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May 16, 2023 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
46:58
20230516_piers-morgan-uncensored-brexit-failure-johnny-depp
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Why Brexit Failed 00:15:16
I'm Piers Morgan on censored tonight, attacking economy, spiraling immigration.
Now the same EU red tape we've always had is here to stay.
Even Nigel Farage said Brexit has failed.
So why has it failed and where do we go from here?
Donnie Depp returns to the red carpet at Cannes tonight, but after his sensational mudslinging split from Amber Heard, should he still be given the red carpet treatment?
We'll debate.
Topsy Trump on blundering Biden looks set to be the least popular presidential pairing in history.
Afro Man, best known for his pro-cannabis anthem, says America needs him as president.
Instead, he'll join me live to explain why.
Well, good evening from London.
Welcome to Piers Morgan Uncensored.
No debate has split Britain as quickly and dramatically as Brexit.
It did more to divide these isles than the Roman conquerors.
Meghan Markle, even me.
For six years, politics in this country was no longer about Conservatives or Labour, right or left.
It was leave or remain.
Friends broke up over it.
Families split up over it.
But voters are moving on.
UKIP was wiped off the political map at last week's local elections.
It now has precisely zero elected representatives anywhere in the country.
Reform UK, the rebranded Brexit party, averaged a 6% of the vote and won just six councillors nationwide.
In short, when it comes to Brexit, it does seem like most of us are just, well, over it.
But as much as voters have moved on, Britain sadly has not.
We have the worst performing G7 economy.
Even Russia will grow faster this year.
Every other major economy faced the same pandemic, the same war in Europe, the same rocketing inflation and cost of living crises.
But nobody else had Brexit on top of it.
The long-promised tidal wave of Brexit benefits, peaked with blue passports, and now seems to be petering into a putrid puddle.
Even the Grand Master of Brexit himself, Nigel Farage, now says this.
We haven't actually benefited from Brexit economically.
Well, we could have done.
I mean, what Brexit's proved, I'm afraid, is that our politicians are about as useless as the commissioners in Brussels were.
We've mismanaged this totally.
And if you look at simple things, simple things such as takeovers, such as corporation tax, we are in business away from our country.
Arguably, now we're back in control.
We're regulating our own businesses even more than they were as EU members.
Brexit has failed.
Brexit has failed.
No benefits to Brexit.
This is the guy that sold it to us, Nigel Farage.
And it's hard to argue with him.
We were promised Brexit would mean control of the borders, but immigration is way up.
There's a migrant crisis in Manila.
We were promised glorious free trade deals.
It would be the easiest deals in human history.
Where are they?
We were told that 5,000 EU laws would be spectacularly scrubbed from the statute books as we wrestle control back of our sovereign democracy.
In fact, it's going to be more like 600.
And I haven't found a single person who can explain what difference it'll make.
Full disclosure, I didn't think Brexit was a good idea and I voted against it.
But I also respected the democratic will of the people, unlike some of the more ardent Ramonas.
And I later voted for Boris Johnson's Conservative government because they were the only people in that 29 election prepared to honour the result of the referendum and therefore to honour democracy.
If you don't accept the results of elections or referenda, then you're not a democracy and you can't be a Democrat.
Now more and more people are changing their minds.
The evidence that it isn't working is piling up.
And it's probably time to have a serious grown-up debate on what we do about this.
And a reminder, Nigel Farage, who says Brexit has failed.
Well, he originally said this.
If Brexit is a disaster, I will go and live abroad.
I'll go and live somewhere else.
Well, off you go, though.
I keep hearing that Rwanda's rather nice at this time of year, Nige.
Well, joining me now as the Reform Party advisor and former Brexit Party MEP, Alex Phillips, by the US editor-at-large, the Financial Times, Gillian Tett from across the pummel.
Welcome to all of you.
Good to see you.
All right, Alex.
I watched you the other night on Newsnight getting brutalised by Alistair Campbell, which I thought you handled him.
You handled him very well.
Let's take a little look at some of it.
It was pretty painful viewing.
When I say you talk nonsense, when I say you talk nonsense, let me finish.
All of those laws that you talked about were enacted by elected British governments and elected British parliaments.
The fact that you in Europe couldn't do anything about it underlines that the sovereignty lay here.
So all your lies about taking back control, more money for the NHS, sovereignty.
Hold on, come on.
The last of it.
I knew you were going to come up with the money for the NHS.
Nothing to do with me, not my campaign.
And it's very rich, a man who essentially was part of telling lies to invade a country, to accuse me of dishonesty.
I think you might have lost the argument there, my dear.
If I may patronise you even more.
Well, good evening, my dear.
Hi.
I'm not going to talk to you in that way, because Alistair, as always, vents his spleen in quite an intimidating manner, actually.
I thought it was uncomfortable viewing.
However, on the central argument about Brexit failing, when even Nigel Farage has to admit it's failed and there are no obvious benefits, here we are seven years after that referendum took place.
Is it not time just to it?
Nothing wrong with the million mistakes.
Is it not time we just went, you know what?
It hasn't worked.
