Is Britain racist against white men?

0:02The Telegraph.

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1:04Is Britain racist against white men? The police are busily revisiting mad DEI policies in the aftermath of Henry Novak's death. Suella Braverman was fired by the Tories for pointing out two-tier policing. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer is in denial that it even exists. Whose fault is all this? Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Tim Stanley. And me, Camilla Tomini.

1:38Tim, you've written a column which is headlined, As a white man, I would love to know exactly how I should react to Henry's murder, which has attracted over 1 ,500 comments. Talk me through that. Let me start by saying I don't self-perceive as a white man. One, because I genuinely like to think I don't see things through the prism of race. But also because, and this is the argument that was made recently within the police, in a society in which whiteness is perceived to be the norm, because we're a majority white society, you don't notice that you're white. No. But if you're an ethnic minority, you are almost compelled to notice that you are an ethnic minority.

2:22And that's why the police argued a few years ago you have to treat non-white people differently because their experiences of society are so much different. And I understand that. So I normally wouldn't phrase anything as a white man because I don't see things that way. I feel that what's happened in the last couple of decades is I have been ironically encouraged by liberals to become aware of my race. Yes. The promotion of multiculturalism has become so strong and stark and unavoidable that you reach a point where you start to think, oh, I am white. Yeah. We are all different. This is the thing, right?

3:11People have had it up to here with DEI to the extent that it's actually made them quite racist. Right. So the classic thing, Sarah Pochin put it very inelegantly about the representation of non-white people on television. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. TV should be reflective of the country. But I know people who work in TV and they will tell you that for a while. And by the way, I believe this has changed because woke is receding. But for a while, you just couldn't get something made until you hit a very precise number of people representing different groups, be they gay, disabled, black, whatever.

3:49Yes. And the result was a popular culture that looks nothing like my experience of the world. No, that's right. In the bit of the world that I live in. The pendulum always swings too far. And it'll go back the other way. But this is my point, is when I wrote this, I don't feel comfortable saying as a white man, because I think it's immoral to see things through the prism of race. But my first point is, I believe the culture is compelling people to do that. And the second thing is that having done that, the culture is now telling people that they shouldn't be aware of being white, even though it's making them aware of being white, and that whiteness might even be bad.

4:31Yes. But then who's right on all this? Because Kemi Badenock is saying let's all be colourblind. Yes. Because she has made it her life's work not to constantly remind everyone that she comes from Nigeria and is a black woman. Because like Martin Luther King, she wants to be judged on the quality of her character, not the colour of her skin. But the adverse view to that is that I need to make something of my colour because other people are making something of it. And if, for instance, I'm more likely to be stopped and searched as a young black man than, say, for instance, Tim Stanley or Camilla Tomini, then unfortunately my ethnicity has become an issue for others.

5:10And therefore, I must make it an issue for myself in order to insulate me against such discrimination. Yeah, that's perfectly reasonable. And that discrimination should be fixed, is wrong and should be fixed. But the end goal is supposed to be a world without discrimination. And part of the problem, and I touched upon this in this article, is that in the pursuit of an equal outcome, state agencies have convinced themselves they must use unequal means. Yes. And so if you combine the state following a strategy of trying to produce an equal outcome through unequal means, plus a culture which is incredibly aware of race and wants to talk about it all the time, the combination of those two things is producing particularly a generation of young white men who feel alienated in a society that they believe is actually stacked against us.

6:05them. Now, you might counter that that's in practice nonsense. Hey, Prime Minister's still a white man. Media is still dominated by white men. Heavens, and this is the irony, the media is very left-wing, but if you want one area of the world that is completely untouched by DEI, it seems to me, it's the media, right? Because it's intensely nepotistic. And indeed, so much of what's wrong with Britain is actually about class, not about race. Yes, I was thinking that just as you were speaking, I was thinking, in what world is it likely that Tim Stanley, in his tortoiseshell glasses, gets stopped in the street?

6:39Okay. And then I thought, is the Henry Novak thing something about class? Is it because he may have had the appearance of being a sort of happy-go-lucky 18-year-old? I made this point last week, and maybe I'm wrong, but the kind of like Stone Island polo shirt analogy, but a stereotype is built up in the minds of the police who are looking at him and then looking at his murderer, Digwa, in his pseudo-religious dress, then looking at all of his religious family and somehow thinking that they are the honourable people and that this young lad who, okay, was a bit cheeky, did suggest to Digwa, you're a bad man.

