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Morgoth - England Your England · UK Column Radio

0:07
Hello, welcome to UK column. I'm Ben Rubin and I am very
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excited today to be joined by someone who I think is one of
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our most important writers and commentators on contemporary
0:21
British society. Morgoth, welcome to the show.
0:25
Thank you very much for having me.
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I've been, I've been a fan of UK column for a long time actually.
0:29
So it's nice to, I think I've been mentioned on the site a few
0:33
times. So it's it's nice to be like
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formally on here. Fantastic.
0:39
Well, it's great to have you. So we have got a lot to talk
0:44
about. There's quite a bit going on in
0:46
the country at the moment, but we set ourselves a little bit of
0:50
homework to provide some context, which I think hopefully
0:54
should be quite, quite useful. And we've been away and we've
0:58
read an essay by George Orwell written in 1942 called England
1:05
Your England. And this was, as I'm sure pretty
1:09
much everyone listening to this will know, slap bang in the
1:13
middle of the Second World War. And it starts with the most
1:15
incredible opening line, which says, as I write, highly
1:18
civilised human beings are flying overhead trying to kill
1:21
me, which is quite, quite a good way to start an essay.
1:27
And he talks about England, the English and the British more
1:31
broadly. And one of the lines that I love
1:33
in it is that he says England is continuous.
1:38
It stretches into the future and into the past.
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And I suppose my first question is more golf.
1:45
Is England in 2025 continuous with the England All Well wrote
1:50
about 83 years ago? No, I don't think it is.
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I think it's something entirely different.
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And, and I think the it's, it's, it's all it's becoming.
2:01
It's all it's all is or is in the process of becoming a break.
2:06
And we could get into this because all we'll see is of
2:09
course, change happens over time.
2:12
But I think what, what people refer to, I don't know if you've
2:16
seen this, but they call it the UK and it's like, YO, OK, AY.
2:23
And it's, it's kind of a funny sort of meme on the Internet.
2:28
There's people been writing about it, people have done some
2:30
surprisingly kind of deep esoteric takes on it.
2:35
But I think it, it describes something, which is the reason
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why it's called that reason why it resonates with people is
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because it's, it's a fundamental break with what Orwell was
2:45
describing. And it's, it's this new place,
2:49
It's a non place, like a kind of squalid airport, which doesn't
2:55
have the kind of characteristics, uh, it doesn't
2:59
have the feel of the, of the things that all was describing.
3:04
And funny enough, I, I actually think in Orwell's essay, the
3:09
reasons that we ended up at the UK are actually dotted in there
3:14
in, in what he's saying as a kind of warning.
3:19
You know, it's kind of strange. It's almost like a subplot which
3:24
came to overwhelm the entire saga, which which he alludes to
3:28
then passing a few a few times, which I'll be so that that's how
3:33
old that's that. I could expand on that quite a
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bit with Orwell and and it what, 1984 and all of that.
3:40
But yeah, that's well, we can come back to that.
3:43
Yes. Now I, I, I would tend to agree
3:46
with you actually. I, I, I think that the old world
3:50
is still there, bubbling away beneath the surface, but there's
3:53
definitely this kind of facade that's been placed on top of it.
3:57
I like that idea of a non place and you talked about a squalid
4:02
airport and I remember going into Luton airport once a few
4:07
years ago and it just looked horrific.
4:10
It was basically like going into a set of Rd. works.
4:13
And actually on the news yesterday, Brian Garish was
4:15
talking about a trip he took to A&E last week.
4:18
And it it was this horrific, brutalist 60s building that's
4:25
being extended. I think he's Derriford Hospital.
4:27
And basically he was stuck in A&E in this kind of in between
4:31
place with junk food in the vending machines and BBC
4:35
propaganda on, on, on the the TV screen, keeping people sort of
4:39
semi comatose while they're sitting there for 10 hours.
4:43
And that to me, that sounds like the kind of UK place that you're
4:46
talking about. Yeah, it's, it's kind of like
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there's, I mean, just demographically it's so foreign
4:53
now. And in many places where you
4:57
don't even have one of the things that I've noticed is that
5:00
people don't even really care where people come from anymore.
5:05
Where it used to be, well, this person's from India or this
5:08
person's from Jamaica and they had their own sort of
5:11
distinctness and their own sort of heritage which they come
5:15
could come with them. And whether it was for good or
5:18
bad was kind of like, OK, whatever.
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But now the difference with the UK, the UK non place is that
5:27
none of that even seems to matter anymore because there's
5:30
no rudeness or heritage anywhere to be found.
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Even the immigrants end up just becoming the sort of drifting
5:37
sort of transient consumers or the the, the high streets of
5:42
vape shops and these American candy stores and, and this kind
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of thing. So there's that one place
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becomes the same as another becomes the same as another.
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And the people in it are just sort of wandering around
5:55
completely disorientated. It's, it's, it's utterly
5:59
alienating and, and depressing. And one of the things about it
6:04
that there was this, this, I mean, where one of the places
6:10
this came from was a Twitter account.
6:12
And he would just post out of context photos.
6:17
So for example, you would see, for example, like a, a Muslim
6:20
family standing outside of like a traditional English pub in, in
6:25
Canterbury or something. And that was it.
6:28
There'd be no context. That would just be that.
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And then the mainstream newspaper, I think it was the
6:33
Guardian or the New Statesman or something, they carried an
6:37
article on this and they didn't like it because they could, they
6:41
knew there was something insidious about this messaging,
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but they couldn't actually explain why without standing on
6:48
their own land mines. They because it's implicit.
6:52
You, you get it. And this is, this is not the way
6:55
people are supposed to think. It's supposed to be woven in to
6:59
a narrative. You, you have, you have to have
7:02
a, a data set and all of the rest of it you.
7:05
And, and that wasn't what it is. It was hitting people in the
7:08
gut, which they knew intuitively to be off kilter and, and not
7:13
quite right. And, and so this is, This is why
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I think it's interesting. And and that sort of not quite
7:20
rightness that the uncanny valley feeling to it is, is why
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it resonates with people who are looking at this.
7:29
And unfortunately, you know, in times gone by, we could have
7:34
this as a national conversation in the media, but we can't
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because we can't address what's actually going on.
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So we live in this non place that denies itself and it's
7:47
utterly confusing and demoralising for everybody.
7:52
Yeah, I like that idea that it's alienating to everyone actually.
7:56
You know, this, this kind of multicultural mush where
8:01
identity is essentially denied to the majority, but as an
8:06
extension of that, it has to be denied to everyone else as well.
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So it just ends up being a compromise.
8:13
Yeah, I, I, I find it, I find it bizarre that somebody would
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leave like the hills of Pakistan to live in it, like above a flat
8:21
in Hull or something like that. It's bizarre.
8:25
I find that strange. Yeah.
8:28
No, I completely agree. I completely agree.
