Latest / Thinking Class / #144 - Ben Jones - Britain Has Become An Island Of Strangers And You’re Not Allowed To Say So

Transcript

#144 - Ben Jones - Britain Has Become An Island Of Strangers And You’re Not Allowed To Say So · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking to you Ben Jones.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Ben is the director of case management at the Free Speech Union and the author of Island of Strangers: Diversity, Decline, and Free Speech in Crisis.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: In this conversation, Ben and I think out loud about when British people stopped saying it's a free country and what replaced it, why the Free Speech Union has dealt with more than 6,000 cases of people punished for speaking, and what that tells us about the state of Britain, how hyperdiversity and the decline of Christianity have destroyed the shared moral universe, why Britain is in a pre-revolutionary state, and why the last time this happened we executed a king, why Islam poses a distinct challenge that cannot be reconciled with Western liberal values, why the ruling class has seceded from the nation and treats the population as an obstacle, why the state is sponsoring an invasion inflicted primarily on women and girls, and why that is a crisis of legitimacy and his plea to liberal progressives.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: Stop the experiment now, because you do not know what you're unleashing.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: This episode is supported by Aquinas Tuition, bespoke academic tutoring for children who deserve to be stretched and not managed.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: If your child needs more than their school is giving them, visit AquinasTuition.co.uk.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: And if you value serious long-form conversations like this, then subscribe to Thinking Class on YouTube, follow on Spotify, and support the show on Substack.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: And if you haven't already, go and watch The Call of England, my documentary series retracing H.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: V.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: Morton's 1927 journey to find out what is left of the old country and to see the evidence of the new England that has emerged since that time.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: Episodes 1 and 2 are live now on YouTube.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the show, classmates, and now Ben Jones.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Ben Jones has written the book that says what most British people know, but nobody in public life feels they're allowed to say, which is that Britain has become an island of strangers.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Ben argues that Britain was a real nation once, with a people, a culture, a faith, and indeed a common life, but that it has been deliberately transformed into something else without democratic consent.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Ben is the director of case management at the Free Speech Union, which means he spends his working life defending people who have been punished for saying what he himself has now put into print.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: While many search to understand what has happened to the country, most understand that it's not possible to publicly notice.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: Ben Jones, welcome to Thinking Class.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks very much for joining me.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: Ben, in my day, I'm going to begin with, sounding like a real young fogey here, the phrase it's a free country used to be a very ordinary thing an Englishman could say.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: Indeed, that's what people would would say to you if you uh protested that what you heard them say was not to your taste.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: It was an instinctive response.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it assumed that liberty was the default condition here, but I don't think anyone says it anymore.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Well, when do you think that phrase died?
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: What replaced it?
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: And what do you think it tells us about what has happened to Britain in the intervening 30 or so years?
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: You're absolutely right.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: Growing up in the 90s, 2000s, I heard people say that all the time.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: I give another example in the book, actually, of a of a different phrase that I heard a lot as a child, but I don't think I've ever heard in my adult life, which is that wouldn't be the Christian thing to do.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: And that has totally, totally vanished.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember being told that by parents, grandparents, by people who never went to church, by the way, as well.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I would argue actually those those two things are related.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: Those two stories are part of the same process of change.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think seeing what I do at the Free Speech Union, we're speaking now at uh lunchtime on a Monday.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: Over the preceding weekend, we've had 10 new requests for help come in where people have been in trouble for something that they uh have said.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think it's become very difficult to say that Britain is a free country in any meaningful sense because you can now be in trouble with the police for expressing pretty mild views about immigration and multiculturalism.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: You can be sacked by your employer for doing the same.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, Islamic blasphemy laws and norms are becoming extremely pervasive.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think it's really impossible to say that Britain is still meaningfully a free country.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's not a totalitarian country, but it does have elements of totalitarianism in its common culture, in the way in which the state interacts with with people.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: And this this bizarre and unsettling transformation is a story that I tell in Island of Strangers um really in two different ways through through two prisms.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: Firstly, we have immigration, truly mass-scale immigration, and the rise of what I call hyper-diversity.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: So we we've moved far beyond the idea of there being um small ethnic minorities from countries that have um have been part of the British Empire and then later Commonwealth, and therefore have some cultural um touch points in the shared region.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: We're now talking about a level of diversity that is really baffling to people when you encounter it in in day-to-day life.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the first part.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: The second part is the decline of Christianity as the glue that holds our society together.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I think both of those stories are part of how freedom of speech has come undone in Britain.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: A couple of threads to pull on there.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: One is the qualitative dis difference between the immigration waves that we've experienced as a country.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: I I I know it myself in my own family, in my own family, I have uh a a descendant of a a former civil servant in the British Empire in Uganda.