Piers Morgan and Trevor Phillips debate Britain's racial identity, countering claims of institutional racism in cricket and the Met Police by highlighting progress since the Windrush generation and diverse leadership under Rishi Sunak. The discussion critiques the Cricket Commission's report on elitism while shifting to Matt Hancock's admission of poor care home data during the pandemic inquiry. Fraser Nelson defends capitalism against Ava Santino's critique of Conservative mismanagement, concluding that despite ongoing institutional flaws and RNLI internal reviews, Britain has evolved significantly from historical standards. [Automatically generated summary]
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Is Britain a Racist Country00:02:09
I'm Piers Morgan.
I'm censored tonight.
A damning report says that cricket is racist.
Sir Winston Churchill has been branded a white supremacist.
Britain's most shocking race murder is back in the headlines.
Does this all mean that Britain is a racist country?
Or do we have a problem with celebrating real progress?
Sir Trevor Phillips joins me live.
Also tonight, Hancock in the dock, the UK's pandemic health chief, takes to a standard the COVID inquiry.
But will the victims of the government's mistakes ever get the justice they want?
We'll debate that.
Thus mortgages exploding, inflation soaring, kids living with their parents till they're grey old bald.
Is it any wonder young people hate capitalism?
Or have they got it all wrong?
We'll debate that too.
From the news building in London, this is Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Good evening from London.
Welcome to Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Is Britain a racist country?
If you watch the news or read social media, there's a lot of evidence that suggests it might be.
The racist murderer Stephen Lawrence is back in the headlines.
London's Met Police has been branded institutionally racist.
An exhibition at St. Paul's Cathedral branded Sir Winston Churchill, one of our great national heroes, a white supremacist.
And a shocking new report today declared that cricket, that most English of indulgences, is elitist, misogynist, and institutionally racist.
An independent commission found that racism is entrenched in the sport and that players at all levels of the game face discrimination because of their class and their skin colour.
If you're not white, male and wealthy, it seems you're not welcome in that great English game.
Now for the many people who love cricket, myself included, it's literally my favourite sport in the world.
I'll be in residence at Lourdes this week for the Ashes.
This report makes unsettling reading, but it's also not really the sport that I recognise or many of the people that I've played cricket with recognise.
From fans and mustans to players on the pitch, most of the people I've ever encountered in cricket are not racist or sexist.
Cricket's Entrenched Racism Report00:14:46
But indisputably, this report affirms that this is going on.
Attitudes have changed as the times have changed.
And that's indisputable too.
I think that's how a lot of people feel when they see headlines like this.
There are problems in our society, yes, but there has been massive progress too.
Last week we marked the 75th anniversary of an event that changed the country.
492 people stepped off the empire windrush from the Caribbean into the gloomy grey swirls of Britain.
They were the pioneers, the first in a wave of new arrivals over a period of decades who became the windrush generation.
Britain invited people from across the former empire to fill labour shortages and rebuild our battered economy after the war.
And they did just that.
They became factory workers, drivers, plumbers, builders, cleaners, nurses in the brand new NHS.
They changed the face of this country and they changed it for the better.
But it wasn't all a fairy tale.
Along with the bad food and worse weather, these people faced a very hostile reception from many.
They were ostracized, bullied and abused.
They faced keep Britain white signs, Enoch Powell's rivers of blood speech.
There were race eight riots with the Teddy Boys in Nottingham and London.
It was a racist country for many of those who came over in the Windrush generation.
But three quarters of a century later in Britain, well frankly, is unrecognisable to those times.
I don't think most people in this country now care about skin colour.
They care about equality and tolerance.
One in six Britons has a parent born abroad now.
There are more black and ethnic minority people in top government jobs here than the whole of the European Union put together.
We've opened our doors to massive numbers of Ukrainian refugees.
The First Minister of Scotland is Muslim.
Half of the England football team is black.
It's not even a topic of conversation.
The Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is a proudly practicing Hindu from East African and Punjabi descent.
And when he got the top job, that fact was really barely a footnote.
It didn't stop the usual suspects queuing up with pre-written hot takes like this.
There's a part of me that feels a little bad for England's racists.
No, because remember, remember, they voted for Brexit specifically to keep Britain white.
And that vote started a seven-year chain of dominoes that has now led directly to an Indian Prime Minister.
Yeah, that was complete nonsense by Trevor Noah, who actually left his show quite recently.
No flowers need to be sent.
Nobody cared or does care that Rishi Sunak isn't white.
If it was mentioned at all, it was to celebrate the fact we had our first non-white prime minister.
But people didn't make a big deal of that either.
The exact same can be said of our old friends Harry and Megan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
They've done more than anyone to spin an alternative reality in which Megan was hounded out of a vile, racist country by a cruel, racist royal family.
But they didn't produce any evidence for that and still haven't.
And the reality to me is that we eulogised the newly biracial monarchy as the fresh face of 21st century Britain.
I wrote newspaper columns about it myself.
What a breath of fresh air this was.
