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Sept. 20, 2022 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
45:45
20220920_piers-morgan-uncensored-can-britain-afford-to-supp
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Britain Wakes to Crisis 00:01:55
Tonight on Piers Morgan Uncensored, the late Queen's death put politics on pause.
Now Britain wakes up to a country still in crisis.
This Trust tells world leaders we've got to keep backing Ukraine.
We can support for the war survive, but rocketing costs at home.
How could working just four days a week solve the surging cost of living problem?
We'll debate that too.
Live from London, this is Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Well good evening from London.
Welcome to Piers Morgan Uncensored.
In the 12 days since great Queen Elizabeth II died, Britain has felt very united again.
But it's easy to forget that just before that happened, it was completely falling apart.
Rocketing costs in supermarkets, food prices, energy prices out of control, house crisis with rentals soaring, millions fearing a bleak winter of poverty, businesses facing ruin, people fearful because violent crime was surging.
We even had excrement being tipped into our oceans at record levels.
Well today we felt, I guess, like we've woken up with a bad headache.
The very sad but also heartwarming distractions of the last 10 days are now over.
And all those problems that were there before are sharply back in focus and they haven't got better, they've got worse.
Russia's vicious war on Ukraine is right at the heart of course of a lot of these problems and this Trust used her first trip as Prime Minister today to tell the UN in New York that our allies must do more.
She says the higher bills are a price worth paying for the security of the world as we know it.
And that may feel like it's a bitter pill to swallow.
But I think she's right.
The UK is spending £2.3 billion this year on weapons, training and aid for Ukraine.
We'll spend the same amount next year or more.
That's 16 times more than France.
Unity Masks Deep Divisions 00:03:24
The question we should all be asking in this country isn't why are we doing this for the people of Ukraine, but why isn't everybody else?
Russia looks beleaguered.
Their propagandists are panicking.
Allies are suggesting Putin should make a deal.
It's not the time to go soft on this murderous dictator who illegally invaded a sovereign country.
If Vladimir Putin's on the ropes, now's the time for us to land the knockout blow.
Well, I'm joined now by Talk TV presenter Richard Tice and royal author extraordinaire Tina Brown.
I can't think of anybody I'd rather have than you, Tina, to wrap up this extraordinary period in British history, actually.
And great to see you, Richard.
You've been here pretty much ever present from the start.
And it has been truly fascinating time, I think.
And we'll look back on it and we'll all remember where we were when the Queen died and when these extraordinary events rolled out.
What do you make of it?
Where are we with all this?
Well, you know, I felt coming as I do now from New York, it's like it was like the Queen's last great act of soft power, from dying in Scotland, which reminded them of wanting to be at the heart of the Union, perhaps again, to this last extraordinary, these days where this crowd came together in this incredibly beautiful way.
So actually the crowd became as much of the event as the actual funeral became.
What struck me, I've written a column about this for The Sun tonight, was that all the flashpoints of division between us in this country, going back to Brexit, whether it's Donald Trump, Brexit, COVID vaccines, you know, independence in Scotland, the Northern Ireland Protocols a result of Brexit being threatened and so on.
All these issues, which really had split families apart.
I know people who literally fell out with family members over some of these issues.
They spill up friendship groups.
They turned us into a sort of toxic society fueled by social media.
People taking sides on everything, screaming at each other.
And then we just had this gigantic pause when none of that mattered.
I don't think anybody in these huge crowds probably had any discussion about any of those things.
It was all centered on one thing, which was our monarch, our monarchy, and the national identity of our country.
Absolutely.
And also those incredible, the traditions, the richness of our history, was dramatized before our very eyes.
And suddenly you saw what Charles was king of.
So from his point of view, you know, the last year he has actually been the stand-in for his ailing mother.
And all of a sudden, he has stepped into the void left by her.
And, you know, I thought my biggest concern before it happened was that the country would just spin, you know, in this sense of unbelievable loss, which it has.
But there has also been a reassurance from it because you saw the great thick, you know, the richness of these traditions that really have this potency.
And into that void stepped Charles.
I mean, you wrote this incredibly prescient book, The Palace Papers, Inside the House of Windsor, the Truth and the Turmoil.
On the back, can the monarchy survive?
That question has been answered, I think, this week.
I think it's been answered.
I think King Charles III, I mean, Richard, we've been talking about this a lot, but I think King Charles III has got off to an extraordinarily strong start in reassuring us, as Tina said, that he has what it takes to follow his mother.
Stepping Into The Void 00:03:06
Completely, because what he did, actually, Piers, he gripped it literally the moment it happened.
And he reassured and gave confidence to the nation.
And in a sense, he's proven that the monarchy is, it's our constant.
It's our foundation, one of the key foundations of the United Kingdom.
And he's proven that actually it can survive anything.
And we've celebrated, in a sense, yesterday, the life of the greatest Britain, in my view.
And we're all privileged to be part of that history.
And interestingly, Tina, I think that she had the same kind of philosophy about how to deal with challenges as the great Sir Winston Churchill, who was her first Prime Minister.
And I suspect the one that she had the most respect for.
