Latest / Thinking Class / #016 - Tom Jones - Betraying Britain's Future: "The Conservatives' Governing Strategy Is Bankrupt"

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#016 - Tom Jones - Betraying Britain's Future: "The Conservatives' Governing Strategy Is Bankrupt" · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, everybody.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm John Gillam, and in this episode, I'm speaking to Tom Jones.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Tom is counsellor for Scotland and Lower Wensleydale in North Yorkshire, England.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Tom is also the author of the Substack Potemkin Village Idiot, and he has written for The Critic, Con Home, CapEx, Unheard, and The Guardian.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: Tom is concerned with winning back a conservative Britain that is fit for the 21st century, and he is a commentator and critic of social policy, culture, and the political class.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode, we talk about public service, the decline of conservatism in the British political class, where the Gen Z might possess a reactionary streak, what people mean when they talk about the blob, why developing a policy of Anglo-futurism would be a good thing, the power of vernacular architecture, why a policy of mass immigration is destructive, and why Tim Martin of Weatherspoon's fame deserves a knighthood.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you really enjoy the show today.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: Tom is deeply committed to creating a better Britain in his own small patch of England and by engaging in the wider public conversation.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I hope he has put a human face on conservatism for those of you that are skeptical about it.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: Before we dive in, you would be really helping me out by pressing subscribe.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: The more subscribers I have, the wider range of guests we welcome to Thinking Class, and the more the show grows.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the show, classmates.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Tom Jones, welcome to Thinking Class.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks very much for having me, Joe.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: You're very welcome.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: For the listeners uh who don't have the benefit of seeing Tom on YouTube, they might be wondering why Tom Jones doesn't have a deep Welsh accent.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, this is because it is not the Tom Jones you may have been expecting, so we won't be talking about his discography today.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but this Tom Jones is an equally good Tom Jones, uh, may I say.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I I I've followed this Tom Jones on Twitter since I joined uh upon the launch of Thinking Class.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think the algorithm threw us together um because we share the fact that we're both northern Englishmen, but I'm glad it did.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: Uh he uh has some very humorous, uh sometime blackpill, but also hopeful and optimistic takes on the state of politics in the United Kingdom.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: So, Tom, I'm really glad you've you've joined me today.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: And you um you're you're you're interesting uh for many reasons, but one of them is that you're a local counsellor, um, which means that you you do some some public service and some local politics, which isn't that common for people, uh particularly those who are in their early 30s.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: So what I'd like to start with what drove you to be a counsellor?
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um well uh I'd like to start by saying thank you very much.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: That was a that was a fantastic, lovely introduction that I don't really feel I deserve, but then I've got curly hair and I don't think I deserve that either.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think the other Tom Jones also has curly hair, so you're in good company.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's true.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: That's true.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: And whilst I'm you know I I'm not that Tom Jones, but for for 20 pounds, I'll be whoever you want me to be.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think the first I think the first um thing that uh drove me to be a counsellor was um a really slightly embarrassing, um embarrassingly old-fashioned sense of I don't want to call it noblesse oblige because that makes it sound like I'm some kind of you know aristocrat, um, you know, 13th Duke of Wimbourne or something like that.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: But I I I have always believed um that if you are in a position in which you can give back to society that that you should do.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that was something that that my mother instilled in me, who um was a child protection social worker and has um, I mean, she's a raging, raging socialist.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but she has a very, very, very strong social conscience, and I think she kind of instilled that in me that I've I've actually had, although this sounds very woke, I've had a very privileged upbringing, and I've been very lucky, and I've been put in a position where um I have the ability to give back to the community that's given me so much.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um and therefore that's that's what I have to do.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: That is a take that I know to be um very uh uncommon amongst people of our generation.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh if you hear about anyone who wants to um make a difference, as it were, uh it generally is phrased uh or framed um with terms like I want to make an impact.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: And usually that entails getting into big corporate jobs um and working on goals that have been set up by supranational institutions or NGOs and anything that's that's couched in that language.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: And this this concept of um a sense of service that's tied to a place with the people that you rub shoulders with every day uh is certainly different from making an impact in that other way.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and and I suppose it is at the very heart of what it means to be um conservative, and in this case, I'll say small c conservative rather than aligned with um the conservative party.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um but but you know you've you've referenced your your mum's politics called a a raging socialist, uh, which suggests you're your politics and you are you're you're you're a you're a conservative counselor, big C conservative counselor.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think I think anyone who um uh is is of our generation, whether they're millennials or the generations afterwards, uh that there are lots of um there are lots of slights about conservatism and conservatives in general.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: What do you think that people commonly get wrong about conservatism?
