Latest / Thinking Class / #108 - Prof. Eric Kaufmann & Dr Paul Morland - Demographic Timebomb 2060: The English & British Are Headed For Minority Status & Why It Matters

Transcript

#108 - Prof. Eric Kaufmann & Dr Paul Morland - Demographic Timebomb 2060: The English & British Are Headed For Minority Status & Why It Matters · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_04: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_04: I'm John Gillam, and today I'm talking with Professor Eric Kaufman and Dr.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_04: Paul Morland.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_04: Eric is Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham and Director of the Centre for Heterodox Social Science.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_04: He directs Buckingham's new Masters of the Arts in the Politics of Cultural Conflict and PhD in cultural politics, as well as its open online course on Woke, The Origins, Dynamics and Implications of an Elite Ideology.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_04: He is the author of Deboo, How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution, White Shift, Immigration, Populism, and the Future of White Majorities, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth, The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, The Orange Order, and one other book.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_04: Eric is co-editor, among others, of Political Demography and editor of Rethinking Ethnicity, Majority Groups and Dominant Minorities.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_04: In addition to 45 peer-reviewed articles, Eric has written for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Times of London, Newsweek, National Review, News Statesman, Financial Times, Unheard, and other outlets.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_04: Dr.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_04: Paul Morland is an author and broadcaster who writes and speaks about population and the big demographic trends across the world, both contemporary and historic.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_04: Described as the UK's leading demographer and one of the world's pre-eminent demographers, Paul has written four books: No One Left, Tomorrow's People, The Human Tide, and Demographic Engineering, and his work has been translated into nine languages.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_04: He has written for and been interviewed in many of the world's leading newspapers and magazines, including The Financial Times, The Sunday Times, The Telegraph, the Toronto Globe and Mail, Der Spiegel, and the Jerusalem Post.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_04: He has broadcast on many outlets, including BBC Radio 4.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_04: In this episode, Eric Paul and I think out loud about the significant demographic changes occurring in the United Kingdom, particularly the decline of the white British population, which is due to become a minority in the country by the 2060s.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_04: We explore the implications of these shifts on society, politics and culture, theories of ethnic conflict and what the future might hold for the United Kingdom, the roles of assimilation and intermarriage, the impact of diversity, equity and inclusion policies and woke culture on social trust, the future of political ethnicity and nationalism, the potential for re migration, the cultural shifts necessary for societal cohesion, and much, much more.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_04: As you can hear by Paul and Eric's credentials, there were only two people that you should talk to about a subject like this, and I wanted to make sure that Thinking Class bagged both of them.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_04: They are two friends of the show, their work is vitally important, and for those who see people as culture carriers and that nations are a product of their people, then this topic should be of widespread national interest given the stakes here.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_04: As ever, make sure to like, subscribe, and follow the show on YouTube, your podcast platform of choice and Substack.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_04: Enjoy the show, classmates.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_04: Paul Morland, Eric Kaufman, welcome back to Thinking Class.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_04: Thanks so much for coming on as a duo.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_05: Thank you.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_04: Well, you two are a bit of a dream team from different angles when it comes to uh demography.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_04: You've both got a big work history, uh, academic output in this field, and have worked together on this as well, I understand, in the in the 2000s.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_04: And so being um Englishmen or Brits or here on this island, there's lots of conversation about the rapid demographic change that we have seen, uh specifically in England.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_04: And recent Office National for Statistics data and projections suggests that the United Kingdom is going to become a minority white British country by the 2060s and perhaps before in England.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_04: So the White British is already a minority in the major cities of London, Leicester, Birmingham, and there are some other cities as well that are not quite as large.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_04: And the overall figure for England and Wales is 75%, down from 80% in 10 years.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_04: Of the 61 million registered living in England and Wales in June 2023, 19% were born in a different country, of which 6% are from EU countries and 13% from non-EU countries.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_04: And in London, it's 41%.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_04: Quite a few people, I would say, uh worried about this, and critics of those people would say that there is a an inherent bigotry within these worries.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_04: And uh regardless of that, I think this conversation's important and we should think out loud about what the implications may be of this for the the white British people, and we should explore this uh without fear because there is there is no no bigotry here, chat.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_04: So, Paul, let's begin with you.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_04: Um ONS data, what can we make of the models?
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_04: Uh are they reliable?
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_04: Are they likely to be uh exceeded earlier, these projections?
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_04: And um is there potentially uh an undercooking in this because there's often a downward bias in statistics?