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: Very uh uh deep warmth towards the country, its people, uh indeed its cultural mores, and came in the post-war period, married into British life, and continued it on, and and is uh uh uh a perfect example of assimilation, uh which can happen.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: I know that there are uh there's talk on the right that it can't, but it can, but clearly since then we're talking about uh scales of immigration and with different kinds of people with different cultural contexts, including from the same kind of places in the world that um are beginning from a a disconnect, which is why you see celebrations of Pakistani independence or Indian independence on on the streets, uh, as opposed to cutting themselves off from the motherland.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you you you mentioned you've had 10 new requests over the weekend under the Free Speech Union.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: I I I I have been wanting to ask this question within the Free Speech Union for a long time.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'd really quite like to know this uh your sense of what the work you see uh tells us about modern working life in Britain, because the modern HR department really is the uh ground zero for a lot of these things, it seems.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: I I think I would say that uh working for the Free Speech Union means uh that I could write this book.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: But if I worked for pretty much any other organization, certainly any business anywhere in the public sector, I could not have published this book and expected to have kept my job at the end of it.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um and that's not because it's outrageously provocative, uh, it's certainly not not racist or any of these things, but it it deals very bluntly with uh the real consequences of mass migration and uh mass migration with heavy Islamic characteristics.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um working for the Free Speech Union meant I was able to do that.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um what I see and what my colleagues see on a day-to-day basis uh really is what impelled me to write this book because I wanted to ask why is it that we are seeing um some truly absurd prosecutions of people for things they've posted on social media?
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: Why are the police visiting um cancer patients uh to question them about non-criminal Facebook posts?
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh why is the uh the aftermath to Southport what it is?
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: And why is the state reaction so severe?
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um why is it that employers are sacking people because they uh don't accept the claims of transgender activists?
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um in terms of the subject matter, these things are all quite disparate.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: We're seeing people who are in trouble for setting off all sorts of different cultural minefields.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um and um I wanted to look at the structural explanation of why is this happening?
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: Why is Britain so unfree?
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: Why does it feel so unfree?
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: And you can look at the polling, there's evidence for this now, going back many years, um, of this trend of people feeling that they've got to self-censor.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, just this morning a new poll came out that said that 51% of people um feel that the country uh is less free with respect to what you can say since the Labour government was elected in 2024.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: So there's all this evidence.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: We see all of these cases.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: We've dealt now with more than 6,000 cases in five years of the Free Speech Union, the vast majority of that occurring in the last two years when we've had a Labour government.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I wanted to step back from that and get to the root causes of why this is happening.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: And they are those two stories.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: It is the the decline of a of a um of a cohesive society that operated within a shared moral universe to what we have now, which is a diracinated landscape where you have multiple different identity groups competing to impose their norms across the rest of society.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: And if you look at it purely from a freedom of speech point of view, would you be better if your objective is to maximize political liberty to stick where we are now in the 2020s, late 2020s, or go back to the 1950s?
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: Now, in the 1950s, you have state censorship of plays, you have an age of stifling deference with respect to politicians from the media.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, Britain is unfree in in all sorts of different ways.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: And yet at the same time, we are talking about one set of social and cultural taboos that everybody in that society understands.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: There are people increasingly pushing against them, but everybody knows what the rules are.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: And you know that there are certain things that if you speak about them or if you say them, you will get in some kind of trouble.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas in 2026, we have a situation where we have myriad different groups, they all have their own set of sacred ideas, and so we have groups as varied as Islamists, Hindus, transgender activists, Black Lives Matters campaigners, etc.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: etc.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: On it goes.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: All saying, no, you can't talk about that.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: You can't say that it's offensive, it's racist, it's Islamophobic.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: And that has chipped away at the public square and chipped away at the freedom of all of us to speak our minds.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: I was reading recently the English translation of Eric Zamore, the French presidential candidate's book, The Suicide of France, translated by Nathan Pinkoski, and he outlines the uh ideas that have led to a very similar state of affairs in France, which was ultimately the prohibition of national preference, the the conversion of France from a nation with a defined territory and culture and a people into a planetary magma.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: And um uh I he he he spoke about the the the revolution, uh the revolutionary ideas that came across the Atlantic or the Pacific, Pacific, whichever direction you go in from San Francisco, one that um valorised the individual, but not in the old Germanic sense of that the English people would understand it, but that of the atomistic consumer, the hedonist, uh, and that of the valorization of the ethnic minority.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I wonder what a post-revolutionary Britain may look like, not one that continues to have imbibed those same ideals, but one that seeks to gain control once more in a way that actually makes the nation governable.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: What's your sense of what would need to happen to put to bed many of these vexation vexatious concern concerns and to return to the British people, the inhabitants of these islands, the ability to say what they think and to be allowed to notice things and to democratically act upon them?
