The Fabian Plot: How Tony Blair and the Elites DESTROYED Britain

Give me a rundown then of what the Fabian Society is.

One gets accused of conspiracy theories and particularly over things like the Fabians, but I mean they're not a conspiracy theory. They're just they're just a fact. So it was founded in the late 19th century by a bunch of people who believe that there are too many humans. If we can reduce the population, we'll create paradise. They see themselves as morally inherently virtuous and therefore they don't need to control their emotions and they don't control their envy. Tony Blair has has started this ball rolling. I genuinely think that the problem with Blair is that he doesn't think he's going to die. Tony Blair began it by We have a government that we can't trust on any level. This government likes prosecuting its political opponents. Trial by jury is our oldest defense against tyrants. They're making a law against everything. We have limited police resources and we are wasting it. Churchill said, "Don't judge England by the present administration. Once a great cause is put before the British people, all sorts of things become possible that were not possible before."

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Steven Barrett, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much for having.

Should we abolish juries?

No, of course we shouldn't. Um, we have been for a thousand years we have been fighting against tyrants in this country. They came over in armor. They murdered our um army and our defenders and our kings and our lords. They nicked all the stuff. Then they behaved in an absolutely monstrous way for at least 200 years, throwing us in ublats, stealing our wives, doing all the bad stuff that happens to the Scots in Braveheart that the Scots don't seem to it doesn't seem to twig to them that actually this was happening to the English too. You know, these bad people were being bad.

Who are they? Who are they bad people?

These are the Normans. These are the Normans.

Bastards.

And they and they well, and they they are a serious problem. And after 200 years of this, well, actually after about 160 years, we sort of forced them to give us some vague sense of justice, but it was rubbish. And then after 200 something years, we forced them to give us real justice in the form of jury trial. And trial by jury is our oldest defense against tyrants. We had the tyrants. The first defense against them is to have trial by peer, trial by jury. And it's more important in terms of defending our right than the vote. If you think about it, we don't really get the universal franchise for men until 1918. Don't get the universal franchise for women till seven years later.

So, and that's, you know, that's a hundred years ago.

The right to vote is very important, and I support democracy. I'm a democrat. But you can't really have it without the right to trial by jury. And the right to trial by jury is just more much more fundamental. You cannot have an employee of the state, which is what these judges were. I always say that in the beginning, the first judges, they're just they work for the king and they're like little mafia men. They're like the sheriff of Nottingham, okay? He's just a little mafia man who goes out to collect for the boss. He probably takes a cut on the side, you know, and basically you are the oppressed people. He's the little mafia man mafia dons, you know, man who's going to do it. Whatever he's told, whatever King John tells the sheriff of Nottingham to do, he's going to do it. And you're going to get the the thick end of that. And eventually our judges become respectable because of trial by jury and because they learn something called the rule of law, which is where and I actually think that they were seduced into respectability. If I don't know if you like that phrase, but it's it's one one of the things that I think about a lot. They they begin as quite shocking characters. You know, go back and watch Robin Hood. Sheriff of Nottingham is is pretty pretty bad character, but they are seduced into respectability by consistently applying rules. So, if you take a rule um and if you're a parent, you do this too. If you if you apply rules consistently to your child, you create a much more positive environment for your child to be in. You're a much happier family, you know, and and eventually you start to think, hey, I'm I'm actually this is good and I'm this is morally right. And our judges eventually learned through applying rules in a consistent way. And through having this power of deciding what is true and what is not true taken off them and given to the jury. But if you have a state employee, so I and I think and I often speak up in defense of our judges, um, I often get criticized for not defending them enough, but they are not immune from criticism and I don't and I'm not going to go down that route because that's the Eric Cartman, you know, respect my authority line and it doesn't end well. No one can demand authority or respect. They have to earn it. So if they are going to if they do think something worthy of criticism, I will criticize them. I will also bat for them and defend them broadly. And broadly speaking, we do have the best judges in the world.

Take away trial by jury and that will go overnight. Their respectability will fall off a cliff.

I I'm surprised if any of them actually want this power, but imagine it. We will suddenly have a bunch of state employees paid really, you know, many many multiples of the national average salary. And they are convicting people. They are saying, somebody's going before them saying, "I didn't steal this." And they're going, "Yes, you did." You know, I didn't stab this man. Yes, you did.

And that's they're saying it. And there will come times when there is intense stress. So, at the moment, this government in particular likes um uh prosecuting its political opponents. So, imagine then I'm sitting there as a judge and it I know it's a political opponent of the government and actually I've deliberated and deliberated and I'm being honest and I genuinely think he did it. He or she did it. And I'm sitting there going, "Well, if I convict them, the public aren't going to believe me. They they aren't going to believe me. I'm gonna have no absolutely no credibility."

A lot of pressure on the judge.

A huge amount of pressure on the judge. Um, which is why I really hope that they reject this and they don't want this power. Um, Tony Blair has has started this ball rolling. So,

it's a lot older than people think. And when they say that they're doing it to fix whatever they say the reason is, it's just we just very sadly we have a government that we can't we can't trust

on any on any level. And they've been planning to to do this for a very long time. Um, Tony Blair began it by getting rid of something called magistrates. So we begin with the the concept of I will be tried by my peers. My peers will decide whether I am lying or not, not the employee of the king. Okay, that that that's the principle of trial by jury. And then we go there's a bunch of really small offenses, littering, say, you know, really tiny things. Do we really need to get 12 people together into a room to deliberate whether or not you were involved in littering? So there is there's a practical balance. And so we go, how are we going to have you tried by your peers then? So we invent this thing called the um, the magistrate. The magistrates, they don't sit on their own. They sit in threes and they are effectively the permanent jury. They're not paid. They're still volunteers. It's very important that they're volunteers because the minute you add pay into it, you can see how that can corrupt the relationship.

Who's volunteering for that?

Uh, well, good and decent people. So, I live in a standard market town.

Wikipedia. Sorry.

Well, no, I said respectable people. Think of the kind of person who's like, and I'm sure they, like you say, well-meaning and all that, but they're like, I'm going to be the magistrate today. And I think those people would have a specific uh viewpoint.

They tend to they tend to have an a view of themselves as as respectable. But if you go around my town,

almost every building that's pre the 1950s will have a stone in it saying that it was st the stone will be laid by perhaps a properly famous person and then somebody else whose name you don't know with the letters JP after their name. So it's part of being a responsible

JP

uh person magistrate gets the title justice of the peace,

right?

JP. Now, in terms of who these people are, I mean, I was um uh just drinking with friends yesterday and a lovely chap who's retired locally who was worked in the city and he is a school chair of chair of school governors.

I've been a chair of a school governors. It it's that type of thing and well actually so so you look you look at that and and I'm sort of my heart breaks because our constitution depends on volunteering. It's it's it's who we are. We define ourselves on the Aristotle um principles of of democracy and engagement. The continent defines itself very largely on Plato principles of rule by elites, rules by philosopher princes.

And that's the real divide between us and the continents. It's a real divide between it's it's a real connection between us and America. We have much more in common um with um with America on that. And you you see volunteering again in the American constitution, in the American system, again in the schooling system. School boards are all voluntary. Who sits on the PTA and you can say well Ned Flanders sits on the PCA but and it's it's got to be people like Ned Flanders but I'd rather be you know have three magistrates like Ned Flanders than an employee of the state. This is this is the the fundamental issue and Blair largely destroyed the magistrates. They're still still holding on by their little fingers. We haven't got rid of them completely but

judges more and more.

