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May 15, 2023 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
46:52
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Can Britain Sustain A Million Migrants 00:15:20
I'm Piers Morgan on censor tonight.
The Home Secretary says we've forgotten how to work.
Labour says bosses should be banned from calling or texting staff outside of office hours.
So is Britain work shy?
We'll debate that with the union boss.
He's ordering ministers to stop calling his workers lazy snowflakes.
But what if they are lazy snowflakes?
President Zelensky makes a shock visit to London and says Ukraine needs jets.
Is it time to give Ukraine whatever it needs to end Putin's war?
We'll debate that, plus prisons banned from saying convict to prisoners, presumably in case it hurts their feelings.
A biological man enters a female university boat race and kids are being taught that women have penises.
No, this isn't an episode of some bizarre spoof.
This is actually happening.
Well, Professor Gad Sad says that common sense is dead and he knows who killed it.
He'll discuss all those stories with me live.
Live from the news building in London, this is Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Good evening from London.
Welcome to Piers Morgan Uncensored.
We Brits like to think of ourselves as a hard-working nation of ambitious, industrious grafters.
Rain or shine, usually the former, of course.
We pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and we get the job done.
But lately, this has been going on for a few years, an infectious disease has rippled through our workforce.
Not COVID, I would call it work-shy wastrel disease, and apparently highly contagious.
Firstly, we'd be walloped by endless strikes and walkouts all year.
And then the workers were still working.
Hundreds of thousands of people just gave up during COVID and never went back.
Many more are still glued to their kitchen tables working from home.
Well, three years on from the pandemic, a whopping 44% of workers still spend at least part of the week at home.
Half of the civil service, the machinery of the government itself, no longer bothers going to the office.
In some government departments, 71% of staff are running the country from their sofas, more concerned with the capacity of their fridge than the bus.
And Dave Penman, the union boss charged with whipping them into shape, responded by, well, whining about being called names.
Now, having been told that you're lazy, woke, inefficient, remainer, activist snowflake, you're also now apparently a Machiavellian genius, able to unseat ministers and undermine the settled will of government.
I don't know about you, Conference, but I've had enough of this.
At some point...
At some point, we have to say enough is enough.
Would have been a full audience if they'd all come into work.
Well, today, the Home Secretary Swella Bravoman, in her latest attention-seeking broadside, said that Brits are forgetting how to work for ourselves and we need homegrown fruit pickers and lorry drivers to control immigration.
And to my astonishment, I found myself nodding with Miss Bravo for the first time, possibly ever.
On this, she may well have a good point.
Well, now Labour's Sakir Starmer, who might also be the next prime minister, says he'll enshrine in law the right to work from home and ban bosses, I love this bit, from sending emails and texts outside of working hours.
I keep reading that jobs are under threat from the galloping rise of artificial intelligence, amongst many other things.
But I also read that the fastest growing type of small business in the US is content creator.
The 50 million people worldwide now say their occupation is influencer.
Well, that means they photograph their avocados for a living and pay the bills by not paying the bills and living with their parents until they're 45.
Well, the good news is there is a cure for work-shy wastelord disease, and Dr. Morgan's prescription is this.
Put down the baguettes, rediscover the lost art of wearing trousers and get your lazy, sniveling backsize back to work.
Well on that tender inclusive note, I'm joined by the General Secretary of the FDA Union, Dave Penman, the businessman and founder of Pimbico Plumbers, Charlie Mullins, and talk to these political editor Kate McCann.
In case you're wondering why the backdrop is not our normal, glowing, colourful graphic screens, we've got what's called a technical hitch in the business.
So there's a kind of funereal.
It looks so bad.
It almost looks like GB News.
I can only apologise to my viewers for this temporary hitch, which hopefully we will resolve, but it sort of adds the right kind of somberness, I think, to this debate.
So, all right, Dave Penman.
Here's my problem with what you said.
What if one of your workers just happens to be a lazy, woke, inefficient Remainer snowflake?
Well, it's not been my experience of that.
But what if they are?
Serious question.
Well, then, like any business or any industry, you would deal with people who are not performing well.
We have no problem with that in dealing with performance.
The problem is, ministers are using this as an issue just to kind of bash the civil service.
They're not basing it on any facts around whether people who work in hybrid environments, made sometimes at home and sometimes at work, are any less productive or more productive.
They're just doing it to kind of trot out an attack on the civil service.
So many civil servants just stuck it up.
Well, it's not just civil servants.
No, I know that.
But why are so many of your workers working from home?
So because, I mean, some people were doing it before the pandemic.
The pandemic, I think, in many industries accelerated that move.
If you look before the pandemic, actually about 17% of the private sector were working at some point at home.
That's now...
But this can't be right for a country trying to compete on the global stage with China, America, and India.
I mean, our work ethic is basically get up, go to your sofa, watch a bit of daytime telly, which is actually quite riveting at the moment.
If it's that, and then you do a bit of work and you con your bosses, you're doing a full shift.
I mean...
If it was that, you'd be right, but it's not that.
How do you know what they're doing?
Because they're producing, if not the same, then more.