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think I've ever been asked the first part of your question before.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I'll I'll answer that bit first of all.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um I I don't think that um any of the off-ramps that now exist are easy or straightforward.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: I think that 30 years of political failure has created a crisis in this country which is um radicalizing people's opinion.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, now there is this debate that lots of people find very uncomfortable about um so-called ethno-nationalism and uh this debate about the extent to which ethnicity matters to be British or English.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: And uh as I was tracking it, this seemed to start with a debate about whether Rishi Sunak was uh uh English or not.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: There's all sorts of complications here because um uh England effectively has been dissolved into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: So it it's not really analogous to the situation in America legally with respect to where states are organized.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um but what's happening because of the scale of mass migration, because it has been done in opposition to the uh political will of the public over many, many years, and now because people are being punished for talking about it, people in polling are saying increasingly, and it remains a minority view, but a growing one, that skin colour, effectively, ethnicity does matter to define British and Englishness.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: And so there's this debate on X about about the consequences of that, there's this um this feud between civic nationalism and ethnonationalism, uh as it's described.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: All of that I think is totally irrelevant because it is all going to be swept away.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: And if you look at what happens when societies reach a pre-revolutionary state, all of the people who are at the vanguard of that revolution usually end up being killed because they are swallowed by events.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: And if you go back to the last time England was in a revolutionary situation in the uh the 1630s and 1640s, none of those men on the parliamentary side would have thought in 1630 that we are going to embark upon a course which is going to see us put a king on trial and then execute him.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: None of them would have thought that.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: But the logic of events becomes propulsive.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so people start doing things and um entertaining ideas that they would have found absolutely abhorrent a short time previously.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_01: And my concern is that all of these questions about ethnicity, um, about minority groups are becoming more and more salient because of the scale of the still ongoing mass migration.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: And bear in mind, we're not talking about something that's stopped.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: We're obviously talking about something that's still going on.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: And uh the small boat crisis, I think, is the most egregious part of that because we no idea who these men are, and they're being settled in um tiny little villages now in Oxfordshire, rural England, um, the north, uh, industrial towns have already taken their huge, huge battering from mass migration um over many years.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: And now the rest of the country is seeing it too.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, all of this is fuelling a kind of radicalization.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: So the debates that people are having on X now, I think, are going to look very tame compared to what public opinion may be doing in five or ten years' time.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're a liberal progressive who believes in multiculturalism, I beg you, stop the experiment now.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: You do not know what you're unleashing.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: I think you've probably put it as uh briefly as I've ever heard it, and uh it is incredibly frustrating to watch this ethno-nationalist versus civic nationalist argument because both have a total blinding to reality.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: So ethno-nationalists fail to recognise that the reality is, is ethnic groups do blur around the edges and people can join on, and they can also take on the kin cultures that have defined a nation.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: And as I've mentioned before, I've seen it in my own family.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: Civic nationalists believe they can just continue institutions whilst all the people who are within them change and uh somehow retain all of the norms that they like, and they fail to see that anything that they like about the institutions were actually created over a long period of time by, as you point out in your book, a settled culturally and relatively ethnically homogenous nation.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I think that effectively what's happening, these tame arguments you're seeing on X are just the repetition of robotic statements.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you get people say enough is enough, millions must go, and then on the other side uh talk about tolerance and respect and all the various values.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: But it is also true that those who are concerned within the ethno-nationalist mu movement are right in thinking that if the this the people change so rapidly and those people remain, the likelihood is that the cultural instincts of those people will end up informing the laws, the institutions, and the nation in the future.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't really know when that that uh realization is going to come, and as you and I have both made the point uh before, is that if it doesn't, the reality will just hit you.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: And if you even look at the immigration statistics from the famed Boris wave, which obviously went beyond his premiership, five and a half million people came into the country between 2021 and 2025.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: That's more than the population of Scotland.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that is patently an absurd thing to think can happen and have no impact whatsoever on the institutions or national life.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um, do you see any movement within the organizations that you end up dealing with indirectly through the representation of these people, in many ways persecuted by them, that there might be a recognition that they've overstepped, or that there is indeed a recognition of the kind of reality that we have just described with regards to the makeup of a nation and a culture.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: Do you do you ever see any of that?
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: Or do you just see a fight to the death and then they do a payout and disappear off?
