Transcription
It's impossible to be anything other than extremely pessimistic about the future of Britain. We've destroyed what used to be the best economy in Europe and is being destroyed by disastrous government policy from both Labor and the Conservatives. The political establishment has effectively lied to the public by selling them a vision of this country that can't be afforded. And that is a ticking time bomb. The House of Cards will crumble because of the debt crisis. When you travel to America, they can't believe how poor the British middle classes are. They cannot believe what the average wage in Britain is and they look at us and it's pathetic. Frankly, in other words, the government can't keep the peace and can't put criminals in jail, but it can put you in jail.
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>> Alistair, welcome to trigonometry.
>> Well, thanks for having me.
>> Oh, it's great to have you on. You are one of the most interesting uh commentators in British journalism for my money. I love reading your column. Uh, you have a French accent. We won't hold that against you.
>> Thank you. I really appreciate it. Most people do, you know, or they think I'm Belgian or something.
>> Yeah. Well, I I would hold being Belgian against you, but having a French accent is tolerable, particularly given some of your interesting opinions. So, it's great to have you on the show. Uh, you've been writing a lot about something that our former guest Liam Halligan has been writing about as well, which is that economically things are just heading in this country in a very bad direction. Most people aren't aware of this because most people don't look at bond yields and all of these other things, but I think you make a very credible case for why we're actually heading for a financial meltdown.
>> Yes. I mean, I think the situation is grave. I think it's very, very bad. Um, it can be summarized very simply. U public spending is growing and growing and growing and on all trends is going to explode in the coming years in Britain. uh but revenues, the amount of money that government can raise is hardly going to go up and that is a short road to something that's very close to national bankruptcy. Now, governments don't technically go bankrupt, especially a government like the British government which has its own currency, but you can get quite close and it's impossible to be anything other than extremely pessimistic about the future of Britain because we are wedded to some ridiculous obsolete model which basically says you've got this thing called the NHS, the National Health Service, which is basically a state-funded socialized medicine and the the the money needed for that keeps on going up and will rise and rise and rise and rise. All the forecasts are that it will hugely increase over the next few decades because the population is getting older and older. So that's what you've got on one side. You've also got a welfare state that's totally out of control. You've got 6 and a half million adults on out-of-work benefits. 6 and a half million adults on out-of-work benefits. Um, we've basically introduced universal basic income without telling anybody. It's possible to not work in this country and to to be able to to survive on benefits. Um, so you've got those two problems on the spending side and on the revenue side, you've got an economy that's basically been destroyed by uh a 25-year slide into soft social democracy. Uh, disastrous monetary policy, disastrous regulatory policy, disastrous tax policy. Um, the entrepreneurial spirit of the economy has basically vanished. Uh, you know, there's no Elon Musks in Britain. Companies are leaving, entrepreneurs are leaving, rich people are leaving. Um, the incentive structure is completely wrong. So you've got this economy that's barely growing and you've got the demands from the public sector on this shriveling private sector that keep going up and up and up and up and that's a recipe for total disaster. And and by the way, you even have mainstream economists now saying things like that and you know, the official fiscal watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility. All these sorts of people agree that there's going to be an explosion in public spending as a as a result of the structure of the welfare state, as a result of the fact we're still stuck in 1945 or 1946 or whenever the NHS was invented and whenever the modern welfare state was invented. And at the same time, the economy is knackered, right? We've destroyed what used to be the best economy in Europe, the best economy in Europe, and is being destroyed by disastrous government policy from both Labor and the Conservatives.
And when I I moved to this country in 1995 from France. When I left France, I was 17. I came here to study. When I left France, it used to be a socialist dump, right? There was no opportunity. It was it was a disaster. I came here. I moved to London. It was like a complete different universe. It was like El Dorado, right? People were running around uh, you know, earning money. People were ambitious. You had these things called investment banks. You had the City. It was incredibly exciting, you know, and uh Britain was was an outlier. Britain was a Hong Kong of Europe, right? It was this incredibly strong performing country that had been turbocharged by the Thatcherite revolution which had just changed everything. Um, and it was attracting the best and brightest from all over the world. You had you didn't have the levels of immigration you've got now, but you had very talented people coming here. And all of that being eroded, not just eroded, actually, throttled and uh destroyed. And it's a tragedy. uh and I blame the politicians of both parties. I think we had this unique opportunity in the 80s where we we were lucky. We stumbled on on a great leader, Margaret Thatcher, and the some good people. They saved this country from oblivion, which is where we were going in the 1970s. But tragically, Blair came along and he was it was a false promise. Blairism was a was a false promise. It was this idea that you can gradually embrace more and more government intervention and and regulation and so on but not actually, you know, uh throttle uh the actual economy, the underlying private sector, but slowly but surely, slowly but surely, we became Europeanized in our public spending, in our tax system, and now in some ways we're worse than uh than parts of Europe. Uh, we're not quite as bad as France yet, but we're quite similar and our rate of growth is is pathetic. uh and GDP per capita, which is the amount of money the economy produces per person, is barely going up or even falling and the pie therefore is not really going up, but the number of people, because of extremely large amounts of immigration, has gone up, which means there's less for every person, which means society is changing and instead of society accepting capitalism and growth and and all that, it's become a zero-sum game. People are fighting for the same or smaller pie. And and when that happens, uh, you get sort of the rise of left-wing populism, the the rise of Corbynism, uh, jealousy, envy, you know, demands for wealth taxes, you know, wars on private schools, all the kind of stuff that that that you hear about today. And therefore, unless we have a massive, massive change politically, culturally, psychologically, philosophically, uh, this country, I fear, is now in in a decline that's going to be very difficult to reverse.
Well, this is uh one of the reasons that I I don't know if you agree with this, but I'm becoming a bit of an what I call an accelerationist, which is essentially I think things have things are very bad and heading in a bad direction, but most people don't know it yet. They feel it and they don't quite know where to place their blame. Therefore, you know, they they'll be told by some people, well, it's uh all Britain's problems are to do with illegal immigration, for example. Now, illegal immigration is a problem that needs to be dealt with. But I keep saying to people, you do realize that when we deal with illegal immigration, that isn't going to change the economic reality of this country even one bit.