Nobody will argue there isn't racism in Britain today and there isn't a lot of work still to do, but the fact that Britain is one of the most diverse, welcoming and tolerant countries in the world is something to be proud of.
The public fury with the Conservative government over the wrongful deportation of some of the Windrush generation is to me more proof of that.
It may be fashionable to say Britain is racist, but in my view, it is fundamentally wrong.
Well, joining me now is broadcaster Trevor Phillips, who's re-released and updated his book, Windrush, 75 Years of Modern Britain.
Also in the studio, Talk TVs, Paul LaRone, Adrian and Richard Tice.
Right.
There's a lot to unpack here, Sir Trevor.
You are probably the most qualified man in the country to unpack it with me.
So let me just start with that simple question.
Is Britain a racist country?
Well, as much as it pains me to agree with you about anything, Piers, I think actually I reached the same conclusion as you do.
When you ask the question, is Britain a racist country?
The first thing is to ask, compared to what?
Compared to the days when my parents came here with their then nine children, I was the 10th born here, and when my father said that he would have to walk the streets at night looking for somewhere to sleep, or when we lived in two rooms, no chance of black people getting council houses then because council of tenants wouldn't have us on the estates, so we lived in Rachman slums.
In our family's case, two rooms, black family upstairs, black family downstairs.
That's why I was sent back to the Caribbean, because you can't get 12 people into two rooms very conveniently.
Or compared to when I had my first girlfriend at university, and in order to meet her mother, we had to meet in Selfridges because her mother couldn't tell her father that his daughter was dating somebody black.
So I think when people say, you know, it's terrible racist, just talk to your parents or to talk to your grandparents.
Now, that doesn't mean we're perfect, but if you survey people now and the think tank British Future did this a couple of weeks ago, 80% of people from ethnic minorities will tell you that compared to anywhere on the continent, and by the way, compared to the United States, this is a better place to live if you are not white than anywhere else in the development.
When I walk up and down my local high street, maybe a couple of times a day, it just seems unbelievably multicultural, London.
I mean, I don't venture north a lot when I do.
It doesn't feel a lot different actually when I go to Manchester or places like that.
It just feels like we live in an incredibly tolerant multicultural environment now.
I think there are racists in Britain, no question, as there are in every country.
But my God, we've come a long way, I think, from that environment your parents had to come to.
Yeah, I mean, let's study on a bit.
I mean, let's the fact that there are many racists in this country, that doesn't make us a racist nation.
But that doesn't mean that we don't have problems.
We don't have a situation where people who look like me know that when they go for a job, people will smile at them and be very lovely to them.
And as soon as they walk out the door, say, oh, not going to have that one because they won't fit.
Let me give an example.
There are all sorts of reasons for that.
Let me give you an example.
I remember watching players like Luther Blissett, one of the first black footballers, then John Barnes and others.
I remember the monkey chants from the Terraces.
I remember the bananas being thrown on.
Not how they remember it.
They were on the receiving end.
But I remember watching it.
And you would never see that in an English professional game now.
I mean, this is unheard of.
You hear about it in Spain still and countries like that, but not here.
And I was really struck by, for example, the Taking the Knee, the George Floyd thing.
It was divisive and controversial for many people.
But I've got to say, at Arsenal, for example, very multicultural crowd, a lot of black players, Mikaya Saka and others.
It was always, they did it for the whole time that it went on for that whole season.
It was immaculately heard by the home and away crowds.
I never heard a single boo.
Now, I don't think that would have happened even 20 years ago.
I think that is true.
And, you know, an Arsenal is a sort of very polite, nice club.
I mean, not a winning club, but a very nice club.
If you went to Chelsea, which has been my club for more than half a century, when I was a student, I stopped going because of the racism.
Yeah, because they were throwing darts.
And I was like the bullseye in the dartboard.
So I stopped going for a long time.
But today, you wouldn't get any of that in Chelsea.
In fact, well, you've had the occasional, but when it happens, it's really, it becomes a big story.
Exactly.
It's nothing like the old days when we had the headhunters and all that business.
Today, our heroes are Didier Drogba.
Yeah.
Conte.
I mean, this is a whole the country itself has changed.
And by the way, those people that you saw coming down the gangplank from Windrush, they were the people who changed things.
Okay, so let's move to something like, and I totally agree with you, by the way.
Let's move to cricket.
Now, you have a vested interest, I think, in the recruitment process for the chair of this inquiry, which has come out with a pretty damning 317-page report holding up a mirror to cricket, which has concluded there's structural and institutional racism existing within the game.
Women are treated as subordinate to men at all levels of the sport.
There's elitism and class-based discrimination in cricket.
Now, and says black cricket has been failed and ECB must develop a plan to revive it.
I don't think people in the game would disagree with that assessment.
Some are horrified.
I mean, quite surprised and shocked.
On some of it, and I'll come to the racial part in a moment with you, but on the part, for example, about elitism, I remember when I was 12, I got picked for the England prep schools cricket squad.
