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June 23, 2025 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:31:55

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1192

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	Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters for Monday the twenty-third of june twenty twenty five.
	I'm your host Captain Darling.
	I mean Luca.
	Joined today by Firas Melchit and Stephen Blackadder.
	Don't be racist fella.
	Don't be racist.
	I thought we'd got rid of language like that.
	Not even close.
	Anyway, today we're going to be talking all about whether or not the conflict in Iran is probably going to evolve into a war of regime change.
	We're also going to talk about the potential economic fallout of closing the Strait of Hammuz.
	And then we're also going to end with Britain's myth-making madness over the Windrush generation.
	So, no announcements today.
	Fair ass.
	Tell us about briefly about where the Iranian nuclear program was, according to the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, the factors that led us to the American strikes and the impact of those strikes.
	So firstly, where the Iranians are building a nuclear weapon?
	Tulsi Gabbard came out in support of President Trump and said that the media is taking my testimony out of context and spreading fake news.
	And then she posted this clip and let's see what it says.
	The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.
	He's not building a nuclear weapon.
	Yeah, that's pretty clear to me.
	Prime leader Khomeini has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.
	The program was suspended in 2003.
	That is 22 years ago.
	The IC continues to monitor closely if Tehran decides to reauthorize its nuclear weapons program.
	In the past year, we've seen an erosion of a decades-long taboo in Iran on discussing nuclear weapons in public, likely emboldening nuclear weapons advocates within Iran's decision-making apparatus.
	Iran's enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.
	So this is pretty much exactly what we knew all along.
	They had a big amount of enriched uranium, but they had not taken a decision to build a weapon.
	Having more enriched uranium means that they can decide to build a weapon more quickly.
	Yes.
	Fair enough.
	But the assessment from the intelligence community, which is sort of helping hunt Iranian nuclear scientists and clearly has deeply penetrated Iran, was that they were not building one.
	Yes.
	You also had the comments from the former UK ambassador to Iran and also the former head of MI6 on Radio 4 last week saying in their view, the UK's view, there was not a program that was leading to the building of a nuclear weapon.
	Exactly.
	So that kind of fits in with what you're saying.
	Which is something that we should remember.
	So what's actually going on?
	Well, I want to go back to the mid-2000s when General Wesley Clark, who was commander of NATO, made the following point.
	About 10 days after 9-11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz.
	I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the joint staff who used to work for me.
	And one of the generals called me in.
	He said, sir, you've got to come in and talk to me a second.
	I said, well, you're too busy.
	He said, no, no.
	He says, we've made the decision we're going to war with Iraq.
	This was on or about the 20th of September.
	I said, we're going to war with Iraq.
	Why?
	He said, I don't know.
	He said, I guess they don't know what else to do.
	So I said, well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?
	He said, no, no.
	He says, there's nothing new that way.
	They've just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.
	He said, I guess it's like we don't know what to do about terrorists, but we've got a good military and we can take down governments.
	And he said, I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.
	So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan.
	I said, are we still going to war with Iraq?
	And he said, oh, it's worse than that.
	He said, he reached over on his desk, he picked up a piece of paper, and he said, he said, I just got this down from upstairs, meeting the Secretary of Defense's office today.
	And he said, this is a memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran.
	So this decision was made early on.
	Iraq was invaded two years after that decision was made.
	But because of the cost of the Iraq war and Afghanistan war, the remaining countries on that list were pursued differently.
	It was through airstrikes in Libya.
	It was through sponsorship of civil war and partition in Sudan.
	Somalia is a hot mess.
	It regularly gets bombed by the United States.
	Lebanon, 2006, there was an attempt by Israel to dismantle Hezbollah.
	That failed.
	And then it succeeded in 2024 or severely degraded Hezbollah.
	Syria, we just saw the consequences in December 2024.
	After 13, 14 years of the U.S. sponsoring jihadis, the government was finally overthrown.
	And now the last one standing is Iran.
	And the unofficial leader of this neocon policy has always been Benjamin Netanyahu.
	This is Netanyahu testifying to Congress in 2002 before the invasion of Iraq.
	look at what he promised.
	If you take out Saddam, Saddam's regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.
	And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others will say the time of such regimes, of such jessbots, is gone.
	There is a new age.
	Something new is happening.
	And that rough speculation on your part, or do you have some evidence to that effect?
	I was asked the same question in 1986.
	I had written a book in which I had said that the way to Deal with terrorist regimes, well, with terror, was to deal with the terrorist regimes.
	And the way to deal with the terrorist regimes, among other things, was to apply military force against them.
	The way we did in Afghanistan.
	The way, for example, I want to answer your question.
	I guess I'm running out of time, so I quickly was trying to get there.
	We've done, I think, what you propose in Afghanistan, yet I haven't seen that sort of neighborhood effect.
	Well, I think there's been an enormous effect.
	The effect was we were told that there would be a contrary effect.
	First of all, people said that there would be tens of thousands of people streaming into Afghanistan, zealots who would be outraged by America's action, and this would produce a counterreaction in the Arab world.
	But I think we're not saying that when you take an action like we did in Afghanistan, we're going to see all the other countries just fall.
	No, what we saw is something else.
	First of all, we saw everybody streaming.
	So basically, Netanyahu was advocating for the Iraq war.
	He's been advocating for regime changing countries he doesn't like or that don't like him for since 1986, according to him.
	So this is the culmination of this policy.
	And it should be understood that this policy was decided a long time ago.
	The specifics of the implementation took their time to be worked out because of how messy Iraq and Afghanistan actually were, contrary to Netanyahu's promises.
	Contrary to Netanyahu's promises.
	And now we're in this position again where the United States military is being used to remove governments that aren't friendly to Israel.
	Now, this is arguably in the United States' own interest.
	It wants more Saudi Arabia's.
	It wants more Egypt's.
	You could make that case, but this is clearly also in Israel's interest.
	And the promise of Trump or his campaigning was based on these being stupid wars that should have never happened, that these were horrific mistakes, that the neocons were crazy and shouldn't be listened to, etc., etc.
	And I was thinking about this, you know, when you were saying about him, he had open ears in Wolfovich and Rumsfeld, and he also said open ears on a number of other people that advised Obama as well as Bush.
	So they were deeply involved in that.
	And I also had to think about him.
	You were just saying he's been going since 1985 on this.
	It's almost like a Prince song, you know, instead of dancing like partying like 1985, it's bombing since 1985.
	I think he's got a mentality that he just wants to destroy everybody else.
	Exactly.
	I understand why he wants to protect his own nation.
	He feels that's the way to do it.
	Yes.
	But that doesn't mean necessarily how we should all be doing it.
	Exactly.
	Exactly.
	And it is how the West is doing it right now because the Germans are involved in refueling Israeli aircraft.
	The Americans are obviously deeply involved now and are doing their own bombing.
	The British and the French are helping defend Israeli airspace from Iran's retaliation.
	So the West collectively is deeply involved in this.
	And there was no vote.
	There was no discussion.
	The popular sentiment is, you know what?
	No.
	Israel's popularity in the West is at an all-time low.
	But the same policy that gave us Iraq and Afghanistan, supported by Netanyahu, is still being pursued by the American administration.
	You could argue it's the donors.
	I won't get into the whole donor thing and Miriam Adelson's involvement and her role in paying Trump $100 million in his campaign.
	I wasn't aware of that particular one.
	So Miriam Adelson, the wife of the late Sheldon Adelson.
	Sheldon Adelson, ended up becoming the third largest donor to the Trump campaign and paid $100 million.
	I knew there was a huge Israeli connection, a very big Jewish connection.
	I didn't know it's the one individual that is actually very pro, in Adelson's anyway.
	They were always very pro just bombing everybody.
	They were basically very close to Netanyahu.
	Yes, that's true.
	Jared Kushner, his family was friends with the Netanyahu families since Jared was a child.
	And so there is this very deep involvement between Netanyahu and Trump.
	There was a period where we were seeing very different signals in the last couple of months.
	Yeah, not even too long ago.
	Exactly.
	Exactly.
	But now here we are.
	Now, JD Vance is saying that actually the US is not at war with Iran.
	The US is just at war with Iran's nuclear program.
	Who staffs Iran's nuclear program?
	Who authorized this Iran's nuclear program?
	Was it the Iranian state?
	Then I guess you're at war with the Iranian state.
	No, no.
	No, no, no, no.
	It's the Chagos Islands.
	It's clearly someone on there.
	It's clearly the Chagos Islands.
	Absolutely, it's the Chagos Islands.
	That's not the Iranian's perspective.
	Needless to say.
	The Iranian perspective, according to the head of their army, is that now they have to retaliate freely against anything related to the United States.
	And from...
	The U.S. wants Iran to stop having regional proxies who view themselves not as proxies, but as allies of Iran that are funded by Iran, in the same way that a big chunk of Lebanese politicians, for example, are funded by the United States and funded by the West or the Saudis or whoever.