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: I I think actually, uh to be fair, I don't think um that people of my generation get much wrong about conservatism, if I'm being honest.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: I think they have interpreted uh conservatism about conservatism as it has been presented to them.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: So we have had a government for the last uh 13 years that has uh basically been interested in conserving the wealth of the wealthy has been relatively uninterested in expanding the means of production, but has been relatively uninterested in um uh giving people a stake in society.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I think actually, you know, the vast majority of of people who are our age are uninterested in conservativism quite rightly because it's it it's given them nothing.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: You know, um I had this uh conversation with um Ben Sixmith on the Critic Podcast a while ago, and he made the point to me that uh the old saying that you uh what is it, you you become if you're not socialist by the time you're 20, you've got no heart.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're not a conservative by the time you're 40, you've got no head.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: That doesn't work because you suddenly get to 30 and you start reading like uh Reflections of the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke and thinking, wow, this guy's got this guy's making some really, really good points.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's that as you age, you build up a stock of, I mean, you might also to be fair, you might also think that.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: But um what happens is that as you age, you build up a stock of both financial and cultural capital.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: You build up essentially a standing in society that that makes the society you're a part of worth conserving.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I think one of my the you know, my essentially my whole Twitter brand is um decroying what conservatives do in government.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um and part of the reason I could do that I I think is because we are essentially presenting a block a lot of the time on a very, very natural progression for people to become conservative.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: And that's that's things like wealth accumulation makes you more uh conservative.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um makes you more conservative.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: The big conservative turn in most people's lives is owning um is I was about to say owning kids, but having kids um we don't do that anymore, uh is having kids.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: And actually the average age of um first-time home buyers or first-time mothers and first-time fathers uh is rising and rising and rising because of things like our refusal to build houses, our refusal to overcome entrenching beism within the party and within society.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um so basically the Conservative Party in a lot of ways is signing its own death warrant all the time.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, and I suppose even if you think about um uh the the root of conservatism being to conserve, and you look at um what has been conserved or not been conserved in this case, uh, whether it be the the um family silver as it's often referred to, whether it's um things that were once owned in the state sector uh that no longer are, whether it's um uh whether it's even the concept of a British culture that that's recognisable, um, is as there's not so much you can look back onto and say that's the thing that I'm trying to maintain and enhance and protect and bequeath.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it's all just become a little bit um a little bit vacuous.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: And as you say, um there's a there are material things that can't actually be grabbed a hold of anymore.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: And uh that this point point you make about people um taking much longer to form families or own homes.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there are some really crazy graphs which show uh just how precipitous a drop-off uh things have been on those fronts and on the homeowning front.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know exactly what the the data is, but the last graph I saw floating around the internet from one of the the various uh statistic producing um organizations that uh that that are official.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, let's be honest, they would usually their dog in the fight would be to try and make that look as good as possible.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: So the fact it was this low is scary, but something like in the last 40 years, it's gone from being you know 70% of um 28 to 35 year olds owning their own homes to something like less than 30 percent.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: It might have even dropped lower than that, sorry, it might even be uh around about 10%.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: And um yeah, I I I I don't know where I don't know where all this is going.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: And and but what one interesting thing that I think to pick up on is I don't know if you saw this, but last year, I think it was last year, or maybe back end of the year before, Financial Times published uh an article which uh got got a bit of traction, uh which celebrated that people were becoming that they weren't following that becoming more conservative over time model, which you'd referenced earlier, and that in fact people were remaining more liberal.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: There's multiple ways we can interpret that.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um but I think what is interesting about that is that we um uh are unable to um we're unable to even point to anything that it is that we're we're aiming to conserve anymore.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: That we're we're not even able to present a positive case for it because of whatever has happened with regards to reputation trashing of conservative parties.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um whereas actually a lot of the things that I think might be causing a lot of issues for us is probably a lack of conservatism, a lack of restraint from making um big decisions and thinking that we can figure things out with grand plans and throwing off um these informal structures and restraints within society.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: So actually, when I see those things celebrated, that that scares me a little bit because then it's think you think you go more headlong into it.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: But I also just wonder if the question's being reframed in correctly because um Gen Z, they're often brought up as being oh, that this is when things are going to change so much.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: They're clearly gonna be even more liberal than the millennials.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm sure you would have seen this on your your time on Twitter.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: There seems to be an awful lot of Gen Z people who are not going that way, where they're going, hang on, why are we paying so much for all of this this stuff, whether it's housing, why have we got such a bum deal?
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: And why is it that we are um why is it that we are inviting people into the country and giving all of them these this support, but not us?
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: We're we're we're your own.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: We're we're we're your young people.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that seems to cut across class and ethnicity of those people who are already here in Britain.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: So uh I wonder what your take on that is.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think Gen Z are as liberal as everyone says they are, or do you actually think there's there's a there's a sense of growing uh reactionary backlash in there?
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I think there's so yeah, I think there's definitely a sense of of of reactionary backlash.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: Basically, I I think one of the problems is that we look around uh at the country that we inhabit, and you know, I I know you were talking about um black pills and being quite hopeful earlier in the introduction.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, you do have to question whether I as a conservative I want to conserve this Britain, and I'm not sure I do, because I think I think there are the vast majority of things need improving in this country, and I think we are reaching a a slightly unique time.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: So what previously I've been on the Politics Joe podcast, and I've um quote quite friendly with the with the Politics Joe um presenters, and it's it's very, very interesting that actually on a lot of these issues you talk about homeowning.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, we agree with not only the problems but the solutions.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there are there are certain disagreements, you know.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: If you're looking at homeowning, I would say if you're going to increase homeowning, you've got to increase house building and reduce immigration, they would probably say just increase house house building.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: But generally, on the on the kind of central issues, I think it is becoming less a left and right issue, I think it's becoming less a class issue, I think it's becoming more a generational issue.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um and again, I I think that's something that conservatives actually need to take the blame for because we have, since we have um taken our place in government, we have entrenched a lot of the problems of intergenerational disparity.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: We have not encouraged an intergenerational trickle-down effect.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, one in four pensioners is now a millionaire.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um and the rate of home ownership amongst, uh as you said, amongst young people, is incredibly low because there is just not that that that bumping down of generational wealth.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I think that's I think that's going to be a real problem actually in the future.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um but I think that's a that's an economic problem to which there is uh quite obviously there are quite obvious solutions to that, you know, which are you can structure a rent tax incentives, you can incentivize people to give money from uh boomers down through the generations.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: And that's that's actually a quite uh an easy solution that to be honest, young conservatives like me have been crying out for for years, you know, the ending of the triple lock pension, things like that.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: If we ended the triple lock pension, we could maybe not have the highest rate of tax um since World War II or the highest level of public spending since 19 since the 1970s, as we do at the minute.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um and those that I think are quite easy wins for conservatives.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um for young conservatives like me.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry to interrupt, Tom.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: The are the hard wins um linked to something that you write about um uh quite a lot um uh around the concept of the blob or or you know, another term could be statism, this idea that centralized government and affiliates will organize and uh uh social and economic affairs.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: Are the are the hardwings um looking at where that taxation's going and deciding, I don't know, Javier Malay style and Argentina, what needs to be fuera, you know, getting rid of government department?
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, that is uh unbelievable video for anyone who hasn't seen it.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's it's worth a watch just just just for the comedy of it.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: But but um is it what one of the hard solutions to to it?
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: You talk mentioned some of the easy ones, is is that is is that will that ever be touched?
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: Will you ever have a have the Malay moment here?
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: I yeah, so so I have written a lot of pieces.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um so so what I was talking about earlier is basically the material conditions to enable conservatism, right?