I was a fast bowler, loved Dennis Lilly.
And I was very good for my age, but I was playing cricket three hours a day.
I was being trained at my prep school by a former Hampshire cricketer.
And I had the benefit of that privilege and elitist experience, if you like.
And then I went to local comprehensive where they literally played cricket once a week for two hours, if they could find any of the meagre equipment that they had for all the children.
And if a teacher could be bothered to do it, which often wasn't the case.
So I went from playing three hours a day to nothing.
And it seems to me we could be the world beaters all the time at cricket in this country if state schools had anything like the commitment, which would have to come, I guess, from government funding, to things like cricket, which they just don't.
I mean, they don't.
So the chances of breaking through past the more privileged, elitist private school system as a cricketer are pretty low.
Yeah, and I think the basic point here is, I mean, I grew up, I was born here, but I grew up in the Caribbean, where cricket is, you know, it's there's the air and there's water and then there's cricket.
Yeah.
And they flow.
They all flow through the village.
You have, we play cricket in the streets here, they play in, you know, they'll have nets.
At the moment, we don't have any of that in this country.
And it's not a surprise then that people will, if they're any good, if they're athletic, they'll do basketball, girls will play netball, the boys will play football.
I think that this is a terrible thing, to be honest, because I think cricket is a fantastic sport for teaching new disciplines, for teaching you teamwork and tool.
And if I may say so, Cindy Butts, who chaired this inquiry, I was delighted that she took on the role because we were asked to find somebody to do it.
And she's done a fantastic job.
The thing about what she has said, people need to remember, cricket is more than a game.
And okay, I'm a Western Indian.
It's a religion.
It's a religion.
Cricket is more than a game.
But it also tells you something about the society.
The greatest book about sport ever written, Beyond the Boundary, by Trinidadian intellectual C. L. R. James, essentially showed that what happens in the world is paralleled on the field.
So for example, 60 years ago in this country, we used to have a thing called gentlemen versus players before you were born.
Professionals were the amateurs, yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
The gentlemen...
They had their own gates.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
The gentlemen were posh guys who only played for expenses, went through that one gate to the pavilion.
The players were professionals.
They went through the other gate and they worked for a salary.
The last game between gentlemen and players, the gentlemen were captained by Lord Ted Dexter.
The players were captained by Fred Truman, son of a miner.
When they got rid of gentlemen versus players, that was announcing that Britain had left that kind of class divide to some extent behind it.
And I think what Cindy's report is doing is something equally profound saying Britain needs to leave behind the hidden class divisions plus the divisions particularly between men and women in sport.
All fascinating stuff.
Paula, is Britain a racist country?
There are parts of Britain that remain of the view that people who look like me shouldn't be here.
There are parts of Britain who are prepared to challenge that view.
And that is why we can have the McPherson report.
That is why we have the reports that we do today that have come out about cricket.
That is why we can challenge the Metropolitan Police, the London Fire Brigade, etc., etc.
So we have, unfortunately, lots of individuals who can give you their experience.
We unfortunately have institutions that have been identified as still.
And it's hard to think of a more damaging thing than to have your main police force in the country condemned as institutionally racist.
I mean, Richard, this is part of the problem.
There are certainly still institutions where you can just feel that the setup is geared towards being accused of, in many cases, quite rightly, institutional racism of a degree.
And you highlight the Met Police, and we all know some absolute horror stories within that institution.
You touched on the fire brigade.
These are public sector institutions.
I think there's far more progress.
And overall, I don't think we are a racist country.
I think we should celebrate the incredible progress we've made.
But there are pockets of it.
What troubles me most is those pockets are in the public sector.
Just coming back to the cricket peers, there are things actually, again, that I don't think the report does justice to.
My son plays in an Oxford league.
There are many teams there where there are either 100% Asian ethnicity within the team or the vast majority of it.
Again, I don't think that is celebrated enough and appreciated enough.
So we're making great progress.
There's always more to do.
But for heaven's sake, let's look at the positives, not just beat ourselves up.
How did you feel about St. Paul's Cathedral having this thing on their website for what turned out to be a long time labelling Winston Churchill a white supremacist?
I just think that's appalling.
I mean, he's one of the greatest heroes.
He saved this country from the ultimate, most hideous white supremacist.
Yes, Adolf Hitler, for heaven's sake.
And we should be celebrating and thanking that.
And for sure he made mistakes.
We all do.
But we are so much better.
Were those mistakes?
Racist mistakes, Richard.
I wasn't around at the time.
Defending Churchill Against Racism00:07:15
Yes, but you know what the history books tell us.
Were those mistakes racist mistakes?
In today's world, we would say definitely.
In the context of then, who knows what it was?
We weren't around.
And so it's important, isn't it, for us to address that?
Well, A.A.M. I thought A.A.M. Wilson wrote a great piece today for the mail when he said that you have to take all these people like Churchill, Gandhi, Mandela, in the totality of what they achieved.