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_05: Well, first of all, the reliability of the projections, I should say these are not, as far as I know, unless something's appeared I haven't noticed, ONS projections.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_05: The projections that have been done are based on ONS and other data, and they have been done by two people I know uh fairly well, and Eric also knows well.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_05: Um, one is Matt Goodwin, um, who has been using the data and um and working with it to project forward, and the other is David Coleman, the Emeritus Professor of Um Population at Oxford.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_05: And although they work separately, um, they have both come to the conclusion that the majority of white Brits will cease sometime in the early to mid-2060s.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_05: Now, two things on that.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_05: The first is, of course, who is white British is a matter of self-determination.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_05: These are not genetic tests.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_05: And um, you know, I sometimes tell the anecdote that I describe myself as white British, although my both my parents were immigrants, but that's how I identify.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_05: My wife, some of whose family have been in this country since the 17th century, identifies herself as white other.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_05: So um I don't want to make too much of that because it is uh if you if you were to draw the parallels or link what people say they are and what they actually are genetically, then I think the link's probably quite close.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_05: But around the fringes, there are questions about who is going to identify as white British in another generation or two.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_05: So I think that's worth saying.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_05: But the other point, and I've made it to Matt actually, I've probably discussed it with David Coleman too.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_05: If you get to the 2060s and you have a bare majority of white Brits, say it's 50%, at that point, if you look at the population pyramids of white Brits and others, if you look at the age profile, you will find that the white British are a, I won't say vanishing, but diminishing minority among the younger population.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_05: So at that point, it's not like you're now at half and half.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_05: You've already baked in, short of mass population movement in or out or whatever, um, you baked in significant minority statement status for white Brit, because at that point the young population will be heavily non-white Brit, um, balanced off by an older population who will be heavily white Brit, and those will obviously die off.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_05: So even if you freeze the demography there, and even if fertility rates have evened out, we might talk about that.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_05: You don't have any more immigration, emigration, you've already at that point baked in the the white British becoming not just 50%, but a a significantly diminishing minority.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_04: And before we bring Eric into this and uh picking up on the thread of of his uh seminal work, 2019 White Shift, uh Paul, you before you came to public attention, you wrote a book on demographic engineering to do with competition and conflict between different ethnic groups.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_04: It's actually quite hard to get hold of a copy.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_04: So before we pass over before we pass over to Eric, uh uh let's let's unpack your thesis and what the data told you, uh, because this is where I want to take the conversation with regards to the changing demographics and what that might mean sociopolitically.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_05: Well, it's a work that demographic engineering, population strategies, and ethnic conflict, a work that Eric's very familiar with because it's a slightly reworked version of a PhD thesis, uh, which I did with Eric.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_05: Uh Eric, as I said, is uh earlier, is younger than me.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_05: I came to academic uh or PhD life rather late.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_05: And that was um a PhD I did with Eric, 2009-2012, published in 2014, uh, and it was published as an academic book.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_05: Um, so it's sort of priced in a rather silly way for academic libraries, although I think there's a paperback version available.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_05: Um, but again, that's sort of 30, 40 quid anyway.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_05: Um, the base that wasn't really very statistical.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_05: It was very theoretical.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_05: So what it essentially said is ethnic groups are real, which was a slightly braver thing back in 2012 to say than it is today.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_05: They actually exist and we can define them in meaningful ways, and we can define nations in meaningful ways, very much in the line of Anthony Smith, a very good friend of mine who was also Eric's um PhD supervisor.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_05: So that was my basic theory of ethnic groups and nationalism.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_05: And um, they have conflicts.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_05: And wherever you have different ethnic groups, there is a potential for conflict.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_05: They are defining themselves not necessarily against, but in some way in opposition to or in contrast to the other.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_05: So ethnic groups exist.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_05: And then if they are going to conflict with each other, one of the things that really matters in those conflicts is numbers.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_05: Traditionally, in pre-modern societies, pre-democratic societies, because of boots on the ground, you know, the bigger gang usually wins.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_05: And in a democratic society, not only that, the sort of sense on the streets, but also um voting patterns.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_05: So that said, I basically set out a theory of how groups in conflict use demography as part of their strategy, contrasting what I called hard demographic engineering, where you bring people in or you encourage your group to breed, or the other group not to, or the other group to leave, or even potentially genocide.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_05: And soft demographic engineering, in which you either re-identify boundaries of identity, so wasps as the core ethnic group in the states become whites and incorporate other groups, um, against whom you can say, um, or you redraw the boundaries on maps in order to consolidate your group.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_05: So, for example, if you look at the um partition of Ireland, it was very much about what's a sustainable Protestant element within uh the larger, larger Ireland, and Ulster could have been nine counties or three counties or six counties according to the partition of 22.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_05: So that was the theory.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_05: So the theory doesn't necessarily say you will always get conflict where you have different ethnic groups, but it does say where you do get conflict, or ethnic groups existing next to each other, there's potential for conflict, and that when you have that conflict, the num numbers really matter and can consciously and purposefully be manipulated by the groups in conflict.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_05: It's quite normal for them.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_05: How do they do it in these different ways?
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_05: So that's not to say I'm predicting conflict.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_05: I think what's really important in the context of the UK, however, is that the UK has traditionally been ethnically homogenous.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_05: Now, yes, you have English, Scots, Welsh, and Irish, and very, very, very small ethnic minorities traditionally, but within the territories of those four countries, um, a great deal of ethnic homogeneity.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_05: So if you go back to the 1820s and 30s, the Chartists, the early socialism of the late 19th century, the general strike, the strife of when I was a kid in the 70s and British Leyland was always going on strike, outside Northern Ireland, where you do have two ethnic groups, effectively, all the strife, all the tension, all the conflict in society was essentially socioeconomic.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_05: And if we are going to become and we have become a multi-ethnic society, and if the numbers in that multi-ethnic society are going to shift, then we can expect the potential for ethnic conflict, and in a potentially in that ethnic conflict, numbers are going to be significant.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_04: I think that's a good scene set for Eric.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_04: So, Eric, your your book White Shift, and please correct me if I I summarise this sloppily, but your book White Shift, uh, you um you you were looking at how Western nations have been affected by the immigration policies of the last hundred years, I suppose, and you looked right across um the Anglosphere and beyond, but in it you argue that we have seen and continue to see mixing between ethnic groups, including intermarriage and rearing children, and that would over time see people assimilated over several generations.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_04: Um, it was written before the famous or the now infamous Boris wave, which I know there are potential political machinations to try to undo that, but it did have a notable impact on the demographics.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_04: And even if undone, I suppose it has brought to light ethnic differences, differences in cultures, I think, quite quite openly now in the public discourse.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_04: And so one in 25 of those walking the streets of Britain have arrived in the last two years.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_04: So, based on what Paul's just outlined with his his thesis, plus the Boris wave, does this impact your work with White Shift at all of how you see the mixing to continue and there to be some assimilation over generations?
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_04: Or do you think that the diasporas now are growing so large that they're going to stick around rather than break down over owing to the size of them?