	They view that this is an alliance, not a proxy war.
	They want the Iranians to dismantle also their ballistic missile program, meaning that they can't retaliate against, say, Israel if it bombs them, or Turkey, or Pakistan, or any of their other neighbors.
	Why would any country, if it's a democratic country or a non-democratic country, say that it's going to turn away all its military and its weapons to protect itself, which is actually, as we all know, the first element of a country should be defending its nation's borders and its people within it?
	We say it every day as parts of the right.
	Why aren't we not defending it?
	So we should understand a nation wanting to do it for themselves.
	We don't necessarily have to agree with them, but we can understand that.
	The first step towards being a decent political analyst is to have empathy for the other side.
	Yes.
	And these demands show absolute lack of empathy.
	But John Bolton, you guys remember John Bolton, Crazy John?
	Unfortunately, yes.
	Unfortunately, now he's cheerleading Trump after having been attacking Trump endlessly.
	And now he's saying Trump did the right thing for America in striking Iran's nuclear weapons program, which, according to Dulcy Gubert, was not a nuclear weapons program.
	Anyway, now onto regime change.
	What does the Donald think about this?
	Well, Donald says it's not politically correct to use the term regime change, but if the current Iranian regime is unable to make Iran great again, why wouldn't there be a regime change?
	Miga.
	So now we've gone from striking the nuclear program to a regime change war.
	Yes, and this is what it's all about.
	That seems like a quick answer.
	And Iranian greatness.
	You know, I'm not saying I'm a fan of Iran or anything, but Iranian greatness looks exactly like what the Americans want it to look like.
	Yes, exactly.
	So it's not an Iranian vision, it's greatness in their own country.
	It's an American vision.
	It's Iranian greatness.
	When Japan was fighting in the Second World War, we needed to teach them a lesson, so we gave them a couple of nukes, even though we didn't necessarily need to.
	But then we made Japan great again because we controlled it with our kind of soldiers, military, and of course our governor who controlled the country for about 15 years.
	Exactly.
	Once they did what we told, and they are puppet enough to be able to say, and sorry to use the word puppet because people will no doubt criticise you for me.
	But if you do not allow a nation to run its own right in the same way Britain was a puppet of the European Union, you know, again, it's something that we're going to find difficult on the right.
	Because at the moment, anyone who says, I'm not supporting the Iranian regime, there are lots of it I don't like, just as I don't like it.
	I despise the Iranian Lebanon.
	That's not the issue.
	When you're using the same logic that we would apply for our nation, we're now called Iranian stooges or Russian stooges or Chinese stooges.
	And I think that is a kind of appalling lack of understanding and applying your brain to the logic.
	Exactly.
	Exactly.
	If the defense of this is that this is necessary to further the American empire, let's have a conversation on that.
	Absolutely.
	Sure.
	And let's talk about it.
	But if this is supposed to be good for the United States or good for the region or good for the Iranians, that's just not true.
	Oh, no, no.
	That's just not true.
	So what were the effects of the strike?
	Well, the issue seems to be that Trump started this off by saying that the Iranian nuclear program has been absolutely obliterated, that it's been completely destroyed.
	But there are a couple of missing details.
	One, we went from the Americans saying that the nuclear program has been obliterated to them simply saying that it's been severely damaged, which is not quite the same thing.
	And if you take it with a little bit of time, we might end up discovering more and more details about what was damaged and what wasn't.
	But part of the problem seems to be that the Iranians were using trucks to move a big bunch of stuff from Furdao before it was struck and possibly to close Furdau with dirt, to sort of shut down the tunnels with dirt, to preserve the facility.
	And it seems that nobody actually knows where the highly enriched uranium is right now, which is a little bit of a problem.
	The Israelis are saying that they have intelligence on where that enriched uranium is.
	Interesting intelligence according to Netanyahu.
	But we don't actually know that.
	And we don't know how they've dispersed it.
	And we don't know what's still there.
	And the certainty that the Furdo was actually obliterated won't exist until the International Atomic Energy Agency gets to inspect it, which the Iranians obviously won't do because the IAEA makes its findings public and does include obviously a number of Western spies.
	So the Iranians are absolutely not going to allow access to their nuclear facilities.
	So with the missing enriched uranium and the Iranians rather reasonably saying nobody's allowed to come near our nuclear facilities while we're being bombed, the argument is going to be made, rightly or wrongly, that the Iranians are building a nuclear weapon.
	Rightly because that seems like a reasonable thing to do when you're being attacked by a superpower and you want to establish a terrorist.
	Wrongly because we won't actually know anymore.
	Which puts us into that lovely field of political choice that politicians love of the weapons of mass destruction.
	Yes.
	We're going to tell you they've got weapons of mass destruction.
	Where's the evidence?
	The evidence is our intelligence.
	Where's the intelligence?
	Our intelligence officers are telling us.
	Where's the intelligence the intelligence officers have got?
	Their intelligence has come for the people who are providing them with the intelligence.
	And on and on it goes when they don't have the proof or not willing to show it because, hey, we all trust our governments.
	Yep.
	Yep.
	So this is obviously heading towards a regime change war.
	Yeah, of course it is.
	And if you're the Iranians, you can't really negotiate because they were supposed to meet with the Americans to negotiate on 16 June.
	Yes, of course.
	The Israelis started bombing on 13 June with the explicit objective of scuttling these negotiations because that's what Netanyahu has always wanted.
	And then Trump last week said that he's going to give himself two weeks to decide whether or not to attack Iran on 21 June.
	And then on 22 June, he goes ahead and he attacks Iran.
	So if you're the Iranians, can you, if you, and if you wanted to negotiate.
	You're not going to want to negotiate now, are you?
	And that's really what they wanted.
	And that's exactly what the objective is.
	So whether we like it or not, this is now a massive regime change War.
	And don't we see this as exactly the same scenario as happened in Russia-Ukraine?
	Because, of course, there they went to Turkey with an agreement to actually negotiate a peaceful settlement.
	Putin's team all were ready.
	Even Zelensky's accepted that they were ready to sign things.
	And then along comes Boris Johnson and some of the Europeans back to with the more warmongering deep state United States to say, no, let's scopper this.
	And so the Russians have used the same excuse.
	We came for peace to negotiate.
	You then did other things that led us not to have that negotiation.
	Yes.
	Now, mind you, nothing that I'm saying here is intended to say that the Iranians are in a good position.
	Oh, no, no.
	They're getting hit from the air.
	They didn't see the B-2s.
	The American reporting on the airstrikes that they conducted was that no Iranian air defense fired at the B-2 strike packages, at the B-2 jets that were doing the bombing, neither while they were entering Iranian airspace nor after they'd bombed and were exiting.
	They didn't see it.
	They're getting hit left and right.
	They're deeply penetrated by Western intelligence.
	They're in a very big mess.
	And they have no idea where the intelligence penetration is.
	They just executed two people over the last two days and arrested another 36 people for spying for the Israelis.
	And these are just the ones that they know about.
	And they don't know where the Israelis, they haven't accounted for all of the Israeli drone bases on their territory.
	So they could still get hit quite severely.
	But even though they're in a very difficult position, the possibility of talks has been taken away by Netanyahu's actions and by Trump's follow-up actions.
	And we should be clear about all of this.
	And this isn't in any way a defense of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
	They're a bunch of insane theocrats.
	But it's equally insane to look at the experience of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria and say we should trust Benjamin Netanyahu because he told us that these were good ideas.
	Let's let him have another go.
	Yeah, his great ideas led to millions coming into Europe and now we're dealing with grooming gangs in the United Kingdom and the changes of our laws that will lead to an Islamophobia definition coming in that will ban us from being able to discuss it without having to look over our shoulders.
	Exactly.
	So the consequences of him trying to defend his nation by destabilizing Middle Eastern countries has led to the whole-scale destruction in part of the European continent.
	And if the Iranian regime falls and all of these refugees and political exiles from Iran, well, Israel's not going to welcome Syria or Lebanon or any of its neighbouring countries, are they?
	So they're all going to come to Europe.
	Of course, and we saw that in Syria.
	First, a whole load who didn't like the regime that was in place, so they left.
	And now we've got a whole new load of coming over because we've got ISIS terrorists who were welcoming in our arms and shaking our arms and giving them big hugs, despite the fact they've been beheading people for the last 10 or 15 years.
	What lovely individuals we're bringing in.
	Yes.
	All because of this policy.
	Yes.
	And it will happen.
	Exactly.
	And so what I wanted to do in this segment was just to explain how these decisions are being made.
	This wasn't a spur-of-the-moment decision where negotiations had failed and where really it became necessary to do a demonstrative strike or something.
	The strikes happened because negotiations could have succeeded.
	And for the Israelis, it was not acceptable to allow the Iranian regime to survive under reduced sanctions and with more inspection of its nuclear program.
