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March 27, 2023 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
46:36
20230327_piers-morgan-uncensored-harry-and-his-privacy-nash
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Harry's Privacy Hypocrisy 00:14:51
Tonight on Piers Morgan Uncensored, Prince Privacy.
Harry turns the global spotlight again on himself with a staged appearance at his latest privacy battle against the British press.
Does someone who sells their own privacy to the highest bidder and that of all his friends and family waive their right to privacy?
We'll debate that.
Horror in Nashville, America, as a shooter kills six people, including three children, in yet another school shooting.
Can we at least agree that images like this Christmas card from a local congressman probably don't help curb America's gun violence epidemic?
And as a string of failing MPs are caught flogging their services for thousands of pounds in an undercover sting, could the answer be to pay politicians a lot more money?
Constantine Kissing joins me live to argue that.
Live from London, this is Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Well good evening from London.
Welcome to Piers Morgan Uncensored for a man who reveres his privacy.
Prince Harry certainly has a knack for making himself the centre of global attention.
This is a show for fearless debates, so let's have a fearless debate about Prince privacy.
Harry is seemingly addicted to invading his privacy, invading the privacy of his friends and families, and appearing in public places and making sure that everyone talks about them.
He's currently at the High Court in London.
He's flown 5,000 miles, which is a good thing to do if you're an eco-warrior, of course, watching your carbon footprint, to attend a case which involves the owners of the Daily Mail newspaper, accusing them of breaching his privacy.
He's one of many celebrities that are down there.
Now, the stage of a court case is all about procedure.
There are no witnesses, no evidence, no box office material.
The hearings take place today and yesterday and could have passed without anyone really noticing.
But Harry wanted everyone to see him.
He wanted to make the front page news and he arrived turning up with a big grin on his face and leaving with a big grin on his face, looking like he's rather enjoying it all.
Which is probably not the best look for someone who's wanting us to believe that he's in trauma because of the invasion into his privacy, which came just before his own grotesque invasion of other people's privacy.
So it's all a bit complicated, isn't it?
And he didn't slip in quietly through the side entrance like some of the others involved in this case.
He chose to parade past the TV cameras, barging past some paparazzi and march through the front gates, using the media that he loathes to invade his privacy.
You see the problem here?
And he's loving it.
Look at him.
Grinning away.
What a laugh.
Nothing better than the cost of living crisis of watching multi-millionaires rocking up in court wanting money for invasions of privacy just after they've invaded their own.
So Harry seems to me to be rather confused about his treatment by the media.
It's almost like he wants to keep his privacy so he can invade it when he's invading everybody else's.
Even our fair-minded peers on neighbouring networks appear to have woken up and sniffed the hypocritical coffee.
He has been taking lots of notes again today.
There's no need for him to be here because all of the evidence that's being presented on behalf of the claimants is written.
So it really is the fact that he's appeared today was about sort of being seen publicly.
Of course.
Well, Harry's hatred of the media was laid bare in six hours of media bashing for Netflix, which ironically is the same media company that just happens to paid him $100 million and of course is also airing the crown, which invades the privacy of his entire family on a minute-by-minute basis and often grotesquely mischaracterizes the truth.
But no matter, there's money, so he will keep quiet about that.
But there's a major flaw also in Harry's campaign against press invasions of the privacy and it's this.
He's made his own privacy a ruthless public commodity, trading in his secrets and those of his family and his friends and sometimes even the people he lost his virginity to, to the highest bidders.
The prince who fled Britain to protect apparently his family's privacy has laid bare every tawdry detail of his private life and theirs in this tell-all memoir, from drug abuse to intimate conversations with his father, the king, at his grandfather's funeral.
He gave exclusive access to images of his children to the Netflix cameras.
He talked TV studios discussing his frost-bitten todger to sell copies of his book.
He charged royal watchers $30 each to watch a live stream of a therapy session in which he again boasted about his drug use.
How much self-destruction of your own privacy can a public figure get away with before they abrogate their right to privacy?
But privacy isn't really at the heart of Harry's crusade.
He's made that crystal clear by selling it to the highest bidders.
Now, what Harry really wants is control.
He can control the narrative in Netflix shows.
He can control the questions he's asked in publicity jump kits.
He can't control his version of the truth in his book or books.
What he cannot control is a free press.
And yet a free press, warts and all, good, bad and ugly, of the type we have in this country, is the very cornerstone of a democracy.
And that's why Harry, who wants complete control over everything that's said and written about him, is so afraid of our free press.
Well, joining me now as a broadcaster, Tricia Goddard and professor of politics and author Matt Goodwin.
Okay, Tricia, you're the case for the defense.
Off you go.
Am I wrong about this point?
I don't want to get into the minutiae of the individual cases.
One of them involves the mirror group and I'm sure he'll have a good old whack at me while he's doing it.
I don't want to get into that because we can't for the legal reasons.
However, on the general point I'm making, which is, yeah, of course, as a member of the royal family, he's had his private life raked over the coals for decades.
Of course, they all have.
And in return, the others all accept that the deal is that you get the palaces, the servants, the fancy life, you're the biggest stars in the world, and the oppressed are like an annoying buzzard on the backside of a bison.