8:31
So you talked a little bit about seeing the seeds of the of this
8:35
transformation, this decimation of our national story throughout
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this essay. And I'm guessing that one of
8:43
those might be the the liberal intelligentsia and you've
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mentioned the Guardian. Is that is that what you were
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thinking about? Well, I would say what he's
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describing there is there's the bourgeoisie.
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And I actually posted this on Twitter because I'd read it this
9:00
morning. And then I kind of went on
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Twitter and I did AI posted it. And it's got, it's getting quite
9:07
a bit of traction. And he said the the working
9:11
man's heart does not leap when he sees a Union Jack.
9:15
But the famous insularity and xenophobia in courts of the
9:19
English is far stronger. And the working class, Southern
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and bourgeoisie in all countries, the poor are more
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national than the rich, but the English working class are
9:28
outstanding in their abhorrence and foreign habits.
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And what, what I think's interesting about that is is,
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you know, you just need to look at people standing outside of
9:38
these migrant hotels. But fundamentally it's a war
9:41
being waged on from on bourgeoisie on the, the working
9:46
class. So you could say this was a sort
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of it's, it's an old and implicit part of English
9:53
identity. But again, to touch on what we
9:56
were saying about the, the UK vacation you, I think we're
10:00
reaching a breaking point. I think it's become something
10:02
existential. But what I, I think the, the
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real sort of what Orwell is really hinting at as well is
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when he mentions and I, I, I cut this bit out.
10:16
Moreover, the tendency of small businesses to merge together
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into larger ones rob more and more of the moneyed class of
10:24
their function and turned them into mere owners, their work
10:28
being done for them by salaried managers and technicians.
10:32
This is actually quite a deep point for Orwell, because in
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there was a This was an essay in 1941.
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In 1942, a thinker called James Burnham wrote a book called The
10:47
Managerial Revolution, and Burnham before that had written
10:51
other book such as the he was very much a realist in his
10:55
approach. And in my copy of the Managerial
10:59
Revolution, there's a lengthy introduction by George Orwell
11:03
himself. And what's fascinating just
11:07
reading that is that there's a, there's a few things, but one of
11:10
them is 1984 is actually a, a parody of the managerial
11:17
revolution and O'Brien in 1984, people say it's supposed to be
11:22
James Burnham. And what they mean by the
11:27
managerial revolution is that the future would be dictated to
11:32
by as he says there. I mean, this is this is this is
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Burnham's sort of view on where the revolution of the world was
11:42
not going to be fascist or communist.
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It was going to be a revolution of the managers.
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And it's interesting to look at what Orwell says here.
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You know, he says the tendency of small businesses to merge
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together into larger ones, rob more and more of the money class
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of their function and turn them into mere owners, their work
12:04
being done for them by salaried managers and technicians.
12:08
And this means that if you take something like, for example, the
12:13
the Ford Foundation, you would normally have thought that
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there'd be a kind of a Rob a Baron or Aceo or a kind of Elon
12:24
Musk figure at the top. Musk is a kind of, he's kind of
12:28
like revenge of the ownership class.
12:31
He's a, he's a bit weird in our current age because what we see
12:35
in these giant firms and these foundations and eventually these
12:39
NGOs is that they are all run by managers and technicians.
12:44
It's so it's as if the middle management has taken over
12:48
everything. And you can see this in, I mean,
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obviously something like the United Nations or the World
12:56
Health Organization or all of these bureaucracies, all of them
13:00
are managers and technicians and they all rule the world today.
13:05
And in the old days, of course, you would have a kind of
13:09
charismatic boss at the top who would be almost like a
13:13
sovereign, like a king. And then you'd have the, the
13:17
work, the, the small businesses as well and the, the workers at
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the bottom. But what the managers do is
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almost like take over the, the running of the firm.
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And so you get these strange things where resources are
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allocated to things which the man at the top just knows
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nothing about woke and all of the, the, the kind of all of the
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funding of woke, it just, it just sort of passed them all by.
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This is how you can get these weird things where Amazon or all
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these massive corporations are just funding subversive
13:51
political movements and NGOs all over the place.
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And it's all these kind of Midwick managers in the middle
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because society became sort of too complicated for one man to
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to to you needed specialists. You needed the technicians and
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the managers. And that is what Burnham said
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would come to dominate the rest of the twenty 20th century.
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I mean, I think we are coming to the end of that system now.
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I I think it's beginning to fall apart all around us.
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I mean, one of the the perfect examples of would be where
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Twitter was a kind of of the managers.
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It was of that class. They took it over from Jack
14:37
Dorsey and then you what you saw Elon must come in like a
14:41
sovereign and just fire them all and get rid of them all.
14:45
And so this is a kind of thing, a schism which is going on
14:48
across the West and an emerging. But I also think so much of what
14:53
we see is a result of the managerial revolution.
14:58
You can just see it everywhere you look.
14:59
One of the examples would be just last week with the sort of
15:03
the Afghani, the Tory party covering up this, this data
15:08
breach, which was a sort of malfunction of the bureaucracy.
15:14
And they, they all think just sort of like computers.
15:18
They, they've got no sort of agency outside of the
15:21
bureaucracy. And so they tended to come to
15:24
the conclusion that what we're going to do is just carry on the
15:28
logic of the system and an important entire army and their
15:32
families mean this is the best case scenario.
15:36
The other scenario is that you could say it's just completely
15:38
malicious. But sticking with the theme
15:40
here, you can see that this is all just the system working as
15:44
intended by these managers and technicians.
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They run, they run everything. And I think they're running
15:49
everything into the ground and it's falling apart because they
15:52
aren't real thinkers. They don't have any kind of
15:56
spiritual element to the more philosophical curiosity.
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They are just pen pushing sort of dead swilled bureaucrats.
16:06
And, and this is what Burnham predicted was going to happen in
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1942. He said that fascism and
16:15
communism were both very similar because they they were both just
16:20
managerial systems in essence. The thing with Burnham is that
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he wasn't, he didn't really believe in ideologies.
16:27
He would first and foremost, he was a realist and a
16:31
Machiavellian. So the ideology would just be a
16:34
kind of post talk justification for what power wanted to do.
16:39
And this is essentially when you come to the managerial side of
16:43
it, you can see that the systems are actually more similar than
16:46
what they're not of the way they function.
16:50
And in 1984, of course, this is exactly what you see.
16:54
You see this again where you it's this kind of hollowed out
16:58
dead soul bureaucracy with a few people at the top, but Big
17:03
Brother like doesn't really exist.
17:05
And all of the rules at the bottom, it's the ones in the
17:08
middle, the the it's, it's a kind of civil war amongst the
17:11
managers themselves in the middle.
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And so this is what I thought was fascinating about All's
17:19
essay was that there's a lot of other things which are nice and
17:22
interesting to get into. But I was just quite struck that
17:25
this is a year before he would have had his back and forth with
17:30
Burnham, and I think about six or seven years before he
17:34
published 1984. And it was just fascinating to
17:38
see that in, in the article, in the essay.
