Hello and welcome to the podcast of Lotus Eaters episode 1334.
I'm your host Harry joined today by part-timer Josh.
Hello.
And part-timer Nick.
Hello.
How are you both doing?
Not too bad.
It's Friday.
Enjoying your time off?
Good.
My time off?
Busier than ever, you cheeky so-and-so.
I do more than Josh now, I think.
I think ladies, it's not a competition.
You can have that.
I did this long.
Long enough.
Come on.
It's all right.
Today, we're going to be talking about the latest batch of Tory defections.
I'm going to be talking about the dismal conditions and prospects for Britain's pubs in the future under Labour.
And Josh is going to be discussing how Europeans are different and strange and weird compared to everybody else in the world.
And that also means the Europeans that went to the other parts of the world.
So Americans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders.
Ah, and that little town in South Africa, the tiny part of South Africa that works, yes.
We're all going there eventually.
The one bit.
It'll be one tiny enclave where all white people live.
And we're having constant border wars with everyone trying to get in.
They're not trying to take our territory.
They're just after benefits.
It's the most polite place ever with incredible literature and everything works.
Great sanitation.
I'm just projecting it.
Anyway, sorry.
No, this is what's going to happen.
And Josh is going to explain to us how and why it always happens.
But with that, bye, Islander.
Let's get into it.
Yeah.
Okay.
I think it's me.
So let's start with the latest Tory bleep storm.
So for those that don't follow this stuff obsessively or you're in America or something, I'll update you.
I don't mean to always do party politics.
I was going to talk about this Chinese spy embassy.
We were going to talk about Nick Fuente's book.
Yeah, again.
And the Chinese spy embassy in the heart of London.
But instead, it all kicked off.
So I had to talk about this because Kemi Badenock, leader of the Tories, has sacked, which cameras it has sacked Robert Jenrick, who was her main rival for the leadership.
And he's still sort of knocking around, being a bit leadery.
She didn't like that.
But then it hit the fan when his resignation letter was leaked.
I mean, he'd written this resignation letter that was so resign-y and it was so reformy.
It was like, reform are amazing.
Tories are rubbish.
Hope no one sees this.
And she found it.
It would be a shame if Nigel Farage saw this one, hey?
It was like Scooby-Doo level plot point.
You're like, that wouldn't happen.
But then upon further reading, it turned out what ended up happening was there was basically a traitor in its midst.
So someone leaked it to Kemi.
She didn't just...
Originally, it was said that it was lying around.
Just lying around the office.
She leaves copies of his resignation all around.
What it actually was, is he has a traitor who he needs to track down and destroy because someone was being a double agent and leaked it to Kemi.
So then Kemi found out, and she had no choice, she felt, but to sack him.
And she was trying to do it before the reform press conference, which they were worried was to leak, was to launch Jenrick.
Because they had a press conference about Scotland that no one really cared about.
Then they had another one at 4.30.
And people are like, oh no, that's the Genric one.
Farage claims it never was.
So we'll get into it.
But this is what Kemi did.
She had to come out and so she's like, right, what I'm going to have to do is have a weird blurred background and do a strange Zoom video.
Where is she?
This is your HR manager.
This is your HR manager from Nigeria.
I mean, at least she doesn't have enough ethnic enemies in the north of Nigeria.
That's not racism.
That's a quote from Kemi.
She talked about her.
She said, actually, I don't really see myself as Nigerian.
I'm Yoruba.
And those people in the north are my ethnic enemies.
Now she's got even more enemies.
This is the kind of rhetoric I want.
I see northerners as my ethnic enemies.
How dare you?
Oh, I see.
That's why.
Oh, yeah.
Sorry.
Oh, you're letting the team down, Nick.
I had an important call.
What are you, scared?
I had an important call at 12.30, but they called 35 minutes late, so it's not my fault.
Clearly they're not.
Why isn't your phone out silent?
Clearly they're not European.
Why do you always have your phone out on the floor?
Because I'm timing my segments.
I don't have to go over because I'm European.
Oh, okay.
Alright, speaking of... I might defect to southerners now.
Apparently, Kemi.
Apparently, Kemi's always late, but that's just a coincidence.
Let's watch what she said.
I removed the Conservative whip from Robert Jenrick after dismissing him from the shadow cabinet.
I was very sorry to be presented with clear, irrefutable evidence.
Not just that he was preparing to defect, but he was planning to do so in the most damaging way possible to the Conservative Party and his shadow cabinet colleagues.
It is my responsibility to protect our party.
And faced with that information, I took the only decision that any responsible leader could.
Because the British public are tired of political psychodrama.
So am I.
They saw too much of it in the last government.
They're seeing too much of it in this government.
I will not repeat those mistakes.
When I was elected leader, I committed to doing politics differently.
Disloyalty and dishonesty undermine trust in politics.
They're also disrespectful to our party members, our councillors, MPs, and most of all, voters.
You all deserve better.
Conservatives suffered a heavy defeat in 2024.
That was painful, but we are rebuilding with strong principles, clear plans, and with a serious team united around a shared purpose.
When individuals choose to walk away from that effort for personal ambition, that tells you nothing about the Conservative Party and everything you need to know about them.
There will be more to say, and I know a lot of commentary about this decision.
But I want you all to be in no doubt.
It's a time of global uncertainty.
I am focused on holding the government to account, ensuring they are acting in the national interest, and that Conservatives deliver a proper plan for a stronger economy, stronger borders, and a stronger Britain.
So, one thing I couldn't put my finger on there is that sounded very weird to me.
And it almost sounded like she was reading the script for an advert or something in her intonation as she was saying that.
Like, I was just like, sorry, I don't want to buy insurance.
Some people said it's like being told off by your HR manager.
Well, yeah, this feels very, very low rent.
This makes the Tory Party, to me, look even worse, because obviously not only are they experiencing all of these people jumping ship, which makes it look like the Tory Party is a sinking ship, but also I know they wanted to get this out quickly to get ahead of the story.
Could they not have gone to an office?
Does she not have an office?
Can the Tories not afford an office and camera anymore?
Why did she just film this?
It's like she just immediately put her laptop screen up and just recorded it off the camera with the blurred background.
It's so low rent and unprofessional looking.
Well, to be very fair, and act as Kemmy's representative, which I never thought I'd do because I literally was at a birthday party with Kemi when she was running and I told everyone I was Team Jenrick, even though she was there, because that's the kind of guy I am.
I don't go to parties anymore.
But to be very fair, they were trying to get it out not just to beat the 430 press conference, but to ambush Farage during his previous press conference where he was with the Scottish bloke, and they started asking Farage questions about what about Jenrick.
Kemmy's just sacked him, so he's in the press conference.
The thing is, Farage is good at reacting, so he just said, he goes, well, I'll buy him a drink and see what he wants to do.
So he reacted quite well to it.
But they wanted to try and at least ambush Farage, given that that was their best option at that time.
So I suppose that's why they did it in a travel lodge.
I mean, I will say that she is right when she's essentially calling him an opportunist.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
He clearly is.
He's a political operator.
He's an opportunist.
He was the main person welcoming in all of these Afghan refugees.
The sneaky Afghan movement, yeah.
Yeah, a few years ago that he then tried to flip around last year and say, oh my God, this is so terrible.
I can't believe that somebody would do this when it was him.
It was him.
20,000 individuals and therefore, including their families, maybe around 80,000 to 100,000 people.
In all likelihood, yes.
All right.
Well, it's a shame anyway, because they were getting on.
Oh, this is not working again.
How do you reset the?
I think I need to unplug it and plug it back in.
We've got the boomer tricks still work.
Yeah, okay.
It's a shame because they were getting on so well.
That's a pic from 2024 of Genrick and Kemi just like blatantly hating each other.
So, Camilla Tomin.
He was already wearing a reform blue tie in that picture.
There were signs, there were signs.
Camilla Tomney was annoyed because he lied to her.
She chose strangely to publish the text messages or the WhatsApps.
Are you defecting or not?
No.
As I said to you, I believe when we spoke at Christmas, not yet or never.
Never.
Lo and behold, that wasn't the truth.
What was it, as I say, the resignation speech being leaked?
The Tories were passed a draft copy of Genrick's defection speech and his entire media plan by a mole and his team.
The Conservatives claims the papers have been left lying around earlier today to protect their source.
In fact, they had someone in Jenrick's team and have done for some time.
Intrigue.
And as I say about Farage, he genuinely seemed to have not been planning it.
And it seemed to be something he had to just adapt to.
So this is what he said.
He wasn't going to join at 4.30 today.
No, I'm sorry, Kemi.
You've jumped the gun.
You've added up two and two and made five.
He wasn't going to join today.
He wasn't going to join tomorrow.
He wasn't going to join next week.
In fact, knowing what these negotiations are like, he might not have joined at all.
I think on balance, it's 60-40 that he would have done.
But you never know until the deal is signed and the hand is shaken.
So the Conservative leadership have jumped the gun on this.
They've hoofed him out of the party, fearing he would appear today at 4.30 on this platform alongside me.
And I've had to think very quickly as to how I should respond to this.
And I just want to say thank you to Kemi Badenock.
This is the latest Christmas present I've ever had.
The negotiations with Jenrick goes on online.
There's nothing more to be said.
Yeah, he says it's a Christmas present from Kemi.
It's just tactical.
She thought, right, tactically, I'll just sack him now.
Then he's like, he can frame it as her panicking and he wasn't even going to join anyway.
If he wasn't, then it is a mistake.
But he obviously blatantly was going to join.
He was talking to them since September, he admitted.
So, yeah, Kemi got ahead of it.