7:17I mean, maybe he was one of those lads that liked a bit of backchat, whatever, that somehow he is being treated in a pejorative way and it might have something to do with the colour of his skin because we know about the bias towards the Digwas because they were Sikhs, we got all that. Was it also that they were just making a judgment on him? Like people make judgments on anyone that goes on a Unite the Kingdom rally? If that were true, then that demonstrates what I'm describing, which is the, to use a liberal word, intersection of state policy and culture. So it's both the state policy of saying you must take accusations of racism 100 % seriously and believe the person who's saying this happened, plus the culture of a working assumption that people who look like that might be racist.

8:03And of course, the irony is, is we could be saying similar things about the prejudice against and mistreatment of black boys, the state policy being bad, stop everyone who looks a certain way in a certain area, plus the cultural assumption that they're likely to be carrying a knife. Just as we could be saying that about black people, we're now saying it about white people to. Now to go back to the central argument of my article, what I'm saying there is that we are taking the two-tier policing problem and we're adding to it a two-tier policing of emotions. Because I know as someone who genuinely wants to be, I'm comfortable with the label anti-racist.

8:45I accept that racism is something which can sort of seep into the skin and you don't notice it's there. So you have to confront it. And it's okay as a society. It's a good moral thing for society to want to draw it out and reject it. Okay. So as a good anti-racist, I was appalled on the human level by the death of George Floyd. I didn't take the knee, but I scribed to much of what Black Lives Matter was arguing at that point, that we needed to talk about this. Okay. And people were moved and full of grief. And there were mass demonstrations. In fact, there were protests. Some of them turned violent.

9:20Property was destroyed. Politicians famously took the knee. The then leader of the opposition, Keir Starmer, talked about how appalling it was. And he demanded that the British government actually complain about the way Donald Trump had responded to it. And when the government of the day refused to, Lisa Naddy said they were weak and wrong. So all of that emotional reaction seems to me to be natural and OK for George Floyd. Yes, but not for Henry Novak. What I don't get is why when Henry Novak happens, there's no minute silence. No. There's no taking the knee. And in fact, the prime minister demands of us national sans-froid.

10:01Now, normally when something like this happens, you'd expect a prime minister to get up in the House of Commons and say, I am disgusted by what I saw. I am furious about it. And I will not be deterred from making sure that never happens again. Instead, we get a everybody calm down. Let's not have division. Let's respect the wishes of the family when they said we don't want division. And you know, in a way, who's almost the worst person in all of this? Nigel Farage. Yes. But isn't it saying, I mean, I wrote my column about this at the weekend. And it, again, garnered a great many comments. And I was basically saying, look, my lived experience is that I'm really angry.

10:52I'm really angry about what I've seen on the body cam footage. And I'm really angry about a great many things that are happening to this country at the hands of the people who are telling me not to be angry. And that's making me even angrier. And I think the Starmer approach is very much, listen, we really don't want angry white men taking to the streets in protest. And yet the actual, and I don't want that, by the way, I want peaceful protest at all times because I think people should reserve the right to demonstrate if they think the state has failed them. And I think we can agree that the state has failed Henry Niamh.

11:27But back in BLM, back in George Floyd, Starmer's rhetoric around it, and I saw the quote because I put it in my piece, it was something along the lines of, and we can understand why people are taken to the streets. So it's okay for angry black men to take to the streets because they've historically been persecuted and therefore they've got a right. But for God's sake, don't have angry white men because that could be really problematic. I mean, a riot is a riot, regardless of who starts it, first of all. Second of all, I want to call for peace at all times. But don't tell people how to be angry.

12:00Don't tell them that they can be angry about this and not this. It's a perfectly legitimate response to be angry. It's not legitimate to incite violence. It's not legitimate to throw wheelie bins at police officers. For goodness sake, control yourselves. But yeah, I've got a right to be angry just as you have about anything I want to be angry about. I don't need to have some prescription from Keir Starmer. I don't need Keir Starmer controlling my rage, Thanks very much. Explaining to us when, as I said in the piece, he might want to send a leaflet to every house explaining how you should feel when someone dies while handcuffed by the police.