Let's try something else.
One of the reasons it hasn't worked is because no one's wants to use any of the levers that we now have as a sovereign nation to make it work.
Why wouldn't they?
Well, it's a good question.
You need to ask them, not me.
You're saying the Conservative Party that voted for this, the Conservative Party that won a huge majority on getting Brexit done.
Which we helped them do by saying that...
So you really expect people to believe that that same Conservative Party is actively conspiring to stop Brexit being a benefit.
Whether it's conspiracy or incompetence, I don't know.
But at the end of the day, the big issue here is actually the TCA, the Trade and Cooperation Agreement, aka the oven-ready deal, because that actually binds us to certain elements of staying in step with the EU, which means we're not able to diverge in ways in which would be very productive for our economy.
So, for example, state subsidies.
We're not allowed to give state subsidies to strategic sectors to therefore render ourselves.
So it wasn't an oven-ready deal at all.
No, it's a terrible deal.
But we knew that.
But isn't the problem that the idea of Brexit was fine to a lot of people?
But the actual reality of trying to implement what it stood for proved to be, in the end, impossible.
Well, one of the reasons I think that that was the case is you've got to turn your memory back to the awful scenes in Parliament when the, let's say, the establishment wanted to overturn the result of the referendum.
And all of this shouting and screaming and probing the Parliament and name-calling and people going over to brief Brussels from the other side.
It actually made the environment in which to make a constructive deal almost impossible.
And at the end of the day, we were on the cusp of essentially losing Brexit altogether around 2019.
Boris Johnson inherited the Olly Robbins Agreement that Theresa May had drawn up, which is a dreadful deal.
It doesn't really diverge from the EU or give us any particular sort of powerful sovereignty in the way that Brexiteers wished and still wish actually we had.
And this oven-ready deal had a slight change to the Northern Ireland Protocol.
He said it won't put a border down the Irish.
The oven-ready deal, to be honest, was a very burnt dish from the start.
They pressed the wrong knobs.
Let's bring in Gillian, who's been listening to this across the Atlantic and New York.
Well, Gillian, look, you work for the Financial Times, therefore you de facto have an enormous economic brain.
Did Brexit ever make sense to you?
No, I thought from the moment it was put on the table, it was one of the biggest acts of self-sabotage that we've ever seen in British history.
Like you, Piers, when the vote went through, I was very willing to recognise the result of the referendum, even though I thought it was a deeply forward referendum, and was very much hoping that the idea of Brexit would be translated into a policy for a flexible, nimble, open British economic strategy.
In fact, what's happened has been a backward-looking, parochial, paternalistic type of policy that's been defensive and hesitant.
So it's no surprise that Brexit has been nothing short of a disaster for the British economy.
It doesn't give me any comfort to say I told you so.
Many people who were involved in international finance and business were saying that right from the start.
But I personally think it's time for a pretty serious rethink.
Well, you're not the only one.
I should say, sitting on the American side of the Atlantic, many people in America are just baffled that Britain would have ever embarked on this act of self-sabotage and not realise the damage it was going to cause earlier on.
And, you know, let's face it, you know, Britain has got the worst performance amongst the G7.
It's, you know, got really serious fundamental economic problems now and a real lack of confidence.
And apart from the damage that Brexit has done to the trading links and the competitiveness, the fact it's distracted politicians and policymakers and voters from really core issues around where Britain is going in the future with its economic strategy is tragic as well.
Yeah, well, you're not the only one who's expressing concern about this.
The most recent YouGov poll says 53% of UK voters now think Brexit was the wrong decision.
Nearly a fifth of leave voters think it was wrong to vote for Brexit.
65% of people think the government's handling the UK's exit from the EU badly.
Polling shows that 50% want to rejoin the EU and so on and so on.
It's estimated that Brexit is costing the UK £1,000 per household and has cost the UK £29 billion in business investment.
That's according to the Bank of England.
Maybe cost the UK economy £100 billion a year according to Bloomberg.
I mean you put all this together.
I guess the obvious question is, we did reverse our decision after 40 years, didn't we?
The Europe decision was only 40 years old.
Why can't we reverse it again?
It's been seven years since this referendum.
Are we not a big enough, a mature enough country to say, actually, this hasn't worked and to perhaps have another referendum?
I mean, why not?
Well, I personally would argue the answer to that is yes, we should.
I know it would be disruptive and distracting again, but I think that it would certainly get a sense of whether the population, the country, actually wants to stick with this Brexit course or not going forward.
But I appreciate that, you know, there are plenty of people who say don't try and open that can of worms right now.
It's going to be too destructive and too distracting.
Yeah, I mean, Alex Phillips, I mean, if you get anything else wrong in life, there comes a point when after seven years of getting something wrong, if a marriage went this badly wrong after seven years, you'd be heading full steam to the divorce courts, wouldn't you?
I mean, why are we lassoed to this thing of Brexit, given that clearly, A, it's not working, and B, it's now causing us actual harm.
And C, so many people who voted for it have now changed their minds.
Okay, so I want to make a couple of points.
