.
	It's so much fun.
	It's good.
	Yeah.
	But the point is you can see the profound weakness in Keir Starmer's position and the fundamental strength of Farage's.
	Everyone knows that the average working man would rather...
	Farage's got his old UKIP tie on.
	Who do you think the average working man would rather spend the evening with in a pub?
	Oh, definitely.
	No one has any questions.
	I might have my criticism.
	Yeah, I've got plenty of criticism for Nigel Farage.
	But the ability to laugh and joke in a pub with people and talk to them in a very similar way to Boris could do, absolutely.
	It's where he's a killer.
	This is 100% his strong suit.
	and there's no way that Kirsten will come with this.
	It's kind of an...
	I mean, to go back to Ernest Campbell's point, if Starmer's got any strengths, it's basically...
	So the way he could kill it is just by doing it, like we said.
	Don't get into all debates and rhetoric and so on.
	Just do it.
	Here Starman seems to have forgotten he's not a politician.
	Because if he's going to get into these scenarios, I agree, Farage will have him on toast.
	Oh, it's going to be great.
	Starman's just not human in a normal way.
	Starman demanded the debate.
	Live on air?
	And I was like, yeah, okay, let's do this.
	I think the safest thing for Star Wars.
	I think one of the safest is send one of the robots that you've got from Elon Musk, stick his face on it in case Nigel Farage and that will do better.
	But you are right.
	Starmer's a matter of process, so get processing.
	Exactly.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Again, he's forgotten he's not a politician.
	Anyway, I'm afraid for time's sake we're going to skip the video comments today.
	Sorry, folks.
	But we'll catch them up again tomorrow.
	Alfred the Bater says, Now, that's a great question, because you've got to wonder what the solicitors themselves were thinking.
	Did they actually think that the people who they were like, look, just plead guilty and you'll get soft touch.
	Did they think that was actually going to happen?
	Or were they like, if I don't tell them to do that, I'm going to get in trouble with the state.
	So it's actually, like you say, to call it perverse is, I think, exactly correct.
	Because these people were just thrown into an absolute lion's den that they didn't know anything about and they got utterly screwed over for it.
	Utterly screwed over.
	Absolutely terrible.
	Kurt asks, how is Starmer not guilty in all of this?
	Spreading misinformation, fomenting racial tensions, causing anxiety.
	His Southport speech alone contains all of these.
	Well, yeah, but he's got the sovereign exception, doesn't he?
	Derek says, Americans have gone through targeted cases.
	There was a man who shared a meme about the voting through text message or how Obama used the IRS to target Tea Party members of the Conservatives basically the entirety of Trump's political career.
	That's a good point.
	Trump got spied on by Obama, didn't he?
	He's been relentlessly harried by the New York judges for his property.
	Things like this.
	I think he's very aware of this.
	So, again, it's nice to have a sympathetic ally, isn't it?
	Omar says, Well, the thing is, I don't think the abortion clinics actually intersect with the Muslim community very much.
	I doubt very many Muslim women are actually getting abortions.
	So I don't think the Muslims, you know, okay, the kafir are aborting their children.
	Okay, you know.
	Someone online says, Yeah, but I mean, I think as you can see, we actually do have something going in our favour.
	Because again, we've got so many criticisms of Nigel Farage and there's so many times where he's done things that I think are just despicable.
	He does represent a change from the way that the country was being run.
	Unless something else comes up, he's the only difference at the moment.
	Unless something else arrives at 6% of the polls unexpectedly.
	Yeah, that's right.
	He's the only thing we've got so far.
	But yeah, so things are in process.
	It's just, as with all things politically in Britain, something happens elsewhere in the world and then 100 years later we finally catch up.
	Matthew says, what uncomfortable topics have we discussed if the UK have free speech?
	Well, that's the point, isn't it?
	Well, I'll tell you what the point would be.
	And the point behind all of it is to protect the negative characterisation of minority groups.
	That's all it is.
	If you negatively characterise people who get abortions, people who are from foreign communities, who do terrible things to English children, then it might look bad on that community.
	And that's a form of oppression.
	That's the point of it.
	Anyway, Henry says, Yeah, I mean, it is nice that Trump has forced them to burn up a bunch of capital they've been sat upon.
