Konstantin Kisin: Britain is on the brink, Reform is the only party that gets it

0:28The Telegraph

0:34Konstantin Kissen, founder and co-host of the incredibly successful podcast Trigonometry. Welcome to The Daily Tea. As someone who was born in Russia, what do you think Britain gets right and what does it get wrong? What I think we get right is I think we have a liberal democracy that we're clinging to as best we can. And I think some of the values that we have in this country, historically speaking, are really incredibly important. Our attitudes to freedom, our attitudes to the sanctity of the individual, our rejection of collectivism in that extreme version of it. I think it's incredibly right and valuable.

1:09Until recently, our celebration of freedom of expression, I think also very important. What we get wrong, I think, is we've decided it's so important to be so liberal that we no longer have any sense of common identity. We've rejected that idea entirely. We've said diversity is our strength, which is nonsense. Diversity is not a strength. It's a weakness. when taken to that extreme. What I also think we get wrong, when I say we, I think our political elites have got wrong for a very long time, and I'm sure we'll come to talk about geopolitics as well, is we've sort of decided that strength is bad and weakness is to be celebrated.

1:46And that reflects in our economic policy, it reflects in our energy and industrial policy, and it reflects in our attitude to our military and all sorts of things. So to the extent that we have our leaders for two decades now have, my view is our leaders for the last 20 years have been engaged in a deliberate policy of economic, industrial, and cultural suicide. And that is what Trump basically said at Davos to everyone's consternation, but he's entirely right. And that's not just true of Britain, it's true of Europe. A deliberate policy. Of course. See, I think we could all agree on the suicide bit.

2:19It's the deliberate bit. And could it be that much of what you're describing is the British character, talking yourself down, making do, muddling through, and it could it also be that as an immigrant it seems strange to you and you notice it and you point it out and thank you for doing so because I think that's necessary, but one might say well this is part of what makes us us. One might say that but I don't think it's a uniquely British phenomenon. I look at the continent of Europe and I see very much the same thing happening across what I would consider our continent. I think Britain, obviously, somewhat separate, but nonetheless geographically part of Europe.

2:57I'm sure you and your listeners and viewers will be familiar with what Angela Merkel said as far back as 2011, which is Europe is 12 % of the world's population, 25 % of its GDP, and 50 % of welfare spending. That is not sustainable. What has happened in the 15 years since then is we've become a smaller percentage of the world's population, a far smaller percentage of its GDP, but our welfarism has continued. So no, I don't think it's the British self-deprecation that has got us here. I think it's perfectly possible. In fact, I would argue a huge strength of being self-deprecating is that it allows you to use your strength with a measure of self-restraint and a kind of self-awareness as opposed to the more bombastic, brash attitudes that some of our cousins across the ocean sometimes adopt.

3:47And I guess my point is that what you described as the good things about Britain, I feel are partly rooted in that self-deprecating nature, that perhaps our liberality, our tolerance comes from not fetishizing strength. I am not remotely suggesting that we should fetishize strength, and I come from a society where that is currently happening and the repercussions of that are terrible. I think as with all of these things, there is a sweet spot. And I feel the problem that Britain and Europe has is we have strayed way to the outside of that sweet spot in one direction. I'm not suggesting that we go to the other extreme.

4:24I would like us to return to the sweet spot, please. And I feel it's a reasonable request. And the deliberate nature of these changes? Deliberate, of course. You're right to pick me up on it. I don't believe, for example, that industrial suicide, which we call net zero, has been pursued with the aim of destroying our economy. Right. But that is a deliberate policy that has destroyed our economy. Now, the fact that these idiots thought they were saving the planet while actually increasing our CO2 emissions in the process, it's somewhat defensible, I guess. I don't think that ideologically possessed people ruining our country for a fake narrative is something that we should respect.

5:04I think it's a terrible policy that's been pursued by left and right-wing governments in this country, sadly. And it is why we are now increasingly irrelevant around the world, which pains me to say because Britain is a great country and should be a great country. And I hope one day we'll be a great country again. But if you cast your mind back to what would it be 20 odd years ago now, the war in Iraq, for example, a war I completely disagreed with. I thought it was a gigantic error and I was totally against it. But if you cast your mind back to how hard George W. Bush had to work to get Tony Blair on side, to get Britain on board with what they wanted to do, that's not where we are today.

5:45And it's not because of Donald Trump. It's because of our leaders and because of the way they've made us weak militarily, weak diplomatically, weak economically and weak geopolitically. And so no one has to care what the British prime minister says anymore because he is irrelevant. Well, it could be because he isn't a very good politician. We're going to ask about China and Trump in just a minute to ask you a rather woke question. Sure. Do you identify as British? As a trans woman, no. No. Have you ever grown a cervix? No. Do you identify as British? How long have you been here now? I've lived here since 1995, 1996, depending on when you start the clock.

