Transcription
There is a sense, I think, people in Britain are waking up to the fact that we have a failed state in this country. They're waking up to that. Previously, they've said we've just got the most useless bunch of idle politicians in the world. Let's throw them out and get a new lot in. They're now discovering that every time they do that, things aren't getting any better. So there's a fundamental problem with the state.
I've experienced it at the top level in government. I've experienced a metaphorical gun being put to my head.
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Hi, Liz. Hi, welcome. Thank you for going to do this.
That's okay. I've read your book. I consider myself a small-C conservative. I've only ever voted Conservative Party, but I haven't voted in the last three elections because I felt like the party lost its way. Then I listened to your book, and everything you spoke about is what conservative people are demanding. So I'm sat here hugely disappointed you're not in government, not able to do the things you said.
Well, I'm disappointed too. I look at what's happening right now. We've got a very serious rape gang crisis at the moment, a scandal that's being spoken about in every quarter. I feel like a lot of that is a result of the things that you recognized—the failings in government and in the institutions we have. Am I wrong?
Yeah, you're absolutely right. You're right. The grooming gang issue, when it first came to light, there was a documentary I think that was put out called "Free Girls." I watched that and thought this is absolutely horrific. But it felt at the time like this was being addressed and it was being dealt with. Then a few years down the line, it turns out it wasn't, and it's still going on. It's just extraordinary. It's an extraordinary failure of the state.
But how does this happen? I mean, from the outside, I feel like we're starting to see behind the veil here. I mean, your book—one of the things that stands out to me is that when you're outside of government, you seem to be able to speak a bit more freely. Is that another fair observation?
That is true. There are various reasons you can't speak freely when you're in government. One is collective responsibility. The idea is that all the policies are agreed, and if you're a minister, you can only go along with the line. I was a minister from 2012 through to 2022, so I had 10 years of that.
But the other thing is, and this is what I particularly found as Prime Minister, because speaking out about what the Bank of England was doing would have actually made the crisis worse. You were in a very, very difficult position. Do you call out what's wrong with the system with the risk of the whole thing collapsing and Britain being in a debt crisis, or do you try and fix it? That is a dilemma I think many politicians face.
But what a lot of people say to me is, they say things like, "Well, you were Prime Minister. Couldn't you fix that?" There is a real lack of understanding about the actual powers a Prime Minister has and what those powers are dependent on, and how the system actually works now compared to how it worked 30 or 40 years ago because huge swathes of power have been outsourced.
Yeah, I talked about the Bank of England. I mean, you were talking about the grooming gang, the rape gang scandal, but power has been outsourced to the judiciary. It's no longer the case that a politician appoints the senior judges; they're appointed by unelected bureaucrats. So we have lost the levers to actually make the change to our country, which is why things are getting worse, in my opinion.
So does that mean we don't really truly have a democracy? Because if we're voting for a Conservative Party and giving them a mandate, but they don't have the power to execute that mandate because of the civil service?
Well, the thing is, in 2010, let's say the Conservatives had won an overall majority. David Cameron could have repealed all of those laws with a Conservative majority, with Conservative MPs who agreed with him, with backbone. If he'd said, "I'm going to repeal the Human Rights Act," "I'm going to repeal the Constitutional Reform Act," which is the act where the judges became unaccountable, he could have said, "I'm going to do all that." But he didn't.
We didn't get an overall majority. We had to do a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, and also a lot of Conservative MPs didn't want to take on the status quo. So I think there's only a very short moment when a government is first elected that you can do the type of change our country needs, and we missed the opportunity.
What happened for 14 years is the cracks were papered over.
Was there a demand under Cameron to make those changes internally?
Well, there were some demands by some people. I was very critical of the amount of quangos that had been set up. I was critical of the powers the Bank of England had. When I became Lord Chancellor, I saw the fact that the powers had been removed and that the judiciary were unaccountable. So there were bits of pressure, but I think it's very hard once a party is in government and dealing with all the day-to-day stuff that you end up dealing with.
And you know, look at the media now. We've now got 24-hour media, we've got social media. There's so much to respond to that those big strategic changes are very, very hard to deliver once the car's already on the motorway.
So the powers you didn't have—you've talked about—you just mentioned a moment ago that people don't really understand the powers you have and you don't have. How would you articulate that to us as voters?
What needs to change is that the bureaucracy has become increasingly powerful, and the political leadership often gets the blame for things that they can't control. What needs to happen is Parliament needs to be the organization that makes decisions in this country because it is elected, and the powers need to be returned to Parliament. That is what needs to happen.
Then if people don't like what that Parliament does, they can vote them out, right? Because you can't vote out the chief of police, you can't vote out the governor of the Bank of England, you can't vote out the senior judiciary. So you need people to be accountable to Parliament because those people can be voted out.
So a bit like the US, when Trump comes into power, he will be able to, in the transition of power, put his appointees into the federal government. In the US, they often critique how organizations like the Federal Reserve have become too powerful, how the bureaucracy in the US has become too powerful. We've had the Department of Justice weaponized and become overtly political.
So they have a similar problem with overpowered bureaucrats in the States, and this is why Trump talks about the deep state. He talks about draining the swamp. That is exactly what they're facing in the US too. We've just got it 20 times worse in Britain.
So we have our own deep state, yes, and we have our own swamp.
Is that which we call the blob?
Well, yeah, I've heard Dominic Cummings talk about that. But do you think of the deep state as a mysterious group of people controlling power? I just think of our problem in the UK as a large bureaucratic administrative state. I don't think of it as some kind of evil secret power, but am I wrong?
Let's take the grooming scandal and what has happened or what we know so far. We know that local councillors with political power deliberately covered up and aided and abetted what happened. We know that the police, for various reasons, some of which were political correctness, did not prosecute these crimes.
We know that there is an ideology of Islamism that has become more powerful in British politics. We've seen at the last election four Islamist MPs were elected. We know that ideology is influencing the Labour Party because they do not want to lose votes.
So we've got a combination of all those different things happening, which creates a groupthink and creates a blindness to what's going on. Or you could say it's worse than blindness; you could say it's deliberate neglect.
The ideology of Islamism, you know, the ideology of Net Zero-ism or climate change extremism. It wasn't a surprise that Greta Thunberg went from being an extremist on climate change, or climate crisis, as she would call it, to being an extremist on Israel.
So there is an ideology here that has become more dominant, not just in the British government, but also in organizations like the BBC, who were found recently publishing huge numbers of articles that were anti-Israel, being very, very biased.
So it's not just that these people are incompetent and unaccountable; there is often an agenda that they go into these positions holding.
Where does that agenda come from?
Well, it comes from wherever any political agenda comes from. I think universities have become places where there's groupthink on particular issues, where you're unable to speak out. If you're gender-critical or whatever, you're not able to voice your full opinions.