You can tell, by the way, that Farage probably was being sincere that he really wasn't going to announce him quite yet at this press conference, partly by how badly organized it was.
For example, Jenrick wasn't actually even there when I was.
And on that note, I will welcome Robert Jenrick into this room and into Reform UK.
He's turned into a speaker.
Oh, he hasn't changed his mind, has he?
We can't find him.
He's in disguise.
He's actually that cameraman.
Yeah, that confused looking camera.
One bit at the end.
Is he coming, Nick?
So that actually went on for ages.
I just put it down to 30 seconds.
It went on for like four minutes.
And that could have been a great joke if he had done it and been like, ah, I gotcha.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But no, that was real.
And Kemi would be like, he's back in the party.
It was all a late Christmas prank.
Yeah, so that was that.
So what else have we got?
Oh, yeah.
So the funny thing is that only five months ago in August, Farage was calling him August 18, 2025.
Jenrick is a Ford.
I've always thought so, and this quote proves it.
A quote about the migrant hotel.
So it's hilarious just how, you know, this is politics, but that was like so recent.
And in the press conference, they said to him, what about you saying he was a Ford, you know, very, very recently?
Farage, oh yeah, well, you know, I've said it.
And he kind of owned it like Trump, and it was kind of funny.
And he goes, you know, but, you know, I'm forgiving him and all this.
I'm teaching him forgiveness.
He had all these things, but then he tried to wriggle out of it and say, the fact that he resigned over the immigrate Rwanda plan, I thought, you know, that was a big thing.
I was like, that was December 2023.
You called him a fraud in August 25.
So it's just nonsense.
Absolutely.
I always find it weird.
I sort of get frustrated.
If I were Farage, I wouldn't go around insulting people that were they to defect, I would snap them up.
Yeah.
From my perspective, that's just a tactical mistake and lacking foresight.
You don't insult people you want to win over.
And in fact, it's normally a good sort of strategy in politics, no matter what position you hold, even if you're a commentator, not to go around insulting people because eventually circumstances will change and people will say you're a hypocrite.
Especially if you're being disingenuous.
I regret insulting you now when you left Lotus Eaters.
I didn't know you were going to come straight back.
You know what I mean?
I said, Josh is awful.
And then you think we hosted it.
You didn't.
Then you came straight back.
It was awkward.
No, you're on the podcast.
Yeah, exactly.
And it's awful.
We've got to have a fight after Nikon.
No one told me that they didn't want me, so I've been turning up.
Yeah, you're saying you wouldn't do this, Josh, essentially.
Robert Jennerick.
Under him as immigration minister, we got up to 56,000 people who'd crossed the channel by boat living in hotels.
He put more people in hotels than even this Labour government.
And here we are, three years later, and he turns up and says, I'm on your side.
My advice to you would be to say, this man is a fraud.
This man is not to be trusted.
Welcome to the party.
Exactly.
And as I was saying, Robert Jenner.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh, is he here?
No, he's found out what I said about him.
Yeah, absolutely insane.
But by the way, Leila Cunningham did the same.
I don't want Jenrick in reform.
That was what?
January the 8th last week.
So that was last week.
Very unfortunate.
But Jenrick did the same.
I mean, look what he said about Farage.
We have first passed the post.
So what if the British public voted Reform UK the biggest party, but required a conservative coalition deal to govern?
Would you consider that?
And would you serve in a cabinet with Nigel Farage as Prime Minister, for example?
No.
Look, I want to, with all due respect, retire Nigel Farage, get back those voters we've lost, get back the Conservative Party into power.
That's what we need as a country.
So there you go.
He also said that Farage couldn't run a five-aside football team.
I don't know if you need to hear this, but you get the idea.
Probably true as well.
Yeah, basically, they're all just both slagging each other off.
And it's not playing, but he basically said he couldn't even organise a five-aside football team.
far nobody in this entire story actually looks good out of any of this.
It's all just sort of Yeah.
The curtain has sort of been unveiled and the clown show is there for all to see.
There's an argument it's bad for all three of them.
I think it's probably best for Farage because it's still quite damaging for the Tories, but it's not great for any of them.
this speech was particularly damaging well i mean how does it i understand that generic has his own fan base but also i mean they've called him out so many times and now they're welcoming him in when he has by farage's own estimates an incredibly poor track record What's he bringing to the table, Farage?
I mean, I've seen lots of people mock up fake, like, they've joined reform, they've defected to reform, and it's people like Iddy Armin and Tony Blair.
Tony Blair.
Yeah, you have to believe that one.
Yeah, yeah.
Kim Jong-in.
Well, I suppose he brings, he is the most, I mean, he was Brookie's favourite to be next Tory leader, so he, and he's quite good on the social media videos.
He brings a certain, he's not that well known, but he's more well-known than virtually all the Tories.
And, you know, he's somewhat on the right.
So he brings some things, but he was extremely damning about the Tories in his speech.
Last year, I said the rape gang disgrace was in part because people with medieval attitudes towards women and girls had been allowed into our country.
Would you believe it?
Several Conservative MPs complained about me for speaking out.
They said I was wrong.
And I shouldn't be saying that about the record of the last Conservative government.
Over Christmas, I instinctively saw the news that the anti-British, anti-Semitic terrorist sympathiser, El Fatah, coming here to live in our country and enjoy the generosity of our people was wrong.
And I spoke out against it.
Let me tell you, several figures in the Conservative Party were angry at me.
They said, and I quote, it exposed the party to criticism for having granted him citizenship in 2021.
So, yeah, you can imagine the Tories definitely doing that.
So he's saying the Tories were just completely wet on all these things, grooming gangs.
Is he pretending to be stupid or is he actually stupid?
Because did he not realize which party he was in?
Well, there is that.
It's not especially surprising, is it?
And he also brought in some of the Afghan migrants.
This was the explicit stated ideology of the Tory Party by this point.
They're more than eager to let anybody in.
Like Boris Johnson's Brexit line was to allow more non-EU people in.
Yeah, well, Gemik's narrative, if you take him at face value, is he was basically red-pilled over Rwanda.
He said, this scheme's never going to work.
It's terrible.
He resigned, which he did do from Vishyu's cabinet and said, right, I can't be part of this.
Although he didn't leave the party then.
He just sort of resigned and sort of tried to, I suppose you could say, change it from within or something.
And that would be his narrative.
The Tories do sound absolutely as bad as you think, though, from what he says here.
At a recent shadow cabinet debate, a conversation broke out.
The question was put to the group, is Britain broken?
I said instinctively, it's broken.
Almost everyone said, it's not broken.
And we were told, that is the party line.
A few.
A few had a third position.
It is broken.
But we can't say so.
Because the Conservative Party broke it.
If they won't admit publicly to you, the British people, what they broke, what possible faith can you have in them to fix it?
The Conservative Party in Westminster isn't sorry.
Oh, this never gets easier to use.
It doesn't get easy.
It hasn't changed.
It won't change.
See, it's not as easy as it looks.
Pretty bad.
Nothing unexpected, but pretty damning for Generic to be saying that about the Tories.
They had to pretend the Tory, sorry, the country wasn't broken because they broke it.
That is pretty extraordinary.
Question is, like, who does, as we've said, who comes out worse in this?
As soon as this happened, I was like, we're going to see the fake right spectator Cope coming out.
And of course, that's what they did, sacking Jenrick has made Bay look stronger.
She's so strong by losing one of her best people.
I mean, this cope is going all the way across.
Now, there's something in it that she shows strong leadership.
She's like the sensible one.
I want to do sensible politics.
There's something in that.
But it clearly doesn't make a stronger overall to lose Jenrick.
I think it's hard to claim it.
They were all saying it across the board.
Well, the spectators associated with Michael Governor.
Michael Cove edits it.
He's Kemi's number one fan.
Exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
Exact amount.
It was obvious.
When Andrew Maher is saying you did well, you know you're in trouble.
Stroppy.
Rude.
Entitled.
I've never liked what I've seen and heard of Kemi Badenock, and so tonight I say this through gritted teeth and with some reluctance.
The Tory leader has done really well today, and she is on course to save the Conservative Party.
It wasn't just the way she kneecapped her old rival Robert Jenrick for the crime of planning to defect to reform, a crime he later performed in public at an hilariously pantomime moment press conference.
In truth, by stripping him of his party membership, she'd left him no other choice.
But is this the splintering away of one hugely ambitious individual?
Or is it the beginning of a more general crumbling of right-wing Tories towards Nigel Farage?
So Ma's saying that, so you can almost certainly bet the opposite, especially when Ian Dale is saying the same.
Self-serving hubristic bollocks from a man who wouldn't know a principle if he stumbled across it.
A total lack of self-knowledge.
He slags off the party he wanted to leave.
This is one defection I suspect Reform UK will come to regret with every word he's proving Kemmy right.
So Ian Dale's on Kemi's team Kemi, Dan Hodges, Kemi Badnock has probably done Robert Jenrick like a kipper, another guy that's always wrong.
Alastair Campbell, smart maybe Kemi Badnock.
So, you know, all the people who are always wrong are backing Kemi and who always like establishment and regime.
Doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong, but it's kind of a good heuristic I always find.
And that is a question, though, who comes out worse.
I mean, the Tories are going to be damaged by it.
They're going to have to be this sort of Lib Dem party now.
But then you've still got the actual Lib Dems.
Who is an actual Tory voter now?
It's quite tricky to figure out.
No one admits it publicly anymore, do they?
No.
And there's been that many defections from the Tories over to reform that the average Tory voter is going to think to himself, well, if I want classic Tory policies, all of the people who came up with them are now in reform.