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't think they are.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I don't think they are waking up to um uh to to what is happening.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um they're still just as active persecuting people as they have ever have been.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: The one advantage we have now is that the free speech union absolutely terrifies employers, police forces, civil service, um, most of the um hostile parties with which we interact um are very, very frightened once they see that their member of staff uh is a member of the free speech union and that they know that we're involved because of our union-like model.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it means that most of our members, perhaps 90%, won't ever actually need our assistance.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but they are supporting the 10% who do.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, in future, they might well find that they're they're in that 10%.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um and that means that we can provide um extensive assistance uh all the way up to um legal support and employment tribunals uh and representation if people are being prosecuted.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um and that model has proven to be highly effective over the last six years or so of our operations.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: But I don't think it's uh a sign of any uh any growing awareness on the part of uh employers or or the state.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I wonder if if if there is some room somewhere of people in Whitehall who are looking at this and and actually understand that there is nothing that guarantees that a society must survive.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_01: There is nothing that guarantees that England will um will go on.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um there is nothing at all that guarantees that the United Kingdom will go on.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um and that's been fracturing in all sorts of ways uh over the last 20 years.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um but unfortunately, if there is such a group of people, the only uh reaction to increasing instability so far has been.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Mounting repression.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: And uh we saw that particularly after the Southport atrocity, the prosecution of Lucy Connolly, two-tier policing.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but there's this kind of brittleness now from the state.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_01: And there was a moment last year when Lord Hermer, who was then the Attorney General, he was asked about two-tier policing.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: And instead of just denying it, he said that people shouldn't say that there was two-tier policing because that was an attack on essential institutions.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_01: Now, to me, that's the kind of language that you might hear from a wartime minister, uh, or or the kind of language you might hear from a late Soviet Politburo member who's defending a very rickety system and knows that too much, uh too much openness is going to bring the whole system down.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, that's what it sounds like to me.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's very brittle, it's it's chippy, and uh it it reveals an un an instability, I think.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk a little about the unique challenge of Islam.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: You have not shied away, like many do, in arguing that Islam poses a distinct challenge to Britain.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: Most people who engage in this topic, I would say, in the English-speaking world, do so in America behind the First Amendment.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but uh as you have mentioned, you probably wouldn't have been able to do so unless you worked for the Free Speech Union.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_00: But you've you've made the argument that that the the challenge of of Islam is distinct from the challenge posed by other immigrant communities that have been received into Britain over the centuries.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps we can explore why it's different from the integration of, say, the Huguenots a few centuries ago, or even the Irish, uh, or even Jews escaping pogroms in the 19th century and before, all of whom, uh to varying levels and depending on their own inclinations, have arrived, fought, adapted, and eventually become part of the common life of the nation.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: What's the what's the nature of the challenge and why is it different, Ben?
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: In the most abstract sense, um I think it's right to say that um I'm borrowing a phrase, that people by and large don't have ideas, ideas have people.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: And um the ideas that uh Muslim populations generally carry, and of course there's variety within Muslim communities and so on, but um the source texts of that religion, the normative cultural practices that it has are so antithetical to a Christian, Western, liberal Enlightenment idea.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the the West Um at this point is a complicated mix of cultural traditions that that are in conflict with each other and which make up the Western tradition.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_01: They go all the way back to the classical past, to Christianity, to the Enlightenment.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I think all of those elements are important in defining what the West is, and it's produced a very uh weird, uh, Western educated, uh, industrial, rich, democratic, a very weird society that is very unlike most societies.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: It is not normal that uh you should be expected to tolerate your holy book being burnt or your god being insulted or your your king or your religious or political leaders being insulted in newspapers or on social media.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: These are very strange ideas.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: Most humans who've ever lived wouldn't uh wouldn't agree with them.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: They are not they are not innate to the human condition.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um and what we have seen in the first decade of the 21st century is an attempt to export that standard to Afghanistan and to Iraq based on the idea that uh if only those peoples could be liberated from oppression, that um once you take away the um superficial cultural uh exterior, that everybody effectively is a Jeffersonian liberal with American cultural values is obviously total nonsense.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: So blank blank statism is the root of that idea.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_01: That's its first manifestation.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: The second is the idea that rather than bringing the West to the Islamic world, you can bring the Islamic world to the West.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: And that, again, because people all basically are good and share the same cultural instincts, there won't be any problems with that.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: Clearly, that's total rubbish.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: One of the defenses that liberals have put forward pretty much since the moment that the Twin Towers um came down, uh is that most Muslims are not violent, most Muslims are not extremists, uh, most Muslims do not support violence.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_01: I concede all of those points.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: But that isn't sufficient, because if you have a situation where a large minority of people do support violence in specific circumstances, for example, um, with the attacks on the uh Sharia Hebdo um uh cartoon obviously back in 2014, um, Pauling showed that a significant minority of young British Muslims felt some sympathy with the attackers.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_01: So if you have a large minority to work with who do not accept Western values and also look at the West and think, well, even the West doesn't accept Western values, what are we supposed to be integrating into?