First of all, Gillian made an extremely valid point in her first answer saying she had hoped that Brexit would make us a more forward-looking and nimble economy, and that's exactly what I would have hoped for.
It's made us a smaller economy.
You let Gillian talk.
I wouldn't mind completing my answer if possible.
I'm just clarifying, it's rather nimble.
I would use the word smaller.
It's actually shrunk our economy.
We've joined the Trans-Pacific community of trade, which doesn't come with the Parliament and all these other laws and infrastructures which the British people have rejected.
But we've missed out on a big opportunity to do things like take VAT off energy bills, to slash our corporation tax.
We don't have AstraZeneca moving to Ireland, to state subsidise vital sectors.
So Tesla wants to build their car manufacturing here and we could prop up British vault through state subsidy.
We've actually, all of the things that might have been quite ambitious and a sort of post-Brexit industrial strategy are not being done.
Now, look, I'm all about democracy.
And if there was a clamour to reopen that can of worms, who am I to say no?
I'll probably end up back in Brussels.
I would say there's more political cowardice.
Keir Starmer ought to do it and ought to be calling for it.
But he doesn't want to risk potentially losing an election.
There are other things that are not being discussed openly right now that I think we really ought to be discussing.
And one of those big things is PESCO, which is the common EU defence policy.
Now, part of this is they want to now set up common arms procurement across the block, which the UK is going to be dragged into.
This means we can't buy our own weapons for our own armed forces, which essentially means we can't determine if we go to war, how we go to war, you know, who we'd go to war against.
And I think that that sort of impingement.
Well, NATO is very important.
And I'll tell you that.
Why are we part of an organisation like NATO, given that you clearly believe we're so much better on our own?
We're so much stronger militarily.
We're not, though, are we?
We didn't say that.
We're actually a member of NATO.
NATO is absolutely vital.
And if you speak to people from the intelligence sectors and from the armed forces, in fact, very senior people here, they think that the EU's plans to set up PESCO are disastrous and a direct threat to NATO.
But let me ask you compromise.
What would it take for you to change your mind?
What it would take for me to change my mind is the EU being a trading bloc, not this thing that imposes its own social legislation, that imposes foreign affairs legislation.
So you could be persuaded to impose it to go back into the EU.
But not on the terms of freedom.
No, but you could.
Not on the terms of trading block only.
We're getting somewhere.
Nigel Farage admits it's a failure.
You admit you could see us going back in.
I think we're moving in the right direction.
I'm not going to see us going back in.
Gillian, I think we're making progress live on air here.
Can I say one thing, which is that one of the reasons I think it is actually worth thinking about having another vote, was that the biggest tragedy perhaps for the last vote of the referendum was that many young people in Britain didn't bother to vote.
It's their fault.
It's tragic.
I would very much hope if there was another referendum that they would vote.
Because frankly, Brexit matters far more to their future than someone who's old and crumbly like me.
And all the polls suggest that it's the younger generation in particular who are most upset by the loss of being part of the EU.
And so I think that's actually a reason to actually have another vote at some point, a referendum, to make sure we hear the younger voice properly because they matter.
I totally agree, but just on the matter of being upset, when you describe yourself as old and crumbly, how do you think that makes me feel?
Well, whatever.
You know, the point is, I didn't have as much stake as my own kids or anyone else.
I think you make a very valid point, Michael.
I agree.
So my sons are all in their 20s.
I think that most young people I've spoken to would go back into the EU in a heartbeat.
But I believe in democracy.
Double Standards in Film 00:13:08
I just don't understand why you...
I don't think we can get summer jobs.
We can't get summer jobs in Europe anymore.
There are so many things that are wrong about the lack of benefits of it's not just a lack of benefit from Brexit, it's active harm from Brexit.
And there's got to be a point at which the country goes, enough of the self-harm, let's go back to the country.
And if this time a majority vote to go back in the EU, well, okay, it's been embarrassing.
We tried.
We failed, as Nigel Farage says, we move on.
Got to leave it there, Gillian.
I've got to stop you mid-flow, I'm afraid.
We're going to a break, but great to have you on the programme, as always.
Great to have you, Alex.
And I think we conducted ourselves in a more rational and grown-up way than you had to endure the other night with Mr. Campbell, the beast of Scotland.
Good to see you.
Arnston said next: Johnny Depp returns to the red carpet at Cannes tonight.
Amber Heard's supporters say it's a slap in the face.
Other critics have slammed it as a festival for rapists.
We'll debate that next.
Welcome back to Piers Morgan.
In the last couple of hours, Johnny Depp has hit the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival as his new film, Jean DeBarry, opens the event.
This is him on the red carpet.
You can hear at the end of this.
A cheer for Johnny.
And he got cheered when he went inside the auditorium.
But there's been an outcry from Amber Heard's supporters and some French actresses with the hashtag Can You Not, accusing the film festival of celebrating abusers for 76 years.
Now, Johnny Depp was vindicated at his recent trial in America with Amber Heard ordered to pay him $10 million and basically exposed as a liar.
