Ezra Levant interviews David Atherton on Britain’s colonial legacy, where he argues former territories like India and Hong Kong thrived under British rule—average earnings hit $80K/year in 1997—while criticizing current asylum policies, claiming migrants exploit wealth (e.g., billions sent abroad) and housing (50% of UK social housing occupied by non-natives). They discuss grooming gangs, citing 80%+ British Pakistani Muslim offenders in cases like Rotherham, blaming delayed action on fears of racism, and contrast it with heavy policing of white Brits. Reform UK’s rise, Sunak’s perceived detachment, and debates over Islamophobia—defined as criticizing "Muslimness"—highlight a fractured political landscape, warning Canada’s future may mirror these tensions. [Automatically generated summary]
You know, maybe I think too much about the United Kingdom.
I'm not sure if that's true.
I like their poetry.
I like their history.
I like their architecture.
I find their politics interesting.
It's a little bit different than ours, but close enough that I see the similar themes.
But mainly, I find it, as I always say, a dystopian time machine.
What happens there today will happen to us in five years, especially on issues such as censorship and mass immigration, which, by the way, are linked.
Today, we're going to talk to David Atherton, who's been really in the front line of criticizing and punditing and journalisming.
That's our feature interview today.
But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to what we call Rebel News Plus.
That's the video version of this podcast.
It's eight bucks a month, which might not be a lot of dough to you, but I tell you, it really adds up for us.
It's how we pay our bills over here.
So please consider going to RebelNewsPlus.com, clicking subscribe, and getting the video version of this and helping Rebel News Stay Strong.
All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, a conversation with the curmudgeonly David Atherton, a British pundit and columnist.
We'll talk about everything going on there.
It's September 4th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
You know, I'm born and raised in Western Canada.
Old British Tradition00:05:03
My family has been out there since 1905 in Canada.
That makes me an old timer.
Of course, 1905 is just a blink of an eye in the history of the United Kingdom, which goes back many centuries.
And in fact, the history of the UK, in a way, is the history of Canada, is the history of the West, the history of the rule of law, of parliaments, of democracy.
So many ideas, including economic ideas, philosophical ideas.
And it was the mighty, I think you could say the word race of Brits.
I mean, it's an indigenous culture that had the greatest empire known to man.
And there was a fighting culture.
If you go to the United Kingdom today, you see many statues of lions at Queen Victoria's monument outside Buckingham Palace, giant lions.
At Trafalgar Square, honoring the great hero who beat the Spanish, lions.
That's how they regarded themselves.
And I think that's how the world regarded them until very recently, where they were told they should be hated, not proud, and they should, in fact, hate themselves.
And that the British Empire, far from being the greatest political assemblage in history, was something to be ashamed of, even though it brought democracy, the rule of law, and the English language to the world.
It's the reason why India has a space program.
It's the reason why India is a democracy.
It's the reason why Canada is what it is.
Just small examples.
Anyways, one of my favorite things to do is find old traditions in the UK and just wrap my mind around them.
Like, look at this.
This is something called the Atherstone Ball Game.
And it's a game.
And it's played once a year.
And it's an enormous medicine ball.
And really, there are no rules other than don't kill anyone.
It's sort of all against all.
It's an old British tradition.
And it's a little bit crazy.
And ethnically, those are Indigenous Brits.
That's not a modern cross-section of central London.
That's the Anglo-Saxons.
That's the Indigenous Brits.
That's one of their fun games, a little bit crazy.
You can go online and Google Atherstone Ball and get a real chuckle out of it.
And you can see that fighting spirit.
There's some lads wearing track suits having fun.
Those are marshals trying to make sure no one's truly hurt.
What a hoot, eh?
What a strange thing.
And I say that because I thought our next guest had a pen name named after the Atherstone ball because his name is David Atherton, but he assures me he is of no relation, even though I put it to you.
He has that same fighting spirit of the Atherstone ball game and of Brits of days gone by.
His name is David Atherton.
He's a broadcaster.
He joins us now from London.
David, what a pleasure to meet you.
And you, Ezra, thank you very much for inviting me on.
I don't know what that introduction was about, other than I truly thought that you were a pen name named after that crazy ball game.
I don't know that much about the Atherstone ball game.
I can't get anyone in my family to agree to go on a tourist trip to see it firsthand.
They don't find it as interesting as I do, but that looks like a great game.
Sure.
Well, it's like a lot of games that Canada and North America plays and Britain plays.
They come from the Middle Ages.
In fact, that game played in Atherstone.
It was typical of the games that were played within Village.
Often it was village against village.
The idea was to take your ball or your object from one village to the other and the other team does the opposite end of it.
Where baseball is based on is stool ball.
It's a documented game in England in the Middle Ages.
I think it's first documented in 1340, something like that, whereby you literally had a three-pronged stool and people would throw a ball at it and you'd hit it with your hand.
It's the basis of baseball and cricket to this very day.
You know, it's a little bit grubbier than the fancy jousting contests in medieval days where knights in shining armor were there was a lot of rules.
I don't think there's a lot of rules in the Atherston ball.
Anyways, I apologize for spending so much time on it.
It's just my way of laughing at myself because I thought you were such an iconic Brit.
I've been following you on Twitter for years and I thought there's no way this is a real guy.
I thought this is someone playing the role of a Brit who refuses to accept the decline and dismemberment of the country.
Sure, yeah, I'm a little bit of a student of history.
And, you know, it is, what's the word?
Fashionable is the word I'm looking for.
Hong Kong's Journey00:11:26
For the Marxists who have strolled for our institutions and run culture of this country, zenigrate Britain to the nth degree.
When I think, you know, of course, individual atrocities were committed by the British Empire.
But also at the same time, we exported democracy, the freedom of the individual.
We exported engineering, medicine.