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_01: We we we have not created the material conditions in order to allow generations to gradually become more conservative, which is the fundamental failing of the last 13 years of conservative government, as I as I see it.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: But you're right, those are the easy wins because those are material conditions, and you just you essentially need to change the tax structures to change that.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_01: But you're right, we also have the highest level of public spending since the 1970s, and it is going on things that are fundamentally unconservative.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_01: I think a conservative way forward report found that we spent something like seven billion pounds a year on political campaigns.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I've written about art galleries in Manchester that are hosting art that call Pretty Patella racist for um for calling people who earn less than 23,000 a year um unskilled migrants, which is a perfectly, perfectly uh legitimate political viewpoint, um, but maybe not on our dime and not on our time.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the great example recently is kneecap.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there's this Irish band who are um all like mid-30s, by the way.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um don't get proper jobs.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um they are all um mid-30s, um, and they uh basically, as far as I can work out, their art is expressly anti-English, um, not so much political as in party political, but very, very anti-English.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_01: And they got a grab for 15 grand and the conservative government pulled it, and now the government is being sued to give them that money back.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm I'm sat there thinking, it's it's good that the conservative government has pulled the funding.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: Why was the funding there in the first place?
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_01: That is a huge, huge problem.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I think this this probably comes to uh to to the bigger issue here, which is the dominance of uh the blob or or what you call statism um in modern political governance, which is that the the uh frankly the blob governs and the conservative ministers don't And I think this is the thing that's really rotten in the state of Denmark is that we have had thirteen years to govern conservatively and we have basically failed completely because our governing strategy is bankrupt and it's fundamentally wrong.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_01: And this is a very long story about which I've written quite a lot.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: And it starts with Thatcher's civil service reforms, which put um you know kind of eliminated ministers from the day-to-day running of the government departments, and that is the kind of ministerial um that was the elimination of the relationship you see in yes minister or yes prime minister, in which um Jim Hacker could still outmaneuver Sir Humphrey by making changes to the kind of machinery of government.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_01: So after Thatcher, because she was finding she had so many wet ministers, she basically eliminated that system.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_01: And she made it um much more kind of uh business-like, basically, which worked very, very well for what she wanted to do.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_01: And then that continued throughout Major's government, as it was, um, if you can call it a government.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then what Tony Blair did, and this is yet another of one of the terrible constitutional reforms that Tony Blair did that that the Conservatives have failed to overturn, is he saw potential in what Peter Burnham, the academic Peter Burnham, called the politics of depoliticization.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_01: So basically, because Labour had a very dubious, you know, economic credibility, uh, it had dubious governing credibility because of how long it had been out of government, and because new labor was a new product.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, it was to the people who wanted to vote for it, it was new, and to the people, to the older people who wanted to vote for it, they still saw it as you know, incompetent 70s Jim Callahan type government.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um basically he outsourced a lot of the governance to uh Quangos, NGOs, um, and and uh outside bodies which allowed the new Labour government to basically uh to basically uh take the uh credit for decisions whilst uh outsourcing the actual decision-making process.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_01: So it if you moved your um some of your fiscal decisions to the OBR, for instance, the Office of Budget Responsibility, um it lent you an economic credibility that New Labor didn't have, but the unofficial unofficial governing structure of the OBR did have.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I think spending on um NGOs went up something like seven times under Blair.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: And when we took that that again lasted until um it lasted throughout um Gordon Brown's government, if you can call it government, and went through to David Cameron, at which point he announced the big society, which was essentially an invitation for um community groups, charities, uh and institutions to get involved more and more with the politics of uh of decision making.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: And basically, that was where the blob really started to thrive.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I think fundamentally, until we come up with a governing as conservatives, I think until we come up with a governing solution to combat that blob, I think we will continue to take government as we have in the last 13 years and essentially not be in control.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: Does it does it uh sound like it's an ext- uh there's a new extension of the blob on the way, but with a veneer of democratic accountability.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I uh had just seen that um Labour, uh, should they form the next government, have decided to um bringing sit citizens' assemblies on a range of um issues, which is um what what they get what they get criticized for is that ultimately it becomes a convening spot for the loudest uh points on a certain issue, and that those people who are convening them um they uh can can lead with leading questions to determine the outcome they want and then bring it back and say it's been ratified.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um what what prospect do you see?
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: Knowing that we've got citizens' assemblies like me on the way to join that myriad of other blobby-like apparatus, uh what prospect do you see of that changing in the future?
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and when, presumably, you know, at the end of a Labour government potentially.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: And um and and why should we, I suppose to put an even finer point on it, second question, why why should people be worried about the blob and not dismiss it as some kind of conspiratorial idea?
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna say that there are quite a few questions in there.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and I think that to deal with a with the concept of citizen assemblies first, I think a great example of how this will actually work is is how the overground lines were named.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_01: They they they basically went out and and spoke to the blob, spoken to the blob, and they held uh that the I think it was DNCO, the advertising agency they employed basically went off and spoke to other members of the blob, it spoke to activists, academics, historians, and spoke to them about a very, very limited range of um this is something I wrote about for CapEx, a very, very limited range of London history that basically conforms to a pre-decided um a predecided answer.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_01: And and essentially what blob governance is, is a forum for the blob.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_01: And this is exactly what citizens' assemblies will be, is it will be a forum for the blob to astrotov decisions that are already taken and the blob will speak into the blob.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I you know uh it's it's we already have a citizens assembly which is parliament.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I'm other than bypassing Parliament I'm not really sure what citizens' assemblies add to our democratic conversation.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's quite clear that actually what it will be is um it will be full of people asking leading questions to get the answers that are have been predecided under Labour government.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I I I think the reason you should be worried about that is for a start, because we should not have um these decisions astroturfed.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: Because fundamentally, one of the great things about democracy is you know who makes the decisions and you make them accountable for those decisions.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_01: And if they aren't accountable for those decisions, I think Aaron Bustani had a piece about this the other day.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_01: If they aren't accountable for those decisions, who do you hold accountable?
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_01: Because you can't remove unelected bureaucrats, but it's very, very easy for politicians to blame those bureaucrats, fire those bureaucrats, and move on with their lives.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_01: But actually, our de our method of democratic control is the vote, and it is therefore politicians that we should be forcing to take these decisions.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I think I think that's part of the reason that that people should be worried about the blob.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's the reason people of all stripes should be worried about the blob, which is a lack of democratic accountability.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but if you are a conservative, the reason that you should be worried about the blob is that these people fucking hate you.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um there's no reason, there's no point in dressing it up.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_01: These people fucking hate you, these people hate everything about you, these people hate your values, and they want you gone, they want you completely eliminated from public life, and you can see that in Toby, the appointments of Toby Young, Roger Scruton, Catherine Bobelsing to public bodies, they were hounded out because they were conservative.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_01: But for for no other reason than that.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um so allowing the blob governance of the public sphere is essentially, I mean, it's surrender of the public sphere.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um, at which point, you know, even if you win back government, you you then have to win back the public sphere as well.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_00: Dear classmate, John here.