Harry sees it in a much more malevolent way.
But then, of course, comes the hypocrisy of the book, the Netflix series, everything else, where he seems to just be relentlessly invading his own privacy, that of his family, that of his friends, that of people he's met on his life.
How can you have your cake, your privacy cake, and eat it?
Well, I'm in a difficult position because I could say to a much lesser degree, and I'm nothing like Harry as far as profile is concerned, but I would be the same.
Because, for instance, when I was in hospital in 2008, I think you know, one of the reasons I moved to the States was I didn't have any privacy there.
I didn't have privacy when I was in hospital.
I had journalists trying to pretend to deliver flowers.
My kids had to go through security and what have you.
Now, I'd written a book about my life and I talked about my life in minutiae, and yet there was a line I didn't think it was fair to cross.
Now, we all have our own lines and our own boundaries, and they might not make sense to other people.
But I think, as you're right, you're right in that.
If we feel we're controlling the narrative, if I wanted to talk about my hospital experience, which I did to a certain amount of drinking, that's fine.
If somebody wants to be underhand and pretend to be delivering flowers and get surreptitious pictures of me when I'm going through chemotherapy, that is something else.
So I think this whole court case, I think, is the difference between Harry having, and you're right there, control, and underhand, alleged underhand methods of people getting another narrative.
I think we all have a public face.
We all have a private face.
Okay.
Matthew Goodwin, your response to this.
Does Harry have any right to privacy now?
Can he go and have court battles over his private life, given what he's now done to his private life?
Well, I think as a couple, they've made a conscious decision to put themselves out there.
And I think there's something else that Harry can't control, which is what the people think about him.
And if you look at the polls on Harry and Megan, and I spend a lot of my time looking at the polls, well, I've never seen a brand collapse this hard, this quickly.
Since the end of last year, both Harry and Megan are down 40 points.
We've just had a poll in America, which shows he's less popular now than Prince Andrew in America.
So as a brand, I think.
Just anecdotally, I've been bouncing this latest thing off people.
They're like, get me straight.
He's flown all the way from LA for a part of the process he doesn't need to be at just to be in the papers, going through the front entrance, and he's laughing.
What kind of thing is he thinking he's representing here?
What image is he putting forward?
I think they think they're the underdogs going up against the system.
But the public won't see that.
But I live at a cost of living crisis we haven't had in a hundred years.
I don't think there's any going to be any sympathy.
Honestly, I don't.
But is he looking for sympathy?
I mean, he's not the only one who's made.
Well, he's looking for vengeance.
Well, he's not the only one who's very visible in this.
And as you mentioned, there are other people, David Furnish.
Melton John and Doreen Lawrence.
Doreen Lawrence?
If Doreen Lawrence is pretty much saying exactly the same thing as Harry, and I'm sorry, with Doreen Lawrence, that infuriates me.
Now, everybody is saying the same thing.
Well, on Doreen Lawrence, we have to...
Pretty much.
We have to be clear that the mail have issued a robust denial of all these allegations, and in particular about Doreen Lawrence.
I agree.
And there is a messy situation involving some of the whistleblowers now recanting what they said.
So let's wait and see how this works.
But what I'm saying is what the people, what they're saying, what they're claiming is fairly similar, but David Furnish, all the rest of them.
So I think it is about control.
And when you say about him laughing as he goes into court, I don't know why, but it brings to mind somebody else, Suella Bravanben, laughing in Rwanda.
I mean, inappropriate.
Sometimes people do stupid things in serious situations.
Because there's also a sadness here, isn't there, Matthew?
And it is a sadness because he's over here and he's flown all this way to go and have his little moment in the court and in the papers because he hates the press.
But he's not being seen by any of his family, it's been reported.
His father doesn't want to see him.
His brother doesn't want to see him.
We don't know that for a fact.
Well, it's been reported by the Telegraph, who's pretty plugged into the royals, that the king has no room in his schedule, right?
If my son flew 5,000 miles to the city I was in, I'd be seeing my sons, any of them, right?
So there's clearly a massive rift here.
Apparently, he and Megan haven't even said if they'll go to the coronation.
I don't know who they think they are to be keeping the king waiting on whether they come or not.
But it just seems, again, the priorities are completely warped here.
Yeah.
I feel sorry for Harry, actually.
I think he's a deeply disturbed young man who needs a lot of support.
And I think if you look at the therapy session that he did in the US, that is not something that I think somebody who is completely in command of themselves and is getting good advice from public relations people, has a supportive team around them.
I don't think that's something that a person like that would do.
So when I look at him, I see someone actually who's quite lost.
Tricia.
Yeah, I agree.
I agree with you.
Trisha, you're an expert in people, right?
You've always been great at giving people advice.
No, I agree.
I actually agree with Matthew.
I think the people around him have given him crap advice.
Yeah, really do.
And also, because there's a disconnect.
The people around him, a lot of them are Americans.
Let's be clear about when you say that.
Look, I think the main driver of a lot of this is Megan as well.
But even so, here's the point about that.
But even so.
She's an American.
Mr. Point.
She's an American who's probably got exactly what she wants out of it.
She's back living in the state she grew up in in a massive mansion with hundreds of millions of people.