We built, for example, 41,000 miles of railways in India in Victorian times.
And they've only added 30,000 since we left in 1947.
Also, for example, in India as well, we brought eight times more land into farming.
And in the time that Britain was in India, the population doubled.
I think we've done a lot of good for the world.
And most of the places that we have gone to, they've left something behind of our British, English and British common law.
Yeah, I think you can track pretty much the most successful newly independent countries of the world are the ones that were under British government.
I mean, even the Middle East.
Look at the contrast of the Spanish and the Portuguese empires of south, South and Central America.
Many, uh many, only recently became um, vaguely democratic in the 1970s, and much much, much of South America is still still run by despots and uh and dictators.
You know, you look at the way how easily Brazil has turned into into into a, into a bit of a.
You know um, you know tyrannical type.
They banned x, they banned free speech and I think they banned uh Bolsonaro from the next election as well.
You know, our freedoms of, you know, are hard fought and they're so easy, easy to lose.
You're so right.
I mean uh, I was going to say, look at the Middle East.
Would you rather be in Jordan, which was British, or Syria, which was French?
Would you rather be in the Bahamas or in?
Yeah, you know, in uh Haiti yeah, you know, I wish I was.
I looked up their gdp, the head figures on that the other day.
Um, Haiti is 1600 per per year, per person, and the Bahamas is thirty eight thousand dollars.
That's the difference between British and uh French rule as well.
You know I, I sometimes uh talk about and this is apropos of nothing.
I'm just going to enjoy having a conversation with you, but I do promise our viewers i'm going to bring it back to the current events in the Uk.
We're going to talk about the current abominations being emanated from parliament and the abuse of the rule of law.
I just want to enjoy my Anglophilia for a little bit.
I'm a bit of a fan.
Um, everywhere you go, colonization and empire are in disrepute.
But if someone was truly interested in multiculturalism and truly interested in history, they would see how astoundingly moral it was.
I'll give you the example of Central America.
I give you the example of the Aztec empire uh, whose capital Tenuptic Clan, which is now Mexico City.
When they reconsecrated the great pyramid there, they killed, according to one reputable scholar, up to 80 000 people.
They sacrificed, they cut them open, pulled out their beating heart and threw their bodies down the pyramid.
That's, that's why Mel Gibson made his movie Apocalypto, to show the absolute horror sure, of Pre-imperial Mexico and whatever you want to say about the conquistadors, and they were not gentle men.
But what they came?
They saw they, they thought they were in hell, they thought they were in an amoral like it, the opposite, just murdering tens of thousands of people, and a lot of them were children as well.
Yeah, and the Brits, when they came to India, they were cultural practices like sati, like burning widows alive, they started.
So whatever you say about the Britsagi as well yeah sorry, go ahead, I interrupted you.
Yeah Thuggie, there were people in in in India that thought uh, so it's where we get the word thug from.
Um, they're Indians, you know, thought they could go around murdering and maiming people at will, and it was the British who put a stop to it.
And, as you can say, with sati, you know no the the, the widow who was alive, was burnt at the stake with her dead husband.
That's only one of the few things culturally, we interfered with in India.
We never touched the caste system or anything like that.
And, you know, I think India, for example, had about no more than 10,000 civil servants and something.
So I think 10,000 civil servants ran the empire.
And there are only about 100,000 troops in India over a population of something like 300 million.
I always think that in countries like India, the British ruled with a great deal of consent from the population.
They saw honest government come in.
So if someone took your house or your land off you, you could go and speak to the local commissioner and he'd give it back to you.
If you've got the deeds to their house and you've got evidence that it is yours, whilst some previous time, someone took it off you, there was nothing they could do about it at all.
My favorite poet other than Shakespeare, of course, is Rudyard Kipling.
And if I'm not mistaken, he was born in India and deeply loved the place.
Now, he uses some language that we don't use these days.
He was more blunt about race.
But anyone who thinks he didn't love Indians hasn't read his poem Gungadin, where he praises an Indian water carrier.
The last line of the poem, you're a better man than I am, Gungadin.
But so I'm going to read a line from his poem called The White Man's Burden.
And you would never use that phrase in 2024, but it's basically what the British, in his mind, were trying to do in India.
Take up the white man's burden, the savage wars of peace, fill full the mouth of famine, and bid the sickness cease.
And when your goal is nearest, the end for others sought, watch sloth and heathen folly bring all your hopes to naught.
And it goes on like that about the best people of the UK should be sent around the world to fight famine, to fight disease, to build things up, to end like, and he called it the white man's burden.
And the other side would say, well, you're enriching yourself.
So indeed, yeah.
And it would be true, but they enriched every country they attended even more than they enriched themselves.
Well, indeed, five out of the top 10 wealthiest countries in Africa were originally part of the British Empire.
There are two countries in Africa that were never conquered by Europeans, Liberia, which was settled by a formal slave from America, and Ethiopia.
I know Liberia is the fourth poorest country in the world.
I think Ethiopia is something like the 20th poorest country in the world.
Generally speaking, look at the wealth of North America.
You look at the relative wealth of Canada and Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, wherever we went, Hong Hong Kong as well.
By the way, Hong Kong is probably the richest province in the world.
The average person there earns $80,000 a year in American money.
And when we left Hong Kong in 1999, you could genuinely see the sorrow in the eyes of the Hong Kong people there because we came in again with good rule and honest rule as well.
And you were able to make your money without any interference from the state, few regulations.
It really was a classical liberal-oriented place.
And to this very day, we're still accepting Hong Kong people into this country.
I think something like something like a million Hong Kongers have come taken advantage of our passport scheme and came to the UK.
And I'll tell you what, Ezra, they're very welcome because they don't rely upon the state.
