540. The Untold Iran Crisis, Henry Nowak, and Farage’s Politics of Rage

24:30Rory Stewart:Exactly. You're totally right. And this is why data centers are now increasingly unpopular in the United States. I mean, these data centers, look, the upside is that you get to participate in the AI revolution, which is going to reshape the whole world. And if you don't have those things, your economy will collapse, the American economy will boom, and you will have no leverage at all. So it's not really an option. But the cost of installing these data centers is unbelievable. There's the cost to the landscape. They're really big, and they're really ugly. There's the amazing energy costs. So 50 % of the increase in electricity demand in the US is driven purely by dentist centers.

25:09Rory Stewart:There's the water cooling problems. There's huge environmental impacts of these things. Then the question, I guess, if you're a government is, it's the classic problem, I'm afraid, with any planning. And I don't want to use the word NIMBY, but we've got to build these things. Where do we build them? So if you don't build them next to a sparsely populated village in Scotland, are you going to build them in Hampshire? Where are you building these things? I mean, I agree with you about there was an element of let's just not do this at all. You know, even though I'm very suspicious about the people behind AI, a lot of them, I totally get where you're coming from on that.

25:44And I thought the Pope was interested in that too. But it's also, there does seem to me to be a fundamental dishonesty about the way that they're projecting this stuff. So this particular one up in a place, wonderful name, Ochtertul in Fife. And it's being put forward by this ILI group. Now, when you see that they say the data center will be zero waste, net zero, and it will only use the equivalent of 239 residential homes annual water usage, when the average use of one of these data centers is between 11 and 20 million liters a day, you sort of do worry that they're not really being straight with people.

26:26I think that's what's going to get the public around the world really pissed off. If these kind of masters of universe just think, look, get with the program or lose out.

26:35Rory Stewart:People will get really pissed off. And I think get with the program is a horrible phrase. But do remember, I mean, I was very, very involved in Cumbria with community groups fighting against wind turbines. And you would have seen very, very similar arguments made against the wind turbine company that they were using dodgy statistics. Yeah. And I love wind turbines. Right. Absolutely. But what you would have seen is the campaigners producing very, very similar documents saying the company said this, but that's lie. This is the truth. This is the impact on these birds. This is the impact on this biodiverse landscape.

27:08Rory Stewart:This is the picture they've shown us. This is the real picture. This is what the law says. So I'm afraid this is the story around HS2. This is the story around Third Runway at Heathrow. This is the story around data centers. This is the story around buildings. There are very, very good reasons for local communities passionately to oppose these things. wonderful reasons because they love their landscape they care about their community and these things are a net negative to that community in fife but they are a net positive i'm afraid if i'm more than a net positive they're vital for the security of the national of britain yeah yeah my sort of gentle criticisms of tony blair really interesting some of the responses to that i had a lovely message from somebody who worked for barack obama who said i thought you handled your criticisms of totally blair very well you you were critical without being disloyal and i should also say that word got back to to his holiness pope tony tony blair yeah um that i'd been and and so he he did leave me so so i got this message how can it be in our interest to spend billions accelerating to net zero when our emissions are relatively low i think i dealt with that on the global leadership thing why are we stopping our own oil and gas production when we're importing someone else's to meet our needs.

28:26He claimed the North Sea is not unviable and that Shell would put 10 billion in.

28:31Rory Stewart:So this is really interesting. And I'm sorry I didn't get on to ask you more quickly about how Tony had responded because it's an obvious question. But let me try to play his part here. The normal argument against us doing stuff in the North Sea is that it's not going to make a difference to the price. Fair enough. Gas prices are global. But it's difficult not to think that there's a national security benefit to having your own gas off your own coast rather than depending on importing from other people, particularly at a moment when we have to get our gas either from the US, which is now one of the reasons that Trump doesn't care so much about straight-up or moves is that American oil and gas companies are making out like bandits.

29:11Rory Stewart:Europe is the largest single importer of US LNG. Or Qatar, why wouldn't you from a point of view of natural security, just as you grow your own food, even though broadly speaking, food prices are set by global markets, would you not keep your own oil and gas supply. Look, we talked earlier about the importance of having a mix and you have to work out what that mix would be. I mean, at one point he said to me, stop just giving me Ed Miliband talking points, which I didn't think I was. I thought I'd actually read a couple of books and I'd been at this wonderful conference listening to real experts like Jan from German, from Cologne.

29:48But no, I get that, but in terms of the cost, so he says Shell are prepared to put 10 billion in what i haven't seen is what that would then produce and at what pace so i think i just still think the north sea oil thing is a bit of a mirage it's a mirage because of the time that it would take and because the quantities that it would that it would produce revenue for

30:07Rory Stewart:the british government i mean honestly you've also been one of the first to point out that one of the reasons that mrs thatcher was able to fund a lot of her stuff was the revenue from that is true north sea oil and gas tax cuts for your rich friends yeah definitely yeah yeah yeah Yeah, well, not just for rich friends. I mean, it helps, you know, even during the Blair government, revenue from North Carolina, yes, I agree. So I think it's quite difficult stepping back, not to raise your eyebrows and say it's a little bit odd, right? We've just told a whole story where the US is in a much stronger position because it's fracking and getting gas out of the ground.

30:45Rory Stewart:It's independent. It doesn't have to care about the Middle East so much. It's able to be an exporter. It's making a huge amount of revenue. And it's able to build all its data centers. You're not pro-fracking, are you? I think it may be. I mean, look, I'm not sure. I was sympathetic to the idea. And then they started doing it in Cheshire and it kept sparking earthquakes, at which point, I guess we get into questions of whether the British geology allows it. But again, remember, with all these questions, are we being honest with ourselves? Are we being a bit nimby? Because presumably, all those American fracking projects, the communities were horrified and worried about groundwater and worried about earthquakes and opposed them.

31:24Rory Stewart:Still are. Some of them still are. Looking at in the round, did the US benefit from fracking or not? Does the world benefit from the drill baby drill and going against renewables? There was another guy you missed. I think you missed, but you met him. Do you remember the tall, very elegant guy with sort of gray wavy hair who came up to say hello before going to do his own presentation? He had the wonderful name Kingsmill Bond. My name is Bond. My name is Bond, Kingsmill Bond. And he's a strategist for EMBA, which is an energy think tank. And he made an interesting observation. He said, this is the first time we've had an oil shock.

32:02And by the way, the International Energy Authority says this is the worst oil shock in history. He says it's the first time we've had an oil shock where oil faces a superior alternative because solar, wind and electric are cheaper, more local, faster deploy, and they're huge. And he made this observation. He says they were winning even before the crisis. This should galvanize change. And I'm kind of, I guess that's why I remain resistant to the idea that we should go down some of the less obvious routes.

32:33Rory Stewart:Can I just throw on Kingsmill, look, just to return to the thing, because I think one of the weird things about this whole crisis is it's partly about how America, our ally, can do much more harm to us than our adversaries. Secondly, it's about how none of us have any leverage over Trump. And we're all talking in the world of AI and sovereignty about how we get leverage over the United States. this is the classic example. The whole world wants them to change, especially from China, Japan, South Korea, Qatar, Saudi, Dubai, Europe. And none of us are having any impact on them at all. We don't appear to have any leverage over the US to force them to change direction in any way at all.

33:10Rory Stewart:But the third thing is that it's about moving out of a world where we thought that real stuff didn't matter so much, where oil and gas was less important, where we were in a world of kind of digital and renewables. And we've sort of been forcibly reminded of something that Kingsmill Bond, of course, understands, but he's not being completely honest about when he's saying to you that, yeah, renewables can power your electricity, but renewables are not going to give you your NAFTA, your petrochemical products that you actually need for your plastics, your rubbers, your solvents, your dyes. They might one day.

33:45But we're already talking about these tools.

33:46Rory Stewart:I mean, look, there's also a short-term, medium-term, long-term problem. Our national security threat at the moment is our planes need jet fuel. Our trucks need diesel. They don't run on renewables. They might do in 15, 20 years' time. I'm a bit skeptical about how quickly we're going to fly planes with renewables, but it may happen. But the problem at the moment is our economies are going to grind to a grinding halt. We're going to end up without the basic stuff to run our economy and we're looking foolish you know when china is stockpiling oil japan is stockpiling oil we're all patting ourselves on the back in a in illusion that we don't need it we do need it now for so many things yeah fine on that because the the other um big event on the first day of the conference was president stubb alexander stubb and he's in such an interesting place because he's you know relatively small country but in large part because he's such a good golfer.

34:42And also he does the Iron Man, which is the sort of thing that really impresses Donald Trump. He's sort of a bit closer to Trump the most. But he said some really interesting things. He basically said, look, we become, we Europe, we became reliant on Russia for energy, China for the economy, USA for security, right? We're now facing real security pressure from Russia on energy and the war in Ukraine. And we're facing political pressure from the United States. And he called that out very, very frankly. And his answer to the whole thing was more Europe. And he actually said this, you know, you and I've talked, we talked about this a little bit on the podcast.

35:22He mentioned, by the way, that maybe he should have called his book the rectangle of power rather than the triangle of power. Remember his triangle was global West, global East, global South, and maybe Europe's the fourth corner. But it was very, very interesting. And it really went down well. The line that got the biggest round of applause was he said, so you've got to get Ukraine, you've got to get the UK, you've got to get the Balkans, you've got to get Norway, you've got to get Turkey because of their military. And wouldn't it be great if instead of becoming the 51st state of the United States, Canada became the 28th member of the European Union?

35:59Oh, they went wild for that, Roy.

36:03Rory Stewart:Beautiful. Well, let's take a quick break. And when we come back, talking about an issue, which just to make the transition, it's very interesting. This is the tragic death of Henry Nowak, which has been a much more dominant issue than the fact that we're about to go into an economic recession caused by the Straits of Hormuz. And it tells us a lot about the tragedy. It also tells us a lot about what politicians are talking about and concentrating on it and the things the public are interested in. Let's take a quick break and then back from there. This episode is brought to you by Lloyds. Now, it seems like there's a big new political news story every day, but what we often don't get into is all the systems which are ticking around in the background, which actually keep things running and keep things safe.

36:47In fact, an awful lot of what keeps the UK going isn't talked about that much at all. It's the diplomats abroad doing great work on behalf of the country. It's our intelligence agencies.

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38:47Welcome back to The Rest of This Politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. So while we were in Finland, Rory, the news back home was absolutely dominated by the killing of Henry Novak, 18-year-old student at the University of Southampton, just being dropped off a few weeks early by his mum and dad. gets involved in an altercation with this guy Vikram Digwa, whose brother calls the police to say that he, Vikram, has been racially abused. Police arrive. Henry Novak tells the police that he's been stabbed. They appear not to believe him. They put him in handcuffs and not long thereafter he dies.

39:30His killer is Vikram Digwa. He's now facing a very, very long jail sentence. But the The incident, in particular, the body cam footage from the police, provoked this extraordinary debate across UK politics about so-called two-tier policing, about anti-white racism, whipped up by Nigel Farage, whipped up by Elon Musk, and then eventually whipped up by none other than the Vice President of the US. So now that we've had a few days back, Rory, what have you made of it all?

40:01Rory Stewart:Well, I think the first thing is that it took, I think, quite a long time for most people to really understand what had happened. So I think it's quite important to get back to what actually happened. And then we'll get on to the question of what did the police do wrong and what we can conclude from that. So as you say, it's after 11pm at night. And the first thing to understand is Henry was a lovely, kind, empathetic boy. And Vikram Digwar brutally murdered him, ended his life, plunged Henry's family into complete misery, brought incredible shame on a whole series of bits of society and of course, massive social unrest.

40:45Rory Stewart:But what was the incident that led up to it. So Henry Nowak is walking home about 11pm at night. He has a chance meeting with a man, Vikram Digwa, who is wearing a large Sikh dagger openly on his clothing. And this is something which members of the Nihan order of Sikhs in Britain are able to wear. It's a privilege, it's also very much a responsibility, and it's never to be used in an offensive way. There is then an incredibly complicated debate, which we don't need to get into, about the relationship between the kirpan, which is a knife, ceremonial knife, which a Sikh carries within his garments, and the display of an external knife associated with the Nihang order of Sikhs, and some members of Sikh communities saying this wasn't a kirpan, this was a Persian knife.

41:37Rory Stewart:But the basic point is that certainly from the point of view of Vikram Digwa and many young Sikhs who wear this, this was part of their religious identity. There is an interaction. And Henry, perhaps cheekily, asks Vikram if he's a bad man and starts filming Digwa on his phone. So, Digwa seems to have felt disrespected and felt the filming was intrusive. He grabs the phone, and then we have to assume that Henry struggled to get the phone back, during which time Vikram Digwa's turban was knocked off, which, again, he as a Sikh may well have seen as a serious act and mark of disrespect and made him very angry.

42:21Rory Stewart:He then stabs Henry in the chest and then twice in the leg and then once in the groin and once in the face and then films him. Henry is now dying from this attack. And Vikram is standing outside his family home and his brother comes out and his father comes out and they call the police. Not to say to emergency service, someone's been stabbed, come rescue them, they call to say, a drunk guy is at our house and has been racially abusing us and called me the P word, and we've restrained him. So the police deploy quite quickly, and the police arrive in their mind, dealing with a young drunk man who they've been told has been racially abusing this Sikh man.

43:09And when they arrive, the mother of Vikram Digwa has hidden the knife.

43:15Rory Stewart:The police, it's dark. Henry's wearing a dark top and he says he's been stabbed. You cannot see any visible blood on his stomach. And the arresting officer, and this is the critical moment, says, I don't think you have been stabbed, mate. In fact, they ask Digwa, has he been stabbed? No, he's not been stabbed. I don't think you've been stabbed, mate. And he handcuffs him. And meanwhile, Henry is dying. What's going on? Question number one, why do the police ignore somebody who says, I can't breathe, I've been stabbed? Well, the answer is that it's actually quite common, police officers say to me anyway, when they are handcuffing someone for somebody to say things like that in the hope of getting released.

43:58Rory Stewart:So it may be that the police officers aim off for that. Secondly, they've framed the whole thing in their head that this guy's the perpetrator. However, it's bad police procedure, right? There should have been some professional curiosity, they should be treating both sides equally, and they should be prioritizing a claim of stabbing over anything else. And it's also very questionable why they felt they needed to handcuff somebody who was basically dying on the ground and didn't need to be restrained. Over to you. Yeah, I think that's a fair summation. And, you know, you took a few minutes to explain it.

44:31And the reason why this has become such a toxic issue within the public debate is because none of that framing or nuancing was indulged in by those politicians and those parts of the media that decided to turn this into a story not about a murder by one person of another one, a horrible person of a nicer person, but turn it into a debate about race, about two-tier policing, so-called. And I think the reason why people became so offended by Nigel Farage in particular, who very grandly announced, and bear in mind, this is Nigel Farage, who's been hiding for two weeks because he refuses to answer questions about where all his money is coming from.