I think that has become a part of being part of the left-wing elite, and those people have become more powerful in government positions, even in senior corporate positions, but also in the media.
This is why the ideology is linked to what people decide to pursue, what they believe, and what they report. I mean, the Black Lives Matter protests and the George Floyd incident were reported far more in the British press than the grooming scandals here.
So it creates an environment that isn't a true reflection of what's actually happening in our country.
But do you think it's just an organic slide to the left?
I think the bigger the government gets, generally speaking, the more to the left it moves. There's a thing called O'Sullivan's Law: unless an organization is explicitly right-wing, it becomes left-wing over time.
You can see that because people working in government are completely insulated from the facts of life. If you don't sell a product that people want to buy, you go out of business. They're insulated from that. They can keep producing terrible products, and they don't go out of business because they've always got a job.
So they're insulated from the facts of life, which is what makes it easier to be left-wing if you're in a public sector organization or where you work for the BBC because you get the pole BBC poll tags anyway, regardless of how much people want to watch your content.
Well, that's that point I keep raising on my show. I did the research on the Labour front bench. Not a single person has ever run a business and doesn't understand the consequences of the budget they've put in place.
I have four businesses. I have to deal with the consequences of the budget—the consequences of Conservative budgets first, and now Labour budgets. I had, I think you know, I had Steve Baker in here. We talked quite extensively about it. He explained there's a serious lack of understanding of basic economics within government, which for someone like me as a business owner is terrifying.
There is a lack of economic understanding, but there are also ideologically left-wing economists who, regardless of the facts about which economic policies have succeeded, you know, we know that the supply-side policies of Reagan succeeded.
We know that the current policies of spending vast amounts of public money don't work. Nevertheless, there are still economists that will say the opposite.
So why though? It's madness.
It is madness, but look at the reaction to Reeves's budget, which was welcomed by the Bank of England, which is full of economists. It was welcomed by the Office of Budget Responsibility. They thought it would deliver more economic growth, and it turns out it had the opposite effect.
So there's also been, you know, in the economic sphere, there has been a capture of economics departments by the left, by the sort of Thomas Piketty thought of this world.
But it's also true that people have not wanted to engage in economics, and they thought that after Britain turned its economy around, they didn't need to worry about economics anymore, that the money was going to keep coming.
If you remember, David Cameron talked about sharing the proceeds of growth as though growth was a given and all we had to do was worry about sharing the proceeds of it—not that growth only happens if you actually enable businesses to succeed.
I do want to come back to this. I don't want to leave behind some of the points on the rape gang scandal because you raised an interesting point. You said there's been cover-ups. Is that criminal, and should that be prosecuted?
Yes, yes. I mean, I can't prejudge any court cases, of course, but people have not been honest about what is actually going on in our society, and those people are in positions of responsibility. I also believe there's been corruption.
If we look at what's happened with the involvement of local councils, the involvement of police authorities, I don't know quite how high it goes up, but it's very worrying that Keir Starmer is refusing to have a full public inquiry.
Well, the man who was in charge of the CPS for... I mean, it is outrageous that he is saying this is a far-right conspiracy.
For people listening, it was about three hours ago he claimed that it was a far-right conspiracy.
I was trying to explain it to my son earlier. We keep having failings with the police—massive failings. I was trying to explain to him what happened with Stephen Lawrence years ago when I was his age.
We had, a few years ago, the murder of Sarah Everard. We've now had this. I mean, it's a constant complete failure from the police. I wonder, is that from the issues that you've identified where people have been worried about offending people, or does this come from a funding issue? Are the police underfunded? Where does this come from?
It's not a funding issue, no, because we can see the police are going to Alison Pearson's house at the weekend to look at her Twitter account. That is obviously misprioritization and a completely wrong sense of what are serious issues that need to be investigated.
I believe in freedom of speech. It's outrageous that they called at her house at a weekend.
It does come back to this issue of accountability that if you want to get on in the public sector—and I saw this for the 10 years that I worked in government—you have to toe the line, not question the orthodoxy. If nothing goes wrong on your watch, you will get promoted.
So there's an incentive to not admit how bad things are, not admit to what's going wrong in order to move up the ladder. If you look at people like Maggie Oliver, who did so much to expose the grooming gangs, she's not in the police anymore, but the people that are at the top of the police tend to be the ones who haven't spoken out, who haven't asked too many questions, who haven't taken difficult decisions.
That is true in the public sector overall, and it's why there is a lack of leadership in the public sector. I could say the same in politics as well. People who speak out in politics, who try to do things, tend to get more criticism than people who don't.
How do you change that?
You've got to make it easier to hire and fire these people. You've got to make it easier to hire and fire them. It's as simple as that.
Well then, the Home Secretary has to be accountable for the performance of the police, and if it's not good enough, she needs to go, or she needs to be able to fire the people that have failed straight away.
At present, it's all clouded in... they'll use the excuse that the police are operationally independent. Politicians can't interfere. They will use all kinds of HR contractual issues to stop that happening.
But I don't think we will get a properly performing public sector until you have real, genuine accountability.
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But who can bring that accountability? If we don't have strong leadership at the top of politics, how's that ever going to change?
The first thing is that I have no hope for this government. I mean, if I haven't been clear enough about that already, I have no hope that Keir Starmer is going to transform into a great leader. I think it's impossible.
I think he represents the failed consensus of the last 30 years. He comes from the public services, which failed to perform. He's the former head of public prosecutions. Rachel Reeves has a background at the Bank of England. We don't know if she was an economist, but the point is they are wedded and embedded in the system we have, and we have a system problem.
So I think the only way of achieving real change is for somebody to get elected on the platform of changing the system.
They have to get elected on that. They have to say, "We're not going to carry on with the so-called impartial civil service, the so-called independent bodies."
I looked this morning at how many so-called independent bodies we have in Britain—444 different public bodies who aren't accountable to anybody, from the Environment Agency to the Migration Advisory Council to the Climate Change Committee—all making decisions about our lives, none of whom we can get rid of.
We need a political leader who's prepared to get elected on a ticket of changing all of that and who has the people ready to do those jobs. That's the only way, in my opinion.
Because I watched for 14 years of Conservative government. We were already traveling down the road. It was very hard at that point to say we're going to change the whole system.
So do you think it required a shift from Conservatives to Labour to shift back to somebody to have that platform?
What I didn't see...
What do you mean by that?
What I mean is, did we have to move away from... because I think of the Conservative Party the last 14 years generally. I think it's very difficult to judge your time because it was too short. We didn't actually get to see you be Prime Minister.
I agreed with a lot of your economic policies, by the way, but we didn't probably get to see it. We mainly had Cameron, Theresa May, and Rishi.
I don't think of that as a Conservative government myself, from what I think of conservatism. I don't see a striking difference between the 14 years of Conservatives that we had—sorry, Miss Bis Johnson—and the Tony Blair Labour Party.