They're working more hours because they're not commuting anymore.
It works for them, it works for employers.
Why would the private sector, why would private sector organizations, when it's the bottom line, one of the biggest sectors where this is working is the finance sector.
Now, you're telling me those big banks and international finances houses don't care about the bottom line.
Right.
Yet their workers, in many cases, in bigger proportions, working.
Okay, I'm going to come to Charlie about the work part of this in a moment, but just on the bullying aspect, the Dominic Raab thing, which blew up this whole idea of how people should be treated in the workplace.
When I went through all the stuff on Raab, I've got no truck with Raab.
I think he was pretty hopeless in many ways.
But when I looked for the smoking gun of what he was supposed to have done to these poor civil servants, I didn't really find one.
Was I missing something?
I mean, it's raising your voice in the workplace now banned.
It's holding people that work for you to, you know, quite firm account and being heavily critical of what you think is shoddy work.
Are any of those things tolerated anymore?
Or is that all off-limits?
Of course they are, but that's not what the report found.
The report found that...
What was he doing though?
He abused his power.
He had humiliated people.
But what was he doing?
What does that mean, though?
What was he doing?
Because how he treated them, how he talked about them.
Give me an example.
Treat me like he was treating somebody.
Well, you know, the report didn't give those kind of level of details.
I know.
But nobody knows.
That's because they didn't want to identify people.
It came up with conclusions.
This was an independent person.
But do you know?
Do you know, though?
Do I know?
Do you know what he was doing?
I witnessed...
So give me a bit of the RAB treatment.
So.
I'm serious.
Well, I wouldn't want to humiliate you.
I wouldn't want to humiliate.
I don't like.
He wouldn't humiliate me.
I wouldn't want to.
Short of mentioning my football team's performance yesterday, you cannot humiliate me.
Yeah, but humiliating someone at work, which is what he was found to have done, targeting individuals, which is what he was found to have done.
Remember, this was an independent KC who had investigated.
This wasn't some woke HR investigation.
Well, we don't know because we weren't told what was going on.
Charlie, there are two issues here.
One, it's how people get treated in the workplace.
But the bigger one, I think, for you with your view on this is this thing about work from home.
It seems to me that Brits are rushing to either abandon work or work from home or in massive numbers go on to state benefits and just avoid doing any work at all.
You put all this together, and the impression that we're giving to other countries is that basically we've become work shy.
And that's exactly true.
Exactly true.
What you said, Dave, about 70% of the private sector working from home.
Them figures are not right, mate.
Private 70%.
What do you say then?
I said 22% of the private sector, but in some sectors, during COVID, it was up to 70%.
Yeah, well, I mean, that's rubbish anyhow.
But the private sector have to go to work.
They've got no choice.
But obviously, the public sector, they're being paid by us, the taxpayer.
Are we happy with, what, what is it, 300,000 civil servants, not 300, 30,000 civil servants working from home, 60,000 civil servants, over 30,000 working from home, taxpayers paying for it.
It's not working.
It's two years after COVID and they're still at home.
There's no reason, no excuse whatsoever.
All the offices are half empty.
They're paying for lighting.
They're paying for security.
It's just not working.
I mean, they're tight in the piss.
So the biggest sector where home working is prevalent is the finance sector.
In much greater numbers than it is in the public sector.
So if that was the case, if this doesn't work, if people who are only in it to make money found that people were work shy and they were at the fridge all the time, why would they continue to do it?
They save money because they've reduced their office costs.
The staff like it because they give greater flexibility.
Also, staff like it.
And they still make money.
Tell me this.
Sorry, hang on.
No, no, hang on.
Let me just say that.
Let me bring the very patient lady waiting at the end of the day.
It takes one hour for the civil servants to answer a phone.
How can it be working?
All right, let me bring in Kate.
So, Kate, I mean, one of the things that made me laugh most was this Keir Starmer initiative, moving to a place where no boss can contact their staff after a certain time of the evening.
I mean, I've spent my entire career being bothered at all times of day and night by bosses, and I just wouldn't cross my mind to complain about that.
If you don't like being bothered, do a job which doesn't require you to be bothered.
Yeah, and it's difficult to see how that would work in politics, for example, when most politicians are expected to be on their brief 24 hours a day or whenever they are awake.
I put this to the Labour Party at the weekend, actually, and they did admit that it would probably end up being a code of conduct.
It would probably only apply to certain types of jobs.
It will not apply across the board because it's not feasible.
But this whole conversation is a fascinating one.
What Labour's trying to get at is this idea that social media, that artificial intelligence is changing the way that we work, and we need to protect people from those changes.
But everything has a knock-on effect.
If you don't go into work, for example, the number of dry cleaners near offices, the number of sandwich shops near offices, the number of coffee bars go out of business, those people's jobs, those people's jobs are impacted.
There is a knock-on effect.
Yes, all of these conditions and changes.
Newspaper sales are down in all the areas where work from home has just carried on because people aren't coming in and spending the kind of money they would on newspapers, provisions, sandwich bars, all that kind of stuff.