He bought he wanted to make us more continental. So he brought in you know these professional they're called district judges. They start off as stipendary magistrates in the 60s. So that's literally that just means a magistrate paid a stipend a paid magistrate. But that that's the wrong there right there. The pay once they're paid by the state, they are employees of the state. Can you really now pull them away from the state in anything when anything's controversial? And this is I think that that was really tested in a way that I think people didn't necessarily spot with that. I don't know if you remember the rather scandalous private prosecution of Boris Johnson.

Now that should not have gone ahead and anybody in the legal system unless you were unless you were mad enough to simply loathe Boris Johnson. In fact, unless that's just your worldview. I loathe Boris Johnson then you know you you would notice that that private prosecution should not have gone ahead. A district judge let it advance. I think magistrates would have kicked it out. And once a district judge had let it advance, we had to have crisis crisis in the legal profession. The judiciary had to run around like, you know, headless chickens. No, the public don't see this, but this is, you know, what happened metaphorically. And we had to get a very very senior judge to come in and go, "Nope, no, no, no, no, no, no." And and shut down the pro private prosecution. And that's how it was done very very quickly. But Boris having resources of course was able to engage lawyers and get you know, but also that the judiciary blessed them had an instinctive uh this something's gone wrong you know, this is not what we should be doing which is why I think they really might reject the power of of getting rid of trial by doing.

I think so you paint a picture of a kind of authoritarian globalist because we're talking the continental kind of thing is that so you say Blair started this with the magistrates's issue is this something that who is pushing for this is it star

No, well this is I mean it's it's a worldview. It is. It is a worldview.

Are you saying we're going to maybe get rid of juries?

Well, so because the problem is that one gets accused of conspiracy theories and particularly over things like the Fabians, but I mean they're not a conspiracy theory. They're just they're just a fact,

right?

Um, and what so what I'd rather do is and and actually I'm not sure that the phrase conspiracy theory is terribly helpful because what's going on as humans simply try to rationalize what's happening.

Sure.

Um, and a lot of the time a lot of what's going on in our country is simple incompetence, but people don't really want to accept that as a reason. And so they'll often look for rational reasons. And looking for patterns is what a human mind does. And this is how we build ourselves out of the dirt. So there's actually nothing bad about trying to rationalize the situation. Trying to work out what's going on is actually inherently good. It's inherently human.

Was the Han's razor thing though because to what extent is it puppet masters going waha? And to what extent is it just people being a bit like well I don't know that seems all right. And then suddenly you're in a [ __ ]

Yeah. And and is somebody an evil mustache twirling conspiracist if they just read Plato's Republic and go maybe we should have philosopher princes you know that's all that they've done really it's it's it's an intellectual commitment you know I don't think Plato was dwelling as Mr. and and plotting to bring down the west when he wrote this. I think he genuinely believed that rule by philosopher princes would be a good idea. I mean, I would point out because I do like tweaking people's beard that he was, of course, a philosopher. So, philosophers may very well think that philosophers should run everything. Lawyers may very well think that lawyers should be in charge. It's, you know, I I don't know if electricians or engineers have quite the same megalomania, but um, you know, it is, I think it's perfectly natural that we might all think that our opinions are more important.

Give me a rundown then in in the most unconspiratorial, most concrete terms of what the Fabian Society is and how it's affecting our society. So it was founded in the late 19th century by a bunch of people who as well as believing in Plato and the rule of philosopher princes believe um in the writings of a man called Thomas Malthus who um was wrong. It's always very important to remember that Thomas Malthus is wrong. We've proven him wrong time and time and time again. But Thomas Malthus' idea is very simple. It's that there are too many humans. So we don't have enough stuff because there are too many humans. If we can reduce the population, we'll create paradise where no one will go hungry. You know, no one will suffer. We'll have we won't have to ration healthcare. Everybody will get perfect healthcare. Everybody will get a perfect education. We won't have to ration things. We won't have to limit the supply of anything if we just lower the population.

And so, because they believe these two things, they act in ways that will engage and advance that idea. So it wouldn't surprise me if we get back to the 1960s when stipend and magistrates come in and we discover and lo and behold it's somebody who's a Fabian or connected to to Fabian ideology because they genuinely believe it's not a conspiracy. They genuinely believe that it's better to have professional judges. They think that um professional people will be better than volunteers. Volunteers must be by definition be rubbish. You know the um it it's and these things are often fashionable. So, if you remember Fiddler on the Roof, there's a very striking part of Fiddler on the Roof is how excited they are to get um a sewing machine because no longer would they have to deal with these rubbish handmade clothes. They will now have marvelous machine-made clothes. And you fast forward to to our time period. Well, what's the most expensive suit you can buy in London? Uh, a handmade one. Yeah. You know, so these things are they are fashionable views. They do people's views change over time but you know, you either if you tend to com this is the thing with human option often there are just two options and often neither of them is perfect and often neither of them suits society forever. So that's why you sort of end up I don't think two party political systems are accidental. I think um really humans have two responses to almost any situation which is fight or flight and so you either run away from the problem which may be the rational response if if the thing is a tiger and it's going to eat you and that may have been the rational response and if the thing was just a duck making a lot of noise then that wasn't the rational response and you should have just fought the duck because then you could eat the duck you know and so as we've evolved throughout history some of us have run away from the sound in the bushes because it might be a tiger and they've lived. They're the ones who lived when there was a tiger. And the ones who went, "No, I'm going to fight the tiger." They died.

But the others, some some of in in another instance, the the noise in the bush might well have just been a duck. So the ones that ran away are now exhausted, cold, wet, and away from their safe space, and they may very well die. And the ones who stayed to fight the noise get to eat duck that night and stay at home

and show curiosity, courage. So you can't say that fight or flight is ever 100% right. And that's where you get extremist politics from. And this is, you know, the horseshoe theory of far left and far right.

Really. I mean, I don't really like the term far right because I I've yet to see what I see as authoritarian right-wingers. Um, I I think the only regime you can argue is right wing that is authoritarian is Pinochet's. Okay. But other than that, other than that, and I think you can argue that actually that's much more corporate and it's still a corporate style of socialism. But anyway, um, that authoritarians tend to be the people who who have a universal flight uh reflex.

Um, but anyway, just I'm getting confused. Far left and far right always respond to stimulus by fighting. And the reason that we see them as similar in a horseshoe theory is that their response to everything is to fight. So fascists and Marxists are both going to punch you in the face. They're both going to be very aggressive. And that's why we see them as very similar. And we can all see those of us who are rational people can see that a 100% response of always fighting everything is is wrong and very destructive. And actually it stands out much more as an obvious wrongness because it it really is just very silly and very unhelpful to human society. Most of the time we should actually be compromising. We should be we should be fighting. We shouldn't be. So the fight response is very easy to spot as extremist politics. There is another type of extremist politics that we don't talk about which is the 100% flight. The 100% compromise. Does that make sense?

So and this is what this is sort of Tony Blair um and the soft left. They are 100%, you know, find a third way, find a compromise, don't fight, don't hold to a rule. Um, they don't really like hard rules. They want you to meet meet in the middle. Um, and they think that they will even pretend they will even absolutely fundamentally pretend that there isn't a conflict.

So, they will deny even that there is a noise in the bushes.

Well, this is where Britain is now.

Yeah. Yeah. We are, we're denying fundamentals. And so you you know, I can see um pictures on on your wall. So I know that you must have dealt with the the the trans

issue.

And the first response by the 100% extremists who want compromise 100% compromises was to deny that there was any conflict between trans women's rights and women's rights.

Yeah.