What is Churchill's greatest achievement?
It was defeating Hitler, the ultimate white supremacist.
So, I mean, Trevor, it's complicated.
Obviously, some of the things that Churchill said over the years were racially tinged.
There's no question of that.
Which was of its time.
I mean, those kind of comments were not unusual.
But I don't think it was a white supremacist.
Well, I think these phrases are hurled around as phrases of abuse.
Let's be clear.
I mean, Churchill, for example, you mentioned Gandhi.
Churchill, I think, described Gandhi as half-naked Indian fakir, a kind of pejorative, dismissive term.
But that was a nature of the English aristocracy at the time.
And that was, without question, a racist point of view.
But the important point is that it was normal.
And that's what...
Actually, I feel really uncomfortable, Paul, when we try and transport the morality of the day back to previous generations.
And this brings me to...
Well, all I was going to say, Piers, is actually what it should tell us is it was like that then.
Goodness me.
Now it's unacceptable.
Now it's unacceptable.
And we should really be thinking constantly, how have we moved this?
Right.
But on that point, though, Paula, this issue of reparations, for example, people today paying for the sins of their ancestors who may have owned slaves.
There was an extraordinary Reuters report today.
Quite hilarious in some ways.
Do you know the only American president?
They charted every American president's links to slave ownership.
Do you know the only one who had no direct links to slave ownership?
Donald Trump.
Trump.
The only one.
Even Barack Obama through his white side of the family, they could chart it back to slave ownership.
Trump is the only one, apparently.
Came after slavery, his line.
And we've discussed reparations before, and you know my view.
I'm very uncomfortable about the fact that the British government felt it appropriate that they should pay back the slave owners and only finished compensating them in 2015.
And yet, when we talk about reparations to those still affected by colonialism, we are told to shut down that conversation.
And that comes back to what we're discussing about Winston Churchill.
If people understood that Winston Churchill did say things that were inappropriate, that Winston Churchill did say things or held views that were racist, it's fine to encapsulate them at a point of history.
I've got no problems in the world.
But what we don't do is take a look at the rules.
Don't do no, we're not discussing this, no, we're not hearing this.
Don't take a place like St. Paul's Cathedral, which literally was an emblem of the blitz, for goodness sake, right?
Where Churchill stood up and basically single-handedly motivated this country to defeat a bunch of white supremacists from taking us over.
Trevor.
Can I just say on that point?
I do apologise for interrupting.
There are a lot of people in this country who think that black people arrived on the wind rush.
That was us stepping into this world.
That's not true.
We were here long before that.
I realise that.
You realise that.
But a lot of people do.
No, no, you make it.
And it's the same in regards to the history of the world.
Okay, let me ask Trevor an interesting question.
In an interview with the mail that you gave, you made the point that you were very disappointed that Meghan and Harry had had this amazing opportunity as the first biracial couple in our monarchy to really be a force for change and good, and they blew it.
Yeah.
By the way, I'm not going to let you get away with the whole Trump thing.
Still not voting for him, right?
By the way, I've never told anyone to vote for Donald Trump, right?
I'm not American.
I wouldn't impinge on their thing.
It just was quite funny.
David read this report and he was the only one.
I've got a lot of American four sisters who live in New York and they've got a view about Trump.
But anyway, on the Meghan Markle thing, look, I think people mistake who Meghan Markle is.
She herself said that until she became this princess, she never regarded herself particularly as black.
And that's understandable.
She grew up in Los Angeles in the most wealthy black enclave anywhere in the United States, Parkview, Windsor Hills, in Los Angeles.
She went to a private Roman Catholic school.
And in a sense, race was never really part of her background.
And actually, you knew anybody who comes from a black family knew that this was not her territory when she made this supposedly incendiary claim about somebody asking about what Archie's skin colour will be.
Well, actually, every black family.
Of course.
The minute you know there's somebody coming, that's what you're speculating about.
For white people, it's what colour hair will be.
By the way, particularly in a family if one parent is white and one parent is black.
As in her parents, for example.
But the point I really want to make about Meghan Markle is that she had to learn to be black on the job, as it were.
And I think she made a bit of a mess of it.
She didn't take advice.
And that's, in some sense, is why I think they've squandered the opportunity to demonstrate something important about this country.
Just very quickly, we have the largest unique, uniquely mixed race population anywhere in the developed world that has come about through romance rather than coercion.
And they could have been standard best.
I totally agree.
All of you're grimacing.
I'm quickly calling out to you.
Because obviously I love Sir Trevor, but we're going to disagree on that point.
You yourself have just said she did a bad job of learning how to be black.
Why did this woman, this person, have to learn how to be black?
She had to learn how to be black because she had to confront racists.
And it was the first time that she was having to confront racists.
And we know that she was having to confront racists.
And by the way, I don't believe she did confront racists.
And we know that she had to confront racists because Neil Basu, the ex-charity of the police, has told us that there are people who have been arrested.
Richard, final words.
No evidence for a racist in the royal family.