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, there's just a lot there, you know, because I think um Paul, you know, talked through really well the demographics and the mechanisms of demography.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's interesting as we move into this question of uh demographic uh expectations or perceptions.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: So once people start to perceive demographic change, it becomes political.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: The other thing is that we're in a demographic revolution globally where we were seeing a transition from high to low birth rates effectively and low death rates.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: But that's happening very unevenly across the world, which is meaning it's it's upsetting ethnic balances, religious balances uh within countries.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: What we see uh right now with this low birth rate uh across the West is that immigration is having a a more rapid effect.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh whereas in the United States, which had relatively high foreign-born share in the late 19th, early 20th centuries, that was happening at a backdrop of relatively high birth rates.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: So once the cap was turned off or it slowed down, the foreign-born share dropped from, you know, 13-14% in 1920 down to sort of five, six percent by nineteen sixty, nineteen seventy.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: So where it's just not clear with the sort of low birth rates now that that will happen as quickly.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: So bottom line is now the question of assimilation, yeah.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: I think in the one of the cases that we know w well is the US case.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: It took three, four generations for the southern eastern European Catholic Jews that arrived in the turn of the uh twentieth century to more or less melt fully into the uh into this new white category, which is the dominant category that emerges from the nineteen sixties.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: We've seen a bit of that in Britain with the Irish uh melting uh in, you know, this is a group that came over in the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's only just happened in in Scotland to some extent in England, but especially in Scotland, only in the last generation or so has that has that really gone away.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: So what I'd say is this takes time.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um the diasporas that are here, of course, uh are growing larger.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: There is also satellite connections, there's cheap cheap airfares, all kinds of things that allow you to leave live at home abroad in a way.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think there is intermarriage, there is assimilation occurring, but that is always going to be competing with the vertical transmission of culture across generations, which is quite durable.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so I would say we should not expect this to occur in in any shorter time than several generations.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um and therefore by piling on more diversity, you know, diversity goes up with immigration, it goes down with deep assimilation, not quote unquote integration where someone gets a job in that and speaks the language, that's great, but that's quite superficial surface.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't mean nothing, but it's by no means necessary to really get at this question of disquiet and social cohesion, which I think is linked to this sort of more organic, deep level assimilation, which takes generations.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: There's no and there's no real government policy, there's all this talk about integration policy, especially in a free country, there's very little government can do to speed that process up.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: Despite all the talk and of integration, it's largely hot air in my view.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: These things take time, and it's really only an immigration pause, uh a very severe immigration pause will give us the time uh to actually digest this, especially now when we're talking about fallen birth rates in the host society.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um now, of course, there is going to be beijing around the outside in terms of you know interracial marriages, and but but I think that even with bearing that in mind, um I just think it's it's a it's a slow process, and the way immigration and ethnic change is going is a fast trend.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: So we have a kind of misalignment, and that would predict, in my view, continual rising tensions through expressed through the rise of national populism through polarization.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_05: Can I just add something to that?
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_05: And I think maybe it's just sort of restating what Eric said.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_05: I think if you're looking for integration and why it will be more difficult in the future, I would say there are four things compared with, say, um, you know, when my parents came here 80 or odd years ago.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_05: First of all, the sheer size of those diasporas.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_05: So we were talking then of 10,000 or 20,000 people arriving in an emergency year.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_05: Now it's sort of around a million, uh, quite often, hundreds of thousands, um, reinforced, as Eric said, by falling um white British birth rates.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_05: Secondly, where people are coming from, so religiously and culturally more distant than you know, the Huguenots or Jews, or indeed the Irish, of course, who've come uh to the mainland um in the past.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_05: Um, so there's there's they're larger numbers, they're more unassimilable on simply on cultural difference.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_05: Um I think the fact that they can reinforce constantly, Eric made this point about satellites, about you, the you don't have to, you can live in a bubble because it's bigger and because we're living in a more uh a world of of the internet and so on.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_05: So you can kind of live in your old culture while being a Briton and very often bring back a spouse from that culture.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_05: So you don't get third, fourth generation, you get endlessly someone with one parent born here and one parent back home.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_05: And then the last thing, which I think is really important, is the host culture.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_05: It's not only that we don't have an authoritarian government that enforces it, as Eric was saying, it's harder in a free society, but also we have moved from a culture, say when my parents came to Britain that was hugely self-confident, unreflectingly self-confident, knew exactly what it was about, and subliminally or directly sent out the message, you are lucky to be here, nobody forced you to come, fit in with all the freedoms of a liberal country, etc.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_05: I think we now live in a world where large parts of the host majority culture, what is still the majority culture, are for various reasons, you know, which Eric, being uh an authority on the woke, of course, knows knows all about, um, have lost that self-confidence, have lost the sense that their culture and their civilization is actually something to be incredibly proud of and worth uh preserving.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_05: So for those four reasons, as I say, in a way I've just repackaged what Eric has said, but for the those four reasons, I think the idea of integration in the way we've seen it in the past is a bit of a myth.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_04: Hmm.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_04: Well, before we potentially explore some of those options to reduce the tensions, which you've you've just uh highlighted, a couple of them, the cessation of of immigration will will really get under the skin of that a little bit later on.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_04: But thinking about the sources of the tensions, uh, we could look at policy, which has not only been a downstream of law like the Blair Wright Revolution Equality Act, which then led to diversity, equity, inclusion.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_04: programs.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_04: But Eric, through your work at the Centre for Heterodox Social Science at the University of Buckingham, you've you've looked at the deleterious effect of these programs both on the economy as well as culturally.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_04: And you also wrote a book about this, Taboo, effectively saying these policies came into being through a mental revolution that I suppose we've come to call woke and which you academically referred to as left liberalism and people refer to as progressivism.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_04: But besides those who are doing this to be inclusive, to be uh to to reduce that down to the be kind politics, do you also think that DEI is is ultimately downstream of inherent ethnic and religious interests of of minorities that are using universalism as a blanket?
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_04: Or is that uh uh is that too much of a cynical view to take?
