Welcome to the Free Cities podcast. My name is Timothy Allen and this is the official podcast
of the Free Cities Foundation.
Good morning, Prospera.
Yes, hello and welcome to this episode number 176 of the Free Cities podcast.
That's right, folks.
I'm in the promised land.
I'm hauled up in the Doona Tower in Prospera for a month, soaking up the vibes and mixing with the Free City elite.
I have to say though, the inspiration here is truly palpable.
And by that I mean the urge to be productive.
You know what they say, you are the sum total of the five closest people around you.
Well, here everyone's working on something in the space and it's really contagious.
Heck, on Sunday I vibe-coded a whole new podcast website from 6am in the morning till 11pm at night.
I'm not being funny I never work on a Sunday seriously I'm just so productive here and so
is everyone else anyway the first few days spent here I was attending the Liberty Acceleration
Summit put on by Infinita City a great event with phenomenal speakers I've got some great stories to
pass on to you all and new projects to reveal in a space watch this space over the next weeks
as the interviews start dropping.
Talking of the conference,
Patrick Hibbert from Veritas Villages
was speaking on day two.
And hey, guess what?
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Look out for their new 340-acre acquisition.
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about that or any of their other projects in Nicaragua and Panama,
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www.veritasvillages.com forward slash free cities.
right today's show and it's from an interview i conducted literally the day before i flew out here
to honduras it was at the freedom festival in the uk which was put on by the margaret thatcher
center an awesome event full of uk freedom lovers talking shop it was a good mix of politicians and
non-politicians i would say many thanks to gemma for letting me set up a studio on site i very much
appreciate it today. My guest is a gentleman by the name of James Price. He's a British political
commentator and former senior government advisor who's worked across five Whitehall departments
including the Treasury, the Cabinet Office and the Department for Education. He's now a research
fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies and he publicly comments on politics, culture and
immigration and the modern administrative state, something we talk about a lot. You may recognize
him from The Critic, The Spectator or The Telegraph or possibly where he's featured a lot,
GB News, the news channel in the UK. Right, in this conversation we zoom out from the daily circus
of British politics and ask the bigger question, why does government across the West feel so bloated,
so managerial, so strangely immune to elections and so hopeless at doing the basic things it claims
to exist for. We get into the rise of the bureaucratic class, the fantasy that smart
people in offices can arrange society like pieces on a chessboard and the way freedom gets quietly
smothered by people who insist that it's all for your own good. We've heard that one before,
haven't we? And why every attempt to fix this mess seems to produce a larger mess with a new
logo on top of it. James has worked at the centre of British politics and gives a rare inside
account of what government actually feels like from within. Ministers with titles but little
power, civil servants who never leave, political promises that hit a wall of administrative sludge
and a state so vast it can absorb elections without really changing course.
We also get into immigration, democracy, centralisation, national identity, Thatcher, Hayek
and the strange modern habit of confusing control with competence.
Many thanks to James for sitting down with me.
This was an excellent conversation.
I know you're all going to love it, right?
quick uh shout out to the last three weeks top supporters i know i normally do a top five
i've got to do more i've got to do a one two three four five six i want to do a top nine
guys many thanks justin bianchi set in stone aaron shadrach darcy christopher albanese a.n.t
Matthias and Rosebids. You're all the OGs, the biggest donators of that time period. Thank you
for your Bitcoin and some of you for your fiat money, but mainly for your Bitcoin.
Straight into the reserve and many thanks to you all and to everyone else who streams and boosts us
on the value for value platforms. I appreciate you all and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
right I'm rushing because I'm I'm in the prosperous state of mind and I'm going to get on with work
very quickly after this uh time for the alpha why don't you well why don't you recline on that
lovely green leather bench over there obviously without falling asleep of course because you're
about to sit back relax and enjoy my conversation with James Price
What I thought, what I really wanted to talk about,
because you have a lot of experience as an advisor to government,
rather than sort of focusing on what's happening in the UK,
because I think it's fair to say that what's happening in the UK
is something that's happening in a lot of places, roughly speaking,
a lot of places we care about anyway um i'd quite like to just kind of pull out a little bit
and i was thinking just before you came in there it's quite quite a macro view of this or this
whole thing but i'd i'd quite like to know what you think in three things what you think the
problem is why is it and how do we fix it from your perspective um and then then you know we'll
see where it goes from there and by problem we're talking we're talking the what everyone can feel
right now i don't know whether that is just me i don't think it's just me i mean i was surprised
you know listening to everyone in this morning the questions you know and the general sentiment
was yeah there's a big problem and i don't necessarily mean just about conservatism
i just mean about government yeah and governing governing and government and since you've been
on the inside I love to know first of all what is the major problem What is it that why everyone feels so despondent at the moment Yeah okay So I think that the explosion since the Industrial Revolution of technological change means that you can experience all these wonders of lifestyle increases and all the rest of it
Then you get the feeling that, oh, something must be done to help out other people.
and so all this stuff builds up into the kind of creation of a welfare state
in around the same places at the same time
alongside a kind of concomitant philosophical set of opinions
that I guess kind of comes from people like Rousseau and Francis Bacon maybe
and these sorts of early people who were not necessarily rationalists themselves
but are precursors of that
and Michael Oakeshott's got the great rationalism in politics essay that people should read to get
the early strains of this which is the something that Smith later Adam Smith calls the man of
system and someone who sort of thinks that he can order the world like the pieces of a chessboard
without realizing that the pieces themselves have their own viewpoints so there's a sort of
philosophical siding to this that you can try and order the world and understand it that goes along
with that scientific revolution the enlightenment and then the industrial revolution with the
material consequences. Marx came along, thought all these things were terrible, and bourgeois,
and all the rest of it, and he could order because he thought he understood the currents
and where all this stuff was going, yada, yada, yada. So you've got that kind of intellectual,
interesting background where all this stuff kind of foments from. You then have everyone
thinking, oh, we're jolly smart. And then the First World War happens. And I think European
civilization in particular probably is not an original thing to say hasn't fully recovered.
I think how we were also jolly smart and yet we got into this problem so desperate for this not
to happen again that we fell into the second world war and at that point you've got all these
interesting currents going around that is best described by James Burnham who wrote a book called
the managerial revolution who again came along and said you go into the industrial revolution
all these parts and the capitalists take over which is you know the sort of same prognosis as
the kind of Marxist idea but maybe a bit more value neutral on it I obviously think the capitalists
taking over is a great thing and led to all the sort of wonderful explosion in life expectancy
and freedom and all the rest. And Burnham then said, well, what replaces that? Because the state
grows more money, more complication. Is this the man of system or the rationalists or the
managerial class? And Burnham wrote this in 1941, 42, 43. He was American and seeing what was going
on the war at the time from a bit of distance, but it's shocking how prescient that is now.
and it was happening at the same time that FDR over in the States
was massively expanding the size of the state
in line with a lot of these historical and intellectual and economic trends that were happening.
You get this explosion of executive agencies and all the rest of it in DC.
At the same time in Europe and specifically in Britain
you've got this happening in response to the Second World War
that leads someone like Friedrich Hayek to write The Road to Serfdom
where he says, if you continue doing all this total war, complete command economy,
stuff that you need to do to build enough Spitfires and to fight the war and to beat the Nazis,
if you keep doing this in peacetime afterwards, because you think, oh, we're going to have all
the control and all the rest of it, you will snuff out freedom, you will snuff out economic
freedom and enterprise and all the rest of it, and you will be on the road to serfdom,
as the title of the book says. And that came out about the same time, and that was also incredibly
prophetic. So you had all that that led, certainly in Britain, to the kind of post-war consensus
that we'd gone from being one of the most industrial and enterprising and free societies
to one that was completely command and control. The Attlee government nationalised everything.