They're going to set up loads of businesses, create loads of jobs and wealth, and good luck to them.
You know what?
I have been to Hong Kong and they're very proud of their British traditions.
During the, I guess it was 2019, when there was freedom protests and democracy protests against new laws emanating from Beijing that would basically end the freedom of Hong Kong.
We sent some rebel news reporters over there and it was so amazing to watch that the culture of freedom that the Brits had planted, those seeds a century ago, had bloomed.
And we came across one man.
I wasn't there personally, but our team was there.
And it was a heartbreaking interview with an elderly man who said, please, can the British come back?
And I want to show that clip to you now.
And I got to tell you, heartbreaking.
And for all I know, this guy's in jail for saying it.
Here's a Chinese man we met in Hong Kong who said, please, the British, come back.
Take a look.
The British government will come back and rule us again.
Don't want the Chinese government to rule us anymore.
You want the British to come back?
Yes, of course.
The Chinese government is terrible.
What's your message to people who call the old British government a colonial power that used to abuse the entire world?
No, simply we just want the British government to come back and rule us again.
It's that simple.
Okay.
So do you think the British did well?
The British government did very well.
Of course.
And do you doubt that across the Commonwealth, millions, maybe billions of people have said the same thing?
That's why Kipling called it a white man's burden.
It is your job, your moral duty to go out into the world and cure sickness and bring an economic system and lift people up economically.
And here's my point.
And we've been talking now for almost 20 minutes and we haven't even talked about what we were going to talk about today, which is the UK today.
And all the self-loathing that is taught from every institution.
Maybe Brits have decided to hate themselves, but the rest of the world still sees the greatness of Britain, which is why they all want to go there.
You can be a refugee in Germany or France, and many are.
But the dream, the gold pot at the end of the rainbow is get on a dinghy in Calais, France, sail across to Britain.
That is the ultimate destination for anyone in the world.
And so while the Brits may hate themselves, or at least official Britain does, and they certainly hate those working class whites I showed playing the Attistone ball game, the rest of the world sees what an incredible present and past the UK has, and they all want to move there.
Yeah, sure.
Also, as well, Britain, when it comes to channel of migration, is such a soft touch.
When these people, you know, when they arrive in the UK, most are sent to Manston, where you used to be an REF based in the Second World War, where they're sort of fingerprinted.
Fingerprinted Somalis and Mini Conspiracies00:02:31
Because most of them throw their passports and ID in the water, and they're sort of fingerprinted.
I don't know whether they're DNA, but certainly they're fingerprinted.
And they have found some terrorists there as well.
So then after that, they're then sent up to a four-star hotel, something that you pay maybe $200 a night for.
And they stay there for maybe six months a year until their case for asylum is reviewed.
In the meantime, they get three meals a day.
They get £42 a week spending money, courtesy of the state, and they're free to come and go as they please.
It really is one of the best pay holidays they'll ever have.
Some work in the black market, some have been dealing in drugs, some work in car washes as supermarkets, and also as Deliveroo type drivers, you know, sort of the people who come around the bike bike to get to give you pizza and Uber Eats and what have we.
So, yeah, yeah, it really is the life of Brian.
And if they get their temporary leave to remain, they're then given a one-bedroom flat.
Some of the ones I've been seeing recently, there's a severe housing shortage caused partly by immigration, legal and illegal at the moment.
And something like, you know, they've been given what would be thought to be well-appointed $2,000 a month apartments.
No, they're not really flats.
Flats being sort of down market apartments being posh flats if you like.
These are given some upmarket, you know, premium flats.
And also, as well, when it comes to the social housing, there are some immigrants over here who are really, really taking the mickey.
Apparently, 50% of social housing in Britain is given to people who aren't born there.
And I think with Somalis, something like 72% of Somalis who have been allowed to settle here live in social houses, you know, which is subsidized because most of them don't work either.
State pays their rent for them.
And they just have to, again, just have the life of Riley and there's nothing I have to do to earn their keep over here.
They're a massive burden on our society.
And in fact, the last six quarters of GDP per head per capita has actually gone down because of the burden of immigration.
It's the same thing in Canada.
Justin Trudeau is juicing the immigration numbers.
He's bringing in record numbers.
I don't think you'll believe me, but he's bringing in 2 million people this year in a country that is only two-thirds the size of the UK.
Girls Groomed in Rwanda00:15:59
2 million.
1 million, he's calling students.
Another 750,000 are temporary workers who are never sent home.
So right there, 1.75 million.
I think that's as large as the entire UK.
And you're 50% bigger than us.
We're running about a million.
We're running about a million.
And you're what a mini mini.
Here's a little mini conspiracy theory.
Somebody, a journalist, has sat down and got the figures for mobile cell phones, the number of contracts issued, looks at the sewerage output, food consumption, the supermarkets.
And officially, our population is about 67 to 69 million, something like that.
They actually think the real population of Britain is 77 to 80 million people.
That's based on, as I say, that's 80%.
Because no one's ever deported.
You know, I don't know why, whenever I think of the UK, I think of poetry, because, of course, the English language may well be the greatest gift that the UK has given the world.
And Shakespeare, who never missed the trick, when he was praising England, he referred to the English Channel as one of its key assets.
Let me read.
He called it the Royal Throne of Kings.
He said, this happy breed of men, this little world.
And then here's how he described it geographically: this precious stone set in the Silver Sea, which serves it in the office of a wall or as a moat defensive to a house.
If you look at the English Channel and think of it as a moat to protect the castle, that's brilliant.
And that's exactly what it always has been.
Going back to the Spanish, going back to the Germans.
The Germans wanted to invade, but that moat saved them.
Well, there is an invasion going on, a D-Day in reverse.
Literally every day, boats bring hundreds of people.
And instead of being sent back, they're being sent to these four-star hotels that you mentioned.