And they're spending in a different way.
They're spending on online deliveries, which means that parcel companies, therefore, are needed far more.
But it also means that Royal Mail can't cope and we need to change the way that Royal Mail is working.
It's a huge societal change.
And I think there are some valid points to all of these arguments.
But everything will have an impact on lots of other things.
Miss Willa Breverman says, you know, I just think more British people should be taking the jobs that we're currently farming out, literally, to foreign workers.
I think she's got a point, hasn't she?
Minister, hear what she said.
We need to get overall immigration numbers down.
And we mustn't forget how to do things for ourselves.
There is no good reason why we can't train up enough truck drivers, butchers, fruit pickers, builders or welders.
You see, I think that is an election boosting attitude to work.
I think a lot of people will think she's got a point.
They're also going to think we have all this obsessive interest in the small boats part of immigration debate.
And it's legitimate.
We shouldn't have this number of illegal people coming in in the way they are.
But net migration may get over a million.
I was reading it at the weekend.
A million people coming in.
Now, that shows that this country has a great heart to people from Ukraine, Afghanistan, Syria, wherever it may be.
But it's not sustainable, is it?
I mean, is that sustainable politically for the Conservative Party who've promised to get these numbers down to have a million figure?
But is it sustainable for the country?
Well, clearly it's not sustainable for the Conservative Party.
You've seen a succession of very senior Conservatives standing on a stage today, essentially telling their Prime Minister that it's not working for them, which is something you generally see when a government loses an election, not in the 18 months before they try and win one, which tells you a lot about the state of politics.
I think if you try and unpack, though, what Suella Bravman is saying about work, it gets very interesting.
The unemployment rate in this country is incredibly low.
But the number of people on benefits is now millions and millions and millions.
Lots of those people have been out of work for a very long time.
It's a very difficult problem to solve because those people may be disabled, they may have mental health problems.
Have we become an easy touch for people gaming the system?
But take it further.
Okay, you're right.
There are lots of people on long-term unemployment.
Very hard problem to solve.
Takes a lot of money, takes a lot of time, isn't quick.
Look at the number of people who are coming in.
Yes, net migration may hit a million, but lots of those have come from Hong Kong.
They've come from places like Ukraine.
They're people that we've welcomed in, but they're also people who've been on shortage occupation lists because we don't have enough people trained in certain types of work to be able to work in this country.
Earlier on today, I was speaking to a fruit farmer in Angus.
He needs 4,000 people to be able to get his strawberry crops onto the market every single six months.
There are only 4,000 people unemployed in his particular area, and most of them are not capable of doing those jobs, which is why, in his view, he has to get people from abroad to do them.
There is...
I mean, all right, let me bring Dave back in on this.
Just from a workforce perspective, I remember talking to a chief executive of a supermarket chain.
Every Christmas, without fail, rather than have local pickers pick the Brussels sprouts for Christmas, they used to fly in from Eastern Europe, several thousand workers to these places, I think in East Anglia, where they picked all the Brussels sprouts, and that's how they did it.
It was cheaper to do that.
That is ridiculous.
Well, I think it depends how you want to run your economy.
If you look at what are successful economies, we often talk about the Australian immigration system as the kind of bespoke one, the points-based system.
That is full of immigrants coming in and doing seasonal work, coming in for a few years and working, bringing on specific occupations, and that works and drives their economy.
But can this country sustain a net migration of a million people?
Well, I think it's a system that this government has designed.
No, no, no.
My question was.
My question was, can the country sustain that?
I think probably, if you would say if that was a yearly figure, that's not going to be the case.
But what we're probably trying to do is just now rebalance the system.
We have huge shortages in places like the NHS and social care.
A lot of these people.
Hospitality.
I mean, every restaurateur I talked to, they can't get started.
You know, the Home Secretary was talking about those issues and the kind of lecturing business around it.
If government paid more in areas like NHS and social care, perhaps more British workers would be able to do it.
Time To End The War In Ukraine 00:15:07
But we can't pay everybody what they want or the country goes bankrupt.
And these strikes aren't helping.
I mean, they're going on and on and on in all sectors.
And that is also contributing to this general sense of the country creaking up the seams.
Well, again, stuff that the government can solve.
They can solve it.
Well, it can by giving them all what they're asking for.
But there's also increasingly, it seems to me, an unreasonable attitude from some of the unions.
Would you accept that?
No, I wouldn't accept that.
Of course you wouldn't.
None of you ever do.
None of you ever do.
But even if I sat here as a union leader and went, I want 50% for my work.
Because he's got a point.
He's got a point.
Could you be thinking, I should have gone 50?
Right?
But if you're a government and you want the NHS to run, you're competing and saying, don't want people to work in less NHS.
I don't want skilled people to go and work elsewhere.
That age you've got appears going rich.
Charlie?
Yeah, I'm going to say we've become work shy, we've become very lazy, and the benefits system is undoubtedly ruining a lot of people from going to work and working from home and all that type of thing.
We've just become work shy.
We used to have great work ethics and I think we need to...