Just deny absolutely flat out deny. Nope. There is no conflict here. These rights do not conflict. Right about that. That is not very sensible. Obviously, these rights conflict and obviously one side is going to have to win or not win.

This is really interesting.

Yeah. And I I think that we don't spot these people as extremists because it it's such a moderate position to want to compromise. It's

extremely moderate.

Yeah. But extreme moderation is insane. And I think I it's probably more obvious to me because of my my profession as a as when I was a commercial a barrister. Something like 97% of our cases settle.

Okay. So that's compromise. So most of the time we are compromising. So I'm absolutely when people try and push me they you know, I've been labeled all sorts of things but you know, they say I'm a far right and and I just want to fight everything. So I'm I'm settling 97% of the time. I really don't think I am an extremist. Makes me think of Daniel Finkelstein, Lord Daniel Finkelstein, who his book was called Everything in Moderation and I like him very much and he means well and when I first saw that book and I read I read it years ago it made a lot of sense to me and then in the in the preceding years I've I've seen or in the following subsequent years I've seen it the whole country fall apart based on what I see you know, I know he might disagree as that philosophy of everything in moderation.

Yes. Well, and and the Fabians are everything in moderation, too. And the 100% compromises do destroy society because you can't do it all the time, which is why we have those 3% of cases of mine where we actually had to go to trial because, you know, you're either being sued by somebody who's just complete chancer who doesn't have a case and who was wasting your time or somebody has literally nicked your your yacht and will not give you your yacht back. How do you compromise on that? No, I don't want a few thousand. I want my yacht. You know, then there are times when you cannot compromise. Does some say there's a Jewish kind of is it anti-semitic? Some people say some conspiracy stuff.

No, I mean I I I mean I hate um anything getting anywhere near anti-semitism and treating Jews as as as one collective mind I think is is a first step down that path.

But I I can see how it's attractive this idea of extreme moderation and I can say this as a Jew to some Jewish people. Obviously not all but there's definitely an element of in Judaism in that kind of culture firstly in the Talmud of the kind of the whole point is you're debating. It's not like Islam for example. The whole point is you're going what about and then you've got that kind of Yiddish influence, that kind of Seinfeld thing. Well, let's And also that thing of like, hey, let's not cause trouble, guys, cuz we're going to be kicked out.

Yes. Although I would say Israel points out that you you do actually need to fight sometimes.

Israel is almost like the opposite to to that stereotype. It's the Woody Allen antithesis.

Yes. And it's and it's it's doing and it's brilliant that Israel exists because of that. And it it sort of probably proves that whilst 97% of the time we do have to go and be Danny Danny Finkelstein, 3% of the time it's too important

to to not fight. And you know, when it comes to protecting children, it's a huge bellwether for humans. Um, and you know, Lord Finkelstein um has I think he has this extremist compromised view. I think he is a good example of it. I think there are others, so I don't think we need to pick on him.

Um, George Osborne is another one. Was it's I guess it's important to kind of humanize I always want to humanize the people who are on the other side of things and what I think his father was in a Soviet war camp his his mother was in the concentration camp so you can see how again that that would go to make for a mind that's going hey come on

yeah and and I'd also say it's very it's very English.

So people do not realize this now but Churchill was very largely hated before the war.

People accused him of being a warmonger. People would say you're going to start a war. You know, he gives this very moving speech where he says, you know, people say that we're going to cause conflict with the dictators. We're not. Conflict is already there. You know, either we're a democracy and we're free or we're under their dictatorial control. There is there is no compromise with the dictator. Um, and very sadly for for Lord Finkelstein, there is no compromise with the dictator. And if we're heading towards that type of thing, we're going to have to now what Churchill did and the way he kept faith is that and he this comes out in a conversation he had in 1933 with um von Ribbentrop in the German embassy.

And people want to Google Churchill von Ribbentrop German embassy you get a nice rather nice um speech that you can listen to and uh it was very apparent that Churchill said to von Ribbentrop look don't judge England and Churchill's got this wonderful line I always like to quote which is on the continent we're often called England. He ought to have said British of course but uh he said just do do not judge England by the present administration. Do not judge us this way. You know, once a great cause is put before the British people all sorts of things become possible that were not possible before. And that's a bit like Israel. It's like, you know, do not judge Jews by their general convivial and general compromising action. Once a great cause is put before them, all sorts of things become possible that people didn't think.

Well, Jews in this country have completely flipped in the last two, three years.

Well, and and rightly, I mean, again, on your wall, I saw my great friend Douglas Murray and I he goes around just making it very clear that that this is absolutely wrong. Um, it it is absolutely wrong and it's because you can't compromise 100% of the time. And that what we also then need to get back to is that doesn't make any of us extremist. I'm not calling for nobody should be calling for 100% fighting. That's obviously wrong. But if there's two responses and a massive problem is coming our way, we're going to have to face the massive problem. Now, I would rather that we face Churchill's wisdom because Churchill genuinely thought, this is in the Iron Curtain speech. I'm sorry to be obsessive about a church but um, I uh, I always wanted to to talk for a living and so I listened to a lot of uh speeches by various variety of people who I respected as as speakers just to learn how to do it, how not to be boring and you know, how to jazz things up a bit.

Owen Jones you listen to?

No, but I I took I take more credence from Dr. Seuss than people give him credit for. Um, Shakespeare, Dr. Seuss, Churchill. These are these are great sources of learning how to speak and be interesting and um, but um, uh, to go back to it, Churchill says after the war in his in his Iron Curtain speech, he genuinely thinks the war could have been averted up until 1935 if we had armed if we had armed enough that Hitler went, okay, they are serious. You know, this is okay because I think we often give off particularly this country is is very bad. This is why the French always know us as Pious Albion. We're very bad at sort of telling people how we actually feel.

So for a start, you know full well that we spend most of our It's one of the reasons that I got mildly hysterical when Radio 4 were constantly going on about Boris's, you know, lying. It's like, well, if I ask you if I'm overweight, are you going to tell the truth or are you going to lie?

Well, we do want him to tell the truth sometimes, Boris Judge. Do you know what I mean? That was the issue with the trans situation, wasn't it?

Exactly. And this is this is why it's much more and this is why it's a much more interesting thing to talk about is where do we put the line? Is it 97% of the time we compromise? Is it 94% of the time? You know, where is this line? Where are you? Where are we on this

in terms of compromising with honesty? And

yeah, you know, because again, somebody who 100% tells the truth is probably an extremist. I mean, you know, we do I mean, I do want people to say I'm not overweight. That's I really I really do.

Yeah, you're not. Sorry. I was thinking of other things, so I didn't interject quick enough. I was thinking about Immanuel Kant and Sam Harris and truth because they're both truth purists or whatever you want to call it. But even Sam Harris said only a psychopath could fully endorse Kant's idea of empirical truth.

Yes. And I mean I I'm a great one for the rule of law and supporting laws and having them fairly applied and consistently applied um equally to everybody. At the same time, it's very easy to turn that into a tyranny. So um, you know, I stood there in Dusseldorf. I went over to teach some German lawyers how to cross-examine. We're all standing at at the main station at Dusseldorf on the way to our hotel with our little weenie bags. Red red man, right? Okay.

Look, look right. I can see it's perfectly flat and I can see a very very long way. Nothing. Look left. Absolutely nothing. Now, I grew up in in rural Warwickshire and that's how I prefer to cross the road. So, when I first got to a town, I had immense trouble crossing the road because I was used to waiting until there were no cars at all. That was the safest way to cross the road. But I mean even I was just like this is this is safe. Why? And there we all stood.