They kept, as we've heard at this conference today, they kept rationing going for longer than
they needed to. And great swathes of industry were nationalised in a parliament in a bit.
and the Tories never went back on this
and we wondered why by the 1970s everything
had fallen apart and it took the Thatcher Revolution
this is my kind of hagiography of all this
to understand the
need for that classical liberalism
to come back, the freedom
of
economic activity and of choice
and all that stuff along with the
other bit of that that I think is necessary
which is behaving responsibly
that's the other part of a kind of
I would say conservatism
that needs to go alongside that.
And we could probably go back all the way to the French Revolution stuff,
but let's not bog down any of that.
So Thatcher manages to do that with the economy,
but never really wrestles with the other bit of it,
which is the sort of large bureaucracy.
The man of system is still in place.
It's obviously the case in Europe as well,
where the European project was always designed
to prevent future wars happening,
which meant more control out of the hands of the people and so on.
And the European Union eventually comes out of all of that as well.
And in America, likewise, the massive executive authority of these agencies and all the rest of it that's grown.
So you see the same thing happening from largely intellectual, similarly intellectual and economic and political and militaristic reasonings
to a point where the unelected bureaucracy, the deep state, the management class, the man of system, the rationalists,
whatever you want to call them, have got all this power.
and that invalidates and breaks what I think we have learned works from political philosophy more broadly.
So I'll use a British example and then I'll shut up.
The glorious revolution that comes along in 1688 that gives Britain this amazing constitutional settlement
that makes us top nation in short order afterwards ought to make some of the great English political theorists very happy.
Parliamentary sovereignty means that you've got enough power to actually do things.
So Hobbes ought to be happy to some extent with the kind of idea of Leviathan, the sovereign that can protect people.
Locke ought to be happy with his second treatise because you've got the consent of the governed
and you've got the feedback mechanism that comes in of the people with regular elections.
Edmund Burke should be broadly happy because in our system you're still thinking about the wisdom of the ages and tradition and all that sort of stuff.
And actually, if you wanted to say you've got the crown in parliament, it's the technical thing that sovereign is.
So there's a sort of religious dimension that should appease and appeal to people there as well.
that in that sort of settlement you should have a great system for getting things done for avoiding
civil wars which is obviously what Hobbes wanted in the first place in Britain all of those things
have been eroded if not all most completely destroyed by the first set of processes that
I talked about so you no longer have power to act as a sovereign parliament the way that Hobbes would
want in order to address problems that come along because you have this sort of blob this
administrative state deep state whatever you want to call it people that have all these power in the
quangos and the civil service and all the rest of it, you don't really have Locke's kind of consent
of the governed anymore, because elections don't matter very much anymore, right? When Starmer
came in in England in 2024, how many people across the entire British state changed jobs?
200. 100 ministers, most of whom are MPs as well. So they're working four days a week at most.
You know, Friday, they go off to their constituencies. And 100 special advisors,
of which I was one, who constitutionally aren't allowed to tell civil servants what to do and have
no power, and are limited to saying, boss, please don't sign that, because I've read it, and they're
lying to you, and I'll only have to say I told you so when it all goes wrong, right, which I got bored
of saying. And that's it. And everybody else in that deep state stayed exactly the same. So the
consent mechanism's gone. And the rationalist worldview is very year zero, kind of blank slate
liberal, in the sense that it thinks the man of the wisdom of the ages, or the wisdom of the
unlettered men and all these things that Burke talked about and tradition or when Oakeshott talks
about traditional knowledge and Scruton talks about this sort of accretive sense of knowledge
that isn't necessarily need to be written down that all gets ignored as well so the great
strengths of the British constitution are gone and they've gone because of these big processes
that we've got in place now and until you get politicians that realize that and of course the
Europe has the same thing with the EU America would be a bit different but there are still
the very powerful forces in their central bureaucracy and all the rest of it there So I think that a very rough canter through quite a lot of big ideas of why we got to the point that we in now
where in Britain, certainly, and I think in Europe, you've got this kind of stasis because
that allows for entrenched interests to take over and to ruin the sort of sense of legitimacy
that is supposed to be garnered from some of those big ideas of the Hobbes and the Locke and
all the rest of it. And we can see the material results of that now, when nothing works anymore,
and we're in masses of debt and nobody's happy and all the rest of it.
Loosely speaking, then, it's derived from people believing they know what's best for other people.
And I think, actually, what you mentioned there,
I think that's one of the things that the average person on the street has no idea,
that when a government changes, a lot of the civil service, it remains exactly the same.
It's wild, isn't it?
Well, I mean, I only really discovered it in the last few years
because I've been sort of forced to think about things like this.
But, and I know, correct me if I'm wrong here,
but you're supposed to be apolitical as a civil servant.
But I, you know, I used to work at the BBC.
It's like the BBC is supposed to be apolitical,
but it's not apolitical at all.
All of my friends thought a certain way.
And whether they sort of outwardly express it or not,
it seeps into the culture, obviously.
And I think civil servants tend to not be conservatives.
is that fair to say?
Short answer yes
slightly longer answer
and I won't take as much time
as I said to him
of my previous one
I love it when you speak
please carry on
very eloquent
the
was it Conquest
who had these
three laws of politics
and one of them
is that everybody
is conservative
about that which he knows
even the person
that thinks
brutalist architecture
is great
and it's great
to knock down castles
to put up horrible
concrete carbuncles
will then become
very defensive about them
if you wanted to pull them down
to put something else up, for example.
And so in their ways,
I think a lot of the civil servants
get small c conservative
because they think they know best
and they don't like change coming along
because they're suspicious of it.
So small c principles there.
But by and large, I think that they think
that they are the legitimate,
real power in the country,
whose job it is to keep things going
the way they were taught that it was,
and that the elected ministers and the spads,
of whom, again, a very small number,
are broadly viruses in a system to which they are the antibodies.
And because there's so many of them, because they can stay as long as they want,
there's no parliamentary term limits for them,
they're always going to outlast you and they're always going to outnumber you.
And so that's the mindset as well.
And then you have got, I think, kind of left-wing people,
because by and large it's a sort of left-wing idea to think that the state can do good,
whereas on the right you're more sceptical without the price mechanism
or the profit motive in there of getting stuff done.
with a few small exceptions in the sort of I think secret squirrel bits where they're all
probably quite sound the guys that work in immigration in the home office are all quite
sound because they spend all day dealing with pedophiles and rapists and terrorists and criminals
and all the rest of it and I think that probably has quite a dampening effect on your sympathy for
wrong-uns. I wondered whether as well the idea of working as a civil servant was maybe a sort of
it appealed more to people who didn't like taking risks basically and it's a long-term
probably a pretty secure job, I would imagine.
I don't really know.
Massively, yeah.
It's almost impossible to get fired.
I think a study came out a few weeks ago in England
that said that you're more likely to die in the job
than to be fired in the civil service.
And the pension is obviously phenomenally good.
So you're incentivized to stick around.
It's hard to get in to the civil service,
mid-rank and almost impossible at higher ranks
because they basically entirely promote internally,
which, unlike the American system,
where you do four years or whatever,
and then you probably, your party loses,
you've got to go and do something else,
learn how the world has changed,
have some more skills.
So you can go in at a higher level
four years, eight years later,
you just stay where you are in the civil service.
And so the extraordinary advances
bypass them completely entirely.
Something like COVID, just quickly,
my old boss, a guy called Nadiem Zahawi,
who did the vaccine rollout,
which I think in the States
was called Operation Warp Speed,
the equivalent in Britain for that.