6:21So I've been here for a long time. I am British. Yes. And do you agree with the narrative, because there's some discussion about it on the right, that Britain is broken, as Farage claims? Badenock says, no, it isn't. We can probably all agree that if it was quite broken, now really Labour is smashing it up. But as a concept, is Britain broken? Well, it depends what you mean. And by the way, I think the reason Kemet Baden-Ok is saying that is because she has to deal with the threat of reform. It's not because she doesn't think Britain's broken. I think all the sensible people in the Conservative Party privately would agree with the view that Britain is in a very bad way.

6:57I don't think it's broken beyond repair for now. But if we continue down this path, it will become broken beyond repair. Absolutely. So my view is it is, like I said, Britain has been a great country and it can be a great country again. but that requires a very significant shift in not just government policy but I think in terms of our attitudes and our cultural beliefs about what is right and what is wrong. Back to the geopolitical question. So we now have this week Keir Starmer going out to China tonight, our time. He's going to spend some time there and in Japan. That comes on the back of the allowing of the Chinese super spying embassy as we're calling it at the Telegraph because we revealed the blueprints showing the sort of spy dungeon underneath the proposed plans.

7:42We've also got, and we're coming back from Davos with Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, massively leaning into this idea that the world order has shifted. We must lean into Chinese relations. And we've got a story on the front of the Telegraph today saying, oh, lo and behold, the Chinese did hack successive prime minister's phones and probably still are right now, as you pointed out. With very bad timing. With bad timing. Kier Starmer last night joked that Trump likes to call him on his phone rather than a secure line. Right. So let's deal with the China issue, first of all. And I think we can blame successive prime ministers for cosying up to China.

8:19We all remember the special golden relationship and all the rest of it. What's your view on Starmer and the wisdom of going to China right now? It really fundamentally depends on what it is that he does there. You know, I'm not, forgive me, in remotely outraged that the Chinese are spying on our prime minister. that's what we should be doing on the Chinese president. And that is what all great countries do to each other. What we are naive about is we sit here being outraged about it instead of getting better at defending ourselves against the spying of other powers. It's a normal part of the world of geopolitics.

8:53And in terms of, I think Mark Carney is completely wrong about cozying up to China. I think what is happening is it's true that there is a political realignment, but the political realignment, as I see it, is the Americans are saying to the Europeans and us, if you want to be allies, it's like a marriage. Everyone has to bring something to the table. Why would we be allied with people who have nothing to offer us other than moral scolding? I remember Davos was the leader of some irrelevant tiny country in Europe who stood up and said, we are going to fight for our values of whatever. With what?

9:27What are you going to fight it with? The Americans are basically saying Europe is engaged in, I think they called it, civilizational self-erasure. I think they're right about that. And until we become stronger, better, more useful allies, this will continue. So is cozying up to communist China the answer to that? No. I think the answer to that is for Europe to become industrially developed, strong, economically strong. I mean, people don't know this, but Britain per capita, which is what actually matters, is poorer today than we were before the great financial crisis. We are getting poorer every day.

10:02And one of the reasons people don't know that is, of course, the Treasury insists on bringing more and more people in so they can claim we're growing by 0.0, whatever percent it is at the moment, when the reality is if you divide the total GDP by the number of people, we are getting poorer all the time. So that is a trend that has to be reversed. and then all of this stuff about China will become less relevant. So, no, cozying up to China is not the answer. It doesn't mean we have to treat them as the enemy. They are definitely an adversary of the Western alliance and we should act accordingly.

10:34It doesn't mean that we can't do some trade with them. It doesn't mean that we can't treat them with respect. I think we should and engage constructively where we can. But cozying up to them because don't orange man bad has been nasty to us I think is foolish and really stupid. Konstantin you run a podcast Trichonometry which is one of the biggest and best in the world it's one of the must listens to every week you Tucker there's some company there but I think you have become one of the absolute must listens to and one reason why I really like it how long have you been doing it by the way approaching eight years now and you've been doing it with remind me of your Francis Foster Francis Foster lovely man very funny man and one thing I really like about you and Francis and the podcast is you take a big picture civilizational view on things.

11:22And I hate to keep asking the as an immigrant question because it's so rude, because as we have established, you are British. But honestly, one of the things I really like about your commentary is you do force Britain to look at its place within the world and within history. We're so terribly parochial. Is there a problem with the British that we don't realize that we think everyone in rest of the world thinks and feels like us. But there is actually a clash of civilizations going on. And that people like the Chinese or the Russians are looking at us in a very different way. And that's one reason why we're losing ground, because we don't realize there's some greater clash of identities and history going on around us.