Yeah.
So I'll just vote reform.
They have literally become the replacement Tory party.
Exactly.
And so, but it does split.
The danger of it to me, it splits the right even more.
I think at this point, reformers have to completely destroy the Tories and try and just get more and more of them.
Because it does split that vote even more.
Not that I say the right, I mean the fake right.
But, you know, there's a danger of Labour doing some sort of agreement with the Lib Dems and that being, and these two being split.
It seems less likely they'd do a deal at this point since it's got so nasty, but who knows?
It's sort of a good thing that, you know, looking for a silver lining here...
Obviously, I'd prefer reform to be very much, you know, on side.
However, if they do gobble up the Tories entirely, at least it gets rid of them off of the picture, finally, and they finally get what they deserve.
I suppose that's...
I mean, if it's all the same people under a different name, though, what difference does it make?
It is extraordinary.
I've said they'll probably all still be backed by the same money as well.
My point being that if reform takes out the Tories, rather than a genuine right-wing party having to face two other parties, it's just going to have to face one with all the same people, which would be very easy rhetorically to be like, well, you're just the Conservative Party's in a teal tie.
It's weird, isn't it?
Especially the fact they brought in the Deem Zahawi, who was just a terrible appointment.
Then they bring a slightly better appointment of Jenmik.
It is what Trump did with the Republican Party, but just Nigel's outside of it just sucking them all to him like sort of iron filings to a magnet and just making a new toy party separately.
It is very...
It feels like wish fulfilment from Farage.
He's been kind of backed out of it.
Yeah, he'd been backed out of the Tory establishment for so long, so long ago, that he decided, fine, I'll just make my own Tory party, except I'll be the leader of it.
And that's literally what's happened.
That's what's happening.
Yeah, here's the random men of trash post.
How disappointing to discover that Robert Jenrick was plotting all along to undermine Kemi.
Some men clearly can't cope with having a strong woman leader who refuses to pander to their ego.
That's Sarah Vine.
Just thought it was just lols, really.
Basically, we've agreed they all largely suck.
There remains one man who can solve all this.
Come off the hour.
Rupert Lowe is the only one talking seriously about how to actually change politics.
He had a plan here.
He says one message has been reinforced today in the most spectacular fashion.
Westminster is a vile snake pit infested with those who put their own personal interests above that of the country.
And it's quite long, so I'll just go at the end.
This is the key part where he says he's going to decide what to do next.
We need an entirely different way of doing things.
Hundreds of men and women from outside politics put forward for election, all of whom must have had nothing to do with how our country has been so abhorrently failed.
I'm going to think long and hard over the weekend about my next step.
Britain doesn't need mere reform from the same arsonists who burned it to the ground.
A real alternative must be provided.
I will do that.
And he's completely right.
If he got together with someone like Dominic Cummings, who's talking about let's bring in people from outside politics, business leaders, military veterans, and so on.
This is what you've got to do.
As Farage, as discussed, he's just changing the brand, changing the colour of the Tory Party.
Completely pointless.
Doesn't seem to really be wanting to build a team.
Rupert's talking about actual change.
So let's hope it can be done.
And by the way, we have an exclusive interview with Rupert in Islander 5.
See how I'm just like...
Lawless segue, though.
Yeah, it's pretty.
Yeah, I've been on TV a lot.
Exclusive interview and with the man himself.
So check out Island the Five.
Available while stocks last.
They are going pretty quick, so snap them up while you still can.
Yes, and then sell them on eBay in six years.
No, it's on treasure it forever.
Lotus somewhere.
If you're not going to read it, bury it that only you know where it is.
Yeah, and it's a really nice one as well.
The cup is really nice, and it's got an exclusive Rupert Lowe interview.
So yeah, there you go.
That's my bit, chaps.
There you go.
Now he's just gonna text Milford.
I was checking the time.
You see, you think I'm being slack?
It's actually so conscientious.
I did 23 minutes 46.
We have a clock there.
Lock schmock, where is it?
That's not time in my segment, is it?
It's with an exact stopwatch.
I respect the autism.
I respect the hustle.
We do have some rumble rants.
Do you want to read through them or shall I?
I can do.
I covered it up because they were saying annoying things during my thing.
They were saying that we don't care about Jenner.
We actually love you, Rumble Ranters.
So don't listen to this misanthrope.
Yeah, exactly.
Don't listen to me.
But notice someone said no one cares about Generic.
I was like, dude, that's the whole segment.
Tell us about Carl's ex-post.
I didn't know what it meant either.
I don't know.
Oh, oh, it's the very vague one that Carl put out about potential big things happening in the future.
You won't find out what I want you to find out.
No, not vague posting.
Vague posting coming 6 p.m.
40 million views, 300,000 likes, and every reply is what?
Yeah, what?
What is this?
Yeah.
Okay, well, so it's Exile 29.
No one cares about Jenrick.
Tell us about Carl's ex-post.
Hayden W. Hello from Cornwall of Cornish Pasty and Lotus podcast is a great combo for Friday.
Hello, sir.
Luke ST91.
G'day, all.
Hope you're doing okay.
Don't worry, Nick.
Josh came back, but he came crawling back.
I'm sorry, Josh, they made me read these.
The more I see this happening, the more I convinced that he's going to use defections for a Tory coalition.
Yeah, I'm going to be joining reform soon.
No, I think he meant the Generic defection, not you.
You're pulling the strings the whole time.
That's why he needed all of the extra free time.
I think you meant Josh.
Sigilstone says, citing their expertise on committing political suicide, Sally, saying, well, it's a form of suicide at least.
Dr. Jack Kavorkian has chosen to join reform.
I don't get that reference.
No, it's too advanced for me.
Google Jack Kvorkian, please.
I'm doing that right now.
Is he one of the guys behind?
Josh hasn't heard of him yet either, but he is welcoming reform.
That's the main thing.
Oh, he's a pathologist and euthanasia proponent.
Yeah, is he Canadian?
Um he was born in America.
Maybe he has something to do with it.
Either way, I know we just ended on an Islander shill, but this is my segment, so I might as well start with it and get it out of the way.
Islander number five, soon to be a very, very hot commodity when they sell out, and they are selling out very fast.
Get them while they are still available, so you can have a beautiful copy of this in your hands in your home.
You can cradle it instead of chip cradling your children.
You can covet it as you may your neighbour's wife.
And it has a number of excellent articles in here.
An incredible interview with Rupert Lowe, conducted by our editor, Rory, is well worth it for only $14.99 while stocks last.
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So get them whilst you still can.
With that, let's talk about the news.
And that is the attack that has been.
This is a repeated assault, really.
It's getting abusive at this point, where Starmer is kind of doing this, doing this will he, won't he, with the pubs in England, which is, is he going to destroy British pubs or not?
The jury is still out.
He still tries to make it sound as though he loves British pubs.
He has his own personal favourite, his local.
He takes all of these photographs in pubs, and they always say that they're going to protect pubs.
But the thing is, if they were actually going to protect pubs, they wouldn't have to keep coming out publicly time and time and time again, reminding everybody after their latest policy announcements have gone down terribly.
Like, do you remember when they were planning on banning smoking in beer gardens?
Which was obviously just an attack on people's ability to enjoy themselves at the pub, making it a less attractive place to go to.
Everybody knows that they're trying to use pubs as a tax raid.
I still remember the blokes shouting at him and kicking him out of the pub.
That was hilarious.
I think that makes sense.
That's the origin story, the villain arc where it all began.
It's a good picture of it.
That's an Odempic photo.
Nobody is who Starmer was before he got kicked out of that pub.
Yeah, and one of the most recent policy announcements that they've made, which a lot of people are taking as an attack on rural pubs in particular, remember, of course, that with a lot of the net zero stuff that goes around within Labour and Ed Miliband as well, it's the same kind of neoliberal policies that the Tories were pushing as well, which is that anywhere in rural England that isn't being used for HMOs, housing for immigrants,
or enormous wind farms and solar energy farms is basically just wasted land and we need to get rid of it so that we can buy it all up for that.
And on that land is a lot of rural pubs.
And there's this new law that policy that they're looking to implement that would decrease the tolerance, sorry, yeah, decrease the tolerance for how much you're allowed to have drank and still drive, which some people are taking as an attack on rural pubs because, of course, they are quite remote.
A lot of people, even within the local area, aren't going to be able to walk down country lanes to get to them.
So they're going to have to drive to it.
And the new laws are looking to cut the drink driving limit so that even a single pint, a single pint, could see drivers breaking the law.
This is a new zero-tolerance approach that they might take.
It's not going to change anything, though.
Like, is there any evidence to back this up?
Also, there's the fact that in the countryside, you know, down my neck of the woods, and they're like, people drink a lot more than one pint and get in their car, which is already illegal.
So I don't think it's trying to put fear in people.
My torture break, and I was literally just walking down the middle of two miles.
The sheep turns out to be right next to you and the pitch black.
That's what it's like.
You can't just, you have to...
Not that I drove then.
Not that you would ever admit to lawful wrongdoing.
No, I didn't drive, but the idea that you can just easily, you know, as long as you don't use a car is what I'm looking at.
It's like, well, how are you going to get there and back a lot?
It's not going to happen.
So it sort of erodes the idea of having a designated driver who can at least have one drink and partake to some degree.
If you just can't drink and then you've got to ferry a bunch of drunk people, that's not very appealing.
No one really wants to do that.
No, so a lot of people are worried that if this is implemented, then people will not go to their local rural pubs as often, which could obviously massively damage the ability of those pubs to stay open.