And he was a guy who founded a business
that's got a market cap of billions now
called YouGov and very successful businessman and was so shocked with some of the stories when he
would tell civil servants something and they say um all right we're gonna the plan is obviously to
get these vaccines uh delivered to the country okay well you're going to deliver the vaccines
at a sub-zero temperature what experience has the civil service got all the um the you know the
medical uh approval board or the human the health whatever uh bits what experience have you guys got
of moving vaccines at scale at sub-zero temperatures?
Well, none, Minister, but.
He's okay.
What experience have you got of moving vaccines at all
at sub-zero temperatures?
Well, none.
What experience have you got of moving anything anywhere?
Well, none, but we're going to,
he's like, okay, can you just Google the logistics industry?
And you go, oh yeah, look at that, that's really useful.
It turns out you can move like ice cream or whatever.
And so, you know, you can retcon it from that.
And the civil servants hadn't thought about that
because I think the world of risk-taking, as you say,
the business world, it's not just alien to them, it's something that they are suspicious about.
Because of the fear of corruption, there's all sorts of stuff put in place, at least in the
British system and I think in others as well, to be seen to be avoiding any kind of whiff of
corruption and therefore that turns into a suspicion that any business interacting with
the state just wants to get something off you, wants to get advantage, wants to weaken protections
for the little guy because they're rapacious profit mongers and that is a very widespread
feeling in the civil service going back to the very macro view of this which is people
thinking they know what's best for everyone is that cyclical is that is that a glitch in the
human psyche or do we do we do we sort of have a renaissance out of that type of because most i
mean obviously in my world the world of the free market makes so much sense to to negate any thoughts
I might have apart from with my children of course but the average person I meet of course I have
absolutely no idea what's good for them necessarily and I want I want them to decide anyway I like I
want to see the results of all this input of different people and it does seem a little bit
less evolved to think that you know what's better for other people i don't know it's a bit it's a bit
like patronizing so i mean do we do we evolve out of it or does this does this cyclical thing keep
happening and obviously what we see now is probably a very deep in the cycle of telling people what to
do government's massive bureaucracy is huge um there's no business people in the government as
as far as I can tell, you know, we've gone right to that end.
So, I mean, does this ever change?
I like your idea of things feeling cyclical.
I think that's a good way to think about it.
I don't think you can evolve out of it.
The Bible talks about that we'll want to recognise the moat
or the splinter in our neighbour's eye,
but not the log in our own eye, right?
Or the classic kind of judge, not let's you be judged.
So I think that tendency is always there.
and Hayek is good on this where in the kind of the fatal conceit I think was his last book
it talks about this idea and Hayek is really charitable about the the man of system or the
lefties or whatever you want to call them because he thinks well actually they're quite smart people
and they're compassionate people I'm not always sure I agree with him on that bit but because
they're smart they think well they're still suffering in the world and there's still some
bad things I'm smart and I care so if I change this system I'm going to make it better for people
And he ascribes that nice, well-meaning, well-intentioned mindset as a big problem that ends up when you have the power of the state in corrupting everything and all the rest of it.
And so I think that that's more likely.
And one of the geniuses, I guess, in the federal system in the United States is that those laboratories of democracy can play off against each other.
And you can see what works.
And if school choice is going to work in Mississippi, other states might start adopting it, being pro-tech in California, yada, yada, yada.
Whereas Britain and massively now the EU trying to standardise everything because one size fits all we know best best practice all that stuff That smashes away that kind of human flourishing And I also like your cyclical point because I think that you end up getting lefty governments in wherever they are
that spend always the same,
always spend too much money,
always over-regulate and all the rest of it.
And eventually economic reality sets in
and forces a change.
And you see that, I guess,
the beautiful fact that Reagan and Thatcher
were in power at the same time
and able to lead that once.
And we've got to hope that that will happen again.
I think we're seeing a version of that in Central America at the moment.
Yeah, yeah.
They had a long road with serfdom and socialism.
And one by one, all right, Venezuela is slightly different, but one by one, they're dropping now.
And Venezuela is at the control, isn't it?
Right?
You know, you see in Argentina this stuff happening.
You see the way that I suppose in El Salvador is, again, a bit different, but very interesting what's happening there.
And they can maybe move on to the economic freedom bits now.
all the while Venezuela has been this like command a corrupt command economy with more oil than any
other country in the world and people are resorted to eating their like pets and zoo animals so I
think you're right yeah absolutely so um okay if it's cyclical what do we are we just do we just
play our hand and watch it happen like because a lot of people believe this is you know there's
there's an outcome which favors everyone and um that would in that would imply that it doesn't
there's always going to be people and i i'm i'm with you on that one i don't believe the world is
fair just uh all these things there's a complete randomness in the world and as a result um if
you're lucky then you have a certain type of life if you're unlucky you have a different type of life
But really, the sort of centralizing force, which is, like I say, where we're at at the moment, it must exist for some good, even though it tends to end in, you know, mayhem, really, and a lot of death and destruction.
When you talk about the decentralizing force, it's easier to argue that it doesn't end badly.
Like, can you get too decentralized?
I suppose you can.
You could get hedonism, maybe, or something, and no one cares about anything.
And there's a lot of infighting at that point, maybe.
Yeah, the example that some of these, I guess, would be like Somalia, right?
Where a total breakdown of law and order, no respect of property rights, all the rest of it.
And it becomes the Hobbesian war of all against all or whatever.
And again, actually, interesting natural experiment to some extent with Somaliland as a breakaway state that is doing better because it tries to respect some more of these things.
so I think you're right that the decentralizing thing has less risk to it probably because every
time it gets tried it's starting from a very high base you think about where we'd got to in the 1970s
in Britain Thatcher had an awful lot of decentralizing and devolving and reforming to do
and then you know you can do so much of it in a kind of political world before a lefty will come
in again say well things are so nice now you don't need to worry about this we can go back to being
nice and sweet and all the rest of it which is why you the kind of constant vigilance as the
blessed Margaret did say you've got to fight a battle more than once in order to win it if you
can bring state interference down and tax burdens down and spending down as much as possible that
will be I guess a kind of buffer against the the re-encroachment of these ideas and burdens and all
the rest of it I'm trying to think of some good examples where that hasn't happened because
governance has been so good I mean Singapore is a great example in all sorts of ways it doesn't
have a lot some of the some of the freedoms in terms of being able to speak your mind or leave
chewing gum on the floor which is not a great freedom anyway but it's gone from in a generation
from third world to first as lee kwan you said and has stayed amazing basically ever since because
it's got a broad set of things right which is really impressive i think people misunderstand
freedom as being freedom from rules always and i think the most important freedom is the freedom
to opt in or out of something, which with Singapore, you can.
You can choose to live there.
You can choose not to.
It's up to you.
And I mean, I don't know how much you know about the free cities movement
that we're part of, but we advocate for this exact governance,
competition between governments.
And, you know, the more the merrier.
You know, like America's a great example of an experiment
which goes along further down that line than most
and appears to be super successful.
And by the way, the American system helps ward against all these sort of federal centralizing powers,
which I suppose is what the founding fathers were warning against.
Because if it's going terribly in New York, because it has been for a while and will get much worse now,
and California, the beneficiaries will be the Tennessees and the Texases and all the rest of it.
It's a great system.
If we had a federal system here, I'd tell you, I would move to Buckingham.
This is a wonderful little place. I've never been here before.
It's an amazing little place, isn't it?
It is.
I don't know what the politics are like here, but it's, you know, it's walking around.
Well, to some extent, it doesn't matter, does it?
Because we're so centralised.
I think Britain is the most centralised economy in the OECD in terms of the amount of taxes that are raised at the centre.