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: Well I I I actually think, you know, uh the roots of this basically what we have is multiculturalism is an ideology which begins in the US really in the in the sort of mid-1910s as a response by Bohemian cultural leftists at the time who were re in revolt against their own society which to be fair had banned you know the sale of alcohol and and had done some things which you might call Puritan.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: So they were in revolt against that and they found the immigrants to be exciting as a sort of tonic against the what they considered the repressed Puritanism of the Anglo-Protestant American uh order.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um so they celebrated multiculturalism as a and and and that meant essentially immigrant minorities should not assimilate, should retain their own culture, whereas the ethnic majority should supersede its ethnicity, its ties, its culture.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: That was kind of the message what I called asymmetrical multiculturalism in my first book in 2004.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: That is really the ethos that has come down post-1960s into Western society.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: And that is also a bridge to woke.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: So in a way multiculturalism uh which is all essentially about saying minorities are good and majorities are bad.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um majorities are not only uninteresting and boring culturally they're also repressive minorities are exciting and exotic and spicy and also oppressed and therefore noble and we need to protect them.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: So that is kind of the paradigm we've been living under since the mid-60s and this is where speech codes and political correctness which emerge in the 1980s but really arise out of this minority sensitivity.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: Whenever you've got you know minorities that have different outlooks, the sort of less liberal response is sensitivity.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: So minority sensitivity is already a scene in the 60s and 70s we then get in that then morphs into multiculturalism in the 80s and 90s which then morphs into something a bit more like woke where it's and and and but I think there's it's all continuous.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so uh you know in the 1980s in Canada if you criticized you know if you said immigration should be lower or if you criticized the idea of emphasizing difference i.e multiculturalism uh that was a taboo and so it's not something that just occurs in the 2010s with the Great Awokening.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: Great awokening is in many ways uh just another upsurge the third, what I call the third awokening in my US title of this uh of this idea system, this kind of ambient public morality which is based around really the sacred totems of race and then to a lesser extent gender and sexuality.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: That means racial minorities are sacred.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: It means anything that is said or done that might offend a sacred totemic minority is ca is is cause for essentially you being cancelled as a blasphemer from public life.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: And now it is true that on the right uh in recent decades that taboo has been broken.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: So Donald Trump broke the taboo against campaigning on immigration and against affirmative action in the United States.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um those taboos have come down on the in in the right in some countries uh but they have not come down broadly across society and certainly not on the left.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I think this is an important part of the story.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_00: It made reform of the immigration system questioning of it very difficult uh from the 1960s onwards and we're living through that process that there is a sacredness you know you it is social death as John McWarter says to be accused of racism.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: And that continues to hang over us because that is the basis of today's public morality.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: Even if you're not woke you are still aware that that's a tripwire.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: And that just sort of sort of makes these conversations much more difficult.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: Now it's worth saying however there is also a longer running issue with capitalism and industrialism that large businesses even small businesses have have in many cases wanted more open immigration.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: We can see those debates in the you know prior to the rise of the cultural left in America in the 19th century you know you could see railroad steamship owners uh campaigning for Chinese laborers to come to California you know there was no question that business often wants cheaper labor.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's the capitalist system but that was usually resisted by some kind of a populist impulse used to come from the unions as well you know the the the economic left but once the the woke left took over the unions in the 1960s that neutralized the unions as a sort of force for restriction.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: So what we're now living through is this kind of progressive neoliberalism where you have an alliance between you know the economic right if you like and the cultural left and that's been so that's what's been so powerful in keeping immigration levels high.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_04: Paul were you going to say something there?
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_05: No I was just going to mention the the trade union I mean before Eric uh raised it the importance of trade unions and gompats in in the the states um you know long tradition of people representing uh indigenous working classes worrying very much about mass immigration its effect on labor um and exactly as Eric has said the um the woke woking of the uh the left the universal woking of the left the driving of uh counterviews to the extreme margin I mean we've seen blue labor kind of begin to bubble up um and uh Eric you might be interested to know that Gomputz and Morris Glassman and I all went to the same school um strangely enough yes um just one of those weird coincidences but um you know essentially the uh that narrative has been purged from the left and I think that gives rise to a lot of anger or among um the indigenous working class that they are not and have not been represented for a long time.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_04: Yes uh a total undermining of of social democracy and and we can see the the the practical realities of what you're talking about on the streets since the Boris wave we can see um many of those recently arrived from the subcontinent um delivering people's food i I was at a Christmas party the other day with a a company I'm I'm doing a contract with and uh it was on the banks of the the Thames and 95% of the staff were very recently arrived and all part of the Boris wave.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_04: And so you just know these people are being hired because they're cheap labour.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_04: And I think I think this is why it's all jumped into people's consciousness so much more than it had before because it it was almost like the spigot had turned been turned on overnight, which it had of course and all of a sudden all of the places which typically didn't feel like what was going on in London for these recent decades, Edinburgh's experienced it the smaller provincial cities have experienced it.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_05: But let's start talking about on that subject I must tell you an anecdote which amused me anyway is I went up to Scotland during the uh in April and I happened to eat the spend the night en route with my wife in in Cumbria and um it was amazing to be in a restaurant where the staff were actually locals.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_04: And I sent a WhatsApp to our our mutual friend Ed West and said I'm in Westmoreland this county is so undiverse it's been named for the two of us like it so let's start thinking about political ethnicity and and and nationalism then Paul you've already mentioned that ultimately these things are uh a historical fact it's something I've been been reading about recently through the work of Azar Gat and Alexander Jakobson uh and and they've researched a long history uh deep roots of of these two themes which have been around for as as long as we know as the as the as humanity but our post-world war conditioning would have us think otherwise that industrial revolution created the conditions for nationalism and the reality is homophily birds of feather flock together is a thing it's not an absolute and and my own family history demonstrates that but we're talking about the population level here so let's pull on a a couple of strands and Paul will we'll start with you first.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_04: So uh the political future in which we vote for pro-nation ethnically aligned candidates and parties is that locked in because we we do see it amongst uh ethnic minorities initially so you've got the the Muslim vote you've got um MPs initially born in Pakistan talking about Mirpur airports being required um and you could argue that m much of at least reform's early support though it's changing it was derived from those who identify as white British likely because they're feeling a sense of disenfranchisement and all the rest of it or do you think a civic nationalism can prevail in which people slough off their diasporic interests and and get behind the nation and I know we've we've touched on that second part a bit as to how hard that would would be but what does what does that political future look like?
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_04: We've talked about rising tensions but how do how do we avoid it?
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_05: Well I don't think that um it's absolutely inevitable we'll end up with ethnic um politics but it and and I don't think anyone can say um for sure but it's quite a risk with our uh national politics um that we will go in that direction.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_05: Now in the past as I said if you look at Britain that I was growing up in the 1970s what was the main cleavage in society?
