The Two Matts Q&A: Palestine Action lunacy and made up words

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1:55Hello and happy Sunday, everybody. Happy Sunday, one and all. Hope you're all having a great weekend so far. This is the Two Mats Q &A podcast brought to you by the wonderful subscribers of The New World magazine. And there's a special offer for people who haven't subscribed. And you can get a free copy of Alistair Campbell's new bestseller, Percivillians. signed by the man himself. Yeah, which more and non. Indeed, there's a question related to that at the end. And you can go to thenewworld.co.uk forward slash two mats, number two, M-A-T-T-S. So if you've been thinking about saying, should I subscribe?

2:31Should I support this great independent journalism? Should I help them do more of it? Am I a good person or not? I didn't want to frame it quite so lovely. I do. But yeah, are you decent and good or not or not a decent blessing well now how is the chance to to prove your goodness and go and get an amazing uh free gift signed copy of alistair's new book civilians when you sign up right uh first question comes from billy what's more important negotiating an end to the war in ukraine or standing shoulder to shoulder with zelensky well it's it's kind of the question of the hour isn't it and uh and a good one so thanks billy um i think in the end they're the same thing in the sense that if you don't stand by Zelensky, and it's hard, especially when the President of the United States and the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, are trying to strong arm Ukraine into a settlement.

3:30If we don't stand by Zelensky, all we'll get is a temporary deal and actually a frozen conflict. We talked about this a bit on the Thursday pod, you know, that will continue to drain our resources. It'll make the kind of frozen conflict in Korea look like a tea party. And the fact is that Putin wants a deal only to the extent that he wants a breather, but he wants all of Ukraine. And if we give him some, to be fair to him, why would he think that he can't finish the job in due course? so that's that's my papers on it i mean i think it's a it's a with respect to billy i think it's a bit of a false dichotomy because yeah you know standing shoulder to shoulder with zelensky helps negotiate and enter the war in ukraine yeah and i think what will perpetuate it and drag it on is if putin thinks well they don't they haven't got the guts to deal with me you know i might not have all the manpower i want and obviously i've got domestic pressures but i haven't got america on my back so really i can i've got carte blanche to do what i want and yeah that that that's the indication that trump's giving putin you know by by this procession of short-term little uh giveaways and deals just to you know potentially give him a couple of points in the midterms you know it's it's which it won't anyway it's the opposite of intelligent statesmanship you know it's absolutely rubbish rubbish behavior and ukraine will inevitably as you've said perpetually will will suffer and be betrayed you know it's all it's happening it really is and it shows you you know that flailing as as trump really is now um when you're president of the united states has global consequences yes yeah you know for sure it really it really does for sure okay right um From Esther in Wimbledon.

5:32Is the cause of Britain rejoining, sorry, joining Europe's top table helped or hindered by the current focus on Russia's interference in the 2016 referendum? What do you reckon? Well, I don't I don't think it's helped or hindered, but I think from I think my general point of view on this is like all things related to Brexit. now the less we hark back to the referendum the better uh and the more we look forward so putting in the way that Andy Burnham did put it on in what was like a very revealing interview yes the rest is politics really really strong lines came out of it with Alistair and Rory um I do sort of think well how's that how will that be received by people who voted to leave Are they going to sit there and think, oh, what?