12:32You know, explain that you should maybe feel mildly anxious, annoyed, irritated, things you could do to take your mind off it. You might want to go jogging or put up a shelf, something like that. But when George Floyd died, not only were there many, many more protests than there were for Henry Novak, they broke lockdown rules to do it. They were permitted to do something that Boris Johnson was forced out of office over. So again, it is the sense of a double standard in the policing of people's emotions. And all of this feeds into the politics of the far right. Okay. So when I was doing historical research post-grad, I specialized in forms of white nationalism, and I taught a course on this, I'm very on top of what the far right says and is doing and what it thinks and why.

13:26And I can tell you that this is for them a golden age of recruitment. And they're feeding upon all the themes that we have just discussed. Yeah. You're not being listened to. You're being controlled. It's catnip. Thanks to the internet, they have a reach they never had before. So if your principal concern is to reduce racial tension in this country, which is a very good concern. But if that matters to you even more than young boys being handcuffed, if it does matter to you even more, you're doing the very worst thing because you are confirming every conspiracy theory. Yes. Much as they did with their reaction to Southport of locking so many people up and giving them very long sentences.

14:11that confirmed every suspicion of a double standard. The other day, someone stopped me in the street. And he told me that his son, who is okay, goes to a private school, right, is white. None of these are crimes, ladies. None of these are crimes. And my point is, this is not about a working class white experience. But you'll see what I mean when I tell you. His son had wanted to study medicine and had been rejected from every single university in this country that he had applied for. Yes. And was going to go to Australia instead. Now, their family assumes, rightly or wrongly, because his grades are very good, assumes rightly or wrongly that that's because he fails to tick any of the boxes of what universities want to take.

15:00Whether that's accurate or not, it's a perception. And perceptions do matter because people act upon them. Yes. And what the white middle classes can do, and in many cases are doing, is leaving behind the country. They're mobile, they can move. If you are white working class and you perceive that this culture has no place for you, that this state is against you, what are you going to do? You're going to join Tommy Robinson. Well, you may well do. And also, by the way, this isn't just, I mean, you've cited an anecdotal example there. We've got the figures on this. We've got the Lost Boys report by the Centre for Social Justice, which says that the class of boys that are being left behind most aren't blacks, aren't brown boys, they're white boys.

15:51They're working class white boys. They're falling behind educationally. They're falling behind from an employment and wages perspective. They're falling behind emotionally. We know about the suicide rate in the under 30s. And whites are overrepresented in that. So they're falling behind at every time, but we can't talk about that because they're white, therefore they're automatically privileged. And this has been the other problem. This is why there'll be no sympathy for the medical student. Oh, well, you're white privileged. No, no, indeed there won't be. But that kid could be far more discriminated against by the university system than a student of colour.

16:31That's the irony here. And we're either judging people at face value or we're not. Should we talk about, you talked earlier about a gift for the far right, whether or not we're classing Tommy Robinson as that or not. You know, Elon Musk, who is a Tommy Robinson fan, has been piping up on social media. Of course. We've got J.D. Vance. He's sticking his oar in. We've got Pete Hegseth. I mean, the latter two seem to think this is about, seem to think Henry Novak has something to do with migrant crime. No, lads. Hang on a minute. Digwar was born in the UK. He is British. I think they saw a Sikh and thought, oh, he must be a migrant.

17:07If you're going to intervene in UK politics or UK social affairs, could you just do some basic research? Yes. Especially you, J.D. Vance. I was once a hillbilly and now I'm a genius. Just like maybe Google it. Yes. Well, Vance and Hegseth have both cast Henry Novak's death as a consequence of mass migration. Yeah. And by the way, British civilisation in complete and utter peril. And civilisation and Europe is in danger because it's letting so many people in, etc, etc. OK. The problem with that is Henry Novak is of Polish descent and the dig was he was born here. Yeah. So it doesn't it doesn't work as an argument.