• 32:31
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• 32:34
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• 32:42
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• 33:00
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• 33:03
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• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: Taking a step back a little and also going deeper into the philosophical depths of the blob and how it even came to be a mode of governance.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: I I I and I maybe you you might have a sympathetic gear to this, and you write for uh write about post-liberalism, which um to give to give listeners who maybe aren't as au fay with the arguments um uh of why we now live in a post-liberal world, um, is there are some political philosophers, people like Patrick Denin, who've made uh a case for it to say that liberalism has failed, uh, uh, but it's baked into the system that liberalism throws off um all settled ways of living and community of any form of self-government, whether at an individual level, so how it is that we stay on a virtuous track, develop character, uh keep our heads down and away from vices, become productive citizens, and then live well within our communities, and our communities are able to self-govern and make decisions for themselves and look after um their own interests, and um up until the rise of big regulatory um um uh movements, I suppose, within uh, or or ideological movements within from the the 30s, 1930s onwards, um you generally would have quite a lot of self-sustaining movements.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_00: And and here in the United Kingdom, we had lots of parish councils and local councils that had quite a lot of clout before they were centralized.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um I I I sometimes wonder whether being governed by regulatory fiat, whether by a centralized government, a supranational institution, whether it's by Kwangos, NGOs, is ultimately our fate for now no longer being being able to um self-govern because we don't have the means anymore.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's not passed down.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's one of the things that we didn't conserve, whether it be through you know the the kind of Judeo-Christian uh Greco-Roman uh philosophical values that used to that used to underpin uh national life, European life.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: What do you make of that?
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_01: I yeah, I so I think the question of whether we live in a post-liberal society or not, I think is a really, really interesting one.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I kind of when I first took political office, that was the first time I think I that I had thought very, very hard about my about my politics and actually about what kind of politician that I wanted to be.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I I think initially I was very, very, very post-liberal.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I think I was I was post-liberal in a slightly Burkean sense, in that actually what I wanted was I wanted a restoration of community by the elimination of the state.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_01: So I saw, because I represent a very, very rural area, I saw groups that had got themselves together, you know, to buy the local pub, for instance.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_01: I've got two um community-owned pubs in my division.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um and those were completely self-forming, self-governing, self-sustaining groups that merely needed the state's help in order to form community.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that is a very kind of Burkean um view.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_01: That is a very Burkean uh group because it is essentially the little platoon that is doing the work.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_01: And my problem, I think, with a lot of post-liberal thoughts that I have, you know, since I've been thinking more about politics, I think my my problem with a lot of post-liberalism as it is, is that it is essentially entirely based on the idea of the state arbitrating responsibility.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_01: And the nation state is not the primary keeper of the common good.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_01: Post-liberals have a much stronger use of the state than, say, neoliberals, and uh that consists of it is a means to a assert national sovereignty, it is a way to protect citizens, it is you know the last groaning bulwark against the unrelenting savagery of the world.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_01: But you cannot turn a nation state into a national community, and the analogy I use for this is a great kind of church roof.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_01: The church roof has is sustained by a series of beams, um, and each one, each one of those those beams, those kind of torrent of ribs, has to bear its weight in order to hold that roof aloft.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_01: And those beams are the kind of local, durable, self-governing associations, institutions, groups that constitute the building blocks of our common life.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_01: And each one is in its way almost insignificant, but the gradual erosion over thousands, over hundreds of years leaves the roof of uh you know, the the the um national sovereignty and national community that leaves the roof preciously unsupported.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_01: And basically what I think has happened is that the roof is collapsing in, and we are trying to we're trying to pop the roof back up instead of repairing the beams first that can support it.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um but I think one of the interesting things about post-liberalism is it is it feeds back into a conversation that we had earlier, which is about the intergenerational disparity.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_01: One of the big problems with post-liberalism is that it you know it talks a lot about the rebalancing of rights and duties, and I'm never quite sure it it always seems to be one more duty away from handing out a right, but it never quite gets there.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, at the minute we're talking about um, you know, there's been papers from um onward, for instance, about bringing back national service.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, which you could agree.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think it's absolutely mad to bring back national service.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because if you're not gonna basically, if you're not gonna make it about the military, you're gonna be putting them into community, community uh endeavours, which are basically gonna be woke madrasses, so you're giving foot soldiers to people who fucking hate you.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um But you know, we we have got a generation at the minute who have sacrificed sometimes 10% of their lives to lockdown, who are facing the biggest living falling, the biggest falling living standards on record, highest tax burden since World War II, highest public spending since the 1970s, on average won't be able to afford a house until they're well into their late 20s, unless they live in London, in which case, good fucking luck.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um and we are now talking about taking two more years out of their lives to to do what?
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_01: Like, how can you ask more of a of a of a of a generation that has already given so much and that are essentially being handed nothing because we're not interested in making sure the wealth trickles down to them, we're not interested in making sure that they have the right of home ownership.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_01: We're interested in theory, in like building more homes, but actually, you know, we're not prepared to look at the tax structures because that's unpopular, we're not prepared to look at building more homes because that's also unpopular.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I think I think one of my problems with post-liberalism is it it loads an awful lot of responsibility on current generations and it's very, very, very short on rights.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the things about post-Boomer government and post-Boomer politics is we are going to have to accept a lower standard of state help and state support than the boomers enjoyed because that was completely unsustainable, because they were just a massive voting bloc who could vote themselves whatever they wanted, and it has come at such a cost that you know current generations are now paying for that, and we are gonna have to pivot towards essentially what Macron quite rightly called the end of abundance, um, but that can't surely involve you know indentured servitude for two years for people on the grounds of being young.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_01: Surely what actually we should be looking at is is reducing the cost of living and creating a more a more productive economy to pay for some of the welfare state growth through growth rather than just kind of dragging down the future generations.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's that's a compelling economic argument.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I think you could even add a cultural argument as to why national service won't necessarily engender what you would want it to engender, which I think behind it may be this idea of uh uh a kind of enhanced or an elevated or even just an existence of some kind of patriotism or national feeling, a sense of national community.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I know Roger Scruton wrote about it.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think it was about a year after the Brexit vote, 2017.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so he wrote a book called Where We Are and the State of Modern Britain.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_00: And he did make a more general comment about the type of lives that we live in modernity, and one of them being that most people now spend their time.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_00: And in the case of Gen Z, and he didn't have this data in front of him at that point, apparently, in case of Gen Z people, they spend a quarter of their weight.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Lives at a minimum on social media.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_00: And what Scruton's point was was no one actually does rub shoulders anymore or have it has an encounter with the people on the streets that they share a home with.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_00: They spend their time networked into countless, faceless, um, touchless individuals anywhere and everywhere.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_00: And that sense of community is is is not really there anymore.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so um maybe that does just leave us only with the economic argument is can you then just become some kind of a benevolent um state in terms of enabling economic uh progress to be able to get people to go, do you know what?