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: You set the stage for a titanic clash of civilizations, but rather than the one playing out um between countries and continents, it's one that's happening uh on the same streets of towns in northern England.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's happening in British institutions.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_01: And the state is now trying to deal with a situation where uh the Muslim population, six or seven percent roughly, maybe a bit higher than that by now, I expect it is, have certain ideas about how society should be organized, have certain ideas about what the limits of freedom of speech are, um, who don't actually inherit a concept of freedom of speech in the way in which uh Western populations have done.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's not an attack on Muslims to say that, of course, they want to replicate their cultural attitudes.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_01: I want to replicate my cultural attitudes.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: But the mistake has been of politicians to think that these things can be reconciled.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: My view is that they probably can't be.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_00: I also think what is frequently misunderstood when there is a railing against a populist wave when it comes to concern about immigration and the continuation of um cultures developed in foreign lands being continued on British soil is the soil element, which is our ruling classes have become very uncomfortable with the notion of territory.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a fatal asymmetry in understanding that territory only ever really obeys uh the the people that are on it with regards to, again, its laws and its institutions.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: But the populist waves, or at least any discontent, tends to come from the fact that people have a historical memory and people know that this wasn't the way it used to be, and that the laws of this land, which have uh clearly proven to be um enticing to people coming to start new lives here, um they are derivative of the people who came before.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so any change toward that feels like what they would say is colonization and they don't want it.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: And people wonder why they are so angry.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there is quite literally a dispossession, whether it's of cultural belonging going along, or even the ability to raise um uh problems with this.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it was interesting when you're talking about um weird countries and it it that that Western-educated, industrial, rich, democratic notion.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: And as you're going through the breakdown of the acronym, I wonder how much of that can really hold true now.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_00: Because as you say, with regards to the Western part, we don't really know our own inheritance anymore and don't continue it so much.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: We might be as well educated as ever on paper, but let's be honest, literacy, numeracy, and all the rest really has fallen off a cliff.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_00: We're largely post-industrial, we're getting poorer, and as this whole conversation has demonstrated, we're largely anti-democratic.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_00: We say we're democratic, but there's absolutely no way that people would want to allow, for example, in Germany, the AFD to come to power, even if it is a legitimate uh democratic party.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: Or there's no way that people would want people in Britain to be able to vote for uh the removal and return of certain people uh on the basis of uh various characteristics, whether it's cultural, criminal, whatever else.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_00: They don't they don't want to see that happen.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: So um I I wonder how much longer we can refer to ourselves as weird nations because we have changed so unbelievably.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_01: I I agree.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_01: And um it it again it comes down to the two shocks.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: There's the the first, which is the uh the external mass migration waves coming in, but there's also the internal loss of self-confidence.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_01: And you can take that really all the way back to the First World War, uh, or perhaps even to the Industrial Revolution if you want to.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um but nonetheless, it's reached a point of culmination and crisis now, where for younger generation growing up, have uh no rootedness to the past of this country unless they cultivate it for themselves.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: They are by and large not uh inheritors of a tradition, they're having to go out and find it.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_01: And um all of these crises are reaching a point in Britain, which of course politicians increasingly call the UK, uh it's rarely called Britain by politicians anymore.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's reaching a scale where I think the political legitimacy of I'll call it the UK state, um is really getting to a point of existential crisis.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_01: And if you look at the question of small boat migration, the most basic task for which states are constituted in Western political philosophy is for the defense of the people and the nation-state.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_01: This is this is the sole basis for which um uh kings exist for which states are constructed.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_01: This is the this is the most foundational task that a state is charged with.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um and uh as somebody of of deeply conservative instinct, the threshold of provocation for me to say, yes, I accept a revolutionary argument that this state has lost its legitimacy is extraordinarily high.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_01: I spoke about the English Civil War earlier.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: My instincts are to side with the king in that dispute.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_01: I um I I I'm I'm an intensely conservative person by disposition.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_01: And yet, looking at what the state is doing now, not just allowing an invasion to take place, but sponsoring an invasion to take place, um, and an invasion which is being inflicted primarily on women and girls, I could not imagine a more intensely provocative course of action for a state to embark upon.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: And um if it continues, I think it is going to create a crisis of legitimacy.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: By the way, we've already had a dress rehearsal for this.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the the issues are less uh primal.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: But if you look at the Brexit referendum, I think there was a moment in 2016, 17, 18, 19, where we reached points where you you have preconditions for civil conflict because you had a source of legitimacy in parliament and you had a source of legitimacy in the referendum.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what you need in a civil war.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_01: You need a crisis of legitimacy.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_01: This is this is what David Betts is always talking about, uh, professor of uh war studies at King's College, who says that the many Western countries meet the conditions for civil war.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_01: So we already had that, and the police were warning at the time that there was a risk of serious disorder, and thankfully there wasn't, and things calmed down, and the referendum result was largely honoured uh eventually.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um but now we're dealing with something that's that's much more emotionally raw and primal than trading arrangements and um fisheries and technical questions of of economics, right?