17:46But there is something in Americans. It's it's almost cute. they just think everything English is white. Yes. Right? Because they have an image in their head of what English is. They're basing it on Downton Abbey, I suppose. What they don't realise. The royal family. Right. Yeah, exactly. So what they don't realise is we have a much longer history and prouder one of multiculturalism here than they have, or multiracialism here than they have an appreciation of. We just have a longer history, full stop. We have a longer history, full stop. Yeah. And of course, Hexeth was speaking in the wake of events this weekend to mark the history of D-Day.

18:21And I never tire of pointing out to people that Britain at that time was an empire. Yes. It was a multicultural society, which is something neither left nor right wants to hear. No. I mean, we could bring in another very commented on story, which is the removal of Winston Churchill from our banknotes. Yes. And you look at that and you think, initially it's like, oh, that's about... Well, initially it was argued, it's about security concerns. And then somebody pointed out, well, hang on, the US dollar hasn't changed since the 1920s. What are you talking about? Then it becomes about wildlife. Oh, we're a nation of animal lovers.

18:50OK, great. We all love an otter. That's wonderful. Then it emerges. Lo and behold, somebody woke in the Bank of England and said, oh, it's a bit of rhetoric now around Winston Churchill maybe being a racist. Yeah. And therefore, is he the right person to put on a banknote? Yes. Well, as he saved this entire population from speaking German, yes, I think he probably should be on a banknote. I don't know about anyone else. There's a reason why he's been repeatedly voted the greatest Britain of all time. and it's probably because he led an allied force in the face of the most abject evil recent memory can recall.

19:26You see the banknote story is another classic example of the two-tier process. Story breaks, something woke. A lot of British people go, I bet that's something woke. Yes. The clever people, all white liberals, say, No. You morons. You racist. You thick, racist morons. You bigots. You've been listening to Elon Musk again. It's actually a perfectly normal thing. It's about weasels. We've always had toads on our notes. You don't know what you're talking about. And then a few weeks later it emerges, we were right. Yeah, it's about wokery. Now, a human being is defined by their history. And what we have done in the last 20 years or so, again, it's all within a certain period, a lot of it under the Tories, is we have said your history is problematic.

20:16Now, of course, your history is complicated. Everyone's family's history is complicated. Everyone didn't like their mother or they had a dodgy uncle or something like that. But it's your history. And you've got to be very careful about how you, quote unquote, deconstruct it. But the narrative we have been sold in the last few years is our history is uniquely toxic. By contrast, Benin, for instance, is marvellous. Yes. And they must get their bronzes back. We stole them. I tell you what. And they must have them back. Anyone else's history is absolutely marvellous and blemish-free. Arab nations.

20:48No human rights abuses there at all. Exactly. The progressive Chinese. Oh, slavery was all us. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Slavery was all us. And if we did get rid of it, someone clever will produce something on Radio 4 that will demonstrate we didn't want to get rid of it. And of course, we paid compensation. Exactly. And by the way, Christians are still being persecuted in Nigeria and other African and other nations. But hey, do you know what? Just turn a blind eye to that. Because look at the British. What about it? What about the British back in the 17th century? Let's concern ourselves with that literally as mothers' babies are being slaughtered in front of them literally right now.

21:26If your lived experience is actually I'm quite proud to be British. And I have got a picture of Winston Churchill up in my house because I think he saved British civilisation. And by the way, I'm also quite fond of Margaret Thatcher. I know she wasn't perfect, but I thought she was a really strong leader. And I really would like to get back to the growth rates of the 1980s. And if you say all these things, you're saying, do you know what? I don't think women can have a penis. And I think the trans thing's gone completely mad and quite worried about social media. Actually, I wish this social media ban went further and actually children couldn't have phones.

21:57People start pointing at you and going, I don't care if that's your lived experience. You're still a Nazi. And that's what's most extraordinary about all this. and the institutions never stand up for the latter, even though you and I both know that the latter are largely the majority because it's always the tiny little voices doing the extreme things, saying things that actually amount to complete and utter nutbaggery, masquerading as consensus. It's never really consensus because all of those people, like you say with the banknotes, did sit back during the trans thing and went, this is a bit weird.

22:29I don't think it's biologically correct, all this. and the two-tier policing, you know, Chris Filtz coming on. When all of that stuff was going on, most people were going, it's a bit mad, this, I don't know if we should have people, I don't think we should have police officers taking the knee because that organisation wants to defund the police and can we just police in a really kind of completely equitable way? Everyone was saying that, but the institutions were still like, no, we've got to sign up to BLM immediately. Well, this is the interesting thing, is as the multiracial society matures, we now have voices within it who are not white, but who have chosen to be here or have grown up here and have been inculcated in its values.