So, does Johnny Depp have the right to relaunch his career, or is Hollywood being hypocritical by celebrating someone who'd even been accused of such behavior and, of course, lost a libel case in the UK?
Well, joining me now is Nick Wallace, author of Depp Be Heard, the Unreal Story, and the family law barrister Paula Roan Adrian.
Okay, Nick, it's an interesting thing.
Johnny Depp, welcomed like a movie star, as he has been since he won this case in America.
He's been mobbed.
Been mobbed, but he doesn't have a completely clean slate because he lost the libel action in the UK.
A judge ruled that the Sun basically, by calling him a wife beater, that they were entitled to do that.
So it's messy.
And there's no doubt that this relationship with Amber Heard was extremely mutually toxic and abusive.
It just comes down to how you categorize who was more to blame and what the abuse was like, which I think your book does it in a lot of detail.
I think the point about Johnny Depp tonight is: should he be continued to be fated as a blemish-free movie star in the way we're seeing at the Cannes Film Festival?
Well, I'm sure he would say he had the right to do that, having got the verdict that he did in Virginia and this huge wave of public support that followed it all the way up to.
But what about the other verdict in London?
Well, this is always going to be the fly in the ointment.
Mr. Justice Nicoll, a learned, respected judge, spent three months looking over the transcripts, the evidence, and all the contemporaneous documentary evidence, which he did place a huge amount of weight on.
And after three months, he decided he came down very firmly in favour of the sun.
Amber Heard was the star witness in that trial.
He essentially believed what she had to say and ruled that on 12 separate occasions, Johnny Depp did physically absorb.
So, where does that leave him in the court of public opinion?
You've got to say Johnny Depp appears to pretty well be unanimously the winner.
Well, he is the winner, but as you know, it's all about the money, isn't it?
And this has now come out of the courts and it's now in the hands of the Hollywood studios.
Johnny Depp has been on this incredibly well-managed rehabilitation arc since last year.
He went on tour with Jeff Beck, was mobbed everywhere he went.
Dior just gave him a $20 million contract.
The highest ever for a man with a fragrance.
He's co-producing a movie with Al Pacino.
This is a really important step on his road to rehabilitation, opening the Cannes Film Festival.
He's got European movie makers behind him, the standing ovation in the theatre.
What he needs now is to get to Hollywood.
He needs Disney to say, okay, you can have a lead part or a bit part in the next Pirates movie.
Paula, should Hollywood or a firm like Disney do that with Johnny Depp?
He deserved to be brought back.
I mean, the hypocrisy of the Cairn Film Festival, it's an incredibly glamorous event.
I've covered it many times myself, but they fetish people like Roman Polanski, who's a fugitive child rapist who escaped justice for what he did.
So they've got a long history of tolerating this kind of thing.
They do say some of the festival organisers they prefer to celebrate the art rather than the person, which is an easy get-out, but some people do think that.
Where do we stand with Johnny Depp, though?
Celebrating the art and not the person.
I would accept that if it was Amber Heard who was on the red carpet.
I would accept that.
Why wouldn't I?
I would accept that, that we were celebrating the art and not the person, if it was Amber Heard who hadn't lost her L'Oreal contract.
I would accept that, that we were celebrating the art and not the person, if Amber Heard wasn't hounded by 4.5 million people to sign a contract so that she didn't get to partake in the Aquaman 2 role.
But we're not celebrating the art.
We clearly are celebrating the person.
And this is what concerns me, particularly when we know that two women a week die because of abuse from their partners.
We are celebrating it.
But an American court trial determined at the end of it that they didn't believe her, that she was a liar.
It is clouded by what happened in London, no question.
But the most recent test of the veracity of both of their claims about what went on that marriage was an unequivocal win for Johnny Depp.
And he has taken that, as you would understand.
It was a two-to-one, wasn't it?
It was a two-to-one.
Yeah, but he won.
So, you know, in terms of the finances, he came out better, of course, than Amber did.
What Amber wanted was that unequivocal win, the same win that she was able to obtain on behalf of the Santa, and she didn't get it.
So why shouldn't he be allowed to continue with his career?
I haven't said he shouldn't be allowed to continue with his career.
What I'm concerned about is the fact that they're not being treated equally.
And what we have is a society who seems to accept that it's okay for a man to be an abuser, but it's not okay for a woman.
They have both sent out, they sent out a joint statement to suggest that the relationship was volatile.
They accepted that.
This is when the marriage was settled.
But then Amber Heard went out of her way to become a spokesperson for gender-based violence based on her relationship with Johnny Depp.
And that is the point at which Johnny Depp said, well, hang on a minute.
And why was she wrong to do that?
Why was she wrong to identify that she believed that she was a victim of domestic abuse as found in the British courts?
Why was she wrong to be aware of that?
But why are you keening perfect victim, Piers?
She was supposed to sit quietly to the artist.
Hang on, hang on.
But she didn't.
Hang on.
Stop painting her as some kind of angel.
Amber Heard was not an angel.
Amber Heard, from everything I saw, did some terrible acts of abuse, both physical, verbal.
We saw it.
We heard it.
We heard the evidence.