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I quite like this place.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_00: This is good, and I'm loyal to it and I'm not I'm not um I'm not disavowing it at every second.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_00: Uh how how likely that is to happen, I I don't know, but um yeah, who knows where we go culturally when I think it's plain to see that most uh that there are many young folks um that that don't don't have any time for the country.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I I certainly used to be one of those.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I used to uh growing up in my my twenties, generally just read The Guardian over and over and um and and and found myself across the speech yes found myself found myself um generally just doing doing the country down and uh and I'm not entirely sure that national service would have made me feel any warmer toward it.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I would have just seen it as proof that it's this tyrannical state.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_00: So um, yeah, there are many reasons why not to go for it.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um Tom, you've written about um what what the future might hold for Britain and one such term that has become popular, um, well not so much popular, but it certainly hit the airwaves recently.
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_00: You've written about, I know Aris Rousinos, who writes unheard quite a lot has written about it.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um this concept called Anglo futurism.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_00: What is it and uh why do you support it?
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_01: Anglo-futurism is this great, fantastic idea that is you know completely unreachable.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's nothing more than a pipe dream.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that Britain has a future that is just not managed decline.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um and it's you know, it's it's completely undoable, completely unrealistic, but it it it's important to have dreams, isn't it?
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um so Anglo-futurism, I think, started in um and I do not, you know, I do not claim to speak for them at or or understand it that much, but it started as a kind of an aesthetic movement in um panel posters on um the right wing, and then I kind of consumed it via uh uh their AI-generated images and the aristocros in our space, which people haven't read and people should read.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_01: But basically it's it's it's a vision of Britain that if we were doing things, if we had a government that was capable of doing stuff, um which it seems we have a government and I'm I'm I'm actually genuinely not sure that a change of the government will change this, but we have a government that is basically capable of doing stuff.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_01: So a lot of the um a lot of the particularities around Anglo-Futurism are the the vast increase in infrastructure.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_01: So a lot of these a lot of these kind of Anglo-Futurist um images are infrastructure that looks fantastic and is built really, really well.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_01: And in that sense, I think it's a callback to the Victorian era where you know we the Victorians built pumping stations in like a neoclassical style.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_01: Everything the Victorians built was needlessly complicated and it was needlessly um, it was needlessly grand, and we were so much better for it.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I think you know, uh there is a concept of the shidification of Britain where now we have train stations.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know, when the Victorians built train stations, they built Newcastle Central, which is absolutely glorious.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_01: They built St.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_01: Pancras, they built King's Cross, which you know has this amazing industrial um iron and glass ceiling.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um Newcastle Central has you know the same the same kind of ceiling.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um almost every provincial town in Britain almost every town or city in Britain has an amazing Victorian railway station, and all the suburbs have modern railway stations that are fucking horrible because they have been uh they have been created in using modern building regulations that basically make it impossible to build nice things.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I think Anglo-Futurism is is is slightly a slightly a response to the aesthetic and fitification of Britain and a desire for us to build um buildings that look a lot nicer as well as are practical.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um and uh I think that's part of it, and I think what it also is is a is a is a latent desire for a government to be able to actually build those things in the first place.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_01: So a lot of these images are of things like small modular nuclear reactors, or of things like uh I think there's a thing like spaceports, um you know, huge cargo container ports.
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um they're also quite uh famous series of particularly right-wing ones of border defences that are just basically massive seawalls of Tover.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I think I think in a lot of ways, I think this is a latent desire for a government to for a government that is able to do things that the current Conservative government has not been able to do, which is for instance lower the cost of energy, lower the cost of living through increased energy production, through small modular nuclear reactors, and uh through um to lower the cost of living and protect the countryside through mass adoption of um uh like um rail systems, HSU, magnet systems, um and apparently to defend our borders by putting up massive iron seawalls.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um so yeah, I think anglo futurism is basically I think it is I think it's partly about futurism, but I think it's more about a reaction against what we are not achieving.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_00: Hmm.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I suppose there's some common themes in it, self-reliance to a degree.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_00: I think generally whether people could put their finger on it.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think people are quite sick of having to import absolutely everything, whether it's energy, whether it's uh goods.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_00: We want to get back to making some things again, getting some spades in the ground for things that'll last.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, the the vernacular architecture point that you make is a is an important one.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_00: Things that look beautiful and that feel familiar.
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_00: And let's be honest, the things that Britain is famous for and why people visit it far and wide and come to choose to live here and have the take their selfies in front of are all these buildings you you talked about.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I I don't know if you follow the account on Twitter, uh the culture critic account.
• 52:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh excellent.
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, he the the the the guy who runs that um every day a thread dropping into your account, uh either schooling you on the great artists of the past or the great cathedral cathedrals.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_00: But his most recent threads that I saw anyway was on vernacular architecture, and it started with this picture of a city, and it was a it was a financial district of a city.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_00: He said, Can anyone guess where it is?
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_00: And um I I knew it only because I'd been there, but it's totally unremarkable, and that was the point in that every city has followed this model of skyscrapers, glass and steel buildings, generally spherical or jutty edges, uh, or cylindrical and or jutty edges, or a mixture of the two.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, and exactly.
• 53:31
  SPEAKER_00: And it was a picture of Frankfurt City Center, and he was like, I don't understand why the Germans in this case have embraced such an architecture when what they're well known for, and I appreciate it can't be half timbered houses everywhere, but you know what you think of when you think of Germany.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and and you can you can think about that if you think about Japan and seeing places in India if you've seen them, if you can places in France, is that there's a way of being and it's in tune with the landscape, the people, and their more their moors.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_00: And uh yeah, I I I I don't see there being any conflict in this idea that we can look towards some kind of future, whilst also having some kind of uh nostalgic look at the past.