But his one was KBO, keep buggering on through World War II, of course.
And her version of that, as we heard from Jacinda Ardern, the New Zealand Prime Minister, when she said, how did you have children and be reigning a country?
And I can't imagine.
She said, well, you just get on with it.
I love that.
But that is so exactly right.
And of course, Prince Philip always used to say, look up, look out, say less, do more.
And I love that philosophy.
And that was, of course, the Queen's philosophy all along.
Never complain, never explain, don't give interviews, don't show too much of your own self.
You don't need to.
And actually, the less they showed her and her mother, the Queen mother, I mean, all the Queen Mother ever had to do was stay in London during the Blitz and not leave to safety as she could have done.
And they'd go down to the East End and stand in the rubble and say, I'm here for you.
And the public never ever forgot that.
They loved her from that moment.
I think very similar to that was the sort of wordless rebuke, if you like, of the way the Queen sat alone obeying the COVID rules in that Windsor, you know, in Windsor Travel.
Obeying the rules that the people who were setting them the night before were breaking with two illicit parties at number 10 down as well.
And there's something about the juxtaposition of those facts.
I think when people read about the Downing Street parties, they remembered the Queen sitting there alone.
And it was such a problem.
I think that's what finished off Boris Johnson, actually.
I think he would have survived Party Gay if it hadn't been for the harrowing image of a lonely queen mourning the rock of her life because she felt a duty to obey the rules that the person who'd made them and his team were breaking with such immunity.
And she couldn't visit him for six weeks in hospital.
The agony of that for her.
Because she never thought of jumping the queue.
She probably could have jumped the queue, and we'll come to that later.
Probably could have done.
She's the queen.
But she decided she would never do what her people weren't allowed to do.
Reinforce the difference between a monarchy, the Queen, and the Duke of Edinburgh.
They always delivered.
They performed, they performed, they just got on with it.
They rolled their sleeves up, they worked hard and hard and hard.
And it was never in doubt.
And I think that's what King Charles will now show us.
He's been out there, he's been meeting people, he's been visible.
And I think we should actually be full of confidence.
One of the other rookies that we now have as a country, not just a new king, but we have a new Prime Minister.
And Liz Truss has gone on her first foreign trip to New York for the United Nations General Assembly, huge gathering of world leaders, many of whom will have come straight from London where they had attended the funeral.
Confidence In New Leadership 00:15:02
Well, joining me now from New York is to talk to the political leader, Kate McCann.
Kate, you've actually had an interview with Prime Minister Truss today in New York.
A lot of lines coming out of your interview and other interviews she's given, the central theme of which appears to be that she is going to plow her own way through this economic crisis and she understands there may be risk, but she thinks it's time for bold decision-making.
And that appears to be a tax-cutting agenda and one in which she's not going to punish bankers or energy bosses.
Yeah, I think Piers, Liz Truss's answers on those questions, particularly on the idea of lifting the cap on bankers' bonuses, are absolutely fascinating because you're right.
What it shows is she's setting the tone as the new Prime Minister, as somebody who, she says, isn't afraid to stick up for what are unpopular policies if she thinks that they will deliver growth in the economy.
Now, the first of those I mentioned, bankers' bonuses, that could well come as soon as Friday.
She confirmed there will be a fiscal event.
The Chancellor will set out more information on the energy plans and more in that so-called mini budget.
But there are much bigger issues too.
I asked her, for example, about grammar schools and about lifting planning regulations, and she said no more caps, no more targets rather than on planning.
And she indicated that she would go ahead with plans for more grammar schools.
Now, some of those policies are unpopular, but they are also things that Liz Truss has made her name on as a politician over the last sort of decade or so.
If she does pursue those policies, then she runs a risk because every economic decision she makes, particularly the ones that will add to the debt burden, will have an impact on interest rates.
And that could really affect all of us.
If you like, Piers, there's a little bit of a race against time going on here.
So one of the questions I asked her today was whether she could guarantee that she wouldn't crash the economy when she's inside number 10.
In fact, I asked her twice.
Have a listen to what she said.
So can you guarantee now to the British public that the economy will not crash on your watch?
Well, what I can tell people is every single measure we take is about getting the British economy growing, but also making sure that we are economically secure.
And one of the reasons that we're facing these energy price hikes is that we became too dependent on the global market for energy.
So we need to build our long-term energy resilience.
I want us to be a net energy exporter by 2040.
So we are taking the long-term steps that will get Britain back on track and make sure we're not just a growing economy, but we're also a secure economy that isn't dependent on authoritarian issues.
Is that a yes?
That's a guarantee.
Well, I'm not one who ever predicts the future.
But what I can say is the measures we take will help us weather this very difficult storm we're facing and also put in place the long-term building blocks to make sure our country is successful in the future.
I mean she's being pretty cautious there and I think understandably because many economists think she's taking a hell of a gamble with the nation's finances.
I've just seen a tweet from her.
President Macron and I are committed to working together to end reliance on Russian energy, deepening cooperation to reduce volatility in the market and cut costs for households.
The problem she's got, and I think you said this to her, I think, in another clip I saw, is that she doesn't have much time to do any of this.