>> Yes. I mean, it might change it slightly, but it won't change the big picture.
>> And likewise, uh, you know, on the left side of populism, it's sort of the bank. I remember this famous, I think Harry and Paul sketch, the bankers, the wankers, the bankers, the wankers.
>> Yeah. The bank bonuses. The bank >> bank bonuses. Right. It was all that.
>> Yes. Well, firstly, if the bank has the bonuses, the bank has the bonuses. It's disgusting. And secondly, if the Tories are really serious about it, they tax the bankers the bonuses to 90%. And and this is what we've ended up in. But actually, I almost think things have to get a lot worse for people to realize that neither of these two populist messages are what what the truth is. The truth is you have to grow the economy and we're not doing that.
>> Yes. I mean, the fundamental problem of this country is that we're living beyond our means. We're living as if we're a rich country. We have expectations of the public sector, of the National Health Service, of the state pension, of the benefit system, of of everything that we're a very prosperous country. Um, but we're not anymore, right? We are we we have barely grown for years. Our expectations have continued rising. Uh, but the reality hasn't uh caught up. And this gulf is growing and growing and growing. And as you say, we do have a illegal immigration crisis. I think that's going to be a catalyst for for radical political change. But that ultimately is not the fundamental problem. Uh, though we are spending far too much money, for example, on uh on welfare benefit for immigrants, but we're also spending far too much money on benefits for UK-based people. In fact, we're predominantly spending too much money on UK-based people. That's the issue.
Allison, you've used the words we're not a prosperous country. What does that actually mean in real terms?
>> It means that the amount of money available for each person is barely going up anymore. It means that when you travel to America, you'll see that they're living in bigger houses. They've got more cars. They've got air con. Uh, they're able to spend a lot more money. They can give massive tips in restaurants. You know, they can buy a lot of stuff. And we look at these people and we think, "Hey, wait a second. Look how rich these people are." And it used to be the case, you know, uh, if you were British and you went to America in the 1950s, 1960s, you couldn't believe it, right? They were eating steak and they all had two cars and all that sort of stuff. Uh, and then the gap narrowed. Um, we became more like America in terms of of being uh prosperous. But but in recent years, that gap has grown again quite dramatically. Um, you know, the top 25% of Americans, even the top 50% of Americans are much wealthier uh than than the the richest people in Britain. In fact, you know, they can't believe how poor uh the British middle classes are. They cannot believe what the average wage in Britain is. They cannot believe how the top 10% or top 5% live in this country. They live much better. We have been left behind, you know, and the reason is their productivity's gone up. They've got incredible companies. They've got entrepreneurship. They got problems. Of course, they got problems. And it's not great being in the bottom five or 10 percent in America. It's terrible. But, you know, if you're the middle class, the upper middle class, the top 25%, top 50%, you're much, much better off in America. And also, the Americans, you know, they've got massive amounts of savings for their retirement, all that sort of stuff, and they look at us and it's pathetic, frankly. And we need, you know, there's no reason why we can't be much richer. There's no reason why our economy can't grow much faster. But uh, we fall into into this ideological trap um and also a form of stasis where vested interest groups uh block all change. So a combination of this, you know, you can't really change anything. You can't build anything in Britain. You can't change any laws. You can't change any rules. You got that on the one hand and on the other hand, you've just got a ruling class which believes is either our ruling class is either defeatist and doesn't believe that we can change or is just completely wrong about everything. Uh, and I think it's a combination of those two things. We've got a very, very bad ruling class in Britain at the moment. We've got an elite that's failing this country. Um, you know, their economic views are wrong, their philosophical views are wrong, their views on free speech are wrong. You know, all of that and we need a new counter-elite really uh that can introduce the sorts of radical reforms that are required.
>> I I like the the fact that you said the word ideology. Now, there'll be people Alistair who's going look how much of the of the 2008 economic crash is to blame for this because wages haven't risen in real time since that event. How much of this crisis stems from that particular moment?
>> Yes. Well, a lot of it stems from that, but it didn't need to stem from that. That's a key point. So the Americans had that crisis. Uh, you know, it but what did they do? They purged the system. They reformed the banks very quickly. They just moved on. They did what Americans do, you know, you file other people, you shut some institutions, you you change everything very, very quickly, you fire CEOs and so on and you just move on. And we got stuck, you know, we nationalized banks and then we passed all sorts of stupid laws. Um, I blame the Conservative uh party for that, the coalition government uh of 2010, 2015 fell out of love with the City. Now, the City is the most important part of the British economy, the financial services industry, the banking industry. But but the Tories regulated to death uh as as a result of the financial crisis. You know, they they thought they they needed a kind of it was revenge almost against uh the the financial system for for for the crisis and that that was a disaster for this country. So the economy never recovered. We've never recovered from the financial crisis in terms of the economy, unlike America, which has just bounced back, and like most other countries, just bounced back, and we haven't recovered philosophically and ideologically because um that crisis was pinned in Britain by self-serving politicians on the capitalist right. Everyone said, oh, this is a crisis of capitalism, capitalism is rotten, doesn't work, we've had to bail out all these people. Um, it's corrupt, you know? Well, wrong. This was largely actually a crisis of central banks getting it all wrong with interest rates and manipulating monetary policy to try and create permanent growth, which you can't do, and it was also a crisis of regulation failures among regulators and and of course, banks made mistakes, companies make mistakes and fail, but there was a different way of doing that. You could have done it without all these um handouts, with far far fewer bailouts, and I think bailing out the City was a disaster philosophically for for this country.
>> And the thing you said at the at the very beginning, I think I don't think people understand the levels of debt and the speed at which it's rising that we're in. I think I was reading Liam's column. 81% of new borrowing is now spent on paying off previous borrowing.
>> Yes.
>> So, so this is absolutely you're absolutely spot on. So, so people realize they're not getting richer, right?