17:41
Yeah, I agree. He he's well predicted many
17:45
things, right. But that this, this
17:48
transformation of the economic and political systems, that was
17:52
one of the things that really jumped out on me too.
17:54
I think we were describing that I, I talked about this on the
17:57
news yesterday. There was a, a report that came
17:59
out last week from an organization called Mooring
18:02
Common, who you might be familiar with is run by Brendan
18:05
Cox, the widower, widower of Joe Cox.
18:08
And they've basically done this big national survey, 20,000
18:13
people. And they've broken down the
18:14
country into these different segments basically based on
18:17
their attitudes towards various different things.
18:20
Lots of questions are asked and they got this one segment that I
18:23
was fascinated by that they called established liberals,
18:27
which is 9% of the population. And these established liberals,
18:32
I feel look at them as default liberals, right?
18:34
Because if you're a default liberal, that's something I need
18:37
from Andrew Breitbart. He used to talk about this.
18:42
Basically it just means you don't have to think about
18:44
anything too much. Yeah, just default liberal.
18:47
Whatever. I won't.
18:47
I'll go along with the flow. But that's basically what you
18:50
were describing. That's the managerial supposedly
18:53
elite. They're the people running the
18:55
civil service. They're the ones at the top of
18:58
the consulting firms. They're the ones in the the kind
19:02
of mid management in the the corporations and actually they
19:07
are very happy with the status quo.
19:10
Even as the country is going up in smoke all around them.
19:13
They just kind of sat there and they think everything's going
19:16
fine. That it is in in sort of our
19:20
era. It is the consensus forming
19:23
apparatus. They dictate and decide what is
19:26
allowable and what is not allowable.
19:29
What opinions you can have, what you can protest and what you can
19:33
stand for. I, I do think it's in crisis
19:36
across the board, though, because the, the chronic lack of
19:39
agency, the chronic lack of anybody.
19:42
I mean, you know, you often find that if, if you work in some of
19:46
these, these places, there is this kind of the conformity
19:51
become suffocating and you need somebody to come in.
19:54
It's it's crazy because I've worked in places like warehouses
19:58
where the their way of doing things was just so chronically
20:02
inefficient. That the event have instead of
20:04
thinking for themselves, they hire another branch of
20:07
managerialism to come in and do the thinking for all them.
20:10
But it's it's it's the managers like sort of policing the
20:14
managers on their own efficiency and it ends up going on and on
20:17
forever. I think this is AI do think this
20:21
is a good and interesting way of understanding the world around
20:27
us. A lot of people would sort of
20:28
push as Orwell did find that Burnham's just so cynical that
20:34
it it becomes almost like nihilistic in a way.
20:37
And I think he parodies that well in of course, I mean,
20:41
Burnham was saying this is not what I want.
20:44
This is just what will be regardless of I, I don't, I'm
20:48
just saying this is where we're going.
20:50
I mean, he got a few things wrong.
20:52
He assumed Germany would win, but by the end of it, you did
20:56
see that sort of Western capital itself would become just
21:00
completely managerial, if for no other reason than they had to
21:05
produce so many tanks, so many jeeps and bullets, they had to
21:11
form all these bureaucracies to ship men around for the war.
21:14
And then after the war, when we head into the Cold War, you'll
21:17
see that what you've really got is 2 sprawling giant managerial
21:21
bureaucracies facing off at each other.
21:24
And it always seems to be that something more esoteric or
21:28
metaphysical, it always gets squeezed out.
21:32
And, you know, to go back to sort of Orwell's essay on, on
21:37
Englishness, you will see that a lot of what he's talking about
21:41
you can't easily put down on a spreadsheet because it is
21:44
something felt and something intuitive.
21:47
But that this is this is exactly the, the conversations and the
21:50
arguments people have every day on Twitter.
21:54
You know, there was something the other day on, on LBC where
21:58
there was a little old lady rang in about this situation with
22:03
Afghanistan. Who, who are they?
22:06
They do have the highest sort of that the data we have got.
22:09
They do have the highest rates of like sexually assaulting
22:13
people. But this woman was saying like
22:16
this is not right. This is.
22:18
And Ian Dale was pushing back on it and his sort of, I just think
22:23
this is typical of what you see because the old woman, she felt
22:27
that something was not right. She, she didn't have the
22:31
language, she didn't have the all of the correct phrases and
22:34
whatnot, but she was trying to impart something that there's
22:37
something not right about this and I don't like it.
22:40
And Ian Deal was asking her, for example, his, he was asking to
22:44
explain what she meant. And the premise of his argument
22:46
was that, well, the Afghans that are coming over were against the
22:51
Taliban. And therefore they are like us.
22:55
Therefore they are just like the liberals.
22:59
They they, they, these people are from like the most backward
23:03
place on Earth, are literally just liberal managerial types
23:09
waiting. They're all Guardian, they're
23:10
all potential Guardian readers and, and all now it's so absurd.
23:16
It's so ridiculous. But the problem is the the sort
23:20
of the bureaucracy as it stands and the incentives are set up
23:24
such a way that that opinion gets rewarded and amplified.
23:28
And the little old lady who is actually correct is seen as some
23:32
kind of nut job heretic from the orthodoxy and non personed and
23:38
all of this kind of thing. And this is how we arrived at
23:40
this this because of this system.
23:43
Yes, she's been asked to articulate something that
23:46
shouldn't need to be articulated, right.
23:49
It's just intuitively. Understood.
23:52
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's interesting.
23:54
So you. Yes.
23:55
So he's these kind of spreadsheet people, data, they
23:58
love data, talk about data. It's all about numbers.
24:02
If they haven't got a graph in front of them and they can't see
24:04
what's going on, it all has to be quantitatively evidenced in
24:08
some way. You know, sounds like Dale's in
24:11
that in that category. It's a funny thing because when
24:14
you draw that to its logical conclusion, a lot of things
24:19
begin to break down and make no sense.
24:21
And one of them was there was an example when there was one of
24:24
those sort of Astroturf green movements and they put some kind
24:29
of spray paint on Stonehenge a year or two back.
24:33
And I remember the, the, the kind of the, you know, the, the
24:36
Lib tapes asking, well, it doesn't matter.
24:39
It's just a pile of rocks. And, and another, another
24:42
example would be when those, those two idiots cut down the,
24:48
the tree at the Sycamore gap and you're, you're left, you're left
24:51
with just this. It's tragic.
24:53
I mean, it's my part of the world.
24:55
I love it up there. I've been there many times.
24:58
It really is heartbreaking. But the problem is from the
25:02
perspective where everything is just this sort of data sheet and
25:06
everything has to be quantified and put down like that, there's
25:11
not really any way that you can like.
25:14
So what's the problem exactly? There's still plenty more
25:17
Sycamore trees. Why is that part of the world?
25:22
Why do we treasure the Sycamore gap, that dip in the Roman wall
25:26
with that tree there? Why is that objectively like
25:31
more important than Terminal 5 at Heathrow?