45:18He appears in some sort of grand looking field with a few sheep behind him, tweets that he's going to make a national address like he's the king or the prime minister at a time of war or something, and talks about the response must be one of rage. and unleashes, I would argue, or plays a significant part in unleashing, a debate where the facts very, very quickly get lost. Now, you've set out the facts, but you've also given a context. What we are led to believe by people like Nigel Farage, Zia Yusuf, who was the one who went out to do the interviews, and this on the back of the father, and I do think in these circumstances, is actually genuinely respecting the family's interests is a good thing to do.

46:08And his father said, we want to use Henry's heartbreaking story to make change for the better. We do not want his death to be used to create further division, hatred or tension. I would argue that much of the media, Nigel Farage, Rupert Lowe did exactly that. And I think it was absolutely shameful. And I think actually the reason that Nigel Farage did it in the way that he did it is because of politics, because they are worried that Rupert Lowe, who was in reform and has now set up his own party, Restore, he's a very wealthy man independently. He's also got the backing of Elon Musk. First Elon Musk piles in, one word tweet, rage.

46:48Rupert Lowe's tweets routinely get tens and tens of thousands of repostings because Musk has told the Twitter algorithm to do just that. And then what happens, and then you see this, I mean, I was, you know, I mentioned this book last week, Roy, this is fascism. And there's a paragraph in here. Every fascist destroys the truth by undermining public debate and censoring criticism. The propaganda machine is given free reign to strip facts of their authority, rob society of the ability to think independently, and create an alternative reality. Every fascist does this by lying brazenly and frequently, not to convince people of the lie, but of the idea that there is no truth but the one he decrees.

47:32Now, this is obviously particularly about Trump, but I think it applies here. When facts lose all meaning, there's also no need to be consistent in one's lies. In fact, this journalist says, the ability to change the story at will is a demonstration of power. I think we saw that with the five million donation. We saw it with this. Sir Youssef went on television and was asked whether he had heard the father saying he didn't want this used politically and he said yes i did and that's exactly what nigel is responding to absolute bullshit well there's there's also this amazing

48:06Rory Stewart:thing from vance um yeah so vance i mean you know i've just given an account of what happened on that night right so take that on board think what you like fundamentally what you're thinking about is a lovely kind man was murdered by a horrible, violent guy who totally unjustifiably overreacted to whatever he perceived as a site and murdered somebody for no reason at all. Vance said, Henry Nowak died the same way a civilization dies. He should still be alive today. And he would be if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against It's the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it.

48:53Rory Stewart:So there's a lot of things going on in that sentence, but it's right at the heart of not just the way that J.D. Vance thinks about the world. I suspect the way that a lot of the far right in Britain think about the world and a lot of the way the AFD think about the world. So let's just break that down. What is he actually saying there? So the first thing is this claim, the mass invasion of migrants. This happens because the mass invasion migrants. Presumably what he means is Henry Nowak would still be alive if Vikram Digwa wasn't living in the United Kingdom, I guess is the claim, right? Many of whom despise the West and the people who love it.

49:27Rory Stewart:Is he saying Vikram Digwa despised the West and the people who love it? Or just many migrants despise the West and the people who love it? And then the last few generations of European elite, if they'd stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred, Henry would still be alive. What does that mean? How would that have saved Henry's life if European elites had stood their ground against self-hatred? And there seem to be two different claims being made here. One of them is a very straightforward, we don't like this guy because he's not white and he killed a white person. And the second is this claim that if it were not for anti-racism policy, DEI, we wouldn't have had this horrible scene of the police responding unsympathetically towards Henry and taking Vikram Digwa's side of the argument before they arrested Digwa.

50:16But the other thing is, look, what the people like Vance, and I would argue Farage and Rupert Lowe and the far right in the UK, they're brilliant at gaslighting. They're brilliant at taking something that may be true and completely inverting it. The truth is, if you look at all the data, you are more likely in the UK to be a victim of bad policing or bad treatment in prisons or bad treatment by the criminal justice system or bad treatment in relation to stop and search if you are black. That is indisputable. They want people to think that you are more likely to be treated badly by the police if you are white.