An interesting point as well that with regards to something we often talk about in our in our circles um the Islamification of the United Kingdom because this idea that all cultures are equal. You can even see despite a long history and being right next to each other across the water, Germany and the UK. Huge differences in the culture and that's one of the most obvious ones when you first arrive in Germany. They will not cross that road until that light is green.

They won't. They absolutely won't. And I'm a great believer in in geographical determinism. And I think that Germany is a more aggressive country because it doesn't have a settled land border. It's not a very stable border. And I think that leads to un feeling a bit less safe and therefore being a bit more fighty. I think France is about 50% more or less fighty than Germany because it has the Pyrenees and some sea.

I see. That's interesting. But there's obviously got to be a mix, doesn't there, in terms of that geographical determinism. I hadn't even heard of that term. Religions and things that I've come across, they make a huge difference as well, don't they?

They do. I think they do. But um look at look at New Woke and then if you map where the Puritans were who we sent over to for found the United States on Plymouth Rock.

Um, they're almost exactly in the same areas. You know, it's Bristol again, it's Cambridge again. What is it about Cambridge that produces extremists? I wonder if because I've thought about this as well and you often see uh yeah Brighton and all of that and you see in the states it's San Francisco and LA these are beautiful places that I suppose that is geographical determinism and people moving to those places because they go oh look how and then and then once it becomes known as that and then they [ __ ] it up and then they all move to Austin right so that's yeah and then to [ __ ] that place up as well.

Yeah, and it's I mean I I do think it's a factor. I don't think it's absolute and I don't think that we're controlled by geography and you know, but I I like to give humans free will, but I think it's an important uh factor in what in what we're doing.

But and so are we slipping into um our own deaths really through and the reason everyone keeps talking about the Fabians at the moment is this kind of I guess that's a society where everybody's really just like oh just everyone can be friends and actually that's not reality. It's not it's not reality and it will lead to dystopian attempts to control. Um, if in in the late term uh it's very interesting actually that you tie this to to German thinkers because of of course the great comparator state to a Fabian state is is the Weimar Republic.

And what people don't and I I really wish we taught the Weimar Republic in school. There's very little point teaching the war. It's like it's a war you know and when we don't want our kids to learn how to fight wars it's not it's not really about that. We should be learning about the cause of the war and the lead up to the war and what you know all of these things um and not accepting Hitler's you know argument that it was all because of the treaty of Versailles and all of this.

That's interesting. I I yeah, I always thought it was give us give us like a two two sentence because what my concern is with history because we don't often cover history on this channel is is that if it's too into the weeds people might go uh, you know, history but give us how can you do a couple of sentences on what the Weimar Republic was and how that actually

before I do that, I'm just going to make it a bit more interesting.

Oh God.

So hopefully that will and that at least keeps viewers attention.

I love that anyone who's listening just on audio on Apple Podcast right now doesn't know what you've done.

No, no, they don't. They'll have to watch.

They'll have to watch on Spotify or YouTube to see what's happened. But do go on, right? Just just don't get that on the table, that thing you've got out.

So So the the Weimar Republic is is this is this idea of eternal compromise. And again because the defeated Germans are very of the view that we mustn't be aggressive again. We mustn't be fighty again. We must um, you know, maintain peace and compromise. And so they they come up with this idea of constant compromise.

Again on this on this sort of Fabian level. They also I'm going to turn it off now just so it doesn't distract people.

I I started worrying as well that it might you don't know how it's going to come up on film.

No. No. So that that's fine. But um, they uh, they overspend. They overgrow the state. So because they can't say no to employing people in the public sector and actually it's one of the if you like people it's so easy to see your political opponents as evil and it's much quicker to just assume that they're morally good and just confused or don't necessarily understand what the outcome of what they're going to do is. So I believe Gordon Brown literally wanted more people in in public sector and in off-balance sheet public sector employment which is what the regulators are and all of this massive bloated state we have because he didn't want them living on benefits and he sort of in his heart of hearts suspected the private sector might not employ them.

And so it it becomes a sort of politics of kindness to grow the state because then the state is providing employment and the state is you know, at least make and and like and I'm sure Gordon Brown does believe this and like Gordon Brown I believe that work is a moral good and that it's good for human beings to be in work is good for their mental health. You know, give them a purpose and all the rest of it. But it just again the Weimar Republic just bloated absolutely bloated to the point where it can't provide basic functions.

This is the opposite of Elon Musk kind of politics.

Yes, it's the exact opposite. And it's what we have now with too many regulations because you're trying to stop all badness.

So, you know, they're making a law against everything. They're like

abusive words.

Yeah. Abusive words. That's where you get to at the nth degree. You know, at the beginning it's all quite good. It's like, well, we should try and avoid financial meltdown. I actually don't think we can. I think in a functioning human society, you have to accept boom and bust. If you want to be a capitalist society, which I think you should be, you're going to have to accept those times. And what it will do is simply teach the people to not be not get too, you know, um, uh, too confident in too in being too safe.

You know what that state thing's like? Cuz I I got an a a nasal spray addiction.

Right? And when you spray it, you're it makes you feel better. So you're doing well. It's like kindness. It's a It's a kindness to myself that, oh, finally I can breathe, but the more I do it, the more bloated I get when I'm not doing it.

Yeah. Exactly. And it's the other feature of the Weimar Republic that I'm sure we don't have now is uh a mass moral degeneracy and sexual decadence.

I'm sure we don't have that.

Yeah. I I don't know how sarcastic you're being or not.

But I mean, well, and we obviously do. I mean, we

that was a feature of the Weimar Republic, wasn't it?

Yes. And it's it's it's a to a form of hyper liberalization. So it's the idea that you can't say no to an adult. But there are adults who you have to say no to.

I see.

So an adult comes along and says, "Look, I want to engage in sexual activity with a child." Right? You have to say no to that adult. You have to and make it very clear and then seriously punish that adult.

We're not doing that. You know, I don't know if you know this, but time after time after time, we get stories in the press of so and so had 3,000 images or 500 images and the judge said they were the worst thing the judge had ever seen. And I'm reading this going, "God, that sounds absolutely horrible." Suspended sentence,

which is what Joey Barton just got. It's funny that by Republic the degeneracy stuff because then the was the total opposite, wasn't it? So,

well, that's what if you don't stop this. Yeah.

You get a massive overcorrection in the other direction.

Okay. And I'm literally warning people not because I want Hitler, but because I I'm the kind of guy. Well, exactly. I'm exactly the kind of guy. And Danny Finkelstein doesn't want him either. I just think Danny doesn't understand that his politics is driving it will drive us in that direction because you can't constantly just compromise with everybody and you have to be able to defend some, you know, common principles.

What What about the Joey Barton situation? I I don't know when this goes out how what will have happened since then. I think he is um what you appealing it. Yeah. Uh, I so what I would do at the moment is stop the state meddling in speech almost entirely. Now if you're Danny Finkelstein you'll say Stephen that would encourage anti-semitism and obviously I don't want to encourage anti-semitism. You know, I shouldn't have to we shouldn't have to state that.

Um, that is the price we pay for getting the state back to a functioning system because we have limited police resources and we are wasting it on all of this. The one thing I will say about the Johnson case that I think is unavoidable is that it was a complete waste of state resource. And we obviously don't have limitless state resource. We keep saying, you know, we had a jury try Joey Barton,

right? And we're going to get rid of juries because we it's like we could have used that jury for something else, you know, and we need to start seeing the state in that way as a as a, you know, a limited not limitless resource because again, the Weimar Republic sees itself as limitless which is why it prints money.