	I would have argued that this would have guaranteed regime change in a few years' time.
	The supreme leader of Iran, Khamenei, is 85. He's not well.
	He doesn't have a clear successor.
	The Islamic Revolution's idea of exporting the revolution had already failed.
	They could have made a deal.
	There was still a possibility there.
	That would have probably brought about the end of the regime through the Iranians' own machinations and internal politics.
	Now, Netanyahu's helped resuscitate this regime, guaranteed the destruction of the Iranian economy, guaranteed massive outflows of people that will head into Europe, and all of this because he's always had this ideology that we want to take vengeance on these regimes and destroy them.
	As if having a million Gaddafis running around in Libya is better than having one Gaddafi.
	Or as if having a million Assads or Saddams running around in Syria and Iraq was better than having one of each.
	And so this is a disastrous mistake.
	And this was decided on much earlier, 25 years ago.
	And they've just killed the possibility of a peaceful settlement, which is more palatable.
	Well, not more palatable, but is something that you can roll your eyes at more if it weren't for the fact that Trump had basically identified himself as the anti-war candidate, the anti-continuity for the deep state candidate, the anti-corruption candidate, and the America First candidate.
	Somebody expressed it as you could vote for whoever you want, but you always get John McCain.
	And that pretty much seems to be it.
	And do you think when we're looking at this, it's the imperative rather than letting him die over a period of time and the regime would naturally have changed, whether it was another mullah, whether it was another kind of more secular leader with a little bit more power and influence, it's that pressure that's happening in Russia-Ukraine war as well that's bogged down.
	And the Iranian links into there, the kind of fact that they're providing weapons, it's keeping the economy of Russia going with the trade that's between the two of them.
	They also see this as a potential opportunity to say we can kill two birds with one stone.
	By having this destabilizing effect, we're having a real impact on Russia too.
	But the reason the Iranians have rubbish air defense is because they didn't trust the Chinese or the Russians to install a full integrated air defense.
	Everything from radars to AWACs to multiple layers of defense, et cetera, they wanted to do it themselves.
	Now you're giving them no choice.
	So in a sense, everything that is done to weaken Iran and Russia ends up strengthening China and giving China a better hand and more access to Russian resources and Iranian resources.
	I think that's partly what we're going to bring out on there because I was going to say this also enables China.
	One thing that China will do is we know that they're pretty much embedded to a certain extent with the Iranian military.
	They will have been watching how the bombers came across on the scene.
	And they'll be getting valuable intelligence from them in order to protect themselves.
	They may also, in my view, I think this also enhances Taiwan's demise.
	I think China now will move much more quickly because in an embedded war, longer period of time, destabilization, particularly if it required boots on the ground, do you not think this is an opportunity for China to say, America's now got a war going on with military there, take ours because it's spreading their opportunities.
	And it also means that given what's just happened, nobody can trust the U.S. in any negotiation.
	Like, you just can't negotiate with the Americans.
	That's the conclusion.
	That is true.
	Shall we read a couple of comments before we run out of time?
	All right, then.
	So we've got it.
	There we go.
	We've got...
	Yes.
	So I just want to say for $200, very, very generous amount of money.
	Blood for the Blood God said, you guys look mighty thirsty here.
	Some pub money.
	A warm day at work.
	Yeah, we'll all be in the beer garden on a Monday evening.
	Monday evening.
	Monday evening.
	I'm not here tomorrow, so it's fine.
	Okay, thank you very much.
	So thank you very much for that.
	Habsification says, Iran is an ethnic patchwork, 60% Persians, 15, 24 Azeris, 7-10 Kurds, 2-3% Arab, 2% everything else, and only 32% Shia, 5% Sunni, and 3% Sufi.
	Pandora's box is about to be open and cause a mess.
	Yes, and the problem is as well that it's always the worst that rise to the top because it's always the one who's prepared to do the most Machiavellian brutal things in order to climb for power.
	Exactly.
	The Engaged View says, oh, no, it's thank you.
	It says, ironic that you referenced the song 1999 since the first line of the song is, I was dreaming when I wrote this.
	That's brilliant.
	Brilliant.
	I did get the ear wrong, but it was close to it.
	Sigil Stone says, all the worst people love this bombing campaign.
	I've heard all I need to oppose it wholeheartedly.
	Well, yeah, if John Bolton's on the side of it, then you know it's got it badly.
	I'll just do one more.
	Logan 17 Pint says, why does it feel like we have a worm tongue next to our king?
	Yep.
	Yeah, well.
	Got quite a few coming in, haven't we?
	Yes, we've got a lot of movements.
	We'll move on to them.
	I'll whip on this unless we've got that.
	Thanks a lot.
	So one of the consequences we've looked at is obviously the impact of what the relationships with China would be, what would happen internally in Iran to its population, the impact we briefly talked about of coming across, I think, as one of the aspects of looking at regime change or a war in Iran is people movement across the globe and the total destabilization.
	And the idea that you can put in, you know, our mates in charge, just replacing one wealthy regime of individuals with another regime.
	The communists did that, didn't they?
	They got rid of the Tsars and just put their own Tsars in place.
	That's all that we're looking at when you look at regime change.
	But one of the most immediate impacts to us would be if we go to war or the Iranians carry out exactly what they said the very following day, is that the Iran parliament approved closing the Strait of Hormuz after the US strike.
	And so they officially went with their parliament, whether we agree it's a democracy or not, but I can't see any country in the world, if they've been attacked and bombed, that would not use the only influence that they've got as a parliament as a whole, because anyone who opposed it would actually be probably thrown in jail, even in this country.
	And we're seeing that now for those who want to have a different idea.
	But the Strait of Oil Moose here is a very clear, important trading route across the globe, 27% of the world's oil trade, 20% of liquid gas.
	And just going to go through a couple of things.
	To those people who don't know where it is, it's there right in the middle of a bottom of Iran, close to the United Arab Emirates.
	It's a very small and Oman.
	And it's a very small area because as I come in, I get a close-up on it.
	I want to show people the wider picture.
	And then you come in and you see here this very small element, a couple of islands in there.
	And you see the West's favourites of UAE and Oman on one side and the West's hated country, Iran, on the other.
	And that little area there, as you say, is transporting 27% of world's oil and about 20% of LPG all across the globe from Saudi Arabia and from Iran itself in oil products that go on then to be used in the production of manufactured products to the oil and petrol that we see in our cars.
	So clearly a very important part when you're looking at over 25%, nearly third, of the world's oil being transported for a very small area.
	And just to give you some idea, this is the threat to blockade it there.
	You see these, it's a very tight turn in that corner.
	And the shipping elements, you've got deep shipping lanes is even more narrow on there.
	So it's an easy element.
	And you can see just on the right there where Bahrain is, where you've got the HQ of the US 5th Fleet, which they believe is now safe because they've bombed enough of what they think is the Iranian's military not to actually attack it if Hormos is closed.
	So there we have an element that's showing the deep shipping lanes, the amount of oil that's transported.
	I'm just going to whip through this one because it's a bit of a broader view of that same thing.
	Now, what we've got here from the US Energy Information Administration, it says that Straits of Ormond remains a critical choke point.
	And we can see here some of the products crude and oil and condensates, how those levels have been roughly over the past five years.
	They've stabilized after Ukraine, but they're still pretty high, despite the fact that we're adding wind energy and other forms of energy to try and dispense with this.
	And what I like about when you read this article for people, it talks about some of the impacts on the price of Brent crude oil.
	It immediately jumped up only $5 on this.
	But if you look where some of the estimates are, it's a concern that if it is closed, it will go $120, $130.
	So a good 40% higher than where we are, maybe 50% straight away.
	And if you look at what happened in Ukraine when we had Ukraine, it was stabilized about $120.
	Did any of us think we were living in a time of plenty when those oil prices there?
	What did it happen to your house costs and your jobs?
	Yes.
	So this is a really important point that the choke points are in there.
	And you've got to add one more detail, which is that if you go back to the map, the previous map, you've got the Babel Mandab Strait as well, which is controlled by the Houthi, and they managed to shut it down even in the face of American airstrikes until the U.S. negotiated a separate deal, supposedly behind Israel's backs, for the reopening of Babel Mandab to American shipping, but not to Israeli shipping.
	So there are two choke points here that are very much under Iranian influence.
	And Babel Mandab obviously leads to the Suez Canal, which is one of the key arteries for global trade.
	So there is this additional dimension.
	And the Houthi have said that they're going to join the Iranians.
	If there is a shutdown of Hormuz, they'll also shut down Babel Mandab to do their part.
	So it becomes a serious complicating factor here.
	It doesn't destroy the global economy or damage it as much as a big spike in oil prices, but it's an additional complication and it's a big problem.
	And I think that's an added important point to see, that when we get choke points, that will mean that the Americans will have to step in to go in there.
	They'll go in there.
	And this causes a broader conflict that will rise.