25:34
Why do we appreciate one and not the other?
25:37
And the problem is the, the, the system as it stands now and the
25:42
intelligentsia and the, the, the, the intellect who get
25:45
platformed, they can't answer that question, yet they somehow
25:49
still sort of their own values negate even the question
25:54
because, well, it's just a tree. Just as in, in the same way
25:58
Stonehenge is just a pile of rocks because that's what
26:02
they've reduced identity to, which is, and that's how you end
26:07
up with the UK vacation of everything.
26:10
Because what does it matter if everybody's just a consumer unit
26:13
that then it doesn't matter where they come from.
26:15
It doesn't matter what the shops look like.
26:17
It doesn't matter what the so all this like aesthetics,
26:20
metaphysics, it's all just crushed under the Gears of of of
26:25
the system. Indeed it is, yes.
26:29
Whatever happened to those two fellows?
26:30
You got caught doing that for doing that?
26:32
Did anything actually happen? You got?
26:34
Yeah, they went to jail for, I think it was four years.
26:37
OK, But there wasn't actually anything particularly, as far as
26:42
I'm aware. I didn't look too much into it,
26:44
but I think we're just a pair of drunken idiots.
26:48
I don't think there was much. And they snitched on each other
26:51
as well. And like it all fell apart.
26:53
I don't think it was some kind of insidious plot or anything.
26:56
I think it was just a pair of clowns.
27:00
And, and you know, they've taken seedlings from the tree and
27:03
they've got they've, they're trying to resuscitate it and
27:06
bring it back and, and all of the rest of it.
27:09
I was thinking about writing something on this because you
27:12
just think, well, what, what is this, this kind of painful
27:17
effort where they've got all of these curtains and they've got
27:20
them in nurseries, tree nurseries all around the
27:23
country, painstakingly trying to get the memory to live on.
27:28
And, and I just think, but why can't we extend that to the
27:32
nation and the people in general instead of doing it in this
27:37
symbolic sense? Because unless you, if you,
27:40
unless you hold that sort of consistently, it's it's kind of
27:45
just performative. Like can we not?
27:47
OK, fair enough. I get it.
27:48
That's fine. Like let's let's do that.
27:51
Let's put more meaning on the Sycamore tree stump week.
27:56
That's great. But let's draw that out a little
27:59
bit. Let's let's keep going.
28:01
But of course they wouldn't. Sooner or later they'll run into
28:04
something that they don't like and that will be that.
28:08
Yeah, just gets bulldozed out of the way.
28:10
I'm reminded now that you've brought up the Sycamore tree.
28:14
I found out recently that Epping Forest, not far from where I am
28:18
right now, is actually managed for the nation by the City of
28:23
London. Did you know that?
28:26
And so if you go to the Epping Forest website, the City of
28:31
London talks about Epping Forest and it basically says we look
28:35
after Epping Forest, which is an ancient, ancient woodland.
28:38
It's been there for thousands of years.
28:40
It's priceless national asset, an amazing place to go, just on
28:45
the edge of London. And they basically describe it
28:48
as a national asset that is worth £1.5 billion and it's
28:56
worth £1.5 billion because the City of London takes £50 million
29:03
a year from various people who want to hold events there or
29:07
film things there, whatever it might be.
29:10
And then they times that by 30 years.
29:13
And therefore, that's what Epping Forest is worth.
29:17
So they've reduced it down to an asset on their balance sheet and
29:21
that's how they talk about, it's how they think about it.
29:23
They've stripped all meaning away.
29:26
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, that's exactly it.
29:29
Yeah. That's the kind of grand
29:30
aversion of of the Sycamore tree cup and you get this, this is
29:36
how you'll get people. One of the, I think I may have
29:41
learned this on UK column actually, and it's the way they
29:45
get around planning permission laws where they invented like a
29:48
new thing called grey belt. And I remember I was in, I was
29:54
on the South Downs in Sussex some years ago now.
29:59
And they obviously the downs themselves, they had the, the
30:03
sort of protection you couldn't build on them rightly.
30:06
And but what they'd done was to so that you could stand on all
30:10
of these downs and then you could look out.
30:13
It was an ancient sort of Woodlands were there and then
30:16
you could look out across the English Channel and things.
30:19
And, and what they had done was at the foot of the Downs, They'd
30:22
they'd got these kind of new build kind of plastic houses
30:27
just right up to the very border where where they were allowed.
30:34
Like they, they got as close as they possibly could now.
30:37
And now technically they weren't building on the South Downs, but
30:42
the problem is when you were standing on the top, you were
30:45
still seeing all of this stuff. You, you could still see like a,
30:48
a little warehouse and all, the, all the rest of it.
30:51
And it, it kind of now this is, this is sort of how they get it,
30:56
because then they'll say, well, we didn't build on the South
30:59
Downs. And I think, well, no, you
31:01
didn't. But it's still been destroyed,
31:03
hasn't it? If we're honest, it's, it's the
31:05
view and and that fear, that ambience, it's, it's still gone.
31:11
Yeah, You know, it's, it's and it's this kind of this little
31:15
wiggle room which they always use.
31:18
Yes. It's just it's cold compliance.
31:21
It's the letter, not the spirit of the law, if you know what.
31:24
I mean, yeah, the, the this idea, especially in a country as
31:28
old as England where, well, there was something that was
31:32
like a mill built on a riverbank like 300 years ago.
31:35
So technically, yeah, that that gives us carte blanche.
31:38
Just put like a a block of flats up there.
31:41
It's so ridiculous because all these old buildings are just
31:44
part of the language. And so again, it goes back of
31:47
what I was just saying earlier, it's, it's the technicians
31:50
looking for technicalities to just sort of reproduce
31:55
themselves and their own kind of soullessness across the land.
32:01
Yes, completely agree. And actually this kind of
32:05
dumbing down, I mean, you touched about it before, right?
32:07
Dead sold bureaucrats, I think is what I wrote down.
32:10
I believe that's the phrase that you used.
32:12
And actually, one of the things that Orwell talks about in the
32:16
essay is the fact that people who elevate within the system,
32:21
the people that the actual ultimate controllers and owners
32:24
of the whole thing actually put into positions of authority are
32:28
are are are are not the most intelligent.
32:32
You don't want intelligent people, well motivated people
32:35
with initiative in place. You want just cogs in your
32:37
machine. And that's how you end up doing
32:40
things that we're talking about here, right?
32:41
They don't have the capacity to think laterally about anything.
32:44
They just do things to the letter of the legislation.
32:48
Yeah. Ultimately, this is I think
32:50
where we are today and why the system struggles is because you
32:55
you get this sort of, you can see what like Tony Blair brought
32:59
in, who was the arch technocrat and managerialist and there's
33:05
somebody just pulling up here. Postman's pulling up.
33:09
Sorry about that. We've got a we've got a very
33:11
jovial postman who who likes to make a song and dance when he
33:15
arrives. I lost my pain and thought and.