>> Right. So, people realize, you know, their wages not really going up when, you know, because of inflation and higher house prices, all that sort of stuff. They also realize more and more people are on benefits. Um, and they realize nothing's working. They realize the hospitals aren't working. The prisons aren't working. You know, we're freeing criminals early. It's crazy. Um, the courts aren't working. Nothing's working. That's broken Britain. But what they don't realize is that on top of that, the debt is spiraling out of control and the government's got a massive hole in the public finances. It has to borrow more money just to stand still. Um, and and that is a ticking time bomb underneath this whole rotten edifice, right? Um, the house of cards will crumble because of the debt crisis. And it is and and we must hope somehow that there's a silver lining to that, that this this coming implosion will at least force uh political change. But there's a big danger. There's a really big danger because when you have a fiscal crisis um it's not always the the the parties conservative parties with the small C that triumph, right? It is often the populist left. So if you want to turbocharge the growing far-left in Britain, uh, which is probably already at 15%, really, if not more, well, wait until the fiscal crisis comes along. You'll have all these guys like Jeremy Corbyn, the the far-left leader, the Green Party, which is basically a socialist revolutionary party uh in Britain. You you have all these people blaming business, blaming capitalism, blaming banks, as they always do. Um, and I think the the anti-capitalist sentiment will start rising yet again. Um, and so so this is quite dangerous. So on the one hand, this kind of crisis will help the forces of of opposition, primarily Nigel Farage's Reform Party.
>> On the other, I think they'll also help the far left.
>> And Alistair, can you all these are all words uh and words and realities are different things. Can you explain to people what a fiscal crisis looks like? What does that mean? If you're an ordinary person who goes to work, comes home, has dinner with the wife and kids, etc. What does a fiscal crisis mean for our country if that happens?
>> Yes. So, I mean, a fiscal crisis is when the government has to either pay more and more and more and more money to borrow or it simply can't borrow anymore. Uh, and let's say you have to pay more and more and more money. Let's say you end up paying 10% uh a year on your debt. Well, the problem with that is first of all, you run out of money to spend on on anything else. So you're forced to make cuts to public spending just to pay your interest payments. But at the same time, the mortgages and other forms of debt, credit card debt, everything goes up together, right? Because it all sort of follows in some way uh the co the government's interest rate. So suddenly you're going to have a massive housing crisis. You're going to have people who when they roll over their mortgages, mortgage rates will be much higher. You know, people who borrow money on their credit cards where they're going to have to pay more. So it's going to be a catastrophe for everybody basically. But there'd also be these huge cuts to public spending and it could be even worse than that.
>> I'm sorry to interrupt, just on the cuts. I think a lot of people have been convinced that what we had was this great period of terrible austerity in which budgets were slashed and and and look, there are individual areas where that did happen. There were some budgets that were very significantly cut.
>> But broadly speaking, we barely reduced our expenditure during this great era of austerity. What you're talking about is going to make austerity look like a walk in the park. No, you you'd have to have real austerity, right?
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>> So, what will happen if if the IMF can't bail us out? What what will happen?
>> We we'll make all these cuts and we'll have to borrow from the private sector and and you know, we just have to hope that the um the interest rate is not too high.
>> But why why wouldn't it be too high? Who wants to lend money to >> because because because when you slash public spending by £50 billion in one day and put up taxes by £30 billion pounds in one day in your emergency budget, uh, then they might believe you. Uh, yeah, they might. Um.
>> Isn't that a recipe for social unrest though?
>> It is, of course, a recipe for social unrest. And the reason it's a recipe for social unrest is that the political establishment has effectively lied to the public by selling them a vision of this country that can't be afforded.
>> M >> This is why I say we've been living beyond our means. We cannot afford the NHS as it currently is. We cannot afford the state pension as it currently is. We cannot afford all these benefits. We cannot afford this stuff. We just can't. Right? There's not enough money. We're borrowing huge amounts of money just to pay for this spending. It's absurd. It's utterly absurd and entirely reckless that at this stage in the economic cycle, uh, we are still borrowing this amount of money. So just wait until there's a real crisis. Okay. So, so the public's going to be very, very angry and um they're going to start looking for scapegoats and you're going to have all sorts of issues there. But I think the Labour Party, if it happens under Labour's watch, um the Labour Party would be annihilated. Um, I just don't think it's going to survive.
>> And so really Labour have inherited this crisis. Is Rachel Reeves helping?
>> So Labour have inherited this crisis, yes, but they've made it much, much worse. So the previous concern, I've got a lot of criticism of the previous Conservative government. I think it failed. Um, I think it it's, you know, what it did to the country was on balance very bad, apart from a couple of things. But at least uh, they were proposing freezes to public spending or even cuts in some areas that would have stabilized the public finances. When Reeves, Rachel Reeves, the current Labour Chancellor, uh, came to power, she massively increased public spending immediately and then massively increased taxes, and that led to an explosion in the black hole of the heart of the public finances. Uh, she wrongly blamed the Conservatives for that. That was wrong. It was her fault. It was her doing. The tax issue raised and all these warnings around the taxes and and the talking down of the economy and the endlessly blaming the Conservatives and so on had a real effect on growth, further depressing growth, further reducing tax revenues compared to what they would otherwise have been. And you've ended up in a very bad fiscal place. I blame Labour for that. Uh, it's it's Labour's fault. Now they're preparing a new budget where they're going to put up taxes again by another massive amount of money. And I can guarantee you, we are already on the wrong side of the La this so-called Laffer Curve. Basically, we're at a place where when you put up taxes, you get very little extra money. Sometimes you can even get less money than you would have had you actually cut the taxes. This is where we are in this country. We are in a very dangerous place where you can't really just put up taxes and put up taxes and put up taxes and hope to just collect more more money. The the economy is at breaking point. We're reaching the maximum amount of taxation that you can extract from a very, very weak private sector.
>> So what you're saying sounds, and this is pretty much what I've thought, and I've got no, I don't have any training in economics or business or whatever it is, but to me, what you're saying is common sense. Eventually, there's only so much juice you can get from the squeeze in the orange, pretty much. So then I look at Rachel Reeves and I look at the Labour Party and I think to myself, why don't they understand this? Is this incompetence? Is this ideology, or is it a mixture of the two?