With the exception, by the way, of my three panelists tonight, we've come in here at 8.15 at night to put a shift in.
That's got a shift, Dave.
Can't do it from home.
Before I let you go, Kate, we're going to have a debate about Ukraine in a moment.
Just how significant was this today with Zelensky coming to see Rushi Sunak and what Sunak is saying about what he wants to do with Ukraine?
It's hugely significant.
The Ukrainian, President Zelensky recognises that Rishi Sunak offering to spearhead this coalition to try and get jets is going to be the important part of the next stage of what he needs.
The question now is, will those countries that can offer S-16s, which is not this country because we don't have them, will they put their money where their mouths are and will they offer those jets?
You know, when I went to see Zelensky in Ukraine last summer, it was when the leadership race was going on here and he obviously liked Boris Johnson very much, all the support he'd given him.
And he said to me, what's Rishi Sunak going to do with us?
Is he going to be as supportive?
He was really, he was desperate because he relies on the support from the British leading the way in Europe, which is ironic, given we've just split from the European Union, but he felt we were leading the way.
Going to be very interesting to see how this all plays out.
Thank you to my pack.
Apologies for the grim background.
You look like the sort of Supreme Court of the United States, which we could probably do a lot worse than you three, I think.
Good to see you all.
Thank you very much.
Well, I'm saying to the next President Zelensky, as I said, made a surprise visit to the UK today and says he needs jets.
Is it time to give Ukraine whatever it needs to end Putin's barbaric war?
We'll debate that next.
The Kremlin issued a chilling morning of retaliatory actions today, after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak pledged more support for Ukraine.
President Zelensky made a short visit to the UK as he attempts to secure more militia support for Ukraine in its fight against Russia.
After a two-hour meeting in Chekers, Rishi Sunak announced he'll send hundreds of long-range missiles and armed drones.
But Zelensky wants fighter jets and the UK won't at the moment commit to that.
Today we spoke about the jets.
Very important topic for us because we can't control the sky.
We want to create this jet coalition.
We are going to be a key part of the coalition of countries that provides that support to Vladimir and Ukraine.
Now, it is not a straightforward thing, as Vladimir and I have been discussing to build up that fighter combat aircraft capability.
It's not just the provision of planes, it's also the training of pilots and all the logistics that go alongside that.
Well, the UK has gone further than any other European country in providing weapons, but is it enough to help Ukraine defeat Putin once and for all?
In the moment, I'll get an expert view from the former head of the British Army, Lord Danham.
First, I'm joined by the men on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens.
Peter, welcome to Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Pleasure to be here.
So look, what is your view of the Ukraine war?
How do you think this now ends?
What should the UK be doing?
Well, I think that all civilized and sensible people should be making every conceivable effort to bring it to an end.
Huge numbers of happy, innocent persons have been turned into corpses and refugees.
Cities have been blasted into pieces.
Houses turned to ruins, an economy smashed, and the whole of Ukraine now faces continuing destruction.
I do not see what interest it serves the world to continue with this.
absolutely interests of the Ukrainian people for there to be peace talks which would bring this awfulness to an end.
But hang on, but how would the peace talks go?
I mean, are you suggesting that Ukraine...
Well, hang on, are you suggesting Ukraine should give up territory that has been illegally seized by Russia?
No, if I was saying that, I would say that.
I'm asking you the question.
I know, and I'm saying I'm not saying that.
So there you are.
That one's solved.
Good.
Any other questions?
I've got a lot of questions.
Yeah, so I mean, what do you think these peace talks would lead to?
Because Vladimir Putin wants to keep control of the territory he's taken and probably some more.
Ukraine is absolutely adamant.
They shouldn't be ceding any territory.
They even want Crimea back for reasons which are perfectly obvious if you spend time with Ukrainians.
So my question for you is, you think you can end with peace talks.
How does that end if the Ukrainians won't give up any territory?
I won't be there at the peace talks.
The people who will be involved would be the governments of the two promotent countries and they will decide.
But it seems to me, I must ask you, given the tone of your question, do you like war?
Have you seen war?
Do you know what a human body looks like after a bullet has passed through it?
Well, okay.
Well, I would say I would answer that.
I would answer that, Peter, by saying, as I think you know, because actually your brother, Christopher, wrote for me at the time, and he opposed my position on this.
I opposed vociferously as editor of the mirror, the war in Iraq, which was sadly I was unsuccessful in trying to get that stopped.
However, my brother was a British Army colonel and served for 37 years in the army, and he served in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.
So yeah, I got an indirect feedback on what a war is like.
And no, nobody likes war.
You'll never meet a soldier who says they like war.
However, as in 1939, when the world, and I say the world, not just Ukraine, when the world is confronted with an evil dictator who thinks he can just march into neighboring countries and destroy them and kill thousands, if tens of thousands of people, and then take their land, the world has a duty, in my opinion, as it did in 1939, to stand up to that person.
And that person right now is Vladimir Putin.
So that would be my position.
But the world has stood up to him.
His offensive has been halted.
His intentions, as far as we know what they were, have not been achieved.
And they're not likely to be achieved.