Why aren't they defending the moat?
Well, I can't work out why there is such a lack of will to stop this.
Theoretically, we can't physically return.
Under maritime law, we can return these people because they're technically illegal.
But apparently, the excuse is the French won't let us in their waters to let them take them back.
It might be kind of a punishment, punishment beating because we left the EU in 2016.
And it just might be a spiteful way of getting back to us.
But the point is, you know, if the French don't stop it and stop it now, the people will just be coming and coming and coming.
And there will be no stop to it.
You know, until Britain is as poor as the third world countries they came from, there will be no end to this illegal immigration that's going on.
You know, Australia a few years back was getting lots of boats coming down.
And Australia could be swamped in a minute because they have a population of only, I don't know, 25 million, maybe 30 million people.
And they're just across the water from Indonesia, from frankly a little further away from China.
So if they weren't careful, they could literally be overwhelmed.
So they brought in a policy, I'm not sure if it's still in effect, where they would capture people and take them to, I think it was called Christmas Island, which was an island off Australia, and they would process them there, and they would either send them back, or if they were genuine refugees, they had a deal with a little country called Nauru, one of the world's smallest countries.
And they would pay Nauru, I don't know, $10,000 to take these migrants.
And they'd say, okay, you're in danger for your life.
You convinced us, but you don't get to choose where you're not going to Sydney or Melbourne.
You're going to Nauru.
You'll be safe there.
And so they genuinely helped those genuinely in need, but they sent a signal to the rest of the boats: if you think you're going to be going to Melbourne or Sydney, you're wrong.
Now, I know the UK had an idea of doing this with the East African country called Rwanda, but it was just a ruse.
It was a trick that the last Conservative government played, talking a lot of we're going to send people to Rwanda.
I don't think a single person was ever sent to Rwanda, but they sure talked about that plan.
And now Labour is saying, no, we're just going to take them all.
Sure.
Well, one person volunteered.
One person, eh?
That's not bad.
Perhaps they like the beaches on the lake, but I don't know.
Apparently, one person was the joke was that more journalists have been to Rwanda than the immigrants.
But right, well, whether it seemed to actually work because to a certain extent, because a lot of the people over in France were reluctant to risk the crossing until the Labour Party came into power.
And it was one of the election pledges of Rwanda, one of Labour's election pledges.
They would stop, they wouldn't send anybody to Rwanda.
But one of the Conservative Party leadership campaigners, James Clevery, has said he might reintroduce it should he be elected.
But yeah, I think the difference between Australia and Britain was Australia likes to get things done.
And we like to sort of look at the dots of the, you know, we like to dot our I's and cross our T's on international law and adhere to it.
And again, if you're a slight, it's not conspiracy theory.
But Robert Jenrick used to be the immigration minister under, I think, I think it was Sweeter Braveman.
And he resigned.
He resigned because he wanted to cut immigration and he wasn't allowed to.
He wrote an article for the Telegraph and said, one of the reasons why everyone's so keen about immigration is because after politics, they want a job with an international NGO or an international agency like UNESCO or United Nations or Amnesty International or something like that.
So the reason they're so pro-immigration is so they don't muddy the waters of their job prospects after they after they leave politics.
Well, I think there's a lot of reasons.
I mean, I was in Dundrum, Ireland, a few months ago, where the town, a village of around 200 souls, it's a very tiny place, 200 people in the village.
The local hotel, country club, golf course, restaurant, like it's a wonderful place, has a contract with the government to bring in 280 migrant men with the possibility to expand it many more times.
So immediately, the village of Dundrum will now be majority migrants.
And why would this happen?
Who would do this?
Well, the hotel owner, he has a secret contract.
Its terms have not been disclosed.
He's making millions personally.
And think about all the different people who make money in Canada.
They come in as foreign students.
So you have all these Potemkin village schools, these diploma mills who are selling tuition for 10 or 20 grand.
They're really just selling a visa.
So there's a lot of people in that Ponzi scheme, whether it's immigration consultants or landlords.
I mean, the price of housing in Canada is skyrocketing.
Same in the UK, because you bring in millions of people.
They need to stay somewhere.
And that's the fake GDP growth you were talking about before on a per capita basis.
We're all getting poor.
But you bring in hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of migrants a day.
It's thousands in Canada.
Someone has to be.
So it's very much a net outflow of money as well.
A lot of them send their money back, but send billions of pounds back home every year to their families in the third world they come from.
Now, there's economic reasons why this doesn't make sense.
But for me, far more important are the cultural reasons.
Let me say a quick thing about Dundrum.
There actually were Ukrainian families staying at that hotel who were being evicted to make way for, we were told, Somali and Nigerian, and I think Afghan migrants.
And believe it or not, the locals said, well, the Ukrainians, they're families.
So it's not just military-aged single men.
There's obviously some commonality.
I mean, they do learn English, but they, you know, there's some Christian commonalities.
There's some cultural commonality.
Frankly, I didn't actually meet anyone who was against helping, because it also felt very temporary.
You're helping these Ukrainian families while the war is going on.
People could see the rationale.
They weren't being tricked or lied to.
They could see the end of it when the war was resolved.
These people were fitting culturally and just on a personal level.
They were integrating.
Like, I actually, I got to tell you, I went there extremely skeptical.
Ireland's taken 100,000 Ukrainians, which in a population of 5 million would be like a million and a half in the UK or a million in Canada.
So there wasn't a beef with that.
It was the cultural fit of Somali, Palestinian, Pakistani, people who come under false pretenses.
They're not actually refugees, do not integrate, and have different social values, especially in terms of violence or minorities or women.
To me, the economics is a part of it, but much more terrifying is the cultural side.
You're right, yeah.
Well, you know, the government of this country on channel might have channel immigration and illegal immigration from third world countries is all very much covered up.