>> It's a mixture of the two. So when they arrived, they were incredibly arrogant. They thought they were morally righteous people. They were holier than thou. They were better people. So therefore, by definition, everything was going to work much better. They just walk into to the government and they just tell the civil service and the civil service is cheer. Hooray. Finally, some good people and we all work together and the economy will start booming and we suddenly start building all these new houses and all that sort of stuff, you know, obviously completely delusional nonsense. So that's the first problem. And secondly, ideology. The the current ideology, the current dominant ideology in this country just does not deliver growth. Right? So what do you have? You've got net zero. Net zero is a complete disaster. Complete disaster. We are producing, we're shutting down all our oil and gas fields. You know, we're producing less and less electricity. We are burdening ourselves with this obsessive desire to reduce carbon emissions at any cost. And the cost is vast. And this is crippling the economy. So that's the first problem. You can't return to proper growth without ditching net zero. Right? First thing. Second, regulation. Everything is regulated. There's far too much regulation, far too much red tape on every aspect of life. Third, tax. You can't be waging war on the so-called rich when it is the rich that basically deliver all the innovation, all the new companies, the growth, and so much such a disproportionate share of tax revenues. The Tories and Labour have been chasing away the so-called non-doms, which are these rich people who base themselves in the UK. They've been chasing away entrepreneurs. They've been discouraging risk-taking and entrepreneurship. You know, where's Elon Musk? Where's the British Elon Musk? What what, you know, every day almost you you hear of another company that's decided not to invest in Britain or another British company that's decided to move to America to to list on the New York Stock Exchange, not on the London Stock Exchange. This is a complete disaster and this is ideology. And then it's this generalized climate in this country, right? There's too much crime. There's too much disorder. Everything's messy. Um, prices are too high. You know, nothing works. The public sector doesn't work. Why do you want to live here under all these circumstances? Yes, obviously Britain remains quite a civilized place and you know, parts of the UK are still beautiful and you know, people enjoy the arts and the culture and all that sort of stuff, but there comes a time when these sorts of advantages pale in comparison with the hard reality, which is why do you want to come here and pay so much tax? You know, it makes no sense.
Well, and you mentioned Francis and you both mentioned ideology and incompetence, but I think there is a much more powerful third force that you alluded to earlier, which is I believe the reason the Labour government is only trying using one of the levers, which is trying to increase taxes. The other levers are not available to them. They know they cannot reduce public spending because for them that's electoral suicide. And so when they even attempt to do any of that or even hint at attempting or even talk about attempting any of that, the entire left wing of the Labour Party comes out and says, you know, you're going to kill the poor, you're going to do this, you're going to do that. And so the fact that you say we're living beyond our means, they can't go to let's reduce spending, which, you know, if you think about it on a household level, if you come home to your wife tonight and say, sweetheart, my salary's been cut in half, so we're going to have to tighten our belts, you might not be happy, but she'd probably understand, and you'd work together to work things out. But if you came home tonight and said, "My salary has been cut in half." And she went, "I'm entitled to the lifestyle that you've provided me to to this point." You've got a kind of you've got a problem.
>> And that's where I think the Labour Party is. The person that they are they've got at home does not want to recognize the consequences of the salary being cut in half.
>> Yes. I mean, that's I'd say a combination of ideology and self-interest and political self-interest. And you saw that uh that the current Chancellor Rachel Reeves was trying to cut taxes uh sorry was trying to cut spending. I mean obviously she was not trying >> wishful thinking creeping in here. So she was trying to cut a bit of a bit of public spending and she was defeated by by the Labour MPs who just rebelled basically. They just said, no, sorry, we're never doing that. And now they're going to try again. By the way, they're going to have another go at trimming uh some forms of public spending. But the reality is there's going to be a fiscal crisis and suddenly they're going to have to do this and their base is going to loathe them for it, right? And the public's going to hate them because they've been lying and saying you don't have to do it. Um, and but you're you're right. Yes. Uh, electoral self-interest is a major problem for the Labour Party if your voting base is basically people who are net tax consumers. All right. That you can divide the country into two groups. Net tax contributors, people who pay more tax than they take out in either benefits or services, and net tax consumers. And the problem in Britain is there's too many consumers, right? Too many people are taking out more than they put in. It's that simple. And the mathematics of that is toxic. It basically means that both the center-right and the center-left end up becoming a proponent for an ever larger welfare state.
>> Which is what we've got.
>> Which is what we've got.
>> So the question then is uh I mean, you've I I don't know your politics exactly, but I imagine based on what you've said, you're not a fan of Labour, you're not a fan of the Conservatives. That only leaves for someone with >> I supported Conservatives at the last election and previous elections. Um.
>> We forgive you.
>> Yes. Well, I I I supported them because I repent. So, well, I spent my whole time criticizing them. Yeah. And then I supported them. And the reason I was criticizing them was not because I disliked them. I I liked a lot of them individually, but because I thought they were going terribly wrong because they were turning their back on free market principles and on genuine conservative philosophy. And I thought that was a catastrophe. And I I was convinced the Labour government would be a complete disaster. I wasn't one of those people who claimed totally wrongly in my view, there's no difference between Conservatives and Labour. There is a big difference. And I think these Labour governments mean catastrophe.
>> No, I understand. But I think part of the way you frame it there is interesting because of the question I I was about to ask you, abandoning free market principles. And yes, there's a difference between Labour and Conservatives. But a lot of people would say the difference between Labour and Conservatives is the speed at which they arrive at the same destination.
>> That's exactly what happened in recent years. Yes. After the Conservative Party embraced Blairism and basically gave up on its previous belief system. Okay. So, we are now where we are. If your projections are correct, which I have no reason to think they're not, we are going to arrive in a fairly radical moment. And as you say, there are two possibilities. There is the rise of the far left. Uh, you know, the the the fringes of the Labour movement, the Green Party, you know, Jezbalah, whatever you want to call it. And then on the other side, you've got Reform. Now, my looking at Reform's commitments at this point, those free market principles which I know Nigel Farage holds very dear, they don't seem to be super present either. I mean, there is a lot of all things to all men going on in Reform as well, don't you think?