I still say she cares about the royal family or the government.
I don't know.
But I don't know whether that is or not.
But I'm coming back to Matthew's point.
The people around him, we all come up with stupid ideas now and again if you're in the media and somebody says, oh, come on, shut up.
There is nobody around him.
I think he's got a lot of enablers.
And they're fueling his kind of perpetual victimhood.
And yet, when I watched him marching into court the last couple of days, I don't see a victim at all.
I see a very...
I see a victim.
Do you?
I see a victim of circumstance, to echo you, of tragedy, of pain, of not knowing where they are, of being lost.
And there's many people in many ways.
How much can you milk that?
When you're actually born into gigantic privilege and when so many millions of people are going through genuine life or death hardship right now, I just think there is a very limited pool of sympathy for Prince Harry right now in this country for watching him take on the media again and railing about privacy.
People are like, hang on, hasn't he just done a book about all his private life?
Yeah, I see a symbol of everything that's wrong with our culture and to be honest, everything that's wrong with Values Voice of Virtue, which touches on a lot of this, right?
Yeah, so basically it's about how have we got here as a country, how have we gone through the last 10 years of political turbulence?
And my argument in a nutshell is we now have a new elite in this country that has become dangerously disconnected from the values that are held by most people out there who feel that they don't have a voice in the conversation.
And they're looking at this elite, embracing this radical woke ideology and they're saying, well, what on earth is this?
And why do you keep undermining the things I love, like the institutions?
Well, I completely agree.
You're shaking your head, but I think instinctively you know there's a bit of truth to this.
This woke stuff completely out of the way.
I hate the misuse.
We're journalists, so let's not misuse the word woke for what it was.
Let's call it, I don't know what you want to call it, but young people.
I think there is.
Not just young people.
I think there's a disconnect between the, I agree there's a disconnect.
I think I'm generalizing here, between youth, between generations, which isn't very different from the days of Bill Haley and the Rockers and what have you.
But there is a, you know, woke to me is a word that people use when they, it's like a catch-all and it's nearly always misused.
I would say there's a disconnect between the, when you call them the lead, I'd say the politicians.
It's not just the politicians anymore.
No, at the moment, for the last 10 years, we've had the same political people in power.
So if you're going to moan about immigration and everything else, we're, you know.
For sure, for sure.
It's politicians on the left, on the right, but it's also the creative ones, cultural institutions.
I also think, though, we've become, as a society, pathetically weak.
And we now celebrate victimhood.
And we celebrate weakness over strength and winning and ambition and aspiration.
And it's making us a weak society.
I really do believe that.
I don't think we're weak.
I think we are, honestly.
I don't think we.
I think there's some people who are.
And I think Harry, in a way, personifies.
He's got all this privilege, all this money.
He went for freedom.
He doesn't seem happy other than when he's taking on the media.
And it's like, really, just get over yourself, mate.
Get on with your happy life in California.
Gun Safety vs Mental Health 00:14:57
Stay with your chickens.
Drop the royal titles because why would you want titles given to you by an institution you hate so much?
Right?
Drop it all.
And then give your kids a title.
I mean, come on.
The whole thing is riddled with hypocrisy.
Anyway, thank you.
Lovely to see you.
Matthew, you're coming back a bit later.
Thank you very much.
We're coming next tonight.
Six people, including three children, ages nine, are killed in another school shooting in America.
How is this still happening?
What can happen to stop it?
Anything?
We'll debate that after a break.
Welcome back to Piers Morgan Centre.
the 87th day of 2023 but America's experienced its 129th mass shooting of the year.
Three children aged just nine and three adults were killed at a school in Nashville, Tennessee.
A former student, Audrey Hale, a biological woman who identifies as transgender or did before she was killed and apparently uses male pronouns, but frankly, who cares about the pronouns, was seen on the school CCTV armed with two assault weapons and a handgun, shooting at the school's front doors and then prowling around the school corridors before killing six people.
Footage from police body cameras has been released showing the moment they approach and kill the shooter and a warning some viewers might find this distressing.
Push an LPVM to go right.
Stop moving!
Well certainly by comparison to the appalling cowardice shown by police at the Avalde mass shooting where you may remember 20 were killed, the police there deserve full credit for the courage that they showed in taking down that shooter.
Joining me now is Ashby Beasley, who herself survived a mass shooting in Illinois only last year along with Fox News commentator and outkick host Tommy Lehran, who lives just minutes away from the school, the scene of this latest shooting.
Well welcome to both of you.
I want to start with you Ashby if I may.
Now you and your six-year-old son were present at a shooting in Highland Park, Illinois last summer where seven people were killed and 48 injured.
And then by an extraordinary coincidence, having campaigned since then for gun law reforms, you happened to be on a family vacation right in Nashville when this latest shooting happened.
And you went down to the scene and you spoke incredibly movingly to the media that were there.
Let's take a look at this.
Aren't you guys tired of covering this?
Aren't you guys tired of being here and having to cover all of these mass shootings?
I'm from Highland Park, Illinois.
My son and I survived a mass shooting over the summer.
I am in Tennessee on a family vacation with my son, visiting my sister-in-law.