Because as ever, this seems to be motivated by city dwellers' hatred for rural countryside life more than anything, and a complete misunderstanding of the culture that goes on in the countryside, especially given that within this article itself, they cite that since 2023, drunk driving, I think possibly longer than that, drunk driving-related accidents have been on the decrease, and that's without having implemented zero-tolerance policies like this.
I mean, saving the pubs could be done quite easily.
All you need to do is reduce the amount of tax on the alcohol served so it can actually be cheaper to get a pint in a pub rather than buying it from, say, a supermarket, which most people have been doing these days.
You can obviously reduce the cost of energy, which has been absolutely squashing the profit margins of most pubs because energy is so expensive and obviously they use quite a lot of energy.
As well as the fact that if you really want to incentivize people reopening the country pubs that have already closed, because so many of them have closed, why don't you have it so that there are incentives in place that if you're rejuvenating a new pub, maybe there are grants available, maybe you have to pay less tax or something to try and motivate people to open these because they are an important part of a local community other than a nice place to go.
And I know that a lot of more rural areas, they're the sort of main place where people socialise other than, say, like a town hall or something like that.
Yes, it's for social cohesion because it's a nice, comfortable, neutral zone for everybody to go to where they can all socialize.
You don't always want people round your house.
No, it's kind of annoying.
You've got to tidy up first, and also you need to get all the chairs out.
And you don't always want to go around somebody's house, because more than anything, houses aren't set up to host a load of people all the time.
Unless you're very rich.
Unless you're very rich.
It's going to be cramped.
It's going to be claustrophobic.
You're going to have to worry about spilling things on people's furniture.
And obviously, you should still treat people's pubs with respect, but they're built for people to stand around and sit around and have conversations and drink in them.
So it just makes more sense.
Yeah, it's a foundational part of English culture, really, and British culture in general, to be able to, on a Friday night, on the weekend, even on a weekday night sometimes, to go to the pub, see your friends and cool off.
It's just a symbolic battle between the spiritual tradition of England versus the managerial Labour government.
Because I just read C.S. Lewis's ransom trilogy, That Hideous Strength is the third book.
He satirizes this brilliantly.
There's this sort of bureaucracy that are evil and literally satanic.
One of them goes to the pub with another guy and he says, well, isn't this like too dark?
Where's the sanitation?
He just sees it as a dark place that lacks adequate nutrition in its offerings and things like this.
This is kind of how, that's obviously satire, but that's how they see it, these people.
They don't like, these kind of people don't like the pub.
They don't like the country either.
Sort of city folk, aren't they?
That's how I see them.
The managerial city folk that is discomforting.
Well, I mean, I agree.
I mean, Kier Starmer's own favourite pub is in Kentish Town in North London.
So it's as far away from a countryside rural setting as you can get.
Even from Roundier, is he?
No, and even they don't want him there anymore, as we'll find out in a moment.
But those were all excellent ideas for putting in incentives for people to be able to go to their local pub and enjoy a pint and maintain the business and maintain the social cohesion of those local areas.
That's fantastic.
Now, they are potentially going to be doing a U-turn on this, but what if instead the government almost doubled business rates for local pubs and all hospitality in general?
Because this is something that the Treasury has basically stated at this point that they are going to do a reversal on this.
But since Rachel Reeves' last budget, it's been looking that they've set aside £4.3 billion in transitional relief in the budget so that they would try and be able to sneak this through the door.
But that, in terms of how this is actually going to hit individual pubs, is going to be a drop in the ocean.
Because they say in this article, when the budget was examined immediately, following the average pub, and I believe this also applies to a lot else in the hospitality industry as well, but pubs were the ones that people were focusing on.
The average pub was facing a 15% increase in business rates in April, rising to 48% next year and 76% in 2028.
So almost doubling the expenses on business rates for these places.
It's ruinous.
And as well, as you say, with all of the other electricity costs and everything else that comes with this, potentially new laws put in place that are going to disincentivize people going to the pubs in the future.
This is going to make it so that the only pubs that are going to be able to survive are probably going to be the kinds that, I mean, even the ones that these ministers who came up with these ideas go to, they might not survive either.
Of course.
They hate small business.
Not just pubs in country, they hate small business.
I grew up in a little restaurant.
We lived above it.
My dad was the chef.
And the constant change.
Oh, you've got to have a new fire door.
It's constant nonsense like that.
Rates.
They just hate small business.
Sorry.
Well, they've also done this to pubs and hospitality more generally, which are industries that are already not exactly generating a very large profit to begin with.
Pubs are already dying before they did any of this.
And so this is just accelerating that to an absurd degree.
Yeah, and for all of the welfarism that Labour pushes as well, they just see these small businesses, they see them as little, little money pouches to steal from.
That's what it is.
It's always about, it's not just about the attack.
There is also a certain level because Rachel Reeves explained, and a lot of the ministers explained that they hadn't actually consulted any of the business leaders that these policies would be affecting before they decided to write up the policies.
Classic.
Which is a genius move.
They genuinely just don't understand.
They are completely incompetent and think that, well, these businesses are here, therefore they will always be here and they will make a certain amount of money and therefore we can just skim as much of that money off of the top as we want and things will remain the same.
There seems to be a strange level of static thinking going into it.
Well, they're looking at numbers on a spreadsheet and not thinking about the implications of it is the best I could probably give them.
But of course, Rachel Reeves, what's her actual claim to any economic expertise?
She worked in an IT support department for a bank.
She doesn't know what she's doing, does she?
That's up to me.
She can't.
It says here the crisis has been triggered by the unwinding of COVID-era discounts on business rates for the retail, hospitality, and leisure sectors, coupled with a rates revaluation.
So, those discounts were to make sure that during COVID, while they were having to be shut, that they would still be able to remain open.
Obviously, that didn't really work all of that well because they still closed a lot of pubs following COVID.
Allies of Ms. Reeves insist she became aware of the scale of the issue only after the budget because Treasury officials were barred from looking at the impact of the rates revaluation on individual businesses.
Why?
Why?
Anyone got any good answers for that?
No, no.
The scale of the increase has triggered a furious backlash from the hospitality sector, with more than 1,500 pubs reported to have banned labor MPs from their premises.
Nice.
I respect it.
Makes perfect sense.
But of course, ministers have signalled that there will be a climb down on this, a U-turn on the tax hikes for these pubs.
It says here, mutinous labor MPs were told that Rachel Reeves will announce a package of emergency help within days.
Now, this article was updated after this, and I've looked around and I can't see anything saying that this has definitely happened yet, but we'll see as the time goes on.
In an about-turn, rapid even for this government, Treasury sources confirmed the climb down just six weeks after the Chancellor unveiled budget plans, which critics said would send all of these businesses in the retail and hospitality sector to the wall.
This package will deliver a lifeline for pubs, but they were unable to say exactly how it would work or what it will be worth, leaving pubs still worried.
And hotels, restaurants, and independent retailers reacted with fury after the minister signalled it because these concessions will only apply to pubs.
So even all of these other businesses that will be affected by this massive hike in business rates, they're not going to get any relief of it.
And even the relief that as yet we do not know what it is, that may be coming, it might just be another thing where they're like, oh, we've got more relief money for you.
Instead of £4.3 billion, let's make it an even £8 billion.
But even then, again, in terms of the overall lifetime increase in costs that's going to be incurred by these pubs, that will be a drop in the ocean.
The best way to solve this would be to just, frankly, eliminate these business rates altogether for these businesses.
Yeah.
Frankly, I mean, you're already taxing alcohol, and you're already having to get everything for the electricity and everything.
They can find different ways of making up whatever budget shortfalls that that would create, including, say, for instance, I don't know, maybe like massively reducing the welfare state.
I would get rid of tax.
Just never sat right with me.
I agree.
Hear, here.
You know, every time I look at my pay slip at the end of the month, I just, I feel you, man.
All that flat rate thing they tried in Latby or somewhere.
I like the sound of that.
It was very simple, flat rate.
Have you heard of that?
Yeah, it makes sense because then everyone pays the same amount of tax, and it's still a proportionate system.
And I still think it's ultimately suffering the same problems, but it's less egregious than the one we have.
I think you should be able to pay for better services relative to how much money you have, basically.
Like, I shouldn't have money taken from me and given to single mothers.
That's even worse.
So they showed up yesterday.
Yeah.
I can't believe you picked out single mothers among the many groups that we don't want to give money to.
I just wanted to show how hard line is.
They're one of the ones I don't think about very much.
There are lots of others that come well ahead of them in line.
I know, but I've talked about those many times.
It's boring.
I've got to say new things.
Josh, Josh, going after the mothers.
It's a bit tongue.
I've just got to say new things by reverting to 2005 Daily Mail rhetoric.
That's breaking new ground there, buddy.
Hey, the news cycle's boring sometimes.
You've got to get kind of hedonic treadmill of your own rhetoric.
Who can I go after now?
I've done all the hypocrites.
I know mothers.
My own colleagues.
You in particular, Harry.
I don't want anything for you.
And of course, the Tories and other parties have tried to use this as a beating stick for them.
But frankly, Labour don't really need much opposition to tank their next election whenever that comes around.
That's one of the reasons that they've been going around cancels saying, please cancel your local elections that are coming up.
And I believe at least a dozen councils have started to just actually cancel these elections because it's not looking good for Labour.
A YouGov poll cited in this article has revealed more people than ever disapprove of the government with a net approval rating of slumping to minus 59, an all-time low.
That's pretty bad.
And this will be part of it.
There will be a lot of compounding factors.