>> I think there's I I think a few a few weeks ago Reform started uh putting out some left-wing policies to try and outgun Labour to try and grab more of the old working-class electorate. I think that was probably a mistake. Uh, on balance though, they are talking now about cutting welfare spending quite heavily. They've just announced they're going to be working on a project to to look at that. Uh, and they're also generally speaking about cutting public spending. I think they are now much more aware of this possibility of a fiscal crisis, which is why they are now, for example, preparing for an election in 2027, which would be two years earlier than the date at which it has to happen. So I do think they are aware that they need to uh have another rethink and get back to basics. I think on all of that stuff. But look, the bottom line is this. Reform are massively ahead in the polls at the moment, right? On current trends, Reform is the most likely to win the next general election, which obviously would be an earthquake uh in British and even world politics. But I think there's we mustn't underestimate the chance of the left somehow managing to pull a rabbit out of of of a hat. Um, you know, the the Jeremy Corbyn is going to eventually launch a new party and it doesn't matter how chaotic it is and how contradictory and whether they don't have a name or whatever, that doesn't really matter. They've got at least 15% of the population that are immediately going to back a sort of Corbyn Green alliance that could grow to 20%. Um, you know, so.
>> But isn't that good for Reform?
>> In the short term, that's excellent for Reform because it's basically destroying the Labour Party.
>> Uh, so the Labour Party is just sinking and left and it's fragmenting the left. Yes. Uh, completely fragmenting the left because the Liberal Democrats are also gradually growing. There's a high chance that the Liberal Democrats become the official opposition after the next election. You know, you might have a Reform government, a Liberal Democrat opposition. Um, on current polling, that's what it would be. But this is where I think things get uh slightly more exciting. I think the Corbynian party could yet have a higher share of the vote than the Liberal Democrats at the next election. So, I think the left is fragmenting. The right fragmented massively, which which made me meant that Labour won the last election, but now paradoxically, the right is less fragmented than the left because Reform is so dominant and and but the Conservatives are still at about 18% or so in the polls. So that's a that's a question.
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And how much of this with which we see with people supporting hard left parties is it ideological, like you've always had your socialist socialist workers parties, and how much of this is just economic illiteracy, like people don't understand what it means to run a country or how you effectively have to balance the books?
>> Yes. I mean, the far left support the omnicors nowadays. So they're no longer purely economic. You know, the old Marxist parties were very kind of materialistic. Uh, it was only about economics, really. You know, in a way, it was a nice message. It was, you know, we're going to make sure the poor become rich. That's quite nice. In reality, it led to catastrophe, death, dictatorship, and so on. Right. But >> everyone was equally poor.
>> That's what happened. Yes. And and equally unfree.
>> But but the left now has mutated. Um, it's woke. Uh, it's got all sorts of hatreds and it embraces what I call the omnicors. Other people call the omnicause, which is this ever-changing set of left-wing beliefs. Right now, it's hatred of Israel. Um, but before that, it was hatred of bankers. It was BLM, you know, it just changes depending on on the moment, as you can see Greta Thunberg basically switching from being a net-zero advocate to being an anti-Israel activist. Um, so they are kind of fueled and fired up by quite a lot of stuff, and those people genuinely believe that there's no difference between the Tories and Labour, which is why they're willing to vote for a far-left party regardless of what that means. Uh, as a general election, of course, they'd hate the Reform Party. Um, but they they really don't care if Labour win or not anymore because they've become so left-wing, so disengaged. Um, by the way, there are of course lots of economic reasons for the growth of the far left. So, it's partly a cultural thing,
>> but it's partly an economic thing. Um, the the cultural thing has also got to do with changing belief systems among younger people when it comes to to the environment, which they prioritize above everything else. Uh, you know, they even say they don't have children, for example, because they care so much about the environment. Uh, but also you've got the whole cultural uh rejection of nation-states. So these people are believe in open borders. They believe that, you know, you should have unlimited immigration, that citizenship's meaningless. So all those sorts of things. But then you've got the economics. The economics is probably largely about two things. One, housing availability. Um, there's just not enough homes built in this country given the explosion in the size of the population and also other forms of social change like people living longer or people living as singles and stuff like that. And secondly, wages. Wages have just not kept up. So they because they these people see that and they don't really have an economic theory of how the world works. They just assume capitalism has failed or not, you know, in late-stage capitalism or something like that, or they assume that the rich are taking all the money.
>> That's what that's I was going to say it's worse than what you say. It's that they what they assume is they've been robbed.
>> Right?
>> And and there are a lot of commentators who will tell them that the reason you are poor is the rich, the rich, the rich. Um, and I I do think that inequality is a massive problem in this country. We can't deny that.
>> Yeah. So I don't call it inequality because I don't have a problem with inequality. I think inequality is normal. I think equality is good even um when when it emerges.
>> Why is it good?
>> It's good if it emerges spontaneously from differential contributions. If you're an incredibly successful sports star and tens of millions of people are willing to pay, you know, your YouTube channel or whatever it is to to to watch you, then I have no problem that person being very, very rich, much, much richer than somebody else. So that form of inequality doesn't bother me. But there's an artificial kind of inequality that's created via fake policy. And that's what I object to. And that's artificial, malign form of inequality comes from terrible education systems that drag down the poor in in this country, in the UK, especially the white working class, which is terrible at school. So therefore, their their future prospects are massively limited. You've got a welfare state that's basically a trap. The welfare state encourages people not to work in many cases. Encourages people to exaggerate their their lack of health, for example, especially mental health. So that's creating poverty. Um, there's monetary policy, i.e. what central banks do. So you've had years and years and years of monetary manipulation by central banks. Central bankers think they're like this new elite class. They're almost godlike in their beliefs. They think that they can just stop that they can create perpetual economic growth just by fiddling with interest rates or printing money, quantitative easing, that sort of stuff. Thing that's been hugely disruptive to the economy over the last 20, 30 years. It's put up the price of certain assets. It's put up the price of housing. It's made it much less likely for young people to be able to afford to buy their own homes. So, that's another reason, another uh, you know, policy creating the wrong kind of inequality. You got another the wrong kind of inequality simply caused by lack of economic opportunity. Right? If there's a lot of economic opportunity, social mobility can be maximized. So, people can climb. Um, you know, if there's
Not much social mobility because there's not much opportunity. If there's barriers to entry, there's closed shops, there's laws that prevent you from entering a particular business area, where clearly that's going to also maximize inequality. It's going to, um, freeze the society in aspect, uh, and again, that would hurt the poor.