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_01: Which are important, but they're not primarily in the same way as a question of is the state going to allow Afghan men to break into the country and rape people?
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_01: Because that's that's what's happening.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_01: So it doesn't really get more provocative than that, I don't think.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_00: I agree.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_00: I also think we have become very blinded by statistics.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: So what I mean by that is people are no longer shocked by big numbers.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I know it's done the rounds in the last week, but the number of rapes in Britain in the early 2000s was something like 7,000 per year, and it is now in 2026 something more like 75,000, 76,000 a year, tenfold increase, which is unbelievable.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, for some reason, it barely registers.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's another one of those things that slight flicker in a certain corner of the internet might have a Daily Mail article on Mail Online, and then it doesn't really get much talking about it.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_00: And uh whilst I can't remember the exact quote of Joseph Stalin uh about how um one one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, this appears to be our exact approach, is no one seems to consider the brutal impact on um someone's life, their soul, their body of being raped, and for it to have come downstream of political decision or indecision.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and yet when you see uh a gro um uh prominent or increasingly prominent young men on the British right, whether it's Connor Tomlinson, Charlie Downs, Harrison Pitt, raising in quite uh a vociferous and um earnest fashion the issues um that the country faces, they're deemed as being angry over the top.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, it is also true to say that that is exactly the kind of response we ought to have when we know such things are happening in our country and they don't need to.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't really know when that waking up's coming, and as you've mentioned, uh it's it's probably not.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_00: But perhaps we can talk a little bit about the the ruling class uh that has allowed this to happen.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_00: You you in your book indicted generations of the ruling class, whether they were Labour or Conservative alike, because they produced this transformation.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_00: And uh let's talk a little bit about the the motives.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: So is it incompetence, is it ideology, or is it something like the French philosopher, sociologist Christopher Guilly described, which is that a governing class has seceded from the nation and it effectively treats the population over which it governs as an obstacle to the society it wants to build?
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's right.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that the I don't want to call them an elite, because in no way are they elite, they just happen to be in charge.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um the people in charge of Britain now don't have any preference for the British public.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um they certainly don't think that um uh there is more moral worth attached to a British life than to another life.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_01: Now, in abstract terms, uh in religious terms, of course, one would not say that one life is worth more or less based on the nationality.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_01: But in political terms, in foundational political terms, the British state exists to protect the British people and to serve and advance the interests of the of the British people and and the British state.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um if if the UK state now is going to abandon that and instead embark upon a universalist moral mission of um uplifting standards globally by seriously reducing living standards and public safety nationally, again we get to a crisis of legitimacy.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that is the characterization that these people make, that it is acceptable that quality of life is seriously reduced for the British people in order that uh millions of people can come to the West and uh uh and enjoy a substantial uplift in their quality of life.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_01: Now, of course, that's nonsense because um setting aside the philosophical argument, the reason Western countries enjoy a superior quality of life is for reasons of um historical contingency and development.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_01: And um these evolutions are charted in centuries or millennia.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it is not accidental uh or incidental who the population of your country are.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um and the story of English history, of British history, uh is one of evolution um driven by a particular set of people, just as the French national story is different, just as the Congolese national story is different.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um you can't simply substitute um entire peoples and expect that national story to continue.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's a bit like um uh adoption.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you can adopt a child into a family and integrate that child into the family and treat that child um as an equal son or daughter.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_01: I don't see, however, that you could um adopt an entire generation of children and then say in any meaningful way that those children's grandchildren are related to your grandparents.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_01: They're not really.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, they can be nurtured in an environment of of of love and total acceptance and um uh and be given a given a family home, and that's a wonderful gift to give.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um but once you do that at a national level, once you have a a a complete or very large-scale substitution of the population that you're talking about, um, are you really still talking about the same nation?