So now we have a position where the two sides are at something like a stalemate.
We don't know.
I don't make any pretense, unlike everybody else in the trade of journalism, to be a military expert.
I don't know what the shape of the Ukrainian offensive, which we're told about so often, will be or whether it will succeed.
But even so, it seems to me that the time has come for us to make an effort to bring an end to war.
Yeah, but the way you bring an end to it, surely, it seems to me we've been very successful, Europe and America, in arming the Ukrainians to resist having their country taken by Putin.
And they've been incredibly successful in doing that.
And there's now a real belief amongst Ukrainians and President Zelensky that if they get enough of the military hardware that they need, they can launch a counter-offensive and actually drive Russia and the Russian forces out of the territory that's been seized.
I don't think they've got any intention of waging any kind of peace anytime soon, because as far as they're concerned, they've had a quarter of their country taken.
Well, you're right.
There is no pressure on them from the great powers to make peace.
There is no general pressure on them.
There's no pressure from Western public opinion on it to make peace.
So you may well be right.
It's astonishing to remember that Vladimir Zelensky was actually elected as president of Ukraine on a peace ticket.
that he actually stood before his people and said, there is a grave war going on in my country, which, as you probably know, started in 2014, not 2022.
It's time it was over, and we must take steps to do so.
But that was before Vladimir Putin invaded.
I know it was, but lots of things were before.
But I think it's important for people to understand this episode has background and many, many elements in it, which are not much discussed in the generally rather, how should I say, cursory coverage, which the causes and nature of the war has given this country.
But Zelensky was a peace candidate.
He was frustrated in that by elements in his own country who preferred the...
But as you know, the situation dramatically changed February last year when Putin invaded Ukraine.
And you've got to say that I find it strange that somebody as smart and perceptive as you, Peter, would look at the situation and think the Ukrainians have any desire to wage any form of peace settlement, which may involve them ceding territory.
Why should they?
We wouldn't, would we?
We didn't in 1940s.
We fought with every bit of our strength to defy the Nazis.
If you don't want me to be on your program, all you need to do is not invite me.
If you invite me, you should at least do the cursive listen to what I say.
I've never at any stage suggested.
You're the one who suggested that anybody should cede any land.
I would have thought the position the Ukrainians find themselves in now is very strong if they go into negotiations.
But you think the Russians would simply give back all the land they've taken?
I don't know what would take place in negotiations.
It's plain.
Come off it, Peter.
You don't think for a moment Vladimir Putin would give up that territory?
Of course he wouldn't.
You know that.
Do you want me to answer your questions or not?
I want you to explain why you think this could possibly get resolved unless Ukraine just cede their territory.
Vladimir Putin is not going to give any of the land back.
He's just spent the last year and a half bombing them into submission to try and take it.
Why would he give it back?
How do you know?
What is this war about?
This war is about Russia under a dictator trying to take back territory that Vladimir Putin believes should never have been given away in the first place.
That's what it's about.
That's your version of it.
And again, I think that the...
I don't think you've made any secret of it.
Well, I'm sorry.
It's a very long and complicated story and one which you certainly and all the people in broadcast before whom I might attempt to explain and argue this are not the person I choose because you'd interrupt me before I got one tenth of what I was going to say out and you'd talk over me, which is what you do.
The last time we met each other on television, you shut me down and silenced me because I was right about it.
Why don't you stop whining and just answer the question?
Do you want me to?
Stop whining and answer the question.
Do you want me to say what I was to say or do you not?
Because I've got many other things.
I'm happy to be able to do that.
You're filling all the time that I'm giving you by whining about not getting airtime.
Say what you want to say.
Thank you.
And stop talking over me.
There has never been any suggestion from me since this programme began that Ukraine should give up territory.
That came from you.
I said there should be negotiations.
Negotiations to do what?
There you go again.
The negotiations are...
It's called an interview, Peter.
I'm allowed to ask you supplementaries.
The viewers, the viewers can decide for themselves whether you're giving me a fair shake or not.
All right.
Look, we're going around the houses here, but I appreciate you joining the programme.
Thank you very much.
Let's go to Lord Dannett.
Lord Dannett, it seems to me there is a move by people, like Peter Hitchens and others.
Let's just do a peace deal, but I don't know how this can be based in any reality.
The Ukrainians don't want to give up any of the territory that's been taken.
Putin clearly isn't going to give it up.
I think it's for the birds, this idea they're all going to sit around a table and just write, okay, this is peace.
What does peace look like in this scenario?
Well, Piers' conventional wisdom would say that conflicts like this do end around negotiation table and trying to come to some form of agreement.
But where we are at the present moment is that Zelensky's opening position and Putin's opening position are completely irreconcilable.
And therefore, for there to be any negotiation that was fair to Ukraine and to Zelensky, they have got to be able to argue from a position of strength.
And that comes down to the battlefield and the success and the measure of success that the counter-offensive, which will start relatively soon in the next few weeks and months, has in Ukraine's favour.