12:01Yeah, I think we're victims of our own success and comfort to some extent. By the way, I'm not remotely offended by you asking me as an immigrant, because I think it's part of a lot of the problems with where we've got to is we're not supposed to say the obvious thing that everyone knows is true because someone somewhere is going to get offended. I am an immigrant and that informs my views to some extent and I think has been helpful to the commentary that I provide and I'm not remotely offended by that. I'm very comfortable with that identity. But in terms of your question, I think this is also true of many people in other countries around the West.

12:34We're just very, very successful historically speaking and we're living off the benefits of that, of the work of our ancestors, I would argue, in this country. And so because of that, we can afford to not concern ourselves as much with what's happening outside the world, and we're therefore quite uninformed about it. I would say we're very fortunate, actually, that people outside of our country haven't quite realized the degradation that we've gone through in the last couple of decades. If you speak to people in Russia or Ukraine or other parts of the world, they still think that we are the Britain of 40, 50 years ago.

13:08Influential, powerful, etc. And it's funny how in that part of the world, there are lots of conspiracies. Well, the British are doing this. And I'm like, believe me. They're not. They're really not. We no longer have the competence to do some of those things. So yes. But I think for the reasons that I articulated, and unfortunately for some other things that I think are probably coming down the line that will be very bad for our country, people will increasingly be confronted with the realities of what is happening geopolitically and unable to ignore them. But doesn't it work both ways? Don't we tend in this country, at least economically, to overstate Russian supremacy?

13:44I appreciate with boots on the ground in Ukraine, that's a pretty powerful stance. And indeed, there's now a cult around Putin that has become one of these despotic figures of history. But at the same time, we're overdoing it. It's not like the old days in Russia either, is it? No, and Russia is not an economic superpower. What Russia is, is because of terrible European energy policy, has been able to wield its natural resource wealth against Europe and forced it. I mean, you'll remember, of course, that when the war in Ukraine broke out, the Germans opening offer to the Ukrainians of help was 5 ,000 helmets.

14:22That was it. And that's because they destroyed their nuclear energy facilities and made themselves entirely reliant on Russian gas, which, by the way, to the credit of Orange Man Bad, he said it to the German politicians' faces and they openly laughed at him, right? So Russia has been able to wield its energy supplies to Eastern and Central and to some extent Western Europe in powerful ways diplomatically. But Russia's strength is not in its economy. Russia's strength is in the fact that it has a very large nuclear arsenal, which means that it can bully other countries. And it has a willingness to deploy force in a way that we frankly in the Western world have become very, very uncomfortable with.

15:01And it's prepared to suffer hundreds of thousands of casualties for a small bit of land or for Vladimir Putin to go down in history as Vladimir the Great or whatever the objective of this war is in your perspective. Donald Trump has bruised our ego recently. And we had to push back because Greenland is an issue of sovereignty and criticizing NATO presence in Afghanistan is a matter of self-respect. We had to correct him on that. But do you think that at Davos last week actually what Trump was asking for, he got and he is generally correct? Two very, very different questions there. I don't know if he got what he wanted.

15:38I suspect that actually European leaders will buck against his criticisms and potentially even double down on the stupidity that they've been engaged with today. But he is correct. I think the one area where I really disagree with what I said was criticizing the contribution of NATO allies during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I think particularly here in Britain, we can be, you know, I disagreed with the wars, but I think the proud service that our men and women gave, and the terrible suffering of many of them, and the death of hundreds of them, is something that we are rightly proud of. And I think he was, and he walked back those comments, and I think it was wise of him to do that.

16:15But in terms of the overall analysis about civilizational decline that we're in, I've been saying those things for a very long time, and so have many sensible people in our country and across Europe. So to see that now articulated, and I think J.D. Vance has talked about this as well. Americans see Europe as committing harri-kiri, and they don't want it, and what they're saying is stop doing it. And the people who are doing it on our behalf get very upset when that happens. I don't care about that. I want those people either to stop doing it or to be replaced by people who will do something else.

16:48Although there needs to be an acknowledgement in America that they themselves have committed acts of self-sabotage. Previous Democrat presidents from Urbana to Biden have been extremely weak on the world stage. I feel like we're always coming back to this issue of actual leadership of Western countries. And as you say, orange man bad, this kind of walking personification of a Cheeto. So at the end of the day, if you're looking for very strong leadership, then a consequence of that is going to be very divisive rhetoric. It's going to be divisive policies. You may even lead to the conclusion that it also sparks people being shot to death in Minnesota.

17:26I think, with all respect, what happens is these people create the giant problems and someone comes in and says, we've got to fix them. And I go, why are you being so divisive? That is a very large part of what's happening here. The tragic deaths of people in the United States who are attempting to basically subvert the efforts of law enforcement, that is what's happening, right? Even in situations where the ICE... I'm talking about... Sorry, let's just speak of ICE here, right? ICE deporting illegal immigrants, people protesting, and then two people have been killed in the course of... And, you know, I haven't followed this latest situation closely.