	So that is a good thing.
	That's always been his strong suit.
	Trump is getting people to reveal friend and enemy distinction.
	Tess says, why are corporations allowed to raise a case with courts over this?
	It should be individuals, not corporations.
	Ah, well, you remember that in America, corporations are legal people, which is a...
	But, you know, that's why.
	That's basically it.
	Hosep says, we Americans view Britain very highly.
	The Normies think of Britain as a second America, but with funny accents.
	Politically aware know that our country wouldn't be possible without the British tradition or the concept of the rights of Englishmen.
	And the Americans are also a lot more well-versed in the structure of their own country.
	We don't have political education in Britain.
	The average British normal person has no idea how the state works.
	And so you'll get even MPs saying things like separation of powers.
	It's like, no, all power technically flows from the king through parliament and the judiciary from that.
	So we don't have that.
	Yeah, I find that shocking when I hear it.
	One of the things Peter Hitchens always talks about is, you know, people don't know about the Glorious Revolution, 1689 Bill of Rights.
	None of that stuff is really taught or known about.
	If you stop like 10 people in the streets and ask them about...
	I've just picked a book in the US.
	It's by a chap called John Hancock who's talking about liberty and the Magna Carta and the link with the US.
	And this is not an intellectual thinker of report across the United States.
	This is a citizen who researched and studied and did it incredibly well because they're well-versed in it.
	They know more about the Magna Carta than many of our schools do.
	Grant says, the only approval rating that matters is the approval rating among voters.
	If the working class is disillusioned with politics and can't be motivated to get behind reform, then it doesn't matter what his actual approval rates are.
	The thing is, and we're seeing this happen in Wales at the moment, in fact, there's a kind of virality in these cultures, in these communities, that exists as an organism.
	And the community votes in a direction...
	that they think collectively is actually in their interest.
	These kind of...
	And so this is why the community is, oh, my grandfather has always voted for Labour, therefore I am a Labour voter.
	You notice there's a deeply traditional community that doesn't think of itself as an atomised individualist.
	There's a couple of council by-elections in Wales today that I'll be following just to see whether they're going to be interesting results.
	It's the same in Wales and probably the same in Scotland as well.
	That's interesting.
	But what's interesting is that when the organism of the community realises, oh, that's an enemy, then the whole community shifts.
	And that's what we're seeing in the Starmer-Farage thing.
	And these shifts aren't necessarily permanent, but they're very difficult to just reverse because it's not a person going, well, maybe I'll be Labour or Tory.
	No, no, no, no, no.
	This is in the soul of the people.
	If the Labour Party have killed off the part of these working-class communities that believe that they are Labour The community will shift and the Labour Party will just never get them back.
	One of the biggest things I think has happened on the street level, places like Wales, rural places all around the country really, is the Boris wave was so big that the island of strangers that Starmer has talked about has started to reach the shires.
	Oh, it totally is.
	You know, places where you'd never see anyone who's...
	You walk down like some South West village and there's some African or Indian there.
	It's like, how are you here?
	I remember reading a study years ago where they actually, psychologists did this test where they stick someone who's clearly a non-native on a bus stop just to register local reactions.
	One person had no problem or then they stick a second one there and start a bus stop.
	They stick a third person there, and suddenly the whole town was, like, outraged.
	I can't remember the name of the paper now, but basically that experiment has happened on a nationwide basis, which is, I think, the unspoken reason why we're getting these huge shifts across the country.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	But it's a community thing.
	It's not an individual thing.
	We think voting is individual.
	There's absolutely not.
	And this is why Farage...
	It's not necessarily a deep loyalty to Farage.
	It's, you know what, I've had enough of all of you, I'm going to go for this prat.
	And that's exactly what I feel it is at the moment.
	And I think he's the beneficiary of it.
	And the question is whether he will...
	That's right.
	Will he be able to be regarded as honestly capable of achieving what they want?
	Because my fear is if he doesn't...
	I'm genuinely worried about that as well.
	But anyway, on that note, we are out of time, so remember, 7 o 'clock we are doing the Trivium, the third and final Trivium webinar on rhetoric.
	Again, it's going to be the best one.
	So we will see you there, and thank you for joining us, folks.

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