Yeah, and it seems to me that Ukraine believe that they can repel the Russian forces, that they can take back, if they have enough hardware from us and from other European powers and from America, if we give them the tools, I think they really believe that they can launch a counter-offensive which will actually drive Russia out potentially.
Yes, and I think that is entirely possible.
It'll be a question of seeing how successful it is.
They've now got from the West what they're going to have as far as this counter-offensive is concerned.
I think we have to set aside Zelensky's talk about a jet coalition.
That's a medium to long-term issue.
But in terms of the equipment that the West has given to Ukraine, the advice we've given them, the training we've given them, they are now in a good position in the short-term timeframe to launch this counter-offensive.
And I think the thing to remember is that an offensive doesn't have to be successful in terms of destroying the other army in great detail.
But after a miserable winter, poorly led Russian soldiers, poorly equipped, trained, and all the rest of it, there is quite a chance that decisive blows by the Ukrainians might break the morale of the average Russian soldier and break the back of the Russian army, such that the Ukrainians could have some quite significant success, as they did around Kharkiv in September last year.
Now, I don't know what's going to happen, but some of the early reports around Bakhmud have indicated that the Russian morale and the Russian soldier is at a pretty low ebb.
Strike him hard and he might break.
And that will then change the situation for future negotiations.
It might even mean that the Russians decide to throw in the towel.
It might even mean that Putin gets thrown out of power in the Kremlin.
I think that's increasingly likely.
But actually, we can hope for that.
Yeah, I think it's increasingly likely that could happen.
And Ukraine, they're not asking us all to start joining in the war.
They're just asking us to give them the tools they need.
And I think that Rushizinek is absolutely right to welcome Zelensky here and to say what we're doing.
Language Limits Our Shared Meaning 00:09:20
Well, that's why our language...
Well, our language has to be of that of a limited war.
It's got limited objectives, which is simply recapturing Ukrainian territory with limited means where everyone's quite hopeful, or thankfully, holding back from nuclear weapons.
We're holding back from giving the Ukrainians very long-range weapons that they could strike deep into Russia.
So there are limits to this.
And the legitimate objective is to help the Ukrainians regain their sovereign territory.
They've got every right to do that.
And we have every right to help them.
And that's as far as it goes.
And we have to keep saying it's a limited war.
And we have to keep saying NATO is a defensive alliance.
And we have no offensive views or attitudes or ambitions as far as Russia is concerned.
I would love nothing more than for Russia to become a part of the integrated family of nations as back in history it was.
Yeah, I completely agree.
Lord Donna, as always, you make great sense.
Thank you very much, indeed for Johnny.
Thanks, Piers.
Ron Censored next.
Gadsard is the world's foremost anti-woke professor.
He says dangerous idea pathogens are killing common sense.
I couldn't agree more.
He joins me live next.
Walking by two Piers Wilgona censors.
On any given day, there are a lot of news stories which make me very unhappy, not least of which, Arsenal Nil, Brighton, free.
Well, we'll won't intrude into private grief.
But they prove that common sense is dead.
Just today, we learned that a biological man entered the 2015 female university boat race.
No one was told.
No one was allowed to ask.
We were told that prison guards have been banned from calling prisoners convicts in case it upsets them, upsets convicts.
We're told that 10% of teenagers want to change gender, but a third of teenagers have been taught in schools that some women have penises.
What is all this?
Why is the world going so completely nuts?
Well, my next guest is an expert on this phenomenon of the world going nuts.
Professor Gadsard is the best-selling author of Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Diseases Are Killing Common Sense and also the sad truth about happiness.
And he joins me now.
Thank you for coming on.
So, just to warm things up, I thought I'd play a little clip of you talking about me in 2018.
Let's take a listen to this.
Morgan is a treasonous Cretan.
I don't care about him as an individual, but I greatly care about his mindset, for it is the singular cause that has led us to the current conundrum that we face.
Every day that idiots and enemies of reason, such as Morgan, have a voice in the public sphere is a day that we inch closer to violence.
Well, ironically, Gerda, that comment actually did move me to near violence.
I'm joking.
And actually, we have found since then a lot of common ground, I know.
So I'm not going to labor the point other than you clearly are just as unsatisfactory.
I don't even remember what that was about.
I have no idea what you were talking about, and no one can find out.
So you clearly just had a view about me that day.
You know what?
It's fine.
I have views like that all the time about people.
But I'm glad to have you on the show.
And I think on a lot of issues, we actually share a lot of similar thoughts about this.
What is going on?
When we see things like 10% of teens want to be transgender in some way, when you see that a male biological rower took part in a very high-profile race without anybody knowing that this was actually a man sitting in a female boat, when you see all this, how do we explain it?
And where does this end?
Yeah, so it all, well, first, thank you for having me, Piers.
It all stems from, regrettably, I'm saying this as a professor, it all stems from the university ecosystem.
It takes academics and intellectuals to come up with some of the uniquely dumbest ideas.
And so each of these idea pathogens that I discuss in the book, postmodernism, militant feminism, social constructivism, sort of erase a bit of the edifices of reason that for most of us constitutes common sense.
So postmodernism, for example, argues that there are no objective truths.