She's got to move very, very quickly, A, to avert a complete financial disaster this winter for people up and down the country, but also because the uncertainty in Ukraine, she's committed to that.
I applaud her for that.
We don't know how that's all going to go.
And then she's got an election ticking away within two years.
So it's very difficult to build any kind of agenda as a new prime minister, isn't it, when you don't have much time?
She's got to really go for it.
Yeah, and of course, all that against the backdrop of a weak pound, the Northern Ireland Protocol, which needs to be renegotiated, a huge problem with Channel migrant crossings, which, by the way, the Northern Ireland Protocol and immigration, neither of those issues came up in her conversation with President Macron today.
That certainly raised some eyebrows and led to questions about whether Liz Truss is trying to make sure it's smooth sailing over here in the early days of her first visit to UNGA.
And then potentially those difficult issues will be ironed out later on.
But they are going to be really difficult.
And the huge meeting tomorrow with President Biden, the one that's been rescheduled, remember, again, raising some eyebrows.
One of the things that she's going to have to try and focus on there is the Northern Ireland Protocol.
President Biden has said he wants to that up, but they are in very different places on that particular issue.
And today, Piers, just as I was asking Liz Truss those questions about the economy, President Biden tweeted he was sick and tired of trickle-down economics, something she has said she really firmly believes in.
Now, that is being ruled out as a direct comment on Liz Truss's policies by aides here in New York.
But it's not going to be an easy meeting, I think.
There's going to be a lot that those two have to try and sort out between them.
Well, one thing they won't be discussing is any trade deal between the UK and the US, which we were told was all absolutely ready.
One of Boris's great promises.
Oh, it's all there.
It'll probably take several seconds for this to all be delivered.
No chance of that happening under President Biden.
He's made it crystal clear.
It's just bottom of the tray.
And I'm mindful of going back to President Obama, who said we were back of the queue.
And that certainly seems to be the case.
And that's not good for a country which has split from the European Union and had as one of its big selling cards.
Actually, the best thing about Brexit we could do is spanking new trade deal with the Americans.
They're not interested.
Yeah, and I think the comments from Liz Truss when she was flying into New York on the plane overnight were designed to set expectations on that front because she said very clearly there would be no trade deal in the short to medium term.
Now you're right.
In a way President Biden had already put that off the table but Liz Truss saying that just before she landed here is an indication that she doesn't want it to be seen as her turning up, putting out her hand for a little bit of help on a trade deal and getting it slapped firmly away.
Now the issue, come back to it, is Northern Ireland.
That's what's been linked with trade.
That's why this is difficult.
There are other issues around that, diplomatic ones here about the way the two countries see free trade, what's beneficial and what isn't.
But it is an indication of the so-called special relationship.
Just how special is it?
And Piers, we love to analyse this, don't we?
We've got a new Prime Minister.
We always want to look in the margins to see how they react to one another.
But that will be fascinating tomorrow to see how warm their handshake is, whether they are smiling when they come out of that meeting and whether they can agree on how well it went because they need to move from there.
And of course, at some point, there will be a formal visit from President Biden to the UK and one Liz Truss heading to Washington.
Kay McCann in New York, thank you very much.
We'll be back with you tomorrow.
I'm sure.
It'll be a fascinating few days out there for Liz Truss, not least with the American President.
So I appreciate you joining us.
Your reaction, just generally, Tina, to Liz Truss.
She's being billed as the new Thatcher.
What do you think?
I mean, it's a huge challenge, obviously.
Well, first of all, I think she has a sudden kind of, it's like she's eaten Alice's Eat-Me Cake today because she's had this huge, massive, you know, greeting of Biden and so on in the context of the funeral, where he was like one of these big leaders at the palace.
And she was like part of all of this.
Now she's in New York, America, and suddenly she's like back to being like not the most important thing in Biden's inbox.
So that's for her must be a bit sort of whiplash.
I mean, in terms of Maggie and Liz.
Because you knew Maggie, though, you remember?
I've definitely met Maggie.
I met her first, actually, in the 70s when she was still just leader of the Tory party.
And I met her at the House of Woodrow Wyatt, you know, the nice boy Woodrow.
Indeed.
And at the point where those days, because people still did this, they said that all the women were going to leave the table, leaving the men to discuss serious matters and have their port.
We, the women, me, one of them, left the table.
And to my complete consternation, Maggie stayed behind.
So we were just like completely kind of appalled.
Now, of course, I think she was absolutely right.
I mean, you know, to hell with this, you know, stay with the men and we should have all stayed.
Absolutely.
She was the trailblazer of that kind of stuff, sticking it to all the men.
Hold five, I'm going to have a short break and be right back to talk about other issues.
You mentioned President Biden.
He was so far back in the Abbey, almost got a nosebleed.
Why was the American president reduced to the mere ranks of mortals at such a world event?
We'll discuss that.
And also, this issue of British queue jumping.
Would you jump?
Any queue?
We'll be discussing the fallout from Holly and Phil, which has been gripping the country today.
Welcome back to Piers Boggley Centre.