I don't see a significant difference.
It wasn't different enough. It was a different flavor of the same drink.
Exactly. Did the Conservatives need to lose? Did they need to see a disastrous Labour Party for someone to come in and offer a significant change?
The reason I say that is that at the moment, that significant change is at least being seen with Reform. Whatever you think of that party, there are strong Conservatives who believe that Reform, or at least speaking the language that Conservative voters want.
What I'm trying to say here is everybody's obsessed in Britain with political gossip and parties and leaders and who's in and who's out and who's stabbed everybody in the back.
It is important in order to get the change we need in our country to elect a good leader and a good party, but that is not enough. That is only the tip of the iceberg.
The people actually running the country at the moment—the bureaucracy—need to change and need to be changed.
So my point is, even if you had an utter genius Prime Minister who was wise in every possible way with a brilliant cabinet, they're not going to be able to deliver with the current system we have.
The whole thing needs to be ripped up. By the way, it's in a serious state. I think that what's happened in the last six months under Labour has just exposed how bad, how rotten it is.
Sure. I disagree slightly when you say that people only care about political gossip. I think there's a lot of people who care about policy.
Actually, when you say people, what I'm talking about is the media and the mainstream media mainly.
See, for example, today, new details have come out about what the grooming gangs did from the court reports, which are absolutely horrific.
And yet, what was the second item on the BBC News? Item one was the storms—fair enough. Item two was Elon Musk's attack on Nigel Farage.
That's what I'm talking about. I'm not saying that is what the people of Britain want to hear about or think about, but that is what the sort of 24-hour media cycle is obsessed with.
Sure. I mean, I think the Elon Musk one was kind of interesting because I think a lot of us found that a bit wild and kind of funny that that relationship collapsed so quickly.
But I think generally speaking, I think we're in the death throes of the mainstream media anyway.
You've come here, you say that, but 68% of people, their main source of news is the BBC in Britain.
But is that... I'd love us to be in the death throes. I would love it more than anyone.
But what's the trajectory of that? Is that declining?
It's definitely declining, yeah. But you know, will there still be a country left by the time it declines? I don't know.
But I would predict—look, we're 38 shows in. I would predict, I would hope, I mean, it might sound overly confident, but a show like this will be bigger than, say, Question Time within a couple of years.
Because I think there is a demand for authenticity. Like you and I sat across from each other for an hour, hour and a half. There's nowhere for either of us to hide.
I'm exposed as being politically naive sometimes, and you're exposed to just have to be honest with the questions.
I think when you're doing four, six minutes, two minutes on the BBC, you kind of get away with things.
But it's not just the style of the questions or getting away from things; it's the attitude of the BBC researchers and presenters. That's a problem.
Sure, but that's why I say I think they're losing because I think there's a demand for authenticity in media and a demand for authenticity in politicians.
At the moment, I always kind of surprise people with this, but two of my favorite politicians at the moment, I say, are Nigel Farage and Angela Rayner.
And Angela Rayner, I disagree with her on everything on policy. I completely disagree with her, but I find it kind of interesting. I think it's kind of cool.
She goes to the club and goes dancing. I think she represents a part of the country I don't understand—the working-class parts. I'm not from there.
I feel like within the realms of being stuck within the Labour Party, she's about as authentic as you get.
I think there is a demand to get more authenticity, which is why I've enjoyed...
I definitely think that's true. Yeah, don't get me wrong. But I'm just saying don't underestimate the power of the BBC, and I think it is a major problem.
This is one of the... See, back when I first became an MP in 2010, I didn't realize what a big problem it was and what a kind of prism it presented that people see things through.
It really prevents the public from hearing the truth about what's happening in the country. It's part of the problem.
So if you feel all this, is there any part of you that wants to go back and be that person?
I don't. I'm not motivated by being that person. I'm motivated by change. The country needs to change.
I want to do whatever I can to help that happen. The reason I wrote the book is to try and explain why 14 years of Conservative government had ended up where they did, which is the worst election result since 1848.
I wanted to explain that, and that's why I wrote the book. Because what I'm trying to say is to whoever gets elected after Keir Starmer, it's not enough just to say we're going to be different from these other people.
You have to take on the most mighty vested interests. You have to take on the bureaucracy. You have to take on the swamp if you're going to change this country.
This is what I think Trump is very interesting because he, in 2016, a lot of what he tried to do got sabotaged because there were people in the State Department, there were people in the Treasury in the US who did not agree with what he was trying to do, and they undermined him.
So he's come in now with Project 2025 with a clear sense of I need to change the people in this bureaucracy. I need to change the way we do things.
He's brought Elon Musk in. That is what we need on steroids in Britain because we're in a worse position than the US. At least their economy is in reasonable shape.
I mean, Britain is not in a good way. So that's what I'm making the case for.
Is anybody echoing this to you? I mean, you don't even have to name names if they're still in government.
So I look now at Kemi Badenoch. She seems nice enough, but I would have thought if you're coming into power and you want to have a significant change, we would know her policies right now.
She would be speaking. People are talking about these issues. Robert Jenrick talks about them. Reclaim from Reform talks about them. Nigel Farage talks about them.
Kemi has talked about them.
I think there is a sense that people in Britain are waking up to the fact that we have a failed state in this country.
They're waking up to that. Previously, they've said we've just got the most useless bunch of idle politicians in the world. Let's throw them out and get a new lot in.
They're now discovering that every time they do that, things aren't getting any better. So there's a fundamental problem with the state.
But I still don't think people... or how would I put this? My view of how much needs to change is probably bigger than most people's of all those people I've just mentioned.
Because you experienced it first.
I've experienced it at the top level in government. I've experienced a metaphorical gun being put to my head to not pursue a particular policy. That's what I've experienced, which has made me realize just how deep the issues are.
You've obviously received a lot of criticism for what happened, and I think it must feel unfair that you weren't given a proper crack at it.
Yes, although I think my mom always said to me, "Life isn't fair." You know, lots of people have terrible things happen to them in their lives.
On one level, I think it's unfair, but I think I've learned so much about what is wrong from that experience, which I wouldn't have done otherwise.
Well, yeah, because I've watched a whole bunch of your interviews since, and I think a common question is if you could go back and do things differently, how would you do it differently?
But you couldn't really.
No, I find that I get asked that question a lot, and it's almost because people want to believe that there is some way of fixing this thing that doesn't involve a total shakeup.
They don't want to... they want to have the omelet, but they don't want to break the eggs. So they have said, "Well, surely if you just presented that better, if you tweaked this policy, it would have been so much different."
Well, it isn't because in the scenario we were in, the Prime Minister and Chancellor did not hold the levers of power. The governor of the Bank of England did. He wasn't elected.
He's been completely hopeless at the job, and yet he can't be removed. That is the problem, and no amount of better PR could have changed that.