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll invoke Scruton again because you know he he talked about how nostalgia is often uh dismissed and it's used as a pejorative that it's only for backward-looking regressive people.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_00: But he said some of the greatest works of our uh of civilization have been based on nostalgia.
• 54:31
  SPEAKER_00: The root the Greek root is nostos, which means like a yearning for home or something.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_00: So the whole of Odyssey and the Iliad were written about that.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_00: Hope Homer, this great man, the whole story is about him going home, and um and it's okay to want that, and it's okay to want to maintain it somewhere.
• 54:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's like you is a realization that that thing's gone, but you can find ways in which to live on and and things that are built that are going to stand longer than um, well, maybe not in the case of new buildings, but if we were to build in that style, the places you've mentioned, the ones that are still standing are still uh will stand for much longer.
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_00: The ones that aren't is because we rip them down in an act of cultural vandalism.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, people want those.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I think I think we can I think we could go back to it.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_00: And um, I know Ed West has written about it on one of his substacks, this um notion of why is it that we build houses in a certain style and flats in a certain style when people don't want to live there?
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_00: And some people say that's not true, they do want to live there.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_00: And then you can pull out any number of surveys that hold side by side something built in a kind of classic Georgian or Edwardian or Victorian style next to something that is modern, and people will uh roundly choose the former, the vernacular style.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so, yeah, I I think I think we should embrace that.
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I don't know if anyone will.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you I think you're right.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think we can expect that from a Labour government, and I don't think we can expect it from a government until such point as um uh our GDP to debt ratio isn't basically on parity.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um uh I I I want to throw um a few more things in the mix, and this is entering into the end zone, but I'm sure it won't be a quick one to to unpack.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to start bringing up some other isms that you've written about.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and one of them is immigrationism, or as the the French uh have popularized this, and so I'll I'll get my my uh kind of plaire accent on immigrationisme.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah, so so so so what what do the French mean when they talk about immigrationisme or immigrationisme?
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_01: Immigrationisme, um insofar as I understand it, it's it's a it's a it's a term that is has been coined by the French, um, I think it was an anthropologist, um Pierre André, and I would also like to apologize for my French pronunciation, Tajueth.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um and it's basically that that the idea of immigration is both inevitable and good.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_01: And from that stems an entire approach to immigration that that governs basically most western nations um because immigration is both inevitable and good.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um the most important thing for people to do is break down barriers to immigration.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_01: And he writes very, very interestingly, it was um I've written about this on my sub stack, I've written about it to the critic, but if you really want to understand it, go and um Google it and it's uh it's uh in a copy of Le Figaro, I think.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um that is conveniently translatable into English.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not intelligent enough to read French, barely intelligent enough to read English.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um but basically that is that the idea that immigration is both good, good and inevitable has downstream effects that are very, very, very recognizable in almost any way Western nation when we talk about immigration.
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_01: So it becomes a process of intimidation because it is good and because it is inevitable, you have to break down barriers, and therefore you have to break down the people that are placing barriers in the way of further immigration, and that is when you get people accusing other people of racism when they talk about an opposition to immigration.
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's been I think that was particularly prevalent in Britain in the in the run-up to um 2016.
• 58:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think after Brexit we we kind of broke the idea of talking about immigration being racist.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think that was kind of dismissed, and yet ironically, immigration has skyrocketed since then.
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_01: But it's now from a more diverse set of places, so apparently that's okay.
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um which is absolutely not what people voted for, but that's by the by.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um so yeah, immigration is basically an enforcement mechanism for a group of people who believe that immigration is good and inevitable, and generally they tend to be what Matt Goodwin might call new elites.
• 59:45
  SPEAKER_01: So they are you know um intellectual elites, they will be financial elites, and I think a fundamental part of this is something I call neo-slavery, which is the idea that you will just constantly import a low-wage workforce forever to in order to um subsidize the living standards of a particularly middle class elite, uh intellectual elite that actually cannot afford the lifestyle that they have.
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I think um one of the things about one of the unintended consequences about Brexit going forward will be an increase in competition between immigrant groups, uh so that you know we used to have a lot of um EEA immigration, which was actually a net um beneficiary to the Chancellor, we now have a lot of um non-EEA immigration, which is a net drain on the Chancellor.
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um but actually that allows for wage competition in the open market, as it were.
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_01: So if you are, you know, if you were previously pre-Brexit paying for your breakfast, let's say it's something woke, like two Smash Dicardos and scrambled eggs and smokes out, right?
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_01: If you have that pre-Brexit and that's made by, let's say, a Spanish um, we have quite a lot of Spanish people in services because the youth unemployment rate in Spain was so high.
• 1:01:27
  SPEAKER_01: If it was previously made by people in Spain and now the immigration um uh parameters are equalized, it's now made by somebody from say Indonesia and it's made even cheaper, which allows basically the government to avoid the real consequences of immigration because it is essentially a form of human quantitative easing that you are absorbing um cost increases through the importation of a lower wage workforce from abroad, and we will just continually find the lowest wage workforce.
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_00: Human quantitative easing.
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_00: Now there's a that there's a slogan, there's a saying that I can see become a bit of a bit of a slogan at some point in the future when uh no doubt there ends up being a uh an immigration reckoning.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it certainly seems to be headed that way at some point in the future.
• 1:02:26
  SPEAKER_00: Going back to your point about accusations of of racism when um people call into question uh the the policy of mass immigration, uh I read recently um a book by Christopher Coldwell uh that preceded um uh another book which is probably more famous, The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray.
• 1:02:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, this book was Christopher Coldwell's The Reflections on the Revolution in Europe.
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_00: And he was talking a lot about mass immigration within that book and and what that meant culturally.
• 1:02:59
  SPEAKER_00: And um there was a quote in there which um I think fits nicely to this idea of shaming people to questioning as to that policy.
• 1:03:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um and the quote is this There are, however, great problems with shame as a means of governing.
• 1:03:15
  SPEAKER_00: For one thing, opposition does not disappear but only becomes unspeakable, making the public even less knowable to its rulers.