23:10And they are some of the most prominent voices saying, why are you doing this rubbish? So in the case of Kemi Betenoch, here is someone with a, as they like to say, blended family, children who are both black and white, someone who has come here from Nigeria and who can contrast what has historically made this country so appealing in comparison with Nigeria. And one thing that has made us so appealing is our lack of tribalism. And maybe it's the lived experience that that isn't a reality, that the British society says we're colorblind and it's not. And okay, if that's true, that needs to be addressed and fixed.

23:47But even if it's an ideal, ideals are important because they're the standard we live up to or try to live up to, if you say the ideal is bullshit and it's a lie and you just tear away the ideal, you have nothing. You just have a tribal competition between people for money and resources and power. And I do think immigrants will save us because I think it is immigrants and the children of immigrants who have the clarity of vision about what makes Britain work, particularly in comparison to parts of the world that don't work. Well, coming up next, let's speak to Badenock's Lieutenant Chris Philp, who is the Shadow Home Secretary but also used to be the Policing Minister in the last Tory government.

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26:32We're joined now by Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp. Lovely to see you today. Now, I've had a bit of criticism from Tories for asking about this at the weekend on my GB News show, but I am going to ask you about it because you're now decrying the state of policing and talking about two-tier policing and saying something's gone terribly wrong. And while I appreciate that Kemi Badenot was making arguments against the Black Lives Matter movement and critical race theory back in the day, we did have a situation where in the original sacking of Suella Braverman, it was as a result of her writing an unauthorised op-ed for a rival newspaper in which she called out two-tier policing.

27:09In that case, she was talking about the policing of pro-Palestinian marches. She was fired by Rishi Sunak for saying that. I don't remember you or other Tories backing her up at all. And now she's being completely vindicated and you're now aping her language, even though she lost her job over it. Well, first of all, you'd have to ask Rishi Sunak, who was prime minister at the time, why he fired Suella Braverman back in the autumn of 2023. But we do know it was because of that. Well, I'm not sure we do know that. I don't think Rishi has said that for sure. I think there were a number of concerns at the time.

27:42there was a comment to do with homelessness, you may recall, that caused some agitation. It was that op-ed, it was in the Times, I don't mind mentioning the rival newspaper, that was the straw that broke the camel's back. And I appreciate that because she's defected now, lots of Tories have got bad things to say about her. Well, she wasn't very good at this and she wasn't. But I merely make the point, when she said two-tier policing, no one in the Tory government backed her up. And now you're all talking in the language of two-tier policing. Well, as I say, I think there were probably a wider range of issues on Rishi's mind.

28:13But if you wanted to know why that happened, you would have to obviously ask Rishi about what was in his mind when he made that decision. Kemi Badenoch, as you've said, spoke out, has spoken out on these issues over a number of years, going back to her time in government. And the most offensive document, the most offensive policy document I've uncovered, which is the so-called police race equity commitment, dates from March 2025. And that is the document which expressly says the police should treat different ethnic groups differently in order to reverse engineer things like the same arrest rates, even though we know, sadly, offending rates are different in different ethnic groups.

28:54So the only way you can reverse engineer the same outcomes, like the same arrest rate, is by treating different ethnic groups differently. The document actually says that. Now, I've been calling that out in Parliament for the last year with Yvette Cooper when she was Home Secretary and more recently with Shabana Mahmood. And I haven't really got any clear answers from them as to whether they support this appalling concept or not. I certainly do not support it. that document should be scrapped urgently and the police should simply treat everybody the same regardless of their ethnicity. How in your mind did we get to a point where the police are concerned about achieving equality in arrest rates rather than just arresting people who they believe are guilty of something?

29:38Yeah, and of course they should simply be doing the second of those things. It's a really interesting question and it goes across policing but actually it's infected whole swathes of the public sector. And I think the origin of this is a very, in my view, very dangerous ideology, which has various different names. It's sometimes called critical race theory. It's sometimes called so-called anti-racist theory. But it is, in fact, itself racist. And what this theory says is that what matters isn't treating everyone the same, which I think is what it means. It actually means reverse engineering the same outcomes.