And then eventually with printing money, you cause hyperinflation and what the Fabians have done this time is try to print money whilst avoiding hyperinflation and they're doing that by not putting the printed money directly into people's pockets.

But the problem is that does cause um it does cause gradual and unseen inflation and asset flight inflation. The most obvious one is house prices. So, and that means that people who don't have houses can't buy houses. So, all of us who have houses are absolutely fine and that's that's well and good. But again, the Weimar Republic fell because the young people couldn't marry and have kids and feel that they were safe. The most important I've got a little study on this somebody very kindly did for me and the the median voter for Hitler is a young Protestant mom and she's looking at the black-clad Marxists because, you know, they had black-clad Marxists writing in the streets too.

I'm not they didn't have spray paint back then so they weren't acting quite the way ours are but they were being as disruptive. The communist isn't he? I remember the what was that burning of that building?

At the Reichstag, yeah. And he and what's really fascinating is the person who's Who's most clued up on all this is Stalin. So after the war, Stalin literally never forgives Hitler because he literally Stalin's an awful man. You know, I'm not pro Stalin anyway, but you know, he literally thought that the two of them could have won and that there wouldn't be a West and he wouldn't have to be in a cold war and he wouldn't, you know, he and they could have dominated the entire globe. And so he really really hates Hitler for for the stab in the back and the betrayal. The betrayal that probably saved us all if we were absolutely honest. But

we would all be not crossing the road on top of the green light.

Exactly. But um, or would we be because we are geography makers rebel. That's true.

But um, uh, the um, so he writes extensively on what caused this and he's very very angry at the Weimar Republic for not stopping the Marxists. He's like, "If you stop the Marxists, if you'd use rule of law and police and stop them, then they wouldn't have had to swing to Hitler." And we, you know, and it's just he gets he gets this point. It's really fascinating to have it have it from him. I'm not sure that people often engage on that sort of intellectual level um with with with Stalin, but um, uh, because he's a monster. I mean, I don't want to study monsters and I don't want there to be monsters. Um, and people who don't know me who are finding me through your podcast probably don't know that that I'm often criticized for for talking on criminal law while not being a criminal barrister. And I always point out, well, you know, there are many areas of law I can talk about and more than happy to. You don't police my knowledge base. I I decide my knowledge base. I talk about the constitution and the laws there and I'm very happy to do so.

You are a barrister.

I am a barrister. Yeah. Of course. Of course. But again, this is don't slip too far into Plato and the belief that you need to be an expert in everything and have a swimming.

Certificate in in this. It's that thing that I think you're saying, although I know I'm starting to sound like everything in moderation, but you need some experts, right? I mean, I know that I can speak French, right? I'm an expert at speaking French, so I know I can do it better than the average English person.

Yes. Yes. And I would say and I am very well-versed in the Constitution. If I'd left university and not become a barrister, I'd still be well-versed in the constitution. So, it's not my barrister-ness really that grounds me in the constitution. It's the academic study I did both at university and then afterwards.

Um, that means that I'm confident and capable to talk on that. But the reason that I'm not a criminal barrister is very, very simple. Just to go back to that, it's because it's disgusting.

Okay. So, if you do criminal law, you are exposed to the worst of human behaviors that there is. If you want to advance your career and earn more money and get more titles, you have to be involved or around or near even more disgusting things. You know, literally when I was a junior barrister and I did do some work in crime as a pupil and afterwards because things were a lot more mixed up back then. They're much more siloed now, which both Jonathan Sumption and I think it's a bad idea for lawyers to be siloed. I think we lawyers have become far too specialized in far too small areas of law.

Um, but if you wanted to advance your career back then, if you wanted to be a criminal barrister doing jury trials, you had to literally do what they called sex or violence.

So you had to specialize either in murders, at which case you're looking at things like autopsy photographs. Yeah. Gross. It's absolutely gross.

By being a doctor. Yeah. And well, exactly. And although I was chair of governors, the one thing I could never do was safeguarding, and we had that to the deputy chair. And the head dealt with all of those because I had a very young child and I didn't want to know about anything.

Which is very understandable. But also we need those people who will look at those things. Yeah. Well, I'm just a coward. We need people who are brave. We call them, you know, soldiers.

Suspicious of some of them. Some of them enjoy it. Yeah. Well, I mean, but that's not for me to say, but the simple fact is that that's why I'm not a criminal barrister. You know, I could not have dealt with this day after day after day. I'm not a fan. I mean, I probably could be a family barrister, but I focus on the money and divorce aspect because arguments about who gets the house and who gets the super yacht. That's much more fun.

Yeah. I'll get in touch with you when my wife leaves me. Well, there's a very specialist group of heroes, heroic children barristers, family barristers who get very little praise in our society, but I think really deserve more. They are called, I think I'm going to offend them by getting their name wrong now, but they are the public children public barristers, public law public law children barristers. They deal with local authorities intervening in a family because a child is suffering something awful. And I don't even want to think about what they have to deal with. I never would have been able to do it. I would have been in floods of tears all day. So you just have to accept, you know, that there are, as you say, we need people in our society who can and can't do different things. At the moment, we don't have enough soldiers. So that's a bit of a problem.

Yes. I mean, that's just a bit of a problem. And that's also a result of all of this, you know, 30 years of constant compromise. 30 years of telling people exactly. But also telling them that violence is wrong. Now, too much violence is wrong.

So, how do you deal with that? Well, the Victorians went about it by having controlled violence via sport. So, you let men be violent in very specific and controlled ways. Boxing, fencing, the rugby pitch, you know, and it's all just a lot more tolerant of violence, but it's not out of control violence. It's not how the Weimar Republic allowed things to just get mad. Woodhousian kind of.

And it's the idea that things are acceptable but if they are controlled. The other one that we've let loose, and I literally think we can pinpoint it exactly to the death of Princess Diana, but we have let emotions loose. We have let go of the idea that to be an adult means that you must regulate your emotions. Now, I think you're a dad, aren't you?

No. Oh, one day, hopefully. God willing. Um, when you are a parent, you realize that you have to regulate your emotions around your children, otherwise it will harm your child. You just, it's just going to upset them. They just don't, you know, I've got a very sensitive child and my child will just cry. So, daddy has to regulate his emotions all the time. That's perfectly normal, and that's part of being daddy. That's what I do.

But in our society, we see far too many adults willing to be hyper-emotional on social media, hyper-emotional on the telly and in the media. And it's really very corrosive because kids are watching this stuff. And this is, I genuinely think a lot of the problems of parenting. So, if you don't want to buy into the Fabian and 100% compromises and platonic thoughts, just see it as bad parenting.

Because it raises traumatized kids who then go on to clad themselves in black because they think that they're doing something morally virtuous and right. Interesting. And again, you need to, the state needs to control what virtuous and right is, and we need to have state-level agreement of that. Now, we're a democratic state, so that shouldn't sound tyrannical to anybody because what I'm proposing is that we all get together and agree. Okay, let's all get together.

Let's stop being so emotional. Yeah. Well, I was, yeah, that's interesting because I was just after all this Joey Barton stuff going on, they've done loads of sort of BBC things about the abuse people get, you know, and always from one side. Not that I expect them to interview the trolls, the anonymous trolls, and go, "Well, I just need to, you know, get sometimes shout at people on Twitter." But there was one I happened to just tune into on the on while I was driving. It was a badminton player, this woman, and she was just saying she said, even said it wasn't, they don't abuse her about anything except her results, and they said, "God, you've lost, you stupid." And they are a bit horrible. But I wonder, I sort of feel like doing this job, and I'm sure you feel the same as well, being in the public eye in this sense, has thickened my skin in a very good way. I mean, the worst things possible have been said to me and you numerous times and now I'm just not really bothered. And you realize, oh well, okay, it was a bit bad, but you can choose to just go, don't really care.