33:19
We were talking about the the managerial, yeah.
33:22
What what what you saw coming in is the overproduction of
33:29
managers, the overproduction of educated professional types to
33:33
go into the system. Now what happens is, and I think
33:37
we're there now is that eventually it becomes two top
33:40
heavy and you can't keep filling up.
33:42
You can't keep creating all of these useless non jobs that you
33:47
see these make work schemes with.
33:49
So you end up having to say it to many people.
33:52
And this with the advent of AI, if it actually comes, I mean,
33:56
we're still waiting to see how that goes.
33:58
What you're going to have with there's a massive amount of
34:00
people on the outside of the the system who should be in, but who
34:05
are dispossessed. And I don't mean the the kind of
34:08
the working class in this, but actual sort of the bourgeoisie,
34:12
as Orwell would have it. There's not going to be a place
34:15
at the table for them that's a problem because they begin
34:19
milling around outside of it with resentment, being resentful
34:22
of weather, of being left in the cold.
34:25
And there's a lot of that going on at the moment, which is why
34:29
sort of dissident groups become more professional, more slick,
34:34
better educated, and this kind of thing, as you can see in the,
34:37
in the sort of the hope not hate panic, They, they are in their
34:41
own kind of incompetent and stupid way, touching on
34:45
something which is real from their perspective.
34:49
Yes, Now that is the digitization and particular,
34:54
particularly AI now is having some very interesting social
34:59
effects. Because you were talking earlier
35:01
about this idea that we've had a war by the bourgeoisie on the
35:04
working classes in this country for decades now.
35:07
And actually, the bourgeoisie are now getting taste of their
35:10
own medicine because these new technologies that they're all
35:13
rushing headlong into are actually destroying their own
35:16
jobs and any possible jobs, future jobs that could come
35:20
along. And actually we're going to see
35:22
this kind of social collapse. Ultimately.
35:26
We've got people who've had established positions in the
35:31
social hierarchy for generations, hundreds of years
35:35
even, all of a sudden now are on the outside.
35:38
And who knows where that leads? Yeah, usually it leads with a
35:43
counter elite to to kind of to come in and you can see this, I
35:48
think, I think where the where the system is at the moment is
35:52
in this kind of desperate mode of throwing up, sort of holding
35:57
pens. I would say Reform UK in in in
35:59
the UKI think Nigel Farage and Reform are a kind of containment
36:05
zone. People may not like that, but
36:06
that that that's how I view it. And, and usually it's kind of
36:11
like buying themselves a bit of time by throwing up roadblocks
36:15
after roadblocks for ultimately there's no direction.
36:19
There's no, they don't know where to go because it's not in
36:23
their frame of reference. One of the things about Burnham,
36:28
I think Orwell wasn't idealist, but James Burnham absolutely was
36:33
not. And I think you end up just
36:36
almost like this, the Borg where everything just has to be
36:40
subsumed. And one of the things that
36:42
you'll find as well, which is I know Auk column has touched on a
36:46
lot, is this idea that viewing everything as a problem that has
36:51
to be solved. And the obviously the, the
36:53
biggest sort of example of this would be the COVID sort of
36:57
thing. Or you can look at the, the
36:59
resettlement of the Afghanis where all of a sudden the, the
37:03
system has the, has created a problem through its own
37:06
incompetence, its own increasing incompetence.
37:12
And then, well, we've got a problem that we have to solve.
37:14
And we'll, we'll go on the only solution that we know, which is
37:18
the most ridiculous and absurd and destructive one, because
37:22
they aren't actually again, tethered to any organic sense of
37:27
peoplehood or the land or a poetic sort of Orwellian in a
37:34
positive way. Normally you would say in the
37:36
context of England, your England Orwellian wouldn't be dystopian.
37:41
It would be something quite positive for a change.
37:44
But usually we're used to talking about that in the
37:47
context of 1984. So it's kind of strange.
37:50
You could see from both sides. But more famously, we are in the
37:54
dystopian Orwellian age for the time being.
37:59
Yes, that's certainly true. That's certainly true.
38:02
So there are, there are there are some parallels here though.
38:05
So we've said, we said at the start that the UK is is
38:09
discontinuous with England as all well understood it, but
38:12
actually there are some similar patterns emerging, right.
38:15
So we've talked a bit about the liberal intelligentsia and these
38:19
are the people to quote from the essay that he describes as
38:22
European eyes. They take their cookery from
38:24
Paris and their opinions from Moscow.
38:26
And I'd say I don't know where the current intelligentsia, as
38:30
they like to think of themselves, get their cookery
38:32
from, but they probably get their opinions from Brussels
38:36
rather than Moscow. But they're pretty much the same
38:38
opinions, I would say. But the, the, the counterpart to
38:42
that on the right is the the blimp, the kind of regimental
38:46
Sergeant major type, red faced, you know, still wearing his
38:50
medals down the pub in the 1960s kind of thing.
38:53
And I think that Farage and that crowd probably fit quite neatly
38:57
into that bucket, wouldn't you say?
38:59
I think yes, I do. Well, I think I think he the the
39:04
Colonel blimp type for God did he did he pretty much went
39:08
extinct. What what I would say about what
39:12
I've called before, like sort of bulldog nationalism is, is where
39:17
you what you have is a kind of pastiche of a postmodern sort of
39:22
spin on this kind of identity where it's you know, you know,
39:27
you look at somebody like Mike Graham and all of these
39:31
characters, they've all got this aura of I, I am sort of doggedly
39:37
speaking my mind as it is and I won't sort of cave in for this
39:41
work nonsense. And and it's a certain set.
39:46
It's all it's all rooted actually in the post war
39:49
mythology. But it is this kind of I'll say
39:52
it as it is. I'm not going to put up with any
39:54
political correct nonsense. And it's, it's all just stale
40:00
and it's all kind of controlled. Boris Johnson's kind of the
40:05
perfect example of, of a this, this kind of pastiche of an
40:10
older form of, of like this lingering vapour of an older
40:15
form of, of English identity. And the people are so bereft and
40:20
so desperate for some kind of champion in the elite.
40:25
To represent them, which is something that all touches on in
40:28
the essay as well, that they'll, they'll at least in recently
40:36
they've, they've glommed onto that.
40:37
They've latched onto it and thought, yeah, I'll if if you're
40:40
willing to stand there with the paint and sort of laugh with
40:44
about Muslim women in their burglars or whatever, then
40:47
you're my guy. Because that speaks more to me
40:50
than Gordon Brown or Keir Starmer or whoever.
40:55
And unfortunately, they just get ripped off and backstabbed over
40:59
and over and over again. Because it's kind of easy to
41:03
package that and sell it and dupe them over and over again.
41:09
But I think what we see now was with the general deterioration
41:13
of the country, it's people who are willing to go further and
41:18
further. Somebody like Rupert Low, for
41:20
example, is, is quite surprising.