We saw the pictures and so on.
She's not an angel in this, right?
The question is, I think, when you get a situation that's messy like this, what happens to the main people involved, right?
And you might be right, there has been a double standard.
Johnny Depp tonight, I've got the pictures now inside the auditorium at the Cairn Film Festival of this standing ovation you've got.
Listen to some of this.
My wen, one of the first strong pictures hand in hand.
Now that's pretty unequivocal, emphatic voter support from the movie industry.
But this is about money.
I mean, it's a huge snub to Amber Heard.
Amber Heard, don't forget, is the only person in this couple at the moment who's got a big Hollywood movie.
From everything you've read about it.
It's an Aquaman Trump.
Right, so Nick, you've researched them better than most people in this fascinating book.
From everything you've gleaned here, where does the truth lie, do you think?
Well, one thing that I have learned from studying this case and reporting on both of them on the ground is that no one has a monopoly on truth.
Not a high court judge, not Johnny Depp, not Amber Heard.
Or on being a doctor.
Not seven.
Well, this is where you get right into the culture war because there is an argument on, I would say, the feminist side that there can only be one abuser in a relationship.
The concept of mutual abuse, which came up in the Virginia trial, is something that I don't know whether colleagues of yours would say does not exist because it allows abusers to say, ah, you're abusing me, you're the problem in this relationship.
And it can turn things on its head.
So we have a real issue where people say, of course, you can have mutual abuse in a relationship.
Amber Heard admitted to physically hitting Johnny Depp on a number of occasions.
But does that make her an abuser?
Or does that make her someone responding to the relationship?
Do you know what?
I reacted to her.
My takeaway, Paula, at the end of it was they had a highly toxic alcohol and drug-fueled relationship, which spilled over into verbal and physical violence, right?
And this went on for quite a long time.
And actually, they are both, I wouldn't say equally because I wasn't there, I don't know, but they both certainly contributed to the blame of the breakdown of this relationship with their behaviour.
And so I don't see two angels, but I'm not quite sure where the scales lie, given we've now had two court cases, one complete exoneration effectively for debt, and the other one the opposite.
Yes.
And that sounds very reasonable sitting here in the studio.
But what's the message that's been sent to victims of abuse?
The message that's been sent to victims of abuse, particularly women, is don't speak out if your man is rich and powerful.
Or if you're lying.
That's the message.
Or if you're lying.
Well, in this country.
Well, Amber Heard.
He's not.
In America, Amber Heard, it was determined she lied, right?
So this is where it gets more complicated.
You have a Hollywood star, Amber Heard, who plays the victim, tries to cash in on being a victim, writes op-ed pieces in serious newspapers and does all that stuff, promoting herself, promoting her brand as a...
She kept her mouth shut, Piers.
I'm not saying that.
Could she have kept her mouth shut?
I'm not saying that.
She would not have voiced her.
No, but Fauler, your position on the...
No, no, but your argument that we should...
It's quite that she spoke out.
No, no, but she's entitled to.
Absolutely.
But then she's also, Johnny Depp is entitled to defend himself, and he did win the case in America.
She has done.
And my point is taken aside.
I don't think she represents your average Joe victim in the street.
So I think drawing that parallel to me is wrong.
Who is that average Joe?
This is exactly the problem.
We have a preconceived view of what an abuser looks like.
And having that preconceived view means that we then challenge a person when they come forward.
When they speak out, we say, no, you can't be the one who suffered because you look like this.
No, you can't be the one who suffered.
Why should we?
You're wearing a short sleep.
You can't be the one who suffered because you were drinking alcohol.
I don't want to interrupt you, but I'm going to interrupt you.
To say this, I recently interviewed a young man who'd been part of this appalling case up north where a woman fantasist had assaulted herself and then blamed a bunch of innocent men.
And this guy went to prison for several months and was facing 20 years in prison.
But eventually she got exposed, right?
I don't believe in always believing people or categorising everyone who comes forward as a victim.
And that's where there's an automatic truth.
I believe in respecting people, in listening to them, and examining the facts and see where that takes you.
Because otherwise, you're going to get fantasists of people gaming the system.
If that was correct, Piers, if our society was built on that fairness, then we wouldn't have had Rochdale.
We wouldn't have had Rochester.
We wouldn't have had the low stats that we know exist in terms of reporting.
Okay, and Amber Hurr came out with what she said.
She was believed.
Johnny Depp's career went into a tailspin.
And as far as he was concerned, he was an innocent, wronged man.
And so he went to court to restore his reputation, which he has a right to do.
And we know how it panned out.
It panned out with a lot of cognitive dissonance because we're trying to work out how a British jurisdiction can say, yes, he is an abuser and a wife beater, and how the American public and an American jury can say, no, absolutely not.
She was the liar in all of this, which is what the fascination about this story is.
But when she came out saying, I was abused by Johnny Depp, his only recourse is through the courts.
Because he couldn't do it any other way.
And otherwise, his entire career was gone.
And his entire career could have gone if you believed the American trial because of a liar.
So it's, but it is complicated.