I have been lobbying in DC since we survived a mass shooting in July.
I have met with over 130 lawmakers.
How is this still happening?
How are our children still dying and why are we failing them?
Well, they're good questions.
Ashby, thank you very much indeed for joining me.
What motivated you to go there and say such a passionate thing there to the media?
You know, only in America can someone like me who survived a mass shooting last year with my six-year-old son go to a rally in DC that is being put on by the survivors of another mass shooting, Newtown, Connecticut, and then stop by to visit my sister-in-law in Nashville and meet up with a friend whose son was killed in a mass shooting in a Waffle House in Antioch, Tennessee, who I met in DC lobbying.
And only on the day when we planned to have lunch could another mass shooting happen down the street from that friend's son's school, a son who was at the mass shooting that killed his brother.
Only in America can you find yourself in that kind of a situation.
I mean, just hearing...
You know, when she called...
Just sorry, just to interrupt, but just to hear what you've just said, I've got to say, sitting here in London, that kind of sentence is just extraordinary to people here.
It's not to me because I've lived and worked in America for a long time, but it's just the relentlessness of these shootings, and in particular, the relentlessness of school shootings.
There have been, I think, over 80 school shootings in America this year alone.
I mean, we had an appalling one in the UK in Dunblane, Scotland in 1996, and we irrevocably changed a lot of our gun laws, and we didn't have the same amount of guns in circulation.
Just to be clear, there's a different problem here.
This was the front page of the Daily Mirror at the time.
I was the editor.
I helped drive a campaign to make things safer.
And we've not had a school shooting since 1996.
America's had over 80 this year.
What do you think, Ashby? is the answer to this because Congress, which would change the rules, change the laws, seems completely locked on this, completely gridlocked.
Almost like nothing can be done.
Well, I'm glad that you said 1996, because since 1999, children in American schools have experienced gun violence.
Over 350,000 children have experienced gun violence in schools since 1999.
So you changed your laws in 96.
We haven't changed our laws since then, and the toll is just growing.
Our government needs to step in.
Our lawmakers need to step in, and they need to pass gun safety legislation.
The access to weapons of war, the easy access to guns, is what's killing us.
It's what's killing our children.
And there is no other answer than passing gun safety legislation.
90% of American citizens support background checks, universal background checks.
Let's do it.
Let's get it done.
Right, let's bring in Tommy here.
Look, Tommy, you and I have discussed guns, I mean, it seems like forever.
This is a groundhog day debate.
I'm not going to sit here as a Brit and tell Americans how to lead their lives.
I tried that once.
It didn't go down very well.
So let's try a different tactic here, which is, I think the key phrase which I heard there from Ashby was rather than using gun control, which is complete anathema to many Americans, particularly in a British accent, because you, as you rightly point out, drove us out with guns.
So you don't want to hear it from us.
I get it.
I get all that.
But she mentioned gun safety.
What can be done to make things safer?
Because things far from getting safer in America.
All what's happening is the number of guns in circulation are exponentially increasing, well over 400 million now.
And so the number of shootings are increasing, mass shootings, school shootings, everything's increasing.
You as an American citizen cannot be happy about that, surely.
What do we do about it?
Well, I will tell you this.
I want to talk about the mental health aspect of this in a moment.
But first, I want to address the gun rights and the gun safety debate in question.
So here in the United States, we use guns to protect everything that we hold near and dear, to protect our politicians, our celebrities, our red carpets, our jewelry stores, you name it, everything that we deem important.
We put people with firearms that are trained to use those firearms to protect those entities and those individuals.
We do not protect our schools like we should.
And if you look into this shooter's background, you look into their manifesto, they had a map of this school because what we use to protect our schools is a little sign that says gun-free zone.
So when you're looking at soft targets, if you are a psychopath, a freak, a monster, you look for places where you can go and cause carnage and damage where nobody will be able to stop you.
Now, thank God for our Nashville officers that responded so quickly and were able to neutralize that monster and that threat.
But had we had somebody outside of that school that was trained with a firearm, they could have neutralized that threat.
Well, hang on, Tommy, Tommy.
We need to look into protecting our schools.
Okay, but we know what happened at Evaldo.
There were hundreds of good guys with guns and none of them had the guts to go into anything about it and 20 kids got killed.
So it's not a given that actually if you have a load of people who are good people with guns in these schools, it makes any difference.
We saw what happened on the video here about what this person did.
But on a wider point, I tweeted today, for example, look, rather than get into the same old debates, what about regulating guns in America as in the same way you regulate cars?
And I got an unbelievable amount of abuse immediately.
Just endless abuse, as if I didn't know what I was talking about.
But when I actually then posted a piece by Nick Christoph, who was at the New York Times at the time, and I explained what I meant, and I'm just going to pre-see what the piece was, a brilliant piece.
It was a few years ago.
But he said, if we had the same auto fatality rate today that we had in 1921, by my calculations, we'd had 715,000 Americans dying annually in vehicle accidents.
Instead, we've reduced that fatality rate by 95%, not by confiscating cars or taking them away, but by regulating them and their drivers more sensibly.
And then he goes into all the things that have happened in that period.
They talked about requiring driver licenses, putting speed limits, registering vehicles.