18:03From what I understand, it may be a case where ICE agents have really acted in a way that's totally wrong. And I'm not saying that's what happened. I'm saying that's my impression based on insufficient information at this point. I haven't really had a chance to delve into it. But even if that is what happened, as with all police brutality in 99.9 % of cases, if people were not resisting people acting lawfully and discharging their duties as law enforcement agents, none of this would be happening. The reason these incidents are happening is that there is a narrative among Democrats in particularly that what they have to do is encourage people to go out into the streets and confront ICE.

18:40Well, when people who are civilians are going up against law enforcement who are forced to contend with the fact that there have been people who've tried to shoot them, there have been people who've tried to run them over with cars, etc., you're going into a heated situation. you're provoking conflict. And sometimes when you provoke conflict with people who are in fear of their lives and have guns, terrible things happen. So that's not to defend law enforcement agents who are acting badly. And if they are doing so, they should be prosecuted. But the way to do this is if what ICE is doing is unlawful, you should pursue that through the courts and you should establish that and you should have remedies and redress for people who've been badly treated.

19:21But we should not. And nobody should be encouraging ordinary people to go into the streets and confront law enforcement officers who have guns. That is stupid. It's irresponsible. And it's one of the main reasons that these people are being killed. But just sorry to kind of hammer home my message on Trump. I'm not saying that the world is in trouble because he is divisive. I'm saying that he is coming up with some solutions to solve the world's ills. but increasingly now figures on the right that had once supported him are slightly having buyer's remorse. Alistair Heath, our colleague here, the editor of the Sunday Telegraph, telling the Daily Tea last week and indeed writing a column that was headlined that Trump was suffering from imperial delirium.

20:03You know, sometimes we have looked at leaders who have shown strength. They certainly haven't been perfect. And what we basically said was, well, look, it's better than the alternative. But what's your actual analysis of Trump? Is this guy a genius, an idiot? Is he mad, maniacal? What do you actually think of him? Because obviously people's interpretations of him, his rhetoric and his policies do waver. And I'm talking about righties. I'm talking about John Bolton once being his national security advisor and then coming out of the White House going, this guy's bonkers. Yeah, I don't know President Trump personally, so it's hard to assess a person's character.

20:44by whom you've never spoken with. To my general approach to assessing people is A, their actions, and B, the central thrust of their argument. The things that they say on the fringes, like I said, I thought his comments about Britain's contribution in terms of soldiers, etc., was very wrong, and I understand why many people would be upset by that, and I'm glad he walked them back. But overall, on the general thrust of things, what I see is a president who's pursuing America's national interest. He's attempting to get the Western alliance to wake up and realize how badly we have mismanaged our countries.

21:20He's done something that we have been told for the last decade at least is impossible, which is dealing with illegal immigration. Is there going to be some collateral damage, particularly when it's incited by his political opponents? Yes. Do I regret that? Yes, of course I do. And every person who is killed in the process of that, I think, is a tragedy. But you cannot solve the problem of mass immigration without deporting illegal immigrants and criminals. And if people then get in the way of that process, you will see the sorts of things that we're now seeing. So is President Trump perfect? Absolutely not.

21:54But is he on the broad sweep of things doing things that I approve of? Absolutely yes. See, I think this conversation is so interesting because it exposes some of the fissures on the right, that there is a perspective that says structural problems are so great. The real issue is Republicans want to enforce the border and Democrats don't believe you should enforce the border. Therefore, they think it's perfectly legitimate to send people out, as you say, to confront policemen. And that's what's creating the climate that leads to these clashes and tragic deaths versus the also conservative view that, OK, there's a structural problem here, but it doesn't have to be solved the way Trump's doing it.

22:30Why does it require an extreme overreaction? Part of the issue with ICE, of course, is that they have signed up lots of people who are essentially amateurs, given them guns and sent them out to deport people, in some cases clearly violating constitutional rights. So that's more of a sort of a Tory perspective of can we just fix this, but in a calm way. Well, this is what we were discussing yesterday, conservation versus reformation. And we're going to get on to the British solutions to that. Just to push back against your point of view, one could argue that part of the problem is our problems are so embedded and we've so internalised them that it requires a touch of madness like Trump to fix them.

23:07Because only Donald Trump could get elected. Only Donald Trump would do what he is doing. And the flip side of someone like him who's willing to say what needs to be said and break things up is he'll also say really stupid things. Yes, but also because the world may be crying out, or at least righties in the world or the Western world, for anti-status quoism. So this kind of like, I will pay Peter and Paul and on the one hand and then on the other, and we must, what did we do last time? Let's just keep on doing it again, has been an abject failure. That then makes Trump more acceptable because of the desperate times people feel that they're in, right?