I mean, the other issue, of course, which I have spoken about, is the Conservative Party itself has lost touch with what it should be about.
Well, that goes back to my point. I just don't think it's a Conservative Party anymore. I mean, it doesn't represent what's important to me as a Conservative.
I think it's deeply split. So if you take the touchstone issues of our times, you know, how big do you think the government should be? How do you think we should leave the ECHR?
Should we abolish the Human Rights Act and curb immigration? Do you think we should deport people who are illegal or have committed crimes?
Do you believe in Net Zero, or do you think we should get on with fracking? Do you believe in transgender ideology, or do you believe that men are men and women are women?
If you look at all those issues, I could name Conservative MPs on both sides of those issues. That's the problem. The party is fundamentally split.
I mean, you've just listed what were the key talking points of the key issues of the last US election. It's exactly the same issues.
It's the same case in the US. There were lots of people who are known in the US as rhinos—Republicans in name only—who were on the wrong side of those arguments.
And we have SINOs, or CHINOs, as in cappuccino—Conservatives in name only. That is the problem I faced.
Is that a result of the coalition?
No, no, because you can see it's not because of the fact it happened in the US as well. It's happening across the Western world.
What is happening is there's a change in who is voting for Conservative parties.
It used to be that the people that voted for Conservative parties were rich, broadly speaking. They were established. They were part of the establishment.
They were leaders in the Church of England or senior doctors or corporate executives. Whereas now you've got a liberal elite, so the establishment is left-wing.
The people who believe in Conservative values—limiting immigration, using oil and gas, whatever other Conservative values you want to talk about—they tend to be less well-off. They tend to be more outside the system.
So it's been a complete reversal. The thing is, a lot of the established elite in the Conservative Party really want to admit that the establishment's left-wing.
Lots of people say they don't want to go to a London dinner party and not be acceptable, so they go along with things like Net Zero or transgender rights, being supportive of migration, blah, blah, blah.
So that's what's been going on. The Republicans have seen a massive shift towards the MAGA movement. That's what basically needs to happen here.
So would you say that... so you're saying the Conservative Party's left-wing?
I'm saying that the Conservative Party is definitely too left-wing. What I'm saying is it's split, and that in an ideal world, we'd have a Conservative Party that comprises the best bits of Reform and the best bits of the Conservative Party.
That's what I would like to see because I think that is the only type of vehicle that could deliver the change the country really needs.
Because in order to get the changes that I've been talking about—to really change the police, to really change the judiciary, to really change our economic policies—you need some very, very tough-minded MPs who are going to be prepared to repeal the Equality Act, repeal the Human Rights Act, repeal the Net Zero Act, and get rid of the Supreme Court, which is like a fake Supreme Court that we've got in this country.
They need to be prepared to do all that tough stuff. They're going to come under massive criticism from the mainstream media, the establishment, all their friends.
If they go to dinner parties, you know, they...
You need 350 really tough people to do that.
But it's possible. I mean, I'm noticing in the circles I speak to, certainly those who... a bunch of my friends, I'm from a middle-class Conservative part of Bedford, and a lot of people that either didn't vote or voted for Reform are talking about voting for Reform.
They feel like Reform, particularly Rupert Lowe, who you mentioned, Richard Tice, and Nigel Farage are speaking their language.
But I mean, I guess you've therefore been impressed by some of what Reform have done.
Well, I mentioned individual MPs from the Conservative Party and the Reform Party, and there are lots of other unique commentators out there.
We've talked about Conor Tomlinson, a very good commentator on that. But the... that's of course communication is very important.
Being able to talk to people is very important, but you do actually have to have the laws that you're going to change, and you have to do it.
And that's where, in the past, if you look at Conservative manifestos from the past 14 years, there's been lots of good stuff in the Conservative manifestos, quite bad stuff as well, such as the point on international aid, which policy I never supported.
But you should explain what that is then.
Well, this is that we have to spend 0.7% of our GDP on international aid, which the Conservative Party put into law, which I think has largely been misspent.
So it's not good enough just to write something good in the manifesto.
It's very important that you don't lose this.
Okay, this is your inheritance through Bitcoin.
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Right, so could you see a scenario where there is a meeting of the minds between Reform and Conservatives?
Then potentially, but what I think is more absolutely necessary is a popular movement to push politicians in the right direction.
It's got to come from the grassroots. That's the Trump lesson. It started with the Tea Party. You had the MAGA movement actually putting pressure on politicians to do the right thing.
Whereas the way things have worked in Britain—and I saw this particularly in 2022—is the mainstream media create and the left create a hoax on social media, which then influences the public.
We need it to be the other way around. The public need to actually be pushing the agenda. I think that's starting to happen.
Well, you keep saying this. I'm very pleased to hear this. I'm just not as optimistic as you, having seen from the inside just how powerful those forces are.
Well, look, no, no. I am fearful of what you've told me from the inside. I'm saying from the outside, I think we're starting to see it, and I think there's a lot of strong signals.
I mean, look, I've seen the comments on our YouTube and what people are saying. I see the riots that we had following the South murders.
I see what's happened with Tommy Robinson. Tommy Robinson's a really interesting character because I've spent the last... not obviously, but I'm probably one of many people who spent the last few years just ignoring him, thinking he was just some racist thug.
The Overton window has certainly shifted on him.
But what I hadn't really fully appreciated is the working-class people that he represents who feel like they've been left behind, who feel like they've been ignored.
It's made me have to really kind of question my own thoughts on Tommy.
If I can't ignore, he has committed crimes, and he has been convicted of assault and mortgage fraud and contempt of court.
But at the same time, despite all those things, there are a number of people who are very supportive of him.
It's similar to Trump. Trump doesn't have a very clean, clear past, but still has a number of people who support him because he's speaking the same language.
It's become a really kind of... I think Tommy's become a really challenging person for many people. Challenging for Reform as well because they've been questioned on him.
It's made me question, has he been politically targeted?
I've tried to compare his treatment to other people who've committed similar crimes. It seems like his punishments have been harsher.
The speed to which he was convicted—same day conviction, I think, or next day conviction—I found him a really challenging...
There's no doubt that when you look at the justice system and who is being prosecuted for what, there seems to be some massively different treatment meted out.
The grooming gangs are the case in point about the level of punishment they've received.
But are you kind of agreeing with that, saying Tommy has been targeted?
Well, it's certainly... I mean, the fact he's in solitary... I mean, I don't know the details of the case.
The fact he's in solitary confinement... What I would say is that it is clear that the justice system is not treating people equally as it should.
I mean, he has been previously attacked in prison, so there is part of you that can go, "Okay, perhaps it is for his own safety because he was previously attacked."
But at the same time, 18 months in solitary seems a long time.
We did the same to Julian Assange. I know Julian's family well. I've interviewed his wife, brother, and dad, and they've all talked about the impact it had on him, which was devastating.