So, there's good inequality, which is the byproduct of a real free market. You know, if you work hard, you can make money; if you're lazy, you don't make money. Um, but there's bad inequality, uh, that's caused by stupid public policy, flawed ideology, flawed economics, that kind of thing. And that is a problem here. And that is clearly one of the things fueling the rise of the anti-capitalist far-left. It's fueling the omnic cause, it's fueling mad content and, uh, social chaos. Imagine.
So, let's, let's do a little thought experiment, Alistair. Let's say Reform get in a sizable majority, and then we have 20% your party, Jezebel, whatever you want to call them. How much of an impact can they make? How much, how much of an impact can they make on Reform, on public policy, on spending, etc.?
Um, it all depends on the professionalism and organization of a Reform government, if that were to be what materializes at the next election. Because for a Reform government to succeed, there's two very big challenges for Nigel Farage, right? First challenge: win the election. That would be an astonishing thing for him to win the general election. People are starting to speak about it as if it's normal, obvious. It's not normal, and it's not obvious. It's a massive challenge for him. Uh, the moment it looks like he might be able to pull it off. But the second massive challenge is that he'd have to seize control of the British state and actually impose the sort of change, you know, a once-in-a-generation, frankly, once-in-a-hundred-year, uh, level of change. The kind of stuff you saw in the 1940s, a more radical, more compressed, uh, period of change than even the 1980s under Thatcher. You'd have to change everything, right? Scrap tons of laws, restructure the constitution, completely change the civil service, which is completely broken. Um, you know, uh, get rid of the Human Rights Act, quit the ECHR, quit all these international treaties, right? And you'll be declaring total ideological war on the blob, on the ruling dominant ideology of this country, and that's going to be very, very tough. So, that is Farage's massive challenge. Prepare. How, how can you prepare? How can you find lots of very talented people outside of politics to bring them in so that they can effectively launch a hostile takeover of the British state after the general election and actually push through change rather than be defeated?
Leah Truss came along, and she was crushed. She was gone within weeks. How do you avoid that sort of scenario? Trump one in America was largely defeated by, by the blob, by the, by the civil service and so on. Trump two, on the other hand, has seized control of the machinery of state. He was very well prepared in advance. You know, he had orders he was just ready to sign on day one, day two, day three, and so on. That's how you do it. Um, but you need quality people, and there's not enough quality people currently in British politics. There's some quality people in the Conservative party. We must hope that everyone on the right kind of unites in some sort of way. Um, so that at least, you talk to a lot of people in both Reform and the Conservatives. It's my, I, I think about these things logically, which usually fails me because a lot of the human behavior is not very logical. But logically, I would think as if Reform continues to do well and the Conservatives continue to struggle, you would imagine that many of the people within the Conservative party would jump ship because it would be the logical thing to do. Are, do you sense that that is what will happen?
I think it will happen, but it's not really happened in any major way yet. No, the reason is they're just biting their time. >> I mean, their strategy is that they think they just, there's no need for them to to to move fast. They don't think there's a first-move advantage in doing that. They think there's a first-move cost because, you know, everyone will hate you, your old friends will hate you, that sort of stuff. It's better to wait until other people do it first. There's a danger there because Farage is trying to bring in people from outside politics. So if you're not careful, he's going to have found new people before those Tories actually join him. >> But I think on balance, um, his big, his big challenge now is to further expand his share of the vote, and that now means further shrinking the Tory share of the vote, which remains still quite high at about 18%. Um, so I think, yes, more Tories will probably join Reform. The problem with the Conservative Party is basically one-third of the Conservative Party are real conservatives, you know, free market conservatives, libertarians, whatever, a coalition of those kinds of people. A third are centrists, they're basically careerists. They do whatever the party leader tells them to do. And a third are basically Liberal Democrats, social democrats who basically are not conservative. Um, you know, who, who are against Brexit, who like international human rights treaties, who like all that sort of stuff. So that party is was always a complete unstable coalition, which is basically what ruined the last years of of their government.
But I mean, every party is an unstable coalition in some form or another, surely? I mean, Labour is an unstable coalition.
Yes. No, you're right about that. But I think, um, there were really, really striking ideological differences within the Conservative party on essential questions. If you go to the Labour party, they all believe that the state is good, that the NHS is good, the government needs to grow, paying taxes is a good thing, right? But they disagree about the details. In the Conservative party, they literally disagreed about everything. They disagreed about first principles. They disagreed about philosophy. You know, do you join the EU? Do you leave the EU? Should you put, should you have a wealth tax? Yes, some Tories believe in a wealth tax, you know, or do you not have a wealth tax, you know, should you cut tax? Should you put up tax? I mean, these are hugely consequential differences. I think there are non-reconcilable differences, which I think if, if Reform want to have any chance of succeeding, they need to make sure that they are united on all the basic principles at least. But you, you, but you know, you look at Reform, is it Jake Barry who's tr who has transitioned over to Reform? And you go, this guy's a proponent of net zero, you know, he's a big fan. You go, well, what's happening here? Surely that's fundamentally incompatible. You've got to hope that he was in the second category, the, the, the centrist career category, and that he...
Isn't that worse?
Right. Well, look, that is, well, Reform faced two problems. Reform faced a number of possible risks. One of the risks is that they become a conservative, you know, and I, so, you know, they better not do those. Another risk, of course, is they don't find enough competent people, you know, and there's other risks, or, or that they inadvertently attract some dodgy people, which for us is obviously very keen >> not to happen.
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Let's go back to my original question, which is the 20% your party, Jezebel, how much of an impact and effect can they have on UK politics and the way we run this country? They can have a very large effect on British politics, but not necessarily on what happens in terms of public policy and in terms of the government. If you've got a strong, well-organized majority government, then the government could ignore those people, fight them on the airwaves in terms of argument, set the debate, shift, uh, you know, shift sentiment in a more right-wing direction, that kind of thing. But if you, you've got a far-left party at 20%, clearly it will make a big impact in terms of grassroots movements and in terms of of the long-term political structure of this country. Yes.