41:22
He's all again, he's almost like a rogue elite in a way.
41:27
He's he's he's I'd say he's more of a a Trumpian figure than
41:32
Farage, though then again, Trump himself seems to have when the
41:38
chips are down, yeah, he'll he'll actually sort of dam up
41:41
the deep state and stand guard on a pile of what we're seeing
41:44
now. But this is the general
41:46
direction. And you think, are we, is
41:49
something going to change or is it all going to fall apart?
41:54
The, the other, the other view that people have on it, of
41:56
course, is that there's already these kind of technocratic
42:01
solutions waiting in the wings, such as digital ID and all of
42:05
that. I actually think that'll just
42:07
make things worse. The putting everybody on a
42:10
control grid is just going to make life even more miserable
42:14
and dystopian. And the violence on the streets
42:16
will carry on regardless. It's I think, you know, the, the
42:20
people in coming across in the boats and things there, there.
42:25
I think there is a case that this could be all used to bring
42:28
in a digital ID, but I don't think it'll keep those numbers
42:32
down. And so the, the UK vacation,
42:35
it's, it'll, it's weird because on the one hand, sort of AI and
42:40
drones and digital technology, it's coded in this sort of slick
42:46
way, this futuristic way. But really, it'll still be the,
42:51
the, the squalor and the and the and the depression of Great
42:57
Britain as it is now, except with more surveillance and and
43:01
more sort of control over the population.
43:05
Yeah, I do wonder quite how much actual control they'll be able
43:08
to implement now, if you think about, you know, if, if if
43:12
there's a storm at sea, can you stop the waves from breaking?
43:17
You know, is that not a bit about what we're talking about
43:20
here? Have they kind of underestimated
43:23
the potential for chaos? Like, what does that actually
43:27
look like? You know, just because you've
43:28
you've told someone to do something on your little
43:31
computer screen, it doesn't mean you're going to get compliance.
43:33
Yeah. And it's, it's, I mean, the
43:35
thing that I've noticed this summer, I, I was thinking about
43:40
writing an article on this, I was just doing some notes
43:43
before. Is that everywhere you look,
43:46
there's this talk of, of, there's these kind of analogies
43:50
of, of like Tinder and kindling where the, the, the, the, the UK
43:55
is a, is a Tinder box and, or, or people are heaping up like
44:01
was it David, Betsy, the dry wood is just getting bigger and
44:05
bigger and bigger. We don't know where the spark is
44:09
coming from, but it's coming. And these these kind of these
44:12
comparisons where the, the, the, the, the country in the summer
44:17
of 2025, like what I'll remember for it is everybody talking
44:23
about it in terms of something which is just going to explode.
44:28
And I'm not sure if that's going to happen, though.
44:30
We've still got, you know, six weeks left or whatever it is
44:33
before we get into the safety. But but yeah.
44:36
And there's people on the streets, there is people on the
44:39
streets. There's it is, it is reaching
44:42
boiling point out there. Yeah.
44:45
And so if you bring in on top of all of that, I think the idea is
44:51
these more sort of these, these technocratic surveillance
44:54
systems, hooking everybody up with the iPhones on the digital
44:58
wallets, all of this kind of thing.
45:00
I think the idea is that the, that would be the equivalent of,
45:03
of pouring a bucket of cool water onto the kindling, whereas
45:07
it could just be adding more kindling onto the kindling,
45:10
waiting for even more sparks. So that remains to be seen.
45:15
I, I, I I don't think there's a way out of this which is not
45:19
unpleasant. No, I, I tend to agree.
45:23
I, I don't think that there is an inevitability of the Civil
45:28
War. That's the term it's getting
45:29
used a lot at the moment. I don't know if Ben's used it,
45:32
I'm sure he has done in other interviews, but it was one that
45:34
came out a few days ago which you might be referring to.
45:37
But if you go onto YouTube, all the kind of right wing
45:39
influences, they're all talking up civil war.
45:41
It's been going on for about 6 months now.
45:43
Yes, very noticeably. They're trying to speak it into
45:46
existence. I think some.
45:47
Of them. It's strange that it's strange
45:49
how this is a thing that just seems to be getting pushed.
45:53
Yeah, but even what does that even look like, right?
45:56
Like, could you even conceive People say these things so
45:58
flippantly? But an actual civil war?
46:01
That's an organised conflict. Like who are the protagonists in
46:05
this? I, I, I don't know.
46:07
I mean, I don't, I don't, I also don't know why.
46:11
I mean, I've listened to bets talking about this, but it's,
46:14
it's this insistence on the term civil war.
46:17
And I know that he's given his own kind of definitions, which
46:20
tend to be quite academic. But I, I don't, I got to, I got
46:24
to understand if people were going to call it sectarian
46:26
strife or something like that, or there were more comparisons
46:31
made to Northern Ireland during the Troubles, which could
46:34
happen. But when, when it's the like
46:38
more incendiary language, like Civil War I, I yeah, I don't
46:43
know. I don't know where this is
46:44
coming from. I have, I have noticed that
46:46
there's a certain sort of network of podcasts that, that,
46:51
that, that seem to be really going in on this and who share a
46:55
lot of opinions, the same opinions on things.
46:59
But yeah, I, I find that bizarre.
47:02
And I mean, I would certainly advise people to be very careful
47:09
about in the way that they talk about civil war and conflict in
47:14
the country, because it seems like regardless of the intent
47:18
for people to begin talking up that way, it could very well be
47:21
a trap. You have to be careful.
47:24
I think I. Completely agree.
47:26
Yeah. Because we, we know like when
47:28
we're talking about the surveillance day, it is already
47:31
here to a large degree. And if we arrive at a situation
47:35
where you've got all of these people running around talking
47:37
about the Civil war, the the that's going to put the system
47:42
it, it kind of justifies aid of exception where where we move
47:47
into special territory like what we had to to some degree in
47:51
COVID, where they say, well, we're going to have to have
47:54
special measures. If you've got thousands upon
47:57
thousands of people talking about civil war and violent
48:01
conflict. We like this is this is not to
48:03
put it on bets or these podcasters or who any just an
48:08
outcome of this, whether intended or not could be
48:11
justification for the state to clamp down on people.
48:13
I'll be very careful about using that kind of language.
48:16
Yeah, no, I completely agree. I completely agree.
48:20
So, but what about the the working class?
48:25
If we could talk about the working class in the UK for a
48:28
moment. And I will just pick up on a
48:30
quote where she read out earlier which talks about the working
48:33
class being outstanding in their abhorrence of foreign habits.
48:37
And that quote continues to say that nearly every Englishman of
48:41
working class origin considers it effeminate to pronounce a
48:44
foreign word correctly, which is completely true still today.
48:48
Actually, I found that brilliant when I read that read that line.
48:52
But one of the other things that he talks about in in the essay
48:55
is the idea that the middle class and the working class are
48:58
becoming much more like each other.