But this kind of just attack on traditional British culture and people's social lives is seen as something that's a complete disconnect from this kind of ruling elite city dweller mentality to the rest of the country.
And even those within the cities that they dwell in, even those who dwell within the pubs, which are supposedly Keir Starmer's favourite local, the pineapple in Kentish Town in North London, have said that they want him barred.
He shouldn't be welcome here, according to locals at his local, such as the unpopularity of the Prime Minister, this Labour stronghold.
Locals in this Labour stronghold, locals have said that they would boycott the establishment if he wasn't barred by the landlord.
I know that I used to be gigs there when I started comedy, I think.
Sorry, did you ever see Keir in the audience?
No, no.
It's the one I'm thinking of.
He didn't like the kind of place he would ever be, to be honest with you.
There's photographs of him there.
There he is pretending to be human.
He looks very out of place there.
There's the outside of it.
Do you recognise it?
No, maybe it's not the same one, but it's similar to a lot of Kentish Town pubs.
There he is posing with real people, of which he is not one.
And here's a load of tweets of him saying, like, I'm at this pub right now for a quick drink before lunch.
I'm really enjoying going to the pub, initiate human programming, is what I'm lovely pint of alcohol and a scampy, please.
Stout yeoman of the bar.
And the chancellor, the chancellor, that being Rachel Reeves, has already been barred from the Martian, her local, by that landlord, Martin Knowles.
Since then, more than 200 pubs have backed a campaign to ban Labour MPs from all pubs.
But even whisperings of a tax climb down have failed to quell disquiet from inside the pineapple.
Yes, because it is a direct attack on their local social community.
It's interesting how the pub has become a sort of right-wing thing.
When I go back home down my way, I think that's another reason they hate it so much.
The last couple of times I went to the Pub down there, someone's recognized me from here and bought me a pint.
So, if there are Lotus Eaters audience members in the pubs, perhaps that's part of the reason.
There's a few people like that at my local pub as well.
I've actually become friends with a couple of them.
They tend to be good blokes.
The secret fight club we have everywhere.
Well, we don't talk about it.
Obviously, that's one of the rules.
Quite high on the list.
But yeah.
Well, he's going to spill all the secrets.
If there were a secret network of people, you know, in ordinary jobs, they would be Lotus Eaters fans rather than Kier Starmer fans.
That's all I'm saying.
This is true.
This is true.
But I just want to end on this as well, which is that if they do end up going back on this tentatively, this is not the only thing that they are kind of half-heartedly backtracking at the same time.
Because, of course, we heard a lot of word for a long time about digital IDs and mandatory digital IDs, that being Tony Blair's secret plan 20 plus years in the making, the thing that he really got into politics to do for whatever reason.
He's just been laser-focused and obsessed with mandatory digital ID.
But in the past week, we've heard word that this government is going to drop the plans for it.
But I don't think it's quite so simple.
I'll just go through some of this information and then we can end here.
So they say in this BBC article, the government has dropped plans requiring workers to sign up to a new digital ID system in order to prove their right to work in the UK, because this was being sold as a larger anti-illegal immigration effort, I should say.
Of course, ignoring the fact that illegal immigrants being employed by foreign businesses probably wouldn't have them on the books in the first place, negating the whole point of this.
These people have been, we've seen it many, many times from people who've done reports and investigations into these foreign businesses that purposefully hire foreign illegal workers.
Is they'll basically sneak them in through the back door, have them living above or nearby, sometimes even multiple people in essentially a shed for a few weeks, and then they will filter them out, cycle in a new group, and that original group will end up going elsewhere in the country.
None of it ever gets put on the books.
So why they think that this would change anything?
Answer, it wouldn't.
It's just so that they can add an extra layer of control over your day-to-day life and track you.
But they are saying that they are going to work to pull this back.
Instead, labor ministers say that existing checks using documents such as biometric passports will move fully online by 2029, which sounds like not too much of a distinction to me.
Because if you're still using these biometric passports and everything is going to move fully online, the likelihood seems to me, correct me if I'm wrong here, lads, that they would probably still want to bundle all of that information into a single app for convenience of use, which was the thing that they were saying that this digital ID would be in the first place.
Basically, all of you.
The customers of state are going that way already.
And the way in which the services are being transformed all signals that digital ID is going to come along regardless.
And until that changes, I don't believe that it's gone for good.
Amazing, as you say, how obsessed they've always been with it, Blair particularly, and how the British public always reject it.
Because even if we're massively surveilled and tracked now, it remains a symbolic thing that we just don't react well to.
Digital ID, we're like, no.
It feels like the last step for a lot of people.
And we always say no, and they always push it again because Satan never takes a day off.
So they always.
It's funny.
This time Rupert Lowe was a big part of getting rid of it.
But as you say, maybe it's not really gone.
It'll never really be gone because they'll never get it.
They'll always continue to push it.
They'll always want it to be in the works.
Even if the last globalist left on Earth was in some secret bunker somewhere, they'd be pushing for digital ID in some capacity.
Like in a tiny like Alex Jones bunker to broadcasting to an audience of 3,000 people.
He'll be pushing for digital ID.
And again, that is what's still going on.
The transport secretary, Heidi Alexander, told BBC Radio 4's Today program the government is still absolutely committed to mandatory digital rights to work checks, including through biometric passports, and said that digitizing the system would help crack down on illegal working.
The digital ID quote could be one way in which you prove your eligibility to work through a digital right to work check, she said.
So again, to me, the celebration of this, it seems to be symbolic because they are saying that they're dropping rights, dropping plans for mandatory digital ID, but we are still going to be digitizing all of the other government documents and checks, moving them fully online by 2029, and presumably as part of that, creating some kind of government app that will bundle all of these together, which was literally what they said the digital ID was going to be anyway.
All of your government documents and files bundled together onto a single app that can be used for convenience.
So it's interesting how we keep getting these small victories, these small incremental victories, while the broader points, the broader goals of these policies are still very much in work behind the scenes.
It may be that they're just saying this to get people to stop paying as much attention to it right now before they just go ahead and announce that they've done it already.
So we'll see where this goes.
I do think that if you're going to do anything, if you want to help the situation, if you don't frequent your local pub, go to your local pub, speak to the local people there, form that bond with your community if you don't have it already, because it is the best thing that you can do to get a real love and connection to your home.
There we go.
I'll read through some of the rumble rants we've got here.
Are you going to cover Victor Orban exposing Queer Starmer's back core sellout at the EU meeting in Hungary a few days ago?
It's a huge story, but the MSM is playing full cover for the worm.
I'd not actually seen that.
Have either of them.
At least I've heard about it, yeah.
Yeah, well, there goes to show the kind of reporting that we're getting about it over here.
Have you heard about it?
No, I don't think I have.
No, I'll have to take a look at that.
Sigil Stone sends two in saying, let me put it this way about Kvorkian.
His advocacy is the source of assisted suicide all over the West.
That's what I suspected.
And Starma just wants to ban alcohol to comply with Sharia law.
Luke says, if your rural pubs are anything like the rural pubs we have in Australia, there won't be any cops for miles for you guys to worry about getting pulled over.
That is true.
That was something that I was considering as well.
But again, just knowing that the law is on the books can itself act as a disincentive for some people who might just have it play in the back of their mind.
Now this isn't going on YouTube.
There is a workaround as well to drinking and driving if you're in the countryside.
And that is own a horse because it's not illegal to be drunk on a horse and you can return to tradition at the same time.
That's also many old pubs still have the same facilities for a horse.
What if the horse is drunk?
Is that covered?
There's no laws saying your horse can't get drunk.
I was going to say, are you allowed to ride a sober, like a drunk horse as long as you're sober?
I wouldn't recommend it, but I'll try.
I don't think it's illegal.
I'm sure it would be more animal abuse to get your horse drunk.
Can you ride any other animals?
I don't know.
Getting beyond the limits of my maybe a donkey.
I do a whole segment on this.
I think, no, I don't think it's a segment.
This is worthy of a full-on Lotus Eaters experiment.
We need to, like, top gear style, go to a aircraft.
If you want to donkey me on a horse, someone else on, I don't know.
I'm way too big for it.
Someone with like a sleigh.
Well, invite Callum back in so that he can go on the donkey.
That feels right.
It feels like comic relief to have the tall person on the donkey.
Luca's the lightest.
He could ride a small cat.
Okay.
Give him a little sleigh of cats.
He's on the little sleigh, and there's just a bunch of cats trying to pull him on.
I think we've got an idea here, chaps.
Anyway, carrying on.
KO7776: Maybe commies just hate small business because they're impossible to nationalize, whereas big business is easy.
This is true.
It would be much easier to nationalize the slug and lettuce than it would be your local.
That's Connor's ideal policy.
He's got like slugging lettuce nationalism tattooed on him somewhere.
Hewitt, 1642, the only way to save pubs is to enforce mandatory smoking for all patrons over 12 years of age.
Go earlier.
I would remove the ban on indoor smoking for pubs.
I would have the pub.
The pub owner can have discretion over that's where I step off because I did comedy for years in these places and I would be dead.
But you're both smokers, aren't you?
There's a lot.
There's no reason we smoke.
I turn into a manager.
Speak of my father seeing this.
No, I'm not.
Okay.
Yeah, good point.
I turn into a managerial fascist when it comes to smoking.
I always, all the principles got them in there because I hate it so much.
But I understand.
I'd keep it like it is.
You don't love the beautiful atmosphere of the hazy smoke in the old-fashioned English pub.
If you say no to this, I'm going to accuse you of being a Jacobin or something.
No comment then.
We certainly covered up the smell.
When they changed them, you're like, oh, old pubs stink when they got rid of smoking.