I'm rejoined by talking to you presenter Richard Tice, royal author Tina Brown, who's booked the Palace Paper.
I would imagine this is selling like hotcakes, isn't it?
It's a movie.
It's a movie.
There'll be a few more pearl necklaces for you, Tina Brown.
But it's a great, I've read it on honor.
It's a fantastically juicy book.
I even enjoyed the bits where you have a go at me.
Mainly because you described me in such a fascinating way.
I was like, this guy sounds riveting.
Then I realized it was me.
The interesting thing, wasn't it?
The protocol at the Abbey for all the world leaders.
President Biden comes in, and I assumed he'd be right at the front.
Not a bit of it.
He was like halfway down the back, which can never happen to people of his stature in that position.
I think we've got footage of President Biden coming in and then being sort of directed into the middle.
Have we got that footage?
I can't.
There we are.
This is where he puts it.
I mean, way behind.
And it turned out the explanation was that the president doesn't have any further status at this particular royal funeral event over other members of royal families and also over members, leaders of Commonwealth countries.
So Jacinda Ardern and others were ahead of him, which must have been, I mean, Justin Trudeau was like, first time he's ever been ahead at any event of the United States President.
What do you make of that?
Is this right?
Or should we have torn up protocol?
I mean, come on, he's the American.
No, I think I love it because it was like, this was the monarchy's show.
This is the way the monarchy was doing it.
This was the Queen's funeral.
And for her, her cousins, all of these royal crown heads, and of course her beloved Commonwealth, they took precedence.
Donald Trump, you'll be unsurprised to hear, was completely graceless about this and said in a message on his own social media platform, in real estate, like in politics and in life, location is everything.
I'm a real estate.
Stabbing Biden firmly in the blades.
He's right.
And there's no way Donald Trump would have been that far back.
I think it was about row 14 or 15.
I think he would have been.
He looked even more distinctly laden than normal.
I think he would have been.
It doesn't matter how much he huffed and puffed.
That is the protocol.
That's something you're right.
You know, I have to say that I could not help but think that the day after this funeral, Trump was dictating a memo to his kids saying, I want a funeral like this, but bigger.
Yes.
I want a funeral like this, but bigger.
On general behaviour, the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, he's probably the wokest world leader in the history of world leaders, and yet constantly gets caught doing things like blackface, everything else.
He's a rank hippogroup.
Anyway, he was caught, I think, a day before the funeral, actually singing Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen in his hotel bar.
I think we've got a picture of this.
I see if you can listen to a bit of it.
Here we go.
Well, I never judged Canada's got talent, but I did judge Britain and America's got talent.
If I had done, he's getting a big red buzzer because that was a tuneless wailing of historic proportions.
I guess the question, Tina, should he have been doing this as a world leader on the eve of the Queen?
Well, here's the thing.
I mean, we are now living in the TikTok era.
Queen's funeral, I'm sorry.
I mean, we're living in the TikTok era.
This is one of the things that Charles is going to have to confront.
His mother came to the throne at a time when it was the culture of deference.
Although, actually, it did coincide, the Queen's coronation, with the advent of television.
Right.
In fact, her coronation was the first big event televised.
It was, but it was most reverential.
Everything was reverential.
Now, Charles comes to power, you know, at a time when, you know, everything's up for grabs.
And so you never have a private moment.
I mean, frankly, I liked him for doing that.
I mean, at funerals, everybody kind of releases tension by getting drunk and having, you know, and having songs and all the rest of it.
It just said he shouldn't have been caught on camera.
Unless it was deliberate.
I mean, unless actually he said the whole thing.
Yeah.
I mean, thanks.
He's a new Freddie Mercury.
Maybe he's got a personality after all.
It's just remarkable.
I'm not a Trudeau fan at all.
But yeah, as you say, he wouldn't win any prizes for his singing.
What do we think of this?
Well, two things.
The queue, right, first of all, and then the queue jumpers.
It's become a huge scandal.
Pretty overblown in my view.
But the queue, first of all, what does it tell you, Tina, about Britain?
When you came back and saw, you've been spending a lot of time in America in the last few decades.
When you saw that queue?
Well, what you saw was that the queue had become, in a sense, the people's own give back to the queen.
So, I mean, person after person said the same thing.
After her giving us 70 years of duty, it was the least I could do.
So the queue became this act of gift to the queen, waiting.
It actually reflected, I think, and again, I wrote this in my song column.
I think it reflected all the virtues of the Queen.
Yeah.
Resilience, hard work, determination, courage, you know, humility, doing something for somebody else, not yourself.
And talking to strangers.
Talking to strangers and getting on with it.
And getting on with it.
It was the personification of all things which actually made this country great, which I think we should be looking to get back into.
Oh, completely.
I mean, I joined it.
I was lucky it was only five and a half hours.
But you did.
You get to the back of the queue and you start talking to people and you start chatting, you make friendships.
And it really was, it was, the Brits love a queue, but this was the queue of all queues.
And I think there was something just rather, rather special about it.
Some people, some very famous people, joined the back of the queue.
David Beckham famously joined the back of the queue.