Yeah. I mean, I applied for something to volunteer for something and set a competency-based question and it was, "Tell us about a time when someone has called you a liar and how you responded." And I began my response by saying, "Before I joined Twitter, nobody had accused me of being a liar for 20 years because I was a barrister."

You know, when I became a barrister, I was called to the bar. My name was published in The Times back then. That's how you get published as a gentleman. In the old days, women would have a coming-out ball as a debutante and then their names would be published in the court circular of The Times.

The scandal sheets as well. And then they would be respectable ladies and we would be the respectable gentlemen. And you didn't lie. And when I was a child, again, lying was treated much more seriously than it is now. And again, I think this is another mistake we've made. We've compromised too much with lying.

But you said Boris can lie. We've compromised too much with it, but we can't become 100% tyrannical. It's the simple fact is it's not a simple, there's no simple answer because both that's why the extreme positions are attractive. 100% fight or flight, at least you are consistent all the time. 100% compromise, you are consistent all the time. Let's not pick on Danny Finkelstein this time. That's Justine Green.

Are you advocating, if I condensed everything that you say in your worldview, for a kind of stronger, not extreme, but strong, a strong centrism? I think of Tommy Robinson in this space when almost nobody else is. It seems to either be this kind of they're talking about the far right or the far left or whatever. And Tommy seems to be dead center, but he's managed to offend everyone because he doesn't give a [ __ ] about how he speaks about things.

Well, no. I think I'm not, I can't talk for Mr. Robinson, but what I would say is that if you see, just see, skied that one, see, see 100% fight as black, and see 100% compromise as pure white. He's too black. I'm advocating gray. Now, which shade of gray we're going to pick partly will depend on circumstances because if war is thrust upon us, we're going to get a lot more fighty very quickly.

Yeah. Um, and when the war came, we had ID cards and we had to even I would have to accept ID cards in a war. We had to accept internment camps without trial. You know, we had some quite shocking things. Um, I read, after, you know, I am just mad about learning things and I encourage learning and I think it's just fun on its own. So I just randomly decided I would read all evil in war and then once I'd read all evil in war, I decided to know everything about the period. So I got the letters between Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh and then I read all of Nancy M.

I don't know about any of this. Okay. And there were six girls to a very eccentric peer who used to go around with an entrenching tool and threatening people and calling all foreigners and saying all sorts of outrageous things that would get him in the press. And so he was quite an eccentric, and of course, he's sitting in the House of Lords making laws. So, you know, these are the days and this is quite high stuff. So his, and he had six beautiful girls. So they got a lot of attention. Now, his only boy was killed in the war. So you can see how this starts to become a celebrity family. And then the eldest daughter is a novelist called Nancy Mitford. But her novels are very good. People should go and read them. But as I became obsessive, you know, I'm reading everything that's published between them. And eventually, one of the granddaughters starts publishing like all of the letters between all the sisters. And you can go back and you read, there's huge amounts of stuff to get through. But in one of them, I found that the government had come up to so Nancy Mitford's sister was married to Oswald Mosley.

Oh, right. Okay. Yeah. The only, that's the only book by Mitford I couldn't read. I tried to read Nancy Mitford, Diana Mitford's book, Diana Mosley's book, but by about 20 pages in, when I had read, of course, that's why Oswald was right and basically anti-Semitic stuff, I threw it across the room. The next morning, I trampled on it and I left it there for a week and then I put it in the bin.

Wow. And that's because I'm an eccentric chap, but you know, I just couldn't, I couldn't bear that. So, I will go haven't that. But anyway, she was married to Oswald Mosley and obviously they're going to inter Oswald Mosley. I discovered through this writing MO5 come up to Nancy and say, "Your sisters are not honorable, you know, she's the daughter of a lord and you know, she's a lady and you know, we don't need to turn her, do we? That's not something we need to do." And Nancy went, "Are you asking me if she's a threat to the country?" And they went, "Yes." And she went, "I think she's a threat to the country."

Now, I think Diana died before Nancy, but before that ever came out or anybody was told that. And I think you can tell from the writings that Nancy was very upset that she felt she had to do that. But at the end of the day, she put the country first. And at the end of the day, this is why when I talk about shades of gray, it depends where we are, where, you know, if we can fix the economy, if we can grow our military to the point where people are now scared of us again. This is the problem. Dictators are once again looking at us as though we're weak. You know, we're again, we're misleading the continent. That was this line about Pipidus Albion. You know, we are, and I call it, how many times can you hit a man with your supermarket and waitress before you die? A friend of mine calls it the exploding doormat, where they're used so used to treading on you, they can't believe that you just exploded. But that is, I think, encapsulates England at least, or the British. And we need to make it very clear that this doormat has spikes. And you know, this, we are not, you are not hitting me with your trolley again.

So, is that Nigel Farage? Those spikes? Uh, well, let's see, let's see how we go. It's, I think the route out, regardless of politics or personality, is very simple. We must slim down our law. We must fix our economy and allow people prosperity and growth. We must let people build. Um, we must control our borders and we must increase our defense spending. And if we do all of those things, then we could actually end up being quite a light shade of gray again and, you know, compromising quite a lot of things. But it depends how far we're going to go and what challenges the country is going to face. One thing I was thinking recently, I think many in our space are very against the kind of ID stuff that people are pushing.

Um, that said, I do wonder if on, it's not the same as ID, but on social media, and although I was saying before, gosh, it was just a badminton player getting, you know, you've got to put up with the abuse and that kind of thing. Is it, is it maybe a good idea to say to people, if you've got an account on social media, you've got to be present and we've got to know to an extent who you are? Because then let's see how brave you are saying this and that doesn't apply to Joey Barton because he did it under his own name. But shouldn't maybe everyone, you know, would we have far less just bollocks on Twitter then?

So that's going more towards the darker shades of gray. But we might need to go there. You know, how if people can't behave themselves, particularly on Twitter. I mean, Twitter is absolutely absurd. I mean, all very successful on YouTube, quite rightly. I've only just really joined YouTube and I'm trying my best. By goodness, it's a lovely bunch of people. I literally, the leading legal YouTuber reached out and helped me and gave me advice. On Twitter, he would have been calling me all sorts of names, not him, but you know what I mean, the person in that position. I wonder if that's to do with audience bubbles and silos because I think Musk did try to sort of open it up. Everyone complained that they were in a bubble on X and then they started complaining, "Gosh, why am I seeing all this Owen Jones stuff?" So he's trying to sort of get it right because no one wants, we all say we want to be outside of our bubble, but when it actually does confront us and says horrible things to us, we go, "Oh, actually, can we go back to the bubble?"