	And you've got the IE saying at the moment the world can't afford to relax about oil security.
	This is a pretty interesting article in the way that they say they talked about attacks in Saudi Arabia, then they moved on.
	Is oil under pressure?
	The trends in oil intensity there, they're still looking pretty high despite everything.
	That's their main point.
	The trends in GDP per capita based on oil is there.
	Not as high as the 70s and 80s, but it's improving in terms of the stabilization of our economy.
	And that's why Bank of England can say, well, look at interest rates falling, which helps your mortgage prices.
	So they're saying if you look at this coming through, but one of the points I wanted to pull from this is if you look at China, India, and Southeast Asia, which we're going to come on to importantly as well.
	China, big friend obviously of Iran for lots of economic reasons.
	You can see how many millions of barrels of oil a day they're acquiring from this.
	They're up to like 14 out of the 50 million barrels of oil a day that's coming out of there.
	They're the biggest recipients as a particular nation.
	India, they're up nearly nine, eight between eight and nine going in there.
	And Southeast Asia, also around eight.
	So you're looking at literally over half of the oil is actually going to those three nations.
	And what do they produce for us?
	Lots of things we've done.
	We've discussed them before.
	Yep.
	So if you end up basically with an oil shutdown, everything across the world becomes much more expensive because the oil shortage drives up prices, the Chinese economy stutters.
	We're buying everything from China, thanks to the same stupid politicians who gave us the Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and Syrian wars.
	And so this ends up with a big knock-on effect on everything economic if it happens.
	Now, there's a lot of questions on the Iranians' ability to do this and how much damage they could do, especially since the US Navy won't be sitting idly by.
	But even then, the increase in prices and the increase in insurance premiums will be felt across the board in the global economy, even accepting the possibility that the Iranians won't have 100% success and that any success that they have will be temporary.
	it's a suicide option for them but if it's a regime change war against them why not Exactly.
	So don't put crazy people in a corner seems to be a wise policy across the board.
	You know, I get the feeling there's big round tables like this with a whole load of warming during guys thinking this is our great opportunity to once again be like our fathers and grandfathers of the past.
	And look, let's hope that they bomb one of our ships because if they bomb one of our ships, then we can move everybody else in.
	And that's the sort of war games that's going through their heads.
	And I'm look just for people who want to read this kind of particular article.
	It talks about the difference in the crude oil that's being processed as well.
	You know, it's a big impact on Japan and Korea because they require more, 70% here, it says, of the processed refinery for Japan and Korea.
	It would decimate Japan and Korea initially because they are so reliant on this particular type of oil, even though they receive less than the Chinese and the Indians.
	But they are one of the bigger players in terms of the overall market.
	And I look at the implications on tensions for global economy.
	This is from JP Morgan's report.
	So I've got two I've put up for people here, one 2025 and one 2024.
	This, I think, is it the 2025 one, just to make sure.
	I've got, yeah, published four days ago.
	This is actually less phlegmatic about the implication.
	It does talk about the fact we've had a spike recently of $61 to 78p per barrel.
	And I'll come to the implications of what that means on the streets for those from the UK who are watching.
	I'm not sure necessarily about the US because you're protected a lot more by your own markets and the national oil kind of security that they provided themselves.
	This is to your point, Farah.
	So this says if Iran only has 4% of global oil productions, its monthly exports are only about 1.7 million barrels per day.
	So it has a massive impact on them if they cut it off because it's a big, big earner.
	Big impacts, though, Saudi Arabia and UAE coming through there.
	Looking through this on that's a little annoying, the shares of global oil down there.
	It goes on to talk about inflation and interest rates here.
	So this is a very shorter one compared to the 2005, but they talk about the shocks that will be generated in wage demands, sustained inflationary pressures, monetary policy leading to tightening.
	And we've already had a period, think of growth in this country, no growth whatsoever.
	A little bit better and more in-depth is their 2024.
	I'm going to skip the top because it's the same sort of overview.
	And they talk about what we're watching.
	This is where we invaded Ukraine.
	This is where it's come down and why we've had a period.
	And that's quite a substantial.
	It's a significant fall, 130 to 70 over 50%.
	And we've not seen a 50% cut in oil prices in our pumps or even the energy costs.
	Yes.
	Despite it falling 50%.
	Well, we can thank Ed Miliband, and we can certainly do that.
	Absolutely.
	And we've had a little bit of up play between 80 and 90. But I just want people to think about the fact that our energy costs are so high now, and yet we're back to the levels of pre-Ukraine in terms of the war.
	If you look at the bottom of that where we are and bottom there, okay, that's the spike we've had recently because everyone's worried about it.
	But this is where we were, and we're already in dire straits.
	If this spikes up again to $120, $130, or potentially $160, which is referenced in some of the reports that I've been seeing, then we would be absolutely crucified as a nation.
	They talk about broader conflicts, which is your point at hand, and I agree with that.
	I think the risk of transit disruption, again, are points that you've both raised today, are very important, the costs of insurance.
	But overall, if they decide to go to nuclear option, now we then need to analyze some of the aspects.
	The impact of the Russian invasion, I'm going to move across quickly looking on times.
	But we know this.
	It began in 2022.
	The OBR talked about inflation peaking at 9% at the end of 2022.
	Well, that's an interesting one.
	9% at the period of 222.
	I've obviously aged a lot since there.
	So well done, CEPR.
	But you get the point.
	So we've got this overall, why is it important?
	There it is.
	Narrow lane.
	Lots of oil going through.
	Very important types of oil for some countries like Japan.
	The military bases of America surrounding the whole area.
	The Houthis on one side.
	Close it down, cut it off, shut it off, has an impact bigger than we faced in Ukraine, 9% inflation.
	So just, I think this one is just a quick one for everyone, how energy prices for the UK person.
	You've got to think about it goes down there.
	For every $10 higher, and we've just had $13 in the last couple of days, get out and buy your oil and your petrol, fill your tank today, because by the end of the week, this will increase 7 to 8p per $10.
	If it goes up from where we are now at $78 to $130, you're looking at adding another 40p per litre on your car.
	This is painful.
	Absolutely.
	And I'm sure when Keith Starmer supports this, he's sort of thinking about the British consumer and the welfare of the British consumer.
	I imagine he is with his free car and he's just working out who else is going to pay for him.
	But I just find it interesting that, you know, as an aside, how many MPs from the Labour Party or any political party are going to reference the cost of living crisis to ourselves as a consequence of supporting this?
	How many will talk about mass immigration as a result?
	We may get Rupert Lowe talk about that, but very few others will.
	In the end, all of them will fall to support this idea, just as they supported Afghanistan, just as they supported Iraq, and just as they supported everything else.
	And it's kind of sod the consequences for the citizens of Europe who can't afford it.
	Well, after 30 years, I'm kind of used to it.
	Well, it is.
	I mean, isn't it slightly depressing that, you know, with a bit of logic and a bit of history and a bit of common sense, you can bring all of these together, you can point it out, and it's like taking the horses to water and none of them will drink it.
	They'd rather poison themselves.
	The thinking for the Americans could be much more cynical than that.
	The thinking for the Americans could be, we know this is going to damage Europe enormously.
	We know that this is going to damage Asia enormously.
	Therefore, it is good for us because we have our own energy reserves and we have Canada's energy reserves.
	So the thinking for the Americans could be considerably more cynical.
	And if you accept that the US is in decline and if you accept that China has its own structural problems, one way of deeply increasing the structural problems facing the rest of the world, more so than it does for the United States, is to have a policy that closes the American border, but that also disrupts all of Europe and Asia at the same time.
	So this is a way of strengthening the American empire at a time of general decay.
	It makes it even more diabolical, in a sense.
	I've got a line that's coming off, feeding off from what you're doing now.
	It's just in terms of that intellectual line, do you think this now fits in quite comfortably with the idea of tariffs?
	Yes.
	Because he's already saying to the rest of the world, I'm going to ignore the impact on the rest of Europe and the Middle East and Asia because we're now forcing people to actually pay to sell their products to us and therefore increase on the level of income, we will get a shock, but we're going to be insulated on the energy shocks because of the way we're dealing with it.
	And by bringing products online, we're now insulating ourselves.
	So that is going back to American first policy.
	In July, the temporary exemptions for the tariffs that were initially announced expire.
	And there haven't been any trade agreements that were signed.
	And so in a very cynical way, the Americans end up with a stronger hand for these agreements if they have access to their own cheap energy and the rest of the world is facing energy chaos.
	So they're much better off anyway.
	And they're much better off anyway.
	So this shows the importance of countries thinking for themselves.
	It shows the insanity of Britain not developing North Sea resources.
	It shows the insanity of Europe shutting down nuclear.
	It shows the whole madness of green energy and of the hostility to hydrocarbons and the hostility to Russia.
	This is what this policy highlights.
	Basically, you've handed your sovereignty and your economic lifeblood to the Americans, and the Americans have proven that they won't learn from history and from bad military interventions.