I'm told that the government does keep a record of who are the perpetrators and who the victims are, but they don't publish them because they're horrific.
There was one freedom of information request that was sent to the Dorset Police, which is in the southwest of England.
And They just wanted a bar chart bar chart of the number of rapes of the last 20 years.
And they found that Bournemouth is on the coast.
It's got loads of hotels there.
And so they put loads of asylum seekers there.
And they attract more of their own kind there as well because they want to get established in flats and apartments and what have we.
And they found since 2014, there's been a fourfold increase in rape.
You might not less, you know, some people might say, well, maybe women feel a little bit more confident reporting of rape to the police these days, which is probably true to it to a greater or lesser extent.
But nevertheless, I should imagine a lot of that, a lot of that is down to the channel migrants and associated violence down there.
Certainly when you're going through the papers and you put into the search engine rape, a lot of the people that are actually being convicted and jailed or being charged tend to be of a migrant, tend to be of a migrant background.
Well, it's because they come from low-trust societies where women would never go out uncovered or without a male escort.
Probably their only interaction with Western women before they came to the West was through searching pornography.
That's my guess.
So they would say, oh, you're an uncovered woman wearing a short skirt.
You're drunk.
You're out at night.
Instead of a high trust society where you'd hop in a black cab and they'd take you home and say, you be careful, young lady.
They're being, you know, they're being treated as a prize ready to steal, like so many other things.
It's just part of when a low trust person comes to a high trust society, they can either say, oh my God, I'm in heaven.
This is the safest, happiest, most peaceful place, or they can say, boy, I'm going to cut through this place like a hot knife through butter.
Well, in fact, if you've got time, I'll read you if I can.
It was written in the background of the 2013 when seven Pakistani heritage men were jailed for rape.
This was written by a guy called an Imam called Dr. Taj Hage.
And he said that the activities of the rapists were bound up with religion and race because all the men, though of different nationalities, were Muslim.
And they deliberately targeted vulnerable white girls who they appear to regard as easy meat.
Also, as well, what they thought was because they wore short skirts and sleeveless tops, they were fair game.
And he actually uses the phrase, they deserve to be degraded by the Imam of the local mosque actually encouraged him to go after grooming the girls.
So, you know, and very few people will admit to that level.
You know, Majid Nawaz, who's a Pakistani Muslim heritage himself, is a broadcaster.
He's a bit of a contrarian and a dissident.
And he used to be a radical on the Islam side when he was younger.
He's a very interesting character.
I don't agree with everything he says, but he speaks the truth where others sometimes are afraid to.
Here's a video of him on LBC, the British radio channel, a few years ago, talking about the uncomfortable subject that 80% plus of the rapists in these rape gangs that are targeting almost exclusively working class white girls.
And I say girls because most of them aren't, most of them are as young as like 11.
They weren't women.
Yeah, they weren't with you.
The average age was about 13.
And youngest was 10.
And generally speaking, the rape gangs let them go when they were 16.
Here's Majid Nawaz talking about the fact that they were Pakistani Muslim men doing it and the victims were white girls.
Here, take a look at Majid.
For too long in this country, We, media, the establishment, society, the chattering classes, the liberal elite, whatever term you want to use, have ignored the issue of grooming gangs of young, vulnerable teenage girls who have been victimized, drugged, and raped and abused.
Whether it's the Rotherham case or all the other cases that were replicated across the country, it is both the conclusion of the prosecutor in the Rotherham case, British Pakistani Muslim Nazir Afzal, or indeed the official inquiry into why it took so long for these young, vulnerable, underage girls to get justice.
Both of those concluded that fears of racism prevented us from coming to the defense of vulnerable underage girls.
Fears of racism, meaning that the state was scared that it would be accused of being racist if it rightly arrested and prosecuted British Pakistani, largely British Pakistani Muslim men in their abuse of underage white teenage girls.
And so from fear of appearing racist, there was a silence across the country as multiple cases of grooming gangs emerged up and down the country, as evidenced now due to multiple prosecutions, successful prosecutions, but sadly and unfortunately too late.
If we hadn't all been silent, if we had all addressed this issue head on when it needed to be addressed, when it was time to address it, then the void would not have emerged for the populist agitators to fill that gap and become popular, actually, as a result of addressing what is a legitimate issue.
They ended up hijacking what should have been the concern of every right-minded citizen in this country.
There have been multiple cases now, and it's beyond any level of doubt that there's a disproportionate number of British Muslims involved in grooming gangs against underage white girls.
Nigel Farage's Warning00:15:06
And to say that is to report on the facts.
It's not to be racist.
And if we're backing away from this conversation, then all we're doing is leaving the ground far open in what is a legitimate issue that requires addressing.
We're leaving the ground for the populace to hijack that legitimate issue and make it their own for their own nefarious purposes.
It's hard to talk about that on TV.
It's hard to talk about that if you're a politician because you'll be cancelled and called far right.
But I can assure you that the men playing that Atherstone ball game, that is indigenous working class Brits who aren't fancy pants, who are ordinary people, when they talk to their mates at the pub, when they talk to each other without the BBC watching their use of pronouns, they're talking about this.
And I think things have finally come to a flashpoint in the UK.
Two things in a row.
You had the July 4th general election where you had five Islamist MPs elected, four of Muslim background, one's Jeremy Corbyn.
You have five members of parliament who ran on explicitly pro-Gaza Islamist extremist agenda and they won.
And they're not even Labour Party members.
They're independents.
That's how strong this extremism is in certain pockets.
And the Labour Party's terrified of this because they don't want to be outflanked on the left.
Just yesterday, they announced a series of sanctions against Israel, not in the British interest, not in NATO's interest, not in the military interest, absolutely to appease this and pull them back into the Labour Party.