Yeah. Well, I mean, again, part of regulating our emotions is to control things like envy and hate. And one of the problems of the Fabians, the left, they call themselves the centrists, they're not in the center, but they see themselves as morally inherently virtuous and therefore they don't need to control their emotions and they don't control their envy. And the reason that YouTube is a lot nicer is that it's not packed full of lefties, which Twitter was. Certainly when I joined it, I mean, there was no right-wing voice. And there is, we need to talk about how the right-wing or the just the moderate conservatives were pushed out of society and utterly silenced and then made to recite things they don't believe if they want to advance their careers. Made to say, you know, trans women are women, which is just so irrational on any level because why isn't trans, why do the words trans women not need a woman who is suffering from gender dysphoria and therefore she is trans? So, a woman who thinks she's a man is suffering from gender dysphoria. So, she should be a trans woman. I mean, my head literally, because I'm a lawyer and so I care about definitions, that one has always irritated me. Why would that be a man who has dysphoria to believe he is a woman? Isn't that already sort of endorsing the very idea? You know, Elon tweeted today and I'm sure therefore others will follow suit in bravery that you, if you tell, you don't tell a man who thinks he's Napoleon that he's Napoleon. You just don't. And that's the funny one. Yeah. The much more moving one is anorexia. You do not tell an anorexic that they're fat because you want to keep them alive and you are compassionate and you care. I think that is the single maddest sort of Maoist struggle session nonsense that's happened certainly in our lifetimes, that being made to recite that [ __ ] me.

I mean, it's just, and it's awful, and it pushed the right completely out of public life. They went into absolute hiding. You know, we've got to fix all of this. We've got to go back to the idea of it's a free country. I don't care what your political opinions are. I mean, I really didn't notice the Brexit referendum because I was holding the baby as a single dad. Okay? So, there are some days when I didn't eat. My focus is on making sure this tiny thing doesn't die. And I'm not really running around trying to worry about whether or not we stay in or stay out of the EU. And what's very funny about the Brexit debate now is that the EU is having the debate that effectively the Leavers were having now, saying we've got too many laws. We need, there's a brilliant report by Mario Draghi that explains how the EU can fix itself and what it needs to do. And these are conversations that are happening more and more inside the EU. Whereas if you went down a classic remain argument, they'd denounce Mario Draghi as some sort of evil EU hater. So it's very, and I always thought because I knew lawyers and friends inside the EU, they would often message, "What are they on about? What's, we do want closer union." It's like, I know you want ever closer union. As if you go into the main building, it's literally there. It's ever closer union.

Did they say that? Ever closer union? It's written on the website. It's just like, did they not realize that? Did they not read the treaty? And it's like, well, actually, I don't think they did read the treaty. But anyway, so I don't really have a strong position on Brexit. But what woke me up was the reaction afterwards because the refusal to give losers consent was absolutely outrageous. That's constitutionally outrageous.

Yeah. It was narcissistic and self-indulgent. And the people who did it really should have become celebrities when they should have been condemned.

Like who? Um, I don't want to name people because I think we should, well, maybe I should. Oh, I don't know, but I'm not the great superhero of the world. So people will know who, which individuals particularly fought the vote. The current Prime Minister did.

It's interesting you say that about not being the savior of the world. I just did an episode with Chris Packham, the environmentalist, and he was wearing a t-shirt. I think it says something like "Saving the World." And I, you know, he's such a sweet guy and he's so intelligent, but that's that mind virus.

Yeah. And when I say we have to regulate our emotions, we have to regulate the idea that we're not that when I'm not perfect, you know, and when I'm not stunningly beautiful, you know, and the world doesn't revolve around me. And, you know, just all of these things which Hollywood. Well, if you want to be a successful parent, well, that's fantastic, isn't it? Because one of the worst parents in the world is Hollywood. And one of some of the most damaged children that are there are the children of Hollywood celebrities. So, you know, and again, whilst I have all the respect for their art and their craft, turning them into living gods has not helped them or us. They are not living gods. They go to the toilets in the bathroom just like everybody else. You know, they fumble with their, if they're middle-aged, they fumble to put their socks on just as I do.

Which is a weird thought still. It is because we've had 30 years of "I'm perfect, I'm perfect, I'm perfect." I genuinely think that the problem with Blair is that he doesn't think he's going to die. I don't think it's clicked. And it does have, and it's an awful thing that we all have to go through this, but we do all go through this. I mean, I'm Christian, so from my religious point of view, I believe God put himself through this.

You believe in heaven? Yeah. In a, not in a literal, well, I don't know what it's like, but you know, I believe that there will be an afterlife. I believe some of the reasons that I hold myself to quite high standards, or maybe they're not high enough, but is because I think I'll have to have conversations with God. I think I would genuinely have to have conversations.

See, that would give, if I believed that, which I don't, and I can't. It's nowhere in me. I know some people move one way, then they move the other way. It's nowhere here, impossible. And but it would give me a great deal of comfort to think. It's hugely comforting because my God is not angry and doubting me. In fact, I like to say that my view of, because I'm very middle-of-the-road Church of England, and we, you know, we're more about the singing and then the tea and the cake afterwards and a chat with perhaps a nice little old lady.

She's great. Yeah. And you know, that's how we go. And you know, it's a community and it's a lovely experience. It's very humbling. The Victorians liked it because it got rich and poor mingling. I think it's very important to mingle rich and poor. If you separate rich out into gated communities, eventually the poor find the gated community and burn it down.

So, you know, the rich don't live happily in Versailles for very long. It's going to get choppy choppy. That's interesting. I always thought of, because London is that, isn't it? Is that a hot now? Well, even back in the day, compared to Paris, where you, you know, they bonded, that was the certain place where you know these rich people and these poor people. It's conscious. It's absolutely conscious. By the Victorians, they also do it with the Palace of Westminster. It's conscious that the public are in there and they are the generation that can remember a prime minister being shot. You know, they try, people try to assassinate Victoria many, many times. Queen Victoria, they don't put glass in the public gallery or a barrier in the public gallery. We do it. Blair does it because somebody threw a purple flower at him.

Purple flower. Well, it's also, you know, they don't put gates on barricades outside of Westminster. When we now have diversity barricades at Christmas markets. This is how we want to live?

And what you have to do is, it's all, all of this again. So I said fight or flight, which is the fear response. It's constant flight, which is the 100 centers, which is Lord Finkelstein, as if he didn't already dislike me. Um, they have a disproportionate relationship with fear. And I, I don't, I mean, I don't dislike them at all because I think that must be awful. I must feel worried all the time. And that's why you've got these new barriers. People probably don't know, but there are new brand new barriers at the Houses of Parliament. This is getting ridiculous where the rich cannot hide from us. And the Victorians knew that actually, if you get people together and they mingle, it gets rid of the tension.

Wait, hang on. The barricades aren't to stop, you know, the poor, so to speak, from getting into the House of Parliament. It's not some Guy Fawkes thing. This is about Islam. Possibly. Come on. Driving in Christmas markets and all that [ __ ].

Yeah. But I mean, if you look at Islamist extremists, does it tag with wealth? I don't know any studies. I'd be interested. I'd be fascinated to see because I take a very universalist view of humanity. When people say things like, "Oh, the problem is Islam." And I know you wouldn't say that. You're far too nuanced. I might say that, but people, people say that. People online do. Well, so let me defend Islam a little bit. Christianity, which I am, Christianity went bonkers itself. We had our dark ages. And in our dark ages, we, you know, life expectancy was under 30. You were lucky to get to 30.

Although, wasn't that partly about infant mortality? Uh, no, I mean, people, people down, people just did not last. Yeah, that was some of it, wasn't it? The infant mortality because if loads of kids are dying at zero, it can change the math. Yeah. But but um, but I mean, Brian Ward Perkins has done a fantastic academic book on the period immediately after the fall of the Western Empire, and even cows shrank.

Cows. Yeah. So they've got cow bones from the Western Empire and then cow bones in France from after the 100 years after the collapse of the empire, and the cows are shrinking.

Okay. So every life is grim. I really don't like these revisionist historians who go on and say, "Oh, look, they could craft a bit of garnets and gold, and therefore they must have been terribly sophisticated."