I'm not saying for a moment he's blameless.
I'm just saying that I don't think she is a great standard-bearer for victims of domestic violence, given that she herself was so violent.
Beer Ads and Humor 00:12:45
Well, that's where.
I'm sorry, I won't.
But also, why is it that the Cannes jury have decided to really push this film to put it in the prestigious opening slot?
This is not open.
What's the answer?
Johnny Depp's got a right to work to hold our nose and get...
Well, the answer is: look at the film industry.
What's it interested in?
Buns on seats and money.
It's not there to make any money.
The fact that Roman Polanski still gets standing ovations, and the first one was led at the Oscars in absentia after he absconded from America to avoid justice for raping an underage girl.
And that's what he did.
I mean, the facts aren't contested.
And he escaped justice and escaped justice for 50 years.
He is still lauded around the world, including in Hollywood, as some kind of hero.
I mean, it is a morally bankrupt industry when it comes to these kind of things.
Anyway, this is a morally unbankrupt book.
Depp v. Herb, The Unreal Story by Nick Wallace.
Fascinating read.
It's an extraordinary story.
I know people that know Johnny Depp who absolutely love him.
I know people who know Johnny Depp and say, yeah, it doesn't surprise me.
I'll know the same with Amber Herb.
I have no idea.
It's Amber who's had to run away and hide beneath the stone in Madrid somewhere, not Johnny.
He's allowed on a red carpet.
All right, we're going to leave it there.
Thank you both very much indeed.
Uncensored, next Miller Light becomes Letty's Beard brand, apparently hell-bent on alienating its male customers.
Do virtue sickling campaigns harness the power of advertising for social good, or are they just extremely irritating?
We'll debate that next.
Well, Miller Light is the latest beer brand facing a stunning backlash for a man-bashing ad.
The US beer famously used Playboy models in its signature campaigns throughout the 90s and early 2000s.
Meghan Markle, of course, went on to be a suitcase girl on Deal or No Deal front of this ad for the brand in 2010.
The new commercial strikes a rather different tone.
Here's a little-known fact: women were among the very first to brew beer ever.
From Mesopotamia to the Middle Ages to colonial America, women were the ones doing the brewing.
Centuries later, how did the industry pay homage to the founding mothers of beer?
They put us in bikinis.
Wow.
Look at this shit.
Wild.
It's time beer made it up to women.
So today, Miller Light is on a mission to clean up not just their shit, but the whole beer industry's shit.
Terrible.
Aren't men awful?
Awful.
Women in bikinis.
Shocking.
Who would have thought any woman wanted to be in a bikini?
Admired by men?
I mean, that's the last thing you'd be wearing a bikini for, right?
Its parent company has trashed its own brand's mud wrestling catfight ad from 2003 in its defense saying women shouldn't be forced to mud wrestle in order to sell beer.
Why not?
I thought mud was good for the skin.
Competitor Bud Light's notorious campaign featuring influencer Dylan Mulvaney has so far cost the company more than $6 million in market capitalization.
I think it was $6 billion actually.
Because actually, it turned out men didn't want to be told that they're idiots and that actually this beer was aimed at transgender women who are biological males who are pretending to be women.
So, are they using the power of advertising to make a powerful and progressive social point to these companies or just deliberately self-harming themselves by alienating their core customers?
I'm joined by former Levi's brand president, Jennifer Say, political journalist Ava Santina.
All right, well, welcome to both of you.
Jennifer Say, there seems to have been a run of these kinds of adverts.
And it goes back, I think, to the Gillette, infamous Gillette one in the wake of the Me Too campaign, which is a perfectly laudable campaign.
I'm not knocking it at all, but the Gillette campaign that ran after it, which basically, rather than celebrating masculinity, became a tirade of abuse about effectively all men are awful monsters unless they can prove otherwise.
And Gillette lost, I think, $9 billion off the bottom line until we did a complete reverse ferret and went back to celebrating masculinity again.
And we're going to see the same thing with Bud Light.
I suspect we'll see the same thing with Miller Light.
What is going on here?
Why are these companies surrendering to this, well, what Elon Musk would call the woke virus?
To see the right thing.
Well, I would, you know, having been in the boardrooms and executive rooms for a very long time, I would call it woke washing.
It may be a cynical take, but I can tell you it is true.
These brands are thinking if we align ourselves with the perceived values of younger consumers, Gen Z and millennials, they'll like us and they'll buy our product.
We don't have to talk about product.
We don't have to talk about product benefit.
We'll just align ourselves with their values so that we can make money off of it.
And it's a virtue signal to distance themselves from past campaigns, the greedy business magnets of the past.
And it also serves to conceal the less altruistic business practices.
So it's a lie.
And that shielding works.
The press generally is all in on it.
They're able to avoid scrutiny from the press by taking these stances.
And they just don't think about the fact that half the consumer base is not aligned.
They just aren't.
And that insulting your consumer is not the way to go.
Usually, if you insult the consumer, they're going to reject the product.
And they're catching a gigantic financial cold.
So Ava, here's my issue about this.
What is wrong with using sexy women in bikinis to sell beer?