• 1:03:22
  SPEAKER_00: For another, shame as a government weapon works only on people capable of feeling shame.
• 1:03:27
  SPEAKER_00: It thus purges high-minded people from the opposition and ensures that when the now mysterious public does throw up an opposite an opposition, it will be led by shameless people and take a shameless form.
• 1:03:39
  SPEAKER_00: I think what Caldwell's trying to get at here is you need to be able to have these conversations out in the open and not seek to shut them down.
• 1:03:49
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you don't, you're gonna end up with a very ugly face shown in the end.
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_00: And as far as I can see, that ugly face hasn't shown itself at the moment, which is good.
• 1:04:01
  SPEAKER_00: I think those people who are questioning the policy, it seems to be on two separate grounds.
• 1:04:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there's the cost uh ground, which um uh recently what's been quite interesting in European countries is I think just before Christmas, the Dutch had run a study as to how much uh immigration cost and which groups and which immigrants cost them the most.
• 1:04:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then um just last month the Austrians did it, and they were exorbitant figures, you know, huge amounts of money.
• 1:04:32
  SPEAKER_00: And um, and then everyone was going, oh, Britain would never do that.
• 1:04:35
  SPEAKER_00: But someone's gone and done it.
• 1:04:36
  SPEAKER_00: I can't remember who it is, but something just came out in the last few days of pre-recording this, um, which said that since 2020, uh immigration to Britain or immigrants living in Britain um that have arrived since that point have cost the country 36 billion pounds.
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, 12 billion of that was um spent on foreign students.
• 1:04:59
  SPEAKER_00: So that's an awful lot of money.
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_00: And and and considering we now couch things in economic terms when we discuss things in the the the political realm, um, I dare say that's going to become quite a talking point.
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_00: And the the other study which has been released um that challenges that that uh that immigrationism policy um is is about um is about culture.
• 1:05:23
  SPEAKER_00: And um usually that's off topic, but because now it's in the eyes of uh this is being framed in the eyes of the the immigrants themselves.
• 1:05:33
  SPEAKER_00: So it's interviewing the immigrants.
• 1:05:34
  SPEAKER_00: Why is it that you tend to choose somewhere like the United Kingdom?
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_00: And the answers that have most commonly been given by people is because there are already large amounts of people like us there.
• 1:05:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's really low effort to get there.
• 1:05:48
  SPEAKER_00: Once we're there, we can feel comfortable.
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so that throws that throws into the the light once more is can you ever achieve a level of integration and sort?
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_00: Social cohesion when that becomes one of the key motives.
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_00: But interestingly, the findings of that study were people aren't necessarily coming just for the welfare state, even if it does seem to be true that Britain has created an international welfare state that's that's open to everyone.
• 1:06:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:06:19
  SPEAKER_01: I think one of the things that this raises is is that fundamentally you're right.
• 1:06:24
  SPEAKER_01: I think when Tejev wrote that piece, one of his points was that the ethics of conviction, especially if it is forced, is not policy.
• 1:06:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that is that is increasingly becoming clear with our with our immigration policy.
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_01: I think one of the interesting things at the minute is that we have a a degree of outridership.
• 1:06:48
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, it's an a degree of outridership with uh people who are saying that multiculturalism has failed.
• 1:06:59
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, I think Sueella Brotherman was was actually one of the first people to say this.
• 1:07:06
  SPEAKER_01: She made a what she called a civic argument, which was that you know, multiculturalism's problem is that it makes no demands of the incomer to integrate.
• 1:07:18
  SPEAKER_01: It has failed because it allows people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it, and it that essentially allows people to be in the society but are not of the society.
• 1:07:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I think I I I I think that's really, really interesting because I think that was the first time for a long time that we have had a frontline politician who was prepared to tackle uncontrolled immigration, inadequate integration, and you know, the misguided dogma of um of multiculturalism.
• 1:07:56
  SPEAKER_01: But I I think that the fact that we have some conservative frontline politicians who are prepared to say that shows that there is a there is a growing movement of people who are prepared to prepared to prepared to make these arguments, and I think that's all reflective of society, frankly.
• 1:08:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um because the fact is that you can't meaningfully integrate people when you are, you know, in the last two years we've allowed a city the size of Birmingham integrate.
• 1:08:31
  SPEAKER_01: You you cannot come up with a meaningful policy integration for that number of people.
• 1:08:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's it's just not possible.
• 1:08:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's just not possible.
• 1:08:42
  SPEAKER_01: And what that means is that what we have essentially had to do as a society in order to enable a level of immigration that is this high is to water down what it means to be British and what it means to be British what it means to fit into British society.
• 1:09:03
  SPEAKER_01: One of the key tenants of multiculturalism is that uh essentially there is no monoculture and that there is no first or foremost culture within Britain, um including British culture.
• 1:09:19
  SPEAKER_01: I think basically that um when we allowed a um when we when we started becoming an immigrant uh a country that allowed mass immigration, what we did was and David Goodhart describes this, we what we did in order to allow that was we replaced the glue of ethnicity, which is a very, very kind of visible glue, you know, um on the basis of race.
• 1:09:52
  SPEAKER_01: We replaced that with the glue of values.
• 1:09:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so that was that was relative that made it relatively easy to accept um Commonwealth immigrants because we would um you know we got immigrants from um India who were relatively culturally conservative, we got people from um the West Indies, also very culturally conservative, um familiar with like British forms of governance, familiar with um British uh legal systems.
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then as we expanded our remit of all the sources of immigration out and out and out and out, we gradually dissolved those um we dissolved that glue of values to the point where we can no longer really ask or make any demands of um newcomers, and we can't even really ask them what their beliefs are, um, which I think is a real problem for social cohesion going forward.
• 1:11:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I think I think you do see that with um I I do think you see that with a lot of the process around Gaza, and I'm I'm I'm quite worried about that what that holds for the future.
• 1:11:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, uh I I agree.
• 1:11:18
  SPEAKER_00: And um I think there are tough um conversations to come, and I think they uh ultimately starting.
• 1:11:27
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you go and watch uh news channels and generally keep your finger on the pulse, you'll find people who are long retired out of uh the political game, the public service game, saying that they're really worrying about the rapid rise of sectarianism within uh our our our culture and uh and its its impact on political life.
• 1:11:50
  SPEAKER_00: So definitely worries for for me as well, and um and I'm sure for many people out there.