All of that was originally met with ridicule.
When authorities in New York City sought in 1899 to ban horseless carriages in the parks, the idea was lambasted as devoid of merit and impossible to maintain by the New York Times.
Yet over time, as more and more people were being killed by cars, they brought in more and more regulation.
By the 1920s, a lot of this stuff, like car registration, license requirements, other safety measures, and then over time, seat belts, airbags, padded dashboards, better bumpers, rules about drunken drivers, graduated licensing for young people, improved road engineering, blah, blah, blah.
The upshot of all that was that there's now just over one car fatality per 100 million miles driven.
And so it was a very well-argued point.
And at the center of it was not a claim, which I know goes down very badly with gun owners in America, that you want to ban guns or grab guns.
I'm always called a gun grabber.
I don't want your guns, trust me.
But about making it as safe as cars, doing what happened to cars.
Why not just do that and see what happens?
Well, here's the thing.
Somebody that's going to go into a school and murder children is not like your average driver who needs to obey a speed limit or wear a seatbelt.
Somebody that's going to go in to murder students clearly does not care about laws in general.
So what does making law-abiding citizens making it harder for us to have firearms, what does that do to stop a monster, a psychopath, a freak?
Now, I understand your argument here.
So we need gun safety.
We need people to be trained how to use firearms to respect firearms and change the gun culture in this country.
I'll also say in the last 30 years, gun ownership in the United States really has not changed much.
What has?
Our mental health situation.
And now, thanks to the radical LGBTQ movement in this country, we are exploiting mental illness, especially in young people.
So when you look at this particular shooter, you look at their background, you look at the mental health counseling and services, they were receiving probably gender affirmation because that's the new status quo now.
Instead of saying this person has a real mental illness that needs to be addressed in an individual basis, we now cloud everything under the guise of gender affirmation and tolerance.
The mental health aspect is very important to you.
We can have a discussion about gun safety and guns, but we have to address mental health and that's being glossed over.
I couldn't agree more with you about mental health.
All I would point out is we have exactly the same mental health problems in this country and in many European countries.
And because we don't have the availability of guns, we don't have 80,000 people a year dying from guns.
We had, I think, one last year.
So that's what I would say in return for that.
I want to come back to Ashby Fannie for this.
The local Congress...
Can I answer something that she said?
Yeah, sure.
Can I answer something that she said?
Yeah.
You know, statistically, we know that mass shooters, 77% of mass shooters, get their guns legally.
That means that they don't have a criminal record.
That means that they're not doing the things wrong.
They're not on some sort of list.
Well, I'm going to make the point, Ashley.
Get their guns legally.
Yeah, Ashby, I was going to make the point that this particular shooter was a woman, transgender.
I'm not interested in that aspect of the story other than to say that she acquired seven guns legally from five different stores.
Right.
And apparently was at the same time receiving medical treatment from a doctor for being emotionally disturbed.
Now, to anyone with half a brain, this seems like an utterly lethal cocktail, but nothing in the system stopped her.
I'm interested also, Ashby, in this.
This is Congressman Andy Ogles, who is the congressman responsible for that district.
So he's a US lawmaker.
And in Christmas 2021, he tweeted this Christmas card to the world on his Twitter account.
Let's take a look at this.
That's him with his family all clutching guns, including young children.
Merry Christmas from the Ogles family, he wrote.
The atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference.
They deserve a place of honor with all that's good.
As some people have pointed out, that doesn't seem a particularly responsible or appropriate thing for a US congressman to be doing.
And now we see, perhaps, in a disturbed mind, what that kind of mindset can do.
Yes, and if I'm being honest, you know, I look at a picture like that and the glorifications of weapon, the glorification of weapons of war, because the AR-15 was designed for combat in the 1950s.
It is a gun that shoots smooth.
It's an easy shot.
I shot one recently.
You can put your eye on the barrel when you're firing an AR-15 and you will not lose your eye.
It is designed for ease, for killing.
When I see a gun like that in a picture like that, what I think of is I think of Mexican cartels and how Mexican cartels are arming themselves with our guns.
They are arming themselves with our guns.
Over 200,000 weapons are being trafficked into Mexico every single year.
Republicans like this Republican in this picture is complaining about the fentanyl crisis on a daily basis, but our assault weapons are enforcing the funds to be able to do that.
I think that's what none of our lawmakers are doing anything about.
Yeah, I think the truth is they're both hugely important issues in America.
They both have huge toll on life.
I just think it's completely inappropriate for a congressman to be putting Christmas cards out with his kids all clutching rifles like that.
I'm not sure what message he's trying to send.
And I'm not saying he's responsible for.
MPs' Second Jobs Debate 00:05:29
Yeah.
Look, Tommy, and Ashby, thank you both.
I mean, Tommy, you and I, we've discussed this a lot.
I just hate the groundhog day aspect.
I love America.
I love Americans.
I respect the Second Amendment.
I understand you can't take all the guns away.
There are too many of them.
This can't go on.
You can't just wake up every few weeks and have another school being shot up by people in combats with all these guns.
Something has to happen.
Something has to change.
And the thing I find most frustrating and dispiriting about it is Americans are the most can-do people in the world.