	And so long as other people suffer more than they do, this is acceptable.
	So this is a level of cynicism that you just have to be accustomed to the diabolical to be able to think about clearly.
	But it's really frustrating because whenever I go out to the States and you always find sensible heads out there who understand, and they were part of the MAGA movement that I met, they were part of the individuals who said, yeah, like me, we don't like what's happening in Iran.
	We don't really like what's happening to an extent in Russia.
	But we understand the reason why we're behind the idea of no wars is not to destabilize the economies because Europe is actually struggling heavily.
	And we need to support you by closing the borders in our country, gives you the messages out there, returning freedom of speech in our countries, helps you in yours.
	But in turn, there's a whole other bunch of Americans who are hidden behind, whether they call it the deep state, whether they call it the military-industrial complex, is a cadre of elites out there who really don't like what the MAGA movement is as a whole, just as the anti-European, the European Union mob don't like anyone that's Brexit, who are just happy to say we want to continue with this empire.
	And in a way, the rest of you can go and just find your own route out the way and we'll ignore you.
	Where this band of real patriotic Americans who understand the importance of working with us are being ignored.
	Where do we see this now with the Trump kind of group?
	Well, the big effect of Trump going into a war with Iran is to discredit the idea of America First and to sort of make the whole MAGA movement, America First movement, seem as an impossibility.
	You're basically discrediting elections.
	It'll be interesting to see how much that punches during the midterms.
	Yes.
	As they come up.
	Exactly.
	I got a feeling that what they've done is this is the clever movement by the backdoor elites to actually put a puncture hole into the MAGA movement.
	It separates those now who fully understand our side of the argument and those who say, no, we've just got to protect Israel and bomb the hell out of Iran, come what may.
	And they like that because then that divides it and then it means that the Republican, the GOP, who've been sat there all along, are saying we can separate them now.
	And it means that everybody who says, I oppose interventions that the Israelis have supported gets cast as an anti-Semite or gets cast as an Iran apologist or as a Putin apologist or what have you.
	It just provides a lot of additional ammunition for attacking genuine people who want their own people and their own countries placed first above the concerns of bankers, globalists, green energy lunatics, interventionists, et cetera, et cetera.
	But then that will entirely just fracture all of the goodwill that Trump's campaign and Trump's first few months put back into the American system.
	The confidence with voters it put back into the institutions, the number of young men signing up to the military again after long stagnation.
	And even further than that, it could be even more hazardous for them because if things escalate in Iran and you get regime change, you get America even further drawn into it, then what you're going to end up with is a lot of Americans at home who are now have fallen off of the MAGA train and actually just don't think democracy is worth it at all.
	And then you've got a core component of, I know it's Republican, you know, it's a constitutional republic and not a democracy, but you'll get the idea of voting, you know, and so people will resort eventually to other options as opposed to being drawn into foreign wars over and over again.
	Given the influence of Palantir and given the capabilities of the surveillance state and given that the NSA is spying on everybody and in this country, same dynamics all over Europe, same dynamics.
	We know that, for example, the French made Telegram give them back door access to everything that is happening in China.
	And the pressuring on WhatsApp, too.
	Exactly.
	So it just means that the surveillance state gets to pick off its enemies and pursue policies that are clearly not in anybody's interests, having pretty much sold all industrial capabilities to the Chinese and destroyed the ability of the West to provide itself with cheap energy.
	It's simply a level of extremism that people can't put their heads around, but it's very materialistic extremism, very hostile extremism, and it lacks any sense of Christian love For your own people.
	The whole idea that the duty of the rulers is towards the ruled, that you are obligated to have care for the people that you're governing, that if you're well off and God has bestowed upon you great power or great wealth, that leaves you with a larger obligation towards those around you.
	This is completely absent from the minds of people who rule us because they are not Christian.
	It's a kind of sheriff of Nottingham-style politics.
	Yes.
	As long as I'm there, I'll have a few friends around me who are doing very well.
	Precisely.
	But we will just try and steal and take whatever we can from the people.
	And every now and again, those who are opposing it will chop them off.
	I really like that framing.
	Sheriff of New York.
	Sheriff of Nottingham.
	I'm going to try to whip through looking at the time because there may well be comments and we've got this.
	But there are some elements about it that we've got to consider in a depth.
	One of those is China.
	And we talked about China being a very good friend at the moment with Iran.
	But they will actually have a major impact.
	I think this is one of the points we picked up beforehand is that we've seen that they have a huge amount of importing from the cost of crude oil to them is 503 billion in 2024.
	So that's a huge amount.
	It is a little bit less.
	I'm not sure if this is the article that shows they're saving a billion, is it a million barrels a day or whatever?
	Is this the particular one?
	But this just shows the level of crude oil that's been going to China.
	Then the next one just goes to show, again, that picture that we saw early on but brought up for China, India and Southeast Asia, how it impacts them.
	So again, China's got a big, big element in this game here.
	And what you have noticed, and I think this is, I'm glad you showed this one to me before we came on air, is I was looking for something to show about the stockpiling later on.
	But China is stockpiling crude oil.
	And maybe they've also been aware of what we're talking about, that America doesn't care what's going to happen.
	We will go in and disrupt.
	So they have actually been looking, it's adding more than 1 million barrels per day to its strategic and commercial stockpile.
	So they import around 11 to 12 million barrels per day.
	They have a massive refining capacity that the rest of the world also depends on.
	And they're stockpiling essentially more than 10% of what they consume every day.
	With the idea being that they need a reserve precisely for this kind of war too.
	They're preparing for war as well.
	And if they end up facing the Americans in Taiwan and somehow the Americans blockade Chinese ports, they will need that oil reserve in order to survive.
	And you looked at that there, at that bottom figure I found interesting as well, the 13.92 barrels of crude oil that has been refined as well.
	So they're stepping up in terms of that level.
	Then you've got the other big player in the region.
	We talked about India.
	Sorry, I thought this was about India here.
	Maybe I've just come out here.
	Yeah, will it impact India?
	50% of its LNG imports flow through this route and 40% of India's oil.
	Bearing in mind that the kind of whole of the Trump view at the moment is trying to shift products from China.
	A lot of companies have been flowing into India for cheap labor and cheap oil.
	So if they hit that, they reckon that it will increase their costs 20, 25%, which are huge for the costs coming across to the rest of us.
	Now, the kind of fly or protective fly in the ointment is that the IEA are estimating that the highest levels of strategic reserves that they've ever done.
	So that kind of gets to me, this is July 2019, so I expect it to be more.
	So they've been, countries hold about 1.5 billion barrels of oil for emergencies.
	So looking at that, they've got significant amounts, and you've got 2.9 billion above the higher average.
	This reminds me of what happened in the miner strikes in the UK.
	The miner strikes hurt us in the 70s.
	So Thatcher encouraged stockpiling of coke and coal.
	And we also did deals with other countries to be able to import more when we had a miner strike.
	So it strikes me that some of these countries have been preparing for this particular moment, particularly if we're looking at the history you've talked about.
	So I would say we're looking at what can be done.
	Well, obviously you can store it and save it for a while.
	Then militarily and I suppose diplomatically, US has asked China to tell Iran not to retaliate against Israel.
	That was before.
	And then they've come in and said, now that they haven't retaliated and Israel have bombed and retaliated back, will you please, China, dissuade Iran from closing the Straits of Hormuz?
	I find those two quite peculiar.
	I think they're trying to humiliate the Chinese.
	I think they're pushing the Iranians into a corner very deliberately.
	And I think that this is more nefarious than it appears.
	This is a war of choice that wasn't necessary.
	And the consequences are some of them are at least intended.
	Let's put it this way.
	I think there is intention, and I'm going to finish with this in the sense that if China is not able to do this, if America threats, do not stop the Straits of Hormuz being closed, then you've always got what Trump said at the end of the day, which is if they close the Straits of Hormuz, and I can't find the link, someone else, if they can, send it to us, is that we'll bomb them.
	Solves everything.
	Solves everything.
	Yeah.
	I don't know if there's comments, but...
	May I just borrow the EU?
	Yeah, sure.
	I'll go through with them.
	Simple fact with regard to Iran.
	If the Trump admin and the MAGA base, if Trump breaks his promise about boots on the ground, the base splits.
	Otherwise, most will give Trump the benefit of a doubt.
	Yeah, quite possibly.
	Neo-unrealist.
	The idea that Trump hasn't spent the last two decades saying Iran should not be allowed to have nukes is absurd.
	Correct.
	He's been saying that for the last decade.
	He said so during campaign October 9, 2024 in the Flagrant podcast.
	He says what he means.
	Correct.
	He also says that these wars are stupid, though, so he could have not meant that.
	and hedonism, could it be just maybe with nuclear production ability gone, we no longer have cause for future conflict with Iran?
	Why assume this means a larger conflict, uh, not less?