So does the government have the ability to use the judiciary to target people unfairly?
I don't think that's the problem, although I am generally critical of Keir Starmer. I think the problem is the judiciary aren't accountable, and the justice system isn't accountable.
That's what I think the problem is. I don't think... I think that the way that elements of the justice system behave is not treating people equally.
I think we also have a legal problem, and the way things like the Equality Act are interpreted, the Human Rights Act are interpreted is a big problem.
Both of those acts should go as well.
Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference because is the problem the legislation, or is the problem the lack of accountability in the system?
I think both of them are probably problems, and both of them have to be fixed.
Just back to your point about the working-class people in Britain and how people have been let down. I think people have been hugely let down.
I think the grooming gangs scandal is one element of that, but if you look at the economic system and the way that has been run, it has not been run in the interest of people who live in the north of England, or people who live in small towns and villages.
It has not been run in their interests. I spent two years as Chief Secretary to the Treasury looking at how they do their economic models, and it is very centric to London.
It is very centric to the way that the liberal elite look at the world because those are the people in the Treasury system, and those are the people working at the Bank of England.
So there's no doubt in my mind that people are absolutely right to be angry about where we've ended up.
I would like to see more of an organized movement like the MAGA movement in the US, where people aren't just talking about the personalities; they're also talking about what needs to change about our country.
We're starting to talk about that now because it's easy to... you know, I can point lots of fingers at lots of people, but you know, the last time Keir Starmer can go for an election is 2029.
By 2029, what would the British public demand that changes about our country to actually start fixing it? That's what really is important.
It goes back to my point. Sometimes I think it has to get really bad for you to realize.
But people need to be thinking about what needs to change. It can't just be we need X person rather than Y person.
It's going to be what needs to change, but sometimes it has to come from real pain.
I've been traveling and making documentaries for the last few years as well. I went out to El Salvador post-Bukele, and I've been four times.
I've witnessed the change in that country from when just after he got elected to where he is now.
His country has gone from having, I think it was the highest or the second highest murder rate in the world, to having now the lowest murder rate in the Western Hemisphere.
He's completely changed the economy there. He's taken on the IMF. I've been out to Argentina. I've seen what's happened with Milei.
I'm aware of what's happened in America. These are hard shifts that people have demanded.
But from those two countries, they had to go through a lot of pain to get there.
I only wish we hadn't in Britain. This is why, you know, you asked me, did I think it was unfair, or do I have regrets?
What really frustrates me is it was obvious the way things were heading in 2022, but there was a massive reluctance to change anything on the part of Conservative MPs, but also on the part of the system overall.
It's just incredibly sad that it has to get so much worse for things to change.
Well, I've got a few things here. So, national debt depends where you go, ranging from 2.8 trillion to over 3 trillion, about 110% of GDP.
Tax as a percentage of GDP is, I think you said in your book, 46%.
That's spending. Tax is lower than that, but tax will eventually have to catch up with that—37.7%.
It's been trending upwards while the value of our pound has been decreasing.
UK government debt reached 310% of GDP by the 2017s.
I mean, I think that's...
Yeah, here's the national debt.
This is the one that always gets me—the interest on our debt alone, 110 billion a year.
It's nearly 30 billion more than we spend on education.
GDP growth estimates vary from 1.2 to 1.7%. Like every single measure is going in the wrong direction.
Yeah, every single measure.
The reason I've gone down this rabbit hole—it might not be anything you know anything about—but previous to this, I don't know if you know this show, for seven years it was a show about Bitcoin.
It was the biggest show about Bitcoin when that's what we covered, and we decided to move back to the UK and cover politics.
But I've been down all these different rabbit holes trying to understand the history of sound money, being on the gold standard, why people care about Bitcoin, why things go up in value, down in value.
I've come to the conclusion that a sound economic basis is what any government needs.
Yeah, sound money.
I mean, I don't know if we could or would return to a sound money standard. I think we definitely need to return to an accountable Bank of England.
So do we need a central bank? That's an interesting question.
Well, if we do have one, it ought to be accountable.
So at the moment, we've got the worst of all worlds. We've got an unaccountable central bank.
What Gordon Brown did in making it independent—you can see the results. We've had huge levels of inflation.
We had QE that went on for far too long, asset price spikes, essentially supporting very, very lax government spending policies with printing money.
Yeah, that's what's going on, and the result was inflation.
We were told beforehand that it was going to be transitory, and it wasn't transitory, even though the lessons had all been learned before.
Nobody has been held accountable for that, even though it's created massive pain for British people.
So I am a supporter of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. I think they're a good thing. I think they help take power away from central banks, so in that respect, they're a good thing.
I'm very, very worried about anything like a central bank digital currency completely.
I think that gives the state huge amounts of power, and what we know is overweening state power is not a good thing.
Could we move to a world free of central banks? It's a beautiful idea—a free market for money.
A beautiful idea.
You've obviously had Steve Baker on your show.
Well, I've covered this prior to Steve. So my friend Nick wrote an article called...
He wrote two. Can you look up Nick Carter?
Yeah, Nick Carter's article. He did. He wrote an article called "Bitcoin: A Peaceful Revolution," which was brilliant.
But he wrote an article about the history of the free market for money, and he kind of got me interested in the idea that we would be better accepting volatility, accepting bank failures, and having a free market for money.
And then I realized, actually, I'm already operating in a free market for money because I keep 99% of my money in Bitcoin anyway.
And that is a free market for money.
The most peaceful revolution.
The most peaceful revolution, yeah. Very interesting.
I certainly think that the monetary policy and the whole monetary system needs to be reexamined and thought about.
The problem in Britain is it became a taboo subject. When I was at the Treasury and tried to ask about monetary policy, I was told it wasn't our responsibility; it was the responsibility of the Bank of England.
I said, "Well, the Chancellor is there to set the terms the Bank of England operates on."
The Chancellor, the politician—not the governor of the Bank of England—the Chancellor should have a view on monetary policy.
During the leadership campaign in 2022, where I flagged up all the policies I was going to pursue, I said that we should look again at the Bank of England's mandate.
Again, I was accused of attacking the Bank of England's independence.
So they weren't interested in what the actual monetary policy was; they were interested in my attack on the Bank of England's independence.
Whenever an organization justifies itself by saying it's independent, that, in my view, is a red flag that there is a problem.
So all of this should be talked about—the international monetary system, the independence of central banks, the role of cryptocurrencies.
I think all of those things are under the surface of what's gone wrong over the past 30 years. Monetary policy is very important, but we haven't talked about it.
Can I tell you about a couple of things that I've experienced that I've gone through, which seem ludicrous? I'd love your perspective on it.
I was a Lloyd's Bank customer for 25 years, and I got a phone call one day from a call center—somebody who worked in there, no idea, sounded about 25 years old—asking me about a couple of my transactions.