30:11and it believes that any difference in outcomes between different racial groups can only be the result of racism. Now, I think that is ridiculous because we do know that, for example, offending rates are different for whatever reason between different ethnic groups. We know mental health episodes are different between different ethnic groups as well. But this ideology has somehow taken root. It's infected the thinking of senior police officers And it then gets reflected in documents like this ridiculous and outrageous race equity commitment. And it trickles down through training. It trickles down through culture, through leadership.

30:48And it eventually manifests itself on the streets where people do get treated differently. And so we need to fight this ideology. This ideology is, in my view, racist because it says you should treat different groups differently. It's racist. It is divisive because it defines people by the colour of their skin or possibly by their religion. instead of treating people as individuals. And in a mental health and a policing context, it is actually dangerous because it lets potentially violent and dangerous people out. But can I ask, I get what you're saying about the equity plan, which has come out in 2025, which appears to have been based on the police race action plan that came out in 2022 while you were policing, Minister.

31:29So at the time that they came out with this idea that actually policing shouldn't be colourblind, what did you say about it? because, again, and I know this is awkward for you, I'm going to be playing the bad cop here, pardon the expression. This is awkward for you, but many people watching and listening to this will say it's all very well you're saying this now, but the seeds of all this absolute nonsense were sown under the Conservatives. And yes, Badenock was a lone voice. To be fair to her, she only became an MP in 2017. You're also quite a recent intake. But I don't remember anyone from Cameron through May to Johnson, possibly Truss, I'm not sure.

32:08Certainly not Wishi because he sacked a Home Secretary for suggesting there was two-tier policing. I don't remember anyone at the time this race action plan was produced before or after crying from the rooftops. Oh, my goodness. The police might actually be positively discriminating against white people. Well, as I say, the document that really sets it out in stark terms, unambiguous terms, was the Race Equity Commitment, which was published in March 2025. Did you call it out in 2022? And this stuff was in the document. You were policing. So I've been, well, I became a policing minister late in 2022.

32:43All right. But did you, were you running around going, oh my God, policing's two tier? Because you're saying that now, but we knew it then. So I've consistently been saying to police, they should concentrate on, and I've said it publicly as well as privately, they should concentrate on protecting the public and catching criminals and essentially nothing else. And what we have seen with this more recent document, March 2025, and with the conduct of certain cases, and this is the Henry Novak case we may talk more about, and there's the Valdez Calacone case and many others, is we've seen now the implication of that in practice.

33:16It is completely unacceptable and it has to end. And to answer your question, the broader question, we are under new leadership. Kenny is the new leader of the party. I know. And she's taking a different direction. Again, I don't, you know, I actually think in life it's always best to look forward and not go backwards. But at the end of the day, the seeds for all this were sown. I don't know whether they were sown by Blair and Brown. We were discussing it. Did we hear all of this nonsense then? We had this whole era of, oh, you know, whites are always the aggressor. We must be anti-racist, which basically meant giving preferential treatment to people of colour.

33:54Policing shouldn't be colourblind. Let's support BLM. Let's take the knee. We had officers taking the knee. Another strain of it was sort of officers taking part in pride and suddenly the police force are wearing rainbow lanyards. I don't really remember the Conservative government saying, hang on a minute, can you just stick to policing? Because, goodness me, further down the track, this could lead to real problems. It's taken an 18-year-old's murder. It's taken the sight, the body cam footage of Henry Novak being handcuffed while he was bleeding out on the floor for people to really come forward and say, oh, goodness me, there's a rot in the state of Denmark.

34:36There's something wrong with the police force. You weren't saying it when you were in office. That's the frustration. Well, I can certainly tell you, during my time in government, I was saying the police should stick to the basics. And you've already acknowledged that Kemi repeatedly called this out over a period of time. And she is the leader of the Conservative Party. So her track record, I think, is pretty clear. There is also a problem, I think, with people being the police and other public sector bodies listening to essentially, this goes back to Tim's question, extremist campaigners. So there was a lady on the Today programme this morning called Abim Bola Johnson, who was until I think very recently a police adviser on their race action plan.