Even things that the average three-day old pigeon would recognize as biological fact is actually up for debate.
And this is how we end up erasing all of the common sense that gives us shared meaning.
So that men now who have nine-inch penises can be women.
They simply have to declare themselves women and voila, they become women.
Yeah, I mean, it's completely insane, but you're right.
Facts have been eroded in this process where people can put their hand up and talk about my truth as if somehow their version of the truth, which of course is statistically factual, that's the whole point of truth, that they can have a version of that, which isn't fact-based.
It's just feeling based.
Exactly.
And this is why I basically say that all of these idea pathogens, they free us from the pesky shackles of reality, right?
I don't wish to be constrained by my genitalia.
So I just have to use the magic wand of the trans prefix and I could be whatever I wish to be.
Social constructivism is another freer from reality.
It basically says that anybody could be the next Ronaldo or Messi.
If only mommy hugs me enough or doesn't hug me enough, we all have equal potentiality.
Well, that's a very noble and hopeful message, but it's perfectly rooted in erroneous views of human nature.
Also, the thing about Ronaldo and Messi, I know Cristiano very well and interviewed him several times.
The thing about those guys, they've got a phenomenal work ethic.
And you'll never hear them, either of them, whining about being pushed hard or even having coaches shout at them or whatever it may be.
It just seems to me the world is slowly shrinking into a very weak-minded place where weakness is celebrated.
Strength is somehow frowned upon.
If you try and talk about mental strength these days, people go mad.
They're like, no, how dare you?
You're belittling people who aren't mentally strong.
You're picking on the vulnerable rather than accentuate the positives, which those two guys represent better than anybody.
And whether it be the soccer players that you mentioned or the world that I inhabit in academia, we used to be proud of the ethos of meritocracy.
Now that's viewed as a form of white supremacy.
Now it's my skin color.
It's my gender orientation.
It's my sexual orientation.
It's my religion that actually adjudicates whether I am right or wrong.
It's grotesque.
It's an attack on the most fundamental deontological principles that define the enlightened societies that we all are proud of.
And this is why I am so irreverent and fighting against all this nonsense.
And it's interesting, what you said about meritocracy there.
There's a move now for the Oscars and the Academy and the way they go about putting nominations forward, that they have to tick a load of diversity boxes.
And that all sounds fine in principle, right?
Till you get to the point where actually it damages meritocracy.
And not only that, Pierce, I'm sure you've also heard that someone should not play, for example, you shouldn't play a gay part if you yourself are not gay.
So what does that mean then?
Sir Anthony Hopkins should not have played a sadistic serial killer in Salas of the Lambs because clearly he's not really a serial killer.
It's insane.
Well, not as far as we know.
But yeah, I mean, you're right.
I mean, who plays Hitler?
Who plays a mafia boss, right?
Does everyone in the Sopranos have to actually be an active member of the mafia?
I mean, and also it never works the other way with these wokies, where you never hear them say, and of course, the quid pro quo is that no gay person can play a straight part.
They'll never say that.
They want all their virtue signaling cake and eat it.
Exactly.
And, you know, to your point earlier about victimhood, I come from Lebanon.
I escaped execution in Lebanon.
And it's folks like me who come to the West who are, you know, completely befuddled by all of the whining.
I think you were mentioning to your previous guests about him whining.
I despise whining.
What's beautiful about Messi and Ronaldo is this, notwithstanding their innate talent, they work hard to be the best that they can be.
We need to return to that ethos.
Yes, we need to start celebrating proper talent, proper work ethic.
People who really want to put a shift in.
I mean, the work from home fiasco in this country is getting completely out of hand with millions of people just basically giving up doing proper work.
You know, it's interesting you're talking about professors there because I think my favorite story of all the cancel culture stories involved an American professor who for 25 years had given a lecture about offensive language.
And eventually, a student complained about his use of offensive language in a lecture about offensive language.
And he was fired for using offensive language, which he had used to illustrate the points he was making about offensive language.
And at that point, I realized universities are being run by students.
And the students, because of this warped mindset, are just running right on campuses.
And the campuses and the people put in charge of these students are just caving to every one of their whims and saying, okay, whatever you say goes.
Trigger Warnings For Cancel Culture 00:02:58
Indeed.
And look, I can tell you, just past semester, I was teaching an MBA class where I was talking about the evolutionary roots of anorexia nervosa.
And in that lecture, I talked about miscarriages.
And one student huffed and puffed that I did not provide trigger warnings before mentioning something as devastatingly sensitive as miscarriages.
And this is someone, me, who went through the Lebanese civil war.
So imagine how much disdain I feel for such an adult, an MBA student, that he requires me to offer trigger warnings before mentioning a medical reality such as miscarriages.
It's unbelievable.
Well, I actually need trigger warnings before I find myself in close proximity to one of these woke imbeciles because it actually does bring me out in wheels.
Gad, I could talk to you all night about this.
I'm glad we've made up and we're friends again.
Come back.
Please come back on Piers Morgan on Censor again.
I really enjoyed the chat.
You're the best.