And then you have scenes of violence.
Like, for example, here's some Pakistani heritage Muslim lads with a violent attack in an airport in Manchester.
No arrests, no charges, because there would be riots in the community.
But when Indigenous Brits protest and some of them took the protest too far and went violent, massive police response, mass arrests, mass denunciations, the prime minister, who's a former chief prosecutor himself, set up 24-hour day courts just to bang through these basically white working-class Brits, some of them for violence, to be sure, but many of them for thought crimes, word crimes.
One said, this isn't Britain anymore.
One said, you cops aren't even doing your duty anymore.
One was arrested for gesticulating at cops.
What does that mean?
Giving him the finger.
One for shouting at a police dog.
Now, I'm not for shouting at police dogs, but that doesn't deserve two years in prison.
And all these examples I've just given are not for me.
This is the police force boasting about people who they jailed for what they said on Twitter or said on small private groups.
So you have mass rape, mass violence, mass rioting by migrants or descendants of migrants, and the police are extremely careful with that.
And then you have white working class Brits who notice.
That's one definition of being politically incorrect.
You're noticing things you're not supposed to notice.
Off to jail for them.
I think that there's a deep problem in the UK right now, and most people are ignoring it, other than Nigel Farage and the Reform UK and a few others we can talk about in a minute.
Well, just come back to a couple of points there.
Tommy Robinson arranged two rallies in central London.
One was at Whitehall, Parliament Square, the other one was at Travalgo Square.
There were next to zero arrests.
No police were injured.
There was no sexual assaults.
There were no arrests for drugs.
It really was an example of how to have a peaceful rally or demonstration.
When you compare it to what happened in the Nottingham riots over the last weekend, there were 334 arrests.
There were three murders, not two.
Most people see it as being two murders.
There's actually three.
A 15-year-old boy was shot dead in a children's playpark doing a rehearsal for the carnival.
And 35 police officers were injured.
Now, if you wanted to look, which rally was the far right rally, you'd probably suggest that might be Notting Hill Carnival riot.
No, it really must have stuck in the throat.
Obviously, the violence in Southport, Southport, and also the follow-on riots that spread out from Southport, thoroughly reprehensible.
I don't condone that in any shape or form.
And people deserve punishment, some description, although I think some of the sentences were savage and completely disproportionate to what they've done.
Probably the worst one, there's a guy called Wayne O'Rourke.
He was jailed for a really big Twitter account of 100,000 people.
And he said, get out there on the streets and things like that.
Although you could construe that, say, just go out and protest, don't go out and cause violence.
I believe there was one he did say, which was violence-oriented.
But on his chart sheet, one of the things they mentioned from the tones of his ex-posts was anti-establishment rhetoric.
So therefore, even criticizing the government these days is theoretically a jailable offence.
You know, I started our conversation about the legacy we've inherited here in Canada from the UK.
And one of them is that we institutionalize anti-establishment views in an establishment, which is sort of a contradiction in terms, but we both have something called His Majesty's Loyal Opposition, which means we take someone who is paid and given privileges and protections and resources and an office, and we say, Your job is to be anti-establishment every day to challenge everything.
In fact, we're going to compel the government to attend question time.
So the idea that being anti-establishment is somehow now a crime, it shows cancel culture has gone wild.
Sure.
Yeah, there's a lady called Bertie Soffoff, who know reasonably well, not particularly well, but reasonably well.
She was held by the police for 36 hours for one of her tweets, which wrongly named the person responsible for the murders in Southport, and also some other details as well that were wrong.
There was information that was given in good faith.
And I'm pretty sure if the free speech union hadn't gone to the police station and represented them with a barrel with a barrister, it wasn't a sort of a solicitor or a duty solicitor that was sent.
Now, I think they actually sent one of their barristers.
And they had to point out to the police that making a genuine mistake on social media is not a chargeable or jailable offence.
But the police were determined to bang up as many people as they can.
And they're still arresting people and they're still jailing people at the moment as well.
I find that astonishing.
You mentioned the Free Speech Union.
I'm actually a member of the UK Free Speech Union, even though I'm over here in Canada.
I'm delighted that they're spreading in New Zealand and other countries.
They sure are needed.
Toby Young, their leader in the UK, is outstanding.
I mentioned that there are five seats now in the British Parliament held by explicitly Islamist MPs, which I think is terrifying.
It's obviously terrifying Labour.
They're doing their best to move to the hard left.
But there are five seats also, four or five seats, I think, that Nigel Farage and Reform UK won.
Now, proportionately, it should have been dozens because they received over 4 million votes.
But they have the first past-the-post system just like we do here in Canada.
Nigel Farage himself won in the writing of Clacton, which I visited on election night.
And there's four others, and some of them are quite good.
Tell me a little bit about your thoughts about Nigel Farage entering parliament.
Is he using that forum to his advantage?
Is he unlocking the power and the resources of that position?
There are some very lazy MPs, and then there's some very industrious MPs.
There are MPs who just phone it in, and then some who use every lever at their disposal.
How's Nigel doing?
Right, okay.
Well, let me try.
There's one question.
Funny enough, I'm seeing the cinema in a couple of weeks' time.
And there's one question that I'm burning to ask the reform MPs.
After the riots, they went particularly quiet.
Right, they were scared to comment on them.
They were scared of being labelled far right, which is like alt-right over here.
They were terrified of being lumped in with the writers.
I don't think they handled it well.
Sorry, I interrupted you.
Go ahead.
Yeah, no problems at all.
No, no, I suppose they didn't want to maybe inflame the situation or whether they got bullied into it by the Labour Party and all the other sort of left-wing people around there.
It was only really left to people like myself and my fellow travellers on X to continue the battle on our behalf, with all the two-tier policing and two-tier justice that we have.