You know what I mean?
When they first got me, they'd be like, oh, they smell weird.
They smell like old food.
They do, yeah.
Also, sticky flaws sometimes.
This is starting to turn into pub bashing.
I won't accept it.
I'll run that last two.
Bay state: first rule of LE Fight Club by Islander.
Second rule of LE Fight Club.
Caps locked this time by Islander.
Third rule of LE Fight Club: never give money to those lazy single mothers.
That's Josh's first rule.
And Luke also says, I second this top gear idea you have.
I think it will make a great lad's hour.
That's true.
And let's get on.
Not sure we'll fit all the barnyard animals in the studio, to be honest, but it's worth a shot.
Hang on.
I'm going to double-check that this one.
I'm going to unplug the box.
There you go.
Oh, we're in business.
Okay.
So I'm going to be talking about why we are not the same.
And who do I mean by we?
I mean the West.
I mean Europeans.
We are not the same as the rest of the world.
And we've talked about this a lot, and particularly in regards to immigration, but we've never looked at the actual data in the research and the psychological publications that have been discussing this sort of thing.
And I find it very interesting.
And what sort of inspired me to do this was someone very kindly tagged me in this and they said I'd find it interesting.
And it's just a graph.
I'm not sure if it's actually representing any sort of data or more of an analogy.
This bell curve, it reminds me of another variation of bell curves that I've seen elsewhere.
Also, I imagine the distribution would look very similar as well.
It does actually.
But the point being that Westerners have very unique psychology relative to the rest of the world.
And this guy here, William Meyer, does talk about one study from 2020.
And I'm going to read what he says and then give you my own thoughts and we can sort of talk about it in greater detail.
So he talks about the multivariate rarity of Western psychology.
Multivariate just means multiple variables.
Using data from the World Values Survey from 2005 to 2014 across 80 different countries, so around 85% of the world's population, an Indian researcher and a bunch of other Western researchers showed that cultural and psychological differences between societies are best understood as patterns across multiple variables rather than as large gaps on any single dimension.
So basically what they're saying is that there can be overlap, but these These differences compound over multiple variables that create the uniqueness of each culture and therefore there can be quite significant differences even though on a single variable there can be people in multiple different cultures that exhibit that that behaviour.
And it carries on saying when hundreds of traits are considered jointly Western populations emerge as statistically unusual in multivariate psychological space despite substantial overlap on individual traits.
Broadly speaking the study finds that Western populations exhibit higher individualism, are more willing to cooperate and extend moral concern beyond kin, place greater emphasis on personal freedom and self-expression, display greater tolerance for individual variation and place less emphasis on obedience to authority.
Now all of this to me sounded very common sense.
It did yeah and it's interesting to me that things that we've talked about without any sort of data background here are being vindicated as statistically significant differences between Western cultures and other cultures.
And is there anything there that you think should be there that's missing?
Of course, we're going to be talking about this for the rest of the segment.
I mean, I can already see one of the things that they say has been left out of it.
But one thing that makes me curious about this is obviously we've got the comparison between all non-Western cultures and Western cultures in general as well.
Is there anything major that differentiates all of the non-Western cultures that's included within this?
Because I'm curious, is it that say a Chinese and a Middle Eastern culture is more similar to one another than either of them are to Western cultures?
So there's this interesting phenomenon where East Asia in particular there's.
There's basically I'm gonna get into the weeds a little bit and people are gonna wag their finger at me, but if you look at maps of genetic diversity, the parts of East Asia that are considered quite collectivist so China and the Koreas, Japan and some of the other Southeast Asian sort of the Oriental countries, as we'd call them they've got very low amounts of genetic variation.
There's a lot of homogeneity there and also they're very collectivist, which I find interesting.
And that's different to some of the, the rest of, say even Asia itself, in that because they've got this genetic homogenousness which is obviously not the correct homogeneity.
That's the one I did say.
Christian said it a second ago, I know, but I'm trying to explain it in simple terms and not sound like a jargony idiot.
So So because they're very homogenous, they can have this view of the collective good and things like that and feel more at ease with being dependent on one another.
However, other parts of that world just simply don't have that because there's more genetic differences and there's a genetic route to this manifestation of social behavior that you don't get elsewhere.
And I think in particularly Germanic cultures in Europe, we're disproportionately individualistic.
We're sort of at the opposite end of the scale.
But that doesn't seem to be as related to genetic variability as it is.
There's still more variability than in East Asia.
You know, how people used to sort of back in the times when you could do this joke that some East Asian people very much look the same and it's easy to mistake them for one another.
You know, people still sometimes say that.
But there is actually some data to back that up.
And there's still the variation in Europe, but the variation doesn't map on as neatly to this linear relationship between genetic variation and, say, collectivism and things like that.
So there's suggestions, and I've been reading a book on this, that Western individualism may have been more of a cultural innovation than pure genetic determinism.
I think it probably is.
There's more of a cultural element to it than perhaps how people view society in other parts of the world.
It also seems higher in England than in Europe historically, in terms of like English people would move away from family and go and find houses where the work was and set up their own castle.
What I'm into, maybe it's too big a question, what I'm interested in is the idea that higher individualism, but paradoxically more willing to cooperate.
Because of course, if you just care about your clan, you don't care about the whole.
The thing about that, it can flip.
If you're individualistic, there's still to be some sense of a wider family, whether it's genetic or not.
You have to have a sense of you want to cooperate with everyone in the country and be an individual at the same time rather than just your clan.
But if that goes wrong, you have the sort of atomization we have now.
Well, in the research that I've read regarding this by people like Kevin MacDonald and some of the stuff that I've seen from Joseph Heinrich who discuss Western individualism, it seems to be the idea that particularly with the northwestern climates of Scandinavia, Britain, Northern Europe in general, that because of the fact that the climate forced clans to be much more atomized in general,
it forced for resource acquisition a greater deal of cooperation between clans.
And you had to be able to use your reputation, develop a good reputation as an honourable and trustworthy person so that people from outside of your immediate group would be willing to cooperate with you,
which they suggest is why it is that Westerners in general have a, but Northwest Europeans more specifically have a greater deal of willingness to cooperate because they have descended from a culture that has emphasized things like honour, trustworthiness and altruism to the out-group, even when the out-group was just the next clan over.
There's also a very interesting phenomenon whereby collectivist societies, and there were lots of studies done in China, for example, and they found that despite you thinking, well, okay, they're collectivists, they care about the group, they care about, you know, getting along with other people and the well-being of the group over themselves.
Well, in China, they found that people are far more willing to cheat to get ahead and lie and do underhanded things, like to the extent whereby there was one of the questions, I believe, that stood out to me was, were you willing to poison someone in a fair competition to try and eliminate them because they're clearly better than you?
And in China, that was the culture that was most willing to do that.
And also...
Next superpower, guys.
Yeah.
That's disturbing.
And in Japan, for example, there were, because of the nature of rice farming, because there's also this divide between the individualistic northern Chinese.
I know I'm going back to China again, which is not Japan, but the northern Chinese were more individualistic and the southern Chinese were more collectivist.
And the north they cultivated wheat, and in the south they cultivated rice.
And that's simply because you need to cooperate more with the rice cultivation than you do with the wheat.
And so there's a difference within the culture.
But with studies in Japan of rice farmers, they found that actually being dependent on one another and having a collectivist approach made them more resentful and less likely to want to cooperate.
But they don't complain about it and address problems of people not putting in sufficient effort and feeling like they're doing a disproportionate amount of the work because they wanted to smooth over relations.
Whereas when you're individualistic, you can agree to cooperative terms on a more fair sort of balance because you're not necessarily dependent on one another.
And so you've got a position to negotiate.
If you break off that cooperation, you're not doomed then to starve.
Yeah, one thing, and this is obvious, I suppose, given everything we know about immigration, but the problem is if you put in the people who will potentially poison you in with the high trust people, it's a prisoner's dilemma.
And you brought in people who are just going to do the wrong thing.
I mean, that's why you can't have cultures mixing.
One thinks that you can poison someone and the other things you can't on a point of honour.
And the interesting thing with that comparison with China is that China, obviously you can quibble over whether the IQ scores that they present to the rest of the world are entirely accurate or not.
But they are an intelligent people.
They are a very highly advanced culture.
Even before Westerners got there, they were one of the outside of Europe, they were one of the grandest civilizations.
In the times, they were more technologically advanced than even the Romans in some dimensions.
Exactly.
So this isn't always a question of pure intelligence.
This is a question of temperament, personality trait.
You can be smart but evil.
Not shockingly.
Not all Chinese people are evil or anything like that.
I've met plenty.
I've worked with plenty of very kind Chinese people.
No poisoning?
Not that I'm aware of.
Do you know what won't poison you though?
Island and magazine.
Buy it now for £15 or £14.99.
I'm inflating the price for someone.
Josh has just saved you a penny.
I did, just by misspeaking.
Discount.
It's got beautiful things in it.
You should buy it.
It sells for a lot more than we sell it for, so we could probably raise the price.
But we don't, because we're nice.
And because we're nice, you should buy our stuff.
Josh has tried to double the price, but we keep saying, no, Josh, you don't even work here.
He wants to put it out of the range of single mothers.
I don't want them reading.
It disgusts me.
No, of course not.
But anyway, one thing I did want to bring up is this.
So these are Piaget's stages of cognitive development.
Most people are actually familiar with this, even outside of psychology.
Piaget, I'm only hearing about him from Jordan Peterson.
Yeah, talk about him here.
That's probably where most people on the right have had it introduced.