49:00
Do you think that that's still true today or is do we still
49:04
have a very distinct working class culture as distinct from
49:08
the middle classes in this country?
49:10
I think no. I think it's kind of lingers on
49:14
here and there. You'll find it in one of the,
49:19
one of the, the things that the, the middle class despised about
49:23
contemporary Britain is Wetherspoons.
49:26
And, and the reason for that is that because he, he and I went,
49:33
I've been in Wetherspoons and I actually think it's great.
49:36
I, I think it was really lively. I think you there was a nice
49:40
array of cheap beer and that was, it was a bit rowdy and it
49:44
reminded me of going out in the big market in Newcastle in the
49:49
90s. You know, I'm getting on a bit
49:52
and I'm old enough to have like gone properly out, you know, in
49:55
the age of like Brit pop and all of that.
49:58
In the late 90s I was old enough to go out drinking with all my
50:02
mates. And then you genuinely really
50:05
had the working class sort of culture and I think it became
50:11
kind of softer and what held it together begin to dissolve and
50:16
this kind of thing. But I think it lingers on in
50:20
places like Wetherspoons where it's still rowdy, it's still a
50:24
bit of a laugh and you can get a lot of like cheap paints and
50:28
it's a good deals. And it's interesting the way the
50:33
middle class just absolutely despised Wetherspoons.
50:36
And it's become this another one is Greg's.
50:39
They, they, they've got this thing where Greg's is, is like
50:43
the, the, the, the slop of, of the lump and proletariat.
50:48
Now this, this, all of this would be fine.
50:51
This would be fair enough. But when you bring in other
50:54
things he talked about these, these asylum seeker hotels and
50:58
things it takes on and just historically things like
51:02
grooming gangs and whatnot, it, it actually takes something on
51:06
very sinister. There's, there's, there's
51:08
something so dark that I think George Orwell would have been
51:13
horrified by the outcome, by some of the things that's gone
51:17
on with it. And, and in that way it, it
51:19
genuinely seems something sick and vindictive rather than we're
51:26
all well painted, we're all right, we'll pick out and we
51:29
don't like each other, but there's a national emergency and
51:33
we're all going to club together and we're going to go off and
51:36
fight Johnny Foreigner. That's no longer the case
51:38
because we can't even properly define who Johnny Foreigner is,
51:42
Meaning the sense of the other has become like completely
51:46
muddied. And so the the US and the them
51:49
that will have to sort of bring club together itself is a
51:53
problem. I think it's very dark, very
51:56
sinister. Yeah, I agree with you.
51:58
I completely agree with you. And I also think one of the the
52:00
problems that they've got is that it seems universally
52:04
accepted now by all of the, if for want of a better word, lower
52:10
strata of society that the people on the top level have
52:13
abandoned them basically. So there's another interesting
52:16
quote here where he says at any normal time, the ruling class
52:20
will rob, mismanage, sabotage, lead us into the muck, but let
52:24
popular opinion really make itself heard.
52:27
Let them get a tug from below that they cannot avoid feeling
52:30
and it is difficult for them not to respond.
52:34
And I think that that has been broken now.
52:36
Yes, yes, I agree with that, that that is the problem.
52:40
There's there's a lot of pulling going on, but it doesn't seem to
52:43
ring any bells in the halls of power.
52:46
And so you end up where who, who ultimately is representing the
52:52
working classes now reform are there to pretend they are.
52:58
They are there to occupy that space.
53:02
And it's it's not good enough. And there's to be honest,
53:06
there's there's not much time left when you when you look at
53:08
where things are going. And but it's to give the
53:12
impression that. So maybe again, it's it's not
53:16
like all doom and groom, though things are very grim.
53:21
But the overproduction of the Leeds is is part of the reason
53:26
why I think you're seeing a general shift.
53:30
You know, you the whole woke stuff and then the all the stuff
53:34
that you saw a few a few years ago has largely been sort of
53:38
dialled back a bit. And I think this is an attempt
53:42
1/2 hearted and useless attempt to rectify this situation.
53:47
I mean, to be honest, much as it's you can kind of talk about
53:52
sort of because I think Labour and Kia Starmer and left Liberal
53:58
types are in our minds here. But let's not forget, I mean, I
54:02
absolutely despise the Tory party and I find that the Tory
54:06
party have probably done more damage to this country than than
54:09
Labour because the betrayal is just so greater and and it was
54:15
all just so dishonest. People will say, well, yeah, but
54:19
you, Tony Blair set the thing, the whole thing in motion, the
54:22
quangocracy and all of this back in 97.
54:26
Now that's true, but the Tories, never all they did was add to
54:31
it. And and you know what?
54:34
What we saw just last week putting on a super injunction to
54:37
conceal their treachery. That is the problem that that
54:43
mainset and they they can pass it off because they lop as
54:49
Colonel blimps from from the essay.
54:52
Yes, yeah, I completely agree. At least Labour are honest about
54:58
the fact that they hate us rather than the Conservatives
55:01
and the reform types who pretend that they still end up in going
55:04
in the same direction ultimately.
55:06
So there's, there's a quote actually just from the final
55:09
paragraph that I think is particularly powerful.
55:11
And it'd be great to get your thoughts on this right, which
55:13
says it needs some very great disaster, such as a prolonged
55:18
subjugation by a foreign enemy to destroy a national culture.
55:23
Now, given that we're talking about the destruction of
55:25
national culture that's been happening for decades now, does
55:29
this, is this what it feels like?
55:31
Does it feel like we've been subjugated by foreign enemy?
55:33
Have we been? Are we being attacked by the
55:35
system? Yeah, I, I, I don't think
55:38
there's any doubt about it. One of the, one of the things
55:41
that comes up a lot, which I've discussed and, and you will see
55:46
people say it's, it's incompetence, not malice.
55:52
And it goes back to Hanlon's razor.
55:54
Don't, don't ascribe to malice that which can be accurately
55:59
described as incompetence or something like that.
56:02
And I think that's a bit of a cope because the, the, the way
56:06
that it works and it's not the reason.
56:09
Firstly, the reason we know it's international in nature is that
56:13
it's happening everywhere. I just think that Britain is, is
56:17
probably the worst sort of affected by it.
56:21
But it the if, if it was just incompetence, if it was just
56:28
that the people who the incentive structure was created
56:32
in such a way that the people end up who are running the
56:35
system, or at least you know, the the bureaucrats at the top,
56:39
Keir Starmer and all the rest of them.
56:42
If they were just morons, then you would expect the outcomes to
56:48
swing in our favour sometimes. If it was just incompetence,
56:52
there would be now and then when that incompetence meant that the
56:56
normal kind of Brit got got a got a piece of the pie.
57:00
But that actually never happens. It never happens that there's a
57:03
positive outcome at all. And so the very best you can
57:08
hope for is that they are indifferent to your suffering.
57:13
I just, I just think we can take incompetence off that, that this
57:18
idea that they're well meaning idiots.