London has this, if you have to wear free cities, it's so overpowering in terms of what's the model in the United Kingdom?
that smart kids or academically smart kids
are told to go off to university somewhere,
Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Exeter,
whatever other places,
and then by and large move to London
because that's where all the jobs are.
And it becomes the cultural capital
and the economic capital
and the political capital
and all the rest of it.
And has a great, if London's doing great,
but it's been run by a bloke for so long now
who has let crime go and all the rest of it.
And it's horrendous.
And I left London,
not because I think you get
any more political freedom,
but just to get out to a small village somewhere
where you are free of the effects
that people have been voting for in that way.
We did it a number of years ago as well.
I live on a farm now.
I've gone right to the very extreme.
We live about half a mile down the track.
Amazing.
But it sounds, you know, it's not strange,
not where we live anyway, but it's real.
I really, like, I've gone down the philosophical road
of leave me alone, leave me alone, leave me alone,
to the point now where I live down the end of a track.
It's not that I, I mean, like,
and we we have minimal contact with the government it has to be said you you really feel that you have
minimal contact every now and then i have to dip my toes into the bureaucratic world and i realize
how fortunate we are but it still it annoys me it shouldn't be like that it shouldn't be like that
it wasn't like that when even when i was you know i i lived in london i worked out of london for
seven years even there you know that was only 20 years ago it felt completely different you know
And my freedoms were much more evident.
Never thought about freedom of speech until the last few years.
Never.
Never thought at all about it.
And now that you do think about it, you realize that we have a terrible system here for freedom of speech compared to, say, the federal system.
Massively.
My wife is from the United States.
She's a Hoosier from the great state of Indiana.
and she said to me recently you know I never appreciated what the first amendment gave me in
terms of enshrining my right to say what I want without fear and all the rest of it until the last
few years of living here and she's lived here for a while now and to feel the way that that has
turned and I think because again that the man of system the rationalist whatever you want to call
it genuinely has never had the the philosophical groundings about freedom explained to them
ordered liberty right as you say it's not just about license to become hedonists or whatever
but the ability to act independently because you want to tinker and come up with new things and new
ideas and all these sorts of things they never come into any of this stuff I don't think we teach
it very well in school teach the benefits of it it's easy to be mocked and you know so for an
example inside government I was in the department for education during some of the covid issues and
the omicron wave was coming in and I sat in a meeting and they said right we are partly because
the trade unions want us to, we're going to insist that every child, including in primary
schools, is to wear a mask during the wave of this all day long, even when they're
sat down at their desks. And that's okay, because it's a zero cost
intervention. And I was the one person in that room, because obviously I'm the only political
person in there, and the rest are all civil servants, but what about their freedom? What
about their personal experience? And you'd have assumed that I'd called their mum a whore or
something, right? It was that like, and then it was more like, oh, you've just said that the,
I don't know, that grass is blue, or they just, they couldn't get their heads around this idea.
But it's zero cost. And so I forced them to go away and do a study that reported back and said,
actually, no, it's not a zero cost, and here are the problems, yada, yada, yada.
Because there's no mechanism for saying you're encroaching on their freedom and all the rest of it.
And there will be some people will say, yeah, but what about the freedom not to catch COVID and all the rest of it?
We're talking about primary school kids here and mostly young teachers and all the rest.
And COVID is an interesting example, I think, of people going, wait a minute.
God, my liberty really can be taken away from me at the drop of a hat and all the rest of it.
But in my case, I had never really contemplated liberty really until 2020.
yeah not not in not in a in a tangible way and is that i mean at the heart of it why is i mean and
you know your wife's american so you can you know america obviously when you go to america there is
there is a liberty it's in the dna and it's also even a liberty movement i've been to conferences
with 5 000 people they're just going there for liberty and things like this you know and it's a
it's across it's all kinds of people young old whatever what why didn't we why don't we get that
bit what is it about living on our little island here that we don't seem to care about that unless
it's like thrust into into our faces like when we were told to not come out of our house and i said
no i'm coming out of my house you know it's hard it was hard to see all those people sort of look
with dagger eyes looking at you doing things you didn't you know but in america it's like you feel
the power of this abstract constitution which kind of it's like an abstract power that you have
because you because you know at the end of the day it's there or in the case of freedom freedom
of speech you know that the bill of rights is is there for you and it's a it's a force i know we
don't have that but why do we not even think about it much it's not in our dna i mean we
arguably we were the first was the 16 and 1600s when people started thinking about individualism
and liberty and this kind of stuff and freedom of speech and freedom of expression all this kind of
stuff why didn't we adopt it properly i don't so i think we did adopt it and i think we adopted it
actually even much earlier than that and before people were consciously putting it into philosophies
there's an amazing book called the origins of english individualism by a man called alan
McFarlane. I've got a young
Padawan called Sam Bidwell, who some people
might know from Twitter, who's obsessed with this book
and goes on about it all the time.
And he points out that England,
and England in particular, different
in the deepest
ways possible, even than
our continental neighbours, even ones
quite similar to us, like the Dutch and the Danes.
The English used to
and still would marry
relatively late, for example, much later
than you'd assume, looking at church records,
and move into very nuclear families very early on.
I'll build up and answer your question in a second.
In a way that doesn't happen even on the sort of southern bits of the European continent.
And so you would kind of very small family unit, mum, dad, kids,
and then they'd grow up and go off and all the rest of it.
So you wouldn't have big multi-generational families.
And you would move place to place based on where the work was.
And therefore you don't build up the kind of cousin marriage,
clannish networks that you get in other places.
because you don't have blood ties with these people you've moved to for work but you develop
a kind of uh oikophilia as critical a lover place whatever and these other ties that bind that make
you act as if they are a kind of blood oration because you're trusting them and all the rest of
it but you're not having to bind these things in with marriage which obviously has you know
consanguinity issues and all the rest of it allows you to develop more individual
characteristics that allows you to hire the best person for a job and so meritocracy kind of comes
along and more freedom that way and freedom to move and to tinker and to get away from the cloying
embrace of parents if you want to and these things all come from very very deep roots and i think
mcfarlane can take it back even further to sort of that's because we followed um sheep around more
or whatever and you know he can he does all that kind of sociology stuff much better than i'd be
able to to give it justice to here and so that stuff was in the dna certainly from the norman
conquest and actually he would argue from before the saxons anglo-saxons had a different kind of
conception this you know the king didn't automatically just get to become king again
the Witton had to meet and all these deep deep deep currents and again influenced I would say
by bits of Christianity and all the rest and some other great books we can talk about if you want to
on that that builds up into this different system than we had and the earlier wranglings about how
that manifests itself in a power sense of the English Civil War the constitutional settlement
that I opened with and all the rest of it that gets exported to the new world definitely gets
exported to the United States what became the United States to the point that Edmund Burke
very very sympathetic to the american revolutionaries right i had a cry in the church in
boston where paul revere did the whole you know one by two one by night whatever it is one by sea
um the heartbreak that we're no longer officially one civilization still right um because it is a
shared inheritance and you get some slightly sniffy yanks who go oh yeah you're just the
ancestors of the people who weren't brave enough to leave the island and were the pioneers and all
that stuff which i think is rot by the way because after losing the colonies uh this island
sent people out and conquered the world and sent common law and all these ideas to other places as
well like Australia and India and great swathes of Africa and the Middle East and all the rest of
it. So I think we did have all this stuff and that sense of English liberty versus you know
the absolutism of Louis XIV or then the horrors of the French Revolution and the kind of reaction
all this stuff so I think we've got this great history of that and that level of freedom and
the first sort of mother of all parliaments all these things. I think we lose it to some extent
after the second world war are exactly the reasons that hayek talks about in combination with that
sort of managerial revolution but the the atlee government had coming to atlee who obviously came
after winston churchill had one parliament of five years and then like another year afterwards
and and then labor didn't get back into power again for ages and even then they've never been
as revolutionary or radical didn't need to be because they so changed everything so fast
nationalizing everything nationalizing health and industry and all the rest of it and we're still
stuck with that now and we're stuck with it and people think uh perhaps because we've got the
americans as a sort of very similar but very different example that they're all gun-toting
and talking about freedom and therefore that's not the english way which thatcher proved wasn't
true either and she said when you know when you people are free to choose they choose freedom
and i think we can do that again and i think we need to do that again i mean i'm just thinking
about after the war and like you say um did we even did we ever have that freedom though if it was
if it could be sort of taken away that easily.