And whether you're cynical about his motivation, it went down very well with people that he didn't take a VIP route like President Biden and others, who, of course, weren't able to do that.
Famous People Join The Queue 00:03:52
But there were people like Holly Willoughby and Philip Schofield who front this morning, one of the big programs in this country, obviously, who took advantage of an opportunity for journalists.
I know, Richard, your own partner, Isabel, was defending herself for doing the same thing.
And actually, put up a pretty good defense.
But here they are going down what was a sort of VIP line adjacent to where the public were going.
And of course, not having to queue.
Now, all hell brokely is about this.
They've been the subject of, I think, a ridiculously over-the-top campaign.
There's 20,000 people have signed a petition to have them fired.
Of course, they shouldn't be fired.
It's ridiculous.
It may have been a misjudgment.
I said myself on this show, I don't think anyone should have been jumping the queue full stop, whoever you are, unless you're a world leader and obviously there's a time issue.
They went on the program this morning and said this.
Holly said this on the program today.
The rules were that we would be quickly escorted around the edges to a platform at the back.
In contrast, those paying respects walked along a carpeted area beside the coffin and were given time to pause.
None of the broadcasters and journalists there took anyone's place in the queue and no one filed past the Queen.
We, of course, respected those rules.
However, we realized that it may have looked like something else and therefore totally understand the reaction.
Please know that we would never jump a queue.
What do you make of that?
I mean, look, full disclosure, I'm a good friend of Holly's.
I feel very sorry.
She's absolutely distraught, I think, about the reaction.
And genuinely, there was clearly in her head, a blurring of the line about work if you're working and you're covering it.
I think a lot of journalists went through there.
Isabel did.
I know other journalists who did it and haven't been subjected to all this.
But is it the old-fashioned thing?
The British are the best at queuing in the world, right to the point somebody tries to jump in.
Right.
Well, it just also became like this, it grew that feeling as the days went by.
So suddenly now it became like at the end, it became like cutting the queue at Mecca.
Because it was so long.
Because it was so arduous.
And there were veterans and 90-year-olds and so on.
But it was the statement.
The waiting was the statement itself.
And that's why it kind of got as it did.
But these things kind of take off, as we know.
You remember during Diana's funeral when suddenly there was that whole thing about where's the flag on top of Buckingham Pouch?
I was editing the mirror at the time, demanding they lower it.
That's right.
And so things like that, they build and they have to, they get very cathartic.
Richard, I mean, Theresa May jumped the queue and nobody seemed to bat an eyelid.
Other politician, Angela Raynor, I think, the Labour deputy leader, she jumped the queue.
You didn't.
You queued, actually.
I queued.
I was your own partnership.
You were split down the middle, didn't you?
Queuing and we took a very different view on it.
And, you know, that's a good idea.
What was your view?
So my view was I wanted to join the queue.
I wanted to be there to experience it and to go through it.
And you've no idea, frankly, whether it's going to be two hours, five hours, or 10 hours.
But I was there.
And there were moments where you think, wow, this is a real thing.
But look, I loved it.
I don't regret it.
For a minute.
And, you know, with the joys of technology, you can work a bit on the old smartphone and whatever.
That's fine.
So, but, you know, other people took a different view.
Holly and Philip, look, in a sense, they made a judgment and it's turned out to be a misjudgment.
I don't think this public flogging that's going on, I think it's got a bit out of it.
The MPs and peers did not need four passes.
Maybe one for their other half, but they didn't need four passes.
Actually, there have been some funny memes about this.
Domino's Pizzas put out a tweet saying they were going to be delivering.
Sorry for any, apologies for everyone waiting, but they've just taken an order from Holly and Phil.
And actually, the best thing they could probably both do is just have a laugh about it, get on with it.
Now, I don't think anyone, the venom of social media is, I've been on the receiving end.
You know, I used to do a morning show before them in the next door studio.
I had to vacate mine for not believing old Princess Pinocchio.
Misjudgment On Ukraine Support 00:15:26
I mean, the world's gone nuts.
So I say, let's end.
Let's end the petition.
End the petition.
Just switch gears now.
This is COVID, which has gone to the President of the United States says that the pandemic is over.
That's been challenged by his own medical experts who say it's too early to say that.
But certainly life feels pretty normal.
I mean, I was thinking yesterday we were talking about this.
Imagine if this had happened in the middle of the pandemic, the first wave, right?
But what was interesting is how some other countries have dealt with COVID.
And China in particular, which was, of course, almost certainly the source of it, has this extreme draconian zero COVID policy to this day.
And there have been the most alarming things happening.
And it's been crystallized by a bus, a quarantine bus, taking 27 people en route to a remote location in one of the provinces.
It sparked complete outrage because it crashed and they were all killed.
But probably the question, well, why are they being taken to these quarantine camps?
You're also seeing clips like this.
This is Chinese social media showing people fleeing a supermarket in Shanghai.
This is to avoid being locked down after a positive COVID case was traced to the store.
When that happens, they lock the store and you could be stuck in there for several days.
China's been building endless quarantine camps, vast camps.
Look at these.