Well, I think actually your commentator explained it perfectly there.
You are alienating half of your base.
This is a problem.
Why would a woman find that offensive?
Well, hang on.
This is a person here who apparently was in the boardroom for Levi, but doesn't understand that actually women are consumers.
And perhaps maybe they are going to now spend half of the business.
You're not answering my question.
Why would women be offended by attractive women posing in bikinis to sell beer?
I'm not offended by attractive women.
I am offended by men over-sexualizing women.
And do you know what, Jordan, Piers?
A lot of men can't control themselves.
A lot of men think that if they buy that beer, then entitled it.
I think it celebrates womanhood and it celebrates the beauty of mud, which we all know is good for the skewers.
That's ridiculous.
Come on.
Let's actually think, what are we watching here?
What's got to do with beer?
Why am I going to buy this product?
I'm a big business.
You know why?
Because it was a joke.
And there used to be a time pre-wokery when you were allowed to just have a joke.
The women were in on it.
The men were in on it.
Everybody laughed.
Nobody got offended.
Now people watch that kind of ad and they literally go nuts.
They find themselves being electrified in a triggering manner.
They have to go and hide in a safe space.
Then they launch marches down main busy thoroughfares because of a joke.
What has happened to that light hand on the tiller?
Why do we care so much?
Why have we now got to expose men to all these adverts doing a kind of reverse assault on us?
Have you considered that maybe it's not all about men?
Maybe there are actually a large proportion of females that would like to see adverts that don't include scans.
But why is Bud Light's market cap just disintegrating?
Now, that's a different topic altogether.
I think you could see there is some merit in we don't need to sexualize women in order to sell beer.
You sexualize yourselves in lots of women's magazines and indeed in men's magazines.
I don't think I did anything of the sort.
You may not have done personally.
It's only a matter of time.
Now that you're a television superstar, when the money comes from GQ, off.
I'm not saying you will.
I'm just saying, normally in my experience, that will happen.
And then that is up to those men to buy those magazines.
And perhaps if they'd like to peruse it, they can.
But it doesn't mean that women are going to buy them and have a good idea.
If you go around the high school and look at women's magazines, there'll be lots of women in bikinis.
And how unhealthy was that of a whole generation of women?
No, now.
Yeah, and how unhealthy is that?
Why is it unhealthy?
Because it sparked a whole generation.
Nothing radiates good health more than a very attractive fit woman in a bikini.
No, that's not.
Rather like, by the way, the way that women have for a very long time drooled over good-looking men.
For example.
No, that's totally different.
Oh, I don't think so.
Let's look at this wonderful advert for Coke.
Remember this?
See you tomorrow.
11:30.
Love to you.
I want to make love to you.
Ava, I'm not aiming that at you.
I'm just repeating what I've just seen in the advert, which is a bunch of women drooling.
Oh, and here's more.
And do you know what?
Hello.
Let's watch some more.
Love to you.
All I want to do is wash your clothes.
I want to be human doors.
I mean, I can't.
If I was a lawyer in a court case, it would be, I have nothing more to offer, Your Honor.
I rest my case.
I think you enjoyed that more than I did.
You know why I did this?
It's because I enjoyed it because of the stinking hypocrisy.
No, that's ridiculous.
And by the way, because those women I know, and I suspect you would be like this if we were off camera in a pub somewhere, you would laugh at stuff like this.
It's just we're now forced because of this woke virus to take all these things incredibly seriously, to be incredibly offended.
No one's allowed to laugh.
No one can find these things humorous.
No one thinks that women can fancy men or men fancy women.
It's all evil.
How did we get so boring over?
Are you joking?
I don't know if you're actually joking.
No, I'm serious.
It's all about a power dynamic.
You must be able to see that those women.
They are playfully laughing and just it's all a good joke and we're all in the middle of the moment.
I love the fact you're trying to defend this.
I'm not thinking about this women's males overeating.
I love the fact you're trying to draw some distinction between what we're watching here.
Let me bring back Jennifer.
Jennifer, this to me just, I'm afraid, epitomizes the rank double standard.
Right?
On the one hand.
Can I suggest...
Go on.
I think there's something that is in between where we're not objectifying women.
And I would cite a Bud Light ad that ran just a few months ago with Miles Teller and his wife that had the trademark Bud Light humor.
It was funny.
It demonstrated sort of an updated view to masculinity and what it means to be a man.
He's a good husband.
He's charming.
He's funny.
He's dancing with his wife.
And she's not scantily clad.
They're having fun together.
He's not sort of shoving her out of the way to get to his beer.
So I would agree with you.
Humor works in advertising.
Why do we have to abandon that?
Why does it have to be so worthy?
Why do we get so prudish?
Why can't we just also enjoy the male and female form?
I mean, seriously.
We certainly can.
And I would cite another ad, which you may be familiar with.
In the 80s, one of Levi's most successful ads that ran in the UK featuring Nick Cayman for 501 shrinks.
I don't know if you remember this ad.
One of the most successful of all time.
It's a good sort of analog to the Diet Coke one you ran because it's funny, it's cheeky.