They get stuff done.
And yet on this, this total paralysis.
And when we did the campaign in the UK after Dunblaine, there was no partisanship or political difference of opinion.
It was never political.
I've never really understood how it's got that way in America.
Here, left and right came together and went, the lives of kids come above everything.
And I think until that is the starting point, I don't think anything happens in America.
But look, I appreciate we all have different views on this.
I also appreciate I'm not American.
So I appreciate you both joining me and thank you both very much.
We're coming next.
They're already on £84,000 a year, a lot of money.
But should our politicians actually be paid a lot more?
Konstantin Kissing joins me next to argue that point.
Well you'll be unsurprised to hear that the disgraced former Health Secretary Matt Hancock has disgraced himself again, as has the disgraced former Chancellor Kwazi Kwateng, who were both caught up an undercover sting agreeing to work for a fake South Korean company for thousands of pounds a day.
Let's have a look at the footage from the campaign group led by donkeys.
So we were wondering, do you have a daily rate at the moment?
I do.
I do.
Yes, it's 10,000 sterling.
We all like to talk about arrangements of fees.
I mean, do you have a daily rate?
Yeah, I mean, a yearly rate.
Yes.
I mean, I would say as an MP, obviously I don't need to create, you know, earn a King's ransom.
But I'm looking, I would do anything less than for about $10,000 a month.
And so it went unedifyingly on.
MPs are allowed to have second jobs.
There's no suggestion of parliamentary rule breaking, just pure greed.
So should MPs actually be paid more to stop them behaving in this grasping way in the first place?
Well, joining me now as the podcast host and author of An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West, Konstantin Kissing.
Constantly, welcome back to the programme.
Great to do your podcast, by the way.
I've had a great reaction to it.
Good, bad, and ugly, which is the perfect reaction to any interview.
Thanks for coming on.
When you watched all this in its full gory details, it was so gruesome to watch.
And it was the usual suspects, Hancock, Kwateng.
Didn't surprise me at all that Kwa Teng had very little grasp on reality of money.
I love the way it said the yearly rate.
He's upselling you already.
I did enjoy that.
I mean, your takeaway from that was that you have a belief that MPs should be paid a lot more money.
I've just say I sort of share that view.
I sort of think if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys, right?
And we're paying peanuts in getting people who just seem to me to be extremely low-caliber politicians.
And we need to somehow raise that bar.
Would money alone do that, do you think?
Well, the headline, pay them more, is what people took away from what I've been saying about this.
My view is, yes, you pay them more, but you then also ban them from...
You say they're allowed to have second jobs.
They're allowed to have third jobs and fourth jobs and fifth jobs.
So as long as the incentive structure is there, they're not getting paid a huge amount for the job that they're doing.
Obviously, compared to the ordinary person, they're being paid a fair chunk of money.
But compared to other people operating at the top of society, I mean, if you wanted your favourite football club to be run by someone who's very good, you'd happily pay them three, four million good a year, right?
And in Singapore, they pay apparently their politicians a lot of money, millions of dollars.
So they take a view that you then attract the best talent.
Your country benefits.
It's actually a small price to pay.
You get what you pay for.
And I think with them, you have to ban the second, third and fourth jobs and so on.
And you have to make sure that they put their stocks and shares in the trust where they don't get benefits from companies being traded in a certain way and whatever.
But the bottom line is, Piers, you get what you pay for.
Well, it's interesting, I mean, you have to get better people into parliament.
Right, so Singapore, they get £672,000 a year for an average member of parliament in Singapore.
Spain is only £49,000.
Germany, £108,000.
United States Senators, £142,000.
And France, just under £80,000.
So I guess by comparison to most of Europe, ours get in the kind of middle range of that.
But Singapore, dramatically different.
And they believe over there that it really does attract a better caliber.
And that makes perfect sense to me.
I just think one of the biggest problems with our politics, Piers, is people think about tribe rather than results.
And if you're tribal about this, you go, well, you know, Hancock and Kwateng, of course.
But actually, cast your mind back to the Blair government.
It's not like they were all squeaky clean either.
We have a system in which the incentive structure encourages politicians not to take money from us and to serve us.
We have a political system where they take money from, in this case, some pretend Korean company.
And who are they then serving?
Well, exactly.
I completely agree.
I want to switch to another story which I thought would probably get your interest.
The Guardian Cancel Culture 00:02:06
The Guardian newspaper owners.
So the Guardian being the most woke newspaper on planet Earth.
Absolutely beyond reproach.
And they've led cancel culture.
They've led wokery.
They are purer than pure, whiter than white, in all things ethical.
And they've had an unfortunate moment today because the Scott Trust that owns The Guardian has had to issue a public apology because it turns out the origins of the wealth used to establish The Guardian came from slavery.
A review found the paper's founder John Edward Taylor had links to slavery through partnerships in cotton manufacturing.
Obviously, The Guardian reaction is to fall on its knees, beg for mercy, announce all sorts of initiatives to prove they're not a bunch of racists and so on.
You'd expect that from The Guardian.
But a comical irony that the paper that's driven probably more than any publication in the world, this kind of woke mentality and been hectoring everybody else about their own shortcomings gets caught like this.