She threw away a great opportunity to advance the cause of tolerance within this country.
And as leaders, no, we didn't.
We let her down and we did.
We gave her a massive opportunity and she completely did.
There are people in prison now because of the threats they made to her life.
And Piers, I know you were sensitive to people who have made threats to people's lives.
You will understand that mental strain that was on her in terms of that.
And you know that because you will have read the report from Neil Massey.
Tell me the name of one person that she confronted.
She didn't even hear this remark about Archie.
It was reported to her by her husband.
I'm referencing what they confronted of police, terror police, Neil Bassey, who was interviewed.
And he informed the viewer that she had received a number of threats to her life.
The Care Home Cover-Up00:08:46
Most of us do have that.
You have that, Matthew.
I have had a few.
So far right.
Paula.
And they have been arrested for that and charged.
They've been found guilty.
And I said, so in terms of that, in terms of that, she confronted racism.
No, she didn't.
She confronted racism.
She confronted threats, which we all get in public life.
To do with the skin.
We'll come back.
This is an important subject.
Thank you for all your perspectives.
I appreciate it.
Trevor, great to see you again.
And good luck with the book.
Windrush, 75 Years of Modern Britain, a cracking read.
On census next, Hancock and Madot, the former health secretary, tells the COVID inquiry that the UK's plans to protect care homes in the pandemic was terrible.
Well, no bleep Sherlock after the break.
Welcome back to Players Book of Life Center.
Today was disgraced former Health Secretary Matt Hancock's turn to face the public inquiry into how the government handled the COVID pandemic.
Hancock said that UK's preparations were too focused on the consequences of a disaster rather than how to stop it.
Over the course of three hours, the man in charge of public health throughout COVID said the plans put in place to protect care homes were terrible.
He had, of course, previously said that he put a protective ring of steel around them.
I'm joined now by Care Home Manager and owner of Crabtree, Carhomes Care Homes in West Yorkshire, David Crabtree, and by Talk TV's international editor and the journalist behind the lockdown files, Isabel Oshos.
Isabel, sum up today.
Well, today was Matt Hancock's effort to set the record straight and to try to convince everybody that he's sorry for what happened.
We saw a performance there of somebody who knew he had to go through the motions of telling people that he's sorry for each and every one of the deaths.
I don't say that he didn't mean that from the heart, but I don't think that will satisfy everybody who has an axe to grind about how he managed the pandemic.
He had decided before going in that he wanted to make one key argument and he kept returning to it throughout today's evidence, even when it wasn't relevant, you know, to the irritation actually of the barrister.
And his key argument was this, that everything went wrong was primarily due to the government having ruled out lockdowns as a strategy before the pandemic happened.
So his argument is that pandemic planning should have focused on the use of lockdowns rather than avoiding lockdowns.
A lot of people will say it's the precise opposite that should have happened.
Well let's take a look at what Hancock said about how sorry he is.
He's been apologising for almost everything for the last year.
I'm profoundly sorry for each death that has occurred.
And I also understand why for some it will be hard to take that apology from me.
I understand that.
I get it.
But it is honest and heartfelt and I'm not very good at talking about my emotions and how I feel but that is honest and true.
He's just a phony Hancock.
Absolute phony.
Honestly, I just think he's an actor when he puts on this stuff.
We saw it when he went in the jungle.
We've seen it ever since.
The fake tears he shed to me on G and B about vaccines.
And let's get to care homes for a moment.
This is a guy, of course, who repeatedly boasted about the protective ring of steel that he had put around care homes.
This is what he said about care homes today.
We didn't even have the data, and this is the work that was ongoing before the pandemic, which is why this statement here from The Guardian, reported from The Guardian, is inaccurate.
There was work ongoing to try to find out even the basics of the provision of social care.
For instance, how many care homes are operating right now in the UK?
That was a fact that we did not know.
Well, let me come to David Crabtree.
David, we've spoken many times since the start of the pandemic, during it and after.
Hancock had always said he put a protective ring of steel around the care homes.
He also, at the start of the pandemic, boasted how well prepared the country was for this kind of pandemic.
Neither of those things were true.
And today he basically admitted he hadn't got a clue about what was going on with our care homes.
And it was terrible.
What's your reaction to that?
I'm hopeful that this is the last time that we see this individual in public other than on a pantomime playing the villain at Christmas.
He's such a self-serving, lying, inadequate sociopath.
He should be sponsored by Kleenex Tissues.
Every time he appears in public, the brain then goes back to those awful, awful times where not just the elderly, this was dedicated social care staff unprotected, which he then said we had a ring of protection around.
The man's deluded, he believes what he's saying, therefore he can create this emotion within himself, but it's a lie.
And I just wish now that this is an end to it.
The poor families who lost, we lost care staff, we lost social care staff, we lost dedicated NHS staff.
The man was not fit for purpose.
He was the primary man who was supposed to look at the contingency plans.
And he believed some rumour that we were the best in Europe.