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_05: It was class-based, socioeconomic uh and out of that came different views on how you should run the economy, the kind of level of tax, the amount of nationalization you should have and those were the big issues back in the 1960s, 1970s, um the existence of post-war Keynesianism and neo-Kynesianism and new ideas of monetarism which kind of played into how you think the economy should be run.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_05: I was a student during the period of the minor strike and that those were the main cleavages in society.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_05: Now two things have happened since then that make me think we will likely move to more ethnic politics and we are as you say already seeing it.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_05: The first is just the fact that we have much larger ethnic groups and the second is that those issues of how you run the economy had broadly been settled in the 90s with the emergence of sort of new labor accepting neoliberalism.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_05: Now I'm not saying those issues aren't going to re-emerge but it's interesting in the states for example that they're not emerging along party lines necessarily um so I think it's quite likely that that these things will cross parties that you'll have people on the right increasingly not necessarily aligned to a factorite agenda say that it's not very clear that we've got new lines of different views on how the economy should be run, the nationalization tax levels and so on.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_05: Although clearly there are differences.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_05: The salient difference in the society in 20, 30, 40 years might be around what is the role of sharia courts or what you know what halal should we have halal food in schools and national institutions and pla prairies all things that would matter to a growing Muslim community and might be so those are the kinds of themes around which I think our politics the salience of our politics will hinge in the future.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_05: And so there's every possibility that we will at least have political parties that if not based on ethnicities clearly play to one ethnic group versus another.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah and I I think it's interesting because I think what we're seeing in the West is is what's called superdiversity.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not like Northern Ireland where you have two groups or Sri Lanka so you have this explosion of groups from all over the world.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: However and so that would sort of suggest that we're unlikely to have two blocks going against each other which is sort of a condition for civil war.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: However on the other hand what you see is that the ethnic majority tends to want to avoid where in terms of where they live where they move to they want to avoid these super diverse the the if you like the the the uh the Tower Hamlets and then the Wembley's and these sorts of places.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I think in fact more likely than pitched ethnic conflicts is is going to be this polarizing effect um which is as much a a within white phenomenon in fact it is mainly within white phenom phenomena and that is this is what we're seeing across the West is that people who perhaps genetically we know this is a third to a half heritable these traits I mean psychologically are wired to view differences disorderly and to view and to want the the present to be more like the past to be continuous in that sense.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact you can even do experiments with dots on a screen messy dots versus orderly dots and and then there's a correlation with attitudes to immigration and so I think what's happening is we're getting a splitting of the population psychologically between the kind of order seekers and people who are attached to the way things were when they were growing up which I think is a strong psychological dimension.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then you have people who think that's that's ghastly and horrendous and react more moralistically which is more the kind of progressive side.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so that then layers on this culture war.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_00: They accuse the other side of being racist and deplorable.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: The other side says oh they called us a deplorable they're out of touch.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_00: And and I think this is really the way the diversity is feeding into all this is it's fueling this kind of polarization which underpins now a second order culture war.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um and that as Paul says we're moving away from the economic left right now to this cultural uh call it globalist nationalist dimension that's really structuring voting increasingly across the West it's not to say free market versus welfare state doesn't mean anything but I think those differences are going to mean a lot less.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_00: So I I think and the other thing I'd say is in a way this could cut across ethnic lines.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_00: So for example among whites those kind of moralistic white progressives are going to go to the left and the more um ethno-traditional nationalists will move right but among minorities you also have a split I think between those who for whom their national identity also involves some ethnic characteristics.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_00: So they want the country to be like they knew it.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_00: They're not necessarily comfortable with the country becoming just a bunch of minorities either.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so this is where I think we're seeing US politics going with a lot of Hispanics becoming Republican.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so at the same time you're getting the white progressive phenomenon you're getting the Hispanic Trump voter phenomenon and and so yeah I don't I don't know that it'll be so much about ethnic politics but what it'll be is the ethnic diversity as an issue is going to be defining politics regardless of your actual race.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this is going to fuel a politics of polarization around culture.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_05: I think that's a a an interesting contrast between the idea of a culture war between progressive multiculturalists and ethno-traditionalists let's say and that happens I think when your ethnic minorities are quite small and the ethnic minorities themselves can become the uh can be patronized I don't mean in a negative sense necessarily by the cosmopolitan types and I think as those groups grow and become more assertive the tensions between those two groups then come out and we've seen that obviously a sort of beautiful textbook case with the EU Party or whatever the nuts and raisins whatever they want to call you know the Corbyn's versus Saltanas essentially um you know you if you when the the once patronized patronise very small minorities want to assert themselves they are not going to fall in with all the cultural um perspectives of the leftist cosmopolitans you've seen it in I think there was a case of a ste a a US uh small town where Islamists or or Muslims took over and they wanted all the pride flags gone.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_05: But you're seeing that in the U Party so you'll see that tension um and again exactly how that plays itself out uh we can't tell but it's it's very interesting.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_05: And for those of us broadly on the right it's somewhat reassuring that those tensions uh among our opponents are already expressing themselves uh because obviously divided they are less of a threat and it's possible to co-opt groups in one way or another.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_04: Well that that teased me up to to bring Eric in on on some of the um peak woke discussion and uh the reason why it teased me up is because you're talking about progressive parties like the Green Party and your party both of whom seem to represent that uh that globalist worldview I suppose where with w it's the melting pot.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_04: Yet at the same token what we have seen is Zach Polansky I saw of a video of his uh as promoting the party a few weeks ago where it was just him going round parts of London and it and the voiceover was just mentioning every different kind of ethnic group and saying mix it all together and it was a uh kind of poetic um look at look at how inclusive and and diverse we are this is brilliant this is the future of Britain and then at the Your Party conference we we saw Zara Sultana stand up and whilst I don't have the quote in front of me it was certainly a um a a rallying cry for her people um her people being from the subcontinent she was referring to the British as separate people and it was um riddled with resentment for the past uh relations between her people and the British people and so I I just wonder Eric um is I know there's lots of talk about there being peak woke but yet we see polling data suggesting that 18 to 24 year olds are going for the Green Party and your party in a big way.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_04: So that probably negates that that thesis but I suppose do you think is is the is the woke mind um worldview sorry uh so impervious to seeing that the world they're trying to bring into being those people who they're now sharing parties with are quite openly going counter to those interests and are trying to advance the interests of a separate people rather than it just being a big progressive family.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_04: Do you think they will just go along for the ride regardless because that's how deeply entrenched it is or do you think in the end they too will wake up and go, oh no, we're we're actually sharing a party with people who aren't on the same page with trans and all the other progressive preoccupations?