57:21
I don't think that, I don't think that stands up to
57:24
scrutiny. I don't, I don't think you can
57:26
get there by that. But then you get this.
57:30
So then the best they can hope for is that they're criminally
57:34
negligent. That that is the best outcome
57:37
where there's all of this suffering, all of this pain, all
57:41
of this misery going on, all the people being reduced to poverty.
57:45
The the idea that you cut old people's heating allowance, but
57:50
then like squander 22 billion on carbon capture schemes.
57:55
That that is what is that is, is that like really is can can we
58:03
now that that would you can only the very best case scenario for
58:08
that is criminal negligence yes. And so you can then deconstruct
58:13
that as well and you can think, well, how can how can they be so
58:17
negligent all of the time and sooner only in that you're going
58:21
to end up where the only rational sort of conclusion you
58:25
can come to is that actually it is malice.
58:28
That's that's all it can be the idea that Oh well, I'm going to
58:33
stop the small boats and they've been saying this for like 5
58:36
years and they still come across every day in their hundreds Now
58:40
is it incompetence? Is it I mean, come on.
58:44
So it ends up where you have to think actually, yes, it is
58:47
malicious. Hanlon's rears or is wrong, or
58:51
at best the very best they can hope for is that their criminal
58:54
totally negligent. Yeah, and, and, or some of them
58:59
think that they're doing it for your own good, which I think was
59:02
CS Lewis. He talks about omnipotent moral
59:05
busybodies who just want to be up in your business telling you
59:09
how to live your life. Yes, it's, it's funny because we
59:13
mentioned earlier about the, the, the, the Sycamore gap tree
59:17
and, and this, these kind of symbols and ideals and things
59:21
which transcend the data sheet. Of course, CS Lewis, what was
59:26
big on that when he was talking about men with no chests And I
59:31
think it was a fountain or a waterfall that he described.
59:34
And he, he had the, the, the, the, it was a young boy.
59:38
It was this the encroachment of technocratic thinking.
59:44
And in the, in this, in this sort of what he's describing,
59:49
the teachers tell the boy, describe the, the waterfall, I
59:53
think it was. And he says it's, it's
59:55
beautiful, it glows, it's got an aura and all of that.
1:00:00
And the teachers are saying, no, that's what you think about it.
1:00:03
What is it like what? And, and, and in the end it's
1:00:07
oh, well, it's HO 2 falling over hard granite and that's it using
1:00:14
gravity. So everything gets reduced to to
1:00:17
its raw components. You can't have any higher ideals
1:00:21
or transcendental sort of symbolism.
1:00:26
This is pure left brain reductive thinking.
1:00:29
Yeah, it's purely materialistic. Yeah, exactly.
1:00:33
OK. So just to, to, to close up,
1:00:37
we've talked about the weaponization of the state.
1:00:39
You've had a a bit of an experience of this recently,
1:00:42
maybe not directly from the state, although by proxy, as I
1:00:46
understand it, you had a bit of a run in with hope not hate.
1:00:49
How has that been for you? What was that experience like?
1:00:51
Because I'd imagine it was fairly dramatic.
1:00:53
Well, most of what they dug up on me was a 10 years old and out
1:00:58
of context and some of it I just don't recognize at all People.
1:01:03
Yeah, I'm not, I'm not crazy, I'm not a nut job.
1:01:06
I'm just, I've just right. And I've seen me thoughts on the
1:01:10
things and they wanted to Take Me Out for I don't know that I
1:01:13
must be too popular or something.
1:01:15
So they, they, they, you know, and it was what I was shocked by
1:01:19
was just the lengths that they went to and how they got some of
1:01:23
the information which speaks to which I can't prove.
1:01:27
So I'm just going to say that I'm not saying it is so, but it
1:01:31
does. I get the impression that
1:01:33
they've got this special calve out in the Home Office to go
1:01:36
through people's passports. There's rumours that Harry
1:01:39
Shuckman travelled around Europe on a fake passport.
1:01:42
The restorationists have done good stuff on this.
1:01:47
And still, the initial sort of thing was that the, the fear was
1:01:51
what I'm going to end up with the police coming to the door
1:01:53
here because that's just how we live.
1:01:56
And this is going to be this is, this is, this is just how we
1:02:00
live. We have to expect it didn't
1:02:02
actually happen. It didn't actually work out that
1:02:04
way at all. Really nothing happened, Nothing
1:02:08
changed. I think if it was 5 or 6 years
1:02:10
ago, it would have been worse. But I think their social capital
1:02:14
is squandered. I think the the system is is
1:02:18
kind of exhausted with all of this stuff now.
1:02:23
What are you going to chase around a Blogger for things that
1:02:26
he said or may not have said 10 years ago?
1:02:29
And like, is anybody actually care about that when all of this
1:02:33
things go in the country? So I'm hoping that hope not hate
1:02:36
are a busted flush. But I mean, ultimately, I'm only
1:02:42
sort of describing what's happening in the country.
1:02:45
I don't have political power. I don't have any influence in,
1:02:49
in the halls of power. So when, when we look at the
1:02:52
state of the country, what I find fascinating is that they
1:02:56
want to somehow project that onto people like me.
1:03:00
The, the, the destabilising factor, the, the, the danger to
1:03:05
our home, harmonious and wonderful multicultural society
1:03:09
with all these freedoms and all of these things accountable
1:03:13
democracy and everything. The real danger to that is not
1:03:18
hope, not hate. People like hope not hate or the
1:03:20
Labour Party or the Tory Party. It's people like me and I just
1:03:23
think that fascinating. It's like, no, like you, it's
1:03:26
your fault the system is like this.
1:03:29
You can't say that people didn't warn, you can't say that people
1:03:34
didn't express anger about this. All this, what was happening 20
1:03:38
years ago, they did. It's just that you silenced
1:03:40
everyone and you shut them down just as you wanted to do to me.
1:03:44
And ultimately, when you know, when all is said and done, it is
1:03:50
these sort of shady NGOs which are killing the the civilisation
1:03:57
and the ideas that they hold within them and the political
1:04:01
power they can have. That is what the that's the
1:04:03
destabilising force. That's some Blogger from North
1:04:07
Tyneside. Yes, I completely agree.
1:04:11
They are the destabilizing force.
1:04:13
And actually I think that'd be a nice place to wrap it up with a,
1:04:16
with a final quote from the essay, actually, which is one
1:04:19
that really stuck with me, particularly in the context of
1:04:21
what's happened to you over the past few months, which says,
1:04:24
talking about the British people, that no politician could
1:04:27
rise to power by promising them conquests or military glory.
1:04:31
No hymn of hate has ever made any appeal to them.
1:04:35
And I think that that it remains true today.
1:04:38
So Morgoth, absolute pleasure talking to you.
1:04:41
Thank you so much for taking the time all.
1:04:43
Right. Thank you very much.
1:04:44
And everyone listening at home, thanks for tuning in.
1:04:48
I've been Ben Rubin at UK column Take Care.