6:25So is he saying we were all mugged off by Russia? Does he think we're that thick? Does it engender, relitigate all of that bitterness about the referendum? What's the point of reigniting those fears? And then the other side of me thinks, well, we've got to be very clear about Russia's modus operandi, you know, and be deeply honest about the malevolence that this guy. And also, frankly, I mean, let's step to one side and put ourselves in the middle of all of this and pretend that we don't have sides. You know, there's some strategic brilliance going on from outside Russia. if they are if they are able to um invade and inveigle their way into our social media and have any inflection on something that's happening in a democratic process in the uk and there's a broader strategic goal behind it which there clearly is well well done vladimir putin okay over to you uk government to make sure it doesn't happen but in terms of how does it you know to the specifics of the question does it help or hinder our focus on getting back to europe's top table i'm not sure it does help um i don't suppose it hinders that much but i think really the whole focus around that should be a positive one about what would be the benefits to yeah exactly our place at that table i mean i think to your point it's it's incredibly important to have a very clear understanding and and the more we know the better is how they how they do this because they clearly do do it at the active measures program they they started in the 1990s a group of kgb colonels got together and realized that that the the the new cyberspace environment created real low-cost opportunities to divide and demoralize and they've they've followed that through um now the the general uh sort of consensus inside the security establishment and white hall it seems to be that it didn't make any difference yeah um and that's important but i still think it's you know important that they try because we could be if burnham uh pursues the line he's thinking of on europe um you know in the foreseeable future we could be back in this terrain again and by god you know i want to know that the next referendum will be secure you know because they'll have a point well i was just going to ask you about on that point do it's interesting isn't it should there must there does there need to be another referendum yes that does you can't get it through on a general election manifest no because for the simple reason that um well there are there are there are there are actually genuine reasons which is that we live in an age where, I mean, there hasn't been a 50 percent vote for a party since 1931.

9:19So any government that's going to be elected of whatever stripe is not going to be able to claim a numerical mandate. And I think I also think that on this, because it was so livid and angry and devastating, we have to go out the door we came in on, if you like, I think, to try and and we saw how devastating this was with when the constitutional treaty was turned to the lisbon treaty and blair promised a referendum on the constitutional treaty and then it was turned into the lisbon treaty and suddenly the referendum promise disappeared it just will mobilize you know all the wrong forces and they'll have a point because you know all the key decisions on europe have for better ever worse been decided by referendum and so to have the next one not is just begging for an obvious line which is they you know in order to overturn 2016 they're going to just force it through parliament now we can have an argument about whether it's a representative democracy referendums are stupid but in practice i think we will just i mean just to go back to the original question i think it hinders if it encourages the old idea that remain would have won without russian interference in the same way that the democrats kidded themselves for too long that hillary would have won in 2016 without russian meddling and i think everything has to be geared to you know if we're looking at the russian question okay when this happens again and i hope it does um how do we absolutely prevent this from happening again because we i think we got lucky last time i do yeah yeah no i think you i think you're right i think your points have been well very well argued there all right um next question is from stan and stan says uh should any private citizen have the power to degrade a nation's ability to defend itself from aggression great question stan and this i assume refers to elon musk and his uh his uh withdrawal of um um starlink and starshield services at least partially from ukraine which has had a you know measurable effect on their capacity to defend themselves uh obscene intervention um although he denies he did anything to starshield but starlink he you know is his is under his control um it's a very i mean there is there is almost zero precedence for this the only one i could dig up was another wicked man, Henry Ford, a great anti-Semite and generally wicked person.

12:00In 1940, he told the UK Parliament via intermediaries that American Ford factories would not build Rolls-Royce aero engines for anyone other than the US. so when we were at our most exposed ford who was pretty much a nasa sympathizer just said well i'm not helping you but that's a very small you know relatively speaking compared to musk's you know power it's a very specific example and i think that if you look at i mean in a broader way if you look at musk's control over or rather the dependency of nasa defense department transportation transportation aviation you know health services musk is everywhere in the federal government and this is you know no man no one man should have that amount of power over any government much less the most powerful government in the history of the planet um and i think you know the funny thing is that his doge i'm going to cut a trillion dollars off the federal debt uh was was just an you know a ridiculous vanity exercise and it didn't cut anything all it did really was deny lots of much-needed medical care to the most desperate parts of the world so good work yeah uh with the usid but i mean i think that was just a little present from trump you know i don't i don't think that's what i mean what musk is about is having every single government on earth at his beck and cool yeah you know and it's intolerable and the way to um and we touched on this on the thursday podcast the way to negate this as a possibility is for europe to develop its own systems in these in these cases which we've been piss poor at doing you know although yeah belatedly we are you know as you said iris squared um is uh our um response to starlink but then you think about other technologies that american corporations hold absolute sway over much of our lives think about card payments right right you know you know mastercard and visa you know if they if if think about the damage they could do to an economy if they if you know if say uh an even more malevolent actor came into the white house and right ordered them no you stop stop availing your services to this nation or to that nation then it would be catastrophic you've got um the cloud the web cloud you know it's amazon microsoft amazon web services microsoft google you know they hold absolute dominance in in these uh technologies that our modern life is totally dependent on that's right and because we've sort of seen it as well these are corporate entities and their commercial people providing services, it's all been, well, what's the problem?