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah I mean I I I unfortunately I don't think so.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean ideology is quite an intoxicant and I think a lot of these people are very steeped.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_00: They've all drunk the Kool-Aid and really the enemy is the majority they're very uh steeped in this you know minority's good majority bad paradigm a very simple totalizing binary uh once you've drunk that you see everything through that lens and minorities really can do no wrong almost and are just seen as oh well that's just nice and not very serious over there.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_00: They're just having letting off some steam.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't think so.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_00: I mean what I say on the Peak Woke stuff is that it's only among sort of thinking senior liberals sort of newspaper editors, university presidents, corporate leaders, these sorts of people um who can look at a place like San Francisco or Seattle or Portland and say, Yes, we can't build a train line.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's full of people defecating, we've got drug pro you know, this is not really utopia.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_00: So the people who are really interested in what works have to admit that the progressive Utopia is not like is not the promised land.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's caused a certain disillusionment and a certain rethinking amongst again a very intellectual elite more senior group.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_00: So they've now rode back on things to some degree.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_00: I I say to some degree.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um or at least there's a more vocal group on the center left willing to at least challenge some of the sacred cows of the left.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_00: But but um on the other hand, the young population has been successfully indoctrinated to a much greater extent, and you can see that in surveys which ask about free speech.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you'll get, you know, 70% of American undergraduates saying if a professor says something that offends the students, they should be reported to the administration.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, someone who says trans is a mental disorder or Black Lives Matter is is a hate group, should not be allowed on campus, like 70, 80 percent agreement.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_00: So we're we've got this kind of yeah, the snowflake kind of moniker does fit a significant chunk of the younger generation.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_00: They, as they become the median voter, the median leader, are going to then bring that different sensibility into society and they're gonna change society.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_00: So that is sort of telling us that you know on the one hand, rogue is being questioned and has lost a lot of energy and prestige um, you know, at the elite level, but on the other hand, it's it's got a through cohort replacement, it's got power to it, and also outside the United States, it's completely captured institutions and they are just zombified and therefore carrying through DEI policies until they're scraped out by a future administration.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um so there are a number of different indicators, they don't all point the same way.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um so it's not a clear picture.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_00: What I'd say, however, encouragingly, I would say public opinion on at least one issue, which is the trans issue, has gone, call it backward, gone gone in the conservative direction.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_00: Now we that's in over the last three years by ten or twenty points.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you would be hard pressed to find any issue where public opinion on a cultural attitude has shifted in a conservative direction in the last sixty years.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_00: We're also seeing, for example, the Trump administration politically repealing affirmative action, which affirmative action has never actually gained popularity the way, say, international marriage has or toleration for gay people has.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_00: So that I think too represents going back to Johnson's affirmative action executive order, repealing it from 1965.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I do think there are more important epochal things.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_00: I think we've reached the end of this unquestioned utopian progressive period, 1965 to the early 2020s.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_00: I think intellectually in the high culture, there is a shift.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_00: But on the other hand, in terms of shock troops, we've got this young generation coming through.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I just don't know where this is all gonna land.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_00: I think what we see in the young generation is a growing polarization on these cultural war attitudes.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's just the balance.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like in Britain, the young people are more left and woke.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_00: In Canada, they're actually a bit more conservative and divided.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_00: So it just depends on which country and where the balance is.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_00: But I think it's gonna be quite interesting to see it play out.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_04: So let's let's think about ways, uh ways out of uh this potential uh demographic morass.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_04: So we've touched on some of these things already.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_04: Uh so we've we you talked about some of the younger shock troops coming through, uh, Eric.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_04: I I think it it's fair to say that that one of the one of the words and concepts that has been mainstreamed over the last year is is the remigration um word.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and I and it's trick to say that there is a portion of the very online right that would just have SWOT teams showing up people's houses, tearing up their visas and passports and sending them back.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_04: But the reality is is that's a very bad idea and would lead to a lot of conflict on the street straight away.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_04: But it is also true that there are grown numbers of people who don't particularly want to be disenfranchised or see their country changing beyond belief.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_04: And so people would like to see the government, for example, crack down on the illicit economy in some way.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_04: They want to um see strict benefit criteria applied.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_04: So it might be that you have to have a contributing, uh a history of contributions to the country, um, and also perhaps even a grandparent who's is British.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_04: You'd have tighter citizenship requirements.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_04: Um, because otherwise you're going to see a continued um chain migration to take advantage of these things, people voting in their own self-interest and those diasporas never breaking down.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_04: Um and it would reduce housing and health pressures, right?
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_04: We've got a health service that's creaking at the teams, a housing um market which is always overheated.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_04: Uh I suppose look, we've got we've got depopulation coming, as Paul knows.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_04: It it's happening amongst the um amongst the the indigenous, so to speak.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_04: Uh d do we almost need to embrace population retrenchment in some way, have the tech bros lean into those um those uh technological advances, have the robots delivering us our food instead of importing low-skilled labour from everywhere and then throwing the civic nationalist card on top and say we're all we're all part of the same.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_04: Uh I'm just throwing all of these out there for you guys to riff off.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_04: So um, you know, whoever wants to go first.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_05: I'm happy to go first.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_05: So on remigration, I think there is a realistic programme.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_05: For example, saying people who arrived illegally have no place to be here.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_05: Um changing our requirements to um consider asylum seekers and whatever we want to do that as a sovereign nation, not within the EHCR.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_05: So repealing that.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_05: Um, questioning the right of people to be here who have dual nationality and have committed serious crimes.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_05: I think there's a whole raft of things that would get popular support.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_05: Um, I think that there are a couple of things we need to bear in mind if and when we do uh as a nation vote democratically to do those things.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_05: One is what are the economic consequences and how can you have a program where you get the workers you need and not larger.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, Matt Goodwin's been very good on pointing out how small a number of the visas actually go to workers.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_05: Um, and there's a lot of data on how certain groups are disproportionately criminal and how certain groups never pay into the system.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_05: So all that um should inform our immigration and emigration policies.