But going back to your point about reform, because Labour are making such a mess of things at the moment, Ezra, absolute haulicks of everything.
Everything they turn has Been disastrous.
It's scrapping the old age pensioners winter fuel allowance of David Lamy cancelling arms contracts to Israel.
They are universally loathed.
And it appears that the rank and file Labour voter is turning to reform.
Apparently, one in four of Labour voters would consider voting for reform at the next election because there's a lot of Labour people that would never ever vote for the Conservative Party.
One of the advantages that one of Nigel Farage's former parties did was attract Labour Party voters to UKIP.
And then a lot of UKIP voters then went on to vote for the Conservative Party.
That was during 2019 when Boris Johnson got elected.
So this is a major threat.
And I think Kier Starmer's Starmer's popularity ratings have plummeted something like 16 points.
He was plus seven.
Now he's also like minus whatever it is.
And also reform have picked up five points off of Labour as well.
And I just cannot see the Labour Party ever making a right decision between now and the next five years.
And they will pay the price of being tone deaf to what anything the electorate says.
Whilst when it comes to the riots, the Labour Party, to a greater extent, have been able to shut people up and they made a massive shove over window to the left.
The resentment, the fact that our political class has completely ignored us on immigration is not forgotten.
It's not forgiving.
And it's still a major grievance that still is smoldering just below the surface.
But moving on from there, if reform can harness that grievances that the vast majority of the country have, I think reform could at the next election, in partnership with the Conservative Party, do extremely well.
By the way, what I remember, there's one exclusive I can give you actually on the Reform Party.
During the campaign, the Conservative Party dug up some dirt on Nigel Farrar saying that he's pro-Putin and he's anti-Ukraine.
No, he's not.
He's just realistic about Ukraine and Zelensky and Putin.
He's just realistic.
But what one of my reform insiders told us, that publicity probably cost reform something like 15 to 20 seats.
And can you imagine a reform party sitting there in parliament with 20, 25 seats?
They really would be in a strong position, particularly with the Conservative Party.
The Conservative Party is having an election at the moment.
Everyone's saying all the right things.
But, you know, talk is cheap.
Actions are far more impressive, Ezra.
Let me ask you a little bit about that because the Conservative Party has been changing leaders every few months without going to the public.
It's really been one palace coup after another, getting rid of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss.
I can't even keep track of them all.
Rishi Sunak was an absolute disaster.
He felt like he was an AI-generated character.
He had no authenticity, no empathy.
On paper, oh, it looks great.
An Indo-Brit success story.
Like this will appeal.
This will appeal to young people.
No, it won't.
He felt like an out-of-touch banker.
He just felt wrong in every way.
And the party was thrashed for it.
Let me ask you two questions.
First of all, what has he been up to?
I suppose he's technically the leader of the opposition.
I saw a video of him in California, probably looking for some next banking job.
Has he said anything?
Like, has Rishi Sunak engaged in public life?
Sure, no, no, no, no, indeed.
In fact, this week, Angela Reynolds, who's a deputy prime minister, was up against James Cleverly in the House of Commons at question time because Richie's still sort of absent without leave at the moment.
Really?
So he's run away, but he's taking his paycheck, of course, because he's a banker.
Well, of course, yeah, you know, he's still billions or billions how much he's got.
But he really is the skull of Pimper now.
You know, we're seeking him everywhere, but no one's spoiled him yet.
He got re-elected as an MP, which is sensitive.
I bet he regrets that.
I bet he wishes he lost.
Like Kim Campbell and you want to be cynical.
I think his missus had enough of Britain.
That was the reason that they called an early election so she could keep the California a little bit quicker.
Don't be cynical.
Because the point is, I think if the Conservative Party has stayed in for another few months and called an election October, November time, I think the thrashing they got at the election would have been far, far lower.
And, you know, because James Cleverly, who hasn't got a particularly high profile, when he was home secretary, managed to get legal immigration down by 80% in three months.
That really is quite impressive.
Do you know what he is?
He comes from a sort of a silent assassin.
He doesn't say very much, but delivers quite a lot.
Kemi Badenock's Conservative Critiques00:09:40
That was staggering that he was having immigration down so much in such a short time.
I'm going to show you a clip of Kemi Badenock, who some people are skeptic of, but she said some conservative things.
And here's a clip of her the other day saying that she thinks the greater threat to the UK is not the handful of reform MPs, but rather that handful of Islamist MPs that I mentioned before.
Here's a clip of Kemi.
I believe in equality under the law.
If citizenship is to mean something, then our laws must apply equally to all citizens.
Anything else breeds division and resentment.
In government, I saw just how malign and destructive identity politics had become.
Laws brought in to protect everyone were used by left-wingers to protect certain groups over others.
We've seen in history what happens when governments do this.
That must not happen here.
And that is why when everyone was talking about the five new MPs from reform, I was far, far more worried about the five new MPs elected on the back of sectarian Islamist politics, alien ideas that have no place here.
It's the sort of politics we need to defeat and defeat quickly.
What do you think of Kemi?
Some people think that she's the future of the UK Conservative Party because she's a black woman, but she is hardlined.
Other people are not as persuaded.
What's your thoughts on Kemi?
First of all, does she even have a chance?
I think she does, actually.
And I think she might be the member's choice as well.
I think how it works is that MPs vote for who they want to be prime minister, but it gets put all down to the last two, that the members vote for it.
So that's how it's done.
That's why often a more right-wing PM is sometimes appointed than others.
But Kemi Babyhole, it's like Pretty Patel.
All these people have said all the right things in all the right places.
But are they the real thing?
It was pretty, you know, it was at the end of COVID.
It was Pretty Patel who allowed 2 million legal migrants into this country.