This is a very good example of this whole thing more generally, where most of these people who claim to be kind and compassionate, they behave in the most awful ways towards the people that they disagree with.
And I think this is where, you know, I'm not, I don't spend a lot of time reading The Guardian.
I'm not going to cancel that.
That's actually bad for my mental health.
So I don't.
But what I do think is, you know, everyone lives in a glass house to some extent.
And I think what I take out of this is we should all stop throwing rocks around because I genuinely think that if you dig down long enough, every one of us has some ancestor who did something wrong.
And the less we focus on things that happened 300 years ago and the more we come together and try to solve the problems of today, I think the better off we're going to be.
I just see this self-flagellation over historical stuff, which current people had nothing to do with.
What's the point?
You know, it's like this thing in San Francisco.
We're looking to pay millions and millions of dollars to every black person who lives in San Francisco as some kind of reparations for what previous generations did hundreds of years ago.
I don't understand how that helps anybody.
No, it doesn't.
And as you know, I talk about it in the book and the issue of slavery more broadly.
I just think we've got stuck in the past in a way that's completely unhelpful.
Michael Jordan Memes 00:09:10
Many of the conversations we have now in the West are about looking inward and going, why are we so bad?
Why are we so wrong?
And the case I make in an Immigrants Love Letter to the West is we live in one of the most open, tolerant, genuinely progressive societies in the history of humanity.
Let's appreciate that.
Let's at least notice that for God's sake.
When do we stop celebrating our country?
I feel the same way about America.
A new poll came out today saying the majority of Americans, the first time I can remember, now no longer think it's the best country in the world.
Americans always used to do that, right?
Now they don't.
There's a kind of, again, self-flagellation about the state of the countries now, whereas America and Britain, in many ways, are two of the great countries of the world today.
Unquestionably.
And to me, it's mind-boggling that we're in this position.
But beyond being sort of frustrated and going, oh, these pink-haired idiots are running around ruined whatever.
To me, this is a real threat, Piers.
Because if we in the West do not have the strength of our convictions, we do not have the courage to stand up and say, you know, our history is the same as the history of every other society.
We've done good and bad.
But on balance, we're good, we're good people, we are people who are doing good in the world.
Then other people will come and take over.
You know, the best people ever in the history of this planet have all been flawed geniuses.
I'm talking to one and you're facing one.
Two prime examples.
Constantly, great to see you.
Immigrants Love That is a West.
Really excellent book.
Making the points you just made.
Good to see you.
I appreciate it.
Thank you, Piers.
We're coming next tonight.
Donald Trump hits out as a rival Ron DeSantis again, Ron DeSanctimonius, as he calls him.
And campaigners reckon it's time to ban sports terms like bullseye and hot dog.
Yes, our friends from Petta are on the march again.
We'll discuss that after the break.
Well, join me now.
Our talk to be contributor, Paula Rona-Adrian, professor of politics and author Matt.
Goodwin's back with me, and political journalist Avis and Tina joins me after we went viral on our last debate.
So good to have you back to annoy me.
Where should we start?
Let's start with digital blackface.
This is the weirdest thing, Paula.
CNN writer John Blake has written a whole piece in which he talks about a term called digital blackface, arguing that white people using black people in memes or GIFs to express comic relief or other emotions is completely outrageous, disgusting, sexist, and so on.
Examples, the crying Michael Jordan, the Tyra Banks, how dare you, the Will Smith crying meme and so on, right?
This is complete nonsense, isn't it?
Why doesn't the same apply to white people gifts and memes of which there are a gazillion?
Well, first of all, you described it as being weird.
And secondly, your presentation in regards to introducing this topic is as if you don't care.
I don't.
And you should care.
Why?
And that's exactly why.
Why is a picture of Michael Jordan?
This article was written?
Because we need all to understand what's happening here.
And what's happening is that there's this insidious, toxic, poisonous racism that just underlies Michael Jordan crying.
He's the greatest athlete in his life.
It underlies this very issue and why it's important for us to explain.
Why is it poisonous to have a picture of Michael Jordan crying as a meme?
So it's not the picture per se.
No, it's not.
You understand, because I'm sure you would have read the article.
I did.
I thought the article was completely nonsense.
But what this is actually about is about how the picture is presented and the context that it's presented in.
Matthew, I'm sorry, I just think it's all complete nonsense.
Yeah, I mean, my personal view, I think we've entered a culture where everybody's become far too sensitive on issues around racism.
Michael Jordan cares that anyone's doing a meme of him with tears, but also cries at the size of his bank balance.
Yeah, but everything, it's everybody's feelings, everybody's lived experience before, you know, objectivity and.
I'm still waiting to hear why that's weird or that's a bad thing.
Well, I'm asking you, though, why is it okay to use memes of famous white people, but not black people?
Yeah, but that was the argument.
The argument is that you should actually use white people.
And the point being that particularly...
We do.
There's white memes all the time.
Particularly boomers who deploy these memes.
It's not really something that Gen Z do anymore or even millennials.
You know, they are more racist.
They are.
They're a more racist age category.
I'm sorry.
And they are typically maybe not as funny and they deplore or angry and they deploy these memes.