• 1:11:56
  SPEAKER_00: Let's try and finish on a more positive note.
• 1:12:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um uh Douglas Murray said uh in a recent Spectator article that soon he'd be the only commoner he knows, owing to all of the titles and knighthoods that the that Buckingham Palace um now dishes out.
• 1:12:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um and within that he suggests you don't have to be particularly great to be honoured in this day and age.
• 1:12:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um and there was recently a bit of a kerfuffle on the internet about Tim Martin of Weatherspoon's fame um being awarded a knighthood.
• 1:12:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um so lots of people who were criticizing him for that and losing their minds over Tim Martin forgetting that.
• 1:12:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um but you wrote a piece about why he deserved one.
• 1:12:40
  SPEAKER_00: Why does Tim Martin deserve a knighthood?
• 1:12:44
  SPEAKER_00: Oh boy, now you really hit me where I live.
• 1:12:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um everything else was kind of bumped until now.
• 1:12:53
  SPEAKER_01: So I I um for people who don't know, which will be almost everyone, because I don't do it for likes, I do it to be interesting.
• 1:13:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um I run an Instagram account called Spoons But Nice, which is basically a I do an architectural history of all the weather spoons that I go and drink in.
• 1:13:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I think Tim Martin absolutely deserves this nighthood because what Tim Martin understands about the British pub that almost nobody else does, is that its place is as a third place between work and home.
• 1:13:33
  SPEAKER_01: And in order to be successful, basically you have to fit into the slightly Victorian tradition of being obscenely grand.
• 1:13:45
  SPEAKER_01: And to that end, Tim Martin buys a lot of incredibly, incredibly um amazing provincial buildings, um, and it keeps them open, a lot of them are grade two listed minimum.
• 1:14:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um I was in the Winter Gardens in Harrogate with my girlfriend yesterday, and it is just an incredible building.
• 1:14:14
  SPEAKER_01: You walk down it, it's got a uh a split staircase as you walk down.
• 1:14:18
  SPEAKER_01: The the entrance hall is neoclassical.
• 1:14:21
  SPEAKER_01: You walk down, it's got um originally it had a it has some of the original um iron and glass ceiling, um, and then you walk further in and it has this wonderful um wonderful pattern ceiling.
• 1:14:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I think what uh again, I think what Tim Martin understands is that the park is neither a place to drink nor is it a place to eat.
• 1:14:50
  SPEAKER_01: It is a place to socialise, and I think he has basically created the the he has analyzed and created the perfect English setting to for people to socialise in.
• 1:15:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I think you look at a lot of the other chain pubs in Britain, you look at the hungry horse or oh god, what are the um ones?
• 1:15:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's not just hungry horse, is it?
• 1:15:17
  SPEAKER_01: There are a couple of other harvesters, yeah.
• 1:15:22
  SPEAKER_01: Green King aren't too bad, actually.
• 1:15:24
  SPEAKER_01: They've got some good pubs, um but yeah, the the the Brewers Fair, that's the other one.
• 1:15:31
  SPEAKER_01: So these are my mother calls them plastic pubs.
• 1:15:36
  SPEAKER_01: They are completely confected, they're all new build, they are horrible because the thing that Britons love that Tim Martins that Tim Martin understands is that Britons love history and they love needless grandiosity in the pubs.
• 1:15:54
  SPEAKER_01: I was talking about Newcastle Central um earlier, and the the the the station pub in Newcastle Central has tiling on the walls that is 20 feet high, and apparently the tiles are worth about 10 million pounds.
• 1:16:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and and Victorian pubs had this weird thing of just being completely overdone in needless grandiosity, and I think Weatherspoons are basically they are the only top company that has ever appreciated and replicated that, and I think that's why Tim Martin deserves his knighthood.
• 1:16:37
  SPEAKER_01: I think Tim Martin will do more than anybody else in Britain to save the pop.
• 1:16:43
  SPEAKER_00: I think you're right, and I think three there are three solid reasons there for him to have a knighthood.
• 1:16:49
  SPEAKER_00: There's the uh protecting and maintaining uh Britain's architectural heritage, there is um bringing bringing people together, contributing to social cohesion.
• 1:17:00
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that's been a common theme of things that have been lacking today.
• 1:17:03
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, all power to matter, and also being a big employer.
• 1:17:06
  SPEAKER_00: Any post-liberal who does not support who does not support Tim Martin is just it's cosplay.
• 1:17:13
  SPEAKER_00: Cosplay.
• 1:17:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's been an absolute uh pleasure, and um, and hopefully for those um who are not so conservative-minded can now see that there is a a friendly face and some deep heartfelt thought to to it.
• 1:17:29
  SPEAKER_00: And it uh you know, you're not uh everyone's not just evil um if they if they say they're conservative.
• 1:17:35
  SPEAKER_00: So it's been a pleasure.
• 1:17:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um you've mentioned a few times on the podcast that you write in various places and you've got various accounts.
• 1:17:42
  SPEAKER_00: Where can people find you?
• 1:17:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um so they can find me on Twitter at uh 93 Vintage Jones.
• 1:17:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um they can find me on uh Substack at the Potemkin Village Idiot, which is quite an appropriate name, I think.
• 1:17:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and on my Substack and on my Twitter, I post um most of my writing, which is at uh The Critic, is at CapEx, and is um generally at Conhome and a few other places, but it is it's it's mainly there.
• 1:18:14
  SPEAKER_00: Tom, an absolute pleasure.
• 1:18:15
  SPEAKER_00: Keep up the good fight.
• 1:18:17
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 1:18:18
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much for having me on, John, and thank you for listening.
• 1:18:21
  SPEAKER_00: Catch you next time.
• 1:18:25
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining me in Thinking Class today.
• 1:18:27
  SPEAKER_00: To keep up to date with all that I am doing, please subscribe to the Thinking Class YouTube channel at Thinking Class and follow me on X at Thinking Classes.
• 1:18:37
  SPEAKER_00: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
• 1:18:43
  SPEAKER_00: Here I seek to explore the ideas, values, and culture that made our civilization, those that are run making it, and how leaders at our public and private institutions should respond.
• 1:18:52
  SPEAKER_00: Engage with me on YouTube or X or write to me at thinkingclasspod at gmail.com to tell me who you want me to speak to and what topics are important to you.
• 1:19:01
  SPEAKER_00: I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey.