Why are Tories predicting a revolution?

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0:49Lewis Goodall:That is a sound and indeed a sight which is becoming more and more familiar with each passing week. That was Canary Wharf, the latest place where anti-migrant, anti-asylum seeker, anti-asylum seeker hotel protests have taken place, with mums and others from the area taking to the streets, chanting, what do we want the boats to stop? When do we want it? Now. There is an air of crisis, almost of moral panic over what is happening with the small boat arrivals and the migrant hotels. But are things as bad as they seem? And why does it appear that some on the Tory benches are stoking this? Welcome to the News Agents.

1:39The News Agents. It's John. It's Lewis.

1:43Lewis Goodall:Konnichiwa. Thank you, John. Same to you. Same to you, pal. Same to you, pal. So, back from Japan. Good trip. Very good. Very good, thank you. Thank you for bowing as I came in. I appreciate that. Well, bowing and scraping. Indeed so, rightly so. Which is what you've had written into the contract, which is what I must do now when you arrive. We'll be coming back to Japan later on. But something very exciting we have to alert you to is to the newsagents.co.uk. Yes, we have our own website available from now with in-depth articles. You can listen to back episodes of the podcast. You can hear the thoughts of Maitlis, Goodall and Soapall, as if you haven't heard enough of that already.

2:22Yeah, so visit thenewsagents.co.uk.

2:26Lewis Goodall:We are going to talk about this question of migrant hotels, asylum seeker hotels, whatever you want to call them. And obviously, it's something which has bedeviled British politics now for at least a year longer. And we seem to have with each week, obviously, it's been happening in Epping. Yesterday, in Canary Wharf, each week, more and more protests against the use of asylum hotels. Yesterday we saw all over Twitter protesters accused of trying to break into a hotel, the Britannia International Hotel in Canary Wharf. The Met saying that protesters were making concerted efforts to breach the fencing and access the hotel.

3:05Lewis Goodall:Also accused members of the group, many of whom were wearing face masks, family with children, waving flags outside, listening to speeches outside this hotel. met accusing members of the group of harassing occupants of the hotel and staff and trying to stop people from making deliveries. Officers were forced to step in after flares were let off in the crowd. And look, there is clearly a lot of tension and concern out there about the use of these hotels. I think what is most intriguing and notable is the extent to which many politicians on the right of politics right now, Now, rather than doing historically what politicians tended to try and do in these situations, which was to try and take the froth off a bit, try and lower the temperature a bit.

3:48Lewis Goodall:Every time this happens, doing quite the opposite, deciding to raise the temperature, increasing the invective and generally making the situation potentially worse still. And so just so you're clear that this isn't just us sounding off. I mean, let me give you an example of some of the kind of posts on social media over this past weekend. Nadim Zahawi, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, not seen to be on the far right of the Conservative party, posted on X the reason why the people of the United Kingdom will revolt. And he was quoting in turn Isabel Oakeshott, who said that police have just banned protests outside the migrant hotel in Canary Wharf for 28 days.

4:26Well, that's not strictly true. The Met pointed out we have not banned protests outside the Britannia International Hotel. We continue to encourage those exercising their lawful right to protest to do so responsibly. Anyone who crosses the line from lawful protest into criminality can expect to face police action. So you have the Metropolitan Police now correcting what's being put out by some Conservative MPs. Let me give you another example. Neil O 'Brien, who's in the Shadow Cabinet, Shadow Minister for Policy, Renewal and Development, posted, Joke regime. We must end it all. and that was quoting a GB Politics article claiming to show video of migrants at the Canary Wharf Hotel working illegally as delivery drivers for Deliveroo or whoever it happens to be after one day after their arrival.

5:16Didn't turn out to be true. And yet the readiness with which people are retweeting and kind of going to arms. Nick Timothy put up a tweet, he's taken it down in fairness to him, where he said it showed an illegal Deliveroo worker getting a police escort and wrote, this sums it all up. The Home Office pretends to get tough with companies that depend entirely on illegal immigration, but doesn't. And so that got deleted.

5:39Lewis Goodall:But it got deleted because, again, the Mets actually were tweeting. I mean, this is a Conservative shadow minister, right? The Metropolitan Police tweeting him saying that isn't true, that there was no police escort for this Deliveroo driver. It was just simply that this person was being attacked as they were trying to get into the hotel and so on. So you've got this. I mean I think just to dwell a little bit on the examples you cited there John I mean I do think sometimes and we talk all the time on this show and have done for some years now about the idea of the Overton window moving that's the idea the Overton window you know basically the sort of acceptability what is acceptable in politics the sort of parameters of politics moving further and further to the right I think it's not just moving at this point it's galloping fueled and egged on by social media by Musk by X by GB News and others to the point that you now see, you know, shadow ministers and, you know, a former chancellor of the Exchequer.

6:29Lewis Goodall:Nadeem Zahawi, someone who I actually respect and like in lots of ways. But, you know, a former chancellor of the Exchequer saying this is why the people of the United Kingdom will revolt, revolt. You know, Neil O 'Brien, again, you know, someone generally in the past being considered on the sort of moderate wing of the Conservative Party, talking about the regime. You know, this is the elected government of the United Kingdom, the regime. I mean, this is the sort of thing, if a left wing party, if a Corbynite party talked in these terms, They would be rightly excoriated and dismissed as student politicians because it's the language in some ways of student politics, but also of extremist politics, talking about regime and revolution.

7:05Lewis Goodall:But this is a sort of language and tone and terms which are now commonplace, not just on reform, but within the Conservative Party itself. I think it's disturbing. Yeah. What you almost get the impression is happening is that they are sort of they're waiting for the violence to erupt, which they will condemn. but then say, I told you so, I mean we did warn we did warn that there was a tinderbox atmosphere and that the atmosphere was getting more and more toxic and polarised and you failed to address the underlying issues that are of concern to the British people and whilst I don't condone any violence against police this is what happened.

7:39Because it will vindicate their world view. It will vindicate their world view which they're sort of laying the groundwork for and you've seen I think the master of this, Farage who always walks up to the line and never crosses it where he's ever can be accused of inciting violence or is a you know a conductor of it but at the same time when he says well i told you so i did say i warned i don't condone this but you know the threat the danger has been there and evidence to see for some time and you feel that some conservatives are doing that as well now yeah and what's striking as well is is that you

8:11Lewis Goodall:know if you look at the data on this if you actually look and actually just a bit more sober and a bit more level-headed about it you can see that actually the use of migrant hotels or asylum hotels is way down on the peak you know september 2023 under a conservative government it was at 56 000 and to be fair it came down on the conservative government and has stabilized at roughly around 33 000 now i don't for one second want to dismiss people with concerns about the use of asylum hotels i completely understand i've reported from them i've spoken to people in areas where they are and i completely understand that suddenly if you're you know you're just living your life and you know a local facility in this case a hotel is suddenly taken over requisitioned and suddenly you get a hundred people who aren't from the area many of whom often yeah men young men i understand that that's that's can be worrying it can be worrying you've got concerns about it you've got and particularly sometimes if there's association with increasing crime which there can be sometimes i totally get it you feel like your community is changing very rapidly in a way that you haven't consented to you don't really understand why it's happening and it's happening really quickly i completely understand it that is why it is especially important for politicians mainstream politicians yes to channel those concerns to hear them to talk about it but to do so in a way which does not readily spread not just misinformation but conspiracy and that is what we're seeing i think in the tone of what for formerly mainstream centre-right politicians and the conservative party it's not so much talking about it i think we should talk about it is important to not allow the really far-right forces to have a monopoly on those concerns and to exploit them in that way but to readily spread conspiracy and misinformation we are we've had neil basu our colleague you know formerly with the met but now on the crime agents on the show talking about how he and his many of his colleagues who are still in the met consider one of the biggest risks to public disorder in britain or public order in britain now this spread of misinformation which we see especially on x or a tone of invective that we see on X, which is raising the tensions even further than where they already are.

10:16Lewis Goodall:And what I think is astonishing is that so much of that is at the hands of mainstream, quote unquote, politicians. You're absolutely right that people have utterly legitimate concerns about illegal immigration. It does look horrendous when you see these small boats arriving, overcrowded, people wearing life jackets women and children risking their lives to cross the channel in this way it is absolutely unacceptable i think there is some blame for politicians who you know rishi sunak we're going to stop the boats kirstama we're going to smash the gangs and unable to do it although they've been able to give out glib slogans people are absolutely right the other problem with it all is of course and this contributes to it is it's such bloody good television it's amazing pictures that you'll get on the beaches of near calais and all the rest of it of these people jumping onto these little rubber inflatables and you're thinking god this looks terrible and but of course any tv company is going to be all over social media it's going to be everywhere because it's good pictures and that and good pictures make for easily inflammable situations which is what we've got now and i just think that you know it's absolutely shocking the level of people smuggling that is going on and the money that is in this industry is gross yes but at the same time let's keep it in some kind of perspective which as you say you know the amount of use of migrant hotels is going down but i do think it is the most urgent problem that kia starmer faces and i think frankly donald trump was right when he was in turnbury saying you know if you want to get re-elected you've got to deal with the migration crisis i think it is part the sort of the dark tone of the reaction on the right, I think is part of a bigger picture though, which is an increasingly, and you see this on the online radical right, and Robert Jenner, or someone like Robert Jenner, because it is a great example of this, but there are plenty of others as well.

12:11Lewis Goodall:There is a sort of deeply apocalyptic tone, I would say, which has taken root on the right of British politics over the course of the last year. And it goes far beyond immigration. It is this idea that Britain is uniquely at a moment of profound crisis in every way, to the point that the state itself is about to collapse or society is about to revolt. And that is not to say or to undermine the idea that, of course, there are profound problems in British society, British politics. We talk about them all the time. But it is this tone, this tone of darkness and almost sort of near apocalypse, which has sort of taken root.

12:50Lewis Goodall:And it is very, it's profoundly bizarre. When you consider, of course, particularly on the conservative side, If you think that Britain is in a state of profound crisis, well, it hasn't happened in the last year. I mean, the Conservatives were in office for 14 years. The kind of ability to elide. I saw Mel Stride, for example, you know, tweeting out today saying that Britain is about to be in a debt crisis and it's unsustainable, out of control. I mean, much of that debt, most of the really difficult bit of that debt was added to the national debt over the course of the last 14 years. You can argue about good reason or bad reason.

13:21Lewis Goodall:Come on, if we're in a debt crisis, it hasn't just appeared over the course of the last year. And it is so this this dark, this sort of sense of impending doom is bizarre. Right. Because if Britain is as broken, as profoundly broken as many on the right are now saying, you've got to ask like, well, compared to what? And compared to the past or compared to other countries? Well, if you compare it to other countries, you know, you would say that most other similar European countries have similar-ish sort of problems, whether it's France or Germany or wherever. The United States, also, you know, big problems.

13:54Lewis Goodall:And if you're comparing it to the past, well, one of the areas that they're obsessed with and you see increasingly fevered talk endlessly is about crime. You know, the idea that crime is so out of control, particularly in London, they have a particular obsession with London and cities, which again has a quite a sort of dark tone to it. The idea that crime is completely out of control. You can barely walk out of the street in London now, according to so many of these kind of radical right accounts, but even accounts within the Conservative Party. You can barely walk down the street without someone snatching your phone or coming to rob you or whatever it happens to be.

14:25Lewis Goodall:Well, again, I mean, just look at the stats, right? In 1995, there were 20 million incidents of crime in England and Wales, 20 million. There were fewer than 9 million in 2024. So let's be realistic here. Let's address the problems. Let's soberly talk about the problems and profound sense of tension, which there can be. but what is happening is that this tone of political darkness I would say and feverishness is galloping away on the right of British politics and what it's doing is it's perpetuating itself because the way we know algorithmically the stuff that gets the likes and it gets the retweets is the darker stuff and which gets darker and darker again in turn and so you're seeing that kind of radicalisation that online radicalisation which was once at the fringes of the online right world spread to and take hold in mainstream conservative politics and opinion.

15:15Well, I said in the introduction, you feel that there is a moral panic at the moment, that this is kind of unprecedented and things have spiralled and spun out. Spiral is the right word. It's just gone mad. It's gone terribly out of control in the past. Well, no, it's been a continuation of what we've had for years. It's just the language which is being used now is different. I thought it was interesting, Nigel Farage today, he made this point about there are some people coming to this country. I mean, there are other statistics around that are being used by the right. I mean, so Robert Jenrick used one of them this morning saying that in London, 25 percent of the population are migrant, but 40 percent of sexual abuse crimes are being carried out by foreigners.

16:01And you think, oh, my God, so the problem has got way worse. Now, it may be that this statistic is right. It's come from a freedom of information request from a kind of right wing think tank. So, you know, I don't know what the numbers are, but you can see how that is being weaponised. And Farage was saying today, well, there are some societies where people are just, you know, are more prone to this and they shouldn't be allowed in. We have to recognise something. There are some people who come from certain cultures that pose a danger to our society. It's as simple as that. The mistake for the left would be to think just to condemn him as a racist and say that is totally wrong.

16:42There are societies that treat women very differently. You know, if you go to Afghanistan today and see what is happening to women living under the Taliban, it is a very different way of life than what you would find if you were a woman living in Western Europe. So there are areas where, you know, violence against women is much more commonplace in some of these societies. It's absolutely true what the left mustn't do or centrist politicians is to say this is complete and utter nonsense you're a filthy racist there are things that farage says which need to be addressed and that's what he does so cleverly yeah i think it's far better to take farage to

17:19Lewis Goodall:task on some of the detail which is for example again just sort of it's completely lacking i mean again at that press conference he was asked about what you do with migrants when you can't send them back to an unsafe country like afghanistan and he says i'm sorry i've had enough of this if you come from Afghanistan, you go back to Afghanistan, I'm done. Like, that's fine to say. But guess what? You know, who's in office in Afghanistan? The Taliban. We do not have a returns agreement with the Taliban. We can't fly people, practically speaking, into Afghanistan. Forget about the legal framework.

17:50Lewis Goodall:We can't fly them in. What are we going to do? Parachute them in? Sort of do an airdrop of people over Kabul? Yeah, I mean, like, come on. And that's and this is again, the problem with the kind of radicalization of the discourse is that it happens in its own terms, in its own bubble, in its own world. And reality, well, never the twain shall meet, right? And I think this is the bigger problem as well with mainstream conservative, centre-right politicians becoming, moving, as I say, galloping with the Overton window to what used to be the preserve of the radical right. Because what that means is, well, what is left for the actual far right?

18:24Lewis Goodall:Where do they go? Well, they move even further to the right. And, you know, you can see this in terms of anyone who's been on X recently can see the level of profound racism which would once have been confined to the darkest corners of the mainstream internet and mainstream discourse wouldn't even been in public discourse is so virulent so ubiquitous being rehearsed and rehashed by people who have got shows on television news channels and huge online followings and certain academics quote unquote so repeating and regurgitating this stuff let me give you an example i think it would have been completely beyond the pale anywhere in mainstream discourse for there ever to have been a discussion about whether rishi sunak was really english this is a discussion which has been basically spreading like wildfire across x and across accounts with huge followings on x over the course of the last week after rishi sunak sent a you know completely innocuous tweet where he did a selfie on yorkshire day and said i'm just so proud to be from here from this country and you know it was also rehearsed a sort of discourse that went on about six months ago as well about whether he was truly english or not of course he's english of course he's english on any reasonable estimation of what englishness is and instead instead what we have is a discourse talking about kind of actually whether he ethnically is english or civically english and all of this sort of thing and you know as i say i think what it means is, what that is representative of, is a profound radicalisation of our political discourse.