Who told him this?
I have no idea who he told it, but shouldn't he have checked?
Shouldn't the captain of the ship have checked before we all sank?
Yeah, I completely agree.
Let me bring Isabel.
I mean, you know him very well.
You wrote this book with him.
I just think he's a phony Hancock and I think he's delusional and I think he's desperately trying to wriggle off the hook, which frankly, it seems more and more certain he is firmly implanted on.
There was an extraordinary moment during the evidence today where Matt Hancock admitted that he and his department didn't even know how many care homes there are in England.
You would have thought that this was basic, but he admitted that the whole setup is so dysfunctional.
There is so little coordination.
Although his title is Secretary or was Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, he had the top responsibility for it, but actually didn't have a clue what was going on.
There was a very, it was a pretty grim, quite literally, bit of footage when he left the inquiry and the Grim Reaper, literally someone dressed as a Grim Reaper, appeared on the other side of the street.
Watch this.
I mean, pretty devastating imagery for Hancock, and frankly, I think he deserves it.
I think his handling of this pandemic was absolutely disastrous.
But the thing is that Matt Hancock absolutely believes that he did nothing wrong.
I mean, one of the hardest things when I was working with him was to get him to admit that there were some failures because you can't have a book which just says I'm a hero and everything was brilliant.
And he really struggled to come up with examples of areas where we got things wrong.
Well, exactly.
Well, he can't because he's delusional.
David, do you want to come in there?
Yeah, it isn't that we got things wrong.
It was new and it happened across the world.
We were watching France and Italy and elderly people in care homes die months, two months before it came across the water.
What compounds it and what makes me still angry is that he lied.
Despite the facts, this is why your comment and my comment, that he's delusional.
A delusion is a false belief that cannot be altered by reason or factual evidence to the contrary.
And he still does, he said he gets it.
He doesn't get it.
No.
He doesn't get it.
I completely agree.
He was so arrogant, you know, in his pronouncements.
There's a ring of steel.
We've never been better prepared.
None of it was true.
And we now know from his own mouth in this inquiry, he knew it wasn't true.
He hadn't got a clue about care homes or how safe they were, what sort of ring of steel there was, a protective shield, whatever the phrase was that he used.
Capitalism and Rising Poverty00:08:17
Look, there's going to be a lot more.
He's coming off on the discharge of elderly into care homes, which everybody, every scientist had told him, don't push people into care homes.
It's a breeding ground.
He did.
And that caused masses of deaths.
20,000, 30,000 people died in care homes.
Isabel, finally, you had access to a lot of WhatsApp exchanges.
There is a series of WhatsApps involving Matt Hancock, I think, from March, April, early in the pandemic, which have just never materialised.
Where are those?
And it's really disappointing that he wasn't challenged on that during the exchanges today.
I still want to know what's happened to those messages because the missing messages, missing as far as I'm concerned, because they were not shared with me, are from March 2020, which is the key time for this particular module of the COVID inquiry, which is all about how prepared were we?
We need to see those messages.
Yes, we do.
Isabel and David, thank you very much.
Thank you both for joining me.
I appreciate it.
On sensor next to the economy in disarray, Fraser Nelson, a spectator, joins me to make the case for capitalism and why we've never had it so good.
That debate next.
Welcome back to Piers Book on Census.
The economy's in the gutter, mortgages exploding, inflation soaring, a generation of young people unable to leave their parents' basements.
Small wonder, perhaps, and many major studies suggest that millennials and Gen Z want to ditch capitalism altogether.
Can we blame them?
So has capitalism failed them?
Or actually, as one of my guests is about to argue, is it our best hope to make the case for capitalism?
It's Fraser Nelson, the esteemed editor of The Spectator.
And David Santina, sitting next to me, will doubtless be foaming at the mouth, ready to rebut what Fraser's about to say.
So Fraser, off you go, a defense of capitalism.
Well, it's better than any alternative you can measure.
That's quite simple.
It has been easily the biggest force for good in the world over the last couple of decades, especially.
We've seen global poverty rates absolutely collapse.
We've seen health, wealth, education, levels of child mortality.
I mean, right, the level of world poverty has never come down faster.
So we're living in a golden age of poverty reduction.
Sure, the last couple of years have been pretty difficult.
Nobody's saying they haven't.
The free market economy, the free enterprise system means things will go up and down.
But the overall trend is absolutely transformative.
Since China started to get more sort of capitalistic in its business dealings, its poverty has gone through the floor.
The same is true with India.
So I think we've now got decades worth of hard facts which prove just how if you want to tackle poverty, if you want to promote fairness globally, then capitalism is the way to go.
Okay, Ava, I can see you nodding away furiously.
No, you weren't.
Well, I mean, the stats speak for themselves, don't they?
Everything Fraser just said is demonstrably true.
Well, I think in broad strokes, yes, but I'll just take a little bit of issue with what Fraser had to say there about poverty, because, I mean, actually, the truth is we currently have 14 million people in the country who are living below the breadline or at least living hand to mouth every month.