15:05You know, we pay for it, they deliver it. But what we've seen with Musk is that merging of corporate and political interests and exposing the real risk, which is you put somebody who has got political goals and also is in charge of a technology that has an absolute existential, you have an existential dependency upon. Yeah. And you are at their beck and call and at their whim. And that is that when we talk about sovereign defense, it's not just about bloody submarines and minesweepers and troops on the ground. It's about the ability to function as a society. Yes, exactly. With impunity. Otherwise, you know, people talk about, you know, it's all about sovereignty, the Brexit referendum.

15:51Well, we can have that debate if you like. But, I mean, have people really thought about what sovereignty means? And where it lies. and where it lies, and our ability as a nation to act with total impunity to the thoughts of others, you know, and act with our values, front and centre of mind. It's a joke. That's a brilliant way of putting it, actually. Because if you think about how much Britain's, quote-unquote, sovereignty was constrained by membership of the EU before we left, and compare it to our dependency in many, many forms to these one-man tech giants, it's no contest. And I think I'm really glad you mentioned particularly Amazon, AWS, Amazon Web Services.

16:33It's very clever the way they do it, because most people still think of Amazon as an online shop. And that's there with Prime Video attached. If you spend enough, you get Prime Video for free. So it's sort of a what's not to like kind of service. But actually, the real power in Bezos's hands is the fact that he has, you know, on his desk, a Bond villain switch that could turn off much of the web. Yep. And the consequences of that are unthinkable. They are actually unthinkable. That's it. We should have a Bramerson referendum, you know. I mean, let's have that. Right, right, right, right, right.

17:12Right. You know, and, you know, to add to the evil, one of the things about the shop, the global shop, is that Bezos has decreed that it must never do more than wash its face, which is odd for a businessman. But of course, when you think about it, it's not odd at all, because what he wants is all of us thinking that Amazon is fantastic, which is a cost cutter. It is. But but but so that's that's how committed he is to all the other stuff he's doing. Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. Right. Anyway, fabulous question. Thank you very much. And we're going to come back, dear listeners, with more of your questions in just a moment.

17:51See you on the other side.

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21:14Welcome back, dear listeners. Hope you're having a wonderful weekend. This is the To Matt's Q &A brought to you by the subscribers of the New World magazine. Next question. Right now. So, from George in Macclesfield, if Marine Le Pen wins power in France, where does that leave Andy Burnham and his growing pathway to Europe? Well, it's definitely not good news. if Marine Le Pen, who is vehemently anti-European Union, and of course would hold an effective veto, as any sort of nation does within the 27 member states over our reaccession or whatever you want to call it, and would be totally against that.

21:55So no, her coming to power in France would be a real setback, back i think for um if what we've got in mind is a sort of sooner than later return to a proper full seat at the heart of the european union i think she would be a blocker um so that i mean but more so it would be um incredibly disruptive and depending on how she gets on of course incredibly encouraging to people who are natively very much anti the european union such as nigel farage if he had a if he had a right-wing populist to point to who said well oh look no look she's delivering and and and as marine le pen could feasibly deliver it as these people always do in the very very short term then um that could be another problem for andy burnham and all of his all of his great schemes i mean it would be uh it would also be a triumph of stamina because i think i'm right that this is uh she tried she's tried four times to be president and her father tried four times to be president so it'd be quite a um you know quite quite quite a quite a coup yeah perhaps literally um uh and and the i mean the other thing i think to add to elizabeth is that it would also her presence i mean france is such an important part of the eu the franco-german axis is very important to its sort of you know its its whole identity so to have you know god knows where germany is going to be in in a few years time to have her and and the difficulty the eu had experienced adjusting to a france led by someone of le pen's ideological complexion that would suck a lot of oxygen out of the room and take up a lot of energy which would in turn And however much the EU wants us back at top table, it would make it that much harder for them to devote the undoubted.