I said, "Which ones?" They brought up two where I transferred money to a Bitcoin exchange.
I said, "Am I under investigation?" They said, "No, we just want to know why you're transferring this money."
I said, "Well, we run a business. I've got two kids and run four businesses. It's none of your business."
Three days later, they closed out my bank account. I got a letter.
Sorry, two weeks later, three days later, I got a letter closing down my bank account.
I then moved to another bank, a neo-bank. They closed down my bank account because my podcast was about Bitcoin, and I got a payment from a company, a sponsor, which was a Bitcoin company.
They closed down my bank account.
So I'm now with Revolut, and Revolut works very well for me.
But so many people I know have either had bank accounts closed or they've had restrictions put on them to even purchase Bitcoin, which they see as an escape.
Now we've been in this ludicrous place where you have to be a high-net-worth investor now to buy Bitcoin, yet I can download infinite gambling apps on my phone and bet on the price of ping pong or the next point in tennis.
It feels like the banking system has become part of the surveillance.
They don't want to lose control.
They don't want to lose control, but it also feels like part of the surveillance state as well.
Well, yes, and you know, as the politically exposed person rule—you remember the whole Nigel Farage bank account incident?
You know, I've struggled to get bank accounts and things like that for that reason.
You have as well?
Yeah, yeah. It's very, very difficult for politicians to operate for that reason.
But you're the guy who... you're the guy...
Sorry, I say you're still subject to all these rules.
I mean, I think all of this in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, there was a lot of extra bureaucracy created.
It hasn't actually helped customers; it's just made the whole system bureaucratic and, as you say, increased levels of interference.
Well, even if you're taking money out as cash these days, if you want to take out a couple of thousand pounds at a branch, you get interrogated on your own money.
Liz, I don't understand how the banking system now has been weaponized against the productive parts of society.
Surely we should be helping and supporting the productive parts of society.
But this comes from... you know, it always starts with, "We want to protect people from making bad investment decisions," or "We want to give them a chance to think about what they've done," or "We want to make sure that..."
A lot of the politically exposed person came in through anti-money laundering legislation, and then there is a mission creep.
Essentially, what I was saying about unelected state bureaucrats having unaccountable power—when the state regulates industries, it also means those people have unaccountable power.
Because you're giving them unaccountable power by proxy, and this is exactly what happened with the post office scandal.
Do you remember the post office were given the power to prosecute people? The minute you give people unaccountable power, it always gets misused by bad people who want to cover things up or people with ideological motives.
It always gets misused, so we have to be very careful about where state power gets used.
So how should we change the economic foundation or the economic policies of our country? What is required to make us a more prosperous country, to drive growth?
Because I'm pretty sure there's nothing Labour's going to do over the next five years that will drive meaningful growth.
Definitely. I mean, all they're going to do is make everything worse from a bad position.
Well, I can say that as a business owner. What do we need to do?
We need to abandon Net Zero and repeal the Climate Change Act.
We need to get fracking. One of the things that drove the American energy revolution was fracking.
Cheap energy made it much easier to manufacture, much easier to run a business.
We know there's going to be lots of businesses like AI that require high levels of energy.
We need to get fracking, abandon Net Zero.
Let's just deal with each one at a time then.
Oh my God, there's a very long list.
Yeah, I know, but okay, so what's the stop?
The US banned Net Zero.
Well, you've got a government that is ideologically committed.
Miliband put in this piece of legislation in 2008—the Climate Change Act. They're ideologically committed. They are believers in Greta Thunberg.
You know, they're friends with the people that stick themselves to the road.
They say we've got a government that's ideologically opposed, but I think ideologically opposed to what I'm saying.
But I also think we need the public to speak up more.
I mean, we have the highest energy bills in the developed world.
Maybe if there were more protests, or you know, the farmers came out and protested about inheritance tax, but where are the householders saying we're not putting up with this anymore?
We've got the highest energy bills in the world.
We don't actually want to pursue a suicidal Net Zero policy when nobody else is doing it, which they're not.
This is all about political will, but in Westminster, there's a panoply of vested interests constantly lobbying the green energy companies.
They're lobbying for more subsidies. You know, Dale Vince, you've got Dale Vince, you've got the swampy types, you know, the Just Stop Oil blocking the roads, etc.
There needs to be a countervailing force, which is what I'm talking about—political movements.
There needs to be a countervailing force saying we're not going to put up with these high energy prices anymore.
Businesses need to talk about this.
I mean, businesses have only started—well, big business in particular—complaining after the budget, even though the Labour Party spent the entire election campaign saying we're going to put in all these naughty Net Zero policies.
They pretty much admitted they were going to raise tax, but there were a lot of businesses that were quite quiet and have only started complaining now.
Check Sky News. I think some retailer just came out today and said they're closing more stores because of the budget.
Why? Why? Where were they three, four, five years ago?
Anyway, the other things we need to do: the Town and Country Planning Act 1947—probably the most damaging piece of legislation in British history—needs to be repealed.
Don't know anything about it?
So this was under the Clement Attlee government, and essentially it nationalized land and made it much harder to build houses.
In the 1930s, and you can see this, you know, all the semis that have been built around cities like Leeds or London or wherever, they were all built in the 1930s before the Town and Country Planning Act.
We were building 300,000 homes a year.
Labour can't manage that now, but in 1947, the Attlee government put in the Town and Country Planning Act, put in the huge green belts around cities, some of which aren't green.
It's one thing I agree with Keir Starmer on—there is a grey belt.
But also, it just made it incredibly cumbersome to build houses.
You have to get permission from the local council to do what you want on your own land.
Until we get rid of that, I think it is very difficult for things to get built in this country.
Should government be building houses?
No. These houses in the 30s were being built entirely by the private sector—300,000 houses a year—and it was all ruined by the Attlee government.
Okay, so those are two things that I do.
Yeah, massively cut the size of government.
I'm a Javier Milei fan.
You're a libertarian.
You're a libertarian conservative.
I think somebody said that a conservative is a libertarian with daughters, and I have two daughters, so I have one.
Yeah, I could agree with that one.
So it ought... I mean, these words like libertarian or conservative depend on how you interpret them.
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Yeah, I mean, look, I agree with massively reducing the size of government because I'm seeing my taxes go up year after year after year.
But also, it actually stops growth because you're taking away people who could be doing productive things, and you're putting them in Whitehall.
Yes, or they're working from home and pretending to be in Whitehall.
So you are taking productive people out of the system.
But you're also taking money from productive people to give to government to distribute to unproductive people.
Correct.
Again, I say, I know that somebody has multiple businesses. I keep talking about this.
I honestly feel less inclined to start new businesses these days because it's just like, what's the point?
The hurdle rate to get to the point where you actually get to a dividend is so high now.
It's not... you're preaching to the converted.
Yeah, but so where do you stand?