And that is actually pretty similar to what we saw in the 1970s.
Now, I'm not going to sit here and argue that we should suddenly go, you know, full Venezuela, but I do think there is an argument for reconstructing the welfare state, which has been left threadbare by, you know, what, 20 years ago?
Where has your socialist dream actually worked?
At the NHS.
Because obviously, Venezuela, it completely ruined the country.
Well, I would point you towards our fantastic healthcare system, which is a socialist, you know, socialist in principle.
And I would also argue that, you know, social housing was very good for many people.
I mean, I'm sure you're a big fan of Right to Buy.
I'm sure Fraser is as well.
It was a fantastic program, innately socialist.
What is your actual problem with capitalism?
I don't have a problem with capitalism as a concept.
I think British capitalism, which is what we're seeing right now, and the strain that we have, the focus that we have on paying out dividends to shareholders and hoping that somehow this kind of trickles down and feeds people at the bottom, that's a system that is demonstrably not working right now.
That's what we need to look at.
Fraser, are there two issues here?
One that, generally speaking, going back 100 years, you can argue, as you've done successfully in this piece, that capitalism has been demonstrably successful in many parts of the world.
But that right now, this country is in a bad place, and partly that could be put down to some of the capitalist policies.
Well, it depends what you mean by capitalist policies.
I mean, capitalism, in many ways, is just a funny word that people give to the basic notion of freedom.
If you look at North and South Korea, no prizes for guessing which of those two countries is doing best.
And, you know, in the 50s, it was North Korea that was doing best.
But that's on a global basis.
Of course, if you have freedom, politicians will use that freedom to make wrong decisions.
In which case, if you print money, if you borrow your way out of every single problem, then eventually there will be a price to pay for that.
We're seeing that now in terms of inflation.
We're seeing that now in terms of dysfunctional welfare state.
But I think when it comes to the welfare state, by the way, it's hard to blame capitalism on that.
That is the government, which is coming up with pretty bad policies, keeping 5 million people on out-of-work benefits and using mass migration to try to fill the many gaps in the employment market there.
So when I talk about capitalism, you're basically talking about private property, about free trade, about exchange, about basically economic liberalism.
Now, that is a system that can be done well or can be done badly.
But as a system, it's better than any other that's ever been invented.
And I struggle to think of many people thinking, actually, here at Venezuela or any other socialist countries is doing much better than we are now.
We've got our problems, but fewer of them than the socialist and communist countries.
Right.
Ava?
I think it might be more helpful probably to look closer to home.
I mean, if we look at Denmark, if we look at Germany, we're actually the poor man of Northern Europe.
And if you actually look at some of the research put out by the Labour Party not so long ago, we're actually on track to be poorer per capita than Poland by 2030.
I mean, that is absolutely insane.
If you look at countries like Denmark, if you look at Norway, they've got higher tax than us, they've got a better welfare system.
And the people there are healthier, they are happier, and they are actually more prosperous.
So hammering down on people in this sort of...
But what does that have to do with capitalism as a concept?
Well, okay, if we look at the sort of capitalism that we're experiencing at the moment, inequality has widened, okay?
So there's a shrinking middle class.
There is actually no middle.
So you've now got the super rich and you've got the rest of us who are now actually classified as super poor.
There needs to be some kind of scaffolding that pulls these people further into the middle so that more people can achieve undercapitalism.
Have we got, Fraser, in this country right now, a poor performing capitalism?
In other words, the concepts...
I completely concur with you about the concept.
Is it being executed badly by a long-running Conservative series of governments?
I'm afraid so.
The Conservatives, every time they get into trouble, they think they will steal labour policies if they tend not to work very well.
As a result, you're seeing a trend in Europe right now where voters are turning to the right, from Greece to Finland.
In Britain, we're likely to get a Labour government at the next election.
That's because the policies people are angry about, the overextending of the environmental regulations, the highest taxes over 77 years, the huge government spending out of all proportion to its usefulness, they've all been brought about by a Conservative government.
So sure, we can compare ourselves against Poland, Sweden, Norway, Germany, all of them capitalist countries.
The questions of capitalism done well or done badly.
And I'm afraid to say that this big government conservatism, which tends not to trust people with their own money and tinker around to pretty bad results, is showing, right now as a case study, in capitalism not done particularly well.
If you print money, if you print most of the 400 billion you used for the furlough during the lockdowns, you've closed down an economy, you're messing with people's lives.
You're messing with the free market.
Capitalism Done Badly in UK00:02:22
And there will be a big price to pay, as we're currently discovering.
Ava, can we end this debate with you agreeing with Fraser?
I can agree on two premises, but not on the conclusion.
I think the taxes are too high, but I would say that in countries where the taxes are higher than we have here, people are happier and it's better spent.
I think the problem is the stewardship of the economy, not the system that we're living under.
A final question, Fraser, for you.
Given I've got you here, who's going to be buying the spectator?