This is where they send people who test positive for COVID.
That's where that bus was going when it crashed and killed everybody in there.
So it's been an extraordinary thing to observe.
There's also people who you have to have a COVID test to be negative before you can go outside in many parts of China.
And some people are queuing in utterly torrential rain for hours on end to have a COVID test, praying that they come up negative so they can actually step outside.
This is, I think, compared to where we are in this country.
I'm joined there by Cindy Yu from The Spectator, who's an expert on all things China.
Cindy, what do you make of this?
And what's going on in China?
Well, it's really heartbreaking, Piers, because as you say, we here in the UK are pretty much back to normal.
And actually, a lot of the world is.
Obviously, that for us has come at a high price of a really extraordinary death toll, which China hasn't seen.
But we now have normality back.
And for my friends and family in China, they could be locked down at, you know, within the space of a few hours that some cities have been locked down at just because of a few cases in cities of tens of millions of people because of this zero COVID policy where no cases will ever be tolerated.
And so you're seeing these very distressing imagery.
You're seeing this horrible bus crash.
And it's really, really sad, actually, that China still hasn't managed to get out of it.
Is there a more sinister thing going on here involving an authoritarian regime wanting to exert control over its people and using this as an excuse?
Well, look, there's certainly local governments who have used this as an excuse because in China these days, you need a kind of app, a health app, to show that you've not been to anywhere, any regions that have COVID outbreaks.
And if you've got a red code on that app, you can't go into public spaces.
And we have seen cases where local governments have used that to control where people can go so that they can't go protest against, for example, financial scams in a different country.
So it has been taken advantage of.
But I think from the central government, it's actually just because they don't know what else to do.
They haven't vaccinated to the same extent.
The vaccines are not as good as the ones that we have been lucky enough to have.
And so if they opened up, it would be in absolutely tragic scenes across the country.
And bear in mind that Xi Jinping in a month's time is facing a renewal of his term limit so that he can have another five, 10 years in power at least.
And so he's not going to want to take any risks.
And so we are seeing the people in a holding pattern because the central government has basically screwed this one up.
Yeah, and of course very little global sympathy because people think, well, you lot started this in China.
You probably covered it all up, didn't tell people quick enough.
So actually you reap what you sow, which is not as horrible for the Chinese people.
But there will be very little sympathy around the world for that.
And there'll also be real question marks now about how China has handled this pandemic and how it ever ends.
I mean, if you operate a zero COVID policy for that number of people, over one and a half billion people, where does it ever end?
I don't see how it does.
Cindy, thank you for joining me.
A broadcast editor, a spectator.
Really appreciate you joining me at late notice today.
So I thank you very much.
We're going to come back and get your reaction to that because it is extraordinary, isn't it?
And we're also going to talk about this big issue, Ukraine.
Do we continue to fund Ukraine with arms, with help, to get them over the line against Vladimir Putin and the Russians?
Or should the priority for Britain be the cost of living crisis?
It's a big debate.
People have strong views about it both ways.
We'll talk about that after the break, too.
Welcome back to Piers World Center.
As the war in Ukraine rages on, the Prime Minister is committed to spending £2.3 billion more in military aid as the cost of living crisis bites here very hard.
Some people will be thinking we should be prioritising the issues back here on the domestic front, not supporting the Ukrainians in their battle with the Russians.
Well, joining me now to discuss this.
Leader of the Heritage Party, David Kurt, plus Richard Tice and Tina Brown, the former advisor to Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, Cormac Smith.
Before we get to Ukraine, just want to get your reaction, Tina, to the situation in China.
My mother just has messaged me with a rather good question.
Are we sure the Chinese don't know something about COVID that we don't?
Which actually is quite terrifying.
This is terrifying.
That's a whole movie.
I don't even want to think about that.
I mean, you feel, I feel it's a terrifying demonstration of authoritarian madness.
Here's Xi, who's going for his third term.
By the way, when they get to their third terms, they always go completely mad.
They do.
As far as I can see.
Like British Prime Ministers.
They all go nuts.
They all go crazy.
So he's gone crazy with this.
And in a way, it actually does sort of dovetail in with Ukraine because that's what we're fighting about in Ukraine.
Putin also is a man who cannot admit he's wrong.
That's the point.
President Xi, he cannot admit he's wrong and he cannot admit that he's got a duff vaccine.
Right.
And that's the biggest problem because they have not jammed.
Certainly a lot of the older people have just not been vaccinated.
So he's led himself into a terrible, terrible position.
And it affects all of us because their economy is in trouble.
It means we've got higher inflation all over the world.
And, you know, so it does still continue to affect all of us.
Yeah, I mean, we had a family wedding last weekend.
Load of people went down with COVID.
My dad, my brother, my uncle, and they've all had a rough few days of a bad cold and they're all recovering well.
That's what vaccines have done to this virus.
And that's what the Chinese are not getting because their vaccines aren't as good.
So let's turn to Ukraine.
Let me go to Cormac Smith first of all, the former advisor to Ukrainian Foreign Ministry.
Liz Truss, new British Prime Minister, as determined as Boris Johnson, their predecessor, to offer full support from this country to Ukraine in this battle with Russia.