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_05: We do need to think about how we get the workers we need, and there are ways of doing that, um, gas starbiter type schemes and so on.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_05: Um, but we need to think about the economic consequences and how to manage those.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_05: And the other thing, and I, you know, I spend a lot of time talking to enthusiasts for re-migration about this.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_05: Um, there needs to be a parallel track to get the uh birth rate of the people who remain up.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_05: So until now, we've had large cities with diminishing white British majorities and down to minorities, and the white British have moved out largely.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_05: What we're now going to see because of our very low fertility rate is those indigenous people reducing in number.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_05: And it comes back to something that Eric's spoken about earlier.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_05: And if you are going to clamp down on immigration and re migrate, you do need to find ways to encourage people to have more children.
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_05: Now, I don't believe, to answer your last point, I don't believe that AI and robots are going to replace um people.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_05: I very I think they'll have a big impact on the economy.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_05: We don't see huge productivity gains, and that suggests to me there's lots and lots we need in an aging, hands-on care kind of economy that the technology is a very, very long way from providing.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_05: So I'm skeptical about that.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_05: The last thing I'd say, and again, I've said this to people on the right, um any people or nation, however it conceives itself, however flexible its boundaries, if it is not going to have children, if a couple is going to produce one child on average, and you halve every cohort, whether or not it allows its homeland to be filled up by people from elsewhere, or it doesn't, whether you follow the Japanese, if you like, or the British model, they will cease to exist.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_05: So within any nation group, ethnic group, um, civilization, if it wishes to persist, it must uh learn again to want to uh procreate in order to recreate itself.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean that's that's really well put far, but I think there is a choice whether you go more towards Japan or whether you go more towards, you know, the Canada's Australia's or Dubai's, let's just say.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I think that people across the West want to go more towards the Japanese model, actually.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_00: I think you can probably try to mechanize, you can try can make it clear to businesses that there will not be this tackle cheap labor.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_00: They are gonna have to go for the mechanization option and they need to start planning forward for that and not expect that uh there'll be a Boris Johnson cabinet table where all the business lobby will get its way.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I just think, you know, uh yes, moving, but of course the birth rate, yeah, you know, as Paul says, uh does need to come up.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_00: I think if it can come up into the 1.5 to 2 range, that will slow decline much more than if it's below the 1.5 range, uh the so-called lowest low.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_00: So I think getting it at least into the 1.7 kind of zone, the French zone, I think will be important as a first step.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh now, whether that can be done, you know, what is the causes of of fertility rates, I think uh Paul and I probably agree that culture is the most important thing.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, in Western countries, regular church attenders tend to have a replacement fertility, whereas those who say they have no religion have about 1.0.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um clearly, probably there will need to be some kind of a cultural shift in that direction for the for the population to recover.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know that we've got good examples of any I don't know whether Mongolia, but then again, that's a sort of relatively poor country.
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_00: There aren't many examples of a any kind of non-religious societies that seem to be able to have replacement birth rates.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I'd be interested in what Paul thinks about that, but I I think there will need to be some kind of internal cultural revival in order to somehow prop up this this.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the other option, of course, is that you can just decline and decline until those who are genetically predisposed to have larger families then take over the gene pool.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but that's going that could be a very long road and and there could be maybe only a handful of grits left.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_04: Well, uh, I mean, thinking thinking about the future, I suppose for anyone who's listened to all of this and thought, well, things change and what's the big deal and all the rest of it is going back to that point of political ethnicity and nationalism, whether it's a a civic or an ethno-cultural nationalism, the reality is is they both rely on a dominant group, and that dominant group is the group that ancestrally brought the nation into being through various things and used different symbolisms to be able to do so.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_04: And I know David Starkey talks about how England without the crown would not be England, and uh Christianity was a decent drapery for power.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_04: Um, fine, but it's also true that England wouldn't be England without English people, without Bede, Gens and Glorum.
• 56:02
  SPEAKER_04: And if we do get to 2060 uh and beyond, and that number keeps whittling further down, uh, we've talked a little bit about social democratic things here, right?
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_04: What you do with the welfare state, how do you incentivize different groups to have different outcomes?
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, you've got some serious mental revolution to take place there to even get to that, where we say, actually, no, regardless of citizenship, we're going to focus in on white British, and this is why.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_04: And the reason is is because there will be no country without it, but um, or at least not any identifiable country.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_04: You've got Dane laws popping up all over the place, and you would need a seriously repressive government, uh, a very um uh Hobbesian Leviathan to be able to force people to pay into the tax pool to distribute to a bunch of groups which have outcompeted those who have ancestrally been part of the the country's history.
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_04: So it's a it is a very messy feature.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_04: And I know I know we can talk a lot about stats, and some people think, well, this is a bit abstract, and this is not a bit bigoted to think about it, but I don't think people quite understand that unless we do find ways out of this to keep a dominant majority of white British or white English, that for this isn't about racial supremacy, it's about the reality of people and culture and all of the things that we hold dear that have allowed us to criticise power or to have this kind of fruit relatively high trust society, which we're seeing fraying in all the big cities where there's been demographic change and the cultural revolutions hit, is it doesn't exist anymore.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_04: And it it's not a pleasant place to be because there are resentments historical that exist amongst different peoples in every direction.
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_04: And just throwing them all together is not going to end particularly well.
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_04: So, you know, I know Starkey thinks without the crown, there's no England, agreed, but also with very few English people, I don't think you have an England either.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_04: Um but but I do I do think I do think this conversation's being had more and more.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, you can find it within the mainstream media, people saying, well, we can't be thinking it's beyond the pale to say that you want things to remain demographically relatively uh identifiable.
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_04: But anyway, Eric, just a final question before we I'll let you you both go off into the night um or the afternoon even, is you mentioned there's a you you you're noticing a bit of a step change amongst the intellectual elite, so to speak.
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_04: Um that is usually where things matter uh up in the annals of of power somewhere.
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_04: So d do you do do you believe that these small gains towards a more conservative worldview are we we're basically just seeing the end of that kind of anecdotal 80-year period of a of a worldview haven't been in ascendants, and whether we like it or not, we're we're kind of going to be going down that route of a more traditional world because people just pick up on this stuff in the ether and it it moves that way, or or is that is that too much to ask?