35:16And she was overtly doubling down this morning after all of this happened, trying to justify two tier policing, trying to justify treating different racial groups differently. And she's previously said that the police should be defunded. The police should never, in my view, be taking advice from people like her. And if she does still have any position, I'm not exactly sure whether her terms expired or not. But if she does still have a position, she ought to be fired because people with those views should not be advising on policing. Why is it then, and in a way I'm almost repeating my question, but why is it that these arm's length public bodies, because we've always tried to give police in this country operational independence.

35:58We don't like political interference for good reason. People are about to trust their independence. Why have so many of these public sector bodies, be it universities, police, the NHS, how have they been captured by this? What is it within them that always seems to lead there? And we never hear of them going right wing. Why is it they're always so open to left wing infiltration? Well, I think that first of all, left wing campaigners, I think, are very active and very aggressive. They claim the moral high ground, even though very often what they're doing is immoral. So this lady, Abinbola Johnson, in my view, the view she propagates that people should be treated differently based on race is itself a racist and immoral view.

36:39But somehow they cloak themselves in a mantle of moral superiority. Some public sector leaders get intimidated by that. The police probably are, in my view, scared of being accused of being racist. So I think we need to just stand up to this kind of ideology and fight the ideology for what it is, divisive, racist and dangerous. I think there's an element of overreaction to problems that have happened in the past as well. And we just need to, I think, politically and publicly stand up and defeat this ideology to make sure it doesn't cause any more damage, which it certainly has been doing for, well, you can see the result in the Henry Novak tragedy.

37:19If you formed a government, we're all currently going back over the past and trying to think about when this began. Would you revisit the premise of Macpherson, that the police force was institutionally racist and you sort of can't trust public bodies not to be racist? I don't want to relitigate the state of policing in the 1980s and 1990s. I will say that I do not think, I do not think the police today is institutionally racist. almost every police officer I've met from the commissioner of the Met right through to frontline constables are, in my view, bending over backwards to do the right thing.

37:54And as these examples have shown, sometimes actually bending too far to the point that they are ending up or the guidance pushes them towards treating people differently, which is completely wrong. On the question of operational independence, I think this concept has been twisted as well. I mean, in my view, operational independence should mean if the police are going to arrest an individual. They're going to arrest Tom or they're not going to arrest Camilla or vice versa. That's an operational decision that politicians obviously should not get involved in. But questions of policy, do you treat people equally or not?

38:25I think it is right that the democratically elected leaders grip those issues. Now, this guidance we've been talking about comes from the National Police Chiefs Council, which stands as the sort of body representing chief police officers, chief constables. But I think when it comes to matters of policy like this, it is reasonable for politicians to grip it. And I think the Home Secretary should be ensuring that that particular commitment gets scrapped immediately. You see, if you got elected, I predict that the left would accuse you of threatening operational independence and trying to politicise the police force, which of course they can do because the police force is political in their direction.

39:05So they look small c conservative defending the independence of the police because the police are behaving the way they like. But if you try and correct it, they will accuse you of interference. But that's why I draw this distinction between operations, who do you arrest, how do you arrest them, right? That's operational independence. As distinct from policy, do you police Twitter? The answer should be no, you don't police Twitter, right? Do you have two-tier policing? In my view, the answer should be no. But those are, in my view, policy questions, which I think elected politicians should get involved in and should essentially be able to influence or even control.

39:40I think that's a reasonable distinction. If the left want to complain about that, I'm happy to have the argument with them. While we've got you in the studio, just a final question on something completely unrelated, Makerfield. You've got reform leading there in some polls, Labour leading in others. We know this is a stepping stone for Andy Burnham to come down and challenge the Prime Minister and become the next Prime Minister. That probably makes life a bit more difficult for the Tories, really, because I think, as Nigel Farage said, Star was a great recruiting sergeant for the right. why are you still standing a candidate there who has no hope in hell of winning, along with Restore's candidate?

40:17Why don't you just step aside and let reform win that seat? Because at the end of the day, the bigger prize is to defeat Burnham's assault on number 10. Well, the Conservative Party is the principal opposition. Of course, we're going to fight across the entire country. And I believe all the parties available, including reform. Don't tell us that they're going to win in this seat. I was actually going to make a different point. I mean, I would say if I lived in McElfield, I'd certainly vote for the Conservative candidate. What I was going to say was that of all the parties available, I think the Conservative programme, policy programme, whether it's a credible plan to secure our borders or whether it's a plan on the economy, I think our programme and our plan is the best one.