I mean, when you look at the American version of freedom,
you realize it's the people kind of enforcing it
and guns are a huge part of that, you know.
But so it would be taking away freedom in the UK is very easy.
And by the sounds of the way you described it then,
after the war, it was probably framed as,
correct me if I'm wrong,
we need to do this because it's important for the country.
We need to take away freedom. Now, in America, that doesn't cut as well, because people really do want to then defend that right. We don't really have a good way of defending it other than saying something. And when it's free speech that's being quelled anyway, it doesn't really work, does it?
I guess the Americans are lucky and unlucky with their constitution being as sovereign and powerful as it is.
Obviously, it's not infallible because there are a bunch of amendments to it.
And the idea that there will never be another one again seems odd to me because our system is actually very different.
We've got the same history, same sort of philosophical roots or the rest of it.
Our political systems are actually shockingly different because in Britain, no parliament can tie the hands of its successor.
there no law that is with a few exceptions that I think are legitimate there no law that is any stronger than any other that couldn just be repealed with a simple majority in Parliament essentially
And I think Attlee or someone basically says that all the power that Lenin sought with the bullet,
the British Constitution gives you with the ballot. And so you have, as I said at the start,
this parliamentary system that does allow you to do great things very quickly. And if people don't
like it, the idea is you should be able to vote against it at a general election and change course
again so you should be able to do a similar version over every four-year cycles that i guess
the states can can do in that experimenting i think the problem probably was that we got whacked
in the first world war and lost a lot of great people and quality men and all the rest of it
were still shaken by that in the run-up to the second world war so the effort of winning that
war totally expended huge amounts of will and all the rest of it in britain right standing alone
against the Luftwaffe, all these sorts of national stories that are largely true,
and we should still be proud of our ancestors for doing it.
You lose the empire in the course of it.
You lose a lot more great people.
You lose a lot more ideas about it.
And then the well-meaning Clement Attlee, all sweet and modest,
comes along and says, we've won the war, now let's win the peace.
And you end up with socialism, which has been a cancer ever since.
And it's not been rowed back fast enough.
Churchill didn't manage to row it back when he came back in
because so much of it had been done.
and then he was poorly and then the the economic malaise that grips that grips you was so difficult
the old thing that you convert yourself into socialism but you've got to shoot your way out
well we got halfway out again with Maggie and then I think we've squandered it again and we could have
done it maybe again after Brexit and we haven't done it again now so I think that there may be
materialist reasons why not there's nothing constitutionally that says we're any less free
particularly that you couldn't get rid of with a stroke of a few pens and a few bills in the new
parliaments what's your stance this is going to sound a bit odd but what do you think about
democracy like a lot of uh 50 of the people we have on this podcast are not in favor of democracy
really and um for many reasons a lot of people believe it always leads to socialism it's the
democratic system itself which which are right it results in in uh socialism what's your view
you've been in on the inside you're probably gonna you don't have to be diplomatic either
I probably do if I ever want to get voted into anything.
Yeah. I mean, Churchill, again, Churchill said it's the worst form of government apart from all the others.
I'm sure you've heard other people say that. And was it an HR man kind of stuff on us?
You know, the people have spoken, the bastards. Right.
I think the alternative to having that mechanism of of changing course is very, very is not obvious to me.
what a better alternative is.
You're not going to get an Aristotelian,
Platonic philosopher king anytime soon.
If you can't change course,
you can't correct for big problems,
which we're seeing in China, for example, now.
It's always all going so well
because they can just do what they want
and all the rest of it.
Well, their economy would be much, much bigger
and stronger than it currently is
because of a load of decisions
that President Xi has made
since he's been in office
and no one's brave enough to correct him.
Ditto Russia.
They'd be in a much stronger, better place
if they hadn't been this massive kleptocracy or the rest of it.
And a proper democracy would be able to fix that.
Yes, my contention in Britain, at least,
is that we don't have as proper a democracy as we could,
partly for this reason that so much of the apparatus of state
doesn't change when people do, as I say.
It's not just only 200 people that change jobs.
When you're in a department,
I don't use the Department for Education, for example,
four advisors, four or five ministers, 8,000 civil servants.
That's just one department, for example.
It's not one of the biggest.
I think the other problem, and this will be controversial,
is that democracies work when there is a collective
and cohesive national story to tell and everybody buys into.
And that doesn't need to be, and it ideally is not an ethnic-based thing.
And the whole blood and soil stuff, I don't think really works
very nicely at all, obviously.
And I see why people get tempted by it because they think
that it's the only way to make people cohere together.
but when you have academic studies that say in multi-ethnic societies the crucial thing
is to push those differences down and and have a collective idea of what binds us and the more in
common and all that sort of nice stuff and what do we do with woke and dei and all the rest of it
we do the opposite we highlight all the differences and when you import lots of people and you don't
forcibly integrate them into explaining our system and the rest of it and you end up with
the multicultural system or society that Britain now is, then democracy doesn't work because you're
going to only go after different groups. I think the United States has this to a large extent,
where both parties will go, right, we need to say these things to appeal to African-American voters
and this to Hispanics and this to the Vietnamese Americans and whatever else. And Britain is
rapidly moving towards that. You saw the Muslim vote as an organization that was founded. There
There was a Hindu manifesto, a Yoruba manifesto for ethnic Yoruba people in Nigeria,
and all these other groups and people starting to appeal to them in Britain.
When that happens, I think then you've got a real problem.
So I think democracy works if everybody is in on the collective consciousness
and that kind of idea that you are all one people and you have the same love of the same place.
Talking of exactly that, and I was surprised.
This is the first time I've been to this kind of a conference in the UK.
And I think the panel I watched this morning, which you were on, is the Conservative Party dead?
And what I noticed immediately in the first few hours of listening to people talk and questions is no one, a lot of people were mentioning reform.
And this is very UK specific, but I was really, I just want to know what your take on this is.
Talking about reform, reform, reform, reform, reform.
And no one was mentioning Restore, which I think in my world, when we look at Restore, we see the real threat to, say, conservatism because what it's saying is what people often are thinking quietly.
going back to what you were saying about this is what happens when you don't have a national identity
things arise and people try and create that identity again i think what what restore are
doing is exactly that that they're basically saying oh hold on a minute this is you know this
is what we we were let's let's you know let's be that again and a lot of people who have been in
this country a long time agree with that and i can see that you know i noticed that just down the pub
you know in my local village people are listening to that and thinking yeah that's that's what i
really like um i forget where i'm going with this oh yeah yeah i just wanted to know why is no one
was really taking it didn't seem like anyone was taking restore um seriously whereas from my
outside of view i'm not in the political sphere at all i'm i'm i'm i talk to lots of people and i
listen to what said down the pub that that's people people will think restore is a really
good alternative so what what why aren't why aren't are people taking this seriously here or not
as a threat to them i mean if you're talking about conservatives and conservatism i'd say
that is their threat because they're what they're talking about and what they're actually saying
whether or not they do it who knows but is what um is is about a national identity again
I'm all for a national identity
I think that given where we are
and given where we have always been
and given where we were with the British Empire
and all these sorts of things
the idea that we would waste time
in a new right-to-centre government
working out who was actually
quote ethnically English
and deciding to send back
wherever back is
a load of people
who just happen to be born with black skin or whatever else,
which is, you know, I'll come to defend that in a second.