Presumably you would support that.
Piers, first, thank you very much for having me on.
Yes, I would support it absolutely.
There's two things I'd like to say, Piers.
First is we have a moral obligation to support Ukraine.
This is the most diabolical act of aggression against a sovereign and peaceful country that we have seen on European soil since 1939 to 1945.
There is no doubt about it.
Putin is the Hitler of the 21st century.
You know, I don't need to retell the horrible atrocities that Russian troops have been carried out, have been carrying out in Ukraine.
But secondly, even if we don't have a moral compass and feel that we have a moral obligation to this, you know, it's in our interest.
Russia has been waging a hybrid war against the West for almost a decade, certainly since the illegal annexation of Crimea.
And, you know, we weren't listening in 2017 when Sergei Lavrov went to the Munich Security Conference and he celebrated the coming asunder of the post-war order, which you know has given us the greatest period of peace and prosperity.
Listen, this is completely the point, as far as I'm concerned.
But David Kern from the Heritage Party, you don't agree.
Why?
No, I don't agree.
I mean, what Cormac is not saying is that the West has been poking the bear for eight years, essentially.
And the Ukrainian army and forces, that's why, and part of them as a country.
Well, you think they're justified in invading the Ukrainian forces.
Is that what you're saying?
The Ukrainian forces for eight years have been shelling, maiming, killing Russian ethnic Russians in the Donbass area.
That's true, but that's actually in the OSCE report.
Genuinely, 14,000 people.
14,000 Russian people have been killed by the Azov battalion and forces, which are part of the Ukrainian army.
Do you think Putin is justified in what he's doing?
He's doing what he's doing, I think, is trying to protect the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.
And it's the situation.
He's waging genocide against the Ukrainian people.
Not at all.
Seizing land that doesn't belong to him.
The situation in the Donbass, the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, is exactly analogous to the situation in Kosovo in the 90s.
And the West supported Kosovo coming out of Yugoslavia, coming out of Serbia.
I'm not saying that we want this war.
We could have sat down at the beginning this in February and we could have avoided this situation.
They wouldn't have had to do that.
We could have just had a negotiation and not been poking the bear on it.
So Putin then says, you know what, I quite fancy Latvia.
You give him half a land.
Well, that's conjecture.
He's not.
He's not.
But you know how he's thinking this point.
What he said, I mean, they don't call this, they call this a special operation at the moment.
It's a war.
The point is, well, we're not at war.
No one in the West has declared war on Russia as far as I know.
I know Putin.
I really hope they haven't because we don't want to get into a war between the West and the Ukrainians.
Putin declared war on a completely unaggressive country in terms of Ukraine.
They were just trying to defend themselves.
I think it's enormously arrogant when people say, you know, they should sit down at the negotiating table and just, well, what negotiation?
What is there to give up?
There is nothing to trade.
I mean, Putin wants to take a big slice, a big hunk out of Ukraine.
He wants Donbass to add to the Crimea.
He wants a whole of Ukraine.
Yeah, be under no illusion.
Putin wants the whole of Ukraine.
He thinks it should never have been ceded.
He thinks the Soviet Union should never have been broken up.
He's on record of saying it was a national disgrace.
That's why he didn't go to Gorbachev's funeral recently.
And he wants the whole thing back.
He wants to restore the Soviet Union.
He wants to be a czar.
He hasn't said that.
And he's relying, by the way.
No, just offend you.
He's relying on people like you to speed the problem.
Justifying what he's doing.
He invaded a sovereign democratically elected country.
I just simply have the opposite opinion.
And I think that we should be trying to end this peacefully.
Because what's happening now?
I've been told that this is Ukraine.
I've never been to Ukraine.
I think what's disturbing to a lot of people today is Lit Trust and the first thing is saying she's going to send 2.3 billion pounds in lethal aid to Ukraine in order to continue prolonging this conflict to try and defeat it which will actually resolve this whole energy crisis in one thousand years.
What do you want?
I mean what do you want?
Do you want to have a break?
Do you want regime change in Russia?
Actually, I do want regime change in Russia.
I would like to see them back in Vladimir Putin.
This is what Biden said.
And I say that, by the way.
We should be de-escalating.
No, actually, I think it's a little bit more.
People are like president.
Time out.
Let's take a short break.
We'll come back.
We're going to continue this debate because actually it's getting interesting.
Back after the time.
Well, back to Pinsworth Sensor.
We had a rather lively end to that last segment.
We've had to lose two of our guests who were due to leave.
So they've gone.
My thanks to Tina Brown and Cormac Smith.
But we've kept David Curtin with his rather, in my opinion, incendiary views about Ukraine.
And Richard Tynes, who probably shares my views.
But let's try and get through this.
So, David Curtin, your position is that we poked the Russian bear and therefore Ukraine is reaping what we sowed.
Partly, yes, because we supported Ukrainian forces, including neo-Nazi battalions like the Azov battalion, like the right sector for eight years, who were shelling, killing Russians in the Donbass area, the Donetsk and Luhansk people.