40:54On your Burnham point, I think, you know, clearly this by-election is about one thing only, which is Burnham's personal ambition to get to Westminster as quick as he can and topple Keir Starmer. I think the people of McElfield are not going to be very impressed. They're being used essentially, as you said, as a stepping stone for Burnham's personal ambition. But if the right united, you can stop him. Well, it's up to the people of McElfield how they vote. I would vote Conservative if I lived in McElfield. I'm saying that if you took your percentage away and you took Lowe's percentage away and you added them to reform, I know you don't like reform, but you'd prefer reform to win it than Burnham.

41:30If reform added its percentage to the Tories, the Tories would win. Oh, listen to Kemmy Badenock's twin brother over here. We're here to fight across the whole country. I think our programme is the best one and I think people in McAfee should vote Conservative. But you take my wider point. Come on, Chris, you're doing the whole I'm going to give you a party political broadcast. Just the right wants to beat the left, doesn't it? Our readers want the right to win this seat. Some of them are Tories, some of them are reform. You're not going to win this one. You know, you're more likely, frankly, to have Count Binface might beat you at this stage.

41:59Come on. This is about something bigger. What if Burnham wins over 50 %? What if Burnham wins over 50 %? I don't know, but this is bigger than a mere by-election. I wouldn't be saying this normally, but this is actually pretty seismic. It's probably the most consequential by-election in recent political history. And you guys are just going to gift it to the left. Well, look, I've already said, and I'll say it one more time, I think the Conservative programme is the best one for our country. And as far as I'm concerned, that is what we're fighting on. On the wider point about if Burnham gets in and successfully kicks out Keir Starmer, which is clearly Andy Burnham's plan, what does that mean?

42:34Well, I think there's a couple of things I've noticed. The first is that I'm not sure Andy Burnham is this sort of political genius everybody suggests he is. I'm sure he's more charismatic than, you know, Keir Starmer, but probably, you know, your pet dog is more charismatic than Keir Starmer. At least I don't have one. Well, there we are. It's still true. You know, on a few key issues, we've already seen Andy Burnham sort of, you know, being wishy-washy and wobbling. He thinks one thing on Brexit, then the other. He hasn't got a clear fiscal plan. He can't say what change he would make. In a sense, he reminds me a bit of Keir Starmer five or six years ago without any clear set of beliefs or values other than a desire to get elected personally.

43:12And if he does manage to kick out Keir Starmer, then he, Andy Burnham, will still be the prisoner of left-wing Labour MPs in just the same way that Keir Starmer is. And because Burnham doesn't have any ideological vision for the country or for the Labour Party, just like Keir Starmer, it's a bit of a vacuum. It's like a grey fudge, a grey mess. He won't, I don't think, be able to lead the Labour Party any more effectively. He'll get pushed around by left-wing Labour MPs in just the same way that Keir Starmer has been. So I don't think ultimately swapping out Starmer for Burnham is going to make, over a period of one or two years, is ultimately going to make that much difference.

43:49Chris Phil, thank you very much indeed for joining us once again on The Daily Tea. Great to speak to you. A pleasure as always. Tim, talking of Makerfield, you and I are going to jump on a train tonight, aren't we? Yes. Different trains, admittedly. To Wigan. To Wigan. Going to overnight there, get up in the morning, probably do some of the episode tomorrow from Makerfield, but we've also got a brilliant interview with Michael Knowles of YouTube fame. Yeah. It's like one of the most famous righties in America. I tried to get him to follow me on Instagram and I discovered he has one million followers.

44:17Oh, yeah. So you're just a little drop in the ocean. And then we are going to intelligence gather in Makerfield so that we can put a special edition together for Friday's pod. So that's going to be everything you need to know about the by-election and then some. We'll see if we can speak to one of the main candidates. But of course, there's an election on, so they won't want to talk to the public. No, indeed. At least of all journalists. So we'll be back tomorrow, 5pm, with Michael Knowles and a side order of the Makerfield by-election.

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