I think this is completely wrong.
It a waste of time It morally wrong It a totally misconception of how a lot of this country has developed And it comes from the fact that with
Okay, so let's start with this. The start of this Restore movement, this is a guy called Rupert Lowe,
who was elected as a member of Reform UK, and he was great on Twitter.
And he was great also in the Public Accounts Committee in the British Parliament.
The Tories actually gave him a slot in there later on, but he was very good at using the powers of an MP to write questions and all this sort of stuff.
He then gets kicked out of reform, and I don't think they did it in a very nice way, and there was all sorts of accusations, and it was all deeply unpleasant.
He sets up this thing called Restore that I joined as a sort of pressure group, I guess, and I thought this is a great idea.
And then it pops up as a political party, as yet another political party to sluice more votes away from the whatever inevitable wranglings there'll need to be at the next election on the right.
Whether reform cannibalised the Tory party, the Tory party recovers, you now make it more difficult with these guys coming along.
The structural problem I've got is that this guy Rupert Lowe, I like very much.
I've had dinner with him, very sound guy, all the rest of it, is basically a kind of classic Thatcherite Tory.
It looked like he might join the Tories if Robert Jenner had taken over in May from Kemi Badenow, for example.
And he talks a good sound game on all this kind of stuff.
He's not writing his own tweets, right?
Like what the guy says when he's in person with a camera in front of him, when he's doing a Twitter live or whatever it's called,
is different in both the tone of what's being said
and in the content of what's being said
than what the guy is tweeting.
And it's just there are demonstrable differences
that people on X have highlighted.
Whereas he, when he's speaking himself,
says things like,
no, I've never said I'd take passports away from anybody.
In which case, the Restore platform,
if that's what their actual platform is,
is no different from reforms or now from the Conservatives.
And yet then on Twitter, he's a lot punchier.
And the accusations are that there are some young, smart,
if slightly over-enthusiastic people around him who are pushing some of this stuff.
And I think there's a problem there if you've got young, enthusiastic people
who can take, actually, a sort of rationalist, man-of-system,
almost year-dot approach of going,
I don't like this, I'm going to make this all clean and nice and all the rest of it,
and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
which leads to one of these guys popping up on GB News
and telling a black woman who is a host on GB News,
even though she was born in Newcastle and she's really right-wing,
that she's not really English.
And I get that you can talk about not being English ethnically.
Fine, I agree with that.
Rishi Sunak, not ethnically English.
But in his mannerisms, and I don't like Rishi Sunak at all,
I think he's a rubbish prime minister and all the rest of it,
he's almost painfully English, right?
He's awkward, he likes cricket,
and he's clearly being slightly browbeaten by his wife,
and all those sorts of deep tropes and stuff.
But the obsession with going,
well, he's not really English, though, is he?
Who's that helping? Who's that turning on?
Who's that turning off?
and when it comes to then the the the horrendous problems that we all know there are in the country
of debt and of actual you know boris wave migrants who have come over here who are totally culturally
incompatible and do need to go and the rest of it you're just drawing away support for average
normal people who know there's a problem but don't like it when people are a bit too bombastic about
it so that's why i've got a problem i think others do about restore as well and in the sort of the
optics of all of this. And just like the article on the immigration point is, there will be some
people that want that kind of bombastic approach. Many others want this issue to be sorted, but will
just get squeamish if you see the stuff on British streets that we saw in Minneapolis. However right
I think it is to only have people who are legally here, and however right I think it is that actually
there is a conversation to be had about people who were given passports in Britain who should not
have been given them and who will only be a drain on state resources forever and their kids and their
families coming over and all the rest of it those people are only administratively British like the
guy who was Egyptian who'd never been here who was given a passport to get him out of an Egyptian
jail that guy's not British I don't think he ever will be given all the stuff he said he wants to
kill all the whites and the Americans and whatever else so what actually is necessary is a sort of
Katie Lamb type approach from the Conservative Party and she's a backbench MP who put forward
what the Conservative policy was for a little bit at least
until I think Kemi got scared of it,
which was saying, I'm ever so sorry,
it's a pity that you're here, you shouldn't have been given that passport
and we're just going to take it back,
which is what the Swedes have started to do
after decades of lending in so many Somali gangsters
that there is a Wikipedia page for grenade attacks in Malmo.
They've started paying to say, right, here's 5,000 krona,
we'll take the passport back, off you go.
And so that kind of more administrative bureaucratic approach
is the only way that's going to work at any scale that actually works.
But that doesn't do so well on the Twitter retweets.
Funnily enough, what I know about Rupert Lowe,
I've got from long-form interviews that he's been on, actually.
It was just that it was a couple of weeks ago.
You might find...
This is why I think that they, at least on paper, are a major force,
that a lot of people aren't necessarily saying it.
I was at my local pub, and we were talking about politics,
as you do in a pub.
and it's very small pubs of parliament right it's a very small pub and you can walk in there sit down
and you can become part of the conversation it's one of those kind of pubs and the the subject of
of rupert lowe came up and someone mentioned that he'd recently said or maybe someone on his behalf
by the sounds of it if that's true had said that they would ban halal halal and kosher slaughter
and you would be amazed everyone piped up in the pub said brilliant brilliant idea you know
and obviously we're a rural community,
a lot of farmers don't like the idea
of caring for their animals
and then shipping them off to that kind of situation.
Plus, we are a nation of animal lovers.
And I often think that something as simple as that,
as that statement,
could get a nation of animal lovers, for example,
to rise up and vote in a particular direction.
Now, I'd never heard it before.
So I did Google it and it's, lo and behold,
yeah he said that we would we will ban it but which when i thought it through and i was ended
up being the only one arguing that side of the story i was thinking wait a minute you can't
imagine the imagine the the process of banning halal slaughter i know a lot of you know around
where i live a lot of farmers a lot of slaughterhouses have consolidated in birmingham in the
birmingham area because there's a lot of um you know the lamb the trade in lamb goes in a certain
direction to a certain demographic in society and blah blah blah so there's this whole economic
part of that story and when you think it when i thought it through i thought how
you can't do that let alone the religious connotations which really we shouldn't care
about if you if you would say right there's a in in the uk we are animal lovers and as a result
um halal slaughter is something that we don't agree with you can do it anywhere else but in
our country we would like it to not happen i can get that i just was thinking about the logistics
of trying to do that and thinking it's almost impossible to actually enforce that how how would
you do that there's there's there's a whole economy there there's a whole there's there's
large swathes of communities revolve around this even if i would agree and i think i'd probably do
i i i don't like the idea of halal slaughter at all i would i would say yes i would vote for that
but the thought of it actually happening seems an impossibility and so is that the kind of thing
you're saying these are these are this is rhetoric which sounds good but but when it comes to it and
we this is what we so often see in politics now is i mean you know they'll say anything to get in
power and then it's almost now like a joke that you just do the opposite you just do the opposite
literally and people are so disenfranchised and disappointed they
don't care anymore you know is that one of those things that kind of you know
yeah so so let me start by saying that this is often a tactic that the civil
service will use for ministers saying it too hard to do it very complicated minister it will take us years to work up the plans and all the rest of it I think there even a sort of the internet line of it called having a cheems mindset that like there no point in trying to do difficult things because someone would have done it already otherwise
it's too difficult to do and all the rest of it so let's play out what it would actually look like
halal and kosher by the way well so this is exactly part of my point that halal can be as
simple as someone standing in an otherwise perfectly ethical slaughterhouse saying a little
prayer and then the animal is humanely stunned and killed that's that's i think in the majority of
cases in britain how it's supposed to work i didn't there are there are other other there again
there are there are interpretations of the um the theology that say that doesn't count and it has to
be still alive and awake and everything we've seen the most disgraceful uh images in some of these
Muslim-run slaughterhouses where they've played the sounds of wolves very loudly to terrify the
animals before they kill them. Why? Yep, because they're evil people. And they think nothing of
the sanctity of animal life. Is that really true? I know, it's the sort of thing that I now sound
like a complete nutter for saying it, but completely true. And it's one of those things,
like the grooming gangs or whatever, that is so evil and so awful to any decent person,
just a decent english person sensibility that you just think it must not be possible to be true
but so that's the other end of the spectrum my understanding is that in the in the kosher method
for for observant jewish people i think it's tshikta or something of that effect theologically
the animal has to be alive and as conscious as possible and therefore kosher food can only really
be prepared in the sort of what we would consider quite a cruel way jews have been back in in england
since Cromwell let them back in the 1600s.