So what I wanted to draw attention to is the concrete operational and formal operational stages of 7 to 11 years old here for concrete operational.
Concepts attached to concrete situations.
Time, space, and quantity are understood and can be applied, but not as independent concepts.
Interesting there that the concept of time is, you know, 7 to 11 year olds in this Western-centric notion of development when parts of certain continents still haven't got that.
What was it again?
Africa time?
That's the phrase, isn't it?
They themselves use, therefore, I'm not being dude.
Yeah.
We all know it's real.
And then there's the formal operational stage, which is 11-year-olds and older, theoretical, hypothetical, counterfactual thinking, abstract logic and reasoning, strategy and planning becomes possible.
Interesting there, isn't it?
There are certain abilities, mental abilities that are gatekept by stages of cognitive development.
We'll revisit this.
Concepts learned in one context can be applied to another.
So you learn one principle in something like innovating, say, when you're learning music, and then you apply that to something else, a field where it doesn't necessarily apply.
You can understand the actual abstract principles at play.
So that's very important.
And in this paper here, it has a quote somewhere down here from Piaget, who said, it is quite possible, go away, Science Direct.
Where is it?
It doesn't matter.
I'll read it.
It is quite possible, and it is the impression given by the known ethnography literature, that in numerous cultures, adult thinking does not proceed beyond the level of concrete operations.
So, you know, one of the most quoted developmental psychology psychologists is saying that many cultures, people don't actually exceed the stage in which in the West we get to at seven to eleven years old.
They never get to this formal operational stage where they can be, you know, theoretical and hypothetical.
Like, how would you feel if you didn't have breakfast this morning?
That's theoretically and hypothetically terrifying.
Oh.
Well, it is.
It is, isn't it?
Yes.
And factually.
I didn't want to go there.
I'm staying within the realm of theory.
You've learnt a concept in one context and applied it to another.
Well done.
Have I?
How good?
Even though I went to state school.
So did it all.
It all happens much later than these ages.
We all manage to get above our stations clearly, gentlemen.
We wouldn't be allowed on the spectator, though, or anything like that.
Thank God.
So another unique thing, other than the fact that we exceed the state of development of an 11-year-old, is that we're weirdly monogamous.
So here's a picture here, or a graph, should I say, looking at relationship types.
And you can see, other than this weird thing going on in Latvia, there's probably one dude with lots of wives there.
I don't know what the deal is there in the Baltic.
But apparently, the rest of Europe is very much monogamous.
Where does nothing, actually?
What's that, sorry?
Where does nothing, if you look at Britain?
Yeah, we've not got a doctor.
Ireland.
Ireland is accounted for byland.
We're not even playing the game are too individualistic.
It's an entire island of Nick Dixons.
I can't believe it.
People call us Turf Island.
Actually, that's wrong.
But it's interesting that this has existed in our culture since they argue here, the Middle Ages.
I would say even earlier than that.
Well, interestingly enough, this exact subject that you're talking about is all part of a book that I'm reading at the moment called Greatness and Ruin by a man called Dr. Ricardo Douchnes.
I don't know how to use it.
Oh, yeah, his surname.
And he's speaking all about all of this, and he's speaking about Piaget in exactly the context that you're talking about, where you can overlay the childhood development of cognition over to societal development as well.
He speaks about Joseph Heinrich and Heinrich puts it all down essentially to the Catholic Church banning cousin relationships.
Without those pesky, sexy cousins, we stay with our wives.
Spoken like a true Devonshireman.
The problem is that Heinrich seems to be suggesting that the Catholic Church just accidentally stumbled onto the rules that would allow for an explosion of monogamous monogamous marriages outside of your own immediately family group.
The problem is that it seems by all intents and purposes the Catholic Church knew exactly what it was doing.
So even within these works, like the weirdest people in the world...
I mean, it's mentioned explicitly here, look.
Yeah.
Joseph Heinrich and these works, they do still basically try and make it sound as though the West accidentally stumbled onto a winning formula for civilization.
They also like to attack Christianity.
Yes, which when instead, I think the evidence seems to suggest, given our great literary history, the history of people writing formal treatises on logic and all kinds of systematic thinking, that Europeans have been very well aware for most of the history since the ancient Greeks, what they were doing and why they were doing it.
No, I very much agree with you there.
And there's also the sort of second order effects of by having monogamy, you have the nuclear family and a form of individualism of you go out and you form your own nuclear family in your household.
This just sort of works in spreading civilization.
You also have a greater investment in rearing your own children.
If you're a man, because you've only got this one set of children from this one woman, rather than polygamous societies where, well, you know, I can trust that.
I wonder where you see this kind of behavior cropping up.
I'll have a few kids with this one, a few kids with that one, and they'll figure it out by the time.
I don't know, man.
I don't know where that's.
That's like Andrew Tate's philosopher.
Half of his philosophy, I imagine.
So yes, interestingly enough, in very monogamous areas, you also find increased trust in strangers, which you'd think, hang on a minute, well, if there's less community involvement in your family, how can you trust strangers?
Well, they're not as up in your business, or particularly your wife's business.
And so you're more trusting of them, I imagine.
And also the fact that you can cooperate with them, as we addressed before, sort of on your own terms rather than having to be dependent on them in some way.
And so I think that that leads to more honest and dare I say, equitable cooperation.
Again, it's all based on if I want to be able to work with the people from the next village over, I'm going to need to know that they're honest and trustworthy, and they're going to need to know that I'm honest and trustworthy.
Therefore, I should develop that reputation of being a virtuous person.
Best of all, actually exhibit it in your private life as well.
So another thing that's been associated with monogamy is greater psychological independence and analytical thinking, which I find interesting, as well as the development of impersonal institutions and markets.
So it basically opens up for greater commerce as well, which I find very interesting.
I don't know how these sort of different familial structures limit that.
I find that very interesting.
Like, how can you not have as widespread trading if you're, you know, you're a practitioner of polygyny?
I don't understand.
But I suppose that means that there's more research to be done.
But another useful way of looking at it is if we have a look at this, R and K selection in human families.
And these are strategies that are more sort of biological.
You can look at this in non-human species as well, looking for quantity and quality.
And this very much shapes how both an organism as well as a culture develops.
I think in the West, we're very quality-oriented, aren't we?
We generally have smaller families that we invest more into the children rather than, say, you go somewhere like India where they have about 10 kids, but you know, if one falls into the open sewer and dies, then you know, it's fine, I've got nine others, and so it's not as important.
Well, yeah, Europe is known for K-selection generally.
I mean, like you say, it's even represented in the way that we biologically develop, because on the K-selection side here, you can see traits like delayed sexual maturity and reproduction, fewer children and smaller families, longer birth intervals.
These are all things that are easily observable within.
Yeah, well, I hear cases in Africa and India and other parts of the world of girls getting pregnant at like six or seven years old.
And I was thinking to myself, how is that even possible?
But it's that they come from a part of the world where development and the sort of time in which you can reach sexual maturity is much lower because they come from these R-selection societies or peoples, should I say.
It's not really a social thing, it's all biological.
Whereas in the West, it simply wouldn't be possible for that to happen because we have this selection pressure towards how we use our resources.
And I can't remember what this is.
In my notes, I've just got it as racism.
Ah, yes.
Oh, yes.
So this study gets banded around a lot.
The white people are not racist to anyone and everyone else is racist to us.
And I think that although it is quite compelling, there are some limitations of it.
Although what it gets at is something unique about us, that we're uniquely focused about these sorts of things.
Like we are so oriented in being fair to one another because we've been programmed to think in sort of pro-social, bigger society ways because of the way all of the prior things have positioned us, that we look to cooperate with other people, that we're preoccupied with this, whereas other groups simply don't care and they're unapologetically chauvinistic for their own groups.
Now, one thing that does make me sceptical is that Asian respondents here rated white people as lower than black people, which if you've ever spoken to any Asian person ever, and Hispanics as well.
You would expect Asians to be like rank us above either of them.
It just means they're secretly hating us, Josh, even more than you think.
Well, I mean, this is this is, I assume, stated preferences.
So that is one weakness of this.
This is what those respondents want to signal, rather than necessarily reflecting revealed preferences.
I think if you were to go, for instance, with Asian rates of intermarriage, the revealed preference there would not reflect that.
I think it's high social status to slag white people.
It is, especially at the time when this study was taken, which is America, 2020, published in 2021.
Therefore, we're kind of reaching peak woke.
And so, of course, the whites are going to feel a certain political pressure to respond a certain way.
All other groups are being con constantly bombarded with propaganda about how whites are the worst people ever.
So there are also these cultural influences from the outside that we need to take into account.
Yeah, and I've read some of the other literature looking at this same question, and it seems to suggest a bit of a different picture, that actually white people are a bit more racist than it's made out to be, which, you know, would be expected, because I don't actually think...
Or a bit less pathetic, you could say.
That's another way of putting it.
The only one's like, we hate ourselves, we love everyone else.
They're all like, we hate you.
Which is a bit pathetic at a certain point.
Yeah, you're sort of like putting yourself at the bottom position in the hierarchy there.
But the point being here as well that you can't actually not be racist.
So to find that we're just not racist, it doesn't make sense because everyone unconsciously prefers people genetically related to them.
Whether it manifests or not as explicitly is a different question, but they do.
So there should be in an objective rating a bit more variance there.
And also I'd expect people to be a bit more favourable towards white people than here in ordinary times when it's not peak woke America.
It depends how much the revealed preference Harry was talking about comes out because if the white respondents say these things publicly and therefore act that way publicly because they know socially it's appropriate then it becomes the same thing.
If they privately act a completely different way, then this is erroneous.