So, let's, I, I, I love your articles, Alistair. I really do. Yeah. I think they're, they're really well written. They're, they're a little bit spicy, slightly provocative at times, which I like. I, which I very much enjoy. Uh, there was one article in particular that stood out, which was, uh, you used the phrase "anarot tyranny," and you were saying this country is descending, or is in the process of descending, into a state of anarot tyranny. James O'Brien was frothing at the mouth, which personally made us all very happy. Yeah. No, I was quite happy about that. >> So, explain what you mean to me and what you mean by that. Cuz when I read the article, I was like, "Oh, this is a bit far." And then the more I read, >> the more my blood started to chill slightly. >> Obviously, I was tongue-in-cheek slightly. >> Yeah. Uh, but the, the, the serious point is this country is a weird mix of chaos, lawlessness, um, hardworking, law-abiding people being criminalized because of some dumb tweet that they might have put out or something they've said, that sort of stuff. You know, massive amount of shoplifting, people getting a mobile phone stolen, that sort of thing. Graffiti, litter, nothing's working. So, that's the chaos bit, the anarchy bit. And the tyranny bit is basically that this kind of increasing oppression, uh, in certain areas, and obviously the war on free speech is a, is a very important, um, part of that.
In other words, the government can't keep the peace and can't, can't put criminals in jail, but it can put you in jail if you're Graham Linehan.
Yeah. Well, that is, that is exactly right, and that is a tragic situation. It's a stunning contrast. Uh, and it's not one that I like. I don't think that's the direction this country should go in. I think it's very, very dangerous. Um, I think the free speech thing isn't a joke. I think it's very serious. I think it's a travesty that so many people are being prosecuted for what they're saying. I think the whole world is noticing. We've, things have gone wrong over the last 20 years. Basically, some of this stuff was originally well-intentioned, blah, blah, blah, right? Clearly, um, but I think it's, I think unfortunately it's gone terribly wrong. And I think the only solution is to adopt, uh, a US-style protection for free speech, um, by which I mean the kinds of rules. I don't mean a First Amendment because you can't do that in Britain. We don't have a written constitution. You can pass a law, but it's never going to be part of the constitution. But you should pass a law protecting free speech. You should basically copy the rulings of the US Supreme Court, their guidance, uh, when it comes to what should be legal and what should not be legal, because obviously in America, yeah, even in America, some forms of speech, if they're inciting immediate and likely violence, uh, obviously you can't do that. You can't shout fire in a crowded theater, that sort of thing. Um, but other than that, all free, all speech should be permissible.
But what's really worrying is talking about free speech. We saw Zack Polansky, the new head of the new leader of the Green Party, on, I think it was, um, Newsnight, and they were talking about the arrest of Graham Linehan, and he said he supported it. >> Now, I accept proportionality of police response is a conversation we need to have. >> But, well, do you think this was proportionate? >> I think it was proportionate to arrest him. And I think there's a pattern here. >> Five armed police officers turning up. >> Well, that's the bit that I don't understand why they were armed. And again, I'd need to hear about the police >> and why there were five, presumably. >> I mean, this is a new phenomenon, which is left-wing political operators openly being authoritarian, openly calling for the arrests of people who say things they don't like. And let's be clear, Graham Linehan said nothing wrong. It was not offensive. There's absolutely nothing wrong in what he said. Right? That, that was a case of persecution. That was entirely unfair. It was entirely wrong. There's no defense for this, and obviously in America, you'd be laughed out of court, right? Obviously, that would never be, um, prosecuted. And I think it's very worrying that the far-left is becoming so authoritarian, you know, but it is right.
You know, what, what starts with speech goes on with other things. You know, I mean, the far-left wants to shut down private schools. They don't want to allow people to educate their children the way they want. They want to, you know, tax them, expropriate their property. They want, you know, a wealth, confiscate their wealth, that sort of stuff. And they don't want them to be allowed to say what they want. That is not a liberal movement, right? The, the woke-infused far-left is a very dangerous, um, is a very dangerous set of of people and very dangerous set of parties. I mean, don't forget, on free speech, the woke believe that speech is basically violent, and they believe we're in an inherently racist and oppressive society, and that, um, the only people who, who got the ability to say anything are actually oppressors. Um, and this is a very, very twisted way of looking at the world, and it's, it's a total rejection of Western values. The far-left is anti-Western. Now, by the way, there's the growth of of fascism on certain fringes in America, for example. I'm totally against that also. That's also very, very dangerous.
I, I agree with you completely. And I think one of the things that's in stark relief for us all today, uh, because we're recording this the day after Charlie Kirk was murdered in America, and we, we don't yet know, and we may know by the time this episode is released, who it was that killed him, what they were motivated by. But the one thing that I think is, it, we've all given this linguistic shenanigans a pass. We've all said, "Oh, you know what? Some students are saying words of violence, but this, they don't really mean it. And they're calling us these people Nazis or those people not, they don't really mean it." But I think we're now, we're now through the looking glass, and we now have to actually recognize the reality of where we are, which is when people say that someone is a Nazi, or when people say that language is violence, and therefore logically you are entitled to defend yourself against that language with violence. We are in a very, very bad place.
Yes. And I think it's time where I really, really agree with what you've said today, is it's time to stop pretending that these words don't mean what the words mean.
I'm a journalist. I can tell you words mean what they mean. Words matter, right? It's all in the words. And the far-left ideology that is generally known as wokeism or whatever you want to call it, is a very bad set of beliefs. Um, it's a, it's a belief that completely demolishes every single foundation of Western society, and it was designed to do so. Right? Marxism only destroyed part of society. Um, this is a comprehensive destruction of all aspects of Western society. Everything, and it needs to be fought. It needs to be taken very, very seriously. The idea that the war on woke has been won is wrong. Yes, Donald Trump is in the White House, but that doesn't mean that the war on woke has been won. In Britain, wokery is still a very dominant ideology. It's still the official ideology of the public sector, right? The police are arresting people for having said something that someone thinks isn't very nice. This is very dangerous. And as you say, let me challenge you a little bit on that, though, Alistair. Do you not think though the way, I, I was just on with my very good friend James, on his new podcast, which everyone should check out, and we talked about this, and he was asking me about this. My sense though, is that the wokeness was metastatic. It was a metastatic cancer. There was a central tumor, and then you've got all these other tumors that have spread into other parts of the body politic. But I do think the central tumor has been removed more or less, which is the ideology is bankrupt. It's discredited. Which is why when Graham is arrested by the police, you have the police coming out saying to the politicians, you need to change the law. And you've got Labour politicians saying, "Yeah, I think we need to change the law because the power of the central tumor is no longer there. These other tumors are starting to fall out one by one." Do you not think that's true?