23:55You know, how do we do this energy that we need? And so I totally agree with you. I think I think it's not it wouldn't be good news. It's not it's not by any means certain that you'll win. The problem is and the thing to keep looking at as the months pass towards April and May is how does she do in second round polls? because it looks very likely she'll win the first round, but that doesn't necessarily mean she'll win. The question is, in second round, is there a way that an anti-Le Pen coalition can be constructed again? And at the moment, it's not looking great, so we'll see. Very, very interesting times en France.

24:36Next question comes from Barry in York. I'm old enough to have a shelf full of great Faber books. elliot heaney plath beckett ishigurhu golding walcott flannery o 'connor what a list so i was dismayed that this supposedly great publishing house has announced it won't distribute sally rooney's works any longer are the mats as disturbed as i am by this craven decision what's going on here matt well it's a terrible business um i mean i should say that i'm not a fan of sally rooney But so what? Who cares? Right. And she has fallen foul of the unbelievably stupid ban on Palestine action because she supports it and its objectives, as she has every right to do.

25:23um and so what what has happened and she is i think graciously agreed to what faber regard as their necessity which is they can't they can't as a publishing house fall foul of the law um and and that it's sort of i my heart sinks really um i mean with barry if you look at the history of Faber it has it has been a trailblazing publishing house it people forget but you know it published Nightwood by Duna Barnes which in 1936 was about you know a lesbian relationship in Paris at the at Elliot championed it and it was very controversial and then it published Finnegan's Weight which no one can still understand to this day and it published as as Barry says you know Lord of the Flies which was an you know no one wanted it no other publisher wanted it they also it was bonkers and now it's standard reading schools across the land and indeed the world so to see a great publishing house you know kind of demeaned in this way and and a you know she's not for me but a very popular literary novelist unable to distribute her work in this country astonishing come on astonishing i mean it's so astonishing that this sort of conspiracy theorist in me started thinking hard and i mean one i can't believe that any government or crown prosecution service or anything would actually come after a publishing house based on on on this but i do accept that her saying she's going to give her royalties to palestine action will be a direct contradiction of this insanely stupid uh thing that event cooper put in place having said that you know as you said mate faber and faber are of all i've got a reputation for challenge and being at the cutting edge of the publishing and for them to sort of recoil from uh the possibility of a huge public imagine the court case imagine the court case and the value for society of being at the heart of that argument like the Lady Chattel is Lover trial of the 2020s so there is your analogy it would be like them saying we're not going to publish it because we're scared of the obscenity laws you know it's cowardice or Lawrence Ferenghetti with the beat writers you know saying it was Hal wasn't it it was Hal Allen Ginsberg That was the end.

28:01Yeah, I've seen the best men in my generation. That's right. The then I started thinking, well, I wonder whether is there something even more clever going on from Sally Rooney if she wants to garner attention to Palestine action and the this iniquitous legislation. And is she how she sort of has it been raised by Faber and Faber lawyers? Has she said, well, OK, you know, if there's any doubt, I'll just pull out of the market. I'll get out of the market. And that will be the story because this is so bloody stupid. Actually, if that version of events has got any truth to it, well, good on her, I would say.

28:41You know, that's it. I don't know. I don't think it is. I think it's I think it's in-house lawyers losing their shit at a potential thing that would never happen. I mean, you remember we ran a front cover with which, you know, I was kind of thinking, well, maybe there'll be a knock on our door because it had a full-size picture on the cover of somebody carrying the placard saying, I support Palestine action. So in 30 ,000 news agents around the country was the front cover of our magazine with a placard saying, I support Palestine action. And the piece wasn't about us supporting Palestine action.

29:21It was about the absurdity of banning somebody holding those placards. And then a guy, if you remember, bought a copy of our magazine, walked out of King's Cross station and was promptly arrested for holding up a magazine. But they never came for us. Now, they never came for us, I assume, because they just thought, well, this is absurd. We can see where this is going to end. The new world will use this as a huge cultural talking point. And everyone will see how ridiculous this bloody law is, which would have been actually a great result for us. You know, bring it on. And that's where Faber should be right now.

30:00Bring it on. you know well exactly so and and it's funny because we were talking about the live streaming execution around america on on thursday and one of the things that that i find that dismayed me is the way that things that we used to regard as unthinkable in western free societies are now becoming thinkable so for me the the rush the affair was incredibly important to my political formation because for me it was like no you know the line is drawn here we novelists have complete freedom of imaginative thought right and we can't be tolerating fatwas and we can't be tolerating death sentences and there's a total difference between satirizing islam and bigotry against muslims and this seemed to me like a absolutely clear moment of up with this we shall not put scroll forward to 2026 and you know faber is doing it unbidden essentially which i mean because i to my mind i mean sally rooney's not under sentence of death it's not the same but for for a house of of the it's a distinction and antiquity and reputation of faber to roll over in the face of such an outrageous ban rather than as you say that you know saying all right you know see you in court yeah and what what a glorious um spectacle that would be you know win-win for everybody because everyone would have been able to see how ridiculous the ban was everyone would have been reminded of why it matters to have the freedom of creative expression even especially if you don't agree with the writer okay yeah you know that's the point and this just the self censorship the self-chilling is often more worrying than the original censorship that's how authoritarianism works right so okay let's let me devil's advocate this a little bit because it does it does occur to me so say because i think this will help get us to the nub of of what's wrong say sally rooney said um well i'm going to give all of my money to um to a real terrorist organization you know so let's go back in time so i'm going to give all my money to the ira you You know, and and the IRA, obviously, a legitimately prescribed organization committing genuine acts of terror in this country.

32:30And that's the difference. That's why this is so ridiculous, is that that's not what Palestine action is. I'd go further, though, because I would say there's a distinction between the publication and the way she spends the money. So, you know, I would not prosecute Faber. i might prosecute i might prosecute sally rooney because she's given money to you know the the the uh the ira's uh top people but but you know how an author spends their royalties is not the not the uh the responsibility of the readers or the publishers i think and um i i really think that this is a good it could be i mean the more you i just think this could be such a good moment to kind of absolutely nail down some key values now court cases are not always good but some of them are just giving society an opportunity to go actually what do we believe yeah what would t.s elliott have done in this situation well he'd probably have written a bloody long poem and got ezra pound to help him write it you know and we'd all we uh what the fuck does this mean um but yeah you're right you know it's sort of the he wouldn't have put up with it no he wouldn't have done you know and he was a very hell with that we'll publish a very conservative man right but he but he believed fundamentally in the freedom of literature and and by extension the freedom of speech and and um we've seemed to have lost sight of all this and I mean, I do think and I find it baffling that so many in the apex of Labour still won't acknowledge this, that, you know, the ban on Palestine action is just fucking stupid.

34:21My theory on this is that it's so tied to Yvette Cooper and that she's. Yeah. Yeah. And she they don't want to lose the face on that by reversing it, you know, because it is so stupid. Frankly, it gives Palestine actions a much outsized place in our civic conversation than they possibly deserve as an organization in its own right. So nobody wins from it. It's absolutely nuts. Prescription is a necessary tool of statecraft, but it is one that should be used very sparingly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. because precisely because of these because this is where it leads you know exactly right we've got time for one more question it's a good one from swanson uh yeah it is a good one alistair campbell has invented the word percivilliance what new word would the mats invent that may be helpful in this day and age right good question i've given before i go into my answer which um i've put a lot of thought into folks i should say it's a brilliant book percivilliance it's obviously you can sort to guess there's perseverance there's um resilience there's there's a few words actually dressed into alistair's thinking and the book is not just about politics it's about life in general and alistair it's a very i think it's probably his most personal book that he's written and anyway this is a long-winded way of saying now is the time to subscribe to the new world because when you do you get a free signed copy of this bestseller perseverance signed by alistair campbell And if you want to hear Alastair Campbell talk to the great Michel Hussain about Percivillians and what it means, then you can see them in the flesh, along with Matt Dancona and myself at Cadogan Hall in London.