20:01Lewis Goodall:And that is, to some extent, happening at the hands of mainstream conservative politicians. And it's also, to some extent, happening because also I think Keir Starmer and the centre-left is not offering sufficiently robust opposition in ideational terms, politically intellectual terms, to these ideas. All of the energy of politics right now is on the radical right, rather than being on the left or being in terms of opposition. The left doesn't quite know how to respond, let alone the centre-right. And that means that our politics just keeps getting dragged in this direction, which I think is pretty dark in every sense.

20:33And you see the way the language has zigzagged all over the place on immigration. So one minute we're an island of strangers, which had sort of power-like echoes, and the next minute, you know, Keir Starmer saying, oh, I've got that wrong and maybe I shouldn't have said that. And it just seems to be this intellectual uncertainty over what the government is trying to say. And I just think that a grown up conversation, you know, there are skilled shortages in this country. There is a declining birth rate in this country and an ageing population. And probably we do need an awful lot of immigrants to do certain jobs in this country if we're to function as a society.

21:09but you know the fear for politicians or the feeling for politicians right now is they've got to say something condemnatory about levels of migration and we've got to bring it under control and we've got to do this and we've got to do that which are largely difficult to do and probably not

21:24Lewis Goodall:in our economic interests either but i think crucially john i think the shift has been and this is where there has been the shift to the radical kind of cultural right is that the debate in britain about migration at least sort of you know for the first 20 years or so i think of this century was largely about though not exclusively but largely about britain's capacity to absorb people in terms of our infrastructure our public service and so on again perfectly legitimate discussion and debate and of course we've been talking about illegal quote-unquote migration it's dwarfed by comparison to the size of legal migration which has taken place particularly in the post-covid period the debate on the right now is less about infrastructure it's far more power light far more like enoch power the sort of power light discussions which took place in the 60s which was is this idea of it's not just that we might lose our public services to immigration it will lose ourselves we'll be swamped we'll be swamped not just by people culturally there's this idea that britain is losing itself is losing its essence is losing its soul and that is why in particular you'll just see online these endless endless references to london in particular this idea that you know you'll see it from these radical right commentators i was walking around london today i could have been in lagos i could have been in islamabad i could have been in car really you've been to carpool recently because i tell you we don't look much like belgravia all right so you know this is just kind of fevered nonsense but it is becoming mainstream this idea that what immigration is doing which actually has been shown repeatedly as nonsense that what immigration is doing it means that britain is losing its sense of self and its essence and its culture, despite the fact, despite the fact that actually, although it's had its problems, what is remarkable about British culture and Britishness and Britain is its capacity to repeatedly absorb waves of migration and for the children of those migrants to become profoundly British culturally.

23:20Lewis Goodall:Rishi Sunak is the best example of that that I can think of. And that is why these people go after him and go after Sadiq Khan. It's because in a way they're afraid of them, because those people are actually the perfect embodiment, perfect riposte to their twisted thinking. Because what are they? Anyone can look at Sadiq Khan and anyone can look at Rishi Sunak and see that they're as English as you or I are. And that's what scares these people. We'll be back after the break.

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24:23Lewis Goodall:This is The News Agents. So I said we'd be returning to what Lewis Goodall did on his summer holidays. So you go to Japan for two weeks and it lurches to the far right. Basically what I'm doing is I'm trying to get ahead of the Overton window, but it just keeps catching up with me. That's the problem with it. It used to be such a stable place where politics was utterly boring and you knew it was going to be centrist politician after centrist politician. And suddenly you go and turn up there and the far right start doing well. Well, it's because I like to time my holidays with elections wherever it's possible, you know.

25:00Lewis Goodall:Of course. It actually has been really interesting being in Japan over the last two weeks, because it did coincide with their election. So it was in sort of, you know, posters everywhere while I've been, inevitably tried to sort of talk to people about it as best as I was able to do it. The poor waiters at the restaurant are not expecting getting too weighed about Japanese politics while we were there. But it is really interesting. And as you say, what's really interesting about Japan at the moment is the fact that it's interesting at all. You know, Japanese politics, possibly, I mean, obviously, if you go way back, It was much more interesting, but certainly since the war or so, you know, boring, possibly the most stolid, stable politics anywhere in the world.