	No Iran-US war coming.
	Well, I hope you're right, is all I can say to you.
	Um, and then Logan's 17 pine: everything within the state, nothing outside the state, total party control.
	Yep.
	The hafiscation, if Iran destabilizes, no one is speaking about the potential outside actors like Turkey and Azerbaijan jinning up further issues.
	Yes, they definitely would, including the Pakistanis, including the Arabs.
	Everybody would try to sort of break up Iran into a smaller Persian core, and that would lead to a massive civil war that A, the 250,000 Christians in Iran, these guys would be gone, they'll be dead.
	The few thousand Jews who are in Iran, these guys would be relocated to Israel, and then the rest would sort of walk until they get to Europe.
	Yep.
	That's all right.
	I've got it.
	Thank you.
	All right, then, ladies and gentlemen.
	So, I want to talk about some recent events, of course, because recent events are popular and good, always.
	Never any bad news around here, is or in Britain.
	But, you know, to go back to a segment that I was talking about last week, in fact, so the wonderful thing about England is that in every town and city, you can find some story of its history that has been really important in some way or another.
	And one of those is Tilbury.
	And the reason that I bring up Tilbury is because in the English mind, if you mention Tilbury, if you enjoy history, if you're a history buff, is that it's where Queen Elizabeth I and her men she gave a speech at Tilbury.
	Have you got the lines?
	Oh, no, I've not got the lines.
	I've not got the lines.
	I had to hold myself up.
	Oh, yeah, kept in the jacket.
	I may not have the body of a man, but I have the body of a king of England.
	Yes.
	Words to that effect.
	I've used it in many speeches.
	Right.
	It's absolutely a gem of a line.
	It's a great speech.
	Gem aline.
	Look at that.
	It's a great speech.
	However, and this was obviously in the face of potential of Spanish invasion and the Spanish Armada.
	And so you might think of Tilbury and remember, you know, that great story from English history.
	But there's another story from Tilbury that the establishment wants you to know that is even more important, an even greater avenue of myth-making of what England is, what modern Britain is, and who we should be.
	And that, of course, is the fact that it was recently the 77th anniversary of the SS Empire Windrush coming from the Caribbean with many, many Jamaicans and people from Trinidad and British Guyana.
	And this is just over a period of about 30 years with this being the beginning, we had what we now call the Windrush generation coming to Britain.
	And this has been basically a day of national celebration for the politicians.
	This marks the new enlightenment into Britain because we were a backwards, terrible people until the diversity came, showed us the error of our ways and what true culture, what true cuisine, what true philosophy, all of these things really were.
	I was just looking at that boat and thinking, why did Natasha Irons actually allow that to be gone?
	Because the boat's white.
	Surely, surely there's something wrong in that picture.
	And this is a constant thing you will see.
	The quote attributed it, which is from a poem, I think, by one of the Windrush people.
	You called and we came.
	I'll explore that a little bit later.
	It's not.
	No button working there.
	That's all right.
	So I just want to play...
	The first nurses, the first midwives in our NHS, the veterans who returned after fighting for freedom in the Second World War.
	Some coming back to serve again.
	The construction workers who literally helped build back Britain after the war.
	The transport staff, the teachers, the shop owners, the cleaners.
	It was the rebuilding of our country and actually shaping what became modern Britain.
	I'm here to make good on the promise that we made.
	We launched the £1.5 billion Windrush Compensation Advocacy Support Fund.
	Hugely important to help organisations provide advocacy and support for applicants.
	And I'm delighted that today we announced the new Windrush Commissioner, the Reverend Clive Fostag.
	And we need to be really clear, learn the lessons, so an injustice like that can never happen again.
	I'm going to unpack all of this.
	Yes, Ferris.
	I had a bunch of questions.
	Firstly, injustice against who?
	The British or the Windrush people?
	The Windrush.
	We've never suffered an injustice either.
	No, okay, fair enough.
	The second one is, does being on benefits count as reparations?
	No, you get that as reparations as well.
	I wanted to do that.
	Yeah, fine.
	You see, for me, I was looking at that last line.
	He says, so we can have a commissioner here, so this could never happen again.
	So the legacy of the channel migrant generation who laid the foundations for modern Britain.
	We will obviously have a channel migrants commissioner in a few years' time.
	Yes.
	So this here, though, but I really want to dwell on these two words because they're proper establishment words, which is just modern Britain.
	Because really what you're looking at here, and the reason that this is trotted out, the reason that you have garden parties at 10 Downing Street like this, the reason that all of this language is used, is because it's essentially the French Revolution of Britain, right?
	What it's trying to do is bring Britain to year zero.
	Yes.
	So there is old Britain, the bad white supremacist, evil Britain of the past.
	That ended the slave grade globally, these white supremacists, yes.
	Yes, but enough of those facts.
	Keep them to yourself.
	But also, there's another important part of this, which is that obviously modern Britain is simply simply bywords for diverse Britain.
	And the point of that is that it's no longer it decentralizes the British people from the creators of their own civilization.
	Okay, so what you have is now after post-World War, we don't have, we weren't the most important people in the story of Britain.
	In modern Britain, everyone has contributed.
	Everyone has an equal level of importance, right?
	No, I just agree.
	I don't think everybody has an equal level of importance.
	No, no, but this is their natural.
	Those people who came over in Windrush had a greater level of importance.
	Those who came over from Africa as a consequence of what was happening in Uganda, they had a greater level of influence.
	Those people who've come from Pakistan had a greater level of influence.
	All I hear from the MPs who are spouting this nonsense is that these people had a greater level of influence.
	They built Britain.
	I think the correct counter to the notion of modern Britain is ancient Britain, to emphasize that this is a country that's been in a certain way for a couple of thousand years longer than that, and that it exists separately from modern Britain.
	Because as you say, modern Britain means the modern is more important than the Britain.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	That's what it is, right?
	Yeah.
	The modern landmass of Britain.
	There's no equality here.
	There's no recognition of the fairness of everybody contributing here.
	The emphasis on these different separate groups is to emphasize their greater contribution.
	Whatever my mum did didn't matter.
	You know, she was born here.
	She may have worked all her life in a variety of jobs, as did my grandfather.
	But their contribution was less than those who were the first nurses that came from Barbados.
	Were there no nurses in Britain before that?
	Of course not.
	I heard about a certain Florence.
	She's fake.
	Fake.
	Yeah, she didn't exist.
	No, she didn't exist.
	I didn't know you guys didn't have nurses until they came from the Caribbean.
	No, not at all.
	No, not plumbers.
	No plumbers.
	No, no.
	No builders.
	No electricians.
	No builders.
	No construction workers.
	We were like the Romans.
	We were like indoor plumbers.
	We had mud huts.
	You had no indoor plumbing before the windrush generation.
	No, and what we went on to do was we built these really flimsy ships and we went and exported our mud huts to the rest of the world so they could have their mud huts too.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Is what actually happened.
	So who is this new windrush commissioner?
	Don't know.
	Right.
	Never heard of him before.
	You're about to.
	So this is Clive Foster, MBE.
	And I had a look into this man and it really didn't take me long at all from a quick Google search to find out that this guy was really big on BLM.
	Oh.
	Would you believe?
	Oh, no.
	Really?
	Yes, unfortunately so.
	He's an Equal Lives Matter person.
	No, so he says, to what extent these shackles become fully loose will depend on a number of factors such as the collective will to speak out, our ability to truly listen and to courageously take action to do the right thing.
	Structural racism has been built over centuries and will require sustained effort to bring it down.
	Bringing it down, we must ensure that Black Lives Matter.
	Yeah, tearing down statutes and towards installing statutes that strengthen equality and justice in our society.
	Yes.
	As if tearing down a statute makes me feel equal and a justice.
	Tearing down old Britain to make way for modern Britain.
	Yeah.
	As it always is.
	This is the sort of revisionism that we're all used to after the BLM stuff.
	I won't dwell on it too long.
	But I do want to talk about the fact that also just one more thing.
	It's like, so do we think that he feels accountable, obligated, responsible for any Englishman?
	No.
	No.
	Not even any Englishman, any Pakistani, any Hindu, anyone outside of his own particular interest group?
	I think he'll apply his own interest group first and then other interest groups that support his interest group as provided by his boss who's given him the opportunity to have power over those interest groups.
	Because this whole, for those of you who aren't schooled on the history of modern Britain, back in 2018, there was something that was called the Windrush scandal, which was essentially during the, you had the 1948 Nationality Act, which allowed anyone with a British passport from across the Commonwealth to come to Britain.
	Great, great mistake, and something that Enoch Powell warned about and what the repercussions of this oversight would be.
	And then in the 1970s, you had another act passed.
	I can't remember the exact name of it, but it basically meant that anyone who had come to stay over those past 30 years had now been granted permanent residence.
	And so the 500,000 people who'd come as part of the Windrush migration over the past 30 years were just given leave to stay.