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_00: Well, well, yeah, I mean it's very hard to be 100% sure, but I do think that the uh this cultural progressivism, which begins in the early 20th century and really takes off in the late 60s, uh, I think it's out of juice, I think it's lost confidence.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_00: I I just think it's it's intellectuals have lost confidence.
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_00: Now, of course, you still have the true believer shock troops that are there, they still control institutions, uh, but I don't think the the the thinking among them, the thinkers among them are not confident that this is the direction of history.
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I think they are now questioning themselves much more.
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's the beginning of some kind of high cultural change.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I mean we've seen these changes in the past.
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, I just think of, you know, in the US being pro-immigration in the late nineteenth century, suddenly around the late 1880s, this became it it became restrictionist at the high cultural level.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_00: So I think high cultures can change.
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_00: Now we're at the beginning.
• 1:00:05
  SPEAKER_00: I still think there's a lot of momentum behind that what I would call is essentially equal outcomes, emotional harm protection for race, gender, sexual minorities.
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_00: That is the public morality, the belief system.
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_00: I think that is still there.
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_00: I think there are more questions, and I think the fact that there is so much discontent through populism is also another nail in the coffin of this.
• 1:00:29
  SPEAKER_00: They cannot solve the populist upsurge.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's now ten years since the uh populist moment of twenty fourteen.
• 1:00:36
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's been going full steam ahead.
• 1:00:39
  SPEAKER_00: They have no solutions, and I think their view that it would just somehow go away.
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_00: They can now are understanding that actually now, of course, there's an attempt to use uh charges of hate speech and misinformation and policing speech to try and put a lid on this, but I think that's causing its own backlash.
• 1:00:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I just think they're out of ideas.
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_00: So the left really is out of ideas, and I think that's important.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_00: It may be the beginning of of a change that that then gets us towards talking about suddenly these deep deeper issues about ethnodemographic change.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_04: Hmm.
• 1:01:11
  SPEAKER_04: Before I let you both go, uh I I think it would be remiss of me to not let you plug whatever you're both working on.
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_04: So uh firstly, thank you for a rich discussion.
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_04: I I think it brings people up to a bit of a meta level.
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_04: I know there's lots of back and forth on this on online, exchanging 240 characters here and there and people go people going for the headlines, but uh I I'm I'm I'm a big believer of of getting under the skin of all the different uh rabbit warrens and uh routes that we can take toward whatever the future might look like.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_04: Uh Paul, before we we've started press record, you're telling us about how you are continuing your rich vein of form on writing books.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_04: What can we expect from you?
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_04: And what are you writing?
• 1:01:56
  SPEAKER_05: Well, I like writing books, even if people don't particularly like reading books these days, because I think the form of the book is a bigger form in which you can really um vent your ideas, test them, and just the structure uh leaves you with more interesting things to say.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_05: It's sort of forcing thought to a higher level than just a bunch of substacks.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_05: So um I am continuing to write books, and my next one, which is now written, we're just working on the um uh working on the manuscript, which I've written with Philip Pilkington, uh, who I've been on with, I think, or he's been on your channel, and um we've written a couple of papers together.
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_05: We've written a book, and I always like to feel that the title of the book should tell you what the book's about.
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_05: So if I just tell you the title, um uh that will inform people what it's about.
• 1:02:45
  SPEAKER_05: It's called Bust, The Economics of Population Decline, and that should be out next year.
• 1:02:50
  SPEAKER_04: Well, I'll look forward to it, and I'll have you on as another dynamic duo with Philip.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and and and Eric, you you you have have written several books yourself.
• 1:02:59
  SPEAKER_04: Uh however, you you seem to be fully ensconced in your your role at the University of Buckingham and your side projects.
• 1:03:05
  SPEAKER_04: But what are what are you working on that that listeners and viewers might be finding interesting?
• 1:03:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, I mean, I obviously have my my personal website uh www.snefs, sneps.net.
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um but mainly, yeah, the Center for Heterox Social Science trying to get a countercultural academia going that is really studying two things.
• 1:03:25
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, one is um critical woke study, studying woke as an ideology, like and like we would study fascism or socialism or anything.
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, which is not happening in universities because they're too skittish about this topic.
• 1:03:38
  SPEAKER_00: The the second is really social science that essentially crosses beyond the progressive frontier, you know, looking at the role of genetics and evolution in in human behavior, I mean any any number of things.
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_00: So for example, uh to what extent is family structure important in explaining the race gap and income, looking at uh i is in fact any kind of uh income gaps or wealth gaps between between men and women really down to discrimination, or are there other factors?
• 1:04:07
  SPEAKER_00: You know, these kinds of sort of very empirical, very straightforward questions uh aren't being asked.
• 1:04:12
  SPEAKER_00: There's a huge amount of social science not being done.
• 1:04:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I'm doing yeah, I'm uh issuing a number of reports, often versions of them coming out at unheard or the substack.
• 1:04:21
  SPEAKER_00: The latest one I'm interested in, uh, which is a whole other conversation, is the role of the online influencer right, people like Nick Fluences, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and so on.
• 1:04:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so I've kind of done a poll looking at people uh what they listen to, what they view online, how that affects attitudes towards blacks, Jews, etc., but also white nationalism.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's gonna be trying to puncture a number of myths that exist out there in the in the sort of moral panic of people's imaginations.
• 1:04:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but that should be either late this year or early next.
• 1:04:55
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, fantastic.
• 1:04:56
  SPEAKER_04: Well, I shall certainly keep an eye out for that.
• 1:04:58
  SPEAKER_04: And uh if your if your Outlook calendar has slots in it, I I'll be I'll be giving you a call back and we can we can get into it.
• 1:05:05
  SPEAKER_04: Uh chaps, it's been an absolute pleasure as always.
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_04: I wish you a very Merry Christmas and a happy new year, and I'm sure I'll catch you in 2020 26.
• 1:05:13
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you.
• 1:05:14
  SPEAKER_04: All the actual date is just made up of the year there.
• 1:05:18
  SPEAKER_04: All right, take good care.
• 1:05:20
  SPEAKER_04: Thanks.
• 1:05:21
  SPEAKER_02: Bye bye.
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_04: Bye.