Maybe you, Piers.
I don't know.
It depends.
There's going to be a long and illustrious list of people.
The greatest magazine in the world is currently up for auction.
And I imagine it's going to be a very busy summer with lots of people wanting to avail themselves of the opportunity of a lifetime if they can afford it.
Well, you're the Manchester United of magazines, aren't you?
And quite right, there should be a frenzied bidding process.
But good luck with that, Fraser.
You've done a great job at the spectator.
Great to have you on the programme.
Appreciate it.
Ava, lovely to see you.
You're staying with me for some exciting, breaking news about Piers Morgan Uncensored.
It's been a, well, let me rephrase the title of the show.
The now multiple award-winning Piers Morgan Uncensored.
There's the clue.
After the break, big news.
Big trophies.
Welcome back.
I've reassembled my stellar pack for a very important piece of news involving this program.
Piers Morgan Uncensored.
So welcome back, Richard Tice, Paul LaRone, Adrian, and Ava Santino.
Well, the news is this, is that unlike my football team, which ended last season trophiless, Piers Morgan Uncensor has gone on a trophy rampage ever since my world exclusive interview with Cristiano Ronaldo, the world's greatest ever footballer.
And to my utter joy, I was presented with it by Dan Walker, my former breakfast television rival from BBC Breakfast, who was the man who on my last day presenting Good Morning Britain, before I was so cruelly removed from the slot because of the wishes of one M. Markle, I managed to get the ratings of Good Morning Britain to beat Dan's BBC Breakfast Show for the first ever time.
And then because I had to leave rather suddenly, he was never able to wrestle back the title.
So the poor bloke then had to give me this award.
Winning the Woke Awards00:03:44
I mean, talk about a series of self-inflicted blows for the poor guy.
Anyway, it was a great moment for us for the show.
I texted Cristiano in the car home.
And you can always tell when Cristiano's really happy with you because he uses the word top.
And he went, top, top, you're the man, top, top, top, top.
He gave me six tops.
Cristiano, you are top.
I've got six tops.
This is for you, Cristiano, because you are the guy that won us these awards.
Without that incredible interview, we wouldn't have had these awards.
So thank you to Cristiano Ronaldo, a great man.
Come back to my pack.
How do you feel about being part of a multi-award winning show?
I mean, you've got to feel good, right?
I'm hoping to bring down the tone.
It's teamwork.
I mean, it's a team effort.
It is.
How many of you were involved in the Cristiano interview?
Although I don't know about you, but I'm hoping to get an invite next time.
Yeah, maybe to the event.
To the event?
Any Cristiano, yeah, we'll be there.
Let's talk quickly about this issue.
So RNLI lifeboatmen have accused the charity of being fixated with a woke crusade amid a row about alpha male bad behaviour.
So it's been a full-scale cultural review at Hastings Lifeboat Station in East Sussex, quite near where I was brought up.
Report says female crew generally aren't welcome.
Only alpha males with a history at the station are welcome.
All lifeboat staff have been able to attend diversity and inclusivity training.
There's evidence of racism by way of lack of opportunities for people of colour, racist language, physically intimidating gestures towards women.
So Ava, here's my point about this.
In the cricket report, interestingly, the female chair person, woman, whatever she wanted to identify herself as, I think rightly said, look, woke has been hijacked.
We know that, I think actually driven by the woke side.
But it's been hijacked as part of the culture wars, many of which are legitimate things.
But at its essence, wokery really, to be woke is to be alert to racial and social injustice.
So when I read this, I thought, really depends what's been going on here.
But on the face of it, I can't feel furious and they should at least investigate it.
Yeah, and I think this is also a really tricky one for a lot of people because many people on the right are furious with the RNLI for saving some of the migrants or refugees that have been found in the channel.
That has been really frustrating for a lot of people on the right of the spectrum.
But look, I mean, one of the arguments that has been levied at them is that women apparently aren't suitable for the role.
And that's just sort of based on assumption.
Look, I'm like, if you're the best person for the role, colour, creed, gender, whatever, you should be up for it.
But what you do need, Paula, is opportunity, equal opportunity.
Yes.
This is my argument about all of this.
I don't like tokenism.
I believe in meritocracy.
Yes.
Everyone's got to get the same crack of the whip.
Absolutely.
And that's what this internal report seems to be about, saying that we're not going to tolerate this kind of behaviour.
It needs to be stamped out.
What intrigues me is that the whistleblower who brought this report to the newspaper said the RNLI are clearly wrong about this and they are not focusing on what's important.
Well, hang on a minute.
That's exactly what they're doing.
Richard?
What's important is that actually the right people get to the boat the fastest and go and do the best job.
And very often that happens to be men.
I'm not sure.
Come on.
I said very often with all you expected.
Why is it men?
Why is it men?
Who's the boat fastest is the most important who is the most capable of doing the job?
And I'm not sure many donors to that charity want their money.
You know, they're sort of in 10 years' time, most of them will be trans women, so we'll be fine.