And my apologies to Arsenal.
Next year, they'll take it.
You know what?
I'm not so sure.
Mentally weak.
They should have signed Ronaldo when they had the chance back in October.
He wanted to come.
Anyway, that's another story.
Gad, great to talk to you.
Thank you very much.
Well, on Censor Next, the Indian Prime Minister plans a campaign to reclaim looted treasures held in British museums and world collections.
Is it time to hand them back?
We'll debate that.
Welcome back.
Joined by Talk TV contributor Esther Krakow and the associate editor of The Mirror, Kevin McGuire.
Let's talk first of all about Eurovision, the world's biggest stain on musical humanity, which turned out to be, to live down to every expectation.
Absolutely horrific.
Here's a mash-up of the worst moments.
Yeah, if I had my old judging hat on, trust me, they're getting buzzed very quickly, like in half a second.
There was only one actual talent on display of the whole thing, and it was this woman.
Elegant, beautiful, talented, proper princess.
Balancing Empire's Good And Bad 00:03:16
Anyway, that's enough said about that.
Apart from this, when I said the other day with Louis and Sharon, when we debated this, it is the worst thing in the world, this show, I said, nobody actually likes it.
It's a complete myth.
And then you go to a poll.
How much do you care about Juvia and Sangues?
A great deal, 6%.
A fair amount, 13%.
Not very much, 32%.
Not at all, 45%.
In other words, 77% of the population don't care.
I rest my case.
Let's not waste any more time talking about it.
Esther, let's talk about India getting back looted treasures.
And obviously Greece and other countries as well who've been moving to get back very extravagant treasures which were looted from them by the ghastly Brits.
This takes me back to the ongoing debate about reparations, about obviously about basically paying for historical sins.
Should we be giving stuff back?
Well, of course not.
I mean, the only reason why they feel emboldened to do this is because, one, no one is asking them about their historical sort of, should I say, atrocities, but also because the UK is in the grips of an identity crisis.
If we could actually have a mature conversation about the empire and what it means to be British and how we shouldn't pay for the sins of the past, Narondra Modi, who is a Hindu nationalist, who has a lot to answer for himself, would never feel emboldened to say, give us back our old treasures.
How far back do you go?
Is he going to talk about, you know, the Mughal Empire and all the atrocities they committed?
Is he going to talk about the Gujarati riots in 2001 and all the predominantly Muslim victims that were in his state when this happened?
You know, he's choosing to...
This is my problem with all of it.
It's like the slavery reparation debate.
Are you going to demand that black people around the world who had slaves, are they going to have to pay reparations too?
In other words, how far do you take it?
Yeah, I think it's different at the reparations debate.
Same principle, though.
It's like paying for historical sins, isn't it?
Look, unless you've got a receipt for the diamond or the Parthenon marbles, you've nicked them, basically.
You've taken them by force.
It's not just Britain.
It is other countries that have empires or invaded, occupied, and looted.
They're all going to have to fierce this up now.
Why though, Kevin?
Why do we let it go?
Well, because the countries would like their treasures back that way.
I'm sure they would.
We would like stuff the Romans too.
But the Vikings.
I can't see what's wrong with it, though.
As long as they're going back to democracy.
Here's my question for you.
When does Britain get a slice of this pie?
Oh, we got it now.
Look, we built the country on an empire which was there for our benefit, not the countries we occupied and looted.
And an industrial revolution.
I'm sorry, many of those countries wouldn't exist in their modern form if it wasn't for that.
History is history.
You cannot change it.
It is history.
But the argument is...
And the demonizing of the empire is fine, but you have to balance it with some of the good things that the empire achieved.
It wasn't horrible.
It was mainly bad.
It was mainly bad.
It depends on who you are.
It's mainly bad.
No, but most of the best schools in India now are schools that were based on the colonial empire and British education system.
Do they give that back?
Yeah, but look, we took immense wealth out of the world.
What about?
Look at China.
We were burning down Palestinian.
India is now an immensely wealthy country.
So it's one of the biggest economies in the world.
Overall, with hundreds of millions of very poor people.
That's true, but let me ask you this question, which is separate to what we've just been talking about.
Boys Are Boys, Girls Are Girls 00:00:48
A theatre company wants to cast girls to play Charlie in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Fantastic.
I go see that.
Leave it alone.
Theatre's always experimenting.
Why do we have to ruin everything?
If you want Charlie to be Charlie Bucket, the British people are going to be able to do it.
Charlie to be Charlie Buckley.
The way he was written.
He was written.
In place of change.
They do this for the PR.
They do this for us to talk about it.
It's not because they're carrying the campaign.
One theatre goes so they were stunned to say Charlie's now a girl.
Charlie's not a girl.
Charlie was written as a boy.
He is a boy.
Is that calling James Bond a girl?
No.
He's a bloke.
That's it.
Shakespeare's Hamlet is always set in a different place.
Got a legal there.
Thank you, Pat.
That's it for me.
Wherever you're up to, keep it uncensored.
And remember, boys are boys, girls and girls.
It's not that difficult, this.
It's easy, actually.
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