23:41Yes. Well, my perspective is I don't think President Trump is mad at all. I think he president people don't understand this and I've been very fortunate to spend time in the US and not only on the East Coast and the West Coast, which is what the vast majority of people do. President Trump is not some crazy outlier. He is what America is to a very large extent. The way he talks, the way he thinks, the way he behaves is how many, many, many, many millions of Americans are and feel and behave in day to day life, in the way they run their businesses, in the way they talk about things. So he's just a very pragmatic guy who's, forgive me, trying to get shit done.

24:21And does he always say the right thing? Absolutely not. Does he always do the right thing? No. But remember, we live in a world of choices. Everything, as we say in Russian, is understood in comparison. And given the choice between people who insist on leaving the border open for their own ideological or maybe even some would argue pragmatic reasons and people who believe that illegal immigration is wrong, I choose the people who believe illegal immigration is wrong. Does that mean that I agree with every single thing every single ICE officer does? No, of course not. But ultimately, countries need borders.

24:55This is why I'm not on the right. I'm basically a 1990s liberal, and I've not changed any of my opinions. But for some reason, the left decided open borders is now what they believe in. And I've suddenly ended up in being this anti-immigration. But I've never been anti-immigration. I just think countries need borders. All countries need borders. Otherwise, they're not countries. And I believe in a closed border for the same reason I lock the door to my house every night. These are very simple, common sense, obvious things about which there is overwhelming majority consensus in America and in Britain and in European countries among the people.

25:29And it's time for our leads to catch up to that. Coming up next, shall we discuss domestic politics and whether Nigel Farage might be able to fix broken Britain?

25:49So I think Nigel Farage is facing a little bit of a dilemma right now. I picked some of this up in conversations with reform type people over the weekend, that he can't appear to condone, obviously, some of President Trump's statements, not least on the NATO troops. On Greenland, he had to put some clear water between him and the US president, basically saying that he was entitled to own that chunk of ice in the Arctic. I think he's having to recalibrate and moderate. And is that the answer to him actually attracting enough support to win a majority? Well, I think he's navigating a fairly difficult thing in the sense that I'm more at liberty to speak because I don't really have to care about the electoral consequences of what I say.

26:38But I suspect, I imagine, I haven't spoken to Nigel, so I don't know if this is a issue, but I imagine he has to sit between the two stools. On the one hand, he would agree with the overwhelming majority of what President Trump is saying about the direction of Europe and Britain. On the other hand, we react very differently to some of his comments, Trump's comments, than the American public or others. And so from a Farage perspective, he has to manage both of those relationships, his relationship with the British public and his relationship with President Trump. And that's not an easy thing to do because of how undiplomatic President Trump can be sometimes.

27:13So that's a challenge for Nigel Farage, for sure. What's your analysis of Farage himself? We had a really interesting email today, didn't we, about talking about courage. Suela Braverman had defected yesterday. We said, was it appropriate for her to talk about how brave she'd been in defecting when she was in a crowd full of veterans who have seen active service? Maybe the optics weren't quite right there. And then somebody pointed out, one of our correspondents, look, if you want to look at courage and what it means, there's physical courage and then there's moral courage. And to be fair to the bloke, he has always been proud to state what he believes, be challenged on those beliefs, be questioned incessantly by the press, be criticised, in some cases physically attacked.

27:56but of all politicians in recent memory, maybe taking the Iron Lady aside, he has shown an enormous amount of courage of his convictions and that is an admirable thing. Whether that means he is prime ministerial, would you like him to be the next prime minister and do you think he can do that job? Look, I always hesitate very much to get into the personalities. If I thought Keir Starmer had the right policies, I would vote for Keir Starmer without any hesitation whatsoever. I've always said this and I'll say it again. I don't care about the Green Party, the Liberal Democrat Party, the Labour Party, the Conservative Party, the Reform Party.

28:31I care about the country. So I care about what is good for the country. Now, if you start there and you go back to what I was saying earlier about industrial policy, economic policy, business tax, which we didn't get onto, and then mass immigration and the erosion of our culture more broadly, on all of those things, as I look at what is on offer today, you know, there's also a constituency issue. So, for example, I imagine, given my views, you don't, you wouldn't imagine this, but I voted for Lib Dem in my constituency at the last election, because that was the best option available given Britain's electoral system, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

29:07But at a party level, in terms of the people who are addressing the huge challenges that I'm talking about, of course, reform are the only ones really doing it properly. And as for Nigel Farage, I mean, I agree with your assessment about him standing on his principle. When we had him on our show, we've had him on a number of times. I remember him talking about the early days when he'd be standing in wherever and losing his deposit and all of that. That is not a man who is in it for the short-term gain of notoriety or money or whatever it might be. He has ideas that he believes in. And so, yeah, absolutely.

29:42But what I see, and I think this is where the reform do need to have their feet held to the fire is they have assembled a coalition that works in opposition that is almost inevitably going to fracture if they ever get elected. Because what you have is the Thatcherite, low tax, pro-business, Faragean view, represented, of course, by him first and foremost. And then you have what you might describe as the Lee Anderson, red wall kind of vote, who are people who do not want a slash and burn of taxes and welfare and so on. And so once they get in, having to manage those two things at the same time is going to be a gigantic challenge.