To people of my age that are exactly funny.
Any other people?
It's very ageist, you don't mind me saying.
You understand, don't you, that in terms of in terms.
Well, then let me help you.
No, I don't understand.
In understanding race and in understanding racism, we learn it's a journey in terms of education.
You no longer refer to me as the N-word.
You no longer refer to me as coloured.
It's a journey.
You never did.
I never did.
My generation never did.
Well, I'm struggling with that one, Piers, and I think some of your viewers might be as well.
Well, you can generalise if you want.
Well, I said some, so I'm not generalising.
And I'm also talking about my personal experience.
And so what this author is.
How is any of that affected by a picture of Michael Jordan, one of the world's greatest athletes, crying as a meme which is used in humour?
Well, you oversimplify the point.
Then you actually kind of willfully miss it.
What we're saying is that, you know, when you exactly...
You're a vegan, right?
Let's move on.
You're vegetarian.
All right, they're all the same to me.
Petter, they like call themselves Peter, but I've been for calling them Petter because it annoys them.
They've brought out another list of things we're not allowed to use now, sporting terms.
Bullseye, worm burner in golf, catch a crab, rowing.
We can't use any of these terms because it implies degradation and mistreatment of animals.
They call it speciesism.
But I think this is deeply unhelpful.
I definitely think we should be talking about consistency.
Do you agree it's not meat?
I think we should be talking about...
Wait a minute, this is a huge moment.
That this would convince anyone to think more carefully about.
So, you think this is pathetic virtue signaling?
I didn't say that.
I said, I can't, I think it's deeply unhelpful.
Pathetic virtue signalling.
How's that nonsense and sharing memes is dramatic?
I don't understand it.
I mean, my students share memes all the time.
I mean, I don't think it's a generation thing.
What we've got, we're living through a cultural revolution.
These are people that are trying to change the world.
It's a war on language.
You've said that twice.
I don't know why you're so fearful of language or people exploring new knowledge.
Why don't we ask the Chinese?
You disagree yourself how dangerous this is.
Why don't we ask the Chinese?
Why shouldn't we be worried about language editing?
I think that we're discussing this.
Isn't it important that people have come out and said, look, this is what we're saying.
People need to be aware of.
You don't defend this garbage, surely.
Even you, the virtue signaller in chief.
You want to dismiss it, but that doesn't mean it's important to listen to it.
No bull in the world is going to watch.
You're not getting so angry about this.
No bull is going to watch bullseye and go, how dare you?
I'm offended.
You know why?
They don't speak English.
They don't understand.
They don't watch the darts.
Right?
No worm watches golf.
No crab watches the rowing and goes, how dare you be so crabby?
Not that I agree with this, but I think we obviously do know that what they're talking about is that you're normalising the killing of animals.
And then, you know, for children growing up and hearing that language, animals kill each other.
Matthew, help me here.
It doesn't mean you have to bring a rose of common sense between two virtue signaling.
I think we're losing perspective.
I think, you know, generations in the past are looking at us and saying, what is going on down there?
It's crazy.
I mean, I think we've lost all perspective.
We're evolving.
We're not evolving.
We're evolving.
We're not doing generations in the past.
We're not evolving.
And that's what we're doing.
We're going backwards for retreating.
Don't want to do that, shout and bang their fists and talk about fear.
I'm fearless, and I think you should be as well.
Well, you seem very fearful of a bull being upset by the word bullseye, which seems to me a reign of terror, which is the like of which we've never seen.
I want to show you a picture of the Pope.
And I want you all to be honest, when you first saw this, like me, did you think, wow, he looks cool?
And nearly post it, right?
I like it.
And then it turns out it's a fake, right?
It's an AI, not chat GPT, trick the internet with a photo of the Pope in a white puffer jacket and sunglasses.
Pabbier, it's quite a funny story.
Pablo Javier, who created the image, told BuzzFeed he was tripping on mushrooms when he came up with the idea and just thought it would be funny.
Is that funny?
I like it.
Okay.
You find that funny?
It's funny, but.
I know, no.
And there's a but, there is a big but.
Don't tell me it's popist.
No, but as human beings.
I'm a Catholic.
On a serious note, we're human beings.
You found that funny.
And what we do is we use our eyes to help us tell the truth.
Quick question.
That bores me.
How are we going to tell the truth?
Paula, was it funny though?
Yes.
Okay, so you find it funny mocking my Pope.
I'm a Catholic.
I'm not mocking your popping.
You see how difficult it is?
I'm not mocking your pope.
You should be sick of it.
You don't like leaves and Michael Jordan.
You don't like bulls being oppressed by bullseye.
When it comes to mocking my pope, you're all in, aren't you, Paul?
If you allow me to answer, I'm not mocking your pope.
I think the Pope looks amazing.
Virtue signalling is a very selective business.
So he's my Pope as well.
I'm a Catholic.
What do you think of that?
I think it's really funny.
But then I see the funny side of life, Piers.
I'm afraid of the people.
So did I.
But that's not the point.
Matthew, good to see you.
Ava, good to see you.
Paula, good to see you.
Thank you.
Whatever you're up to, don't go virtue signalling.
Keep it uncensored.
Good night.
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