You mean after Russia seized Russia?
No, they didn't.
Well, they had a referendum and they decided to join Russia.
And they were part of actually Russia until the 1950s.
They were just added to Ukraine later on in the time of Khrushchev.
They weren't allowed to.
So you don't respect the breakup of the Soviet Union.
You think it shouldn't have happened?
No, I do think that's a good thing because I don't support the Soviet Union.
You want Ukraine to give back the land.
Not at all.
But it has democratically won for itself and has voted to keep.
As I said in the last segment, we supported Kosovo when they wanted to leave Serbia.
Crimea wanted to leave Ukraine.
It's exactly the same situation.
They had a referendum and they decided to join Russia.
The simple fact is that Putin's Russia invaded a sovereign state.
Interestingly, the only part of its border on that western side that's not a member of NATO.
And I think that is a key point.
He didn't dare touch NATO.
So he's gone into Ukraine.
You can't say that he's sort of protecting Russian people.
He's gone into someone else's sovereign state.
He's murdered women, children and men in the most barbaric way.
By the way, Ukraine, everyone thought that Ukraine would roll over.
Ukraine has put up an unbelievable resistance.
And when I went there and interviewed President Zelensky, you could feel it amongst every one of them.
They were determined not to give the Russians an inch of their land.
Interestingly, Vladimir Putin was due to address the Russian nation today.
It's now been delayed until tomorrow.
Rumours swirling about what he may be trying to do.
Is he going to declare war?
Is he going to mobilize the Russian people, which comes if you declare war?
But let's be very clear.
The reason the Ukrainians are doing so well, apart from their incredible courage, is because of the weapons.
Our support is the weapons that we in the United States, notably not from other European countries like Germany, but those weapons have made a massive, massive difference.
And my problem, David, with your, in my opinion, rather naive take on this is that if you think Vladimir Putin, if he succeeds in what he wants in Ukraine, grabbing the Donbass to add to Crimea at the very least, the idea he's going to stop there is for the birds.
This guy wants to restore the Soviet Union.
It's not going to stop with a bit of Ukraine.
No, I think he will.
He stated beforehand exactly what he's going to do.
He wants to demilitarize Ukraine.
Standing Up To Putin 00:02:58
He wanted to denazify it.
That's his words.
He's the Nazi.
He is the Nazi.
When you say denazify.
And by the way, Ukraine's president is Jewish, right?
This idea that he's supporting the moisture.
Which by the way, who also supports the Russov battalion.
This is where flags and their shit.
What you're saying is exactly the kind of propaganda that is spewed out by Russian state media every single day that this is justified because the Ukrainians are a bunch of Nazis.
Their president is Jewish.
He lost family members in the Holocaust.
But that's nothing to do with what's happening today.
Actually, it's got everything to do with Jewish fascist notion that this is Vladimir Putin standing up to a bunch of Nazis.
It's completely out of it.
Kelensky is funded by an oligarch called Kolomoyski.
Kolomoyski funds the Azores.
Does any of this got to do with Vladimir Putin invading each country like that?
You are.
You're spewing Russian propaganda.
You are.
I do not want this conflict to go on.
I don't want to escalate it.
But you want it within the city.
Kelensky just take our land.
Because the people in the Donbass region and the Crimea are ethnic Russians and they would like to be able to...
Do you know what percentage of people in the Donbass actually consider themselves that they want to be Russian?
100%.
And the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republic.
Absolute nonsense.
No, that is the fact.
I mean, you can say it's nonsense, but I'm not sure.
But people watching can have...
What are the essentials of the people in the Donbass that want to go back to being Russian?
The people in the areas that they're talking about.
What percentage of the Donbass?
You know, from the poll.
100%.
Oh, it's absolutely nonsense.
It's like 8% want to be Russian again.
Well, I think people can sort of check.
You say 100% is actually 8%.
Obviously, you know, in those areas in the eastern south of Ukraine, there's always been a majority of ethnic Russians, and in the western centre of Ukraine, there's always been a majority of Russia.
The vast majority of people in the Donbass have no desire, which is why they're fighting every single day, risking their lives to stop the Russians taking the land.
And why the Ukrainians, by the way, have been taking back a lot of territory, because they're beginning to win this battle, this war.
They have encouraged us.
You cannot negotiate with a brutal bullying dictator.
History is littered with those examples.
The greatest, most horrific of all was Hitler.
And you think that you can sort of negotiate with Putin?
Forget it.
He's a bully.
You have to stand up to Putin.
Rock solid, firm, and you have to push it.
And that is what is happening at the moment.
And actually it continues.
And when you're talking about Nazification, what Putin's been doing in Ukraine is utter Nazification.
That's what he's been doing.
He's been behaving like Adolf Hitler behaved in 1939.
And that's why it's incumbent on the world to stop him and why I applaud Liz Truss for continuing the good work of Boris Johnson in this area of leading the way in Europe to help the Ukrainians win this war.
Thank you for joining us.
I appreciate it.
Thank you, Richard Teis.
That's it from me.
We'll be back same time tomorrow night.
Good night.
And remember, keep it uncensored.
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