I think that using stated preference here is...
It could be self-fulfilling to some degree is what I'm saying.
Or it might not be.
I think using stated preference is a mistake here anyway because I think it's much more interesting to look at revealed preference than stated because stated people will there's such a social acceptability desire here when you're talking about things like racism that it's such a taboo topic that people aren't going to be honest no matter what.
Yeah, but I'm just offering a counter that when you look at the white one, they do pretty much act like that.
So I wonder if because answering the it's just I'm just thinking out loud answering the poll is a social act but so is all kinds of other things.
They might treat people as they would answer the poll you see even if they privately have other views you know what I mean in their own house or in their own mind.
I'd also expect there to be more variation as well because I refuse to believe that white people living in America in certain parts of America wouldn't be racist just based on their experiences.
Like from what I've heard of people living in say black majority areas in the South who are white.
I've heard some pretty horrible stories.
I imagine it'd be enough to make people shift that little dot in that response.
But it's a flawed study I think.
But what is not a flawed study is the wealth of IQ data.
And one thing that is unique about the Western world is that barring Argentina for some reason, I wonder what aspect of the Western world got to that Argentina following World War II.
So.
You know what I was getting roped into here?
Disavow.
Wow, look at North Korea though.
Now that's impressive.
North Korea is doing alright.
South Korea is even better.
But what we're seeing here is basically East Asia and the West does very well on IQ tests.
I think Russia can be thrown in with Europe a little bit.
They're sort of got European culture, haven't they?
Despite, you know, I mean there's European Russia and then there's Asian Russia and I imagine European Russia is even then Asian Russia is probably doing fine as well.
Who've got Irish DNA in the test?
Because they're just a little behind on that.
I've got some.
A little bit reform versus Tory there on the but the point being here as well that a lot of the behaviours you have to reach a certain threshold of intelligence to be able to exhibit them.
To have the self-awareness for example not to use your speaker phone on public transport you need at least a post 90 IQ to be able to understand that concept that me making noise loud on phone disturbs other people therefore bad.
Right.
Which is very simple.
I've always wondered what the reason is.
But I thought it was because they other people don't have the same other groups don't have the same social conventions as us, but you're saying in many cases they basically physically incapable of understanding it.
Yeah, in the in the sense of I've told a lot of Indians off in public for doing antisocial things because I sort of take a zero tolerance approach now to people breaking English social norms.
And a lot of the time they're annoyed at the fact I have a problem with it.
That's more of an issue.
They don't even approach they don't even see the problem with it.
They just see me as having an objection to something they're doing.
It's like, what's the problem?
This is a public place.
We can do what we want.
And that's the line they say.
It's the opposite of the public schools down track.
Yeah, and I explained to them, actually, no, there are lots of laws in place that prohibit people being obnoxious in public.
There's a guy playing really loud music.
I was like, listen, you need to turn that down because you're disturbing lots of people here.
It's like, no, no, no.
This is a public place.
I'm allowed to do this.
You are wrong.
And it's like, no, actually, the Public Order Act of 1986 prohibits this.
You don't even need an actrogist.
It's like, well, this is our country.
This is what we do.
I mean, I love that.
This is a public.
I can do whatever we want.
It's like, what if those two things ever got together?
You're thinking of private place.
You need a law for something when something's only when something starts going wrong.
And that's exactly it, isn't it?
That it's a clash of very different worldviews.
We don't need laws for us to do this because it's so baked into us both as a people.
We ended with the Singapore model, which Lee Kuan Yu said, you could only get there with laws and brutal enforcement.
We had it organically, which was the greatest thing, which we've now pissed away.
Anyway, sorry.
You're getting impressed by this study.
Carry on.
So it's worth mentioning, intelligence is largely inherited, and so this is a problem that isn't necessarily going to go away.
It's not a problem.
It's very heritable, is that right?
Yeah, it's very heritable.
0.8, I'm told.
Is that right?
Does that make sense?
0.8 is like 80%.
Yeah, fine.
Was it a very eccentric man in a cravat?
That's what I got.
But the final thing is that knowing all of the things that we've talked about, when you see something like this that's made to insult us, it's basically like a highlight reel of all of our best points.
You should be flexing over this.
Like rugged individualism and things like that.
Self-reliance, that's a bad thing, apparently, because it's white culture.
Of course, this is US-focused, but it's basically when they say white, they mean European in a sense.
And in all of these senses, the West sort of roots its culture from Europe, doesn't it?
And that quite often is true of lots of people.
That's about where we're from.
Yes.
Yeah.
And things like the nuclear family here, that doesn't seem weird now because that is unique about us.
Emphasis on the scientific method, you know, looking at evidence and having rational linear thinking.
This is for some reason a reason to condemn us.
You know, the reason that we invented all the technology that we're using right now.
Having a respect for history and things like that.
Yeah.
Heavy focus on the British Empire.
Oh, boo-hoo.
You know, biggest empire that ever existed.
Formed the United States.
Although it's talking about Judeo-Christian, there boo.
Two things are not compatible.
Protestant work ethic as well.
Religion.
Christianity is the norm.
It's basically just being white here is just being European.
Following time, being oriented to the future, working hard and having respect for people who have succeeded.
These are all things that are just aspects of European and Western culture more generally.
And all of these things they're complaining about, like being number one and caring about being successful.
Like they're insulting us here for being good, for Our culture producing one of the most prosperous civilizations that have ever existed.
I don't believe we have aggressiveness in extroversion, though.
They might be thinking of the German or Dutch there or something.
I don't know.
They're not necessarily extroverted.
I think aggressiveness, surely that's more.
Do I say it?
No.
I'll be good.
Good.
No, you've still got a line.
I'm glad that you're not taking a very anti-racist approach to your timekeeping on this segment, Josh.
I know, yes.
It went on for a little while, didn't it?
To be fair, we've been having a decent chat, so whatever.
May I have a mouse?
You can.
Thank you.
I'll read through while Samson gets the videos up.
I'll read through a couple of these rumble rants.
For the White's graphs on the racial preference stated, it comes down to, I am not racist, I hate everyone equally.
The Philanselmo excuse.
There you go.
Hewitt says, I want to see videos of Josh socially policing Indians.
That can go on the daily channel.
Sigil, Josh has negative 7 million is at.
What does that mean?
High hands.
What's that?
Free hands.
That's the thing where Indians don't mind messing over with other people to get ahead themselves.
And they seem like a bonus.
That's correct, isn't it?
How do you measure IQ in the Hermit Kingdom or confirm in places as corrupt as the CCP?
That's the fun part.
You don't.
Habsification.
Remember, guys, always avoid your first to eighth cousin.
Always find the lady from a completely different village.
Josh, you really should have listened to that one.
Don't trace my family history.
Ochigdo.
I had friends learning Chinese, and part of that is learning culture.
And my friends pointed out with all Chinese inventions, if the choice was tradition or innovation, they sided with tradition.
You find that with basically every culture outside of Europe is that between maybe 8th century and 2nd century BC, they went through something called the Axial Age, where they developed these huge advancements in their own culture and then for some reason stopped and then just stayed that way for thousands of years afterwards.
And anything new that came from it was more just a kind of a small development on tradition that was already there rather than something new and innovative in and of itself.
And to be fair, that's one way to structure and structure a civilization.
There's nothing like, there's no moral value in there.
Habsification, we should also consider not hooking up with your first cousin and having kids with them helps build civilization as well.
I read a few of my hate crime against my people.
Can we read some of mine?
Yeah, go for it.
Annie Moss, regarding Kemi's Zoom call, I disagree with her premise.
The damage done to the Tory Party is being done by the Tory Party, not by defectors.
And she says defection of Tories to reform is just another way to control the uni party.
That way, if reform wins, then once again, nothing will happen.
I just wanted to read this one.
Nick Dixon texting MILFs is the name.
Says you don't insult people you want to win over.
I disagree, Josh, on the prime example of why is Donald Trump.
He's insulted nearly everyone in his current cabinet.
Some very personally, it's all just political theater until loyal underlining are needed.
Yeah, that is basically true.
Trump's got away with that.
To be fair, they all insulted him as well.
So I think it was kind of a mutual thing.
I don't care what you think.
Now you need to be won over.
To prove your point.
Yeah, I'll read some of mine.
Annie Moss, again, to all English people, if you want the pub to survive, you must go there and give them your money.
Otherwise, they will die.
This is true.
This is what I always say to my missus as well, which is, I need to go to the pub.
Do you want them to die?
And then she doesn't have a response to that.
Then I put on my white sleeveless tank top.
I heard a rumor there's EU legislation in the works to mandate locking the ignition behind a breathalyzer on new cars.
The problem may be even more petty and bureaucratic than previously believed.
I believe that's already the case in a few countries in Europe, and they are looking to potentially make that law in England, but only for people who already have convictions for drink driving.
Nicholas Ware, young men talking freely after having a few drinks is what they fear.
Men who do that tend to get ideas.
True.
And let's go through some of yours.
Michael says, absolutely fascinating stuff.
Reminds us why England, with such a small population, was able to conquer half the world and maintain an empire.
Also explains Rome and why the Ottomans collapsed.
And where was it?
Benny Pax says, I have a friend who is French and Italian that has lived in Africa for many years.
He's never on time and doesn't know when to leave.
Well, apparently it can be learnt.
Welcome to Hotel Nigeria.
Sorry about that.
Anyway, on that terrible, out-of-time and tuneless note, it's time to go.
Thank you very much for watching.
Enjoy your weekend.
And if you're a subscriber, we've got Lads Hour in just under 30 minutes.