There's little old ladies that think he looks cute when he takes his pants off in the laundromat.
No one's objectified.
It's funny, but here's the other thing.
Of course, he's being objectified, but nobody cares.
Men don't care.
But the woman's product is at the center.
This is the problem.
I'm not going to buy something because a female brewer from 200 years ago made it.
Why do I care?
You know what?
If I saw a good bit of mud wrestling on TV tomorrow, I'd go and buy that beer instinctively.
I would.
Just on principle.
Just because it'd be so refreshing to see an ad that was actually a bit naughty and a bit funny.
That's fair.
I think bringing humor back is important.
We've forgotten, I think, Jennifer.
Honestly, I think we have forgotten how to laugh.
Wokery is where comedy goes to die.
And this is the problem.
We've forgotten how to have fun between the sexes and just to have a laugh.
The old saucy postcards will be coming for those next, the ones on the beach on the resorts.
They'll have to go.
Can't have jokes about things like sex.
Got to leave it there.
Thank you, Ava.
Thank you, Jennifer.
I appreciate it.
Please, can we bring back some humor?
Can we just go back to having fun?
Having a laugh?
No one's going to die.
It's all fine.
We can just have fun, can't we?
Or is it all over?
Uncensored next.
I speak to someone.
I think we'll bring a bit of fun if he wins the White House.
Cannabis and White House Fun 00:02:03
The naughties rapper, Joseph Afroman Foreman, is bidding to be president and he wants to legalize.
Well, we'll find out what he wants to legalize after the break.
It's along the lines of his hit song because I got high.
I was going to get up and find the broom, but then I got high.
My room is still messed up, and I know why.
Why, man.
You probably remember Afro Man's iconic pro-cannabis anthem because I got high.
Well, Afroman is back, but now he wants high office.
An Afro man, also known as Joseph Foreman, joins me now to explain why.
So, Afro Man, I think I can call you that, your real name, Joseph Foreman, but I'll go by your famous stage name, Afro Man.
You want to run for president?
Why?
I want to get cannabis legal in all 50 states so citizens and fellow Americans don't have to go through what I went through.
That's why.
And for those who don't know what you went through, explain what you went through.
Oh, okay.
I'm so sorry.
I had the sheriff department, the local sheriff department, raid my house with guns drawn, raiding my house, looking for cannabis.
And they found like, I think they said they found some roaches, like the ends of blunts, and some vape pens.
But I think people should not get raided or almost killed because they are using natural medicine that God placed on the earth.
We know of a number of states in America where it's medical cannabis legal and all.
I mean, a number of states in the United States, it's now legal to use cannabis.
Decriminalizing Natural Medicine 00:03:44
Do you think there'll be a time in the not-too-distant future where it becomes legal across the entire country?
It sure will if I'm elected president.
I will decriminalize it federally.
I will take it off of the bad drug list.
It will no longer be a crime federally.
Right now, it's legal in the states, but it's still illegal federally.
But I'm going to decriminalize it federally.
And one of the other issues that you're campaigning on is law enforcement reform.
You want mandatory body cameras for every law enforcement officer if you were elected president.
I would go along with that.
It seems to me a lot of the more incendiary episodes recently between law enforcement and particularly African American community in America has come from people not really knowing what's happened.
Cameras, of course, would be the best way to clear up a lot of those confusions.
Yes.
Not only would I make sure that officers wore cameras, I would make it to the point where they couldn't get paid unless they had cameras on, and then I would appoint a group of citizens to monitor the police to make sure they are for the people, by the people.
You know, this will, you know, cut out a lot of nonsense.
And then I would get rid of immunity.
I believe law enforcement officers ought to obey the laws they enforce.
Yeah, I don't disagree with that.
Let's talk about another one of your campaign pledges.
It's reparations, that you would single-handedly save the U.S. taxpayers $61.9 billion annually by ending the war on cannabis and stopping all foreign aid, taking the money saved from that to distribute to families negatively affected by the atrocities of slavery.
We had this debate actually earlier this week on my show.
And here's my problem with it, really.
Sort of punishing modern day taxpayers for the sins of their long-distant ancestors, for doing stuff that today we would all agree was completely appalling, like slavery, for example.
Where do you draw the line with that?
For example, I made the point that the Vikings and the Romans invaded my country.
Let me finish my question.
If the Vikings and Romans invaded my country, would we be entitled to claim money back from the Danish people or the Italians?
Okay, I'll answer that question.
I'm not punishing modern citizens for the atrocities of the past.
However, the things that took place in the past has an effect on African Americans and Africans around the world in the slave trade at this present time that are present modern day problems.
Since the past still has problems in the presence because of slavery, it's up to the people that benefited from slavery, whether in the past or right now, they are still, you know what I'm saying, living in benefits, benefiting off of slavery.
Unfortunately, we've run out of time.
I just got your answer in.
Thankfully, we run out of time.
Thank you for joining me.
Good luck with your campaign.
I appreciate you being on Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Thank you very much.
Whatever you're up to tonight, keep it uncensored.
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