When are we talking about? After the fall of the West. The dark ages. So, 560 to, I don't know. Yeah. Well, that's the point about Islam. I mean, Richard Dawkins would say this. It's, you know, because he's not a fan of Christianity either, but he would say they're 700 years behind.

Well, I just think all religions have the potential to be bad. I agree. And all religions have the potential to be good. Then that's because all humans have the potential to be bad and all humans have the potential to be good. Genuinely take a universalist approach. So even atheists have the potential to be lovely and amazing and the potential to be awful.

Of course. And it's just, it's just normal. It's just so you don't really need to look at, and you're not diagnosing the problem. The problem is humans. You don't need to diagnose any extra additional cause. So when it, when we were in this terrible position and all of our books were either falling apart or we'd burn them for firewood or whatever. Um, I mean, literally, if you sing "Good King Wenceslas" and actually listen to the lyrics.

What was that life like? You know, that's, or you won't know the Christmas, it's a Christmas carol. Sorry. Um, literally the Good King Wenceslas, who is the saint, he's good because he finds a poor person who is out gathering twigs in the freezing cold with six inches of snow. And he tells them to tread in his footsteps because he hasn't got anything on his feet. And his, this is because the good king is a saint, the ground is hot and not freezing. And so he's able to pick up his twigs and then go back to his hovel.

Yeah. It's a really, it's actually a really. It's something. It's very well, it's I find it very, very disturbing. But anyway, so we're in our worst way ever. And some very enterprising monks at the University of Bologna, which is one of the first universities in the world, in northern Italy, wander all over to the Amir of Cadiz. Now, Cadiz in Spain, Muslim occupied Spain, fountains, free water, healthcare, soap, peace, trade, law. Compare and contrast with the hovels and sticks, okay? And a grand library. And they go, "Dear Mr. Amir, I don't know how you're addressing him, but whatever they would have used the appropriate mode of address. May we please borrow your Aristotle?" And he goes, "Of course you may borrow my Aristotle." And they say, "Thank you very much. That's right." And they probably take some other books as well, but the most important one is Aristotle. And then they wander all the way back to Bologna. And then they have to start manually copying out Aristotle. So it takes ages to manually print. You make a book. This is before printing. So that starts the Italian Renaissance. Okay? As those books travel, not very far from Bologna, probably to Milan, and probably, you know, and the Americans are very big on the Italian Renaissance. They always point this as a very important sea change in human history and in Western history. And it is. It's the great change from we had amazing civilization, everything collapsed, everything was awful, and then we start to get it back again with the Italian Renaissance, which becomes the Enlightenment, as the literally as the books are manually copied and spread and manually copied and spread. And eventually they get to England. And you manually copy and spread. And then we get the printing press and things speed up and speed up and speed up. And we get Enlightenment and all sorts of other ideas.

That does sort of make us, we should at least be very grateful to the Amir of Cadiz. I think. Good on him. You know, we should, you know, just recognize that there is potential in Islam. It's and and my great hope for Israel at the moment is the Abraham Accords. And I thought the greatest, so for a start, October 7th is not a day. Apparently Wikipedia is now calling it a battle, which I find sick. I'm sorry. That is that is Wikipedia is a mess. It's gone. Absolutely sick. October 7th was an atrocity. Probably the worst atrocity of my life. Absolutely disgusting atrocity. So the day after was a war. And the greatest day for me, in that war, was when Iran fired at Israel and Jordan and Saudi fired to knock them out.

That's a sea change. To knock out the Iranian missiles. The Iranian missiles. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, look, I mean, obviously, obviously, obviously people are people. Yeah. And you know, but does it, you know, is Islam the issue? Is Scientology the issue? Well, a lot of Scientologists have beliefs that might not work so well with today's society. And that's what I would say about many of the two billion Muslims, particularly Muslims in this country right now.

Yeah. I mean, we, we should talk when we talk about, we do need to recognize culture. We don't, you know, the greatest Muslim population country in the world is Indonesia. We don't have any Indonesian rape gangs in this country. Even if there were five, you know, we don't have, we don't. So this culture of rape gangs is coming from somewhere. And it's obviously, it's obviously racially motivated. And the first group they targeted was Sikh girls. And then the Sikhs quite rightly fought back and stopped all that. Thank you very much. And the police didn't do anything then because.

I would just say at the same time though, there's what, 52 to 55 Islamic countries and none of them do women have the same rights as men. And none of them is it okay to be gay. And none of them, not yet, are they particularly fond of Jews? No, I'm hopeful. So, you know, that's a, if it was 40 out of 55, you go, there's a pattern. But if it's 52 out of 52 or 55 out of 55, that's when you go, okay, well, what's the one thing all of these countries have in common? And yes, there's a culture, but the culture is sort of downstream of religion.

Well, look, I don't mean to turn into Danny Finkelstein, but we do. I love Danny Finkelstein. I feel so sorry for him that we've. He's taking a lot of. Well, yeah, he's a love, he's a good guy, and I bet he does like you as well. I'm sure he does. I'm sure he doesn't dislike it. It wouldn't be in his, in his over to dislike anyone, would it? It would defeat the point.

I've got one more question for you because where can people find you and all that? Oh, that's very kind. I have. So, what's his YouTube channel? So, I have a YouTube channel. I think it's just Steven Barrett Barrister. Okay. Um, I always use SB Barrett Bar if I can. So that's S B A R R E T T B A R. And that's because I was called to the bar. So. Oh, wow. So I use that for Twitter. I use that. I'm pretty sure that's my YouTube and I'm pretty sure that's my Substack. I have a paid subscriber community on Substack which is called The Lovelies. And we get together quite often. It's Substack again. We talk about social media again. Absolutely lovely. Mainly because it's people who like to read and they've all come together.

Well, they're your fans. Well, exactly. My and my fans are a certain type of person. But it's a bubble as well. They like you. Yeah. They like you enough to pay to sign up to your. They do. This is the issue we all have. We're surrounded by sick fans. But whereas X does show us those other people, and I think that's what I want. But then I go, "Oh gosh, you know what? I'm not sure I want to keep seeing what Owen Jones is saying." But we have to. Um, who's a heretic you admire? So I thought about this for a long time, and I think I want to say Churchill because of the period before the war. But people won't, I don't think they'll understand that he was a heretic before the war because of how he's seen afterwards because of all the great things he did. So we have this chap in law called Lord Atkin. And Lord Atkin upheld the law against the government during the war, and he was correct to do so. And nobody now would doubt that Lord Atkin's judgment was correct to do so. Nonetheless, society at the time absolutely shunned him. Even fellow lawyers said nasty things about him in private. And when Lord Atkin died, nobody went to Lord Atkin's funeral, which I think is really dishonorable. He was a fantastically brilliant lawyer. Bad lawyers will think that he created the law of negligence. He didn't. He refined the law of negligence into its modern form, but that was pretty apocryphal. And that is probably one of our most famous cases in civil law. It's called Donoghue v Stevenson. It's the decaying snail in the ginger beer bottle. Again, people don't understand, but ginger beer had to have opaque bottles because if sunlight got on it, it exploded.

Wow. So, yeah. So it's stoneware opaque bottles, which is why you couldn't see the decaying. If it was a plastic bottle, it wouldn't have been, it would have gone. The history would have taken a very different course. But that's Lord Atkin's. So we still hold him up for that. But in this case where he found against the government, he was society shunned. And that is when I think we make mistakes. And we point out somebody who's not a heretic, really, who's acting respectably, but society is more than happy to call them a heretic because that's what humans do.

That's brilliantly put. People, please go. If you've been watching this long, just watch this. You're going to really enjoy what's coming up next.