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_01: I don't see that you possibly can be.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_00: Let's delve a little into the psychological impact of all of this on people here in Britain.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_00: You clearly see it in the cries for help that you get through the free speech union.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_00: So what uh how how would you say a repressive environment when it comes to freedom of expression, i.e., there is no freedom of expression, plus the uh uh extraordinarily rapid and equally rapid embedding of different cultures, a negation of cultural belonging for British people.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_00: What what what does the picture look like for the average Briton, I suppose, through the work that you do in Free Speech Union, that shows the toll all of this takes on the people of the country?
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_01: We've had cases of people who've been punished by their employer for saying they don't like changes to their local area, that their street is becoming messy and untidy, that people aren't looking after it, that new households are moving in who just don't really seem to care about maintaining the area.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_01: They don't care about looking after the street.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um and an employer takes it upon itself to enforce the standards that are required of the UK and of upholding these social changes and and therefore punishes their employee for expressing this totally reasonable view.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_01: I I think you can go to all sorts of well, different different parts of Britain, um rural and urban.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_01: And there's just a kind of tattiness that is descending, I think, all over the place where just small things like litter on the side of motorways, um, grassy verde is not being known, um, less of a problem this summer.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and just this or these ordinary acts of maintenance, which are not taking place.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_01: And the country is succumbing to this well, if you don't mind my swearing, on Exit it's been called inshitification.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think that's the process that that is is taking taking place.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I think people find it really bewildering.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I had a similar experience when I went to, and uh forgive me you've heard this story before when we spoke on the New Culture Forum, but I was stood on the Cathedral Green at Exeter where I went to university um about 8 or 9 pm, I think it was.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and there were just delivery drivers cycling through, blaring music out.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_01: And this is an ancient uh medieval city cathedral, um, and it in very beautiful, very serene.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_01: And there's just this horrible cultural clash where you have people who just have no sense of that because it's not their history.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's not their city, not their culture, who just think nothing of driving through, bearing out their music.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, this is increasingly what you encounter in public transport when you go on trains.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_01: This really different cultural attitude to making noise in public places.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I think people just really don't like it.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's really unsettling.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I find on a on a day-to-day level, often I have to find uh I find that I have to spell my own name, Ben Jones.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's not it's not difficult.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I don't think you could get a simpler English name than that.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I have to spell that to receptionists or to people on the phone.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um and the difficulty, I think, that comes about of not being able to take for granted that the person you're speaking to is a native English speaker or native standard English speaker, um, is it it strips out all of the richness of the English language.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_01: You can't speak idiomatically, you can't speak with reference to historical events or cultural touch points, you can't assume that any of these things are known about.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_01: And that furthers this uh this atomization that is so well advanced already.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_00: Indeed, uh with regards to the psychological impact of all of this, uh I've definitely felt it myself.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_00: And it took me leaving the country for a couple of weeks to realise exactly the kind of conditions that we live under.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I spent two weeks in the United States.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_00: I was there primarily on holiday, but I did go to a conference in in California.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_00: There were people from all over America there of various different religious uh and political stripes, and I know America has its own problems, but there is also still there a very healthy approach to conversation where nothing's off the table.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_00: I was seated next to a prominent left-wing Egyptian-descended Muslim journalist who writes for a more progressive leaning outlet, and we spoke for four hours uh over dinner.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_00: We spoke about every problem facing Britain, demographic transformation, all the safeguarding failures and the grooming gangs and the parallel societies.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_00: He thanked me for helping him to um re-evaluate his priors.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um and he engaged in really good faith.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_00: And he was shocked by it all.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_00: And we talked about those things openly and freely and without fear.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_00: And it struck me that I wouldn't have dared have that conversation, even with people remotely right-leaning in Britain, even if you know which way they're likely to vote, because people are so afraid of going further.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_00: I did actually have someone say to me once when I was speaking at a much lower level, I said, I'm sorry if I've said anything that was a little bit too spicy for you.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, Well, at least you've got an opinion.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and uh that's where that's where we're living now.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um I I I think that is always missed out.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_00: We spent all this time talking about metrics and statistics and all of these things, and if we just try, we can make it work, and we and we care so much about creating uh an inclusive environment of belonging for people who've just arrived, and pay almost no attention whatsoever about the impact on the common person because British people are also human, they also have uh a desire for cultural belonging, they also want to be able to express what they see and speak openly.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and I actually think it's um besides the huge demographic transformation without consent, I think one of the largest crimes right now is what's happening to the common person on a psychological level, and it's and it's all because of both the state and indeed those who go along with it because they think it's a a good idea.