36:14On Thursday. On Thursday the 22nd in the evening. And there's a few tickets left. So snap those up while they go. Now, my word. Enough plugs. My word. so i gave it some thought and i thought what what kind of describes the human condition these days there's no word for and i think it's this we touched on it about social media and ai and our kind of attitudes to things that might be hurting us but we don't we don't change course at all right so we sort of we carry on marching towards the cliff edge regardless and so it's a combination of doom and momentum so it's do mentum is my good my word that it's a human condition we all suffer from is do mentum the inability to change tack even though we're walking towards the dance of the lemmings of the lemmings yeah exactly right do mentum well mine is um uh it's not good actually but it's i am as i think you know i hate euphemisms i really fucking hate them and i think it it's uh it it's part it says it's a sort of subcategory of my hatred of self-censorship you know and so euphemoclasm is my my word okay what's the etymology hostility to euphemism right so amongst the amongst the euphemisms that i categorize under this are the and the reason i hate them is not because of necessarily the things they describe although some some do but the way that it's a way of moving away from reality to to get something past democratic scrutiny so number one collateral damage was is it was is the daddy of them all right that means ordinary people being blown up by bombs right that's they're not collateral damage they're people right so that you know that that's a i also i i don't know when it started to become involved i've got a pretty good idea actually officer involved shooting right what do you think that refers to folks okay number three efficiency savings yeah right cuts right just sackings yeah sackings and people losing their livelihoods and departments not working and libraries being shut uh a lie to which number four is difficult decisions now no decision that's difficult ever leads to a nice one right when you hear someone on the today program telling to nick the robinson that it involves difficult decisions he doesn't mean and at the end of this difficult decision there's going to be lots more nice things for people so you just wait number five career transition sacking right part of your career transition number six he misspoke right he lied right or or said something true no no sorry he said something true which he then didn't want to yeah be on the record instantly number seven gender affirming care now this is not to say that you shouldn't go through transitioning but calling it gender affirming care is just a meaningless phrase it doesn't mean anything yeah and it's put the whole lot just the debate back years and then a couple more one is pass away and i've heard a lot of people actually interestingly it was raised to me by someone who's who's uh uh spouse had just died an acquaintance of mine, a friend.

39:36And so they were so sick of hearing them say, how did he pass away? No, he died. You know, he died. And, you know, there was no passing going on, right? And this relates to my top one, which I think is being used in any context now, and especially Instagram, and you know who you are, is journey, right? Anyone who goes on a journey, A, probably isn't, right? B, may well be dying, right? uh there are cancer journeys right and see don't call it a journey it's not a journey whatever it is you know what you are trying to do is turn something which made me deeply traumatic into some sort of you know trip to center parks it's not so what was the word again euphemoclasm euphemoclasm how are you spelling that eu you you theme so you guys in euphemism and then oclasm.

40:32I love it. Euthemoclasm. I love it. Euphemoclasm. We should do 20 great portmanteau words, shouldn't we, that describe our world. It's a sure sign. I mean, one reason euphemoclasm is useful is because when you hear one of them, you know something is up. Yeah, yeah. I love it. I just love the sound of it. Euphemoclasm. Well, I'm a euphemoclasm personally. Brilliant. Dear listeners, send in your words. What are your portmanteau words to describe this hellhole of a civilization we occupy? Send in any questions, any observations to 2mats at tnepublishing.com. That's the number two, M-A-T-T-S, tnepublishing.com.

41:19And don't forget, you can get your copy of Percivilience, the great new word developed by Alastair Campbell, our very own editor-at-large, weekly diarist you can get that free signed by alistair when you subscribe to the new world or if you're already a subscriber and you want the book and you want to gift the new world to somebody you can get a copy that way too go to the new world.co.uk forward slash two matt's number two m-a-t-t-s um thank you as ever to the third matt matt with us for producing the show Thanks, Matt. And until Thursday at the latest. Have a great week. Yeah, have a great week.

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