30:26And that's where I see they need to have more work on their policy, but also on their communication and warning people about what is likely to be a very difficult set challenges. Is a path through that contradiction putting Britain first? So for instance, if you take the two child benefit cap, what they will say is, yes, we're going to scrap that, which sounds red woolly. But on the other hand, we're going to limit it to people born in Britain, British citizens. So that's a little more palatable for those who think we shouldn't be handing out welfare. Who are both working, we should point out.

30:57Who are both working. So is reform sort of post-conservative? It's trying to cook up just a sort of nationalist policy that can appeal to people across the aisle. Yeah, look, all these labels I just think are deeply unhelpful. I think we just look at things policy by policy. Is it right that foreign nationals receive benefits in this country? No, it's not. That should end. That never should have been the case in the first place. And I say that as someone who was for a very long time living in this country as a foreign national. There is absolutely no reason why people who are not British citizens...

31:30Look, if you turn up at A &E with a broken arm, we're decent people in this country. Of course, you should get looked at. But actually, in terms of other health care, you should get private health insurance, which is exactly what I do when I go to the US. And on all social housing, there should be no foreigners in social housing in this country. There is no reason for that. And so on and so forth. So yes, that's Red Wally. But the point I'm trying to make is something else, which is if you pursue a pro-business, pro-growth economic policy, you cannot do that, coming back to the Angela Merkel comments, while you are disproportionately spending on welfare.

32:07You have to cut welfare. Interestingly, Reform have just announced their candidate for the Gorton and Denton by-election, and it is one Matt Goodwin, academic, GB News broadcaster. And you may recall that on yesterday's podcast, I talked about a national conservatism conference in 2023, and I noted that many of the speakers at that have since defected from the Tories to reform. Well, Matt Goodwin was one of the speakers at that conference. Which brings me back sort of to the very first thing we opened on, which is the question of what do you want Britain to be? Yes. And I'm a sort of a declinist.

32:43I would prefer to be a welfare state. You would. Than some kind of free trade zone with a military attached, which I do feel is what some on the right want. I quite like my free healthcare. I like my education from cradle to grave. I'm very reluctant to give up these things. And I think most voters are too. They are. Sell me on why after several hundred years of fighting for the vote, fighting for industrial democracy, building a welfare state, explain to me why I, as citizen of this country, should suddenly seek to become like America. I'm not suggesting that we become like America at all. Although there are some great things about America.

33:22I mean, their attitude to business, their attitude to growth, their mindset is incredibly inspiring. And I go to America in the hail of that attitude and bring it back to my business, trigonometry. We employ 11 people now and we go for things in a more aggressive way and we pursue things with that inspiration in mind. And that's lovely, but I don't want to work a 12-hour day and have to pay for healthcare. That's fine. I'm not suggesting that you should pay for healthcare, although I don't have a problem. I've worked much longer days for the last eight years to get our show to where it is. And I love work.

33:56Because you want to, but most Brits don't. They just want to have a family and have free time and be able to live a decent life with dignity. And I think those are perfectly admirable things to want. However, if you don't want your children to be poorer, and if you don't Britain to be weaker and less able to defend itself in the world that's coming, then we are going to have to get serious about having a strong industrial base, having a strong economy, and having strong leadership. It's just inevitable. Otherwise, we will continue as we are already doing, getting poorer. And then what you will see, and I alluded to this earlier, of course, all the sensible economic analysts are predicting that there's a fiscal crisis coming because you can't afford this level of spending that we are having indefinitely.

34:36And when that happens, you are going to have the adjustment and the correction whether you like it or not. And it's going to be a lot more brutal than if we do it ourselves now. When you said about no foreign national should be in social housing, aren't you therefore saying as a consequence that really only skilled migration should be welcome to the country, not unskilled? Of course. And so therefore, speaking as an immigrant, if you can, Constantine, that needs to be cognizant of the fact that we have unskilled workers from overseas in this country because British workers don't want to do the jobs they're doing.

35:09That's not true. It's not that British... See, this is the great myth of the mass immigration ideology, right? And I'm not saying that you are responsible for it. I'm just saying at the core of it is the great lie. In a market economy, other than very, very select skill shortages, which can happen in very particular, there is no such things as jobs that people don't want to do. In the words of my great friend Eric Weinstein, for the right price, I will come to your house and clean your toilet with my own tongue. Sure. Let me qualify it. There are jobs people don't want to do if they're better off on benefits in this country.