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_01: I I think there's a there's a fantastic piece of um research to be done about the psychological impact of um uh massive cultural change occurring in a very short space of time.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and if you see your street, your town uh reconfigured in the space of five or ten years, and that's really what we're talking about.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's a really short timescale.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes it's it's not even that long.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um I know people who say that their local area has changed just in the last two or three years, almost beyond recognition.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it's a profoundly destabilizing thing to see.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and as you and I were speaking about a couple of weeks ago at the New Culture Forum, um this is something that's playing out increasingly in rural England as well.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's not really possible to escape these kind of changes anymore.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and there is some evidence, of course, that people are trying to escape it, that uh white flight, as it's called, that's a phrase from the United States, uh, is taking place in Britain.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_01: But of course, there aren't that many places to go in Britain.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_01: And the Labour government is now absolutely committed to uh spreading the burden of uh asylum, housing asylum seekers throughout the country and uh moving people into HMOs and and out of hotels.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_01: So there's really no escaping from it.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_01: And in 2029, there will be an election.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um perhaps there'll be one sooner than that, but but certainly by then there'll be an election.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_01: I suspect that would be the last opportunity at which it is possible to start to turn this around.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so again, I repeat my plea if if you're a liberal progressive watching this and you care about diversity and tolerance and multiculturalism, um, the the very worst thing you could do is to keep Britain on this course because people don't want it and it's not going to be accepted.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_01: And people like Charlie Downs and and the uh Restore uh spokesman, I think they are going to end up sounding like centrist dads compared to what we see emerge in the next five or ten years uh if if we keep going like this.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_00: Well, your book has added to uh uh a corpus of work that has been analysing the impact of liberalism, uh, but also uh that that's that's taken place across the West and the dissolving of all of the bonds, whether it's faith, family, nation.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh your book takes that further, and you look specifically at the British context and uh our our disconnection with our own civilizational inheritance.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_00: The the analyses are coming thick and fast, and yet I suppose what we're talking about is we almost need formation.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_00: We need institutions that are forming those who are able to continue the inheritance, but also to be willing to use the powers available to be able to try and turn this ship around to govern properly.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_00: You rub shoulders in the the uh the Westminster bubble, I suppose.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh is there any sense that there is anyone, any group of people, any institution that are really trying to get a grip of some of the issues that you deal with day to day to try and turn this around?
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_00: Or do you think that on current trend we're locked into this uh hope that we might get our um our freedoms back, but really it's just uh an ungrounded optimism?
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think that there is a chance in 2029 we're dealing with a situation where the rights are seriously divided, which is uh suboptimum to put it mildly.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh there is a chance in 2029, however.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um if though we continue on the course of multiculturalism managed by state repression, two-tier or multi-tier policing, and the imposition of blasphemy laws across society, then I think we get to a very, very dangerous uh situation.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I think, as in all pre-revolutionary um societies, it then becomes impossible to predict what will happen.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_01: I that's I suppose the the main thrust, what I've I've tried to convey in this interview is that it's really impossible to predict if the state keeps doubling down on this failed system of multiculturalism.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and if it keeps increasing the pressure and it keeps punishing people for speaking out, and if people decide actually, well, voting doesn't change anything, and I'm punished even for talking about it, that is going to radicalise people and bluntly, deservedly, the state will then have to deal with the nutrocious situation of its own making.
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_01: There is an off-ramp for this.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_01: There is a there is a slender possibility that um that that all of that can be avoided in 2029.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um but if if we miss that chance, I think we're in a very dangerous situation.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_00: Ben, there's much I'd want to push you on, but I know we're up against time, so I'm gonna ask you the question I ask all of my guests, which is what have you changed your mind on during the course of your life, something you once believed, whether it was a moral absolute, maybe something more day-to-day and concern, that you no longer believe, and what was it that made you think differently?
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_01: I came of age really in the in the 2000s.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_01: I was I was about 10 when 9-11 happened.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um grew up reading Hitchens, Dawkins, uh Sam Harris, um, and was a very annoying new atheist teenager who irritated my very patient uh grandparents and uh religious studies teachers.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um I would have been horrified back then to have read this book, in which I argue that Christianity is the wellspring from which the tradition of political liberty and freedom of speech comes from.
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um but uh but so it is.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_00: Well, intellectual humility embodied, Ben.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's been an absolute pleasure.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_00: I'm very glad that you were able to join me.
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure we will speak again.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_00: But before I let you go, where can people find you on the dark corners of the internet?
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_00: And are you working on anything else?
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the corners aren't that dark, actually.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um you can find the book in Waterstones, Blackwells, Amazon, all over the place.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and uh please go and pick up a copy.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um and you can follow me on uh X at Ben Barry Jones and uh please send me a message if uh if it's been of interest.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_01: Uh always happy to hear from people.
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_01: Ben, keep finding the good fight.
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_00: All the best.
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, John.