50:59The other thing they want you to think is that because we've had immigration and we now have a large proportion, a sizable minority in our country who are, quotes, don't look like us, don't look like J.D. Vance, don't look like Nigel Farage, that somehow that is the reason we've got crime. Okay. Fraser Nelson, who doesn't share my politics, is very much on the right, I would argue, is politics. But I really recommend, he's written a very good substack about this, with the facts. And he points out, the immigrant population has doubled. And during that period, crime has actually halved. he says that Vance is talking about a Britain that simply does not exist and he's doing it because of you know we should maybe tell people that the leading interview on this week is the brilliant Norwegian historian Od Anna Westad who speaks about a lot of the things we were talking about early in relation to what might lead to war but next Monday we've got James Cleverley and And, you know, he was actually interesting, said a lot of interesting, measured, thoughtful things.

52:11But I think that, you know, today, Kemi Baden-Lock's making a big speech about aspects of the Equalities Act that she doesn't like. And I'm sure it's sincere and I'm sure it's what she thinks. And it's certainly in line with things she said before. But I worry that this is an example of an initiative announced because a debate has shifted and it's been very deliberately shifted by people that I would hope are to the right of Kimmy Bader. I think we're dealing with a fake narrative a lot of the time. It's nonsense. It's nonsense that white people get treated worse than black people in this country.

52:51It's nonsense.

52:51Rory Stewart:Well, then, okay. So one of the challenges James made in our interview, so as a conservative politician, we haven't had many conservative politicians on, is to say that the Labour government is not good at listening to all minorities. It's good at listening to some minorities. I guess what he means by that is it's not very good at listening to the minority white working class population. Let me try to get beyond. Farage is a massive hypocritical dick. And there's no more evidence for this hypocrisy than the fact that when Trump commits a crime, he's on record saying there should be quiet anger as opposed to rage.

53:35Rory Stewart:Nothing's achieved by rage. When it's a woman, Sarah Everett, killed by a man, Farage says we mustn't allow tragic murder to turn into attacks on men and police. But when it's a white man killed by a Sikh, he's not saying we mustn't allow tragic murder to turn into attacks on Sikhs and the police. Put that all aside, though, what is the issue going on in the background? Why are so many people who wouldn't consider themselves natural reform or restore voters agreeing with Farage? And what's he getting into? There could be socioeconomic arguments. So you'll have friends who'll say this is because the white working class are not doing well economically.

54:14Rory Stewart:But there's an underlying sense that we have created a big, big compliance state. So what you'll see a lot of the right-wing media talking about is that the amount that councils have been spending on diversity initiatives has doubled in the last few years, that the number of people specializing in this stuff has increased, that since the Equalities Act, many civil servant departments are gold-plating this. And the argument I think that probably we have to make is quite a difficult one, which is we absolutely defend the Equalities Act, that Kemi-Badnock is wrong to get rid of it, that every developed country in the world has protection for women, for racial minorities, for the disabled, and that this is the basic sign of a civilized society.

55:00Rory Stewart:But there may be problems with the way in which things are complied with and implemented. And people may be sensing that one of the frustrating things with government, and maybe in their mind, they associate it with health and safety, they associate it with bureaucratic box ticking, is a whole culture of compliance, which seems for them to go against common sense. And what they're trying to say is, listen, the police's job is to be good police, get in there, do their investigation, be curious about what's going on. And what on earth does this guy think he's doing handcuffing somebody who's lying on the ground?

55:32Rory Stewart:And what is the context that could possibly cause I agree with you. In an ideal world, the police would have arrived. They'd have first of all said, oh, this guy's on the ground, need to check he's okay. And a fairly routine check might have established that he was bleeding in several parts of his body. Okay. And then there might have been a different story. And I also agree with you earlier when you said that because of the lies that were told by the killer's brother in reporting the crime to the police, the framing that was given to the police officers who were arriving on the scene was such that they were, you know, in their minds programmed to think something.