	Then in 2018, the Home Office under Theresa May, I believe it was, and the great stateswoman, Amber Rodd, then Home Secretary, she made an oversight where some Windrush people were accidentally threatened with deportation, which based, I don't know, you know, it's an interesting oversight.
	I think you're missing a key part of the detail.
	They hadn't done the administrative work required to prove their citizenship and to prove that these laws had applied to them.
	So these laws came in, but I think my vague understanding of it is that you still probably had to fill in some paperwork to ensure that everything was done correctly.
	We do like paperwork.
	Which is understandable.
	Making the written word holy is how this country became great in the first place.
	When the Wing Rush brought paperwork to the public.
	Yes, yes, yes.
	I think they had a stash of pencils, which was new to you guys.
	But anyway, they couldn't be bothered with actually doing that bit of paperwork to prove the same thing.
	So the machine went burr and sort of said you were supposed to be deported.
	That's the extent of it.
	It wasn't some kind of nefarious, evil Theresa May that the people who built Britain must now be expelled.
	Well, because I mean, Tory, but this is the people that the Tories want to appeal to.
	They'd never want to deport them, ever.
	No, no.
	So that kind of detail, I think, should be.
	There was an element of that, and I'll be a little bit on the devil's advocate why is because the Home Office produce literally every other day stats on the Windrush regulations, what the regulations are, and I've got some particular annoyance over the Windrush policies that they've got in particular, is that unfortunately some people did lose them over a period of time.
	They weren't asked for these for like 30 odd years, and any human being might not keep the original documents they had when they came off the boat.
	But it also enabled those who were not coming over legitimately to be able now claim that they were able to do so.
	So once again, you have that scenario typical in our life when the Home Office messes up, when it doesn't do it properly, those genuine individuals who have cases of mistaken documentation are actually also lumped in with those who are deliberately trying to hide it, albeit much smaller.
	The consequences, and I don't know how far you're going to deal with this, is that the compensation scheme is just absolutely open to mass abuse.
	Does that count for reparations or is that also excluded from it?
	We have to give Kent to Kent and Essex and everything within it to compensate them just simply for reparations for Barbados alone.
	But because this happened and the Tories were absolutely terrified of being called racist by the BBC, they made them a statue in Waterloo Station.
	And they also, as you said, started up this windrush scheme, which has, and obviously, but now it's become such a world where the NHS and the royal family, you've got portraits in Buckingham Palace now, commissioned for it, for new modern Britain.
	And I just want to point out to people as well that this is reform's position.
	Immigration is the lifeblood of this country.
	So pro-wind rush, right?
	Reform position is at the wind rush also.
	He lost me on that.
	I might as well have voted Labour if I'm voting reform now.
	Right.
	When you have that particular view that immigration is the lifeblood, I mean, I just got furious about this.
	Yes, my grandmother came here from Ireland and she worked hard.
	But my grandfather lived here generations.
	He worked hard.
	It's not the lifeblood.
	If we cut out immigration today, we wouldn't die and drain away.
	We wouldn't be sitting there on a lifeblood support machine going, help me with an injection.
	Your denial of my role as your lifeblood is deeply offensive.
	And complaining to the Windrush Commissioner.
	Let's get that.
	Yes, yes.
	It's nothing about equality.
	I hate the idea because it's never, ever about equality.
	No, it's not about revenge and narcissism and trying to carve out something.
	Narcissism.
	Yes.
	It's nothing narcissism.
	It's just an inferiority complex being turned into a whip.
	That's what it is.
	But as Migration Watch point out here, the ethnic minority population in 1951 was around 3%.
	And as late as 1991, the white British population was still 95% of the population.
	So the Windrush population would have been less than 1%.
	And somehow they changed the entire view of society.
	And I suppose these 95% here were twiddling their thumbs, being on benefits, just dossing about, not really doing anything of particular consequence.
	And so I just wanted to go through some things that Harry had posted as well, because this is what I mean when I talk about myth-making, which is that when I said earlier on, it's, you know, you called and, you know, we came.
	Well, we never did call.
	In fact, as soon as the Atlee government heard that this ship was going to leave Jamaica and come to Britain, the office scrambled to try and figure out how to make sure it never returned up.
	You can see here as well, Colonel Secretary Arthur Creech-Jones replied, these people have British passports and they must be allowed to land.
	But he also added confidently, they won't last one winter in England.
	So the intention was never for them to stay.
	It was never for them to become like an actual part of society.
	The Labour government at the time just thought it would be a problem that would fizzle out eventually.
	Oh, yeah.
	Only 6,000 people will arrive if we open the borders to all of Eastern Europe.
	Yes.
	Yes, said Tony Brown.
	Same idea.
	Same sort of principle.
	And again, if you go back to what, is it Creedy Creasy, whoever he was who just, I missed his name.
	Oh, yes.
	Just that, Arthur Creech-Jones, Colonel Secretary, that just shows the intransigence and absolute lazy thinking of the liberal elites in this country.
	It won't last one winter.
	I'm sorry, but if you're living...
	Yeah, if you're living on two beans and a couple of rodents, then you come over to Britain, you're actually going to have a lot more to eat.
	You've got a housing and you don't mind the cold.
	You'll get used to it.
	And so that's why they're on the boats coming over from the channel, because they don't really particularly care about their own countries.
	They think it's better off here.
	So, you know, at the end of the day, people like Creech Jones just do not understand humanity.
	They don't understand the need and drive for people to leave and what they will sustain and endure if they think it's better than where they're leaving.
	Could you please read the previous one?
	Because I think this is important.
	I think this is important.
	The arrival of these substantial numbers of men under no organized arrangement is bound to result in considerable difficulty and disappointment.
	I hope no encouragement will be given to others to follow their example.
	You called, and we came.
	That's not calling.
	No.
	That's shooing.
	Yes, yes.
	Okay.
	Yeah, Attlee wanted to have it redirected to the African continent.
	Ah, right.
	Well, who did they say called?
	Was there a letter?
	The British.
	We needed them.
	The uncivilized pre-modern Britain called without knowing that they did.
	But their despair called across the ocean.
	So, this entire thing is, of course, total revisionism.
	And when we actually think about it, it's like, okay, look, I really don't want to be callous, right?
	On a natural level, I'm not a mean-spirited person, right?
	But what have the Windrush generation really contributed in the past 70 years that we couldn't do without?
	We've got Nottingham Carnival.
	That's very good.
	That's very diverse.
	This results in multiple stabbings every single year.
	I don't think there's anything in particular that they can say that they've given to us in particular.
	I would just turn around and say that when you look at the vast number of people that come here, the vast majority of them did work.
	They have contributed.
	I'm not saying all of them, because at the end of the day, we do know those who did come and some of their relations and those who have come here illegally from places like Jamaica are very involved in criminality.
	They're one of the biggest levels of people we want to deport.
	But the vast majority of human beings, when they get here, did work.
	But there's nothing that they would turn around and say, other than the carnival, that is substantially related to that community.
	Also as well.
	You've just got good people that have done good jobs and worked just as anybody else would do.
	Yes.
	But also we talk about this like, you know, when they first arrived back in the 1950s, the standards were just higher.
	People dressed better.
	There was still a real patriotism in Britain.
	Neighbourhoods were in good social standing, all these sorts of things.
	And so they would have been, you know, just a drop in the ocean of the population.
	And that would have incentivised integration.
	It would have incentivized them not to slack either.
	But now with future and future generations down the line, living in a population where, you know, the British have gone from 75% to 90%.
	There were also some pretty bad communities.
	Obviously, the one I grew up with, pretty much in Mossside in Hume.
	They had a lot of people who weren't working.
	A lot of people, young men who weren't working.
	And a lot of the times it was the women.
	I mean, I say this from growing up, we noticed how many of those who came from the Windrush, the women were the ones who were working.
	And a lot of them loved to go to the men loved to go in the shabines.
	They'd sit out there going to the nightclubs.
	And this is a fact that they don't want to talk about.
	This is the history of what I grew up in, the areas I grew up.
	And when you've got really decent men who were religious, Christian, or wanted to work hard, they were often laughed at by men of their own communities.
	So, you know, it's a great honor for those individuals I knew who worked out of their communities to get to university, study hard, become lawyers, bankers, because it was incredibly difficult when they had a whole lot of community who'd rather say, we won't do the same sort of things.
	We're not going to blend in.
	That is a story that's also ignored.
	That's the lived, if you want to use that, my lived experience, but lived experience of others who knew what those communities were growing up.
	Yes.
	And so it comes down to, and it's brilliant here by the BBC.
	It's on the Notting Hill Carnival thing.
	It says the West London Carnival is in jeopardy.
	Its chairman Ian Comfort said that in a letter leaked to the BBC on Wednesday in which he asked the Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy to provide urgent funding for public safety measures.
	So they need more funding because they know how dangerous these carnivals get every year.