So, I think that's slightly too optimistic for me.
Okay.
I, I'll tell you why I agree and why I disagree. So, I think the, the anti-woke forces have won a massive victory when it comes to gender ideology. Uh, and I think, by the way, that only happened because of the sensible left. So, it's not the right that won it, it's the left. It's J.K. Rowling. She's a hero in my view. >> Rosie Duffield. >> Yes. And all these people. They got together, the few people on the right, and they managed to defeat gender ideology in America. Trump has has really pushed that. And gender ideology, when normal people actually understood it, was hated because, you know, people realized how demented it was, anti-natural, and all the rest. So, that aspect, the woke, of the woke revolution, is in retreat. Um, on speech, I think Britain is just a crazy outlier. So, the restrictions on speech in Britain are so ridiculous, uh, that they've overreached. So, there is going to be a backlash. But I, I don't really think that the overall ideology has been properly damaged because when, when you look at the arguments of, you people say, "Okay, fine, in this particular case, we shouldn't have arrested this person, but nonetheless, in all these other cases, it's still valid." And I don't think that's a proper defense of free speech. That's just a sort of recalibration. It's, um, the woke overreached. So, now they are kind of slightly moving back. And then I think there's other areas where the woke ideology is still completely out of control. For example, this whole idea of colonialism and, uh, settler states and exploitation and paying reparations for slavery and all that sort of stuff, that is still growing. We, we haven't, that has not been defeated. And the entire left-wing hatred of Israel, for example, is based specifically on that ideology. That ideology defines Israel as a settler state, which by definition, automatically is committing a genocide. You don't have to prove it. You don't have to show any evidence. It's just happening by definition. And those people also think that America and Australia and New Zealand and Canada are invalid constructs. Uh, and that stuff's gaining ground. And so, you know, I look at the world and I, I see, okay, the woke are not winning every battle, and they've been pushed back in some areas, even defeated when it comes to woke ideology, but they're not, we, our side is not winning on everything. And also, by the way, on economics, right? I think, um, more and more young people in America, in this country, elsewhere, are describing themselves as socialists. And that's, of course, you know, Marxism, traditional Marxism, is basically the economic wing of the woke movement. That's how it all started. But that still remains essential. In New York, you've got that socialist candidate who's probably going to win, >> Zorani. >> Indeed. Yes. And he's, he's a woke revolutionary, basically, and and he's now going to launch it on economics, on crime. Even on crime, um, you know, of course, there's been pushback and, you know, everybody realizes, many people now realize that defunding the police is literally utter idiocy. I mean, madness. But nonetheless, you know, there's a lot, there's still a lot of of work to be had, I think. So, so yeah, I think it's a mixed picture. Mixed picture.
Before Alistair answers the final question at the end of the interview, make sure to go to triggerpod.co.uk to hear him answer your questions and see this.
What's the most high-impact reform the UK could make today that we'd still thank ourselves for in 10 to 20 years? Do you think it would be viable for the UK to create a sovereign wealth fund using shale gas? And why do you think that net zero energy and security has taken over the West?
Alistair, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Last question is always the same. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?
Um, I think we're not talking enough as a society about the return of anti-Semitism, uh, in Britain and the West. I think that's an incredibly dangerous, toxic, hateful belief that a lot of us thought had been vanquished. Uh, but in fact, it turns out hasn't been vanquished. There's a poll in a recent poll, a YouGov poll in the UK, which shows that 21% of the population now are basically anti-anti-Semites, in the sense that they believe in at least four anti-Semitic tropes. 45% of the population believe that Israel is treating Palestinians in the same way as the Nazis treated the Jews, which is obviously completely absurd. Um, and, you know, there's more and more acts of violence, uh, more and more, uh, criminal anti-Semitic acts that barely go reported anymore. They've been normalized. Uh, and there's been this normalization across the middle class and across the elites. And I think there's no country ever that has survived unscathed from allowing anti-Semitism to to to grow in this country. And by the way, this, you know, is not just anti-Semitism. You know, any country where that turns against against successful, integrated, patriotic minorities, uh, is a country that's going down the drain, basically.
Do you think this is an Israel-specific phenomenon though, or do you think it's more to do with the economic realities that people are struggling and so they're looking for an explanation?
I think Israel is the lightning rod, but I think it has lit up underlying beliefs that hadn't really gone away. Um, and I think what we see is very ugly. And of course, you can criticize any country. I criticize Britain all the time, right? I criticize the British Prime Minister all the time. Doesn't mean I hate Britain. I love Britain. But what the criticism of Israel, we see is not fair. Uh, you know, it's not, uh, grounded in reality. It's hysterical. It's incredibly biased. There's incredible double, triple, quadruple standards. Um, it's almost demented. And that, that form of hysteria is prejudice. It's not the rational criticism of of a particular set of policies. And that's all feeding into ancient hatreds, both traditional ancient hatreds that have always existed in Britain. Britain invented the blood libel, um, 800 years ago or 900 years ago in Norwich. Um, and of course, also more recent arrivals that, that are sometimes anti-Semitic. So, you've got that combination of things. Um, and what's most scary, I think, is the, the levels of prejudice that have crept into, I think, the upper middle class again, and and the ruling elites. Um, and I'm very, very worried about that. I think, um, that is, there's a red light flashing here. And, you know, I used to be an optimist. I used to be like, really a rational optimist, but I now consider myself a rational pessimist. I think there's a lot of things going terribly wrong in this country and in the world. And I think human nature tends to revert, uh, to the mean, and that's not a particular good place to end up.
Well, there you go. That's your positive message for the day. Head on over to Substack where we ask Alistair your questions.
As an experienced editor of a non-French media publication, could Mr. Heath offer an honest opinion of the political landscape in France, how we got here, and what to expect in the near future?
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