And also, Kemi Badenok was the person that opened the floodgates to all the fake student visa people over here.
When you get a student visa in Britain, you're entitled to get a national insurance number and work for up to 20 hours a week.
But who's counting?
So basically, so you've got your student visa, you know, that's you in the country for good, should you want to stay.
I think there should be a lot of lazy or gazing within the Conservative Party when it comes to words and deeds.
Quite frankly, though, it's all right.
As I say, it's all right saying one thing, but they have to stand up the civil servants.
They have to get the approval of the Prime Minister to fire civil servants that are in the way.
These people really need to have a purpose and a will to get things done.
If we don't, this country is just going to drift off into eternal damnation and decline.
You've been very generous with your time today.
It's great to meet you and to know you're a real person, not just a Twitter avatar, which I don't quite know why I thought that, but I did.
I want to show you a clip from the UK Parliament the other day when a reform MP asked, what exactly is the definition of Islamophobia?
Because by gosh, Kirstarmer and the Labour government and the prosecutors, they want to stamp out Islamophobia.
So someone might ask, well, what is it?
And here's a clip of how that went.
Mr. Speaker, could the Secretary of State please explain to me and the House what the government's definition of Islamophobia actually is?
So stay up when you say well I say to the honourable member that a new definition must be given careful consideration so that it comprehensively reflects multiple perspectives and considers potential implications for different communities.
And we're actively considering our approach to Islamophobia, including definitions.
And we'll provide further updates on this in due course.
So I don't think that's an answer.
She says they're going to update it, but from different communities.
Communities is a weird word in the UK, especially.
It means every community except for the indigenous British community.
No reference to freedom of speech, no reference to apostate or reformist Muslims who themselves want to criticize Islam.
I mean, half the history of the Christian church is dissenters.
You probably don't know the background to this.
If you don't know the background to it, let me explain it to you.
There is in Parliament the all-party parliamentary group of Muslims, and they've stitched together what they consider to be what Islamophobia is.
And I quote, before I read this out, let me say, you know, abusively swearing at somebody using the P word and assaulting people and grabbing your jabs off women obviously is anti-Muslim hatred.
I don't think any of us have any problem condemning that.
But when it comes to Islamophobia, I think it was Andrew Cummings who summed it up best of all.
Islamophobia is a word created by fascists and used by cows to manipulate morons.
It's obviously often misattributed to Christopher Hitchens, but it was Andrew Cummings who wrote it originally.
But what the all-parties parliamentary group on Islamophobia, well, by Muslims on Islamophobia is, the key sentence is, and I quote, Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expresses of Muslimness.
And the key word phrase here is, or perceived Muslimness.
For example, if you want to confirm or debate what age Muhammad consummated his marriage with Oisha, that could be perceived as Islamophobia.
if you want to quote verse 434, which is basically gives husbands the right to beat their errant wives and the Quran 424, which basically says that non-Muslim men and women can be enslaved and the women can be abused, shall we say.
If you start quoting all this, or for example, the other example would be if you showed a picture of Muhammad, anything that might insult a perceivement of Muslimness could be construed in a court of law that you have committed Islamophobia.
It really is a particularly slippery slope.
And I can also probably exclusively reveal to you, Ezra, I said a tweet would have been about, I think it was about, I think it was February of this year, where one of the key phrases was, what it said was, excuse me, Fred, I'll just substitute the word F, the words to F.
It said, F Hamas, F, F, F Palestine, F Islam.
And I'm under investigation for sending that out.
You know, I've been thinking about this issue for 20 years.
I don't know if you know, but in the early 2000s, I published in Canada the Danish cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad.
And that launched against me a human rights complaint that lasted 900 days.
And I mean, I've been thinking about insulting religion a lot.
And I wouldn't walk up to someone and say, I wouldn't walk up to a Muslim person and say, F Islam.
I wouldn't say F Muhammad.
I wouldn't burn a Quran.
I just wouldn't.
Because that's not my style.
And I generally want to go through life being moderate in a way.
But neither do I think it should be a crime to do all the things I list.
Just like if someone said F Jesus, F Christianity, or God forbid, burn the Bible.
I would think those things may be odious.
They may be provocative.
They may be attention-seeking, but they ought not to be crimes.
And I feel like this Islamophobia push is a reintroduction of blasphemy laws because I think of my late friend Tarek Fatah, who was born Muslim, but was a strong critic of Islam.
And he would be the first one hit with a genuine Islamophobia offense because he's critical of Islam.
And that whole religion, some would say, needs a reformation.
The West went through centuries of bloody battles, Protestant, Catholic, some of those battles still rage on.
And to criminalize criticism of Islam, and what even is the view of Islam that's beyond criticism, that's what I find dangerous.
Well, the thing about Islam is, you know, particularly Islam, because it's both a secular and a religious way of life, all rolled into one.
And therefore, it is an ideology.
And any ideology must be subject to criticism.
Yeah, I think you're right.
Criticizing Islam Ideologically00:01:08
Well, listen, David, you've spent a full hour with us.
I'm very grateful to you.
Now I know you're a real person and not just named after the Atherstone ball game, which I'm still going to try and find someone to visit with me.
No one I know wants to go see that sweaty, angry mess in Atherstone.
I find it amazing.
Sort of like the running of the bulls in Pampala.
But it's nice to talk with you.
And I suppose I care more about the UK than the average Canadian.
I don't know why that is other than I see that it's the fountain of so much of our life here, from law to history to language to government to freedom to economics.
There's so many things in Canada that are only because of the British and the British Empire.
And so I care about what's happening in, quote, the mother country for reasons of history, also because what happens there today may well happen here tomorrow.
It's great to talk with you and to get to know you a bit.
And too, Ezra.
There you have it.
Atherton.
Great to see you.
Well, that's our show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, see you at home.