	It's just always want and destruction.
	And again, just no sense of responsibility for looking after the local area, looking after the local neighbourhood, you know, the people who actually have to live in Nottinghill, God forbid.
	And so, but also, obviously, champion of the Windrush, Diane Abbott.
	So the Windrush generations were proudly British.
	Yet immigrants are still fighting to be seen that way.
	I'm not going to go too much into her article, but what I really want to just hark on for a second here is the fact that when you say the Windrush generations were proudly British, all of this, everything that I've been through before, it's not proudly British.
	It's proudly Windrush.
	You're setting yourselves up as another organism within Britain itself, right?
	We don't have Huguenot, a Huguenot scheme.
	That's right.
	We don't have a Roman scheme.
	We don't have a Norman scheme.
	All these things like, well, you've always been a nation of immigrants.
	It's like, okay, but we were all British.
	And the numbers are so fundamentally different.
	Well, of course.
	Only about 0.1% of the population.
	Oh, no, no.
	As opposed to what's happened over the last couple of decades.
	It's putting 500,000 over 30 years, when since 2018, we've had 267,000 come across the channel alone.
	So we're half that number in just six years.
	So there's no comparison.
	And so there's just one more link here as well, which is just, again, to further the argument, we stand on the shoulder of Windrush pioneers.
	So you don't stand on the shoulders of ancestors of Britain, right?
	The people who I say go all the way back to the original Tilbury that I talked about at the beginning of this segment, Elizabeth, and back into the mists of time.
	No, you recognize that your roots come from the Caribbean.
	You're loyal to them.
	You're loyal to their memory.
	You're loyal to that identity.
	So I'm sorry, Diane, but there's a reason why you're not seen as British.
	And the harder you wrestle, the more you're never going to be.
	Simply, you're not trying to be British.
	You're not trying to be British.
	Did you see the video of the girl who was saying we need more money for the carnival?
	That video where she said, well, you know, there was only something like 5,000 arrests, 364 injured and two dead.
	That's all.
	But two million people came.
	Yeah.
	Sorry.
	So looking for census terms, it's okay.
	Is this Notting Hill or Rio?
	Yeah.
	So, you know, it's perfectly okay to have a couple of people die every year for an event, but you should fund it just in event because, you know, without it, more me.
	And if the police do stop and search, they're racist, right?
	Yes.
	Oh, indeed.
	Indeed.
	Don't forget.
	It even says in this article, it says the Windrush flag has been raised over Wolverhampton.
	Oh, so not the British flag.
	Now, don't get me wrong, I know that counties have different flags, but this is a flag for an actual people.
	Yes.
	And so, forgive me if when you have the choice of two flags and you choose one from the Caribbean, I'm not inclined to believe that you're actually British.
	I'm very sorry about that.
	It's just my cynicism.
	Maybe we should stand up in a street stall in the middle of a town and say, here's a flag, that's Britain.
	Here's a flag, whatever.
	Are you British?
	And if they come around and say yes, which is your flag?
	And if they say that, then how can you be British?
	Because that's not a British flag.
	It's a Charlie Kirk moment, isn't it, really?
	Well, maybe if you raise that flag, maybe a government-funded, we can use the Windrush scheme to perhaps provide some transport back to Tilbury.
	I have to pay reparations for emotional damage.
	Emotionally damaging me every day.
	I have to listen to this, isn't it?
	Really awful when we're seeing this, you know.
	Yeah, I'll go to some comments, Gusware.
	Yes, Sigilstone says, you called, we came, said by both the Windrush generation and the Cenobites from Hellraiser, and both for the same reason.
	I'm very sorry, I don't know what that is.
	That's a name for modern Britain.
	It's called DieuK, says Habsification.
	Very, very true.
	Logan Pine 17, don't the elites know that if this all falls, they will be removed one way or another?
	Yes, but I don't think they care because, you know, in the words of Richard Tice, they'll be long gone.
	So it's not their problem.
	Right?
	And Sigil 717 also says, very good.
	The Windrush generation saved and civilized Britain with their yummy foods like nondescript brown slop and the neighbour's pets.
	Yes, very funny, very witty.
	Right.
	Is there any video comments, Samson?
	None today.
	I'll do it tomorrow.
	Alright, great.
	Okay.
	In that case, we'll just go through some comments for the last past few minutes.
	Do you want to read yours?
	Yeah, sure.
	Zesty King says, I think it's important to remember in regard to negotiations with Iran what happened to Libya.
	Exactly.
	Gaddafi was given an ultimatum, give up your nuclear materials or get overthrown.
	He gave up the nuclear material and was overthrown anyway.
	Those in power in Iran probably know this.
	Yes, absolutely true.
	Absolutely true.
	Then Scotty of Swindon, Ukraine surrendered its nuclear weapons in exchange for assurances from Russia.
	That's not accurate, but okay.
	Now Ukraine is at war with Russia.
	It's really stupid to agree to give up your weapons because other countries don't like you having them.
	Correct.
	The illegal truth, this could bring civil war to the UK faster than we think.
	All Iran would need to do is activate some of its sleeper cells in the UK to carry out terror attacks like Southport.
	Rioting would kick off again big time like last year, but much worse with the country being like a Tinderbox at the moment.
	Iran could easily destabilize the country.
	That would require the army to be focused on the UK, not on a war in the Middle East.
	This is true pretty much of everywhere in Europe, really.
	Arizona does it rat, this Iran situation is going to turn into a new foreign war debacle.
	It always has and always will.
	Yep.
	And she also says, and we are certain that those nuclear sites were actual nuclear sites and not dummy sites?
	Relatively.
	That's another problem that could arise.
	Amar Awad says the lefties are surprisingly quiet on the, is this what you voted for front when it comes to bombing the Middle East?
	Yes.
	Plenty of MAGA split because they aren't a brainwashed monolith.
	Also true.
	George Happ says, I guess Tulsi also thinks the US should do Israel's bidding and dictate who can and can't have nukes.
	It seems only one fanatical Middle Eastern country is allowed that.
	Funny how that works.
	No comment.
	I'll just read some from my segment as well.
	So Lord Nereva says, this genuinely feels like we've been left in the cold.
	Our one shining hope was Trump and him dismantling the exact deep state that he was just forced him to make war on Iran.
	Now what?
	If even the Donald is susceptible to pea-taking on a global scale, who could possibly put a stop to it?
	Well, yeah, I mean, that's the thing.
	You know, you put all your hopes in Trump, and then if he doesn't come through, now what?
	Good luck with that.
	I think these are all coming off in...
	Psyched me out.
	Yeah, okay.
	Rick Monicendon.
	China has been doing all Iran's propaganda.
	Why is US talking to China as if it will settle anything?
	China lies.
	Trump really hasn't got a grip on the basics if he is making mistakes like this.
	Yeah.
	There's a point above that, actually.
	You can see just there that someone pretty much agreeing where we go.
	And I actually can see this, oddly enough.
	He said if Iran decides to shut down the Straits of Ilmuz, it would be the final nail in Iran's coffee.
	True.
	It would reduce Iran's exports by 90% and only affect the global oil supply by 20%.
	Well, I'd say the effect in the 20% would be significant.
	Theirs is only 1.8% or 1.9% of it.
	But we could survive.
	That would be no way that Iran hurts itself in confusion.
	We're saying it would do, but the choice is we're going to be taken out anyway.
	So why not go down fighting?
	Yeah, exactly.
	And got here.
	The reason that Windrush built Britain is such popular rhetoric for many late 20th century centurist types is that it allows you to express mild patriotism, this country is good, without it actually being praise of the nation, but instead veneration of everyone else.
	This is true.
	The actual, when they say, you know, the enormous contributions that the Windrush generation have kept, they really just mean simply by existing.
	Yes.
	Right.
	They just mean being diverse.
	That is merit.
	That is good.
	And we were talking in a previous segment about how Iran's diversity could be used to start a civil war, but diversity good is...
	Uh...
	That's exactly what I was saying.
	Exactly.
	Maria Manzi, oh, for Stephen and Firas, an important point is the Home Office under Blair destroyed the landing cards that had the details of those who came during Windrush.
	He also stopped exit checks.
	That's important in point.
	And Michael Drabeldis, I will get around to saying that correctly, I promise you, Michael.
	I think all benefit payments should be offset, should offset any reparations.
	If we do that, the victims would now owe the country the sum of 2.5 trillion.
	When we add in the cost of crimes committed by these victims, the amount these people owe skyrockets to 5.8 trillion.
	Like most statistics, these numbers are pulled out of my ass.
	Well, you keep yanking them, Michael.
	I do not endorse the last statement from our men's.
	Anyway, well, it's coming up to half past.
	That's all we've got time for today, ladies and gentlemen.
	Thank you for listening, and we'll be back tomorrow at 1 p.m.
	Thank you.
	Have a good day.
	Brilliant.
	Good night.

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