35:45Maybe I should qualify it like that. That's also part of it, of course. But another part of it is there are jobs that people don't want to do at the rate that is being offered. If we did not have mass immigration to do those jobs for virtually free, then yes, of course, the cost of those things would go up, but also the wages of people in this country would go up. And for£50 an hour, a British person will quite happily pick strawberries or asparagus or whatever it is that British people don't want to do. I just think that's complete nonsense. I know, but you'll never get a£50 an hour roll picking strawberries.

36:19I get what you're saying. You get what I'm saying. I get the principle of what you're saying, but let's look at what's just recently happened with pubs. You know, a well-intentioned policy to put up the minimum wage has forced a load of 18 to 21-year-olds who should be starting out in life, getting a job, socialising, doing customer-facing roles, which actually improve them, you know, as a well-rounded individual. let alone increase their bank balance. And they're now being forced out of that jobs market. So I love this kind of idealistic, everyone should be paid more. It's very Rachel Reeves.

36:49In practice, it basically means that more people are laid off because it's unaffordable, because this country has become unaffordable. I did something on Twitter today pointing out that Colgate toothpaste at Boots was being priced at£7.70 for a tube, up to£11 if you want teeth whitening. But what I'm saying is, I know I might... And Tipex costs just£3.50. Well, indeed. But my point is, yes, I see exactly what you're saying, but at this point where businesses are being screwed left, right and centre, they can't afford to pay people£50 an hour to pick strawberries. £50 an hour to pick strawberries, just like the licking your toilet clean were metaphorical examples.

37:28I know. But you get the thrust of what I'm saying. I do, but I think there's a huge difference between mandating a minimum wage which forces employers to pay wages that are inappropriate to the skill level and the value that the employee brings, versus creating a market which naturally finds the optimum point between what someone should be paid and what they can afford to be paid by the employer. There's a very different concept. But I feel like maybe everyone looks at you, for instance, or good immigration. You are such a good example of good immigration. Believe me, not everyone. All right. You know, you came here...

38:00Given some of my views, there's a lot of people. All right, you came here in the 90s from Russia, clearly well-educated. You've gone on to better yourself in this country. You've embraced British values. As you say, you're now employing 11 people, which is highly commendable. Well done, you. But, of course, not all immigrants are like you. That's right. And therefore, should we actually be saying quite brutally, obviously reform have a net zero migration policy, that if you're not like Constantine, then don't bother coming? Well, you've personalised it to me, which just makes me sound awful if I agree with you.

38:30You're pulling up the ladder. But you're absolutely right. I am the model for emulation for everybody. Yes, but when Constantine arrived, he didn't arrive with skills. But you arrived with a good education. No, I acquired the education here, actually. That's why my parents sent me here. So perhaps one should be judged. What kind of education did you have, state or private? I went to private school and then to university, by which point my parents ran out of money and I ended up sleeping in a park and blah, blah, blah and made my way up to where I am now. OK, see, he's a model immigrant. He slept in a park.

38:59Yeah, but he started with nothing is my point. Whereas our immigration policy now is to say, you can't come here if you've got nothing. But we're talking to a success story who came with nothing. Hang on, he came with nothing, but his parents could afford private school. Right. So this is the point, right? Just because I was 13 or 12 or whatever when I came, I didn't have the higher education or the skills or whatever. And this is why I'm against a net zero immigration policy. I am for a sensible immigration policy, which means just like in your house and in your house and in my house, I open the door and welcome with open arms the people I want to see in my house.

39:33And I close the door and don't allow people into my house that I do not want there. I don't have a net zero policy in my house. I don't say, well, I've already got one person. So when my best mates turned up, I'm not letting them in, right? That's stupid and impractical and not contributing to anything that's of value. What we should have is a very clear policy, not even in terms of, oh, you know, you've got this skill because that's the government trying to manage all of this. First of all, no benefits for foreign nationals. That is going to deal with the vast majority of the unwanted legal immigration that we have in this country, right?

40:06We don't want people here who are net takers of benefits. They will either find better jobs or they will leave if we have a very simple policy that you don't get benefits. And then we have got to deal with illegal immigration, which is crazy. Just to give you one simple stat on this, when I came to this country 1996 net immigration this is legal immigration so you go to an embassy you apply for a visa was 55 ,000 people a year that is the number of people who come here illegally every year today yes right so that is completely unacceptable and it's got to be dealt with and by the way doesn't mean that we don't occasionally take refugees from countries that we we feel empathy for you know the ukrainians what did they do they would leave Ukraine, they would go to Poland, they would make an application, they would be allowed in, and then they would come in.

40:55None of them came here on boats, right? And this is one of the great lies about immigration as well that I'm glad we're exploring here, which is that not all immigrants are the same. I don't see any Ukrainian grooming gangs running around raping British girls, right? Because Ukrainians don't tend to do that. I don't see the honking knees phone snatchers on the streets of London, even though we welcomed tens of thousands of Hong Kongers in a short period of time. We have got to be selective. And it's not about blaming this group or saying this country is bad. It's about looking at the data. What does the data tell us about what people from certain countries seem to do at a higher rate or lower rate, depending on what it is?