I had George Galloway in here the other day, and even as a Conservative, I don't agree with him on very much.
No, but I respect he stands up for what he believes in, and he doesn't toe any kind of party line.
But one area I did have an interesting conversation with him about, as somebody who disagrees with most of left-wing politics, is that I'm troubled by some of the privatization.
I'm troubled by what's happened to the water industry, that part of privatization, where I had somebody in—we made a show about it—and how private equity has essentially siphoned out and laid all these companies now with a huge amount that it's led to a lack of investments and pollution in our rivers.
It's been very badly regulated.
So you put that down to regulation?
Yes.
So it could be privatized, but so how would you change the regulation for that?
So first of all, you've got a proliferation of regulators.
So you've got Ofgem, you know, Ofwat—all these different regulators regulating the same things, which are basic utilities.
I would have a single regulator covering all the industries, and if somebody is providing utility like water, and there are some...
If you had a single regulator, you could actually have telecoms companies or electricity companies running, you know, using the same basic infrastructure—all network infrastructure.
So it would be more efficient.
But if you're providing a utility, I don't think the government is particularly good at running organizations or operations.
I think we could all agree on that.
Actually, what the story of the railway industry over the last 30 years is, more and more of it is effectively run by the government.
Civil servants and the Department of Transport are deciding the train timetable, whatever.
You know, they shouldn't be doing that.
But if it's a business where you are just providing utility, it should be regulated on a cost-plus basis or something like that so that the infrastructure is being properly priced.
It's just... and it's really the sort of government is... it's like a spider's web of laws that it's almost impossible to get to the bottom of which law is creating all the problems.
So do you remember at HS2 there was the massive bat tunnel that cost millions?
But that is because of the natural habitat tax directive, which is a piece of European legislation we didn't get off the statute books.
So if you actually got rid of all that stuff, like the natural habitats directive, like the nutrient neutrality rules, then you could actually properly monitor the water companies on whether they were delivering the infrastructure in a cost-efficient way.
At the moment, that's impossible because there's just so much bureaucracy on top of it.
You're like swimming in the bureaucracy.
But the idea... I mean, before these utilities were privatized, it took six months to get a phone line.
The state was not good at doing this stuff.
I remember British Rail when I was a child. It was rubbish. All the trains were late. They were dirty.
They were...
They still are, aren't they?
They're still...
They are from better.
Well, they've got worse.
No, no, but they got better.
Yeah, and now they're getting worse because there's more and more state involvement in them.
Right.
Now, I don't think we could go into a long discussion about... I don't think they were privatized in the right way.
Right.
I think you should have privatized the train and the track together.
Go back to the days of Great Western Railways and, you know, those great sort of companies that actually controlled the track and train ran the service.
That's what we ought to have done.
Separating the track and train was a mistake.
So sorry, you said the government isn't very good at running... what is government actually good at? Or is it that government is a necessary evil and it should do the best it can?
Necessary.
It's just necessary.
So, for example, natural monopolies—defense, yes. Keeping our country safe. Police, keeping our streets safe.
Making sure that everybody in society has the means of getting a good education.
That doesn't mean the government has to provide schools. It just means that everybody should have a means of getting a good education.
But I think there's been massive mission creep in what the state does, and it's been a disaster.
I don't think the state should be investing in the arts, for example.
What business is it of the government about whether a museum is good or bad?
It's quite nice that museums are kept free.
I'm afraid we're going to disagree on this point.
Yeah, you know, I really resent going abroad and paying to get into museums and then seeing tourists from overseas getting free into our museums.
I think that's completely wrong.
Yeah, no, I can understand that.
I just think a lot of people don't even get to travel abroad.
I remember when my kids were young, we would come down to London and go to the Victoria and Albert and Tate Modern.
I think we would go... we went more often because of the fact they were free.
Look, I can understand the arguments against it.
People who never go to those places are paying to subsidize your visit.
Yeah, I mean, you know, people with less money than you that couldn't even afford to go to London are basically subsidizing your visit to the V&A.
No, I know, and I agree because I've made the exact same argument.
So you like free things, basically.
What a surprise!
I'm afraid that the country is in the condition we're in because a lot of people like free things.
Because of me?
Because of me wanting free things?
Well, no, but look, I've made the exact same arguments against maternity leave—that people who choose not to have children should be paying for us to have children.
And I've made the exact same argument.
Don't worry, I've had the same pushback on me.
I've made the exact same argument because I think children are a benefit to society.
But you want them to be... you want people to freely have them without having to...
I want to have to pay for you if you want to have children.
It's the same argument, Liz.
Well, as a society, I think it's good if people in Britain are having children because that will mean that we're a successful country in the future.
I think it's good if we have... and the tax system is not neutral.
The tax system isn't neutral.
I know, I know.
No, look, I understand the point you're making.
I don't think we've done a particularly good... I don't think the police... I think the police have been under a lot of criticism for the entirety of my... since I was Connor's age, like 20s.
I don't know if they're actually doing a good job or they only get spoken about when there is a scandal.
And that's an area I've struggled with.
Defense, I don't really know how defense works for us because I've never lived at a time where we've been attacked.
So I don't... these aren't things... these are things that are nebulous to me.
These are the things the state has to do.
Yeah, no, there are things the state has to do, and we've talked...
I think improving accountability in all of these organizations will massively improve their performance.
What about the health service?
Goodness, man.
Well, I can give you my opinion first.
Get one, then.
So I have private healthcare because I think it's amazingly cheap in this country.
It costs for me and the kids less than 300 a month, whereas I know what people pay in the US, which is ridiculous amounts.
I had a back operation. I was in surgery three days after the diagnosis.
My son has shin splints, dealt with very well.
I think it's great that we have the NHS.
I think it's bloated. I think there's too much middle management.
But I think what we should do is incentivize more people to be private.
I think private healthcare should lead to a tax break, similar to private education, rather than punishing people for taking these.
That's where I am.
I don't think a fully privatized healthcare system... we've seen what happens in the US.
I don't think it's good, but that's not... that isn't the choice.
This is often presented as you either have to have the NHS or the American healthcare system.
No, I'm offering the middle ground—the Australian system.
I think the Japanese system is pretty good, which is a social insurance system.
I think some of the European systems are quite good, but I don't think the National Health Service does have to change.
It really does.
Is that stuck, being unable to be changed for the same reasons?
I think there are accountability problems, but I think not having a social insurance system with universal cover is a problem.
I think we should look at where it works best, where people are best cared for, and use their systems.
I know you've got to go up to the US a lot.
I go up to the US a lot.
Do you think we need more of a culture of freedom and liberty in this country?
Yes, God, yes.
Definitely.
Do you think it...
I'd love the First Amendment.
I don't want a written constitution. I just want the First Amendment.
Okay, would you want the Second Amendment?