56:08And actually, it was a very interesting example of that in the interview with James Cleverley. Do you remember when he was telling us a story about one of his superiors when he was in the military? And we were discussing racism. And I made an assumption that the guy he was talking about was white, because I'm assuming that his officer, he's a rare non-white person in the military at that time, or relatively rare. I'm assuming he's white. And I made an assumption about that guy. And then when I learned he was black, I sort of changed my mind. So, you know, we all do it. We all make, we all have framings in our minds.

56:47The police have done that. It's a terrible mistake. I do feel sorry for them. And I feel sorry in particular for, I don't know if you read this, Rory, a woman police officer who was wrongly named online as being the police officer who was there, who's now living under police protection. Apparently, she's not even in the police force anymore. And so when politicians like Farage talk about rage, and as you say, with all the hypocrisy underlining it, there are people who are going to take that and say, right, let's go and beat up the coppers in Southampton. Let's go and have a little riot.

57:22Rory Stewart:Which is what happened. Exactly. For international listeners, 11 policemen were injured, a police dog was injured, and there were terrifying scenes of guys literally attacking police lines, trying, I think, to get to Vikram Digwa's house. Yeah. And now I read something about one of these. So now there's a number of people who were involved in this, these violent protests who are now being going through the courts. Some of them will go to jail. Most of them are being held in custody. And I read something about one of these guys with his family, weeping, weeping as he, as it dawned on him that he's probably ruined his life.

57:58on a weekend when the multimillionaires, the Farages, the Musks, they'll be off doing what multimillionaires do at the weekend. Not giving a damn, really, about these guys who are now going to spend a considerable part of their life in jail, having been whipped up to do this. Now, do they have any justification to be angry? You have justification to be angry that one police officer, two police officers, didn't handle a really difficult situation well in the moment, right? Do you really, can you really claim that if you're a white working class person, the police treat you worse than they treat non-white people?

58:38I just don't believe that stacks up. And then to have the vice president, the vice president of a country with one of the highest murder rates, where you get kids killed in schools because anybody's around, you know, they've got this ridiculous gun culture, and he's telling us about civilizational decline. It makes me vomit. And these people, the Farages and the Lowe's, they side with him, J.D. Vance, against the police who are trying to protect us and who are trying to stand up for British values. I mean, I just think it's evidence of how... And I think, to go back to our first half of the discussion, Richard Tice, Net Stupid Zero, it's part of the same thing.

59:21Take any debate and twist it to an agenda.

59:25Rory Stewart:And also the normalization and degradation of British politics. I was listening to the debate in Parliament when we were in Finland, and I realized that the language being used in Parliament is not language that would have been around when I was still in Parliament. How easily Jenrick stands up and says, will you accept that it's not just black lives that matter, but white lives matter too? Or people asking the Home Secretary to commit that white people will be treated equally under the law. I mean, it's really weird. I mean, that stuff would have been booed six, seven years because it's ridiculous.

1:00:00Rory Stewart:It's completely ridiculous to ask Shabana Mahmood, will white people be treated equally under the law? It's ridiculous. And the fact that that's become normal in politics, and J.D. Vance's tweets have become normal, and that there is this incredible thing going on now. If you point out what Lowe said or what Faraj said, the first thing you get back is, oh, well, it's exactly the same as George Floyd. George Floyd said he couldn't breathe. And Henry Novak said he couldn't breathe. So it's George Floyd, right? George Floyd said he couldn't breathe when he was literally being murdered by a police officer.