25:34Lewis Goodall:I mean, the Tory party likes to claim and it just sort of says it just reflexively without ever actually bothering to check. Tory party always says, oh, we're the most successful political party in the democratic world, you know. It's like, have you checked with the Japanese Liberal Party, Democratic Liberal Party? Because, you know, what's amazing about them, the LDP, Japanese LDP, they've been in office for every year, but three since 1955. I mean, it's astonishing. Like, basically, Japanese politics hasn't really been contested between parties. It's mainly happened within the LDP, this quite sort of centre-right, small-c conservative force, which obviously, you know, Japan has had a transformational history after the war became the second biggest economy in the world for a while, and so on.

26:15Lewis Goodall:And yet, for the first time, really, it feels like their hold on power is potentially starting to shake, partly because Japan, for the first time, is having this rise of a hard right, far right radical force, this party called Sensito, which just won a clutch of seats in the upper house elections, Japanese diet elections, depriving the LDP of their majority in that chamber for the first time ever. and the really interesting thing is about it is that it's both familiar and slightly different familiar because they are running on something that feels like their politics is catching up with ours in the sense that this party sensito starts off as kind of basically a youtube only anti-vaccine kind of force basically has become far more mainstream used youtube incredibly effectively especially with younger voters and is based on this idea of you guessed it japan first or Japanese first and its leader actively praising and basing himself on Donald Trump.

27:11Lewis Goodall:So it's another one of these Trump inspired radical right forces around the world. So the last time I was in Japan, which I think two or three years ago, the ambassador there who I ended up having a dinner with was Rahm Emanuel, who was Obama's chief of staff back in the day. And he's going to play a big part, I think, in democratic politics going forward. But he was making the argument that the reason that the politics of Japan was so popular and hadn't succumbed to the populism that we'd seen in America during Trump's first term, all that we're seeing now in France and Britain and Germany and Hungary and wherever else, is because it's so ethnically pure.

27:51It's because immigrants can come and visit. They can come and stay for a little while, but they're not Japanese. and what i felt when i was in japan was my god this is the most kind of you know everyone is japanese you don't get the diversity that you get walking the streets of london when you're walking the streets of tokyo and you know foreigners are welcomed as tourists but don't think you're living here and don't think you're japanese yeah no indeed and it has historically

28:18Lewis Goodall:low i mean by comparison to western levels you're right it has very low levels of foreign foreign-born residents and so on and immigration but it has been going up and again this is where the story is quite familiar to ours right it's been going up partly because japan has a profound demographic problem you know its population is probably about to peak and is expected to decline rapidly over the next 20 years the government have had to try and do something about that so the number of foreign residents has gone up from 2.2 million a few years ago to 3.77 million over the past decade again by western standards very very low but profoundly controversial in japan and again this is why one of the reasons the ldp is sort of shaking in its boots now is because so this this phenomenon sansito has got all of the hallmarks that we see of populist right-wing populist parties across europe they target living standard stagnation remember japan has had 20 years of stagnation where we've only had 10 because of their particular economic problems that they've had food prices increasing rice prices are hugely controversial there because they're basically set by the government and they've been going up very very rapidly but then it's got these particularly kind of japanese elements and this is where i think it's quite interesting so one of them seems quite prosaic it's like tourism sancito running hard on a question of over tourism because japan has had i suppose i'm part of this problem right has had this huge boom mainly from east asian countries actually china and taiwan huge boom in tourism over the past 20 years you only had like four million tourists a year in japan 20 years ago they've just had last year they had 37 million tourists so you know all of these tourist hotspots like kyoto and so on getting completely swamped sancito is literally running against them basically talking about the idea that foreigners are again sound familiar back to our previous conversation that japan is losing itself to foreigners even tourists that they're behaving badly they're not respecting japanese culture and then you mix it with the darker thing again, which is Sancito talking really quite openly about the idea of Japan needing to be ethnically pure, right?