So if you're an observant Jewish family,
you've been here for 400 odd years,
and you're suddenly told that you can't access
any of this food that you need
and that you're going to have to leave,
is that right?
I don't know.
It doesn't seem right to me,
but it also doesn't seem right to me
that an animal should be killed in a cruel way.
But then to Dale Vince,
the mad eco-lefty guy who funds the Labour Party,
he thinks that eating animals at all is wrong.
and you know so this is a complicated interesting conversation that we could we could delve deeper
into uh are we really when it comes and you know can you do one without the other can you say as
some people might say oh but so jews have been here for 400 years and their contributions to
society are enormous look at the nobel prizes yada yada we'll make an exception for them but
not for halal because the people that use halal arrive more recently and are less likely to be
net contributors right someone might make that argument right which is again very tricky guys
because others would have to say in a liberal approach you have to ban everything equally or
not at all these are these are interesting conversations that and this is the thing
that we're going to focus not you and i but that a government is going to focus on trying to work
out and spend all of its resources energy on working out rather than all the low-hanging fruit
of an insane energy policy and insane immigration policy and insane regulatory policy insane
education insane health care no military yada yada yada so there's a there's a problem there i think
in terms of being reasonable on the rest of it.
And the other bit of it is,
is it just that you're creating a hostile environment
for groups of people that you don't like?
Because I don't like lots of people
who have come to this country recently
who are probably likely to eat halal food
and probably want it in the most unpleasant way
because I've seen the problems of political Islamism
and I've seen the problems of lack of cultural assimilation.
And the school that I used to live near in North London
had five-year-old girls wearing hijabs, right?
And I would obviously, that I would ban in a heartbeat.
It's totally unbritish,
the thing we've seen this last week of the adhan the call to prayer in trafalgar square again all
the blokes at the front and the women in the hijabs at the back and so on and so are we really
talking about integration here is it is it is it actually about the animal welfare these are really
interesting and deep difficult conversations and i've got my knee jerk opinions on it that you'd
have to think through and you you know legitimately probably have to kind of consult on and all the
rest of it is that what we're going to spend our time doing as a first government to try and save
the country from the doldrums that it's in good good point i'm not i'm not trying to be defeatist
about it but like that is a these big conversations and if you're going to say no sorry just to finish
you know if you're going to say don't care it's awful it's just bloody wrong i'm just going to get
it done is that the same slapdash approach that we're going to take to uh to the uh to the economy
right because that's kind of a bit where the trust uh program went to just right slapdash
just get it done governing's actually really hard right labor fell for this where they thought
Tories were evil our theory of change is just get the evil Tories out and everything will be fine
and now the newspapers are full of of Labour ministers and spas going Christ actually it's
really hard to do this we're in such a pickle it's very difficult so you tell me I don't know
what do you think well no I I was just thinking it through then I would say that and this I'm this
is how I'm assuming how it happened we invented with regards to halal and kosher we we invented
a rule that said to be humane with an animal you must pre-stun you must stun it first before you
kill it and that makes sense but there are these exceptions on religious grounds that so i would
come at it from that stance i would say no let's have no exceptions because the idea is the animal
is is is bad enough that it's getting killed anyway but why do it in a painful way that's that's
that's not something that i think anyone well that's not true obviously plenty of people don't
care but i would say that if the law was that and if the law was passed to say that but there's these
exceptions then i would say it's not a real law then because the exceptions especially if it was
religious grounds well that's that's a very kind of uh liberal take in general right and and with
the stuff we've seen again from the prayer controversy in Trafalgar Square,
Ed Davey from the Liberal Democrats saying,
yeah, it's so un-British to suggest that people can't pray the way they want to, and so on.
We had test acts on the statute for hundreds of years that forbade, you know,
Catholic worship or whatever, or fined you if you didn't go to church a number of times.
Is that un-British?
Because we did it for hundreds of years longer than we've been doing lots of other things
that we now consider to be British and all the rest of it.
So, you know, I think without trying to be a cop-out on it,
I think a lot of this stuff is really difficult to be morally and ethically and politically consistent about.
If what you're actually saying is you acknowledge there's a problem with cultural assimilation,
okay, then let's talk about it like that.
And if you think it's a problem about animal welfare, okay, let's talk about that.
And then we get into a very intractable, messy problem of competing rights and balancing rights.
It's always been a difficult thing, right?
it's not just enough to have mills harm principle balancing how we behave towards one another
you have a right of an animal to not be killed in a nasty way versus the right of someone who's
lived here for 400 years to do what he thinks his god tells him he's got to do in order to be a good
person right i might think that's silly i might care more about the animal how are we going to
balance these things out and if it's done in this spirit of actually i just want to get rid of these
people i don't like that seems that seems concerning okay as much as i don't want a lot
of those people to be here if they're going to be forcing their five-year-old girls to wear hijabs
and do political Islamism and, you know,
horrible stuff from the pulpit and all the rest.
I think the reason I brought it up at that particular one
is because I think it's a cross-party issue, animal cruelty.
And it's a really interesting one because it makes everyone think,
especially, I would say, the left side of the aisle,
who might say, well, that person should be able to do what they want to do.
But hold on a minute.
They want to hurt an animal.
you know right i think it's i think it's a phenomenal a phenomenal it's a bit like uh you
know the kind of the abortion debate in a way it's our version of it because we don't really
care about abortion over here but we love animals right we really love them and and i would say that
is part of at least my culture yeah the love of animals is a british sentiment almost certainly
one of the reasons why we ended up leaving london was that we got a cocker spaniel called tennyson
because I thought it was the silliest thing to shout in a field, right?
Come here, Tennyson.
And the way that he was perceived by people who arrived recently,
the dog got kicked, dog got spat on,
they're terrified because there's a Hadith that says that, you know,
Dog saliva cancels prayers and things.
It doesn't seem right to me.
We've been domesticating dogs
and they've been domesticating us back
for what, 30, 40,000 years.
And some of these ideas are much more modern than that,
much more recent than that.
I hate that too.
So I'm totally with you on that front.
And yet, is this what we're going to prioritize?
We're going to not have an economy that's fixed
and a stupid energy policy
because we're going to spend all our parliamentary time
in debating all this stuff.
Maybe, maybe.
And again, I would like this to be a country
where people are really pro-dogs and really pro-animal welfare
and really well integrated and not forcing five-year-old girls to wear hijabs
and not marrying their cousins and all these things.
But to just kind of go, you know what's going to be a banger tweet
that's going to stick it to Faraj because he's a wet?