41:36And then we go, well, if people from this country seem to commit more crime, then we will be extra selective. Maybe there's an extra interview, or maybe you need a higher level of education, or maybe you need a better job before you come in. And just tailor it like that. I think that's perfectly reasonable. I don't think there's anything prejudiced about that. Being selective is a good thing, provided you're doing it on the right criteria. And one reason why Trump is going big on immigration in northern states is because of a Somali-dominated fraud ring, the story of which is fascinating and people should look into that billions, well, so far a billion dollars, it is reckoned, was claimed fraudulently during COVID, where mostly Somalis set up fake businesses and then claimed COVID support money for them.

42:20So there's all sorts of bizarro stuff going on. Let's finish on the right and whether it should unite. I know you're saying that you're not looking at this from a party political point of view, but a policy-orientated one, because what you're saying you support, actually, Kemi Badenok has now pivoted the Conservatives too. Although we had Braverman yesterday saying she's lying, she won't leave the ECHR, they're Tories in name only. What's your view? Well, I look at people's behaviour, as I said. If you look at the record of the Conservative Party, I think it's very difficult to disagree with Suela Braverman on that.

42:53They have had 14 years in which to do all the things they're saying they will now do. And you saw Rishi Sunak. I remember Rishi Sunak, who, of course, resisted leaving the ECHR. The moment he was no longer prime minister said, we must leave the ECHR. Well, if they all privately believe this but don't do it in office, what's the point of electing them? Yeah, but aren't you and Badenock little peas in an immigrant pod coming here in your teens? You're on a park bench in a private school. She's at McDonald's. She says that she became a righty because of communist rule in her own home country. You're saying you're not quite a righty, but you believe in what you believe probably because of communist rule in your own country.

43:27Therefore, you're little bedfellows. That's quite a stretch. That's quite a thought. Well, yes. I like Kenny very much, but not like that. We had a supposedly conservative government for 14 years, and many of the things we discussed got far worse during that time. During that period, you created this podcast, which I'm going to continue plugging because I just think it's so good. I'm sorry. It's as good as our podcast. It's a rival. It's as good as us. But what podcasting has done is created a space outside of politics. A safe space. Outside of the psychodrama, as Kimmy likes to say, of politics, where ideas can be expressed and articulated and explored.

44:03I think you should. do you take some credit for the revival of interesting conservative ideas? Because it's really been happening within that online space. I don't know that I would add the word conservative. I think what I like to do and what I hope I'm having some success with is getting people to actually talk about ideas in the first place, whatever those ideas are. I think so much of our discussion of politics, and I understand it's tempting. And of course, the personalities matter and the great men and women of history matter and all of that. But ultimately, what matters really when it comes to the implementation is the ideas that people have.

44:38And we talk far too much about personality and also about, you know, there's this great general assumption, and I'm sure you guys would agree with me on this, speaking to politicians regularly, as you do as well, that the politicians are all corrupt, they're all in it for themselves, they're all, and I just don't think that's remotely true. I think politicians mainly in this country are driven by the desire to make things better. Some of them are really stupid about the ideas they think will make the country better. I think Zach Polanski is incredibly well motivated. He's wrong about everything.

45:12All the time. All the time. And I see the same people will say, well, the conservatives, the reason this happened is they're just in it for themselves. And I was like, most of the people who are in politics, if they were really in it for themselves, especially when it comes to money, would make way more money doing something else in the private sector, which would be a lot easier. They would take a lot less flack. They would be a lot less hated, and they would end up doing far better for themselves and their families. I think most people could go into politics, do so with good motivations. Now, of course, there's a narcissism and there's a desire to be well-known and all those things are there too.

45:48I wouldn't deny that. But I think what we should really be talking about more is which ideas work and which ideas do not. And if we had that conversation more, it's not that we would end up in a conservative place or a liberal place or a left-wing place or a right-wing place. We would end up in a place where we really focus on what makes our country better. Now, yes, it's true different people will have different definitions of better. But I think there is increasingly a consensus around some things which are objectively worse or better. Mass immigration being one of them. Economic weakness being another.

46:23it. Net zero, increasingly, thank God, another one, and so on. And that's what we really should be talking about. And that's what we tried to do on the show, which is, I think, why we've had some measure of success. Are you going to ever go into politics? No. No. I'm not insane. I think we can all agree. Tim tried it once, didn't you? All right, rub it in. Who else? And then you chose. You were over in the house. Well, thank God he didn't succeed. He's a declinist. Exactly. We don't want one of them. We would have had an entire political cadre of those people. He was at number 10, I'd be running this country into the ground.

46:55And it would be great fun. Constantine Kissin, thank you very much indeed for joining us on The Daily Tea. Thank you so much for having me.

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