I don't... all my American friends are like, "You need the Second Amendment to protect the First Amendment."
I don't think we have the right culture here, but how do you have a First Amendment without a constitution?
Why don't you want to have a constitution?
Well, we do have a constitution in that we have, you know, Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights—all of those great pieces of law that shape the liberties we have.
I think the liberties that were there already, such as free speech, which is in the Bill of Rights, have actually been curtailed by more recent pieces of legislation like the Human Rights Act.
So I think getting rid of all this... those false rights, if you like.
I mean, why should a rapist have a right to a family life in Britain? It doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
So I think if we get rid of that, those false rights, we will return to our traditional British liberties.
So we should... but I fear if we ended up with a written constitution, it would be subject to huge judicial interpretation.
I want Parliament to be in charge of this country. I don't want the judiciary to be in charge of this country.
Okay, I agree.
But I don't think we have free speech in the country right now.
I agree with that.
I don't think we have definitely a free media.
I think journalists are concerned about writing particular articles, especially independent journalists.
I've been through a five-year legal lawsuit recently for tweets, and I know there are people right now who are currently in jail for writing things on Twitter.
I don't think we have a culture of freedom and liberty.
I don't think we have a culture of free speech in this country.
I agree, but we have to look at why we've ended up there.
We've ended up there because of various communications acts that have limited free speech—the online...
I think it's the Online Safety Act, the Human Rights Act...
Yeah, the Online Safety Act, the Equality Act—all of these pieces of legislation have essentially made it harder for people to be free in this country.
Even though they've got nice names like rights and equality.
So you think this is great stuff?
Or Online Safety—who could be against that?
They've had the effect of damaging our traditional liberties.
This is the difference, I think, in Britain. Our whole culture is based on the idea that people are free to do something provided it isn't prohibited.
Whereas other countries have this approach of positive rights.
We've never had that culture of positive rights, and Tony Blair in particular tried to insert that into our culture, and it has not worked.
So we've got to get rid of all that stuff.
Where do you think our place is in the world now?
Because I feel somewhere near Europe, it's just off the coast of France.
You know, we are a small nation with a rich history.
My American friends are always taking the piss out of me, saying, "You're a small, irrelevant nation now."
Well, I like to think we invented them, basically.
Well, did we?
We did.
And I like to say...
They get offended if I say that.
I say, "Obviously, there was a bit of development after that."
Well, you know, the thing you can mock them for is you got rid of us for a 2% tax and now pay 61% tax in California.
So did you really get freedom?
But they do question our place in the world.
I think we should stop worrying about this stuff.
I really think we should stop worrying, and we should start worrying about how to make our country successful again.
That's what we should worry about.
That's what people in Britain care about.
But I think it's the same thing.
I think making our country successful again is what people want to see.
I think that's quite...
So I don't think we should... we shouldn't spend time like a sort of teenage girl at a party worried about what other people think of us.
We should be focusing on improving ourselves.
Well, but I again think I'm making the same point.
I think the point there is this kind of reflection on us.
Yeah, yeah.
They maybe only see the headlines, but what are they seeing at the moment?
They're seeing a faltering economy, high tax, socialist left-wing government, rape gangs, they're seeing a migrant crisis, mass immigration, and they're looking at us thinking, "Oh, Britain's fallen."
But thank God for X because it's exposing all of the problems in this country, and people are able to speak freely on it.
Actually, Americans are able to speak freely on X because they can't be prosecuted under any of the bunkers laws that we have in this country.
So I say good on them for exposing what the problems are because the sooner we acknowledge what the problems are in this country, the sooner we can get on with sorting them out.
Well, there's a huge amount of problems. Everything we've spoken about, you've spoken about, comes back to this swamp.
Everything comes back to needing a hard shift.
You're a fan of Milei?
I am a fan of Milei.
I'm a fan of you.
I may become a fan of Trump if he does something in the next four years.
I would say, how do you appeal then to the people on the left who think they're voting for good, but they don't really understand they're voting for things that work against their own best interest?
Well, I think they're rapidly finding out what a Labour government looks like.
Some of the people on the left are voting in their best interest.
If you're a train driver, you've done pretty well out of this Labour government.
Sure.
If you're a public sector worker who gets to work from home four days a week or whatever, you're doing pretty well out of this Labour government.
It's the people who voted Labour because they wanted to change. Those are the people who...
I mean, I think Keir Starmer is doing the job of explaining what the problems are with that approach.
Do you think he survives the year?
I do think he will.
I know there's a lot of doom and gloom, but he's got a huge parliamentary majority.
This is the difference.
We've just been talking about Argentina and the US.
I do not understand... I do not know any details about El Salvador and the system there, but the point is they have a presidential system.
So once a president gets elected, they can't really be removed.
Whereas we have a parliamentary system.
So this is my point about it's not just the identity of the leader that's important; it's having 350 MPs with iron wills.
You don't just need... you need people who are prepared to vote the tough stuff through Parliament.
The people won't necessarily like... you know, there'll be all sorts of winging about getting rid of human rights or getting rid of Net Zero or abolishing the Town and Country Planning Act.
There'll be all sorts of winging about that.
You need really... you need a group of tough people.
I think that is what's different about the British system.
But how do we get back there again?
Because it feels like we're a long way from finding that person.
I've just said it's the people.
I said you just said you need 350 of these people.
You do, yeah.
But you also need... you don't just need 350 of the people; you need the people in the country who are going to support that and who are going to get on the streets and protest about how high their electricity bills are and start making noise.
Start making noise.
That's why I come back. I still think we're such a long way from that.
Well, yeah.
All right, final thoughts.
You know, you said there's 10 years to save the West.
How many years was that?
A year ago, I did it.
No, this is like... is 2024.
So the West has to be saved by 2034.
2034, okay.
You're going quite well so far in that Donald Trump got elected, so that was a big step forward.
So I think, like, you're hoping he delivers on the promise.
Yes, because if he fails and if he doesn't reduce the size of the state and if he doesn't reduce the size of the debt, it meant nothing.
Well, he's already... I think he's already having a positive effect on things like the woke agenda.
It has markedly lost a head of steam, I think, since he was elected.
And the Net Zero agenda—people are talking less about that.
So yes, he has to deal with issues like America's debt, but he also has to change the regulatory culture and the wokery that had been coming out of the US and having a bad influence here as well.
So what's your rallying cry then?
Let's get out there and protest.
It's not... my rallying cry is that we need a big bazooka to change Britain.
That it's not going to be enough just to elect a good leader.
There have to be... we need great MPs.
We need people to run the bureaucracy who believe in changing our country.
We need huge amounts of public support, and people have to understand what needs to happen.
If someone came along with that bazooka, could you be tempted back in?
I'm always willing to fire a bazooka.
Liz, thank you. I appreciate your time. You've been very generous.
Thanks to everyone listening.
Thank you. Bye.
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