Done.
That's not how it works.
And that's not me being a merely mad civil servant saying,
Minister, it's too difficult because I don't want you to do it.
There are difficult considerations to work out.
Right.
God, I sound like a centrist dad.
I thought I was meant to be a radical.
we'll wrap it up in a sec um i just want to going on from that then um you're saying what you know
are we going to prioritize this right you you can prioritize whatever you want how do you fix
what's going on now you personally based on everything you know from inside the government
outside the government i think we need i mean from where we're standing there needs to be
another year or so of the parties of the right and the left knocking seven shades out of each other
i think that's actually quite healthy my broad take is that there will be a sort of darwinian
survival of the fittest or the survival of the most able to change or whatever uh approach and
that one party might just cannibalize the others um maybe that's restore maybe that's reform maybe
that's stories and then you end up you know hopefully with some of the best quality of all
of them in there uh and that then you've got a reasonable prospect to give to the the public
The fact that reform and the Tories have got pretty similar policies on lots of areas is encouraging for that.
So then you vote for the most robust right-wing party that can win.
If you get into power with that and the things that ought to be prioritised is an acknowledgement that we are, the hour is even later than most people think.
And that the economy will be so bad, unfortunately, by 2029, that we're not going to be able to do a lot of stuff straight away.
they're going to ruthlessly prioritize massive deregulation
to energy and to business in general,
trying to attract investment here,
trying to attract people back again.
Then maybe you get no income tax for someone moving back
from Dubai for a year or two,
something like to try and get some of our best people back
to try and rebuild things.
And I think that alongside that then there is a very serious policy on immigration that needs to happen which is to turn back at least all the people who are in the country illegally foreign criminals or the rest of it
And there should be a conversation about people who were given passports in the last few years,
who are not contributing in any way, actively seem to be failing to integrate.
That is very difficult to do.
And that's probably not something that's going to be able to be done in all the fighting between the parties right now.
Maybe it is because you don't want to set precedents that say, well, hang on a minute.
You now in 2040, you don't subscribe to what Prime Minister Zach Polanski thinks a British person believes.
Therefore, we're going to send you to the penal colony.
But that's there is one thing we've seen in the last few years.
Slippery slopes are really real.
So let's the first instance you do the low hanging fruit.
I think then what you do is to try and be a bit more sneaky sneakison about it is you look at the kind of the benefits and welfare system as we've got it.
because we are paying huge amounts of money for people to sit on their arses and do nothing.
Not people who are poorly or anything like that, but people who have recently arrived.
And maybe they have now got ILR or they've got passports,
but they don't contribute in any meaningful way and send money home and all the rest of it.
Let's have a look at some eligibility criteria there.
As I imagine, there's probably an awful lot that you could quite quietly do
in order to encourage some of these people to no longer do it when they can't just sit on the taxpayer teat.
And the last bit of that, I think, as well, is to just cut off all the funding to all these NGOs
and the charities and all the rest of it as well.
And that would get you an awful lot of the way there.
And then I think some other stuff about,
on the political Islamism front of cutting off funding
and looking at what some of our friends in the UAE
and Saudi and stuff have done.
Look, in Saudi Arabia, you now have,
the state has to approve what speeches are given
by imams in mosques.
And when Trump did that first appearance in Saudi,
when he's sort of touching that weird orb in that thing,
music was illegal in Saudi and when Trump spoke last year he ended his speech with YMCA for the
village people right so you know there are big cultural changes that are happening in that part
of the world that we should look at and how they deal with extremism there banning the Muslim
Brotherhood be a great start and all that that would entail as well and that would be a start
and then let's see after five years when you fix the economy and got some military back again
and fix welfare payments and sent back all the illegal immigrants and stop the boats
and or the foreign criminals and all the rest of it and then let's see okay all right that sounds
pretty good countries in a better way then we can start having thornier conversations about how much
more needs to be done to force people to integrate whilst at the same time promoting the best
appreciation or the rest of it one thing you didn't mention there sorry one last question
reducing the size of the government that would always be my my issue the government too big there too many civil servants Too many people working there That costing too much Too many people deciding on how you live your life
Is that something that you think is even possible?
Like, we saw this in America, a version of.
And, you know, the richest man in the world just walked away.
And was obviously not going to achieve anything anyway.
I don't expect the size of the UK government to get any smaller
but I'd even test to take 1% smaller
not 1% bigger
I didn't mention it because I've been banging on about it in my own head for so long
I've taken it as a fait accompli now
we absolutely do need to shrink the size
shrinking headcount is really important
and when you try and do that in government
they'll go no no we'll find savings in other ways
because they know having more people means they can do more bad stuff
and so actually I think headcount even if it's expensive to sort of pay people off
is going to be worth it in the long run because then you've not got a kind of overworked special
advisor go around trying to stop all the mad projects that are happening everywhere one of
the things that I think that Musk had to deal with with Doge and all the rest of it is that all
the senators and the congressmen and the governors had the pork that they liked from the bad spending
because that's I guess the downside of that federal system and therefore couldn't touch
this waste of money here because senator so-and-so was going to be up for re-election and so on
if you have a plan for all this stuff and do it really early on in the parliament
everyone's hands are dipped in that blood early on the way that our constitution means you can
just cut a lot of that spending much more quickly i think the economic reality will also force us to
reduce headcount and spending and that kind of stuff and i think crucially when it comes again
to that welfare bill that's how you can massively cut the size of this there's stuff you can't touch
and then like pensions it's trickier and all the rest of it that you can make more efficient but
But cutting away a lot of these people, astonishing amounts, I think, we'll find where people are being paid who shouldn't be just to sit around and do nothing but bring in family members and all the rest of it.
What about reducing the workforce?
Does that ever get talked about inside government?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, Boris tried to push this for a while.
And so you'd ask the civil servants and they would come up with the kind of classic bleeding stump strategy of like, well, I suppose we could manage 4%.
But, you know, you've said 20%.
And how many children?
we're going to calculate how many children die when that happens and how many farms will just
suddenly explode and how many this, that and the other. And they'll really lay it on thick,
whereas I don't believe that happens at all. But what you do need to have is an understanding
that where some of the kind of welfare is teat, whether it's business or people or whatever else
has been done, there is short term pain and dislocation and then things get much better.
So I think New Zealand has this in their agricultural sector where all the subsidies
were taken away and everything collapsed very briefly And now you get New Zealand lamb everywhere It a major export because they learned to be market leading and all the rest of it And so you got to have a level of comfortableness
with that sort of creative destruction
that, again, the sort of free marketeers talk about.
And that's scary.
But I suspect we have to use the crisis
of how bad the economy is going to be to get to that point.
And what Thatcherism showed us
is that you can turn this stuff around so quickly.
Just a bit of economic freedom can cause absolute miracles.
And I'll end with this, that the criticisms of Thatcher in those first few years were,
God, the economy is so bad and unemployment's so high.
It's so terrible.
She doesn't know what she's doing.
A few years later, it was the Harry Enfield sketch.
Loads of money where they know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
And all they care about is being filthy rich and all the rest of it.
Because suddenly everything turned around like that.
And that's what a little bit of economic freedom can do.
It did in the past.
It can do so again.
And then we can start affording all this other stuff as well.
because the problem of no growth means it does become zero sum
and then we get mean about things.
If you can get people onto that prosperity agenda,
then wonderful things can flow from it.
If you don't, nothing can.
Bravo.
Well, let's keep our fingers crossed.
It sounds like a lovely future.
I'm not sure I can see it at the moment, but who knows?
Anyway, James, thanks for coming in, mate.
Thank you, mate.
Really enjoyed speaking to you.
Likewise, thank you.
Thank you.
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