1:00:35Rory Stewart:It's a completely different case. He was being murdered by a police officer. He was saying to the police officer who was strangling him, I can't breathe. That is a very, very important difference. Again, people point out that Keir Starmer took the knee and that Keir Starmer said, I think at the time, that he felt shocked and angered by George Floyd's death. but that is not the equivalent of farage saying i suggest the rest of us respond with pure cold rage right this is all these false equivalences okay enough for me no i but your point about language back to my book um it has this line right-wing populism was seen you talk about how things have changed in the last few years was seen as a call for a different moderate form of democracy, certainly not as a threat to the system itself.

1:01:26Now that view is shifting. What we're seeing is that these right-wing populist parties are radicalizing, and the dividing line between the radical and the extreme right has become wafer thin. So what Lowe is doing is moving Farage even further. Farage was trying to avoid all this stuff not that long ago. And that, I think, is, you know, I got the feeling from talking to James Cleverley, people can make their own minds up on monday i've got look he's very loyal to kemi badenock but i think i get the feeling he's maybe a little bit worried that they are they're moving too far in that direction and your point about language is this just listen to this this is umberto echo who you know has written about this for years emphasizes that every fascist uses simple language reminiscent of orwellian newspeak quotes an impoverished vocabulary and elementary syntax this is trump in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.

1:02:18This form of language almost seems designed for the messages on social media platforms like X, which in turn become the megaphone of contemporary fascism. Now you said, if you go back to the election when we were in New York, the American election, and we were having a debate about whether we thought Trump was a fascist. And I remember you said, well, not sure. Is it that helpful to say so? Blah, blah, blah. But I remember you saying, I think you're right, but I do think Musk is a fascist. And I think X, I mean, yes, I'm still on it, and you're still on it. And I kind of don't like the idea of vacating the space, as it were.

1:02:53but to see that stuff being whipped up and to have the richest man in the world the south african i would argue fascist and the american vice president when they see it being whipped up whipping it up further in order to project a vision of the world that i think is actually abhorrent to most decent british people but then bit by bit you normalize it you change it and people start believing that, well, these councils, I mean, the reason we haven't got any potholes mended because, you know, all they do is employ people to tell us that we should respect black people more. And the worst thing, even Rupert Low called this out, Rory.

1:03:33And this is why I worry about them. And by the way, part three of our reform funding mini series is out this week. We're now into the Harbourn story. So there's Farage with, you know, untold riches to spend. I was talking to somebody up in the Makerfield by-election yesterday who said somebody, they were out knocking on the door and somebody told them we're going to vote Restore. And they were showing them the stuff on their phone that they were getting. And even Restore, even Rupert Lowe called out what Reform did because they took something Kemi Badenock said. Kemi Badenock was trying to say, you know, we should be colorblind as it were.

1:04:07It shouldn't matter if you're white or black, everybody gets treated equally. But she said, I'm fed up of this white lives matter, black lives matter. Okay. They clipped her saying the bit about, I don't care about white lives. okay now kemi badenock's black so a big big graphic with kemi badenock's face and basically i don't care about white lives is then put out even rupert lowe called that out and this is what this is what the millions are being used for not he doesn't give a damn about people like us and coming on our podcast doesn't give a damn about all the stuff he normally does they are just using this money to distort, mislead, subvert democratic debate.

1:04:49That is my humble opinion.

1:04:51Rory Stewart:Very good. Well, I think we violently agree on this. So thank you very much. More to come. Question time, a lot of issues. We've got Mille, Argentina, Armenia, the World Cup, and many directions to go. And so look forward to speaking again tomorrow. See you tomorrow.

1:05:14Hello, dear listeners. As many of you will know, Father's Day is coming up on the 21st of June.

1:05:23Rory Stewart:And we know that a good number of you will be wondering what to get your centrist dad this year. And we have the perfect idea. Get him a membership to the Restis Politics Plus and make the most of our 25 % discount on a gifted annual membership. And that gives you access to all these members-only miniseries that we're making. It gives you early access to question time. Just head to therestispologies.com and click on Gifts. The gift will land straight in your dad's inbox on the day. It's the only present for a centrist dad.